Category: sex

Because Free Love isn’t Free

freeloveNovember 3, 1927
White Plains, New York

Those free love proponents are at it again!  Everybody knows you should pay for love (with your soul).  If we ran rampant with free love—divorced from the constraints of law—the next thing you know we’d have homosexuality and obscenity and, well, divorce!  And eventually…hippies!  And, you know, free love!  And you know where that sort of thing leads.  Female sexual pleasure.

In any event, it should come as no surprise that United World Communism has the United States as its target for the promulgation of Free Love.  But fear not, as one lone woman stands stalwart against the Reds and their revolutionary sexuality:  Mrs. B. L. Robinson, President of the Massachusetts Public Interests League, and wife of Prof. B. L. Robinson, professor of botany at Harvard University.  She addressed members of the Women’s Political Study Club of White Plains on the topic of “Alien Propaganda in Our Colleges and Schools.”

Mrs. Robinson denounced the radical groups Fellowship of Youth for Peace and the National Federation of Students, but saved her most vitriolic vitriol for that incendiary demagogue whose unholy mission it is to urge our children to use birth control:  Bertrand Russell.  Unbelievably, stated Mrs. Robinson, Russell’s What I Believe was used in the freshman year English course in Smith College, and over 170 other schools, though the book condones both sex perversion and adultery (Mrs. Robinson was especially peeved with Smith College’s über-lefty Harry Elmer Barnes friendship with Russell and Barnes’ gleeful, secular-humanist demoralizing of twentieth-century womanhood).

Of course, this is 1927, and Russell still hadn’t made his big splash with his piece of 1929 agitprop Marriage and Morals, in which he goes on about how young people can try out intercourse with each other if they so wish before (or without!) getting married—heck, use birth control and get divorced if you wanna!

Now Mrs. Robinson, though Russell was one of those evil lefty one-worlder internationalists (we still fight them to-day!), did you not realize that in discussing birth control he was speaking of population control in general and of preserving your very race, endangered species that it is, in particular?  Surely you thought of that as you spoke to your crowd there in aptly-named White Plains:  

This policy may last some time, but in the end under it we shall have to give way–we are only putting off the evil day; the one real remedy is birth control, that is getting the people of the world to limit themselves to those numbers which they can keep upon their own soil… I do not see how we can hope permanently to be strong enough to keep the coloured races out; sooner or later they are bound to overflow, so the best we can do is to hope that those nations will see the wisdom of Birth Control…. We need a strong international authority.   
 
            – "Lecture by the Hon. Bertrand Russell", Birth Control News, December 1922

Oh, and by the way Mrs. Robinson, you haven’t all that much to fear from Reds of the Russian variety.  By the end of the 20s Stalin had quashed all the strides made after the October Revolution; you’ve much more to fear from the English and the Lithuanians and the Japanese and the French and the Germans and the Australians…

I Did Not Have Sex with that Woman!

Jacobson Headline

August 6, 1927
Los Angeles

Councilman Carl I. Jacobson was arrested in a morals raid at 4372 Beagle Street in the company of a woman who said her name was Mrs. Councilman JacobsonHazel Ferguson, but who later admitted her real name was Mrs. Callie Grimes.

The married councilman insisted that he was framed and that the raid was the underworld’s retaliation for his much publicized crusade against vice in the city.

Jacobson, who lives in a small bungalow at 3014 Terry Place with his wife of thirty years, told cops that he had called upon Mrs. Ferguson to discuss a matter of street assessments with her. He said Mrs. Ferguson had telephoned him at his home and asked him to look over her property to see if it was worth paying the assessments.

When he arrived for their meeting Mrs. Ferguson poured two cocktails, and then moments later all of the lights in the house went out. It was then that police announced themselves and placed Councilman Jacobson and Mrs. Ferguson/Grimes under arrest.

The four arresting officers, Captains of Detectives Wallis and Williams, and Detectives Lucas and Raymond related a version of events substantively different from Jacobson’s account. They stated that they went to the Beagle street house, watched through a window and then observing what they felt constituted criminal behavior, crashed down a door to arrest the couple on morals violations. The arrest of Jacobson and Grimes begs the question: why were four high-ranking LAPD officers creeping around in the shrubbery with their noses pressed to a window like four Peeping Toms?

The case against Jacobsen would drag on. Jacobson would be tried twice on morals charges. In the first trial the jury would vote 9 to 3 for acquittal; in the second trial the jury would be evenly divided and the DA would decide against trying him for a third time. Mrs. Callie Grimes would confess to her part in the frame-up, and then recant. Grimes along with the four officers who conducted the raid would be tried for conspiracy, and the charges against them would be dismissed in 1929.

One of the detectives, Harry Raymond, would leave the LAPD and become a private investigator. He’d turn up again in the news as the victim of an attempted assassination by car bomb, in a 1938 corruption scandal involving Los Angeles Mayor Frank Shaw, members of his administration, and the LAPD.