Continuing Chapter 2 of The Undressing of America, in which a young dry-goods salesman and amateur porn-buster named Anthony Comstock has improbably, with the support of the YMCA, risen to become America's first professional censor:
Comstock wasted no time in wielding the YMCA’s resources against the smut mongers of New York. He quit his job and gave his full days to collecting evidence against them, spreading the Association’s money among informants in the demimonde, then pushing the police to arrest them and the state's attorneys to prosecuting them. He built his cases so thoroughly that prosecutors began to follow his lead, sometimes using him as an expert witness, often bringing him into their conferences and adding him as a consultant to their legal team in the courtroom. Judges became familiar with him and often praised him, and he in turn publicly supported those judges who were mostly likely to sympathize with his cause.
As his potency increased, so did Comstock’s certainty not only of his righteousness but of his importance. He was known to brag about having brought on William Haynes’s fatal heart attack. When a second pornographer fled New York soon after and was rumored to have died, Comstock said he hoped the man had ended his own life. Then came a third death, another pornographer who may have killed himself. Comstock began to speak with relish—not only to confidants but to the press and civic reform groups—of helping deliver sinners to “their final judge.” With each new victory, he would inform the newspapers of the number of criminals he had now had convicted, the number of shops he had shut down, the number of books he had had destroyed, and the number of deaths he had inspired.
Then, in October 1872, he met an adversary worthy of him: a pair of adversaries, really, who forced him to draw upon his full resources of spirit and anger and to become the man God wanted him to be. The Claflin sisters were not pornographers, but they were exponents and personifications of everything about the age of mass print and the intellectual and social instability of the post-war years that alarmed men like Anthony Comstock.
They were born of a marriage of two forces on the rise in mid-nineteenth century America: hucksterism and crackpot religion. Their father was a confidence man and patent medicine salesman and their mother an illiterate member of a spiritualist sect that followed Franz Mesmer’s beliefs in the healing and mind-controlling powers of magnetism. During the many stretches when their father was unable to make enough money, the children were hired out as menial laborers; Victoria, the seventh of the ten siblings, was pulled from school at the age of eight and sent to clean houses. Soon after she turned eleven, however, her fortunes changed. The family was run out of their small Ohio town when her father burned down his own mill and tried to collect the insurance, and in casting about for a way to make a living he settled on Victoria and her “spirit powers.” For Victoria was a clever and imaginative child who embraced her mother’s ideas about magnetism and invisible forces. She believed she could levitate objects with her will, walk without touching the ground, and see places from a great distance. Soon enough, “Dr. R. B. Claflin” and his family were touring the backwater towns of America, conducting séances and offering “magnetic healing,” with Victoria as their star attraction.
At fifteen Victoria escaped the family act by marrying an unlicensed doctor named Canning Woodhull. They moved to the boom town of San Francisco, where she promptly had two children by him, but he contributed little to their upkeep, preferring to drink, chase other women, and disappear for weeks at a time. When she could not earn money as a clairvoyant and healer, Victoria worked as a music-hall actress and cigar girl, a pair of occupations that in those days commonly included some selling of sexual favors. Finally, in 1860, at the age of twenty-two, she left her husband and returned to her family, who had taken their spiritualistic road show to New York City, their primary selling point now being her beautiful sixteen-year-old sister Tennessee.
Victoria was little interested, however, in returning to her old place in her father's fiefdom, and within a few months had persuaded Tennessee to leave the family and hit the road as a sister act. They quickly discovered eager audiences among the more cultured and affluent urbanites of New York and New England, among whom spiritualism was catching fire as a peculiar new blend of godless religion and novelty entertainment.
In most times and most places, a Victoria Woodhull would have lived her life at the periphery of American society, flickering briefly through the consciousness of curiosity seekers and uncritical spiritualists and then vanishing forever. But when the waves of cultural change are tossing high, the most unlikely figures can rise to the crest. She found her company sought after by some of the brightest men in New York, not only for her charm and eccentricity and prowess as a medium but for her caustic wit and increasingly daring ideas. Her belief in the transmigration of souls led her to believe in the spiritual equality of all people and the relativity of human institutions, while her own experiences had taught her to resent the traps of marriage and the legal and economic power of men.
She married James Harvey Blood, a sensitive and cultured infantry colonel who had returned from the war believing not only in spiritualism but in free love. He, Victoria, and Tennessee turned their home into a salon where they soon found themselves hosting the boldest of New York’s intellectuals and politicians. Victoria embraced the most radical social and political ideas of the time: women’s suffrage, absolute racial equality, sexual freedom, the abolition of marriage, the legalization of prostitution, and the new styles of anarchism and communism being propounded by the First International in Europe. She was a quick study and, despite a third-grade education, became known as a witty and challenging conversationalist.
Victoria was the quicker and more knowledgeable, but Tennessee’s beauty and charm soon proved useful to their social rise as well: at the age of twenty-three she won the affections of the seventy-three year old Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in America.
To be continued...
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