I have absolutely no sympathy for Anthony Comstock, 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 chance sent the Connecticut farm boy far from the crucial battles
around Richmond, and he 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 war 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 Patrick, 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, 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, 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. But for
forty years Jessup was supportive of 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 19th 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, 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 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 federal anti-birth control
campaign, 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” and chief of America's “moral eunuchs.” In 1877
Comstock went after Massachusetts social activist Ezra Heywood 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 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. He 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, and was convicted and sentenced to another two years of
hard labor. This time there was no pardon. A year after he was
released in 1892, Heywood died of 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 and receiving a
suspended sentence in 1899, for to violating Illinois' Little
Comstock Law, she was 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 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, Ida Craddock put her head in the 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...(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? ...The man is 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 death was one of his
proudest moments.
It was not Comstock's bullying, but 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 46th 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 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”(above). The work was 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 out every 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.
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 with
prophylactics.. Instead, under Comstock's insistence, the Army and Navy lectured its soldiers on abstinence. As a result the American Army and Navy discharged
10,000 men who had become infected with sexually
transmitted diseases, the largest single cause of American causalities during
the war. 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 that refuse to offer high school students sex education, opting instead for preaching abstinence - which has proved no more effective today than it had in the 19th century. It seems that every prig, Anthony Comstock was convinced he was the savior of civilization. And yet no prig ever saves anything, except the tattered myth of morality..
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