The new scourge

In the last excerpt, we saw the squalor and vice of New York as viewed by the likes of Tony Comstock in 1868...

Countervailing currents, though, surged through the city’s consciousness too. Talk of reformation, of cleansing and uplift and reconstruction, was everywhere. The tremendous growth of the city had brought tremendous challenges, including sanitation issues at a scale America had never before had to deal with. Sewer systems were overtaxed almost as soon as they were built. No aqueduct had been built capable of bringing adequate water to the burgeoning population, and so the island was dotted with pools and reservoirs that became breeding grounds for cholera and malaria. Now, with the war over and vast reserves of public money and manpower freed up for other ends, monumental public works were launched, most prominently a new, interrelated system of aqueducts and sewers. New York’s civic conversations were dominated by talk of bringing in clean, pure water and sweeping out filth.

            And as the resources dedicated to war were now turned to the physical improvement of urban life, so were the moral energies that had been devoted for years to abolition and the preservation of the republic now brought to bear on uplifting the city’s moral life. With slavery removed as the principle evil for ministers, reformers, and evangelical organizations to battle, new attention was brought to the evils of alcohol, sexual license, the exploitation of women, and the neglect of children. A movement to take care of children and young men who were left without resources by poverty, or by parental death or neglect, had spread from England to America in the 1840s and ‘50s, most notably in the form of the Children’s Aid Society. Tony Comstock approved of their work. The thrill of reform coursed through him as intensely as did his revulsion at vice.

It was another English transplant, however, that spoke most to him: the Young Men’s Christian Association, dedicated to “Improving the spiritual, mental, social and physical condition of young men.” Its principal concerns were men like Tony and like the men he saw around him at work and in his boardinghouse, men who’d come alone to the big city and were especially vulnerable to its seductions. It was the New York branch of the YMCA that would give Tony Comstock his next mad dog to kill, and so doing give him his purpose in life. It was the YMCA that drew his attention to a new scourge threatening the young, a scourge that he found more alarming than alcohol, prostitution, crime, poverty, cholera, syphilis, Catholics, and rabies: publishing.