€33 IIHHHWHIHHWWWWW"WWI

   

. THESIS

I LIBRARY
.11 OC (, Michigan State
Universfiy

This is to certify that the
thesis entitled

THE PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS MYOPIA AND CIVIL
LIBERTIES: ANTHONY COMSTOCK, THE EXCEPTION,
AND THE OBSCENE EMERGENCY

presented by

ERIC MICHAEL SHAW

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

MASTER OF degree in LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

 

 

goth: MMMW.

 

Major Professor’s Signature

13%;,“ \5, @004

Date

MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

PLACE IN RETURN Box to remove this checkout from your record.
To AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2/05 p:/CIRC/DateDue.indd~p.1

 

THE PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS MYOPIA AND CIVIL LIBERTIES:
ANTHONY COMSTOCK, THE EXCEPTION, AND THE OBSCENE
EMERGENCY
By

Eric Michael Shaw

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
Department of English
2004

ABSTRACT
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS MYOPIA AND CIVIL LIBERTIES:
ANTHONY COMSTOCK, THE EXCEPTION, AND THE OBSCENE
EMERGENCY
BY
Eric Michael Shaw

In January 2001, the new Republican president’s first executive decision
was to have a minister dedicate the inauguration to Jesus Christ. For many,
this event marked the advent of renewed governmental exclusion, a politics of
particularism intended to impose minority status on those outside the pale of
Protestant Evangelical Christianity, and ultimately, a means of demolishing the
wall placed between the secular and religious by America’s founders. Soon the
new administration, as Ron Barrier has noted, began “smuggling religion into
social programs, and preying on some of the most vulnerable people in our
society.” As discrimination becomes policy, as distinctions between church and
state blur; as America, consistent with its history of conquest and bloodshed
and its interventionist foreign policy, continues to seek out and destroy ‘infidels’
at home and abroad, there is no reason whatever to presuppose that what Carl
Schmitt termed “the exception” for Reasons of State will not be further utilized
to institute self-serving, faith-based legislation couched in language consistent
with national and societal defense. Looking back at Anthony Comstock and
those laws that engaged ‘obscenity,’ endorsed censorship, and foreclosed the

dissemination of information, one is inclined to glimpse an all too imminent

American future in which thought and expression are monitored and controlled.

Copyright by
ERIC M. SHAW
2004

For Bern,
In Loving Memory

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I ........................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER II ...................................................................................... 10
CHAPTER III ..................................................................................... 14
CHAPTET IV ..................................................................................... 32
CHAPTER V ...................................................................................... 41
CHAPTER Vl ..................................................................................... 44
APPENDICES .................................................................................... 48
WORKS CITED ................................................................................. 52

The Problem of Religious Myopia and Civil Liberties:
Anthony Comstock, the Exception, and the Obscene Emergency

Godliness is in league with riches. . . .Material prosperity is help-
ing to make the national character sweeter, more joyous, more
unselfish, more Christlike. . . .In the long run, it is only to the
man of morality that wealth comes.

—Bishop William Lawrence

The Relation of Wealth to Morals (1901)

Nothing will more effectually guard us against vice, than a firm
belief in the existence of God. For surely if we realize that there
is such a Being, we shall naturally infer from his perfections,
from the nature of his moral government, and from our situation
as rational creatures, that we are amenable at his awful tribunal.
Superior power, wisdom and goodness, always lay us under a
restraint, and command our veneration. These, even in a mortal,
overawe us. They restrain not only the actions, but the words
and thoughts of the most vitious [sic] and abandoned. Our
happiness depends on our virtue. Our virtue depends on the
conformity of our hearts and conduct to the laws prescribed us
by our beneficent Creator.

-Jonathon Maxcy, quoted in

The Columbian Orator(1811)

CHAPTER I

The American state was founded upon principles of inequality, most
saliently those which facilitated the marginalization of women (their assumed,
absent presence within the Constitution but never a direct acknowledgement of
their existence) and the dehumanization of African slaves. It is also imperative
to note the founders’ exclusion of Christianity as a basis for enjoying full
citizenship or holding elected or appointed office. This facilitated the
incorporation of a measure of inclusion, however small, if not a full equality,
extended along Eurocentric lines of descent and of course, whiteness. There
was, within this ground-breaking dynamic of secular determinism, a solid effort
to ensure that popes and princes would not regulate the laws; that such tried-

and-failed, often bloody dicta as the divine right of kings would never dominate

American government. Ensuring by design that legislative, juridical, and
executive components would be free from the constraint and contamination
imposed upon them by a state religion, by requiring that “no religious Tests
shall ever be required as a qualification to any Office or public Trust under the
United States” (US Const., art. 6), the framers neither denied the existence and
numerical superiority of American Protestant Christianity, nor did they especially
endorse it. Such requisite oaths as persisted in England (swearing to the
existence of and belief in the Holy Trinity) until the nineteenth century were
never established at the federal level in America.

Yet from the time of the inception, signing, and ratification of the
American Constitution, pressure has been exercised to establish officially, in
writing, the presence and supremacy of a Protestant, singularly American God,
and subsequently to deny the power of reason so beloved of Enlightenment
thought its rightful, primary place within the lawmaking process and the larger
interests of the State. Only the laws of this God, established through Holy
Scripture as interpreted by his chosen earthly representatives—presumably
only men, and these of the ‘correct’ race, class, and religious background—only
these vessels of a higher morality might best determine and uphold the laws
required in the furtherance of God’s sacred and revealed purpose for his
chosen land and for that larger and less fortunate portion of humankind within it:
the large percentage lacking the congenital advantages of their social and

moral superiors. If only somehow sufficiently blessed, these masses of men and

women, too, might ultimately realize the shortcomings of the United States
Constitution, and lend their support to amend of the document as written.

In the latter days of the eighteenth century, men such as James Madison
and Thomas Jefferson, steeped in Enlightenment philosophy; doubters, or
perhaps, Deists, were branded by religionists as atheists and heretics. Thomas
Paine, praised as a true patriot in the cause of revolution, was all but written out
of history for expressing his personal beliefs anent religion in The Age of
Reason (1794), which included his now famous declaration, “My own mind is
my own church” (50). The Bill of Rights, sufficiently vague in areas to be seen
simultaneously as inclusive and exclusive, became and remains a battlefield for
religious and secular issues. Engaged in this perennial struggle are secularists,
comprised of both religionists and non-believers who wish to maintain a distinct
separation between civil and ecclesiastical matters, and fundamentalist
“Christian” revisionists, those who feel righteously compelled to seek a re-
articulation of Federal law as they seek the penultimate mandate for a
religiously specific and putatively moral agenda. The latter group, if successful,
seeks not only to defame but to abrogate all action and thought which they find
inconsistent or in (direct) opposition to their own beliefs. Of late, manifestations
of the struggle have emerged within the issue of a Constitutionally mandated
definition of marriage. A spotlight has been focused on the traditional (Judeo—)
Christian one-man-one-woman union, while simultaneously casting any other
type of relationship into a shadowy realm of morality-based scandal and

illegality.

One manner in which so-called ‘faith-based’ movements seek to gain a
permanent foothold in the fight against popular secular sovereignty—to
redefine, if not eradicate the notion of ‘We the People” and supplant it with an
expression sufficient to apotheosize the very foundation of American social and
political existence—is to utilize what political philosopher Carl Schmitt termed
“the exception” (5): to declare the presence of a state of emergency, one that
current laws are not adequately prepared to address. The exception, Schmitt
posits, has been and may ever be used to test the endurance of a sovereign
power, or to supplant popular sovereignty with the urgently needed, immediate
decision-making capacities of a select individual. As this paper will show,
Anthony Comstock was one such individual.

In Les Six Livres de la Republique (1594) Jean Bodin wrote, “the finest
means of conserving the state and guaranteeing it from rebellion, sedition, and
civil war and to keep its subjects on good terms with one another, is to have an
enemy against which one can exert oneself" (Haslam 42). Since its inception,
America has been at war nearly continuously against some enemy. Whether or
not the conflict was armed and joined, whether or not the enemy was something
tangible such as a nation or a people, or something amorphous, alien, all but
ineffable, such as an ‘-ism,’ there has nearly always been put forth the presence
of some perceived threat to what is perhaps the most vague, and yet seemingly
wholly logical lie of all, the ‘American way of life.’ For in truth, this latter,
diaphanous concept is just that—a mental construct, as variable and malleable

a fantasy as there are dreamers to embrace it. Sheer political force, however,

and dynamic efforts to motivate public opinion can and may reduce the liberality
they deem to be putatively imbued in the concept of personal and public
liberties. Strict conformity may be established through the emergence and
incremental progression of a legislative agenda, and the social legitimacy
granted its emergency-generated status by time, utility, and by notions of
enduring sacrifice and service during a ‘long, twilight struggle.’ This struggle
may, perhaps, be waged against anything broadly termed ‘heresy,’ ‘obscenity,’
or ‘immorality’—and need not be predicated upon a true consensus of
reasoning opinions or even the dubious and controversial mechanism known as
popular suffrage, but solely upon the judgment of the individual, or small, non-
representative group, engaged in this ostensibly patriotic struggle, until
conformity to an ‘exceptional’ code of morality, robed in the majesty of divine
will as perceived and established through the generation of Scriptural exegesis,
becomes the standard of normativity. Once established, people will presumably
think and vote and perpetuate the status quo as they ought, while focus is
shifted to yet another enemy of the state. A new struggle begins, which is in fact
merely an extension of the old.

Some vigilant Americans worry lest the juridical, executive or legislative
branches of the federal government blur the distinctions that delineate, or are
supposed to delineate, the civil from the ecumenical. Such people brook no
ecclesiarch as leader of the so-called free world, and have been alarmed to
learn that Cabinet meetings, not unlike Ku Klux Klan rallies, were and

presumably continue to be opened with Christian prayers for divine guidance.

Discretionary dollars culled from publicly funded budgets are distributed
disproportionately to faith-based organizations. These retain the right to staff
themselves only with those of their own faith, as Barbara Ehrenreich suggests,
creating in the process “an alternative welfare state, whose support rests not
only on ‘faith’ but also on the [doctrinal and political] loyalty of the grateful
recipients” (6). Early in the latest war against an ‘-ism,’ the President of the
United States made alarming declarations of purpose from a church pulpit,
assuring the congregants and those virtually present by dint of cameras and
microphones, that the one true God would guide America to an inevitable
victory of the righteous.

Historical precedents for the use of the exception, for the state of
emergency in America, are of course, extensive, and in the name of the
emergency, as in the name of God, we have accumulated an embarrassing
juridical legacy. Offenses are saliently egregious as regards numerical
minorities. Legal rights granted by discovery, the notion that lands espied from
a ship at sea entitled European colonizers to settle them, was completely logical
to Chief Supreme Court Justice Marshall and a concurring majority, who
ultimately, in spite of seeming efforts to the contrary, facilitated the
displacement and near extinction of the Cherokee nation (Worcester v. Georgia
(1832) ). An impoverished and militarily weakened Mexico could be beaten into
submission and its lands annexed by the United States through misguided
notions of national interest. The drive of ‘civilization’ westward to the Pacific

coast, involving temporary and final solutions to problems posed by indigenous

peoples, was only a component part of the great crusade christened by John
O’Sullivan in 1845 as ‘manifest destiny.’ To O’Sullivan, America was a nation
“destined for better deeds”:
It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of
battle fields, but in defence of humanity, of the oppressed of
all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal
enfranchisement. Our annals describe no scenes of horrid car-
nage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to
slay one another, dupes and victims to emperors, kings,
nobles, demons in the human form called heroes. We have
had patriots to defend our homes, our liberties, but no
aspirants to crowns or thrones; nor have the American people
ever suffered themselves to be led on by wicked ambition to
depopulate the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a
human being might be placed on a seat of supremacy.
(481-82)
Not to place a human being on such a seat perhaps, but carnage and
desolation are invariably deemed necessary when committed in a righteous
cause—the struggle to fulfill requirements placed upon God’s chosen nation by
his revealed will, “to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the
worship of the Most High. . .lt’s floor shall be a hemisphere” (O’Sullivan 482).
The loss of a few hundred thousand indigenous souls must have seemed an

insignificant price to pay, and in fact it has proved to be only a scant fragment of

the ongoing project to raise this temple. And, of course, those who were not
exterrninated, they, or perhaps their Children or grandchildren might, in time, be
sufficiently civilized and Christianized to see the prevailing wisdom and
righteous necessity of the loss of their ancestral lands and the eradication of
their families and cultures.

The dichotomous American mindset typified by O’Sullivan—that of the
righteous cause carefully imbricated with an immanent objectification and
vilification of the other, must constantly channel and re-channel its energies, in
a ceaseless effort to retain supremacy and repress the manifold negative
ramifications of its permutative methodology. One direction in which the
repressive agencies of enforced morality have been necessarily pointed, is that
in which they might be availed of control over individual thought and expression.
Left unaltered, such ‘Iiberal’ capacities might offer dangerous challenges to
peremptory Christian dicta regarding ‘correct’ morality. The same revisionist
spirit of those who believed and continue to believe the First Amendment can
be interpreted as self-contradictory—merely seeming to eschew an official
American religion while making no provision whatsoever to prevent its
establishment—holds also that it offers no guarantees for freedom of
‘expression’ or of ‘conscience.’ Challenges have thus been created, which in
effect, use loosely interpreted Scriptural bases for foreclosing natural human
impulses. Religious dogma may thus be utilized to obtain, subtend, and

reinforce Civil statutes against virtually anything, and by extension anyone,

deemed ‘obscene,’ and their power holds discretionary agency in determining

the ‘literary merit’ of any text.

CHAPTER II

What precisely, is obscenity? How might governments best establish
public standards that neither infringe upon freedoms of expression, nor risk
infliction of irreparable harm on the most malleable members of society, its
children? Are cries of “obscene!” directed at any text, any product of the graphic
or plastic arts, any musical composition, entertainment venue or hyper-real text
necessarily (il-)legitimate? Historically, problems of defining obscenity and
enforcing laws established to prohibit its dissemination, have served special
and political interests, while supporting a quasi-legal basis for censorship on
religious grounds under the specious rubric of public morality.

As long as criteria for assessing the social acceptability of texts remain
predicated at any level on religious-based ideas of morality, no work of literature
is safe. American literary ‘legal’ censorship dates to 1821, when John Cleland’s
1748 novel, Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was printed in its
original, non-expurgated form by a Massachusetts publisher, Peter Holmes
(Karolides, Bald, and Sova 284-5). The very notion that Holmes might be, as
Massachusetts Chief Justice Isaac Parker claimed, “ ‘a scandalous and evil
disposed person’ who had contrived to ‘debauch and corrupt [readers], to raise
in their minds inordinate and lustful desires’ ” (Karolides, Bald, and Sova 285),
suggests the religious forrnativity of secular, civil matters of judgment.
Establishing what would become all too common in American juridical practice
anent matters of ‘obsoenity,’ “the judge refused to review the book, to have the

jury read the book, or to enter passages from the book into the court record for

10

to do so ‘would be to require that the public itself should give permanency and
notoriety to indecency, in order to punish it’ ” (Karolides, Bald, and Sova 285).
Attempts to import James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses into the United States
in 1922, resulted in the incineration of 500 copies of the book by postal
authorities (Karolides, Bald, and Sova 328). John Sumner, legatee of and
successor to the central figure of this study, intending to prevent the novel’s
serialization, sought prosecution in New York against a periodical, the Little
Review, for publishing a single chapter. Sumner’s efforts prevailed in the
courts. In a rare instance, however, during the 1933 trial against Ulysses
stemming from violations of US. tariff law, and Random House’s interest in
publication and mass domestic distribution of the novel, passages deemed to
contain “the dirtiest language” were “viewed in the context of the [work as a]
whole,” its individual words as “bit[s] of mosaic to the detail of the picture
. . . Joyce is seeking to construct for his readers” (Karolides, Bald, and Sova
329). Presiding District Court Judge John Woolsey “viewed the language and
actions to be entirely consistent with the types of people whom Joyce
[described],” remarking in his decision, “. . .it must always be remembered that
his locale was Celtic and his season Spring" (Karolides, Bald and Sova 329).
Only over time, and only comparatively recently, to paraphrase Judge
Woolsey, has this ‘Celtic Spring’ and its atmosphere of artistic latitude existed,
and this has been conditional upon whether or not any work, as scrutinized by
the authorities, seeks solely to serve prurient interests (Harrison and Gilbert

197). As prurience seems to exist on a sliding scale, the balance of which may

11

be shifted between poles of tolerance and intolerance, the ‘season’ of
acceptability that blossomed and bore fruit during the trial of James Joyce’s
Ulysses in 1933, may yet prove to be of short duration. After all, seasons do
change.

In considering the ‘legality’ of Joyce’s novel, Judge Woolsey indicated in
his decision, “I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for dirt’s sake”
(Harrison and Gilbert 197). The future of ideas, of expression, rests upon this
delicate legal point. Ulysses was initially banned under Federal legislation that
denied its importation due to the novel’s presumed inclination “to stir sex
impulses or lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts” (Harrison and Gilbert
193). This presumption was not only made by lawmakers who had not read the
book, but notions of ‘purity’ and ‘lust’ resonate with the rhetorical echoes of
religious teaching. They are institutional Choke Chains applied to the human
conscience which actually transcend and attenuate civil authority. How do laws
so established truly serve the public interest? Can standards of ‘sexual purity’
and control of human thought processes be constitutionally established? Once
standards for ideas, of thought and consciousness, become predicated upon
the moral, and even the marital imperatives of the Christian tradition, organized
religion and Scripture have free rein to become the sole agents of arbitration on
matters of civil order and conduct.

In Mapp v. Ohio (1961), US. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart
wrote that in accordance with the Constitution, the possession of ‘obscene’

matter could not be legally penalized, because to do so would not be

12

“consistent with the rights of free thought and expression assured against state
action by the Fourteenth Amendment” (Leonard 210). For ninety years prior to
this case, the Fourteenth Amendment had been interpreted othenivise, or
ignored altogether. Ideas and policies treating the obscene, particularly in the
publication of printed matter and photographic reproductions, but extended to
include matters of birth control and abortion, were largely influenced by what
was, even then, already becoming today’s Religious Right. Laws intent on
curbing free thought and expression were established, strengthened, and
enforced with a truly religious zeal by a man who ultimately lent them his name,
and whose record and memory serve as reminders of the dangers that manifest

themselves when civil and religious interests cross their boundaries and merge.

13

CHAPTER III

The Connecticut that produced Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) still
resonated with the echoes of its theocratic Puritan establishment. At the time of
the American Constitution’s ratification process, state delegate William Williams
had moved to revise the document’s preamble to read:

We the people of the United States in a firm belief of
the being and perfection of the one living and true God, the
creator and supreme Governor of the World, in His universal
providence and the authority of His laws: that He will require
of all moral agents an account of their conduct, that all rightful
powers among men are ordained of, and mediately derived
from God, therefore in a dependence on His blessing and
acknowledgment of His efficient protection in establishing our
Independence, whereby it is become necessary to agree
upon and settle a Constitution of federal government for
ourselves, and in order to form a more perfect union, etc., as
it is expressed in the present introduction, do ordain, etc.
(qtd. in Kramnick and Moore 37)

Williams also demanded that tests of Christian loyalty be administered to
all federal officials before they could legally assume office. Such a measure was
surely reminiscent of the English Test Acts, designed to exclude Catholics,
dissenting Protestants, and others from holding office, and was, in the

prevailing Climate of the Constitutional convention, not approved. Though not

14

necessarily enforced, tests of Christian loyalty in a number of states remained
on the books and were not abolished until the US. Supreme Court ruled on
Torasco v. Watkins in 1961, which singled out religious tests in the state
constitution of Maryland (Kramnick and Moore 42-3). It is a safe assumption
nevertheless, to posit that such qualifications of faith still form part of an
extralegal litmus test for political appointments and even influence elections in
the United States.

Kramnick and Moore note that since the Civil War, repeated attempts
have been made to overturn what one religious newspaper labeled in 1862
“this atheistic error in our prime conceptions of government” (145). The efforts
of yet another NRA, the National Reform Association, in its efforts to ensure
“the faithful administration of the government according to the principles of the
word of God” (Kramnick and Moore 146), offered their own revision of the
Constitution’s preamble:

We the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty

God as the source of all authority and power in Civil government, the

Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the Nations, and His

revealed will as of supreme authority, in order to constitute a

Christian government. . .do ordain and establish this Constitution for

the United States of America. (146)1
Taxes levied in Connecticut directly supported the Congregationalist Church
there until 1818, when, under its revised constitution, the state also ceased

referring to itself as a “Congregationalist Commonwealth” (Bates 29). When

15

Anthony Comstock was a young man, his home state imposed a strict fine on
bachelor men who chose to live singly (Bates 25). Thus Christian monism, fully
adapted to the political system at the state level, limited life in Connecticut for
some residents. Prevailing, numerically superior beliefs held that religious
pluralism was a violation of divine mandate, and a desecration to those early
intrepid Christian souls who had colonized New England. The colony, later the
state, of Connecticut was deemed a “land of steady habits” (Bates 30) whose
denizens enjoyed blessings of liberty, prosperity, and social order predicated
entirely upon the Christian rectitude of its laws and leaders. Plurality could only
lead to dissent, a direct threat to tangible and enduring, albeit circumscribed,
success founded on enforced religious and moral values. Having a state
constitution that ensured the majority of representatives would be selected from
rural, Congregationalist areas also kept the Connecticut General Assembly
‘pure’ in its entrenched beliefs and vigilant against the dangers—the perceived
infidelities—of liberalism. Non-Christians were not granted equal rights under
the law in Connecticut until the 1840s (Jacoby 32).

Anthony Comstock was raised in a religious household in the aptly
named farming community of New Canaan, where his antecedents had lived
since at least the 1730s (Bates 28-9). Daily prayer sessions, strenuous farm
labor, regular Sunday and holiday trips to the New Canaan Congregationalist
Church, and rigid adherence to Scriptural interpretation were important
elements of family life. The Comstock children were entertained and instructed

by their mother’s Bible stories, through which they must have envisioned Old

16

Testament heroes serving as righteous agents of the Lord’s will (Bates 32-3).
This may have led Comstock early to the employment of hyperbolic religious
rhetoric in his writing, and in his descriptions of numerous arrests and materials
confiscated during his years of service. He eschewed the use of alcohol and
public theatrical entertainments, and frequently wrote confessional passages of
personal weakness in his diary, since lost, presumably by the New York Society
for the Suppression of Vice (the organization once so proud to acknowledge its
custodial responsibilities) but excerpted prior to its loss or destruction in a
biography written by Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech, and published in
1927. Comstock seems, at times, to have severely chastised himself for having
“yealded [sic] instead of fleeing to the ‘fountain’ of all my strength,” or to have
expressed remorse, having “debased myself in my own eyes. . .by my own
weekness [sic] and sinfulness” (Broun and Leech 39). Like many adolescents
before and since, he must have been ‘properly’ horrified by what were merely
the natural impulses he experienced.

As an adult, Comstock continued his severe, self-critical introspection,
consistent with the self-probing urged by his Calvinist inculcation, and sought to
extend his personal beliefs outward as well. After serving in the Civil War (as a
replacement for his fallen brother), Comstock returned briefly to New Canaan,
then set his sights on New York, where he secured employment, first as a
porter, then after several years, as clerk, for Ammidor, Lane and Co., a dry
goods business (Bates 51). The neighborhood immediately surrounding the

young man’s boarding house on Peale Street, which he described as

17

 

 

 

 

 

ornamented with “dissipated young men. . .[and] diseased furniture,” was also
home to the working poor, largely immigrants and prostitutes (Bates 50-51).
There were numerous saloons, brothels, theaters, and other establishments
offering “the poison of impurity” (Comstock, in Bremner ix) to impressionable,
corruptible young men. Determined to persevere in his new environment, and
consistent with one whose desire to act is circumscribed by the enforced,
rooted limits of a religious background, Comstock prayed, then determined that
he would do his utmost to clean up what he observed, focusing on the effects
and indifferent to actual factors of causation; intent upon his desired ends, but
as yet uncertain of the means. Perhaps Comstock thought his prayers
answered when, probably at the urging of his mentor William Ives Budington,
pastor of the Clinton Avenue Congregational Church in Brooklyn, he first

. encountered the YMCA.

Comstock joined the Association in 1866, when he discovered its
sympathies to be in league with his own fundamentalist Protestant views, and
realized its potential as a vehicle with which to restore and enforce those
uniquely Christian values of morality and decency in urban America, imperiled
as they were by demographic changes brought about'by the immigration
needed to supply a labor force for the country’s burgeoning industrial modernity.
The New York branch of the YMCA was not only supported by the city’s largest
Protestant churches, but by leading financiers as well. At the time Comstock
applied for membership, financial backers included JP. Morgan, Samuel

Colgate, Morris K. Jessup, William E. Dodge, Jr., and Abram S. Hewitt, all

18

representative of high New York society. These men, among others, would all
be instrumental in funding the YMCA’s Committee for the Prevention of Vice,
later to become the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (Bates 52;
Bremner xi). The name Change is highly indicative of such groups’
methodological rationale: if something can not somehow be prevented, it must
somehow be suppressed.

To Comstock the nascent anti-vice crusader there existed an inflexible
logical connection: a direct correlation between what he deemed obscene, the
lewd behavior produced by exposure to it, and the unfortunate results of such
behavior on American society. In his book Frauds Exposed, written and
published in 1880, Comstock cathects upon a progressive nexus of exposure
and spontaneous addiction to pornographic or obscene matter, the immediate
loss of morality generated by such exposure—especially as characterized by
the inescapable impulse to indulge in masturbation—and the subsequent,
irreversible destruction left in the wake of anyone “whose mind [is so]
debauched?

The effect of this cursed business on our youth and society, no
pen can describe. lt breeds lust. Lust defiles the body, debauches
the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the
memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart, and damns the
soul. It unnerves the arm, and steals away the elastic step. It robs
the soul of manly virtues, and imprints upon the mind of the youth,

visions that throughout life, curse the man or woman. Like a

19

panorama, the imagination seems to keep this hated thing before
the mind, until it wears its way deeper and deeper, plunging the
victim into practices he loathes. This traffic has made rakes and
libertines in society—skeletons in many a household. The family is
polluted, home desecrated, and each generation born into the
world is more and more cursed by the inherited weaknesses, the
harvest of this seed-sowing of the Evil one.

(Comstock, Frauds 416)

Comstock’s characteristic style is to incorporate the utter ineffability of
vices, what “no pen can describe,” with religious rhetoric, here, a protracted and
detailed account of obscenity-engendered dissipation. Elsewhere, he lashes out
at “liberals” and “infidels” who seek to hinder his efforts by fighting or violating
anti-obscenity laws. Largely, his proficiency is that of the sophist; however,
sophistry had currency then and is alarmingly successful now. Writers such as
Laurie Hall continue to capitalize on the abilities of righteous living and Christian
prayer as the best means of “salvaging” families from the “devastation of
pornography.”2

While perhaps the best known and remembered, Anthony Comstock was
not the first to crusade for comprehensive codes of morality, especially where
the ‘lower’ strata of American society were concerned. In the 1830s, another
son of Connecticut, Sylvester Graham, wrote of the link between “illness and
sexual expression” (Horowitz 94). At about the same time, Luther Bell

popularized mythic accounts of boys returning from boarding schools seemingly

20

dissipated from too much study, but in reality on the verge of self-destruction
from prolonged indulgence in onanistic practice (Horowitz 400). One is also
compelled to draw attention to the stir created by Hiram Powers’ s sculpture,
The Greek Slave (1841-43) upon its unveiling and national tour in 1847-48. The
exhibit drew hundreds of thousands of spectators nationwide, generating
discourse on the sculpture’s shocking and putatively obscene appearance (see
Appendix B)—that of a naked woman, her wrists shackled, hands just covering
her genitals, and subtle, concomitant references to institutionalized American
slavery. The debate over the statue’s validity and over the propriety of its public
tour, was joined by scholars, clerics, and aItists, and continued for years.
Putnam’s Monthly featured an anonymous Abolitionist poem in December 1854,
entitled “Powers” Greek Slave,” which concluded:

The snow that falls where never foot has trod,

On bleakest mountain-heights, is not more pure

Than thy white soul, though thou stand’st naked there,

Gazed at by those whose lustful passions start

WIth every heart-throb! Long may’st thou endure,

To vanquish with thy calm, immaculate brow,

Th’ unholy thoughts of men, as thou dost now! (666)

At issue for many Americans was whether or not such a statue could in

fact generate “lustful passions” or “unholy thoughts” of a kind merely prurient,
inconsistent with the noble impetus to undo institutionalized slavery, and for

whom these might most likely be the inevitable result. Consensus seems to

21

have been that those least educated, least sophisticated, and least advanced,
as best evidenced perhaps by their lack of personal wealth and community
status, were those most likely to succumb to overriding lust, in spite of their
inability to afford the price of admission. With advances in lithography, however,
travel and the price of admission were no longer at issue. Inexpensive, mass-
produced images might allow anyone to glimpse the naked human form.

Proponents of Christianized morality such as Comstock expressed little
or no objection while Powers’s Greek Slave and other naked statuary remained
housed in museums where only a select portion of society might view them. He
did, however, rail against public displays, and the possibility of the working
classes gaining access to mechanically reproduced images of such artworks.
Such people would be unable to exercise the judgment necessary to view these
images without doing permanent harm to their minds. According to the logic
engendered by the wealth-to-morality ratio, the task of monitoring the behavior
of the lower classes was naturally incumbent upon Americans of the highest
social standing, those ostensibly best suited to enforce standards of morality.
Thus the implementation of the YMCA's committee to suppress the sinful
impulses congenitally located in the poorest and least racially pure Americans,
might result not only in the salvation of many poor souls othenrvise doomed to
eternal perdition, but would ensure Comstock’s wealthy supporters of a
regularized, sober working Class.

At the height of Comstock’s popularity as a ‘weeder in the garden of the

Lord,’ industrialist George Pullman was experimenting with an eponymous

22

company-owned town south of Chicago, in which his rail-coach workers were
compelled to live. “[A]t a time when dynamite bombs and revolutionary
murrnurings [terrified] monarchs” and moguls (Ely 453), the management of the
town of Pullman ensured that all facets of life there were carefully observed and
engineered—its intended purpose, “to be a forerunner of better things for the
laboring classes” (Ely 455). Richard T. Ely, professor of political economy at
Johns Hopkins University, conducting a “social study” of the town for Harpers
Monthly in 1885, was able to note, in spite of the “needless air of secrecy” that
permeated the Pullman Company and its town, that “the minimum return
expected [was] six percentum on [all] expenditure” (459), and that this profit
was earned across the board, as “nothing in Pullman [was] free” (461). Alcohol
was available only to upper management, those members of the community
wealthy enough to frequent the restaurant at the Florence Hotel, the only place
in town where it was sold (Ely 459). Rents were deducted automatically from
workers’ paychecks, as were their utility bills. Pullman even collected rents for
the use of the town's Greenstone Church, with denominations (presumably all
Protestant; it is not Clear whether or not Catholics were welcome in Pullman)
coming and going in pre—designated shifts each Sunday, to the accompaniment
of bells. “We are born,” one workman wrote, “in a Pullman house, fed from the
Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman
Church, and when we die, we shall go to the Pullman Hell.” Methodist minister
WIlliam H. Canrvardine referred to the town as a “Civilized relic of European

serfdom” (“The Parable of Pullman”).

23

lndustrialists like Pullman reaped incredible fortunes (the value of the
town, with improvements, multiplied nearly 50 times during the first two decades
of its incorporation) not merely by controlling workers’ daily lives, but by
ensuring maximum productivity through the establishment and enforcement of
strict controls. This was perceived as benevolence by some outside observers,
though for Professor Ely, Pullman’s philanthropy was somewhat diminished, in
that it “demands a good round sum for everything it offers” (461). And while Ely
noted as early as 1885 issues which would generate labor unrest only a few
years later, such as salaries insufficient to support families on what was left
after the company deducted for rents and utilities (462), it was nevertheless a
popularly held contention of the era that piece workers were crude individuals of
the lowest social strata, who, left to their own devices, would unquestionably
suffer dissipation and degeneracy, defenseless as they were against the vices
of modernity.

Worse, this plague might move upward through the social ranks over
generations, leave the nation without capable leadership, and constitute a
threat to the dream of loyal and enthralled workers. For capitalists and religious
reformers alike, popular intellectual and moral independence was seen as a
nightmare far worse than mere trade unionism. For workers at Pullman,
theatrical productions were pre-screened for seditious elements (Ely 458) and
“every aid [was] given to those who patronize[d the town library] to render it as
instructive and elevating as possible” (459). While “a special effort [was] made

to induce the subscribers to choose a superior class of literature,” notably trade

24

journals for machinists and periodicals such as Scientific American, “the record
[indicated] that seventy-five percentum of the books drawn [were] still works of
fiction,” a figure consistent with public libraries nationally, where citizens usually
borrowed books without cost—in Pullman, yearly subscriptions to the library
were $3.00 each (Ely 458-9). For the working man, and for working class youth
in particular, to exercise free rein over their consciences constituted nothing
less than a national emergency: the impending loss of a ready and submissive
labor force.

Even a casual scan of American periodicals published since the
eighteenth century will reveal frequent expressions of concern for the future
welfare‘of children and teens. Parents of the growing American middle class
were no less preoccupied than they are now with what they perceived as the
social ills that threatened their own children. As the nineteenth century
progressed, children were seen as increasingly at risk, more susceptible than
ever to exercise thoughts or actions deemed ‘impure.’ Samuel Bayard
Woodward, superintendent of the Massachusetts State Hospital for Lunatics in
Worcester, and Luther Bell, superintendent of the McLean Asylum in Boston,
wrote during the 1830s of the observed link between masturbation and mental
illness (Horowitz 98-99). Moral decay, particularly as manifested in aspects of
youthful sexuality, and most notably evidenced through seemingly epidemic
proportions of masturbatory inclinations, became the avenue through which
religious reformers might gain almost universalized acceptance by capitalizing

on perceptions that they were best prepared to deal with the growing national

25

emergency. The traps that awaited youth, Comstock warned, were legion.
Introducing Traps for the Young in 1883, he wrote, “[t]his book is a plea for the
moral purity of children” (5). His prefatory remarks, however, mirror
contemporary beliefs not only about children but working class adults, former
slaves, minorities, and immigrants as well. He promoted his text as

. . .an appeal for greater watchfulness on the part of those

whose duty is to think, act, and speak for that very large

portion in the community who have neither intellect nor

judgment to decide what is wisest and best for themselves. (5-6)

This same rhetorical moment, this identical concept is at the root of
religious authority over the so—called ‘Lord’s flock,’ utilizing the expressions of a
pressing need for shepherd-like intercession that cuts across social bases of
age, social class, gender, ethnicity, and religion. Many of the academic
disquisitions on the state of Western society at the fin—de-siecle also
demonstrate a preoccupation with social phenomena that might be loosely
gathered beneath the heading “Degeneration,” an umbrella term coined by Max
Nordau in the 1890s. For many, the time was one of “unbridled lewdness, the
unchaining of the beast in man. . .the shameless ascendency of base impulses
and motives. . .the repudiation of dogma” and ultimately “the end of an
established order, which for thousands of years has satisfied logic, fettered
depravity, and in every art, matured something of beauty” (Nordau 5).
With traditional standards under siege, someone had to assume the task

and responsibility of preserving, reclaiming, and enforcing Christian ethics of

26

morality and conduct. If controlled environments such as Pullman could not be
established on a vast national scale, and inculcation by example of one’s social
betters was insufficient, the ultimate recourse was to legislate, to seek out sin
and purge it at its taproot, by constructing a nexus of legally binding codes of
morality predicated on Scriptural or religious models.

Comstock’s personal and public crusade was predicated on the state of
national emergency, a certain, imminent disintegration of the American social
fabric set in clockwork motion by anxieties over countless thousands of
masturbating youth influenced by a “pervasive presence”3 of pornographic
stimulants, and slowly lapsing into idiocy and moral turpitude. The futures of
American life and American institutions were becoming endangered, as
obscene, heretical texts and images threatened a dominant culture that, by
century’s end, seemed to be losing its choke-hold on a largely homogenetic
population. In other words, any written work deemed pornographic or obscene
threatened Protestant Christianity, male hegemony, white supremacy, and
peculiar notions of traditional middle class values.

For the American middle class, prospects of social acceptability, and
more crucially, social advancement over forthcoming generations were at grave
risk. Nicola Beisel’s comprehensive study of Comstock and family life in
Victorian America points to parental anxieties over whether children would
exceed contemporary “moral boundaries” and assume counter-cultural
identities which would preclude them from the acceptance required for security

and success. Proper morals and behavior were elemental components of the

27

“cultural capital” a young man needed, were he somehow to become the next
Andrew Carnegie or Samuel Colgate (6-7).

Of paramount importance to proper growth, proper living and social
standing was “virility,” that characteristic William Acton deemed “necessary to
give a man that consciousness of his dignity, of his character as head and ruler
and of his importance, which is absolutely essential to the well-being of the
family, and through it, of society itself” (qtd. in Marcus 25). The state of
emergency necessitated exceptional measures such as male infibulation, the
affixture of devices specifically designed to cover the male genitals. One type of
apparatus was a surgically attached device made of lead wire, which pierced
the foreskin, pulled and folded it over the glans penis, and clamped it in place.
Capitalizing upon the importance of social advancement and cultural guilt
associated with the so-called “solitary vice,” physicians like Scotland’s David
Yellowlees (1837-1921) were able to ‘treat’ numbers of young men. A medical
journal article quoted the doctor as remarking, “[t]he sensation among the
patients was extraordinary. l was struck by the conscience-stricken way in
which they submitted to the operation on their penises. I mean to try it on a
large scale, and go on wiring all masturbators” (“Have Chastity Belts Been Used
on Men?”). Extensive studies on male infibulation continued in both the US.
and Europe, through the eugenics-obsessed 1920s (Marcus 25 fn). The state of
emergency also facilitated the rise and methodology of Comstock’s anti-vice

career.

28

Inspired by what he read in pamphlets and heard in anti-obscenity
lectures, Comstock’s moral crusade began at least as early as 1868, when he
wrote “an impassioned letter” to YMCA director Charles McBurney in which he
expressed his enmity for impure writing and other morally compromising
features of urban life (Bates 52). His first anti-vice engagement was with
Charles Conroy, a one-handed book vendor Comstock blamed for corrupting a
close (and possibly fictional) friend (Bates 53). The crusade began to draw
public attention four years later in the wake of a federal anti-obscenity law
passed with the help of the YMCA (Bates 58). In spite of the financial problems
it caused him, Comstock began to devote less of his efforts to selling dry goods
and more of his time and energies to hounding ‘pornographers.’ With reporter
Robert Griffith of the New York Tribune and a police captain in tow, Comstock
made purchases of apparently offensive materials at two stationers’ shops on
March 2, 1872. The precise nature of the confiscated texts is unclear, but the
previous day, and without escort, Comstock had searched the “place” of Patrick
Bannon, who was later arrested and charged with using the mail to distribute
obscene literature, which, according to Comstock’s own record, was comprised
of Circulars for a “Woman’s Rights Convention” (Bates 61). The arrests of the
Barkley brothers and James McDermott , staged for the convenience of the
press and the praise of the YMCA “yielded three convictions with jail sentences
ranging from three months to one year at Blackwell’s Island and fines of $200 to

$500 (Bates 61).

29

In May of 1872, Comstock met with the newly formed Committee on the
Suppression of Vice at the home of Morris K. Jessup. Comstock’s all but
nonexistent shipping Clerk’s salary was supplemented by a YMCA anti-vice
committee stipend of $1950 plus expenses, which was augmented by an
additional $3,000 in 1873 (Bremner xi).

During a period of forty-one years, Comstock allegedly obtained the
arrest of “more than 3,600 men, women, and children. . .enough to fill a
passenger train of sixty-one coaches, sixty coaches containing sixty
passengers each, and the sixty-first almost full” (Broun and Leech 15-16). Of
the passengers on Comstock’s railroad of the damned, nearly 25% were
unskilled laborers. A great many were European immigrants. Less than 2%
were of the managerial level, and none were professionals (Bates 9). Such
figures would either tend to support the contentions of Comstock and his YMCA
backers that the lowest segments of the American population, and these alone,
were engaged in undermining the Christian moral purity of middle and upper
level American homes and families, or they might suggest an imbalance in the
way this righteous crusade was conducted. Comstock enjoyed an unbroken
string of successes, winning conviction after conviction in the court of Judge
Charles L. Benedict. Yet while efforts in New York were promising indeed, the
level of the crisis was national, and needed to be addressed at the federal level.

According to Carl Schmitt, the exception generates reaffim'Iation of state
power, particularly as exercised in the role of protector of its citizens (15). Laws

that “need not be based on law,” putatively created in the common interest by

30

means of the state’s “monopoly to decide” (Schmitt 13), can be utilized to
subtend and support an existing regime or system. In the case of Anthony
Comstock this was the passage of federal anti-obscenity laws which ultimately
granted him the power of arbiter, using highly subjective and questionable
criteria for determining the validity, under law, of certain articles distributed
through the US. mail.

A formula predicated on Calvinist doctrine and Scriptural interpretation
must, it seems, necessarily circumvent the secularity of established
constitutional rights and the democratic notion of due process while for the sake
of exigency, it must appear to do just the opposite. As Carl Schmitt maintains,
“legally recognized institutions such as religious associations [can] ensure the
continuity of the social order” (xxv), particularly when appearing to operate in
harmony with the political apparatus.

At the same time, according to Schmitt, an agent of sovereign power can
operate outside “the normally valid legal system” (7), using extralegal means to
combat ideological enemies by acting as the “acknowledged representative on
earth” of a deity that may or may not exist. Agents like Comstock can “assume
authority concerning these matters for which there are no positive stipulations”
(Schmitt 10). Such stipulations can be established retroactively, legitimizing the
emergency, the agent, and the exception. “What characterizes an exception is
principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire

existing order” (Schmitt 12).

31

CHAPTER lV

“An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, obscene
Literature and Articles of immoral Use.” Apparently, to observe the rules of
grammar by capitalizing the ‘o’ and ‘i’ would have somehow dignified the
Obscene and the Immoral. The act was signed into law with 117 other
measures by President Grant on 3 March 1873 (Bremner xiii). Strengthening a
statute passed the previous year, “Section 148” now included contraceptives,
abortifacients, and “any article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent or
immoral use or nature” as being prohibited from being deposited in the mail
(Bremner xiii fn). Amid the uproar surrounding the Credit Mobilier scandal, “a
railroad construction investment scheme” designed to line the pockets of
prominent Republicans, including Vice President Schuyler Colfax (Horowitz
381), and only one of many improprieties which emerged during the Grant
administration, the Comstock Act, as Section 148 was often called, may have
been seen at the time as a political ploy to recover public trust by diverting
attention from possible executive and legislative corruption. Anthony Comstock
was made Special Agent for the Post Office, a position that carried with it an
annual salary of $3,425, under an appropriations bill passed by Congress in the
same session that passed Section 148 (Bates 87, 89). It is important to note
that while he was reimbursed for expenses, Comstock never accepted the
government salary (Bates 191), opting instead to leave the dry goods business
and live on the stipend granted him by the newly chartered New York Society

for the Suppression of Vice which, even though it replaced the Committee on

32

the Suppression of Vice, remained the de facto public morality arm of the
YMCA and its wealthy, white Protestant supporters. By 1875 the influence of
these supporters had procured police powers for Comstock within the state of
New York under Section 1145 of the Criminal Code (Bates 99), allowing
Comstock to personally arrest anyone he deemed in violation of anti-obscenity
laws.

In 1876 Section 148 was amended once more (US Statutes, Sections
3,893-94 vol.19 p.90 rpt. in Bennett, Tn'al 8-10), adding still harsher penalties,
as anxieties over the growing national emergency, likely fueled by increasing
immigration and news of falling ‘American’ birthrates, signaled a potential shift
in the imbalance of power. Ohio and New York already had state sanctions
against contraception and abortion (Bates 84). In the wake of the Comstock
Act, through the fln-de-siecle, nearly all states passed similar measures.

That Comstock was a relentless foe of those he deemed “infidels” can
best be demonstrated by example. His methods seldom varied. He, or someone
appointed by him, would write and mail a “decoy letter,” a request for certain
items (Beisel 89). Once the requested items were received, an arrest warrant
would be secured. Documents, lithographs, even personal articles would or
could be seized, if Comstock designated them in violation of his own standards.
In New York, convictions were assured when obscenity cases were placed on
Judge Benedict’s docket. When on rare occasions Comstock’s targets were
acquitted or received reduced sentences, they would be re-subjected to

entrapment until the desired convictions were obtained.

33

The written account of the 1879 trial of D. M. (DeRobigne Mortimer)
Bennett, containing a brief preface, the trial transcripts, and appendices, reveals
a frightening aspect of the manner in which Comstock sought to persecute his
ideological enemies. Bennett, founder and editor of The Truth Seeker, was
arrested for distributing by mail two pamphlets, “How do Marsupial Animals
Propagate Their Kind?” and Ezra Heywood’s polemic against enforced
marriage and divorce restrictions. This pamphlet, “Cupid’s Yokes,” angered
Comstock and his anti-vice committee brethren not only by its rejection of
conventional marriage and its suspicion of organized religion, but also for its
advocacy of free love and its rejection of the ultimate authority of Jesus Christ.

Cupid’s Yokes: or, The Binding Forces of Conjugal Life. An Essay to
Consider some Moral and Physiological Phases of Love and Marriage, Wherein
is Asserted the Natural Right and Necessity of Sexual Self-Govemment is a
slender pamphlet. Its ornate, nineteenth-century, multi-fonted title seems nearly
as long as the booklet itself, which spans a mere twenty-six pages, including
advertisements. In spite of its modest size, the work presented a clear and
present danger to the corrupted, Christian-biased, plutocratic social order that
men like Comstock had sworn to protect. The author, Ezra Heywood,
proclaimed:

It is better. . .to do wrong and suffer the consequences, than
to be “saved” by mediational agencies which act for us,
thereby over-riding our necessity and power to reason, and

divorcing us from original relation to truth; better to go to hell

34

by choice than to heaven by compulsion. (15)
Challenging traditional beliefs, Heywood asserted that marriage was not

a divinely ordained institution, but was instead the product (“force”) of custom.
“We were all trained in the school of repression, and taught that, to love
othenivise than by established rules, is sinful” (61). As a human institution,
marriage might more easily be exposed as defective:

What Nature ‘hath joined,’ man need not attempt to ‘put

asunder;’ but, since the legalized marital relation is so

chaotic and mischievous, (Clergymen and legislators

themselves often being the first to violate what they

profanely assume to be divine ordinance); and since

Deity has never yet come forward to own that he is the

‘author and finisher’ of marriage laws, it is better to attribute

them to the erring men who enacted them, than to accuse

Divine Wisdom of so much folly. (6)

Heywood’s polemic favoring “complex marriage” (14) describes Jesus as

a “woman’s emancipationist,” whose Kingdom of Heaven did not require that
women marry or be given in marriage (13), and that all men and women were
free to love one another as they saw fit: “Variety is as useful in love as in eating
and drinking,” he wrote (14). For Heywood, divorce was not something to be
proscribed by religious leaders when marriages were so often loveless from the

onset, disintegrated over time, or held women prisoners of their husbands’

35

whims. And D.M. Bennett was mailing this information to anyone who could
pay for it.

Bennett was also taking risks as an avid and outspoken opponent of the
Comstock laws. In 1877 he asked readers of The Truth Seeker to mail their
signatures to the paper so that they might be added to a petition that would be
presented to Congress in early January of the following year. In a botched pre-
emptive move, Comstock had Bennett arrested in November 1877 for sending
copies of his newspaper through the mails (Bates 139). As a newspaper,
however, The Truth Seeker was exempted from the statute. In 1878 Bennett
published Anthony Comstock: His Career of Cruelty and Crime, as well as “An
Open Letter to Samuel Colgate,” whose company manufactured Vaseline.
Colgate’s advertisements for the “Best Family Remedy in Use” included a false
claim that when mixed with salicylic acid, it could be used as a contraceptive
(Bates 141). Bennett suggested that Colgate revise his advertising copy or risk
punishment at the hands of his paid enforcer, Comstock. The mythic
contraceptive properties of Vaseline were never advertised again.

In 1879, the same year in which he was tried on obscenity charges and
ultimately published the account, Bennett also published Revelations of
Antichrist Concerning Christ and Christianity, which he co-wrote with J. P.
Mendum. This highly researched, detailed, and thoroughly controversial text,
which declares itself “the most radical attack ever made on Christianity” (xiv),
questions the existence of Christ and his Apostles, utilizing an intertextual

approach that takes into analysis the relevance and relationship of apocryphal

36

accounts, as opposed to the carefully constructed and selected tenets of
orthodox Christian writing adapted for contemporary teaching, worship, and
control.

According to Bennett biographer Roderick Bradford, a member of the
prosecution team sat in plain view of the jury during the trial, and appeared to
be reading yet another Bennett publication, “An Open Letter to Jesus Christ,”
(Bradford). This pamphlet included inflammatory but nevertheless free
commentary under the statute. Bennett asked readers, “In a few words, is not
Christianity, as known and practiced in the world, a cheat, a fraud, a costly and
expensive luxury which mankind could well spare, losing nothing by its
rejection” and contended that“ ‘false gods, base devils, useless saviors, and
degrading creeds’ should be abandoned and replaced by practitioners devoting
themselves to improving the world and encouraging the pursuit of human
happiness” (Beisel 91).

Bennett had earned a great deal of notoriety over this four-page letter
before his trial for mailing “Cupid’s Yokes.” The fact that the letter’s presence in
the courtroom, strategically placed before the jurors, was intended to bias them,
does not seem to have become an issue. What did anger the defense,
however, was Judge Benedict’s refusal to admit Heywood’s entire pamphlet.
During deliberations, jurors had copies of the booklet, but were instructed to
confine their perusal to specific, pencil-marked passages. These were the
remarks which Comstock had found to be in violation of the statute, and which

became patently and transparently so when taken out of context. Additionally,

37

the judge’s definitions of ‘obscene’ and ‘indecent’ were the only ones provided
to the jurors, and as one of them, Alfred A. Valentine, admitted to the New York
Herald on 27 March 1879, the “definitions were so broad and uncertain that it
seemed to me they might be used to condemn a very large, and perhaps the
larger, part of the literature of the country, as well as the isolated passages that
had been picked out of “Cupid’s Yokes’” (Bennett 172).

In fact, the jury was given a definition of obscenity as defined by Queen
v. Hicklin, an 1868 English trial in which it had been determined that one could
convict if “the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and
corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral impulses” (Queen v.
Hicklin, LR 3 QB 360 (1868) qtd. in Bates 141). Judge Benedict advised the jury
in the Bennett case that if they found that the highlighted passages in
Heywood’s booklet conformed to the Hicklin standard, “it is your duty to convict
the defendant, notwithstanding the fact that there may be many worse books in
every library in the City” (Bates 141).

The judge also stated that “for the distribution of matter of any kind on
paper there is no other engine of equal power" to the United States mail
(Bennett 147). The mails were pervasive, accessible across all social
boundaries, and reaching every part of the country. They were confidential;
“received in secret by the person to whom they are addressed, whether in their
own or fictitious names” (Bennett 147). Thus any written document (save
newspapers under the statute) might be deemed inimical to the purposes and

goals of individuals or parties within the state, branded illegal or heretical, its

38

publication squelched, and its originators punished. Bennett was convicted and
sentenced under the Comstock laws to thirteen months at hard labor (Bates
141). He was sixty years old. Three years after his release, he died following a
protracted illness. While Comstock sought to destroy The Truth Seeker, it
continued to publish. At the time of this writing it remains in publication, after
173 years, the oldest continuously published periodical in America.

Other opponents of Special Agent Comstock did not survive his assaults.
A number of those he arrested died as direct or indirect results of disgrace,
financial loss, trial and imprisonment. At least one man, William Haynes, may
have taken his own life rather than face trial (Bates 59). Charles E. Mackey was
arrested by Comstock solely upon the basis of objectionable titles found in his
book catalogue. Judge Benedict agreed that titles such as Ovid’s Art of Love
and Prostitution in Paris were sufficient to convict Mackey. The contents of
these books were never scrutinized by the court. Given a $500 fine and a year’s
imprisonment for books that in fact were not obscene—even by the Hicklin
standard—Mackey, a prominent member of his community and Methodist
church, was shocked to see fellow Christians turn away from him without any
consideration of his possible innocence or of former friendships. Comstock
branded Mackey a “snake” and “one of the lowest wretches in the [obscenity]
business,” without so much as reading a single page of either text (Bates 62-3).

Comstock did not confine himself to persecuting men. Opportunities
outside the domestic sphere were leading women out and away from the

traditional, confining roles apparently assigned them by the revealed will of

39

God. Other threats to the family unit were generated by liberated men and
women such as Ezra Heywood and Victoria Woodhull, who embraced the era’s
freelove movements, and Ida Craddock, who spoke and wrote and thought
about sexual union in spiritual terms, and who conceived of women as sexual

beings, capable of experiencing and enjoying orgasm.

40

CHAPTER V

Ida Craddock’s only crime may have been that she was brilliant. Still, she
represented a triple threat to hegemonic, masculine Christian values. As a
liberated woman she rejected conventional domestic life, working instead
outside the home, initially as a shorthand instructor. As a spiritualist and
“Instructor in Divine Sciences” after the tradition of Charles Fourier’s concept of
“passional attraction”, Craddock pursued a doctrine that rejected conventional
marriage, insisting instead that certain individuals were naturally drawn together
by means of a spiritual attraction (Bates 189). Craddock also posed a threat as
an author of controversial works that blended her radical challenges to
mainstream Christianity with well-researched and insightful advice to married
couples. Her prose is sometimes, as in her pamphlet, “The Wedding Night,” a
blend of nineteenth-century medical rhetoric and frank deviations from it, as
when she informs her readers that “[a] woman’s orgasm is as important to her
health as a man’s is for his. . .the bridegroom who hastens through the act
without giving the bride the necessary half-hour or hour to come to her own
Climax, is not only acting selfishly; he is also sowing the seeds of future ill-
health and invalidism in his wife” (Craddock, “The Wedding Night”).

In 1893 Craddock's views brought her into direct conflict with
Comstock’s. Her “four page defense” of the “danse du ventre,” performed by
Fahreda Mahzar (Little Egypt) at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago,
described the dance that Comstock called the “hootchie cootchie” as a

“religious memorial inculcat[ing] purity and self control” (Burton). One source

41

indicates that Craddock noted in her diary “that she used various ‘Danse du
Ventre’ techniques in her lovemaking” (Chappell). Comstock had tried without
success to have the dance, in which a woman wore filmy clothing and gyrated
suggestively, banned for its patent immorality. He turned his wrath on
Craddock, and used his position to bar her defense of the dance, published in a
journal “The Worid,” from distribution through the mail (Chappell).

In the fall of 1899 she ran afoul of the anti-vice crusader once more,
when her pamphlet, “Right Marital Living” appeared in a “medically oriented
journal” published under the title “Chicago Clinic” (Burton). As a result of the
journal’s distribution through the mail Craddock was indicted in the Chicago
federal court on October 27, 1899. Attorney Clarence Darrow posted her bond,
and Craddock ultimately received a suspended sentence in exchange for a
guilty plea (Burton).

Shirley Burton notes that Ida Craddock’s views of marriage, abortion,
and autoeroticism were akin to Comstock’s own. Nevertheless, contentions
such as “[t]he love function may and ought to be exercised periodically, in order
that both husband and wife may have a healthy, well-balanced physique and
mentality” (Craddock, “Right Marital Living”), were too controversial for
Comstock’s moral standards. Whether it was the open nature of her discourse
that infuriated the govemment’s Chief postal agent, or her idea that intercourse
was a process of shared vitality is uncertain, as excerpts deemed “obscene,

lewd, and lascivious” were cited but never entered into court records (Burton).

42

“Mrs.” Craddock (she was unmarried but claimed to have a spiritual
spouse (Bates 189)) moved to New York shortly after receiving a suspended
sentence in the Chicago case. There, she continued to mail her pamphlets to
clients, maintaining that she was “really divinely led. . .to face this wicked and
depraved man Comstock in open court” (Burton). In fact, she was arrested,
prosecuted and sentenced several more times, for using the mails in Chicago,
Philadelphia, and Washington, D. C. to distribute texts deemed obscene (Bates
190). In each instance her work was not admitted into court records. In 1902,
after being released from the New York City Workhouse and being re-arrested
as she left the building, she was offered an opportunity to dismiss the validity of
both her work and her beliefs by pleading insanity. Craddock’s devout Quaker
mother urged her to accept this course of action, but she refused. On 16
October 1902 she took her own life, telling her mother in a note, “I maintain my
right to die as l have lived, a free woman, not cowed into silence by any other
human being,” and describing her work and self-sacrifice as a “propaganda to
humanity” (Craddock, “Letter to Her Mother”). As for Comstock, she wrote:

The man is a sex pervert; he is what physicians term a
Sadist—namely a person in whom the impulses of cruelty arise
concurrently with the stirrings of sex emotion. The Sadist finds
keen delight in inflicting either physical cruelty or mental hu-
miliation upon the source of that emotion. (Bates 191)

In the wake of Ida Craddock’s suicide, public support for the NYSSV fell

sharply and government funding for Comstock’s witness fees was withdrawn.

43

CHAPTER VI

The salient, disturbing aspects of what George Bernard Shaw termed
“Comstockery”4 (Bates 193), such as peremptory decisions handed down
without observing proper rules of evidence, omission of evidence on the basis
of its unholy content and putative unutterability, notions of dissenting opinions
as dangerous to the moral and physical health of the body politic, vague
definitions of abstract concepts such as ‘obscenity’ and its immediate, direct,
and deliberate correlation to Manichean/Christian conceptions of ‘good’ and
‘evil’ are all tragically indicative of the blurring of distinctions between church
and state. Combat over which sect can claim the sanction of a deity and stake
out a primary or exclusive role in government, and the belief that as a result of
their differing beliefs or non-belief, certain individuals or groups within American
society ought to be restricted and denied direct access to power are not,
regrettably, relegated to the dust of some vague or Victorian past. A growing
movement for ‘religious correctness’ has extended the national state of
emergency and continues to seek a Christianized American government.

Though the Mayflower Compact addressed early settlers’ hopes of
attaining “the Glory of God” and “Advancement of the Christian Faith,” its
signers also pledged to “solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one
another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politick, for
our better Ordering and Preservation” (“Mayflower Compact”; emphasis mine).
The words of these victims of religious persecution have been corrupted over

time for political gain. In a recent television broadcast, Pat Robertson, urging a

44

“spiritual revival” in America, told viewers that the country was established with
the words, “we Claim this land for the Lord, Jesus Christ” (“The 700 Club”); at
best a conflation with the earlier arrival of Spaniards in the New World or a
misreading of the Mayflower Compact; at worst, a statement of revealed intent
by the forces of present-day Comstockery who pay millions of dollars in order to
broadcast infomercials staged as alarmist news broadcasts on matters of faith,
‘family values,’ and the ideal of a future Christian America.

Current standards of “obscenity,” a much abused signifier, rest
precariously on the 1973 Miller v. California decision (413 US. 15), replete with
its tripartite criterion for judging the obscene, and its unfortunate reaffinnation of
the earlier majority opinion in Roth v. United States (354 US. 476 (1957) ) in
which Justice Brennan’s misguided contention that “[o]bscenity is not within the
area of constitutionally protected freedom of speech or press” (Roth v. United
States). For the present, the three basic points, the “basic guidelines” by which
‘obscene’ material may be determined remain:

(a) whether ‘the average person, applying contemporary community
standards’ would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the
prurient interest. . .(b) whether the work depicts or describes in a
patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the
applicable state law, and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole,
lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. (Roth v.

United States.)

45

The problem is that the High Court made no effort to explore the
underlying components which construct or control “community standards,” or
how these might be compelled to change. This matter is left to individual states
under Articles Nine and Ten of the Constitution. As in the Roth case, very small
groups—juries—are asked to imagine their communities as a whole, and to
make objective determinations of highly subjective values. Michel Rosenfeld
argues that “the intersubjective perspective of an ‘interpretive community’ can
only prevail through the suppression of difference and the subordination of the
dissenting other” (154). As such, the legal definition of obscenity and by
extrapolation, those texts subject to this definition remain in flux.

The battle to overturn Roe v. Wade (410 US. 113 (1973) ) continues
along lines of religious-based morality, and does so during times in which
individual freedoms are constrained by the ‘legal’ exceptions generated by yet
‘another’ emergency. They are times in which Justice Department or Cabinet
officers bow their heads reverently in prayer before each meeting. The Chief
Executive is a man who has defined the war on terrorism as a “crusade”
(Lyons), and truly believes that in 1998 his presidential destiny was revealed to
him by God. With Supreme Court Justices deliberating over popular elections
and ‘liberal’ justices aging, with so much potential power and control at stake,
all battles between the secular and the religious must be taken seriously. If
rights of reproductive choice are overturned, it is only a short step to overturning
Griswold v. Connecticut (381 US. 479 (1965) ) and (re-) institutionalizing

fundamentalist Christian dogma which must, today, not only prohibit ‘illicit’ use

46

of the mails but of the Internet and emerging media. D. M. Bennett noted “we
are practically subjected to a despotism from sectarian interferences” (170), and
expressed alarm at this despotism’s “dangerously vague and elastic power”
(169).
James Madison observed:

ecclesiastical establishments . . . have been seen to erect a spiritual

tyranny on the ruins of Civil authority; in many instances they have

seen the upholding of the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance

have they been seen the guardians of liberty of the people.

Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty, may have found an

established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government,

instituted to secure and perpetuate it [liberty], needs them not.

(Jacoby 20)
Parties seeking to de-secularize government, or presumably secular

juridical minds obstructing First Amendment guarantees with such indistinct and
volatile guidelines as ‘community standards,’ lend support to the divisive and
destructive forces of political and religious correctness. Recalling just whose
interests these forces actually represent should be sufficient cause to startle
and anger anyone for whom civil liberties are of paramount importance. The
opportunity, if not the ability, to think and express oneself freely without guilt or
exclusion is, finally, an American institution worth firmly establishing for the first

time.

47

APPENDICES

48

APPENDIX A

NOTES

1. The NRA continued to petition Congress with its urgent desire for official
government recognition of what it termed “the obligations of the Christian
religion” until 1945. In 1947 and again in 1954, the National Association
of Evangelicals attempted to have “[t]his nation divinely recognize. . .the
authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of Nations, through
whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God” (Kramnick and
Moore 148). The current strategy employed by the Christian Right, as will
be indicated elsewhere in this paper (see pp. 44-5), is to embrace the
Constitution as written, while seeking to rewrite history instead, in order
to subtend and disseminate misconceptions of a nation and its founders
deeply rooted in a fundamental, monistic Christianity, endangered then
and since by the corrupting ‘evils’ of pluralism and liberalism.

2. See Laurie Hall, An Affair of the Mind: One Woman’s Courageous Battle
to Salvage Her Family from the Devastation of Pornography (Tyndale
House, 1998), or Mark Laaser’s Faithful and True: Sexual Integrity in a
Fallen Wor1d(Zondervan, 1992) for current examples of the lingering
anxieties within the Religious Right, as well as their proposed targets of
repression.

3. The term is widely attributed to author and conservative columnist
William F. Buckley, who employed it in an article which appeared in the
National Review, 19 November 2001. Not unlike Anthony Comstock,
Buckley writes nostalgically of some mythic, bygone era characterized by
ideal moral standards, conduct, and restraint, and dreams of a future
predicated on this idealized, nonexistent human past.

4. Shaw coined the term after he, too, was harassed by the anti-vice
crusader in 1905. Comstock sought to have Shaw’s play, Mrs. Warren’s
Profession, banned from the stage in New York. Characteristically, this
action was taken even though Comstock had neither read the play text,
nor seen a performance.

49

APPENDIX B

Hiram Powers
The Greek Slave
Marble (134143)
Corcoran Gallery
Washington. DC-

50

 

51

WORKS CITED

52

   

WORKS CITED

Barrier, Ron. “ ‘American Atheists Launches Petition Drive: Names to Be
Presented to White House at Saturday, February 24 Demo.’ Press Release
Feb. 12, 2001”. Internet. 25 October 2004. <http://www.positiveatheism.org/
hist/quotes/bush.htm>

Bates, Anna Louise. Weeder in the Garden of the Lord: Anthony Comstock’s
Life and Career. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995.

Beisel, Nicola. lmperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family
Reproduction in Victorian America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997.

Bennett, D. M. Trial of D. M. Bennett Upon the Charge of Depositing Prohibited
Matter in the Mail. New York: De Capo, 1973.

Bennett, 0M. and J. P. Mendum. Revelations of Antichrist Concerning Christ
and Christianity. Boston: Investigator. New York: Truth Seeker, 1879.

Bradford, Roderick. “The Truth Seeker on Trial.” lntemet. 09 July 2004.
<http:llwww.hackwriters.com/ TruthSeeker.htm>

Bremner, Robert. Editor’s Introduction. Traps for the Young. By Anthony
Comstock. Ed. Robert Bremner. Cambridge: Harvard-Belknap, 1967

Broun, Heywood and Margaret Leech. Anthony Comstock, Roundsman of the
Lord. New York: Literary Guild, 1927.

Buckley, William F. “Porn, Pervasive Presence: The Creepy Wallpaper of Our
Daily Lives.” National Review. 19 November 2001. lntemet. 11 July 2004.
<www.nationalreview.coml19nov01lbuckley1 1 1901 .shtml>

Burton, Shirley J. “Women Making a Difference: Ida Craddock, Adelaide
Johnson, and Laura Dainty Pelham.” Internet. 09 July 2004.
<http://www.lib.niu.edu/ipo/iht419722.html>

Chappell, Vere. “Ida Craddock: Sexual Mystic and Martyr for Freedom.”
Internet. 09 July 2004. <www.idacraddockorglintro.htrnl>

Comstock, Anthony. Frauds Exposed; or, How the People are Deceived and
Robbed, and Youth Corrupted. 1880. Patterson Smith Reprint Series in
Criminology, Law Enforcement, and Social Problems 289. Montclair, NJ:
Patterson Smith, 1969.

--. Traps for the Young. 1883. Ed. Robert Bremner. Cambridge: Harvard

53

Belknap,1967.

Craddock, Ida. “Letter to Her Mother on the Day of Her Suicide.” Internet.
23 December 2003. <httpzllidacraddock.org/mother.html>

---. “Right Marital Living.” Internet. 23 December 2003
<http://idacraddock.org/right.html>

---. “The Wedding Night.” Internet. December 23 2003.
<http:llidacraddock.orglwedding.html>

Ehrenreich, Barbara. “The Faith Factor.” The Nation 29 Nov. 2004: 6-7.

Ely, Richard T. “Pullman: A Social Study.” Harper's Magazine 70 (Feb. 1885):
452-466.

Harrison, Maureen and Steve Gilbert eds. Obscenity and Pornography
Decisions of the Supreme Court. Carlsbad, CA: Excellent Books, 2000.

Haslam, Jonathan. “Reasons of State.” No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist
Thought in lntemational Relations Since Machiavelli. New Haven: Yale
UP, 2002. 17-88.

“Have Chastity Belts Ever Been Used on Men?” The Straight Dope (Chicago
Reader). Internet. 28 December 2003
<http:l/www.straightdopecomlclassicsla1_073.html>

Heywood, Ezra. Cupid’s Yokes: or, The Binding Forces of Conjugal Life.
Princeton: Co-Operative Publishing Co., 1878. Ann Arbor: UMI
Books on Demand. 27 December 2003.

Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and
Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Jacoby, Susan. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. New York:
Metropolitan, 2004.

Karolides, Nicholas, Margaret Bald and Dawn B. Sova. 100 Banned Books:
Censorship Histories of Worid Literature. New York: Checkmark, 1999.

Kramnick, Isaac and Laurence Moore. The Godless Constitution: The Case
Against Religious Correctness. New York: Norton, 1997.

Lawrence, William. “The Relation of Wealth to Morals.” Democracy and the
Gospel of Wealth. Ed. Gail Kennedy. Boston: Heath, 1949. 68-76.

54

Leonard, Arthur S. Sexuality and the Law: An Encyclopedia of Major Legal
Cases. New York: Garland, 1993.

Lyons, Jonathan. “Bush Enters Mideast’s Rhetorical Minefield.” Reuters:
21 Sept. 2001. lntemet. 16 Nov. 2004
<http:l/www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/bush.htm>

Marcus, Steven. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in
Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. New York: Basic, 1966.

Maxcy, Jonathan. “The Existence of God, demonstrated from the Works of
Creation; Being a sermon preached at Providence.” The Columbian Orator.
Ed. Caleb Bingham. Albany: D. Farrand and Green, 1811. 195-202.

“Mayflower Compact.” Internet. 27 December 2003.
<httpzl/www.law.ou.edu/hist/mayflow.html>

Miller v. California. 413 US. 15. Supreme Ct. of the US. 21 June 1973.

Nordau, Max. Degeneration. New York: Appleton, 1895.

O’Sullivan, John. “The Great Nation of Futurity.” (1839). Making Connections:
Reading American Cultures. Ed. Tom Lyon. New York: McGraw—Hill, 2001.
481-484.

Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason. New York: Kensington, 1988.

“The Parable of Pullman.” lntemet. Chicago: Illinois Labor Historical Society.
20 October 2002. <http://www.kentlawedu/ilhs/pullpar.htm>

“Powers’ Greek Slave.” Anonymous. Putnam’s Monthly. 4 (Dec. 1854): 666.
lntemet. 26 December 2003.
<cdl.library.cornell.edulmoa/browse.author/p.158.html>

Powers, Hiram. The Greek Slave. Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC.
Rosenfeld, Michel. “Deconstruction and Legal Interpretation: Conflict,
lndeterminacy, And the Temptations of the New Legal Formalism.”
Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel
Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson. New York: Routledge, 1992. 152-206.
Roth v. United States. 354 US. 476. Supreme Ct. of the US. 24 June 1957.
Schmitt, Carl. “Definition of Sovereignty” and “The Problem of Sovereignty as

the Problem of the Legal Form and Decision.” Political Theology: Four
Chapters of the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Cambridge:

55

MIT, 1985. 5-35.
The 700 Club. Christian News Network. WDWB, Detroit. 28 April 2004.
US Const. Article VI.

Worcester v. Georgia. 31 US. 515. Supreme Ct. of the US. January 1832.

56

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll'llllllllllIll