Mightier than the sword

New York Times, December 15, 1913. One doesn’t hear much about “poison pen letters” anymore, but I suppose that’s part and parcel of the general decline of letter-writing culture. (Damn you, Internet, enemy of all that is refined and genteel!) Anyway, this case is typical in that the writing of anonymous defamatory letters was disproportionately a feminine vice as well as an upper-crust one. We no longer have “well-known motion-picture censors” either, despite the best efforts of documentarian Kirby Dick. I wonder what Miss Kate Davis would have made of those two classics of poison-pen cinema, Georges Clouzot’s Le corbeau and Joseph L. Manckiewicz’s A Letter to Three Wives. Netflix ’em today! More socially prominent douchebaggery after the jump.Isn’t that just the way it goes? You come back from the Purity Congress and find your reputation is in shreds.

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