With his book on the New England Watch and Ward Society, P. C. Kemeny has provided a most welcome corrective to narratives that portray the politics of morality as the preserve of the contemporary Christian Right. This is an exceedingly, almost excessively, detailed case study of the workings of a single, now largely forgotten Boston-based moral reform organisation (originally known as the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice) formed in 1878 by the scions of the mainline liberal Protestant establishment. Better remembered for their modernist and Social Gospel reinterpretations of the Christian faith, Kemeny shows that these very same individuals – clergy and mostly male laity from the Congregationalist, Methodist, Episcopalian and Unitarian Churches of the time, with some leading Ivy League professors thrown in – also took the lead in campaigns for the suppression of ‘commercialized vice’, including obscene and immoral literature, prostitution and gambling. They were propelled by an essentially whiggish view of society as a single organism in which the state needed to look after the moral lives of its citizens as much as it was bound to redress structural socioeconomic injustices. According to these anti-vice activists, immoral ideas led to immoral actions, and habituation in immoral activity lent itself to character formation with structural antisocial results. At the very core of this believed nexus lay the commercialisation of vice, that is, the for-profit publishers, gambling hall owners and pimps whom the Watch and Ward Society combatted. Its agents engaged in incessant public polemics but also in lobbying, pressurising of businesses and in private policing, and they formed close cooperative arrangements with Massachussetts prosecutors and police forces. Their pivotal alliance with secular Progressives yielded significant new moral legislation, prompted a multitude of convictions and led to the suppression of books such as Walt Whitman's Leaves of grass and Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry. As Kemeny notes in passing, some of the Progressive era's leading Christian fundamentalists and conservative Catholics co-operated in these efforts despite their deep theological differences of opinion. This is a dimension of the story that fails to receive the attention in this book that it deserves, and as a result the reader may end up with a slightly one-sided picture. Impressively documented and cogently argued, if somewhat repetitive, on the whole this is still a most valuable addition to the corpus alike on modernist Protestantism, the Progressive era and the long history of the regulation of morality in the United States. Moreover, when charting the late 1920s decline of the Watch and Ward Society in the face of growing libertarian opposition, Kemeny offers useful contemporary reflections, suggesting that we read the story as a parable of what is likely to happen whenever a moral consensus starts to decay and its custodians turn to coercive measures to preserve it.