CHRISTIANITY TODAY
NEWS
Special Report
Off-color “greetings” are being sold in record quantities. Producers of so-called “sophisticated humor” see the chance to cash in on popular demand during the holiday season. Result: A tide of iniquity is flooding this year’s Christmas card trade.
Ribald jokes with illustrations of drunkenness and sexual indecency are taking the place of traditional messages of good will. This is the sad reflection on the present state of American morality.
The bare-bosomed blonde in a sock crowds out the Christ of the manger. A degenerate verse crowds out the message of the Bethlehem angels. Satan takes the center of the stage even at Christmas, as if to publish the fact that in 1958 Christ is crucified almost before a carnal society acknowledges that he was born.
Postal officials in Washington expressed concern about the number of obscene and indecent Christmas cards being sent through the U. S. mails. They said, however, that the majority of such cards are sent through first class mail which the post office is powerless to open for inspection. Publishers and vendors of the cards have been avoiding prosecution by moving the cards to dealers by means other than the mails, postal officials added.
The cards were described as “extolling drunkenness and sexual license” as a means of celebrating the Christmas holiday and “otherwise mocking the observance.”
The Post Office Department acknowledged that it has received protests from religious groups against the indecent cards, but said it is primarily a matter for local law enforcement at the places of sale of such “greeting” cards.
Said one postal inspector, “Anyone receiving a card which he considers objectionable or in bad taste can help stop future mailings by protesting to the sender and questioning his spirit in purchasing and mailing such cards.”
Some of the worst cards are sent anonymously, in which case it is almost impossible for the post office to take any legal action.
When the legal road is clear, however, the post office quickly moves in. This month Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield announced that the publisher of Manhunt has been convicted by the U. S. District Court in Concord, New Hampshire, of depositing in the mails copies of the periodical containing obscene, lewd, lascivious, and indecent matter.
The prosecution was initiated by postal inspectors on the basis of illustrations in the April, 1957, issue of the magazine which described itself as the “world’s most popular crime fiction magazine.” After receiving complaints from citizens, the inspectors determined that 190,797 copies of the magazine had been mailed from the Concord post office.
The Flying Eagle Publication, Inc. of New York City, owners of the magazine, was fined $3,000, and Michael St. John, president, was fined $1,000, given a suspended six-month prison sentence and placed under probation for two years, Summerfield said.
Card producers and vendors seem to be bending over backwards to give risque merchandise the Christmas pitch. The double-entendre is exploited in terms associated, though often remotely, with Christmas.
At least one shop in Washington was displaying cards especially “dressed-up” for a Yuletide appeal. The reference to Christmas was far-fetched. The obscene connotation was plain. Christmas seals were affixed, presumably to clear up any doubt the prospective purchaser might have as to whether the “greeting” was definitely seasonal.
The same shop placed in its front window reprints of an old stand-by in the indelicate greeting card trade: A suggestive illustration with the squib, “I don’t know how to wrap it.”
The display of offensive Christmas “greetings” in Washington represents a daring imposition, for last year a shop in the nation’s capital was closed by authorities because it sold cards which officials described as “satire on the holy holiday.”
Large demands for distasteful so-called greetings apparently have grown out of the crude studio card craze, which had its origin in New York City’s Greenwich Village after World War II.
Studio cards themselves, which are also referred to as “jazz” or “contemporary,” seldom are obscene but often are objectionable. The first big-seller reportedly was a card with the message, “People are no damned good.”
Some 200 or more firms now are said to be producing studio cards. Even the most respected greeting card companies are cashing in on current demand by turning out ribaldry.
The studio motif with its simple sketches and insulting messages is also being used to profitable advantage in the sale of novelties. Awkward-looking line drawings and degenerate squibs appear increasingly on note pads, ash trays, drinking glasses, plaques, napkins, and even dishes.
Newsstands once were largely respectable business establishments. Now some have been reduced to hotbeds for lotteries and filthy reading matter, the latter having been described by the Dallas Morning News last month as a “$500-million-a-year racket.” Many a quaint gift shop seems to be headed in the same direction.
“We do not ask that non-Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ,” said Dr. Edward L. R. Elson, minister of National Presbyterian Church in Washington. “But if other than Christians can share in the commemoration, we should expect them to join us in exaltation rather than pollution of something sacred by secular and vulgar distortions.”
The Churchmen’s Commission for Decent Publications noted a year ago “the deterioration of Christmas into an occasion for the exchange of obscene and suggestive holiday greeting cards.”
At a meeting of the commission’s executive committee, a resolution was passed urging distributors and dealers “to manifest their concern for community decency by refusing to handle merchandise of a bawdy and sexy nature.”
The resolution encouraged local church and civic agencies “to protect the Christmas season as an occasion of spiritual force rather than of commercial exploitation of prurient interests.”
The post office was commended for its vigil over obscenity law violations.
The Dirtiest Ripple
Steps to strengthen the fight against “commercialized smut” were discussed at the first national conference on obscenity, held in Cleveland and sponsored by the Citizens for Decent Literature.
Dr. Pitirim Sorokin, Harvard University sociologist, said obscenity has been an accompanying factor in all the great crises of history. The rise of pornography today, he said is merely “the dirtiest ripple of a more powerful tidal wave” that threatens our civilization.
In various forms and degrees, Dr. Sorokin noted, obsession with sex has become so characteristic of movies, television, books, magazines and social and cultural institutions that “we now face the prospect of the collapse of the great cultural mansion of Western civilization.”
