Word: mosses
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Paul Moss is a big, grey-haired Jew whom Mayor LaGuardia picked to be New York's Commissioner of Licenses when he turned Tammany out of City Hall three years ago. Since the power to license is the power to reform, Commissioner Moss, who is as notable for his integrity as for his dapper dress, lost no time suppressing shortweight ice dealers, market racketeers, dirty magazine publishers...
...private life. Commissioner Moss's business was show business. He and his brother, Benjamin S. Moss, were pioneer chain cinemansion operators, he coproduced a hit called Subway Express and for a long time was a prominent Theatre Guildsman. It was only natural that Commissioner Moss should concentrate his reform zeal on Broadway. He requisitioned dress rehearsal seats to all productions so that if a show was dirty it could be cleaned up without the furor of revision after the opening. He made all casting offices take out licenses, rid the city of unscrupulous booking agents. In 1934 he requested...
...nudist colonists" and other female exhibitionists were responsible for the gay success of world's fairs at Chicago, San Diego and Dallas. The fair girls vanished with the autumn and the Legion of Decency rectified the films. But burlesque in New York City suffered no brake except Commissioner Moss's warning and an occasional police raid when a show got too hot for even the precinct police captain to tolerate. The old scatological burlesque jokes bandied by the tramp, the Irishman and the Jew remained about the same. But as additional burlesque houses opened all over town, desperate...
Biding his time until within a few days of May 1, when all burlesque theatre licenses came up for renewal, Commissioner Moss suddenly summoned producers and entertainers from the city's 14 burlesque houses to his office, asked them to show cause why they should be permitted to continue making a living out of naked women and dirty jokes. Press and pulpit rallied to his support. His Eminence Patrick Cardinal Hayes inveighed against "these disgraceful and pernicious performances," and the Jews and Protestants agreed. President Thomas J. Phillips of the Burlesque Artists Association of the U. S. lost...
...liberties are crumbling away, the tendency to accomplish "reforms" by administrative fiat rather than by judicial hearings is one of the first signs of weakness. There is nothing in New York law or tradition that sanctions the practice of combining judge and jury in the single person of Mr. Moss. For someday the official inquisitor may not be so enlightened a man as Mr. Moss, and the voice of authority may ring out for the abridgement of some less undesirable pursuit than Mr. Minsky's. It would surely set a better precedent to take this matter before the properly constituted...