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ONE
1873
The citizens
of Washington, D.C., prepared feverishly for Ulysses S. Grant's second
inauguration on March 4, 1873. Shopkeepers hung brightly colored fabrics
on store windows. Construction crews scrambled to build viewing platforms
and string streamers and flags along the procession route, which extended
from just outside Georgetown to the Capitol. A week before the official
festivities were scheduled to begin, the crowds started to arrive. Trains
brought in well-wishers and invited guests: noisy West Point cadets sporting
new gray uniforms; a car of musicians and soldiers from New York; a fire
company from Philadelphia. By March 3, hotels and boardinghouses in the
nation's capital had filled to capacity.
In the midst
of this excitement, a distracted Congress hurried to complete unfinished
business before it adjourned on March 4. A series of scandals involving
financial schemes profiting prominent Republicans and their business cronies
had cast a pallor over Washington politics and fueled the reformer Horace
Greeley's unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1872. Laboring under
a cloud of suspicion, the Forty-second Congress now worked overtime to
end the session with a spate of creditable legislation, as presumably
befitted hardworking politicians worthy of the public trust. In the final
hours of the term, Congress passed some 260 acts, the precise provisions
of which remained unknown to many members. So impressed with their industriousness
were these gentlemen that one of the last things they did before adjourning
was to vote themselves a pay raise of twenty-five hundred dollars, retroactive
for two years.
One measure
passed in this last-minute frenzy was an anti-obscenity bill approved
in the early-morning hours of Sunday, March 2. Commonly called the Comstock
Act after its chief proponent, the morals crusader Anthony Comstock, the
statute, embedded in a broader postal act, passed after little political
debate and was signed into law along with 117 other bills on March 3.
The Comstock Act defined contraceptives as obscene and inaugurated a century
of indignities associated with birth control's illicit status. Invoking
its authority to regulate interstate commerce and the U.S. postal system,
Congress outlawed the dissemination through the mail or across state lines
of any "article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any
article whatever for the prevention of conception." At the time, the act
largely eluded public comment. Over the next century, however, its impact
on birth control would be profound.
It was not
the first time Congress had made obscenity a crime or had sought to regulate
what was sent through the mails. In 1835, President Andrew Jackson, courting
slaveholder support, recommended that Congress prohibit "the circulation
in the Southern States through the mail of incendiary publications intended
to incite slaves to insurrections." Seven years later, Congress enacted
its first anti-obscenity law, passing without explanation a tariff act
authorizing customs officials to seize "obscene or immoral" imported prints
and pictures (but not printed matter). Implicitly identifying pornography
as a foreign, primarily European, phenomenon, the 1842 statute strove
to protect republican virtue from the sexual wickedness presumed to be
festering overseas.
By the 1860s,
a lively domestic trade in tawdry novels, pamphlets, and photographs had
revealed not only that the Tariff Act had failed but also that native,
not foreign, hands were to blame. Those who doubted Americans' complicity
in the pornography boom that swept the country in the 1850s and 1860s
had only to survey return addresses on mailed matter to know better; most
hailed from New York, not London or Paris. Improvements in printing technology
and reductions in postal rates had made possible the widespread diffusion
of titillating publications, and the migration of single men to cities
had created an expanding urban market for their consumption. Leisure patterns
during the Civil War exacerbated the trend. Divided in their politics,
soldiers shared common ground in making mail-order pornography a vibrant
part of camp life.
By 1865,
Congress had become fed up. Senator Jacob Collamer of Vermont, postmaster
general during the Taylor administration, demanded that the power of the
federal government be harnessed to stop this spreading social menace.
"Our mails," he seethed, "have been made the vehicle for the conveyance
of great numbers and quantities of obscene books and pictures . . . and
that is getting to be a very great evil." Collamer's bill, enacted on
March 3, 1865, made the mailing of any "obscene book, pamphlet, picture,
print, or other publication . . . [of ] vulgar and indecent character"
a misdemeanor punishable by a fine not to exceed five hundred dollars
or by imprisonment for no longer than a year. It was left to individual
postmasters, who could scrutinize return addresses and look inside printed
publications (typically sent open at one end, enabling one to discern
the contents without breaking the seal), to exclude materials they considered
offensive. In 1872, Congress strengthened the 1865 law, adding envelopes
and postcards to its list of "suspicious" articles."
The Comstock
Law thus continued a policy of federal obscenity regulation that in 1873
was more than thirty years old. It expanded the scope of the 1872 law
by eliminating loopholes and codifying an extraordinarily long list of
"obscenities." Ominously, contraceptives made the list for the first time.
The decision to include them was Anthony Comstock's.
Comstock
was born in 1844 in the countryside of New Canaan, Connecticut, about
eight miles east of the New York state line. His father was a prosperous
farmer, his mother a devout Congregationalist who died when Comstock was
ten. After his mother's death, Comstock remained a zealous devotee of
the church, attending services and Sunday school regularly. Throughout
his life, he clung to the austere, fire-and-brimstone faith of his childhood.
The devil was real, omnipresent, and ready to suck souls into the fiery
pits of hell. Abstaining from all things evil was one's only hope for
salvation. Impure thoughts and behavior -- anything that might derail
one from a straight-and-narrow path -- were as ruinous in Comstock's eyes
as lack of faith. Even church-inspired worldliness was suspect. Once,
after attending a Catholic midnight Mass out of curiosity, he confided
in his diary that he was "disgusted. Do not think it right to spend Sunday
morn. in such manner. Seemed much like Theater."
After his
older brother died at Gettysburg, Comstock enlisted in the Seventeenth
Regiment of the Connecticut Infantry. He passed most of his one and a
half years in the Union Army in a peaceful section of Florida, far removed
from the skirmishes of battle. Perhaps he felt, as many men who came of
age after the Civil War would later, a hollowness for having missed the
"good fight." Perhaps it was this void that turned him into a lifelong
crusader. He certainly loved to battle, and nothing could restrain him
if he believed Satan, masked as a Confederate, a pornographer, or a bottle
of gin, was his foe.
Freed from
combat with Confederates, Comstock launched a private war against tobacco,
alcohol, gambling, and atheism. He joined the Christian Commission, an
organization that distributed temperance and religious tracts to soldiers,
and established prayer meetings for his regiment, which he attended four
to nine times a week. Although some recruits appreciated formal opportunities
for worship, most felt differently about Comstock's refusal to drink whiskey
and, even worse, his uncharitable habit of pouring his ration onto the
ground. When Comstock left the Army in 1865, he did so, by his own admission,
an unpopular man.
After holding
short-term posts in Connecticut and Tennessee, Comstock moved to New York
City seeking fortune. There, the Connecticut farm boy entered a world
radically different from anything he had previously encountered. New York
in the 1860s and early 1870s was the center of commercialized sex in the
United States, home to a wide array of erotica well integrated into the
city's economy and public culture. Once sequestered in brothels, assignation
houses, and isolated residential districts, commercial sex in postbellum
New York had gone public. Sex was easily viewed and consumed on streets
and in hotels, shops, and saloons throughout the city. Prostitutes roamed
neighborhoods freely, and posted pictures, window modeling, and even newspaper
ads promoted their specialties and rates. Local printers sold pornographic
books, pamphlets, drawings, and photographs. Stage shows in concert saloons
combined alcohol, food, dance, loud music, and heterosexual and homosexual
pleasures. Alone or in groups, entertainers would dance, strip, gyrate
suggestively, or insert accoutrements like rubber dildos or cigars into
various orifices to tease and tempt the crowds. Masked balls, which enjoyed
their peak in popularity after the Civil War, permitted men and women
of varying social status to transgress traditional boundaries of public
sexual behavior." As they danced about the hall, participants would take
advantage of their anonymity to engage in flirting, touching, kissing,
and even group sex.
Alone and
jobless, the newly arrived Comstock rented a room in a cheap lodging house
on Pearl Street near City Hall. He soon found work: first as a porter,
then as a salesman for Cochran, McLean and Company, a dry-goods notion
house. Nights passed in unkempt boardinghouses and days spent walking
the streets gave Comstock firsthand exposure to the traffic in sex. His
travels took him around Broadway and Pearl, Warren, Nassau, and Grand
Streets, areas where the sale of contraceptives, abortion services, and
erotica thrived. What he saw disgusted him, as did the behavior of his
young business associates, who gawked at pornographic books and pictures.
Comstock's
reactions to this sexualized economy influenced his anti-vice campaign.
To ignore that the sex trade was first and foremost a trade is to miss
an important part of the Comstock story. Vice, as he understood it, would
forever be entangled in the commercialized state in which it was consumed.
Weeding it out meant destroying an industry.
In 1868,
Comstock went on the offensive, making the first of what would be hundreds
of arrests during his lifetime. Largely through the efforts of the Young
Men's Christian Association (YMCA), the New York legislature had recently
passed its own anti-obscenity statute. With this for ammunition, Comstock
went vice hunting. When a friend blamed a lewd book for luring him to
a brothel, where he contracted a venereal disease, Comstock became furious.
He pursued the supplier, a book dealer named Charles Conroy, whose business
was headquartered in a basement a block away from where Comstock worked.
Comstock bought one of Conroy's sexually explicit books and showed it
to the captain of the local police precinct; together they arrested Conroy
and seized his stock. As he would with other "vice entrepreneurs" he apprehended,
Comstock monitored Conroy's subsequent business dealings and in 1874 arrested
the book dealer for the third time. An irate Conroy fought back, slashing
the face of the man whose relentless pursuit of vice criminals had already
become legendary.
*Endnotes
were omitted.
Copyright
© 2001 Andrea Tone
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