Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction inVictorian America

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Reviews in American History 26.4 (1998) 717-724

Victorian Vice

Patrick J. Kelly *


Nicola Beisel. Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family
Reproduction in Victorian America. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997. x + 268 pp. Bibliographical references and index. $35.00.

Anthony Comstock enjoyed a long and singularly successful career as a
moral reformer. In a campaign that stretched from the years following
the Civil War until the first years of this century, he played a
central role in defining erotica as pornography, thus making its
circulation through the mails a federal offense, criminalizing
abortion and contraception, and organizing a crusade against
gambling. His influence on American life and politics in the Gilded
Age was so pervasive that federal anti-obscenity legislation passed
in the 1870s, legislation which he helped draft, was known as the
Comstock Law. By the end of his first decade as an anti-vice
crusader, sociologist Nicola Beisel reports, Comstock had arrested
ninety-seven people for "advertising or selling abortifacients or
indecent rubber articles, including contraceptives," and seized
202,214 obscene pictures and photographs, 21,150 pounds of books, and
63,819 contraceptive devices, abortifacient instruments, and
instruments used to enhance sexual pleasure (p. 45). And his legacy
remains with us. The Communications Decency Act, passed overwhelming
by Congress in 1996 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton,
adopted language from the 1873 Comstock Act, making it "a felony to
transmit 'indecent' information, including information about
abortion, over the Internet" (p. 201). Precious few moral reformers
can claim to have left such an enduring mark on U.S. society....

...Given her disciplinary interests, Beisel is less concerned with
Comstock the historical actor than with Comstockery, the movement.
Readers seeking to find a detailed narrative account of Comstock's
life and work must look elsewhere. His activities after the 1890s,
including his legal crusade against Margaret Sanger, go completely
unmentioned. In addition, Comstock shares the stage with moral
reformers from Boston and Philadelphia. Beisel's objective is to
uncover the links between moral reform movements and the "role of
families in creating and reproducing social privilege" (p. 217). What
is the connection? Beisel argues that a significant portion of
late-nineteenth-century urban upper and middle classes supported
Comstock because they believed that vice, or at least what Comstock
declared as vice--erotica, both written and visual, gambling,
abortion, and contraception--undermined the child's ability to master
the "values and habits" essential for productive adulthood (p. 5). By
corrupting children of the upper class, vice imperiled the
reproduction of a family's wealth and status into the next
generation. By corrupting children of the middle class, vice
imperiled any opportunity for advancement in class status. Since
Beisel contends family reproduction is also class reproduction, moral
reform movements were thus at the center of the creation, defense,
and reproduction of the cultural and economic hegemony of urban
elites. By linking Comstock's moral reform crusade with class
formation, Beisel offers scholars an original way of understanding
anti-vice efforts in Victorian America.

Anthony Comstock's meteoric rise from Manhattan dry goods clerk to a
nationally known moral reformer started in 1868. That year the New
York legislature passed a law restricting the sale of erotica.
Comstock, using an entrapment tactic that soon became characteristic,
bought a sexually explicit volume from a book dealer, and, evidence
in hand, persuaded the local police to arrest the dealer and seize
his merchandise. Comstock's association with the wealthy backers of
the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), an association critical
to his career, began in 1872. In that year he requested funds from
the YMCA, money he used to purchase and then destroy salacious books
and plates owned by the widow of a deceased book dealer. Impressed
with Comstock, the YMCA leadership created its Committee for the
Suppression of Vice which secretly funded Comstock's anti-vice
efforts. In 1874, the Committee for the Suppression of Vice became an
independent organization, the New York Society for the Suppression of
Vice (NYSSV), with Comstock as its main investigator. The NYSSV, a
private organization generously supported by New York City elites,
provided Comstock with an institutional base from which he was able
to work.

Comstock's ability to gain the support of wealthy New Yorkers helps
explain the remarkable longevity and success of his career. Beisel
points out that nearly one-third of the contributors to the NYSSV
were either millionaires or listed in the Social Register. (The same
was true of benefactors of the New England Society for the
Suppression of Vice, a Boston-based organization created in 1878 and
renamed the Watch and Ward Society in 1891.) Samuel Colgate, the
millionaire scion of the soap family, served as president of the
NYSSV from 1878 until the end of the century. The majority of the
remaining supporters of both organizations were members of the upper
middle class: merchants, businessmen, financiers, and professionals.
Gilded Age anti-vice campaigns, Beisel argues convincingly, were thus
a province of urban elites.

The multifarious activities Comstock defined as vice existed prior to
the Victorian Age, so why did urban elites suddenly find them so
intolerable? Beisel argues that Comstock's reform efforts must be
viewed in the context of increased immigration into the U.S. Many
native-born Americans found the presence of Eastern and Southern
European immigrants, who flowed into U.S. urban areas by millions in
the last quarter of the century, profoundly threatening. One of the
major concerns about immigrants was the perception that their arrival
coincided with the sudden expansion of illicit activities in urban
areas, an expansion which multiplied the number of times children
were exposed to temptation. A significant portion of Comstock's
success, Beisel argues, was due to his ability to "articulate a link
between the problems of elite family reproduction and the (real or
imagined) threat of immigrant communities" (p. 12).

For Beisel, the fundamental objective of Comstock's campaign was to
"ensure the reproduction of children suited to take their parents
places as leaders of society" (p. 50). Upon this goal all else
depended. Upper- and middle-class Victorian parents grew so exercised
about pornography because they believed that exposure to obscene
literature exposed their children to dangers including "laziness,
immorality, lustfulness, criminality and sometimes death" (p. 53).
Wealthy children were especially vulnerable to the "traps" posed by
obscenity, Comstock argued, because many attended boarding school.
Far away from the protective eyes of their parents, boarding school
students were, Comstock warned, easy prey. Comstock accused smut
peddlers of purchasing boarding school mailing lists from local
postmasters for the express purpose of blanketing these
establishments with mailed advertisements. No matter where the
exposure, whether in elite boarding schools or on the streets of the
city, vice posed a danger to all children. Comstock argued that
obscene literature, "designed and cunningly calculated to excite the
imagination and inflame the passions of the youth into whose hands
they may come," induced children, both boys and girls, to masturbate,
a habit which many Gilded Age parents believed destroyed children's
morals, minds, and bodies (p. 53). (There was also a plausible
connection between pornography and prostitution, but Comstock choose
to leave anti-prostitution campaigns to other organizations.) Elite
parents, therefore, supported anti-vice campaigns because they
believed that obscenity, by corrupting young people both in body and
spirit, destroyed the child's ability to reproduce or improve the
family's class position in succeeding generations....

...Comstock saw contraception and abortion as on the same continuum
as obscenity. For him, contraception was the logical consequence of
vice, as both allowed "young people, afflicted with lust from reading
pornography, to sin while affording themselves and their partners
protection from disease and pregnancy" (p. 40). The criminalization
of abortion, Comstock argued, was necessary to protect young women
from the sexual exploitation inherent in the dangerously sexualized
culture of Gilded Age America....

...Comstock's attempt to discipline the sexual and reproductive
behavior of women is most clearly evident in his fight against the
free-love movement. Some of Comstock's most sensational cases were
his arrest and prosecution of free-lovers such as Victoria Woodhull
and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, as well as Ezra Heywood.
Free-lovers offered a radical critique of marriage, arguing that the
institution of marriage enslaved women by making them economically
dependent upon their husbands. Free-love doctrine argued that married
women were politically oppressed and economically exploited.
Insisting that women entered wedlock ignorant of even the most basic
facts about sexuality, free-lovers believed that marriage was little
more than a system of state-sanctioned prostitution. Marriage, they
argued, was an arrangement in which females surrendered control of
"their bodies, their sexuality, and their reproductive capacity" (p.
102). For free-lovers the most effective remedy to this situation was
a candid, comprehensive, and public conversation about marriage,
sexuality, and family. Fearing that free-love doctrine posed a threat
to the sanctity of family, Comstock branded any such public
discussion as obscene, and attacked free-lovers with a special fury.

In 1872, after Woodhull and Claflin exposed the details of the
Beecher-Tilton affair in the pages of their weekly newspaper,
Comstock had them arrested and charged with circulating obscene
material. In their trial both sisters were acquitted when the federal
judge overseeing the trial ruled that the original Comstock Law had
not included newspapers, a loophole Congress soon closed. In 1877
Comstock arrested Ezra Heywood for publishing Cupid's Yokes, or, The
Binding Forces of Conjugal Life, a book attacking the institution of
marriage, the Comstock Acts, and Comstock himself. Heywood was
convicted of violating the Comstock statue and sent to jail, only to
be pardoned by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878. After his
pardon Heywood continued to challenge federal law by his stubborn
promotion of enlightened sexuality and by his public advocacy of
contraception. In the early 1880s Heywood was arrested for mailing
two Walt Whitman poems--reprinted in Heywood's journal the Word--and
a contraceptive device he had named "The Comstock Syringe." Found
innocent, Heywood was arrested three more times by Comstock until, in
1890, he was convicted of printing in his journal a discussion of
oral-genital sex and a letter from a mother discussing the sex
education of her children. Sentenced to two years of hard labor,
Heywood, who was sixty-one, served nearly his entire sentence, and
died soon after his release from federal prison.

Comstock, then, was a tenacious opponent of the one group in Gilded
Age America, free-lovers, that offered the most forceful defense of
the sexual and reproductive freedom of women. Add that to his
campaign to criminalize contraception and abortion, and it is not
difficult to discern why scholars have detected in his reform efforts
an attempt to keep women at home and pregnant....

On the federal level, the legislative codification of Comstockery in
the Comstock Laws marked an unprecedented expansion of Washington's
power to discipline the sexual practices and beliefs of every
American. What is even more remarkable is that this expansion of
federal police power came at a time when the growth of the U.S.
central state was, according to most current interpretations,
constrained by the political and cultural tenets of localism and
laissez-faire. Beisel notes that Comstock was a federal agent--he was
appointed as a postal inspector but refused any pay, and instead
continued to draw his salary from the NYSSV--with the power to drag
his opponents into federal court and, often, into federal prison. As
a private citizen deputized with federal powers, however, Comstock
did not work alone. The federal government employed dozens of postal
agents whose authority was national in scope. By the mid-1870s, these
federal policemen were charged with the job of suppressing the
circulation of materials that Comstock played an instrumental role in
codifying as obscene. In ways that Comstock's opponents well
understood, the significance of Comstockery was its role in
dramatically increasing the power of the Gilded Age state to regulate
the private lives of all U.S. citizens.

Imperiled Innocents adds to the small but growing literature on what
has been, up until recently, a largely ignored facet of Gilded Age
state formation: the growth of the law enforcement apparatus of the
federal government. William Novak concludes his book on local law and
regulation in the pre-Civil War era with the observation that,
although the Founding Fathers did not create a national police power
for the protection of the "safety, morals, health, comfort and
welfare" of Americans, "legal and political developments" after the
1870s made "federal police power--an essential attribute of modern,
centralized states--a practical if not a technical reality." 3 By the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, in fact, the federal
government had created a number of police agencies. The Secret
Service, an outgrowth of the Legal Tender Act, was created to protect
the integrity of the newly nationalized currency. In his book on the
Secret Service, David R. Johnson argues that its aggressive and
largely successful anti-counterfeiting activities offered Washington
"an effective means of penetrating into the local civic fabric of
society in order to enforce its version of political and social
order." 4 Wilbur R. Miller argues that the Bureau of Internal
Revenue's efforts to enforce federal liquor laws between 1865 and
1900 "represented a government whose reach into the lives of ordinary
citizens slowly extended after the Civil War." 5 During the postwar
years the number of federal crimes increased dramatically, so much so
that in the early 1870s Congress created the Department of Justice,
an agency charged with the task of enforcing federal law....

...Post-Civil War Washington was not always successful in policing
Americans, its failure to enforce federal laws designed to stop
southern whites from terrorizing African-Americans immediately comes
to mind. Yet, in many areas--the fight against counterfeiters,
moonshiners, polygamists, and pornographers especially--the record
compiled by the Gilded Age state was, for better or worse,
impressive. The Comstock Laws were an important part of that policing
process, a process that gave the federal government expanded powers
to coerce individual Americans into accepting normative standards of
belief and behavior....

Patrick J. Kelly, Department of History, University of Texas at San
Antonio, is the author of Creating a National Home: Building the
Veterans' Welfare State, 1860-1900 (1997)....

Notes

...3. William J. Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in
Nineteenth-Century America (1996), 242.

4. David R. Johnson, Illegal Tender: Counterfeiting and the Secret
Service in Nineteenth-Century America (1995), xii.

5. Wilbur R. Miller, Revenuers and Moonshiners, Enforcing Federal
Liquor Law in the Mountain South, 1865-1900 (1991), 188.

6. Stephen Cresswell, Mormons and Cowboys, Moonshiners and Klansmen:
Federal Law Enforcement in the South and West, 1870-1893 (1991), 124.

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