Continuing Chapter Two of The Undressing of America: some thoughts on the cultural forces and metaphors driving our evolving ideas about "purity" and "filth."
It is difficult, from our distance, to realize that the perception of indecent literature as a source of social and psychological harm was once a new one.
There had been attacks on obscenity for centuries, including mass burnings of it and the persecution of people who made it, often led by Calvinists like Comstock. But in the middle 19th Century, Calvinism was fading as a dominant force in American life, eclipsed especially by heterogeneous, secular cultures of New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The mores of New York, in particular, had grown steadily more lax in the decades before the Civil War: risqué entertainment and scandal had become accepted topics of polite discourse, and the prostitute had become a common subject of literature and journalism, a symbol both of what was most tragic and most romantic about modern city life. Religious attacks on immorality generated little interest. But a new conception of forbidden stories and images began coming into focus in mid-century: pornography as a negative social force, a force that a generation needed to be protected against; a force, almost like a disease, worthy of being dealt with through public policy.
Much of this was simply the worried response of the affluent and established classes to what the common man was seeing. Educated opinion was ambivalent about this still-young medium of mass print: clearly it made the masses more literate and aware, but who knew what sorts of bad ideas or dangerous stimulation it would bring to the uneducated and the impressionable young? When pornography had been consumed only by men of a certain level of wealth and therefore, implicitly, of sophistication, it had been easily dismissed as a matter of personal moral failing. But when one considered the young men who every day arrived in the city fresh from small towns or their parents’ farms, already feeling the heady freedom and countless distractions of the city, one could easily imagine them being aroused and made curious by those magazines and books they could find at any newsstand. And since those same newsstands also sold guides to local brothels and newspapers advertising condoms and questionable medicines for the prevention of social diseases, they might be led to act on that new curiosity; a curiosity that led not only to moral decline but likely to syphilis, that incurable gate to madness, shame, and family devastation.
Pornography led young men even more certainly often to other deeds, deeds rarely spoken of in public but ever more frequently worried about in private. During those very years a growing mass of medical authorities and educators warned of the physical and psychological danger of masturbation, once a vice that troubled some clergymen but was otherwise of little general interest, now recast as an incipient destroyer of young men’s energies and mental capacities.
The intensity of concern inspired by pornography, however—intense enough that it apparently came to worry Morris Jesup and other officers of the New York YMCA more than the brothels and diseases themselves—show that we are entering the realm of cultural metaphor, of common patterns of thought and perception shaped by the larger fears, hopes, and daily preoccupations of the time.
This was a moment of tremendous change. Industrialization was still young in America, its transformation of life, work, physical environment, and common thought still in its fluid days, still bringing soaring dreams, deep terrors, and vast mystery. The cities especially were changing rapidly, and none more quickly or dramatically than New York. The centralization of capital and industry, and the accompanying federalization of power in the wake of the Civil War had raised new questions of national identity and new expectations of government. Ideas of progress and reform, the conviction that change was not only here and inevitable but noble and desirable, dominated nearly every field. Young men made up the new workforce that would drive American industry and commerce during the post-war years, but they became more than that in popular thought: they became symbols of change itself, omens of the future. In the behavior of a generation, older people looked then as they do now for signs of coming prosperity or ruin, indications that the future would be as bright as they hoped or as dark as they feared.
The Civil War gave new poignancy to that metaphor. The slaughter of so many thousands of young men had made that generation seem not only precious but fragile. The horror of those young bodies scattered over the battlefields, maimed and diseased and blown apart, haunted the national imagination, evoking horror at what we might do to our young, inspiring an overarching protectiveness, a desperation to identify and prevent future harm.
In the popular imagination grew up a sentimentalization of young men that nearly amounted to a new national myth. Even as Anthony Comstock was beginning his pursuit of indecency in the mass press, another New England Congregationalist, Horatio Alger, was using that same medium to tell stories about plucky, hardworking adolescent boys in New York finding their ways to riches and respectability through courage and moral virtue. Alger himself had a romantic, even erotic, vision of young men, and it struck a loud chord, immediately making him the most popular American writer in the cheap press. Thus mass print became the great promoter of the potential of young men, which tightened the popular association of cheap publications with the moral and intellectual formation of the new generation. If Alger’s stories were to be embraced as good for boys, then Alger’s opposite numbers must be denounced as bad for them.
There was, however, a bigger metaphor than this at work.
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