Is New York City a Menace That Deserves to be Abolished? Oct. 3, 1925

Methodists Seek to see if New York Is Menace. . . If New York Is a Frankenstein Then Action Will Be Taken

Washington, Oct. 2—Congress may be asked to abolish New York. The Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which had a large part in the elimination of the saloon, is conducting an investigation with a view to determine whether or not New York is a menace. Once it is settled, if the answer is in the affirmative, then some move to improve conditions will be made.

“The West wants to know if New York is a menace,” the Methodist board says. “Throughout a great part of the territory of the United States the people are asking whether or not they have created a Frankenstein in building the gigantic city of which they are so proud.

“The whole country has assailed the indecency of a certain large group of magazines and of the product of certain popular novel writers. Most of this nastiness is coming out of New York City.

Fully two years ago there was a nationwide outburst of indignation over the character of theatrical exhibitions emanating from New York City. Particular objection has had to nakedness, profanity, blasphemy and obscenity in these productions. Now the word comes from New York that the present season is to be the profanest and nakedest in American history.

“From New York emanates most of the propaganda inciting to violation of the prohibition law and attacking the standards of Americanism which Greenwich Village calls “puritanism.”

‘No great city in the world has a larger group of high minded, patriotic, intelligent business men than New York. They have considered themselves, and the country has been glad to consider them, custodians of the financial power of the country, and its leaders in social development. But recently the great mass of unAmerican people which plagues that city have seemingly found that they are in actually majority and are convinced that they do not need to consider those with American habits of life withing the city’s borders, nor those with “puritanical” habits of thought out in the vast spaces where, in their opinion, the Indians howl and the buffalo roam.

“If New York was the safety of its own future in mind, it will apply pressure upon the theatrical producers, publishers of erotic literature and the propagandist of crime.

From the front page of the Concord Daily Tribune, Oct. 3, 1925

newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1925-10-03/ed-1/seq-1/