OH, HENRY!

 

I believe "anarchist" as a functional political label became passé with the invention of psychiatry. Of course it has stuck around as a vestigial etymological fossil, but any current criminal shrink can now vouch that the loonies who espouse anarchy (or libertarianism) are really pathological egotistical narcissists.  There is no more "cause" there, than in the activities of "Oath Keeper" on 6 January 2021. Just a desperate hunger for attention.

As proof  I now present you with the head of Emile Henri (above), who lost his head over the injustice he suffered because of another inarticulate Frenchman who sought to destroy the establishment and managed only to blow his nose at them.

Everything about Auguste Vaillant (above) screams irony. He was a kin of Lee Harvey Oswald, a little man who wanted to be important, but lacked the necessary attention span. He claimed to be the leader of a socialist group which seems to have had only one regular member. Him. While waiting for the revolution he was ludicrously employed in sewing expensive handbags and wallets for the wealthy to carry their money around.

Concerned about justice for the poor, Vaillant had abandoned a wife and two children - leaving them in poverty - and then moved in with a deaf woman. For a political revolutionary to be living with a woman who could not hear his rants against capitalism passes into the realm of absurdity. 

And that is where we find Auguste Vaillant on Saturday,  10 December, 1893 entering the public gallery above the Chamber of Deputies (above), the French congress, carrying a sauce pan bomb in his overcoat. Ce n'est pas ironique, c'est le plus absurde. 

Auguste had constructed two sauce pan bombs, but discarded the larger one after realizing he could never sneak a 3 quart sauce pan past security. Spotting his intended target, the French President, standing on the Chamber floor, Auguste uncovered and armed his 1 quart sauce pan (above). This attracted the attention of the woman sitting next to him. (“Excuse me, but is that a sauce pan bomb in your pocket or are you just unhappy to see me?”).  She was able to deflect his throw so that the sauce pan bounced off a decorative cornice and never made it onto the chamber floor before exploding,

The blast shattered Auguste’s right arm. The nuts and bolts packed around the explosive, shrapnel intended to kill 150 politicians, instead lacerated Auguste’s own neck and chest. And the explosion blew his nose completely off his face. Unfortunately, the quick acting heroine was also badly wounded, as were at least 20 of the intended targets. But the only person who died, if not immediately, was Auguste. Ce n'est pas tragique, c'est le plus absurde.

Auguste’s trial was brief. And on 3 February, 1894, the guillotine finished what Auguste’s own bomb had started. His last words, before the blade severed the rest of his head from his body, were, “Mort à la société bourgeoise! Vive l’anarchie!” The translation would be, “Death to the Bourgeoisie! Long live Anarchy!” Even his last words turned out to have been ironic, since he barely lived long enough to utter them, and given his position, he shouted them into the pavement.  But then, like most humans,  he had always been lecturing mostly to himself, but mostly not listening.

But there was one lunatic who was envious for Auguste's death scene; that 21 year old nobody anarchist fanatic, Emile Henri,   After all, just over a year before,  had not Henri stricken a much more effective blow against the bourgeois but had received little of the press coverage afforded to the now headless incompetent dead man? 

Henri had decided to strike his blow for striking miners. He packed 20 sticks of dynamite into a sauce pan - 20! -  and rigged it to explode if it was jostled. He then carefully left this “infernal device” outside the second floor offices of a mining company just before lunch on 8 November, 1892.  

A lowly porter noticed the sauce pan, and realized immediately it was probably not somebodies' lunch. But rather than evacuating the offices he ordered an office boy to carry the suspect sauce pan down to the street. Somehow the office boy made it in once piece, but he felt a uneasy about leaving it on the sidewalk, in case a passing pedestrian should be injured or killed.

So the humanitarian alerted a nearby school crossing guard. She called the police, and two patrol officers responded. And, instead of evacuating the area and calling in experts, they tied a napkin around the bomb and then the three of them, the cops and the office boy, carried the bomb suspended between them to  the rather mis-named Rue des Bon Enfants (Street of the wonderful children), to the police station.  

Once inside, where the explosion could be concentrated, the 10 sticks of dynamite exploded, killing four cops and the diligent office boy.

Henri had to lay low for awhile, and he was still living in anonymity in a crummy apartment with his deaf girlfriend when he opened his anarchist newspaper on 4 February, 1894 to read of Auguste’s dramatic speech at his execution. And Henri was green with envy.  Now, there might be some who feel my tone slights the victims of these attacks; to which I reply, "baloney". 

Murder has been anathema for at least six thousand years, when the ancient Egyptians made “Thou shalt not kill” their first commandment, predating Moses by at least a thousand years. If a human being is murdered by a serial killer, a lunatic at the controls of a hijacked jet, a deluded doctor, a drunk at the wheel of a car or a waiter too busy to wash their hands, the result for the victims is the same; tragedy. Fundamentalist Islamic-Christian-Marxist- Socialist-cultural-political justifications matter only to the perpetrator; I say again, baloney.

As if to prove my point, one week after the glorious execution of Auguste, Henri entered the restaurant at Hotel Terminus, next to the Gar Saint Lazare train station in Paris (above). He had stopped at two other bars earlier but, he claimed later, they weren’t crowded enough to justify his and the victim's sacrifices. My guess is he had not yet drunk enough courage. 

He nursed two drinks for an hour at the Terminus, and then as he staggered out the door, tossed his bomb back into the café, where it exploded, killing one person.

 A waiter ran after Henri, who shot him. Two policemen took up the chase. Henri shot one of them. The other knocked him down and restrained him. Henri’s toll was now eight dead – five at the police station  the year before and three more at the restaurant.

At his trial Henri was defiant and bombastic, until his attorney put Henri’s mother on the witness list. Henri objected. He told the judge, “It never occurred to me to inflict such pain on my mother.” In fact I suspect Henri was more concerned about his image. It would be difficult to remain an anarchist hero with your mummy explaining to the court how hard it was to get you toilet trained. 

According to the New York Times, On 21 May, 1894 at “4:07 a.m.…the iron doors swung apart…Henri was ghastly white, but walked with a firm step. 

As he approached the platform he shouted, “Courage comrades. Long live anarchy.” His voice…trembled noticeably…As they pushed him against the plank he shouted again, “Courage comrades. Long live anarchy.”  He had evidently worked this out and wanted to be quoted exactly. The next moment the click of the knife was heard and Henri’s head dropped to the ground. The blood from his trunk spurted high as the head revolved into the basket. (The executioner) himself picked up the head from the sawdust and threw it viciously into the basket with the body.”

Anarchy as a viable theology, it turned out, was not long lived, either. History proved it to be a temporary delusion, to join those other temporary delusions people have claimed as justification for random murder; communism, fascism, Black power, White power, the Basque Independence Party, the Irish Republican Army, the John Birch Society, the Confederacy, and the myriad other stupid self-justifications invented by humans to demand their get their way over the majority of citizens.

Hatred is a lot like all ideology in this respect - reduced to its core it is always about self.

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THE PROFESSIONAL PRIG

 

I have absolutely no sympathy for Anthony Comstock (above),  a man described by a biographer as having  “no conspicuous talents and...boundless energy”.   His brother's death from wounds suffered in the three days of slaughter at Gettysburg, compelled Anthony to join the Union Army. But the Connecticut farm boy then spent a year of isolation and boredom guarding the backwaters of St. Augustine, Florida. 

Most of his fellow soldiers considered him a bible thumping prig, who instead of simply refusing it, pompously poured his daily whiskey ration out on the ground. And the great lesson this “religio-monomaniac” took from the four bloody years that ended slavery, was that his fellow soldiers were addicted to pornography.

By 1861 there were almost 3,000 photographers in Paris, and 200 schools teaching the skill in London. And from day one, a significant percentage of these technicians found taking “dirty pictures” very profitable.  

Shortly after Gettysburg, another smug priss, General Marsena Rudolph Patrick (above), had boasted in his diary of “burning up a large quantity of obscene books, taken from the mails.” 

And it wasn't just pocket editions of “Fanny Hill”, and the “Libertine Enchantress” that he burned. There were also the “barrack favorites”, the “carte de visite” French postcards – nude photos of women, which went for twelve cents each, and “London and Paris Volupuarties” engaged in actual sex acts, for $3 a dozen ($9 for stereoscopic views). Comstock found himself drawn to these “deadly poisons” - as he called them - “cast into the fountain of moral purity.”

By 1868 the muscular Comstock was a menial worker in New York City, making $12 a week as a porter for a dry goods store. He was a man "devoid of humor, lustful after publicity, and vastly ignorant “ who, by his own admission, spent many lonely evenings fearing “for the souls of the young men” who roomed with him. 

He joined the Young Men's Christian Association, and became convinced he faced “some of the most insidious and deadly forces of evil” in America.  A nation racked by continued violence inspired by four bloody years of war saw pornography as a low priority.  But Comstock did not share that opinion.

He quickly attracted the attention of the President of the WMCA, Morris K. Jessup (above), who had made his fortune as a banker for railroad tycoons. Jessup interviewed Comstock in his Madison Avenue mansion and liked what he saw. 

They made an unlikely pair. Jessup stood over six feet tall, and was a philanthropist to many causes. Comstock was short and brutally single minded. Despite their differences, for the next forty years Jessup supported Comstock, with money and political influence, even creating the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for the Christian warrior, when others in the WMCA questioned his tactics. (It is interesting to note that of all the social reform movements of the late 19^th century, the Comstock's “Society” was the only one with no women in positions of authority.) Comstock would admit in his diary, “ Only one man thinks as I do and that is Mr. Jessup.”

With Jessup's support Comstock successfully lobbied congress for the Comstock Law, the last act of a lame duck congress on 3 March, 1873,  which made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material through the mail. The act also created a job of Special Postal Inspector for Comstock, allowing him define as pornographic anything mentioning birth control or preventing venereal disease. In Comstock's view, “God has set certain natural barriers. If you turn loose the passions and break down the fear (of unwanted pregnancies or disease) you bring . . . disaster.” 

His first year the new Special Inspector, always dressed in his black frock coat, traveled 23, 000 miles on a free rail pass, looking for sin in America. And luckily, since his job depended on it, he found it everywhere, and 24 states passed their own versions of "his" law, collectively called the Little Comstock Laws.

In 1872 Comstock won national attention when he went after Victoria Woodhull (above). She was no common pornographer, but a feminist who had run her own Wall Street brokerage firm and her “Weekly” newspaper -  in which Victoria argued, ”When woman rises... into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom...then will woman be raised”  

To highlight the hypocrisy of men making decisions about birth control, the “Weekly” published details of an extramarital affair by one of her critics, popular Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Breecher.  The same day the article appeared, Victoria, her husband and her sister were all arrested. Reporting the affair, said Comstock, was spreading obscenity. Comstock's belligerent theatrics in the court room so offended some members of the jury, they hung. Still, the trial only increased the popularity of both Comstock and adulterous Breecher.

Comstock claimed he convicted 3,500 people of distribution of pornography and destroyed 15 tons of obscene books, including medical text books that displayed female anatomy charts or mentioned abortion. To Comstock, woman’s health was far less important than their moral purity. 

He also burned novels written by D.H. Lawrence and Theodore Dreiser. Comstock even tried to close down a play by George Bernard Shaw, whom he called an “Irish smut dealer”. Of the first twelve people convicted of violating the Federal Comstock law, 5 were pardoned by President Ulysses Grant, who had signed the law.  And of the 105 people arrested for violating Comstock's campaign against birth control,  all but 16 were found not guilty. In state courts Comstock fared much better.

He saw himself as “the weeder in God's garden”, but his critics saw him as “a first class Torquemada”, who had run the church's inquisition. They also saw him as chief of America's “moral eunuchs.” In 1877 Comstock went after Massachusetts social activist Ezra Heywood (above) for publishing a pamphlet about marriage called “Cupid’s Yokes”. 

The judge told the jury the pamphlet was too offensive to allow them to read it, and without reading the offensive words, they sentenced Heywood to two years at hard labor in the Dedham jail. Six months later President Rutherford B. Hayes pardoned Heywood, but Comstock saw that as a challenge. 

Comstock (above) now persecuted Heywood, having him arrested four more times, once for reprinting two poems by Walt Whitman, and again for discussing a contraceptive device called the “Comstock syringe” . By the fourth arrest the sixty year old Heywood was broke and emotionally exhausted, when in a state court he sentenced to another two years of hard labor.  This time there was no pardon. In 1892, after a year in jail, he was released, but died soon after , from tuberculosis he had contracted in jail. Comstock had won again.

Comstock boasted he had driven 15 people to suicide. His most famous victim was Ida Craddock, a free spirit and writer of fact based guides like “The Marriage Night” and “Right Marital Living”. 

After pleading guilty to violating Illinois Little Comstock law,  and receiving a suspended sentence,  Ida was immediately arrested under New York's version in 1892 and suffered three months in a workhouse. As she left that jail Comstock had her arrested again (above) on Federal charges for the same offense. This time she was sentenced to five years at hard labor. And Comstock let her know, that as soon as she served that term, he intended on arresting her again.

The night before she was to enter prison yet again, Ida Craddock put her head in an oven, turned on the gas jets, and then slit her wrists. In her public suicide note, Ida blamed her death on “This man, Anthony Comstock,...(who is) unctuous with hypocrisy..."

...."if the reading of impure books and the gazing upon impure pictures does debauch and corrupt and pervert the mind", wrote Ida,  "...(and) Anthony Comstock has himself read perhaps more obscene books, and has gazed upon perhaps more lewd pictures than has any other one man in the United States, what are we to think of the probable state of Mr. Comstock's imagination?"

Ida (above) called Comstock, "...a sex pervert;  he is what physicians term a Sadist...for nine long years I have faced social ostracism, poverty, and the dangers of persecution by Anthony Comstock.. I beg of you, for your own sakes, and for the future happiness of the young people who are dear to you, to protect my little book...” Comstock insisted that her suicide was one of his proudest achievements.

It was not only Comstock's bullying, but also his lack of self awareness that gradually weakened his grip on public morals. The final breaking point came in 1913 when Harry Reichenbach besieged Comstock with complaints about the Braun and Company gallery on west 46^th street in Manhattan. The prig-in-chief found the sidewalk in front of the art gallery crowded with young men snickering and praising the beauty of a painting of a nude woman (above) in the front window. 

Comstock stormed into the gallery and ordered the painting removed. The clerk, James Kelly, stammered, “But that is the famous “September Morn” by Paul Chabas”.  The work was indeed famous, having won a medal of honor from the French Academy of Painting just the year before. Undaunted, Comstock replied, “There is too little morning and too much maid”, and threatened to arrest the gallery owner, Philippe Ortiz,  if the painting was not removed.

Defiantly, Mr. Ortiz kept the painting in his gallery's front window for another two weeks, removing it only after the crowds jamming his studio had bought every single print of it.  Twenty years later in his memoir, “Phantom Fame”, Reichenbach admitted he had staged the entire thing, including hiring the young men to ogle the painting, as a publicity stunt for the gallery. Comstock, who was not in on the joke, had behaved as boorishly and brutally as expected.  The Gallery made a bundle.

Comstock died suddenly on the evening of 21 September, 1915. His monument was that during World War One the United States was the only nation not to supply its soldiers and sailors with prophylactics.. Instead, under Comstock's insistence, the Army and Navy merely lectured in favor of abstinence. 

As a result the Army and Navy of the United States discharged 10,000 men during a war who had become infected with sexually transmitted diseases, the largest single cause of American causalities during World War One. 

It would be another 18 years before birth control could be openly purchased in the United States. Shadows of Anthony Comstock's warped vision have distorted American education well into the 21st century, in states which refuse to offer high school students sex education, opting instead for preaching abstinence - which has proved no more effective today than it did in 1916 to 1918.  And the never ending war on "Planned Parenthood", was also begun under that prig Comstock.

It seems, like every prig, Anthony Comstock was convinced he was the savior of civilization. And yet no prig ever saves anything,  because they trade human lives for a tattered myth, a fig leaf of morality.

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