The New Scourge

Another excerpt from the book in progress, The Undressing of America. Young Tony Comstock has just arrived in New York from small-town Connecticut in 1868.

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

      The city was exploding in size, from half a million in 1850 to nearly nine hundred thousand by the late 1860s. And nearly a quarter of those nine hundred thousand people had been born in Ireland, most of them to the rural poor. Other foreigners were pouring in too, especially Germans, tens of thousands a year, most of them as Catholic as the Irish.

      The city grew rapidly, ruthless northward, but no amount of construction could keep up with the population. Vast shantytowns sprang up at the edges of the new neighborhoods and old neighborhoods were overbuilt by denser new dwellings, or old buildings were carved up into tenements. Wide swaths of the city fell prey to such overcrowding, neglect, and poverty that living conditions in them approached the unendurable: open sewers, backyard livestock pens and open-air slaughterhouses, hundreds of people living in windowless basements, defecating in the corners, falling prey to the waves of cholera, malaria, and tuberculosis that swept through the city. Descriptions of the city speak of filth in the streets—human feces, animal feces, sometimes the offal of slaughtered pigs—filth sometimes so thick that a man couldn’t walk through it without it slopping over his shoes. And they speak of a brutal, inescapable stench.

       Crime ran rampant. A growing army of abandoned and orphaned children survived largely by theft, and violent gangs grew up to run graft and extortion rings in the rougher neighborhoods. From those neighborhoods came political power, too. Just three years before Comstock arrived, immigrant workers had rioted violently against the draft, paralyzing the city for weeks. Fear of another insurrection haunted the established classes. Tammany Hall and its Democratic machine had been amassing more and more power through the decades of immigration, and the year after the draft riots it had cemented its power over the city’s politics by getting one of its own elected mayor. Boss Tweed became a hero to some and the embodiment of ruin to others. Political corruption became business as usual. Laws were increasingly enforced on a pay-as-you-go basis.

      Prostitutes lined some streets and bordellos others. Female poverty, official corruption, and a great number of unmarried workingmen guaranteed that prostitution would be a big business. Sophisticates considered prostitutes part of the local color, writers and artists—Walt Whitman among them—were fascinating by the figure of the whore, and guides to sporting houses were sold openly throughout the city. Other industries sold sex too: a great vogue in those years were the “pretty waiter girl saloons,” restaurants and watering holes that replaced the traditional male waiter with women hired for their looks whose job it was to bring men in and keep them buying. Theaters were popping up everywhere, and more and more entertainments advertised their beautiful actresses and dancers. Local gossip was filled with tales of rich men trolling the restaurants and theaters for women who were willing to be kept.

      Tony Comstock found all of it alarming, but at first he seemed most troubled by the ubiquitous saloons. New York had always been a hard-drinking city, but now whatever attempts the more upright city elders made to control the number of drinking establishments were swept aside by the rising political and cultural power of the Catholics. Young Comstock had known drinkers all his life, but in Connecticut he had been able to draw a clear line in his mind between the rude farmers and workers who thrived on cheap liquor and the teetotalers who dominated the social, religious, and political community. The mongrel world of the city, where Catholics and sophisticates of all classes and vocations imbibed without shame, made him worry for the fate of the city and the nation.

      He heard those fears echoed often among the people he knew. The idea that New York was in a catastrophic moral decline grew as the city grew; for not only were more Catholic foreigners arriving to change its mores, but more small-town Protestants were arriving to be horrified.

       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.

To be continued...