Amative Nature

Chapter 2 of The Undressing of America continued. The Claflin sisters, stage spiritualists and political pot-stirrers, have become toasts of New York society in a moment of especially interesting cultural upheaval:

Vanderbilt quietly bankrolled and advised the sisters in the forming of Woodhull, Claflin and Company, a stock brokerage. They made $700,000 in their first year, and immediately became favorites of New York social circles and the popular press. They epitomized everything most glamorous and startling about the city and the era, those beautiful, extravagantly-dressed, attention-loving, free-loving radicals who had mastered American capitalism.

       The sisters understood the power of the popular press. Newspapers drove some of the great reform movements of the day: the Times’s attack on Boss Tweed, Horace Greeley’s on corruption in the White House. And it was Greeley, of course, who publicized Anthony Comstock’s battle against pornography. So it was that, in the spring of 1870, as soon as they had money to invest, they brought out a newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, to promote their ideas and bring their own provocative interpretations to events of the day. Victoria immediately caught the eye of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the other leaders of the feminist movement, and within two years had become such a popular writer and speaker on the rights of women that the nascent Equal Rights Party nominated her for President of the United States, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate.

       Until that autumn of 1872, the sisters had inspired only admiration, gossip, amusement, and argument. There seemed room in New York, on the newsstands, and in the hodgepodge community of reformers and radicals for a vast moral and intellectual range, and Victoria seemed not unjustified in her assertions that hers were the ideas that would shape the future and liberate the world. But then they took the step that put them on a collision course with the other rising force of American reform, the purity movement as embodied in Anthony Comstock. They reported that the most respected of American clergymen was cheating on his wife.

      Rumors had been swirling around the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and his relationship with the wife of one of his parishioners for at least two years, but so great was his prestige as an abolitionist leader, moral reformer, lecturer, and brother of the nation’s most admired novelist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, that no one had dared to print a whiff of them. Certainly no one who valued Beecher’s support in the battles for racial justice or women’s suffrage would have thought to besmirch him.

The bedroom eyes of Rev. Beecher

      Victoria Woodhull had no patience with such hypocrisy. Although she and Beecher worked for many of the same ends, she disliked his sanctimoniousness and the distress he brought to his wife, and she disliked the dishonesty of those who kept his secrets while denouncing immorality. In her mind, the fault was less with Beecher as a man than with the false idols of marriage and monogamy. She wrote of Beecher’s “amative nature,” the sexual magnetism that made him such a compelling speaker and leader, and lamented that the false morality left to us from an oppressive past did not allow him to express his nature openly, nor allow the rest of us to discuss it freely. For Woodhull, the improvement of humankind would come through the exposure of the truth of human nature.

       That issue of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly sold out instantly.  Many readers lauded their courage and honesty. Others simply enjoyed the scandal, as well as Victoria’s voluptuous descriptions of Beecher’s “immense physical potency,” “zest,” and “magnetic power.” But many of their allies and supporters were appalled. Feminists who saw the suffrage movement as aligned with Christian rectitude, who had been loyal to Beecher and appreciated his support, denounced them or distanced themselves.

       Among those most outraged was Anthony Comstock. He was unshakably certain of the Reverend Beecher’s innocence and just as certain that the sisters were proponents of corruption engaged in an assault upon decency. In his mind, Woodhull and Claflin were of the same stuff as all the indecent publishers, just two more purveyors of smut and innuendo. But now they were not simply corrupting the young for profit, they were using their obscenity against a leader of the church, they were attempting to tear down the pillars of the nation’s morals. Where everyone else seemed to content to cluck their tongues and vow to the deny the sisters social entrée, Comstock took action.

Comstock: eyes for anywhere but.

       He went first to the state courts, suing for action on the grounds that the weekly violated the obscene publications law of 1868, but the District Attorney refused to pursue the case. Comstock called his attention to another obscene article in the same issue of the newspaper, this one about a stockbroker named Challis who went around boasting about his female conquest. Still the DA would take no action. But Comstock would not stop. He knew another law on the books, another law that the YMCA had supported, this one a federal statute, enacted just four months before, a tightening of the laws against using the US mail to send obscene publications. There he found a more sympathetic audience. A pair of deputy US marshals were dispatched to arrest Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.

       At first no one, not the arrested women nor their supporters, took the matter seriously. A crowd gathered at the Weekly’s offices where, according to the New York Telegram, “puns, jokes and witticisms were freely indulged in at the expense of each other, the police, the prisoners and the United States government, and many a hearty laugh indulged in as a fresh sally was heard.” The Dispatch described Claflin at her arraignment as “flushed like a rose, and her blue eyes sparkled nervously. As she glanced round the room, a smile of contempt seemed to gather about her ruby lips.” The case against them seemed thin indeed, but the feeling against them ran high enough that a grand jury brought indictments against them, the judge set a high bail, and they spent most of November in jail.

       The trial was delayed once, and then again, as the prosecution kept shifting its charges, seeking something that might stick. And at the forefront, publicly denouncing the sisters and demanding that the government stay true to its prosecution, stood Comstock. Many in the press began to protest, seeing a misuse of government power that would threaten the basic freedom of the press. The Brooklyn Eagle criticized “the irresponsible action of the more zealous and sensible Comstock,” and soon after noted, “As to Mr. Anthony Comstock, we never heard of him till he ‘ranged himself’ in legal company with the Claflin Sisters as their prosecutor and world-wide advertiser.”

       More and more the battle was seen as being between the sisters as representatives of a titillating but dangerous new morality and Anthony Comstock, so recently unknown, so suddenly prominent, as the embodiment of militant rectitude.