Transcription of Chicago Daily Tribune Review, May 16, 1926
Chicago, May 7.—“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” as indicated in your Friday editorial column, undoubtedly points an accusing finger at us from the viewpoint of standardized morals. But its almost sublime honesty—after the hundreds and thousands of American books, plays, and movies in which the heroine somehow turned out to be “pure” after all—is a welcome relief, indeed, a breath of fresh air, in this great land of self-deception.
Whatever Miss Loos may have intended, the result has the hopeful ring of ironic truth. This is no David Belasco nonsense! The condition she has so unaffectedly caught is by no means confined to prostitutes—or even to semi-prostitutes. It is a widespread attitude of mind—a sign of the times, as your writer truly says, but a sign of the commercialized times, as he carefully does not say.
As a nation we stand today—or try to stand—with the ideals of our pioneer ancestors clutched nobly in our one hand, while the other busily practices an utterly opposed code of actual daily expediency. Until we can find the courage to admit that this popular brand of go-getting philosophy is at the very root of all our moral ills we'll hardly get on very far toward reform. We are the only nation in the world to make of greed a virtue. Older civilizations at least have no hallucinations on the subject. Yet we continue to teach our children the glories of making good—of getting ahead—of putting it over—and then have the characteristic naiveté to be incensed at so unmistakable a product as Lorelei Lee.
Miss Loos has written a satire—a bitter satire, if we read it aright. And I, for one, give her the high credit of having intended to do just that.
FREDERIC HAYES.