The Birth of American Porn

Continuing excerpts from The Undressing of America. Many Americans like Tony Comstock were worried about the rise of mass print and its capacity for challenging current mores. And sure enough...

Obscenity laws were spotty and rarely enforced, and no one had time or resources to keep watch over everything that poured from the presses of New York. Just as the anonymity of city life allowed a greater personal freedom than the closeness of the village, the opportunities for transgression were much greater once publishers could expect their creations to go unnoticed in the clutter of the newsstand or the overstuffed shelves of downtown bookshops. And those voices spoke true. The cheaper newspapers increasingly took ads from the purveyors of products that couldn’t be displayed in stores: potions to aid male virility and rubber devices to prevent pregnancy and unmentionable diseases. Some book publishers brought out risqué stories, others guidebooks to local vice for the newcomer and visitor. And if one knew where to look, there was pornography.

     The pioneer of American mass-pornography was a surgeon from Ireland named William Haynes who found it difficult to establish a profitable practice in New York and thought he’d make a little money on the side through his private hobby. In 1846, taking advantage of the cheap printing in which his new city abounded, he put out a two-dollar edition of Fanny Hill, a bargain for the sort of book that had until then been circulated quietly among cognoscenti. The edition sold out. He printed another, that sold out too, and he decided to reprint other old works of pornography. Soon enough, he began hearing from customers who were seeking a publisher for their own erotic efforts. By the time war broke out, he had issued a catalog for all his wares.

     By then other publishers had jumped into the business too, all of them in New York, many of them cheek-by-jowl with the more mainstream publishers on Ann Street. The Civil War was good for business: lists of the effects of soldiers captured or killed show quite a few catalogs of dirty books, and both postal and military authorities expressed outrage at the quantity of smut being mailed to Union Army outposts. One captain wrote of lighting a large bonfire of all the obscene publications he had confiscated from his men.

     Many of these books aped the flowery style of Fanny Hill and its ancestors, some seemed to aspire to be romance novels of the type then bursting from the cheap publishers, and some expressed genuine points of view. One, The Secret History of a Votary of Pleasure, spent its first thirty pages excoriating Congregationalism—Tony Comstock’s own faith—and declaring that religious prohibition of sexual behavior was the greatest possible goad to prurient thinking, before the non-stop frotting began. Some of them danced about with euphemisms, but some did not, and left no doubt as to the techniques and pleasures of sex of many kinds, including oral and anal. Some took the guise of education, like Mysteries of the Wedding Night: Techniques for the Making of a Strong Marriage and Robust Children.

     Then, of course, there were the dirty lithographs and photographs. For photography had been making great technical advances in those years, too, and by the 1850s it became possible to reproduce unlimited paper prints of a single negative. The man with the big coat selling “French photographs” had become a fixture outside train stations and saloons by 1860. Nor were all such items hidden beneath coats. Among the ads in the cheaper newspapers were those for vaguely described books and photos. And a few careful questions at a well-stocked newsstand might turn up quite a few items hidden behind the counter.

     As citizens began to voice concern about some of what was finding its way to the newsstands, local governments began to pass more legislation concerning the content of publications. In 1860 Congress passed what was, essentially, the first federal censorship law, stating that newspapers containing “indecent” material could not be sent through the U.S. mail. The law was vague, however, and although its terms were explicated a bit more in an 1865 revision of the law (largely inspired by reports of the mountains of pornography being mailed to the soldiers), still it lacked teeth. With a great war and a volatile economy to worry about, few Americans paused to be concerned about the content of publications. But as the Civil War ended, that was about to change. A new war was about to be launched between a ragtag militia of smut mongers and yellow journalists—and the hale-bodied troops of the YMCA.

To be continued...