The Magnetic Girl

Continuing The Undressing of America, in which a young dry-goods salesman and amateur porn-buster named Anthony Comstock has improbably, with the support of the YMCA, risen to become America's first professional censor:

Comstock wasted no time in wielding the YMCA’s resources against the smut mongers of New York. He quit his job and gave his full days to collecting evidence against them, spreading the Association’s money among informants in the demimonde, then pushing the police to arrest them and the state's attorneys to prosecuting them. He built his cases so thoroughly that prosecutors began to follow his lead, sometimes using him as an expert witness, often bringing him into their conferences and adding him as a consultant to their legal team in the courtroom. Judges became familiar with him and often praised him, and he in turn publicly supported those judges who were mostly likely to sympathize with his cause.

     As his potency increased, so did Comstock’s certainty not only of his righteousness but of his importance. He was known to brag about having brought on William Haynes’s fatal heart attack. When a second pornographer fled New York soon after and was rumored to have died, Comstock said he hoped the man had ended his own life. Then came a third death, another pornographer who may have killed himself. Comstock began to speak with relish—not only to confidants but to the press and civic reform groups—of helping deliver sinners to “their final judge.” With each new victory, he would inform the newspapers of the number of criminals he had now had convicted, the number of shops he had shut down, the number of books he had had destroyed, and the number of deaths he had inspired.

     Then, in October 1872, he met an adversary worthy of him: a pair of adversaries, really, who forced him to draw upon his full resources of spirit and anger and to become the man God wanted him to be. The Claflin sisters were not pornographers, but they were exponents and personifications of everything about the age of mass print and the intellectual and social instability of the post-war years that alarmed men like Anthony Comstock.

     They were born of a marriage of two forces on the rise in mid-nineteenth century America: hucksterism and crackpot religion. Their father was a confidence man and patent medicine salesman and their mother an illiterate member of a spiritualist sect that followed Franz Mesmer’s beliefs in the healing and mind-controlling powers of magnetism. During the many stretches when their father was unable to make enough money, the children were hired out as menial laborers; Victoria, the seventh of the ten siblings, was pulled from school at the age of eight and sent to clean houses. Soon after she turned eleven, however, her fortunes changed. The family was run out of their small Ohio town when her father burned down his own mill and tried to collect the insurance, and in casting about for a way to make a living he settled on Victoria and her “spirit powers.” For Victoria was a clever and imaginative child who embraced her mother’s ideas about magnetism and invisible forces. She believed she could levitate objects with her will, walk without touching the ground, and see places from a great distance. Soon enough, “Dr. R. B. Claflin” and his family were touring the backwater towns of America, conducting séances and offering “magnetic healing,” with Victoria as their star attraction.

     At fifteen Victoria escaped the family act by marrying an unlicensed doctor named Canning Woodhull. They moved to the boom town of San Francisco, where she promptly had two children by him, but he contributed little to their upkeep, preferring to drink, chase other women, and disappear for weeks at a time. When she could not earn money as a clairvoyant and healer, Victoria worked as a music-hall actress and cigar girl, a pair of occupations that in those days commonly included some selling of sexual favors. Finally, in 1860, at the age of twenty-two, she left her husband and returned to her family, who had taken their spiritualistic road show to New York City, their primary selling point now being her beautiful sixteen-year-old sister Tennessee.

     Victoria was little interested, however, in returning to her old place in her father's fiefdom, and within a few months had persuaded Tennessee to leave the family and hit the road as a sister act. They quickly discovered eager audiences among the more cultured and affluent urbanites of New York and New England, among whom spiritualism was catching fire as a peculiar new blend of godless religion and novelty entertainment.

     In most times and most places, a Victoria Woodhull would have lived her life at the periphery of American society, flickering briefly through the consciousness of curiosity seekers and uncritical spiritualists and then vanishing forever. But when the waves of cultural change are tossing high, the most unlikely figures can rise to the crest. She found her company sought after by some of the brightest men in New York, not only for her charm and eccentricity and prowess as a medium but for her caustic wit and increasingly daring ideas. Her belief in the transmigration of souls led her to believe in the spiritual equality of all people and the relativity of human institutions, while her own experiences had taught her to resent the traps of marriage and the legal and economic power of men.

      She married James Harvey Blood, a sensitive and cultured infantry colonel who had returned from the war believing not only in spiritualism but in free love.  He, Victoria, and Tennessee turned their home into a salon where they soon found themselves hosting the boldest of New York’s intellectuals and politicians. Victoria embraced the most radical social and political ideas of the time: women’s suffrage, absolute racial equality, sexual freedom, the abolition of marriage, the legalization of prostitution, and the new styles of anarchism and communism being propounded by the First International in Europe. She was a quick study and, despite a third-grade education, became known as a witty and challenging conversationalist.

      Victoria was the quicker and more knowledgeable, but Tennessee’s beauty and charm soon proved useful to their social rise as well: at the age of twenty-three she won the affections of the seventy-three year old Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in America.

       Vanderbilt quietly bankrolled and advised the sisters in the forming of Woodhull, Claflin and Company, a stock brokerage. They made $700,000 in their first year, and immediately became favorites of New York social circles and the popular press. They epitomized everything most glamorous and startling about the city and the era, those beautiful, extravagantly-dressed, attention-loving, free-loving radicals who had mastered American capitalism.

       The sisters understood the power of the popular press. Newspapers drove some of the great reform movements of the day: the Times’s attack on Boss Tweed, Horace Greeley’s on corruption in the White House. And it was Greeley, of course, who publicized Anthony Comstock’s battle against pornography. So it was that, in the spring of 1870, as soon as they had money to invest, they brought out a newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, to promote their ideas and bring their own provocative interpretations to events of the day. Victoria immediately caught the eye of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the other leaders of the feminist movement, and within two years had become such a popular writer and speaker on the rights of women that the nascent Equal Rights Party nominated her for President of the United States, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate.

       Until that autumn of 1872, the sisters had inspired only admiration, gossip, amusement, and argument. There seemed room in New York, on the newsstands, and in the hodgepodge community of reformers and radicals for a vast moral and intellectual range, and Victoria seemed not unjustified in her assertions that hers were the ideas that would shape the future and liberate the world. But then they took the step that put them on a collision course with the other rising force of American reform, the purity movement as embodied in Anthony Comstock. They reported that the most respected of American clergymen was cheating on his wife.

      Rumors had been swirling around the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and his relationship with the wife of one of his parishioners for at least two years, but so great was his prestige as an abolitionist leader, moral reformer, lecturer, and brother of the nation’s most admired novelist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, that no one had dared to print a whiff of them. Certainly no one who valued Beecher’s support in the battles for racial justice or women’s suffrage would have thought to besmirch him.

The bedroom eyes of Rev. Beecher

      Victoria Woodhull had no patience with such hypocrisy. Although she and Beecher worked for many of the same ends, she disliked his sanctimoniousness and the distress he brought to his wife, and she disliked the dishonesty of those who kept his secrets while denouncing immorality. In her mind, the fault was less with Beecher as a man than with the false idols of marriage and monogamy. She wrote of Beecher’s “amative nature,” the sexual magnetism that made him such a compelling speaker and leader, and lamented that the false morality left to us from an oppressive past did not allow him to express his nature openly, nor allow the rest of us to discuss it freely. For Woodhull, the improvement of humankind would come through the exposure of the truth of human nature.

       That issue of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly sold out instantly.  Many readers lauded their courage and honesty. Others simply enjoyed the scandal, as well as Victoria’s voluptuous descriptions of Beecher’s “immense physical potency,” “zest,” and “magnetic power.” But many of their allies and supporters were appalled. Feminists who saw the suffrage movement as aligned with Christian rectitude, who had been loyal to Beecher and appreciated his support, denounced them or distanced themselves.

       Among those most outraged was Anthony Comstock. He was unshakably certain of the Reverend Beecher’s innocence and just as certain that the sisters were proponents of corruption engaged in an assault upon decency. In his mind, Woodhull and Claflin were of the same stuff as all the indecent publishers, just two more purveyors of smut and innuendo. But now they were not simply corrupting the young for profit, they were using their obscenity against a leader of the church, they were attempting to tear down the pillars of the nation’s morals. Where everyone else seemed to content to cluck their tongues and vow to the deny the sisters social entrée, Comstock took action.

Comstock: eyes for anywhere but.

       He went first to the state courts, suing for action on the grounds that the weekly violated the obscene publications law of 1868, but the District Attorney refused to pursue the case. Comstock called his attention to another obscene article in the same issue of the newspaper, this one about a stockbroker named Challis who went around boasting about his female conquest. Still the DA would take no action. But Comstock would not stop. He knew another law on the books, another law that the YMCA had supported, this one a federal statute, enacted just four months before, a tightening of the laws against using the US mail to send obscene publications. There he found a more sympathetic audience. A pair of deputy US marshals were dispatched to arrest Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.

       At first no one, not the arrested women nor their supporters, took the matter seriously. A crowd gathered at the Weekly’s offices where, according to the New York Telegram, “puns, jokes and witticisms were freely indulged in at the expense of each other, the police, the prisoners and the United States government, and many a hearty laugh indulged in as a fresh sally was heard.” The Dispatch described Claflin at her arraignment as “flushed like a rose, and her blue eyes sparkled nervously. As she glanced round the room, a smile of contempt seemed to gather about her ruby lips.” The case against them seemed thin indeed, but the feeling against them ran high enough that a grand jury brought indictments against them, the judge set a high bail, and they spent most of November in jail.

       The trial was delayed once, and then again, as the prosecution kept shifting its charges, seeking something that might stick. And at the forefront, publicly denouncing the sisters and demanding that the government stay true to its prosecution, stood Comstock. Many in the press began to protest, seeing a misuse of government power that would threaten the basic freedom of the press. The Brooklyn Eagle criticized “the irresponsible action of the more zealous and sensible Comstock,” and soon after noted, “As to Mr. Anthony Comstock, we never heard of him till he ‘ranged himself’ in legal company with the Claflin Sisters as their prosecutor and world-wide advertiser.”

       More and more the battle was seen as being between the sisters as representatives of a titillating but dangerous new morality and Anthony Comstock, so recently unknown, so suddenly prominent, as the embodiment of militant rectitude.

To be continued...