The Undressing of America: Opening

After months of diligently avoiding the blogosphere, having finally, actually finished a fairly polished draft of the first chapter of The Undressing of America, I've decided to start posting excerpts to see what people think. This is how it will begin, not counting whatever I write as an introduction... until either I or my editor decides that it has to change.

Although the great forces of history are most likely immune to the acts of any individual will, and most of what we like to see as turning points are probably, really, the first manifestations of movements already bound to happen, still it’s interesting to speculate on how the cultural history of America may have turned on the shooting of that rabid dog in Winnipauk, Connecticut in the late summer of 1862. There were other events to the south that had a more obvious impact on the nation’s course and no doubt deserve the much greater attention historians have given them—the Battle of Antietam and President Lincoln’s first Emancipation Proclamation to name a couple—but even so, what happened inside the soul of one young man when he leveled his gun, not at a Confederate soldier but at a drooling mastiff, would echo through the next five decades and beyond.

          

       Tony Comstock was eighteen years old. Just six months before he had left New Canaan, one of those Congregationalist communities scratched by sheer puritan zeal out of the thin New England soil over a hundred years before, now withering slowly as the wealth of America moved to more temperate, more southerly, and more secular climes, to seek better fortunes in the mill town of Winnipauk, burgeoning with the recent arrival of a railroad link to the coast and the rest of the world. Tony was less interested in worldly fortune than in serving the austere God whose spirit had informed every joy and sorrow of his childhood, every lowering winter sky and hard row of sod and tender spring shoot of barley on his now lost family farm; but he had obligations. His mother had died when he was ten, his father had vanished while chasing another of his financial pipe dreams, and his older brother had gone to war to end the evil of slavery; his younger sisters were living with relatives, and Tony’s income provided their keep.

          In those six months, Tony had already impressed his Winnipauk neighbors with his energy, industry, and earnestness. Tony was, above all things, earnest. His round face, nascent jowls, full chest, and thick legs made him look several years older than he was. His air of complete devotion to every task he undertook, the gravity he brought to discussions of morals and politics, his obvious love of little children, and his unquestioning willingness to lend his energies to anyone who needed help made him seem older still. So it was that when rumors shot through the town of a mad dog on the loose, Tony was among the first men asked to hunt it down.

          This was not a request made lightly. Rabies was one of the great terrors of nineteenth century American life. There was no cure, or any treatment known other than washing the wound (which many people dismissed as superstitious nonsense anyway), and the contracting of it was a sentence to agonizing death, inevitable from the appearance of the first symptom. Reported cases had been rising since early in the century; although to what extent that reflected the genuine spread of an epidemic as opposed to the rise of a terror within the national imagination is hard to ascertain. America’s canine population surged exponentially along with its human population, and the ever-quicker flow from farms to towns and towns to cities brought dogs, like their owners, into closer contact. So epidemics are spread.

          But times of change stir their own special nightmares, too. In communities like those of New England, where once-homogeneous societies found themselves increasingly disrupted by rapid economic and population shifts, where the moral and philosophical control of the founding churches was being steadily eroded by spreading secularism and free thinking, the idea of the loyal family dog turning suddenly into an agent of death was a compelling one. Common belief held that the first symptom of rabies was a sudden mania, a feverish energy, a frantic and directionless roaming: canine echoes of the unbridled human ecstasies that earlier generations of New Englanders had read as products of witchcraft. Many a cry of “mad dog” went up before the creature in question had a chance to show the insatiable thirst and foaming chops that would have proved it to be rabid; and many a dog surely died for no more than a bout of uncharacteristic energy or anxious restlessness.

      This dog, this Winnipauk mastiff, was doubly damned, because it belonged to a saloonkeeper. Tony Comstock was well aware of this particular saloonkeeper. He not only sold the Devil’s drink to mill workers and railroad men, preying like all saloonkeepers on the loneliness of men who had left behind their families, their home towns, and their native churches; he sold it also to women and children. Tony had heard stories of the man exchanging gin and cider for groceries, even with women, even with mothers of young children. Already the man spread dissolution and destruction through liquor, indifferent to the lives of the innocent. That he would do the same in an even viler manner by leaving his dog untethered and unwatched was only to be expected.

      Tony was one of two young men working at the general store when a neighbor burst through the door and cried for help. Both boys took guns from the store’s stock, poured powder into the muzzles, and rammed home bullets. One bullet per gun, and poor guns at that; every decent weapon in New England had gone south to the war. Facing a mad dog, a man could hope to kill it with his first shot or hope the beast didn’t charge him if he missed, because no man could reload faster than a dog could close a gunshot’s distance between them. Tony fell to his knees and prayed for courage. Then he stood and strode to the door. When he held the door open for his fellow worker, he saw the boy still standing at the counter. He’d lost his nerve. Tony stepped into the street alone.

      Finding the dog was not a complicated task: wherever other people ran from, Tony walked to. Soon enough he marched alone through the streets (or so he would always tell the story), watched from doorways and windows by terrified men, women, and children. He saw the dog at the end of a street. It turned toward him as he brought the gun to his shoulder. He fired his single shot, and the cur dropped. His fellow citizens began streaming toward him, thanking and praising him. He admitted later that he enjoyed their adulation. But his greatest pride, he said, was that “I killed it before a single child could be bitten.”

      Tony went straight back to work at the store, knowing that his Lord wanted a man to attend to his work as earnestly as to the protection of innocents, but not many hours had passed before he found his day interrupted again. Another dog had been seen racing through the schoolyard at the other end of town, and it too appeared to be rabid. Evidently the saloonkeeper’s dog had already begun to spread its illness before it could be killed. This time the townspeople turned to no one but young Comstock to deliver them.

      Again Tony loaded the gun. Again he tracked down the dog by forging upstream against the terror of his neighbors. Again he fired his single shot. But this time he missed. The dog wheeled and charged at him. Tony had no time even to hope to reload, but he did not run. He asked guidance of God as the beast bounded closer. Then God answered, in the sound of a gunshot. This time, one of the men watching from a window had his own rifle ready. The dog crumpled and fell at Tony’s feet.

      That evening, Tony hiked back to his small, bare room as a local hero. He had proved himself to be not just a young man who could track and kill a mad dog, but one who would stand steadfast, unarmed, as a mad dog charged him. But his was not the unfurrowed brow of the hero who knows his battle is won. He knelt and thanked his Lord for this opportunity to protect the women and children of Winnipauk from unimaginable horror. And yet, that mission seemed scarcely completed. For the first cause of the horror was not the saloonkeeper’s dog but the saloonkeeper himself. Even as the dog ran wild, spreading its madness and physical corruption, its master sat in his den spreading his own madness and corruption. His poison worked more slowly, but it would spread death among women and children even more widely and for far longer.

      Tony sought guidance from his own Master, and the truth came instantly clear: the dogs had been only his calls to arms. His true battle was against the man.

       The next morning, Tony went to the sheriff and told him everything he had heard about the saloon, including the rumor that the owner had no legal license. The sheriff didn’t deny the charge, but he also didn’t seem inclined to do anything about it. The saloon was a popular local service, and clearly there was no political gain to be had in shutting it down at the insistence of an outraged stockboy still years shy of voting age.

      Tony left him in a rage. He knew the damage wrought by men who would not do their duties: his own father had repeatedly abandoned his family to chase financial phantasms, leaving little Tony to be his mother’s support, until that neglected woman had died and left Tony with no one to look after him but God and the church. This man who would not use his authority against vice was as guilty as the purveyor himself. And if civil authority could not be trusted to do good, then a higher authority must be invoked.

      “I wish to buy some apples,” Tony boomed as he stepped through the saloon door. The owner told him that he didn’t sell fruit. But Tony paid no attention to his answer, because he was casing the saloon. He took note of the big, wooden, fauceted kegs that held nearly the man’s entire stock, and he took note of the windows nearest them.

      He stole back under the darkness of night. He waited to be sure that he was alone on the street and that no lamps burned in nearby windows. Then he grabbed one of the saloon’s window shutters and, with all the power of his solid torso and unblinking faith, he tore it free. He climbed through into an even deeper darkness. His memory led him to the kegs, where he felt along until he found a faucet. He opened it full, then groped his way to another. The air filled with the hiss and stench of cider, gin, and whiskey gushing to a dirt floor. When that sound subsided, and Tony could only hear the splash of his boots in the man’s foul stock, he wrenched the kegs off their struts and sent them rolling across the floor. He felt the walls until he found bottles and mugs, and he smashed those against the shelves. At last he found the counter and laid on it a note he had written earlier that day: if the man did not abandon this evil business, it warned, then next time the Lord may bring down the entire building.

      Such attacks were not yet established tactics of the religious battle with alcohol: Carry Nation was then just a sickly fifteen year old wheezing in bed in rural Missouri, still twenty years from her saloon-smashing days. This was simply what Tony Comstock knew God wanted. He went to bed that night with the “same consciousness of having done a good job completely that was felt when the first dog lay dead and harmless.”

      He had found the one thing that, for the rest of his life, would give him true pleasure and satisfaction: stopping mad beasts and moral disease before they could destroy the innocent.

        When his brother died at Gettysburg, Tony’s extended family  expected him to enlist to take his place—that’s what good New Englanders did—but for seven months Tony ignored the call. His brother’s death seems not to have affected him terribly; lifelong Tony would bond strongly with women, especially women like his mother and sisters, whom he could protect or depended on him, but he built no strong ties with other men. He also showed little interest in the war itself, or in any political or moral issues beyond his local battles. He finally went off to war in the spring of 1864, with the Confederacy already in retreat.

      Like any Congregationalist, the young Comstock saw slavery as an evil, but the battle for abolition seems to have been too abstract for him to care much about it. In the diary he kept during his year of service, he never mentioned the larger issues of the war and tripped lightly over the tiny bit of action he saw, instead writing mainly of his relentless efforts to organize prayer meetings and urge his fellow soldiers to attend. He was frequently “twitted” for lecturing his fellows on the evils of alcohol and nicotine, and once rather violently hazed, but he never stopped. Usually he enjoyed arguing and took a special satisfaction in calmly standing his ground when vastly outnumbered. He railed against his own weakness when he fell into wrath or self pity over the twits and insults of these men who knew not what they did.

      When the war ended, Tony returned to Connecticut, but there was little there now to hold him. His sisters were growing up, he was not close to his extended family, and he had no real friendships. His closest bond had always been with his mother Polly, the one person he believed had loved him truly and completely. When the judgment of New Canaan had descended on the family for his father’s inconstancy, it was Polly who had protected him. He often said that her memory was his most constant companion, and that when he fought to defend the innocent he wanted to give them the protection his mother had given him. But having let other relatives take over the family farm during the war, his last physical connection to her had been severed. A year after the war, jobless and nearly penniless, he asked a family friend for help.

      No young man with Tony’s energy should stay in Connecticut, the man said. In the wake of the war, too many men were competing for too few jobs. But a great boom was coming. Huge industries had been springing up before the war, and now they would be making up for lost time. The West about to be opened: the two ends of the transcontinental railroad had stretched to within a few hundred miles of one another. Any young with ambition should be heading for the center of the nation’s business and finance: New York City. The man even offered to give Tony money to stake him. He could only afford five dollars, but that was more than Tony had. And so, in the summer of 1866, the twenty-two year old Tony Comstock arrived in America’s biggest city with three dollars and forty cents in his pocket.

      Very quickly, he discovered that other young men had left Connecticut for New York, and countless others had left every other state in the union. There were jobs, but there were men lined up for every one. After days of dogged searching he secured a place as a shipping clerk at a dry goods company. Unable to afford to live in New York itself, he had to take a cheap room in the neighboring city of Brooklyn and commute by ferry.

      Nothing in Comstock’s life had prepared him for New York City.

To be continued...