New York City, mid-1870s:
BAM BAM BAM.
His hard fist smote the door.
“Open up in the name of the Law!” he yelled.
From within, whispers, scurryings. CRACK.
Smashed by his black boot, the door splintered, collapsed. Lunging through with warrants in one hand, a
revolver in the other, his badge agleam on his breast, the Special Agent of the
Post Office and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice barked out: “Arrest those men!
Impound all smut as evidence!”
From behind him, bluecoats rushed to obey. Within minutes the prisoners had been led out
manacled, and a printing press and tons of print carted off: another smut den
closed.
For a year the Special Agent, in drab black over stiff white
over perennial red flannel underwear (his only dash of color), had crisscrossed
the nation by rail, his pockets laden with handcuffs for miscreants, and cheap
rubber toys for little children, whose innocence he treasured. Caned by an abortionist, pommeled by an
ex-pugilist, and stabbed in the face by a smut dealer at his third arrest, he
had clapped them all in jail.
In rare quiet moments, nursing bruises or a severed artery,
he sat at his desk writing speeches for Purity Leagues, or letters to
abortionists tempting them, in a small, neat script with flourishes and signed
with a ladylike name, toward offenses by mail that if committed brought
immediate arrest.
In January 1874 he read his first confidential report to the
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a distinguished assembly of
merchants, doctors, lawyers, and judges, itemizing his seizures in the past
year:
130,000 lbs. of bound books.
194,000 bad pictures and photographs.
60,300
articles made of rubber for immoral purposes,
and used by both sexes.
and used by both sexes.
5,500
indecent playing cards.
3,150
boxes of pills and powders used by abortionists.
130,275 advertising circulars, catalogues, handbills,
and songs.
and songs.
4,750
newspapers containing improper advertisements,
or other matter.
or other matter.
20,000 letters
from various parts of the United States
ordering improper articles.
ordering improper articles.
22,000 names
of persons throughout the United States,
catalogued and sold to dealers in bad literature, as
persons likely upon receipt of circulars, etc., to
send orders.
catalogued and sold to dealers in bad literature, as
persons likely upon receipt of circulars, etc., to
send orders.
Of
the 106 persons arrested, 37 had pleaded guilty or been convicted, 3 had been
acquitted, 9 had been discharged, 9 had absconded, and 48 were awaiting
trial. The report then added
tellingly: “Three publishers, one
manufacturer, one abortionist, one expressman, and one prisoner in jail, or a total of seven,
have died since April, 1872” – statistics that the report’s author would
attribute to divine intervention. He
then reported sentences imposed totaling 24 years and 1 month, and fines
totaling $9,250. He himself had traveled
23,500 miles by rail. To which he added,
“This work has just begun.”
Such were the doings of Anthony Comstock early in his long
career. The smut dealers of Ann and
Nassau Streets, who, long tolerated by the police, were used to displaying
their wares openly, had come to know only too well this bullnecked,
stocky man, dressed habitually in boiler black, his muttonchop whiskers
yellow-brown in color, his hair thinning, his eyes bright with the hot blue
gaze of conviction. One after another he
had approached them, bought their wares, and then immediately had them
arrested, following which he began attacking the sources of those wares.
To few of us is it given to live out in real life, and
repeatedly, our most cherished fantasies.
But Anthony Comstock, in battering down the doors of smut dens and
having all the inmates arrested and their wares confiscated, was doing exactly
that. He saw his endeavors as heroic,
and himself as a lone crusader fighting the armies of evil: a pose worthy of
the heroes of the dime-novel adventure stories that the growing boys of the
time read eagerly – novels that Comstock denounced as a species of obscenity. But who was Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), and
what had brought him to this unique vocation?
The story has been told many times (google him and you’ll see) with
various shades of bias, so I’ll just discuss the start of his career.
“Every day something for Jesus,” his diary read for New
Year’s. A farm boy from Connecticut,
Comstock remembered from his earliest years shoveling through snowdrifts to get
the family wagon to church, where a full day of sermons and services portrayed
sinners scorched by the crackle of hellfire – a vision he would never forget. Coming to the city to get a job in dry goods,
he had been assailed on every side by gambling and billiard dens, dime novel
stands, dance halls, rumholes, theaters (those sinks of sin), and the brazen
tasseled legs of hussies in saloons (he may have peeked, but certainly didn’t
go in). “O make me pure!” he prayed to
his stark Connecticut God, and wrote in his diary, “Tempted by Satan, did not
yeild.” (Spelling was never his strong
point.) But worse than billiards and
drink, cards, faro, oyster suppers, and the Cyprians of Broadway in corrupting
young men from the boarding houses, were vile books sleek with smut thrust at
them by peddlers and the grimy hands of bookdealers in full view and knowledge
of the Law.
All his life this moral crusader was obsessed with
pornography. There was little poetry in
his soul, but when he described the perils imposed by smut, his imagination
kindled. Just listen to this description
in his book Traps for the Young:
This
moral vulture steals upon our youth in the home, school, and college, silently
striking its terrible talons into their vitals, and forcibly bearing them away
on hideous wings to shame and death.
Like a cancer, it fastens itself upon the imagination, and sends down
into the future life thousands of roots, poisoning the nature, enervating the
system, destroying self-respect…. It is
honeycombing society. Like a frightful
monster, it stands peeping over the sleeping child to catch its first thoughts
on awakening.
Elsewhere
he describes pornography as an invisible malaria, a canker worm, a leprosy
secretly wasting society. Could anyone
write so vividly, so luridly, without having experienced these perils himself?
 |
| Porn in the Mail Senders (left); the mail system (center); a furtive recipient (right) |
To fight this insidious plague, he wrote to a group of high-principled
and moneyed Christian laymen affiliated with the YMCA; a conference
resulted. Appearing before this
phalanx of respectables, his upper lip drawn taut, his blue eyes bright with
fervor, he probably told them a favorite tale from his youth. At eighteen, clerking in a store in
Connecticut, he had learned that a mad dog was loose in the streets, a threat
to every child in the village. At once he
kneeled, prayed to He Who All Sustaineth, then took a gun, went out alone (all his
friends hung back), confronted the snarling mastiff, aimed, shot it dead. To protect the youth in this city plagued
with lewdness, could not he and the gentlemen join together and by legal,
forceful means shoot dead the slimy-tentacled, hydra-headed monster of
obscenity? (Yes, he often used such imagery. A bit phallic, I think -- a notion that would have dismayed, or more likely infuriated, this tireless crusader.)
The gentlemen had emphatically agreed. Not only did they support his efforts
locally, but in January 1873 they sent him to Washington to lobby for stiffer
federal legislation to ban obscenity from the mails. At the Capitol he met with senators and
representatives (few of them, in his opinion, fit models for youth), showing
them books, postcards, circulars, and immoral rubber articles seized in his
raids. Confronted with The Lustful Turk, A Peep into a Female Seminary, and The Frisky
Song Book, the solons of
Washington were duly shocked and set about drafting a bill. Annoyed by the inevitable legislative delays, in February Comstock wrote ten New York State abortionists, purporting to be a poor seduced Treasury clerk begging them to send her "something that will relieve me." Attending a reception at the White House, he was scandalized by the low-cut dresses of the women. Further delays caused him to verge on despair. With Congress about to adjourn, his diary tells how he was so troubled that he could not say, "Thy will be done," and went to bed beset by the Devil. Then, the next day, a Sunday, he managed to humble himself in prayer and found peace. That afternoon the chaplain of the Senate informed him that, in a feverish last-minute session, Congress had indeed passed the bill. His diary records the joy in his soul.
When signed by President Grant on March 3, 1873, the bill became the law of the land. Soon known as the Comstock law, it banned from the mail all obscene matter, including specifically “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.” By mid-April abortionists in New York and Albany were being arrested for sending ads and articles for abortion through the mail; in every case Comstock was the witness.
When signed by President Grant on March 3, 1873, the bill became the law of the land. Soon known as the Comstock law, it banned from the mail all obscene matter, including specifically “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.” By mid-April abortionists in New York and Albany were being arrested for sending ads and articles for abortion through the mail; in every case Comstock was the witness.
With the passage of this bill, which was strictly enforced
well into the twentieth century, the federal government became a censor of the
mails, and standard medical treatises could no longer be mailed until certain
illustrations were purged from their pages.
Soon afterward Comstock was appointed a special agent of the post
office, in which capacity – at his own request, without pay – he could now pursue
malefactors nationwide. His original
YMCA backers – decorous churchmen who shunned publicity – were dismayed to find
they had a tiger by the tail, and he in turn was annoyed by their finicky
discretion. The situation was soon remedied
to the
 |
| Symbol of the Society |
On weekends
he returned to Brooklyn and the quiet woman ten years his elder whom he called
with affection “little Wifey,” a tidy homemaker, small and slight, self-effacing, pale as a pressed rose. On the piano in
the parlor stood a tintype of a lovely young girl; when visitors asked who it
was, Meg replied, smiling faintly, “Why, it used to be taken for me.” Of his work he
told her little, deeming it unfit for a lady's ears. When her Tony returned from battle she gasped at his cuts and bruises,
proclaimed him a “dear, sweet boy,” nursed him tenderly; he relished it. Recovering, he brought her a basket of
flowers to provoke the soft laugh that delighted him, then escorted her to
picnics and church. Whatever happened between them in the stealth of night, there was surely no mention of it by day, as was often the case in those Victorian times.
 |
| Comstock in his later years |
Such was Anthony Comstock at the beginning of his long
career, which lasted until his death in 1915.
In those early years he insisted that the “best” public opinion was behind
him, and he was probably right. But over
time his zeal became excessive, and he decried milk-and-water Christians who
shrank from the fight, as well as lazy prosecutors and lenient judges who failed
to bring malefactors to justice. As it
became clear that he made no distinction between the shabby products of the
lowest smut dens and legitimate literature and art, opinion about
him changed. He was pilloried in cartoons, and George Bernard Shaw created
the term “comstockery,” which passed into the language. My Second Webster’s Unabridged defines it as
follows: “a Zealous prosecution of
immorality in books, papers, and pictures.
b Hence, in a derogatory
sense, prudery.” Years later in the
1980s, when I was doing research for my biography of Madame Restell, he was
generally regarded as a relic of another age, one who might be dismissed as a curmudgeonly buffoon, had he not been so dangerous.
| St. Anthony Comstock, the Village Nuisance, a 1906 Puck cartoon by Louis M. Glackens. Portrayed as a monk, Comstock reacts to displays of flesh by women, horses, and dogs, bathes fully dressed, and, nude, is mocked by demons. Courtesy of the Library of Congress |
This, one might assume, is the final judgment on the man,
but it isn’t. Since then, the abortion
wars have heated up considerably. Recently, when I was googling Comstock to see what information was available online, I stumbled
on the website of the Christian Coalition.
There, in a book review, Comstock is hailed as a forerunner and
exemplary champion of the right-to-life movement, and a worthy foe of Margaret
Sanger, the birth control activist who created the term “birth control” itself
and founded what became Planned Parenthood.
No judgment, however seemingly universal, is definitive.
We will meet Anthony Comstock again in future posts, probably in two or three weeks, when the irresistible force meets the immovable object. If you look back to the New York of the 1870s
and later, he is hard to avoid.
Source note: There is lots
about Comstock online, but for the most part I have used information in my
biography The Wickedest Woman in New
York: Madame Restell, the Abortionist (see the source note in post #35),
and, supplementing that, the meticulous notes I took on the first five annual
reports of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; Comstock’s book Traps for the Young (1884); and the
Society’s record of arrests for 1872-1884 in volume 2 of their records, now
preserved in their entirety in the Library of Congress in Washington. Personal information about him, including diary entries, comes from Charles Gallaudet Trumbull's Anthony Comstock, Fighter (1913), the earliest (and least objective) biography, sanctioned by Comstock and written with his help.
(c) 2012 Clifford Browder
(c) 2012 Clifford Browder
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