Only Sensation-Mad City Dwellers Like Jazz, Sexy Broadway Shows, Says Channing Pollock, 1930

From The News-Record, Marshall, ‘The Established Newspaper of Madison County,’ Tuesday, July 1, 1930

Broadway, the most renowed Gay White Way in the world, doesn’t even support its own appetite for jazz, sensation and sexy shows, Channing Pollock, author of The Enemy and The Fool and a host of other serious and clean plays, declares in an article in the current American Magazine.

Outside of New York, in the far reaches of the country, is the stable public, the backbone of the American nation, which supports good plays. That class, he adds, which supports good books and the same mode of living that is traditional with America, will always be in the majority. Sensation-mad city dwellers cannot support the noisy institutions that brand America as decadent.

“There are more lights in library windows than there are on Broadway. You may not be aware of them, but they are there,” Pollock continues. “The city newspapers may be catalogues of crime and the country may be dotted with night clubs. But men and women get married and the majority of them stay married. Flaming youth makes matrimony and the football teams. It achieves parenthood and normal healthy children.”

Pollock cites the past year in the theatres of New York. The year began, he says, with an inundation of sex and murder plays, at the apex of what is known as the jazz age. Before Christmas, all but one of those truck gardens had disappeared and Easter found the New York stage without a single success that did not deserve it. Reviewing plays of the last decade, he finds that not a single lasting success was built on sex or crime in plays. Even the light comedies were those without objectionable lines. Twenty-eight archaic instincts of sentiment, loyalty, or pity. “There may be a rash on the face of civilization,” Pollock concludes, “but its heart is still beating vigorously, and its feet are still marching on and up.”