The Enemy Silenced!

Continuing The Undressing of America: Anthony Comstock and the YMCA battle to convict the radical free-love, free-speech proponents Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin for indecency when they expose the sexual shenanigans of a prominent minister in the press:

Comstock was not content to be merely a player in the protracted Claflin case. That would always be a mark of his character: he was indefatigable and unwilling to stop. Although his sponsors at the YMCA distanced themselves from this case, they saw great value in his new fame and confidence. The Association was sending representatives to Washington to lobby for a stricter law on the mailing of obscene material, asking sympathetic lawmakers to help them prepare a strong case for the new Congress that would convene the following March. Even though the previous Congress had just passed a law covering the same ground, the YMCA argued that the fact that the prosecution had such a hard time constructing a case against Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly was evidence in itself that the current statute was inadequate. Comstock began to accompany the association’s expeditions to the capital. At first he was baffled by the labyrinths of Washington, but his sheer passion, certainty, and knowledge of the extent of the evil of obscenity made a deep impression on many legislators.

      The Claflin case dragged on into 1873. Free on bail, the sisters traveled the Northeast giving speeches and continued to bring out issues of the Weekly. They regularly attacked Comstock as a hypocrite and a coward, and described the YMCA as “our new Protestant Jesuits” and said they would call its crusade a new Spanish Inquisition except that no one involved had the stature of a Torquemada. Many newspapers joined in the attack, if not quite so colorfully, complaining that such prosecutions were a dangerous threat to freedom of speech, declaring that the federal government’s involvement in what should have been a local issue was gross overstepping of its authority and an attack on American liberties, and that the prominence of a private citizen like Comstock in a federal case was a travesty.

      The federal prosecutors involved seemed less than enthusiastic about this case that looked weaker with each passing week. The entire aspect of the case involving Henry Ward Beecher was dropped, and by the spring the only charge still being pressed concerned the sisters’ far less interesting exposé of Challis the stockbroker. The sisters, their supporters, and many other observers denounced the whole procedure as simple persecution by Anthony Comstock and the YMCA.

      Comstock did not back down. Even as he grew less sanguine about the prospects of the case, he still saw it as a moral necessity to keep fighting. He stood in the middle of the courtroom one morning, looking at the seats filled with Claflin supporters, listened to their jeers, and knew he was up against “the hardest kind of free-lovers.” He knew that he must not surrender, even if the case went wrong, even if he became the target of national opprobrium: “What happens to me matters not at all,” he write in his diary. “The Master’s plan is everything.”

      His efforts were not without reward. Even as most newspaper stories on the Woodhull case did not go far beyond amusement and titillation, an increasing number of editorials denounced their values and philosophies as genuine threats to American life. More and more news stories rolled off the presses about free love, utopian communists, wealthy radicals, and dangerous publications. Many leaders of the feminist movement of which the sisters had been so vital a part condemned them for their insouciant dismissal of Christian morals and American traditions. Even as he was losing the case, Comstock stirred and focused public anxiety about indecency and the effects of mass publishing on the minds of young people and the future of the country.

      Nor was he idle. While the sisters were out on bail, he pushed the authorities to prosecute another newspaper publisher, a man named Frank Leslie whose weekly paper flirted more openly with erotic fiction. This was a speedier trial, and before Woodhull and Claflin appeared in court again he’d already won a conviction. This was a major case for Comstock: for one thing because Leslie published a newspaper that appeared on most newsstands and would have been thought reasonably respectable, not dirty books that had to be pulled from the back room; for another because it brought him national publicity. The fame and notoriety he’d earned from the Claflin case had made Comstock himself worth reporting on. He was becoming recognized as the leader of a new reform movement, the cleaning up of publishing.

      Comstock’s greatest work in the first months of 1873, however, were not in the courts of New York but in the congressional offices of Washington. He had become the lead proponent, and to some extent the lead author, of a sweeping bill to give the Post Office vast and unchallengeable authority not only to refuse to carry any material it judged obscene but to prosecute violators, with penalties including years of imprisonment. It also created the office of an official Post Office Inspector whose job it would be to catch filth passing through the system, to arrest perpetrators, and—unilaterally, even before they were judged guilty—ban their products from the mail. That would be a powerful post, because hardly any publication could survive without the mails. There were no networks of distributors then, no trucks to move material around, and most of the country’s population still lived in small towns or rural areas. The inspector’s findings could be overturned in court and the accused could return to the mails, but being banned from them even for a few months could be a commercial death sentence to many a publisher, and so the rage and whims of the nation’s postal inspector would be terrible indeed. Not surprisingly, Comstock hinted that he would available for the post, should the government see fit.

      Congress at that moment was reeling from revelations of scandal: many leading members of the legislature had been taking bribes from the construction company called Credit Mobilier, which was actually an arm of the Union Pacific Railroad and was revealed to have defrauded the nation of over a hundred million dollars through inflated, extortionary invoices. The newly reelected President Grant had been implicated as well, and suddenly any opportunity to stand up for decency and reform was seized upon in Congress, especially by the dominant Republican Party. The “Comstock Bill,” as it was already becoming known, sailed through both houses easily and became law on March 7, 1873. Surely no one was surprised when the Postmaster General chose Comstock as his Chief Inspector.

      Before Comstock could begin to take on his new duties, another opportunity arrived. In June, as most expected, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin were found not guilty of sending obscene materials by mail. The case was done, and many member of the YMCA board expressed embarrassment at having been associated for so many months with such a dubious crusade. Comstock argued that the sisters would have been found guilty under the new law that he and the Association had just seen passed, but still the directors began to aver when he suggested they turn their energies to hunting new quarry, this time armed with their stricter law.

      Frustrated, Comstock spoke to some of his allies on the board and suggested that what the cause needed was a new organization, unattached to the YMCA or any other institution that might have reason to feel conflicted about the pursuit of smut. Within weeks, those men and several other prominent New York Protestants had come together to form the Society for the Suppression of Vice. It would have an ample budget and a full staff for the purpose of seeking out filth and the men behind it, then publicizing their findings, pushing New York’s city and state authorities to take action, and helping them build their case. As its first secretary and chief warrior, the new group chose Anthony Comstock.

      By the end of summer, Comstock was beginning his wave of arrests as special postal inspector and chief suppressor of vice. By the end of the year, he was already scoring convictions. The state of New York proved as eager to support him as had the national Congress, for it too had been thrown into upheaval by scandals—Boss Tweed was tried and convicted in the same summer that the Society was formed, laying bare years of blatant graft and corruption in New York city’s politics—and there too the reformers were taking charge, and few dared oppose them. The prosecutors and most judges of the city proved more than eager to win Comstock’s favor and hand him victories. They wanted to show the tide of sin being turned, especially by the Republican Party, and in one realm, the realm of publications, Comstock was a valuable ally. Almost immediately, newspaper and magazine editors began to clean up their product, and the dealers of more open smut drew deeper underground. Soon enough Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin had shut down their weekly and moved on to less risky pursuits.

      By the end of 1873, Anthony Comstock had made himself the chief censor of America, the embodiment of the dam that the old Protestant elite erected against the flood of words and pictures and ideas pouring from the new mongrel nation, a man of tremendous cultural power. He was not yet thirty years old. His reign promised to be a long one.

Next: enter Bernarr Macfadden...