The Mighty Blow

Continuing excerpts from The Undressing of America. Having described the rise of the pornography business in America, we've just made mention of its imminent opponent, the Young Men's Christian Association:
 

Twenty-one years before the Confederate surrender, a group of young Evangelical men, mostly working class, still mostly in their early twenties, founded an association to aid their fellow workers. Seeing drunkenness, venereal disease, and other epidemics sweeping through the growing industrial slums, they believed the city needed places where young men lacking families could find safe rooms to sleep in and activities to keep them busy that improved them not only spiritually but intellectually and physically too. Their YMCA proved to be at the growing edge of “purity movement” spreading out from London—an answer to the poisons of industrialism that stressed bodily purity as essential to Christian rectitude—and within a decade had not only sprouted branches throughout urban Britain but was sending up shoots in Europe and America.

     In the young, robust New York City branch, within months after the war’s end, the association’s leaders added to the list of urban ills from which men must be protected obscene publications. American Evangelicals, mainly Congregationalists and Presbyterians, had inherited Jean Calvin’s distrust of secular literature and drama, and to them the fouling of the mind was no less destructive than the fouling of the body with liquor and disease. In that moment, they also saw their work as crucial to the building of a more civilized and moral post-war world.

     In 1866, a committee of leaders of the New York YMCA produced a memorandum on the dangers currently threatening those young men. Brothels, saloons, theaters, gambling dens, and billiard parlors were high among them; but obscene publications ranked highest. “Illustrating the audacity with which this temptation is flaunted in the faces of young men,” read the memorandum, “it may be stated that, at one place, on a principal thoroughfare, there are openly exposed for sale two vile weekly newspapers, which can be purchased at ten cents a copy, and more than fifty kinds of licentious books, each one illustrated by one or two cuts…. The debasing influence of these publications on young men cannot be over-estimated; they are feeders for brothels.”

     The YMCA’s directors typically preferred to act as a safe haven against worldly ills than to battle against them, but this issue meant enough to them that they began lobbying sympathetic members of the New York state legislature to draft a bill for the suppression of obscene literature. As news of the Association’s battle spread, more and more reform-minded New Yorkers began to see the fight against obscenity as a significant one. Typically, those reformers contented themselves with sending funds to the Association or writing letters to their representatives in Albany. There was one friend of the YMCA, however, who could not be contented by such indirect means. One who felt that if a mad dog threatened the innocent, then the dog would simply have to be shot. 

(Robert Indiana)

      
       After two years in New York, Tony Comstock had improved his station not at all. He impressed his employers with his hard work and dogged seriousness, but he apparently impressed them only enough to keep him as a shipping clerk. Lacking the intellectual nimbleness and hunger for opportunity that the modern city favored, he was not clearly not one of those  young men in the popular novels destined for fame and fortune. He was also not destined to rise in the society of his fellow workers, for not only was he not the sort to go out drinking, gambling, and joking with the other chaps at the close of business, he was, in fact, not even the sort to bite his tongue when he felt the other chap needed spiritual guidance. Tony’s social life comprised essentially just his regular prayer meetings.
    

     Comstock watched the YMCA’s campaign against published smut closely. Through work, he knew a young man who had come down with a venereal disease, presumably at a brothel, and he felt certain that a particular erotic book had led him there. The moment the YMCA’s obscene-publications bill was passed into law in 1868, Tony tracked the boy down and demanded to know where he’d bought the book. The purveyor had been a bookseller named Conroy, an Irishman and a Catholic. Tony marched promptly to the shop, bought a dirty book, carried it to the nearest police station, showed it to the precinct captain, and demanded that an officer accompany him back to the shop to arrest the seller under the new obscenity law.
    

     The captain himself took on the task; in the six years since he’d failed to persuade a sheriff to shut down an unlicensed saloon, Tony had developed enough ferocity of demeanor and weightiness of presence to impress authorities that he was not to be dismissed. The captain sized up Conroy’s stock, placed the man under arrest, and seemed to feel the job was done; but Comstock insisted that the captain seize the shop’s entire indecent stock. Again the captain did as he was told. Tony Comstock  had brought justice for his friend, had protected other young men from the same fate, and had made the hand of God felt among the smut-shops of lower Manhattan.
    

     He had begun building a dam against the rising flood of mass publishing, a dam that would rise higher and hold firmer than he could ever have dared hope.

     For three years, he fought alone.

    Just a few weeks after he’d brought down his first mad-dog pornographer, he tracked down another, a stationery vendor named Simpson who sold indecent books out of his back room, and had him arrested and his shop shut down too. He slackened his pace after that, bringing five more smut mongers to earth over the next two years.

    His zeal was dampened partly by frustration: the obscenity law of 1868 was vaguely worded, and the authorities seemed little interested in enforcing it. The state’s attorney had declined to prosecute Simpson the stationer, sending him back to his shop with just a warning to stop selling smut; a year later, Comstock found him selling more than ever. Determined to see the smut-monger put away once and for all, Comstock found a nearby policeman and told him to stand ready outside the shop for the moment when Simpson took his money and handed him an obscene book. But while Comstock was still searching for a suitably indecent title the price list, he caught sight of the cop slipping through the back door and whispering a warning in Simpson’s ear. This time Comstock went straight to police headquarters, where he got the patrolman fired and Simpson locked up again; but the episode drove home to him just how arduous was the crusade ahead of him.

    In early 1871 he took on a pair of new roles, roles that might have led many a part-time zealot to leave the crusade to less busy men, but that in Comstock’s case set his zeal aflame: he became a husband and an expectant father. Maggie was thirty-five years old, ten years his senior, painfully shy, and never married. Tony’s feelings for her were never passionate but always protective. “Became cross with wifey tonight,” he wrote, “and left the house rather than speak unkindly.” She gave him what he had lacked so far in New York, a home and someone to support him in his times of doubt. Four months after they married, he learned that she was also giving him a child. Perhaps because he now had two loved ones in need of protection from the evils of the world, he threw himself back into his campaign.

    This time he sought to stir public opinion to his side. He stomped into the offices of the New York Tribune—Horace Greeley’s paper, an abolitionist and reform-minded organ then entering battle with Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine, and one that had mentioned Comstock’s victories in the past—to send a reporter along with him on his arrests. The editor agreed, and Comstock delivered. Now he went after not only pornographers but saloons too, hoping that New Yorkers would rise up with him against vice and that the authorities would be shamed into doing their duty. Despite several newspapers stories, neither happened. Meanwhile the trade in dirty books was growing larger and better organized; distribution networks were springing up. The mainstream press was becoming more daring as well, reporting on scandals and New York nightlife ever more eagerly and vividly.

    Comstock could not see how to win this war. “I found laws inadequate,” he wrote later, “and public sentiment nearly dead.”

    He paused in late 1871, when his daughter was born. But soon after the turn of the new year, now having another innocent to protect, he took up his moral cudgel again. This time he determined to hunt down the most successful, most notorious, and so far untouchable of the destroyers of young men: William Haynes, the Irishman who had founded the founder of the American mass pornography business. This time he determined as well to build a solid case against the man as a threat to society before bringing in the police, essentially doing the state’s attorneys’ work for them to make declining to prosecute too shameful for them. He prayed to the Lord for help and plunged into the depths of the metropolis, questioning newsdealers and merchants of questionable virtue what they knew of Haynes.

    This time, however, when the Lord answered his prayer for help, it came in an unexpected form: no sooner had Comstock begun his hunt than Haynes dropped dead of a heart attack. To Comstock this was no coincidence. Clearly Haynes had been warned. “Get out,” he imagined the message reading, “Comstock is after you. The damn fool won’t take money.” The terror of it was too much for Haynes’s heart to stand.

    Although pleased to have the world rid of Haynes, Comstock now found himself in an unanticipated moral dilemma: all of the pornographer’s books and printing plates passed to his wife, and she, wanting no part of her husband’s business, planned to sell them to rival publishers. Comstock could not allow Haynes’s nefarious ways to go on polluting the world as if he had never died, but at the same time he could not bring himself to set the police on a widow who, so far as he could see, was mostly blameless. So he called personally on Mrs. Haynes and entreated her to let him have the books and plates in order to destroy them. She answered that she would be happy to see them gone, but as a new widow she needed money. She would eagerly turn the goods over to him, if only he could pay as much for them as her husband’s old associates would, which would surely be over a thousand dollars.

    Then Comstock bargained with her. Every time he raised his bid, he topped it off with reminders of the moral satisfaction, the approval of society, and the favor of God that she would be earning by accepting his offer. In the end, the moral crusader and pornographer’s widow agreed that for six hundred dollars she would turn over the whole of Haynes’ vile stock.

    Comstock’s moral victory, unfortunately, was overshadowed by fiscal reality: six hundred dollars was no great fortune, but it lay infinitely beyond the reach of a young dry-goods clerk with a wife and new child. Tony, in fact, had virtually no money of his own to contribute. He asked Mrs. Haynes for a few days to raise it.  Only one institution, he knew, might have both the money to give and a passion to destroy pornography: the YMCA. 

    As soon as he returned home, Comstock seized a pencil and poured out a long letter, explicating his loathing for indecent literature, describing his solitary campaign and repeated frustrations, and entreating the Association to assist him in burning the foul legacy of William Haynes; then he mailed it to Robert McBurney, secretary of the YMCA’s main New York branch.

    The letter caught McBurney’s interest, but he had to struggle so hard to decipher the author’s passionate, penciled scrawl that he decided to send it back to Comstock, asking him to rewrite it legibly, in pen, and send it again, whereupon he might forward it to the Association’s directors for consideration. Whether or not that delay would have caused William Haynes’s obscene plates to pass back into circulation, we will never know. For while Comstock’s barely legible letter still lay on McBurney’s desk, Morris Ketchum Jesup happened to stroll by.

    Jesup nearly personified New York’s, and America’s, ascendant reformism. Like Comstock, he had come destitute to New York from Connecticut as a young man, but along with devout Calvinism he also possessed the work ethic and business acumen to make a success of himself in banking. Before large-scale philanthropy became a requirement of respectability among the New York rich, he was funding the YMCA and helping form the United States Christian Commission to bring medical and spiritual aid to Union soldiers during the war. He combined, one friend said, the “ability to make money and the disposition to dispose of it in unostentatious benevolence." After the war he turned his zeal and his resources to the support of science and public education; he was among the founders of the American Museum of Natural History and was largely responsible for enlisting other financiers the cause, including his frequent business partner, J. P. Morgan. Jesup combined the Calvinist belief in purity with the optimism of industrial science and American commerce into a brand of civic utopianism especially compelling to commercial leaders, the academic elite, and the established rich in the post-Civil War years.

    What made Jesup pause and begin to read Comstock’s letter, we cannot guess. But he did, and it intrigued him. To a man of Jesup’s values, obscene publications represented both moral and intellectual corruption, obstacles to civic uplift of all sorts. So he was moved to visit Comstock personally at the dry goods store to take the measure of the young man, and, liking what he saw, he assured him that the six hundred dollars would be his. More than that, though: he invited Comstock to his Madison Avenue mansion to discuss with him and Mr. Burney the problem of pornography.

    At the meeting, Comstock impressed the older men with his knowledge of the inner workings of the pornography business, and he impressed them even more with tales of his dogged battles and occasional triumphs. He was told that the YMCA would be happy to assist him in future battles; but Jesup also had something larger in mind: a Committee for the Suppression of Vice, supported by the Association but officially separate from it, a Committee free to leap into battles messier and use tactics less genteel than the directors of the Association dared permit. This Committee would be given a budget large to employ a full-time Secretary at a salary modest but greater than a young man could expect as a dry goods clerk, along with whatever operating expenses he might require to find, expose, and assist with the prosecution of filth mongers. And, as Jesup could guarantee the moral and political support of New York’s leading citizens, it would undoubtedly be a far more effective combatant than any lone hunter of mad dogs.

    Anthony Comstock knew then that the Lord had only been testing his faith and dedication, and that this had been his calling all along. “At last action is commenced against this terrible curse,” he wrote in his diary that night. “Now for a mighty blow for the young.” He had just become America’s first professional censor.

To be continued...