Thy Neighbor's Wife by Gay Talese

Farwell was decidedly aloof from his father, and was equally intolerant of any citizen who profited from political schemes, gambling, or sought pleasure from immoral sex.
    Most Chicago brothels were closed temporarily in 1912 after constant petitioning by Farwell’s league, and it succeeded in 1915 in having Chicago’s saloons shut down on Sundays. If Farwell’s league had little success during Prohibition in curbing the profitable partnership between politicians and gangsters that produced the speakeasies and whiskey wars, it was partly because Chicago after the Volstead Act of 1919 was under the strong influence of ethnic groups—mainly the Irish—who did not share the prohibitionists’ view of whiskey as a vice, although on matters of sex the Irish were possibly more puritanical than the Puritans.
    In fact, by the 1920s—as Hugh Hefner’s sober Methodist parents from Nebraska had settled into Chicago—the Irish-Catholics had more or less replaced the Farwell-type bluenose Protestants as the enforcers of sexual morality in the city. The great Irish immigration of the mid-1800s had imported into Chicago a fierce brand of Catholicism founded on sexual regulation and orthodoxy, and the city gradually reflected these values politically and socially, becoming less tolerant of unorthodox thought and behavior. Even when the Irish did not control the mayor’s office—which they did regularly since the 1920s—the orthodox Catholic view on morality and sexual censorship was reinforced by the preponderant number of Irish-American state legislators, aldermen, ward leaders, states attorneys, police officers, and politically connected clergymen. The Irish were more quickly successful than other immigrants because they arrived in the new land with an ability to speak the language, were united in their religiousbeliefs, and were politically hardened and organized as a result of their shared struggle back home against the English. Fortified by their interfaith marriages and political cronyism, they slowly shaped a Chicago Democratic machine from their South Side shanties, blue-collar bungalows, and tenements that excluded blacks, and from such a neighborhood came not only Mayor Richard Daley but also the two Irish-Catholic mayors who had preceded him, Ed Kelly and Martin Kennelly.
    Daley’s neighborhood was not so different from other ethnic white areas largely populated by the Polish, or Czechoslovakians, or Italians, or Russian Jews; nearly all were inhabited by socially conservative Chicagoans tightly tied to their families and trade unions, and they were more enduringly insular and immutable than the ethnic Americans living in more liberal cities, where the neighborhoods were not so formidably preserved as blocs of votes. Chicago was well organized, solid, stolid—a town of regulars who were shocked less by political chicanery and extreme racism than by an attempt of a neighborhood theater owner to show a sexy movie.
    The films that Hugh Hefner had seen as a teenaged usher at the Rockne Theater, and as a patron of other cinemas, had been screened beforehand by a police censor board, whose reviewers usually included five housewives married to policemen. When Hefner was working in Von Rosen’s promotion department, Chicago’s main distributor of magazines refused to carry Von Rosen’s products because they were sexually oriented and might provoke the displeasure of City Hall and church leaders. Von Rosen’s magazines were therefore circulated circumspectly to newsstands by drivers working for a smaller, hungrier, more daring firm known within the trucking trade as a “secondary” distributor.
    In almost every large American city there was a primary distributor that circulated the socially acceptable mass-market magazines, like Reader’s Digest and Ladies’ Home Journal , and a “secondary” distributor that took what the primary preferred not to touch. In Chicago the secondary was the Capitol News Agency, and, like