Anthony Comstock recognized the obscenity when he saw it, and the famous anti-vice crusader saw it everywhere. From the 1870s to the beginning of the 20and century, the dry goods salesman turned self-proclaimed censor was a man on a mission: to impose his sense of morality on what Americans read, saw, and even did in their own bedrooms.
Although not an elected lawmaker, the devout Protestant, appalled by the sexual permissiveness he witnessed in New York, extensively rewrote federal postal laws “to prevent the couriers from being used to corrupt public morals.” . And he got a docile Congress to pass them. Some historians suggest that the politicians were looking for a question that would divert public attention from the Crédit Mobilier scandal, in which many of them were implicated.
While laws against obscenity already existed, Comstock succeeded in expanding the scope of “lewd, obscene, or lascivious” material to include information on birth control and abortion.
The post made him a special agent, with the power to conduct raids and arrest suspected offenders. He wielded that authority brilliantly for the next 42 years, claiming nearly 4,000 convictions, 160 tons of books and other materials destroyed, and at least 15 suspects driven to suicide.
Until his death in 1915, Comstock was admired in some circles for his moral uprightness – and derided in others as a dickhead and a nosy. Today it may seem like a relic of the Victorian era, but its laws have affected American life for decades and its spirit lives on in endless battles over censorship, free speech, the right to privacy and the appropriate role of government among citizens. ‘ lives.
Comstock’s “Chamber of Horrors”
In 1872, Comstock began visiting Washington, D.C. to lobby legislators for stricter vice laws. In a famous show-and-tell presentation in Vice President Schuyler Colfax’s office, he seduced senators with a selection of dirty books, pornographic playing cards and contraceptive devices. He called the collection his “chamber of horrors.”
Comstock had already made a name for himself in New York as head of the YMCA Committee for the Suppression of Vice. He used his position to confiscate and destroy books and other materials which he believed could corrupt the morals of young men. The law that allowed him to carry out his raids, the Obscene Literature Act of 1868 in New York, also granted him a reduction in any fines.
Anthony Comstock
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But Comstock had bigger ambitions, not just to clean up New York, but the entire country.
In 1873 he got what he wanted when Congress passed an act for the suppression of the trade and circulation of obscene literature and articles of immoral use. It became commonly known as the Comstock Act.
A few days after the law was passed, the Post Office gave it the power to enforce its own rules. While other obscenity laws allowed Comstock to raid booksellers and publishers and harass art gallery owners with paintings of nudes on display, Comstock’s laws technically required the material to pass in the mail before he can act.
Rather than wait for this to happen, Comstock would send out materials on contraception and other forbidden topics using assumed names. “In some cases, he concocted entire families, individuals sharing a surname, living in the same town,” reports Amy Sohn in her 2021 book on Comstock, The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Golden Age. When the packages arrived, he jumped up.
READ MORE: America’s Forgotten Mass Imprisonment of Women Considered Sexually Immoral
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Comstock’s laws spread to the United States
Satirical comic titled ‘St. Anthony Comstock; The Nuisance of the Village’ of Puck, c. 1906.
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Federal Comstock laws were not universally liked, and there were many attempts to repeal them federally. However, many state legislatures enthusiastically adopted them, and more than half of the states enacted their own Comstock laws in subsequent years. Some were harsher than the Federal original.
Meanwhile, lawmakers continued to tinker with the 1873 law. In 1908, for example, it banned as “indecent” any material that might “incite arson, murder, or assassination.” It was a time when concerns about anarchism and socialism were strong and, as Sohn notes, Comstock’s law was “evolving to fit the times”.
The women strike back
Margaret Sanger during her trial in Federal Court for her book The Woman Rebel, c. 1906
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Comstock’s attacks on contraception turned out to coincide with the growing women’s rights movement, for which family planning and women’s control of their own bodies were central issues.
Anarchist activist Emma Goldman and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger were two of his most prominent targets, and they returned the favor by denouncing him in their publications and at the conference.
In 1914 he arranged to have Sanger indicted for the contents of his magazine The rebellious woman, which he called “lewd, lewd and lascivious”. Threatened with a potential prison sentence of 45 years, she fled the country, but returned to stand trial in 1915. The case was dropped the following year when the government dropped the charges.
Meanwhile, Comstock died of pneumonia in September 1915, aged 71. He had pursued his crusade to the end, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Appointed by President Woodrow Wilson as the U.S. delegate to the International Purity Conference in San Francisco, he was disturbed to see naked mannequins in department store windows (apparently still worked by window dressers) and decided to make some a federal case. He lost.
Comstock’s laws after Comstock
During the 20th century, court rulings would gradually undermine the original Comstock laws and their state imitators. But from time to time publishers and the public were reminded that the law was still in effect.
In 1943, the Postmaster General moved to take Squire the magazine’s second-class mailing privileges on the grounds that some of its cartoons and other content were obscene. (Cheaper second-class mail was vital to the survival of many magazines.) The case dragged on until 1946 before the United States Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s verdict in Squirethe favor.
In 1955 a new postmaster denied Playboy the magazine’s application for a second-class license, prompting editor Hugh Hefner to remark that “we don’t believe Postmaster General Summerfield has publishing magazines. It should stick to mail delivery. To like Squire, Playboy prevailed in court.
These days, postal laws rarely make headlines or lead to major court cases. While would-be censors from various political persuasions periodically call for greater restrictions on social media and the internet, this cause has yet to find its own Anthony Comstock.
