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...

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...

No Regrets

This was the most fun I've ever had at a literary event: Regreturature, a fund-raiser for LitQuake, in which about a dozen of us from the San Francisco Writers' Grotto read the most humiliating juvenilia, misfires, and bad ideas of our careers. We read high school poetry, first novels, ill-considered screenplays, and arrogantly stupid letters to editors. We made people laugh, we raised a ton of money for one of the country's best literary festivals, and we bonded in our shame. We're already talking about Regreturature II next spring. Here was my moment in the sun:

The First Mass Medium

Continuing excerpts from my book in progress, The Undressing of America. Having brought our Puritan hero Tony Comstock into contact with New York squalor, we take a section break and return with:

The story of mass culture in the 19th Century is largely the story of paper. In fact, it was paper that made possible a “mass culture.” Over the span of four or five decades, a tidal wave of cheap paper and printer’s ink surged across the cultural, social, and economic landscapes of Europe and North America. Industries were born, old trades were wiped out, hierarchies were toppled and the obscure were vaulted into power. Paper transformed the ways in which information was transmitted, children were taught, class identities were shaped, politics was conducted, morals and aspirations were shaped, literature and art were developed, and the whole shape of culture was formed. New York was one the cities most changed by paper, and in the years after the Civil War it became the center of the one first great cultural battles over paper’s new power.

        As the century began, little had changed in publishing, printing, or paper manufacturing since the Gutenberg revolution had settled down in the early 17th Century. Paper, hand-pressed from linen and other rags, was expensive as a raw commodity: middle-class letter writers developed the practice of “cross-writing,” completing a letter and then turning the page at a right angle in order to write perpendicularly on top of the earlier words, thus squeezing two sheets’ worth of words onto one precious slip of paper.

        Printing, conducted mainly by independent artisans with small staffs of journeymen, made published material more expensive still. Book prices were such that many writers lined up subscribers in advance to cover the costs. In 1796, the English novelist Fanny Burney filled the first thirty-six pages of her novel Camilla with a list of her subscribers; Camilla was a best-selling novel by the standards of the day, but it was aimed at a select and mostly affluent audience. Some books sold in the tens of thousands, a few may even have mounted toward a hundred thousand, but they were those that became required reading among the intelligentsia: Voltaire’s Candide, Goethe’s Faust, Rousseau’s Julie. A market for popular fiction was building, but its clientele remained well-to-do and even the more successful novels sold only to a few thousand readers. Burney’s Camilla was considered a tremendous success for having sold out its first print run of four thousand copies.

      Newspapers were circulated among the affluent and posted in public places for the less affluent. The “broadsheet,” the gigantic page that was becoming standard for news, was as much poster as reading material. Most newspapers, especially in the United States, were partisan political organs, supported by wide-ranging political networks more than by local readers and advertisers. Production and distribution were slow, often creating a lag of a few days between an event and its description in the journals, and most of them ignored the stories of crime and mishap that we think of as “news” today in favor of discourse on political developments. Circulation was primitive: copies were sold at the printing offices, delivered by hand or wagon to scattered general stores, or mailed to subscribers.

      All these publications consisted almost entirely of the typeset word. Pictures could only be reproduced by engraving, a slower and far more expensive process even than printing. The less costly and more widely circulated publications generally contained no pictures, and what pictures did reach print were mostly simple line drawings. Art and illustration remained the province of people who could see original pieces—which for most meant only what was displayed in churches and other public buildings—and those who could afford fine engravings. There was no such thing as a mass visual medium or a popular illustrative vocabulary. Fine art, precise representation, and pornography were all the provinces of the few.

       By the end of the 18th Century, however, it had become clear that the markets for all kinds of printed material were growing, and that a vast number of customers were eager to buy whatever they could afford. The populations of Western Europe and America were growing rapidly, and literacy was on the rise thanks to burgeoning industrial economies and a spreading doctrine of the value of education—even for the poor, in the United States and a few other countries. Urban populations were growing especially quickly, creating vast new markets for newspapers. In 1780, a French chemist named Aimé Argand, knowing how much this new urban, literate citizenry must crave more hours to read, developed a clever lamp that burned as much as ten times brighter than a candle. By the end of the century, the darkness of night had been driven back more violently than it had been in millennia, and the time taken from it was used mainly to consume the printed word.

      Soon other chemists, mechanics, and printers were devoting themselves to finding ways to lower the costs of producing those words. For generations, most printers had been able to press about one hundred pages in an hour, the fastest printers double that, scarcely enough to keep up with the growing market. An Englishman, Charles Stanhope, worked out a new press in 1800 that more than doubled that, but then a German outdid him: Friedrich Koenig developed a steam-powered press that put out over a thousand pages an hour. The Times of London, its circulation already the highest in the world, inaugurated the Koenig press in 1814; two years later Koenig sold them another press that could print on both sides of a sheet simultaneously, instantly doubling productivity. The Times instantly longer and come pouring out of the presses earlier in the morning, while its price dropped. The newspaper for the masses was born.

      During the same decades, paper production was being speeded through chemistry and steam-powered pressing machines, raising supplies and lowering prices. Some quality was sacrificed as the new methods of processing and bleaching rag-paper left it less supple, more likely to tear or to break with age. But the appetite for words and information far outweighed that for nice paper. Soon magazine and book printers were switching to steam printing and cheaper paper, discovering vast new markets for news, articles, and fiction. By the late 1820s, the prices of some English newspapers had dropped to a penny; where the earlier mass-produced newspapers had still aimed for a middle-class and reasonably well educated audience—those who had been interested in newspapers before but curtailed their purchases due to the price or were unable to find them easily enough—these went after an entirely new audience, one that not long before had read little but shop signs, pamphlets, and broadsheets pasted to building walls. Clerks, mechanics, and even those industrial workers who could read began to discover the pleasures of written information and diversion.

      In the span of just a few years, an entirely new reading public had been invented. As the material spread, so did literacy, for the arrival of this cornucopia of entertainment and information stoked a desire to read fluently among people who hadn’t seen much point in it before. Although news led the way, every other form of written diversion quickly followed: gossip, illuminating articles, editorials, humor, fiction, and everything else that had graced the expensive and rather exclusive magazines of the 18th Century, now targeted at broader and less sophisticated audiences. “Story papers” and “story magazines” proliferated, turning fiction from a haute-bourgeois amusement into an industry, a craze, a sweeping common denominator. Publishers quickly discovered the power of the serial to bring readers back, and soon great, sprawling novels began to wend their way like rivers through the magazines, pooling into fat books a few months later.

      This was something new: a mass medium. A new generation grew up on it, shaped by it, making from it a new kind of culture, a mass culture. It worked the way mass culture still works: new media arenas aren’t driven by artistic visions needing a venue. Machines make the arenas just as big as technology and market will allow and then the writers and artists fight to fill them, and to shape them. And as with every new medium since, the audience was in love with the medium itself. So Charles Dickens became its first hero in part because he was the cheap press, in his riverrine productivity, his relentless surge toward undetermined endings, his casts of characters as motley and restive as his still-evolving readership. A readership happy to slog through his swamps of page-filling dribble to reach those peaks of his from which they could scan this sprawling new world that paper and ink were making them part of.
       The flood of cheap publications rose first in England, but it quickly swept across the Atlantic to inundate America’s cities. The American belief in freedom of the press then extended to lax copyright laws, including a complete indifference to the copyrights of Europe. Anything published in London was likely to show up, often riddled with errors but dirt cheap, from pirate printers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore almost as quickly as a ship could cross the sea. British writers and publishers howled, but, as has been the case ever since, nothing could slow the American production of mass culture.

      The typeset word was not the only beneficiary of new technology. A clever young German actor named Alois Senefelder had devised limestone lithography in the last years of the previous century, and over the next few decades it had been refined by sundry hands to become a practical and inexpensive means of mechanically duplicating pictures in large numbers. Lithos were far more expensive than text, but they allowed illustrations in moderately priced books and pictorial covers even on cheap newspapers, making imagery an integral part of the new mass culture. Then, at the end of 1835 a twenty-two year old printmaker’s assistant in New York City named Nathaniel Currier published a lithograph of a dramatic fire that only days before had devoured most of Wall Street; he sold several thousand copies, and the litho became part of the news revolution.

      When two years later, a Frenchman patented “chromolithography”—the use of multiple plates to create an image in different colors—Currier jumped on it instantly with a lurid, two-colored litho of another fire, this one on steamboat. It sold so well that the New York Sun, one of the new generation of mass newspapers, contracted him to supply a chromolitho of some current event every Sunday. Now with a steady supply of capital, Currier turned his energies toward publishing “Cheap and Popular Prints” of whatever type the public wanted, and soon he became the leading figure in a “chromo” craze that swept the nation. He began hiring the most popular artists from the newspapers and magazines to turn out original images of American life and events, and soon was putting out as many as three new images a week and selling over ten thousand prints a year. Countless other printers followed him, plastering the nation with color posters, advertisements, novelty cards, bookplates, and home decorations.

      Meanwhile, the flood of mass print rose higher as inventors and capitalists competed to find ways to exploit a market for cheap publications that seemed to grow faster by the year. In the middle of the 1840s a German engineer named F. G. Keller developed a chemical process for making paper out of trees. Many others had tried before, but it was Keller who realized that wood contained fibers that, if extracted, could be chemically turned into pulp just as rag was. And that wood pulp, just like rag pulp, could be pressed and dried and bleached into paper. That paper was more brittle and easily torn paper than even the cheapest rag paper, and because of its high acidity it would quickly destroy itself in a “slow fire,” likely to turn yellow and fall apart within months. But it was cheaper than rag paper. And as the means of logging and transporting low-grade wood improved—especially in America, as canals were dug and railroads were built into the trackless forests of the hinterland—the price would drop still further. Keller sold his patent for almost nothing and ended his life in poverty; but he had given the world pulp—newsprint—the very stuff of mass culture, the fat, cheap, porous, ephemeral, and universally accessible foundation on which a new world of rapid information and disposable mythology would be erected.

      By the beginning of the Civil War, American publishing had become a giant industry. Fat, prosperous newspapers battled for circulation and political power. Fiction publishers began to organize the production of content along industrial lines. Story papers were increasingly replaced by “dime novels” and “five-cent novelettes” produced by in-house writers to fit a uniform format. A couple of New York printers still in their thirties, Francis Scott Smith and Francis Shubael Street, kept costs down and production smooth by developing a “fiction factory”: on the top floor, clever young men scribbling novels in pencil, every one a hodgepodge of formula and plagiarism; editors at neighboring desks, plowing rapidly through pages to catch the most incomprehensible passages and the most egregious violations of audience expectations; on the floor belong them the typists and typesetters; and on the ground floor the ceiling-high stacks of paper the ever-whirling presses, and the stitching machines that bound the books. No plot or word left the building between the time it left the writer’s brain and the time it went on sale. And so the American popular-culture factory was born.

      The largest audience for such products were young people, adolescents and yet-unmarried adults of that most broadly literate generation in history, that first generation raised on mass publications. They poured into the towns and cities, putting their rustic backgrounds behind them, filling the ranks of a fast-growing and volatile class: the skilled mechanics and semi-skilled laborers, the clerks and copyists, the  delivery boys, the seamstresses—and the newspaper and print-company employees. Literate and often ambitious, aware of greater economic and social possibilities through promotion or marriage, vastly more cosmopolitan and invested in the future and the greater world than the farmers and manual laborers who sired them, and yet still shut out from affluence, property, and social power, they were a complex and heterogeneous, an optimistic and restless bunch.

      They shared a vast appetite for news of social scandal and sensational crime, and for loud, simple fiction that could be ingested in a few gulps on ferry rides, during lunch breaks, and in the brief evenings after long, exhausting workdays. They liked stories of the criminal underworld and the wild west; they liked tales of lethal jeopardy and last-minute rescues, fistfights and wrestling matches with innocent lives at stake, death and tears offset by romantic awakenings, fires and raging rivers, depravity banished by virtue, occasionally the crack of a gun or the thunder of cannons. They liked their heroes young, brave, and forward-looking; in the wake of the Civil War they especially loved stories of young men coming to the city to seek their fortunes.

      So, as the children of American farms and the escapees of impoverished Europe flowed into the cities, as the city of New York surged like dirty floodwaters up the length of Manhattan, a great wave of printed words and images rose with them.  Booksellers sprang up everywhere. A new institution, the newsstand, peddling newspapers, magazines, and cheap books, began popping up on the street corners like mushrooms. A few voices rose in alarm, mostly the same voices that expressed fears of immigration, unbridled growth, epidemic disease, the growing armies of the poor, and moral decay, the voices of those invested in a more homogeneous and less volatile America. With sensation and titillation as selling points, they knew that much of what saw print must violate the bounds of decency.

To be continued...

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...

The Undressing of America: Opening

After months of diligently avoiding the blogosphere, having finally, actually finished a fairly polished draft of the first chapter of The Undressing of America, I've decided to start posting excerpts to see what people think. This is how it will begin, not counting whatever I write as an introduction... until either I or my editor decides that it has to change.

Although the great forces of history are most likely immune to the acts of any individual will, and most of what we like to see as turning points are probably, really, the first manifestations of movements already bound to happen, still it’s interesting to speculate on how the cultural history of America may have turned on the shooting of that rabid dog in Winnipauk, Connecticut in the late summer of 1862. There were other events to the south that had a more obvious impact on the nation’s course and no doubt deserve the much greater attention historians have given them—the Battle of Antietam and President Lincoln’s first Emancipation Proclamation to name a couple—but even so, what happened inside the soul of one young man when he leveled his gun, not at a Confederate soldier but at a drooling mastiff, would echo through the next five decades and beyond.

          

       Tony Comstock was eighteen years old. Just six months before he had left New Canaan, one of those Congregationalist communities scratched by sheer puritan zeal out of the thin New England soil over a hundred years before, now withering slowly as the wealth of America moved to more temperate, more southerly, and more secular climes, to seek better fortunes in the mill town of Winnipauk, burgeoning with the recent arrival of a railroad link to the coast and the rest of the world. Tony was less interested in worldly fortune than in serving the austere God whose spirit had informed every joy and sorrow of his childhood, every lowering winter sky and hard row of sod and tender spring shoot of barley on his now lost family farm; but he had obligations. His mother had died when he was ten, his father had vanished while chasing another of his financial pipe dreams, and his older brother had gone to war to end the evil of slavery; his younger sisters were living with relatives, and Tony’s income provided their keep.

          In those six months, Tony had already impressed his Winnipauk neighbors with his energy, industry, and earnestness. Tony was, above all things, earnest. His round face, nascent jowls, full chest, and thick legs made him look several years older than he was. His air of complete devotion to every task he undertook, the gravity he brought to discussions of morals and politics, his obvious love of little children, and his unquestioning willingness to lend his energies to anyone who needed help made him seem older still. So it was that when rumors shot through the town of a mad dog on the loose, Tony was among the first men asked to hunt it down.

          This was not a request made lightly. Rabies was one of the great terrors of nineteenth century American life. There was no cure, or any treatment known other than washing the wound (which many people dismissed as superstitious nonsense anyway), and the contracting of it was a sentence to agonizing death, inevitable from the appearance of the first symptom. Reported cases had been rising since early in the century; although to what extent that reflected the genuine spread of an epidemic as opposed to the rise of a terror within the national imagination is hard to ascertain. America’s canine population surged exponentially along with its human population, and the ever-quicker flow from farms to towns and towns to cities brought dogs, like their owners, into closer contact. So epidemics are spread.

          But times of change stir their own special nightmares, too. In communities like those of New England, where once-homogeneous societies found themselves increasingly disrupted by rapid economic and population shifts, where the moral and philosophical control of the founding churches was being steadily eroded by spreading secularism and free thinking, the idea of the loyal family dog turning suddenly into an agent of death was a compelling one. Common belief held that the first symptom of rabies was a sudden mania, a feverish energy, a frantic and directionless roaming: canine echoes of the unbridled human ecstasies that earlier generations of New Englanders had read as products of witchcraft. Many a cry of “mad dog” went up before the creature in question had a chance to show the insatiable thirst and foaming chops that would have proved it to be rabid; and many a dog surely died for no more than a bout of uncharacteristic energy or anxious restlessness.

      This dog, this Winnipauk mastiff, was doubly damned, because it belonged to a saloonkeeper. Tony Comstock was well aware of this particular saloonkeeper. He not only sold the Devil’s drink to mill workers and railroad men, preying like all saloonkeepers on the loneliness of men who had left behind their families, their home towns, and their native churches; he sold it also to women and children. Tony had heard stories of the man exchanging gin and cider for groceries, even with women, even with mothers of young children. Already the man spread dissolution and destruction through liquor, indifferent to the lives of the innocent. That he would do the same in an even viler manner by leaving his dog untethered and unwatched was only to be expected.

      Tony was one of two young men working at the general store when a neighbor burst through the door and cried for help. Both boys took guns from the store’s stock, poured powder into the muzzles, and rammed home bullets. One bullet per gun, and poor guns at that; every decent weapon in New England had gone south to the war. Facing a mad dog, a man could hope to kill it with his first shot or hope the beast didn’t charge him if he missed, because no man could reload faster than a dog could close a gunshot’s distance between them. Tony fell to his knees and prayed for courage. Then he stood and strode to the door. When he held the door open for his fellow worker, he saw the boy still standing at the counter. He’d lost his nerve. Tony stepped into the street alone.

      Finding the dog was not a complicated task: wherever other people ran from, Tony walked to. Soon enough he marched alone through the streets (or so he would always tell the story), watched from doorways and windows by terrified men, women, and children. He saw the dog at the end of a street. It turned toward him as he brought the gun to his shoulder. He fired his single shot, and the cur dropped. His fellow citizens began streaming toward him, thanking and praising him. He admitted later that he enjoyed their adulation. But his greatest pride, he said, was that “I killed it before a single child could be bitten.”

      Tony went straight back to work at the store, knowing that his Lord wanted a man to attend to his work as earnestly as to the protection of innocents, but not many hours had passed before he found his day interrupted again. Another dog had been seen racing through the schoolyard at the other end of town, and it too appeared to be rabid. Evidently the saloonkeeper’s dog had already begun to spread its illness before it could be killed. This time the townspeople turned to no one but young Comstock to deliver them.

      Again Tony loaded the gun. Again he tracked down the dog by forging upstream against the terror of his neighbors. Again he fired his single shot. But this time he missed. The dog wheeled and charged at him. Tony had no time even to hope to reload, but he did not run. He asked guidance of God as the beast bounded closer. Then God answered, in the sound of a gunshot. This time, one of the men watching from a window had his own rifle ready. The dog crumpled and fell at Tony’s feet.

      That evening, Tony hiked back to his small, bare room as a local hero. He had proved himself to be not just a young man who could track and kill a mad dog, but one who would stand steadfast, unarmed, as a mad dog charged him. But his was not the unfurrowed brow of the hero who knows his battle is won. He knelt and thanked his Lord for this opportunity to protect the women and children of Winnipauk from unimaginable horror. And yet, that mission seemed scarcely completed. For the first cause of the horror was not the saloonkeeper’s dog but the saloonkeeper himself. Even as the dog ran wild, spreading its madness and physical corruption, its master sat in his den spreading his own madness and corruption. His poison worked more slowly, but it would spread death among women and children even more widely and for far longer.

      Tony sought guidance from his own Master, and the truth came instantly clear: the dogs had been only his calls to arms. His true battle was against the man.

       The next morning, Tony went to the sheriff and told him everything he had heard about the saloon, including the rumor that the owner had no legal license. The sheriff didn’t deny the charge, but he also didn’t seem inclined to do anything about it. The saloon was a popular local service, and clearly there was no political gain to be had in shutting it down at the insistence of an outraged stockboy still years shy of voting age.

      Tony left him in a rage. He knew the damage wrought by men who would not do their duties: his own father had repeatedly abandoned his family to chase financial phantasms, leaving little Tony to be his mother’s support, until that neglected woman had died and left Tony with no one to look after him but God and the church. This man who would not use his authority against vice was as guilty as the purveyor himself. And if civil authority could not be trusted to do good, then a higher authority must be invoked.

      “I wish to buy some apples,” Tony boomed as he stepped through the saloon door. The owner told him that he didn’t sell fruit. But Tony paid no attention to his answer, because he was casing the saloon. He took note of the big, wooden, fauceted kegs that held nearly the man’s entire stock, and he took note of the windows nearest them.

      He stole back under the darkness of night. He waited to be sure that he was alone on the street and that no lamps burned in nearby windows. Then he grabbed one of the saloon’s window shutters and, with all the power of his solid torso and unblinking faith, he tore it free. He climbed through into an even deeper darkness. His memory led him to the kegs, where he felt along until he found a faucet. He opened it full, then groped his way to another. The air filled with the hiss and stench of cider, gin, and whiskey gushing to a dirt floor. When that sound subsided, and Tony could only hear the splash of his boots in the man’s foul stock, he wrenched the kegs off their struts and sent them rolling across the floor. He felt the walls until he found bottles and mugs, and he smashed those against the shelves. At last he found the counter and laid on it a note he had written earlier that day: if the man did not abandon this evil business, it warned, then next time the Lord may bring down the entire building.

      Such attacks were not yet established tactics of the religious battle with alcohol: Carry Nation was then just a sickly fifteen year old wheezing in bed in rural Missouri, still twenty years from her saloon-smashing days. This was simply what Tony Comstock knew God wanted. He went to bed that night with the “same consciousness of having done a good job completely that was felt when the first dog lay dead and harmless.”

      He had found the one thing that, for the rest of his life, would give him true pleasure and satisfaction: stopping mad beasts and moral disease before they could destroy the innocent.

        When his brother died at Gettysburg, Tony’s extended family  expected him to enlist to take his place—that’s what good New Englanders did—but for seven months Tony ignored the call. His brother’s death seems not to have affected him terribly; lifelong Tony would bond strongly with women, especially women like his mother and sisters, whom he could protect or depended on him, but he built no strong ties with other men. He also showed little interest in the war itself, or in any political or moral issues beyond his local battles. He finally went off to war in the spring of 1864, with the Confederacy already in retreat.

      Like any Congregationalist, the young Comstock saw slavery as an evil, but the battle for abolition seems to have been too abstract for him to care much about it. In the diary he kept during his year of service, he never mentioned the larger issues of the war and tripped lightly over the tiny bit of action he saw, instead writing mainly of his relentless efforts to organize prayer meetings and urge his fellow soldiers to attend. He was frequently “twitted” for lecturing his fellows on the evils of alcohol and nicotine, and once rather violently hazed, but he never stopped. Usually he enjoyed arguing and took a special satisfaction in calmly standing his ground when vastly outnumbered. He railed against his own weakness when he fell into wrath or self pity over the twits and insults of these men who knew not what they did.

      When the war ended, Tony returned to Connecticut, but there was little there now to hold him. His sisters were growing up, he was not close to his extended family, and he had no real friendships. His closest bond had always been with his mother Polly, the one person he believed had loved him truly and completely. When the judgment of New Canaan had descended on the family for his father’s inconstancy, it was Polly who had protected him. He often said that her memory was his most constant companion, and that when he fought to defend the innocent he wanted to give them the protection his mother had given him. But having let other relatives take over the family farm during the war, his last physical connection to her had been severed. A year after the war, jobless and nearly penniless, he asked a family friend for help.

      No young man with Tony’s energy should stay in Connecticut, the man said. In the wake of the war, too many men were competing for too few jobs. But a great boom was coming. Huge industries had been springing up before the war, and now they would be making up for lost time. The West about to be opened: the two ends of the transcontinental railroad had stretched to within a few hundred miles of one another. Any young with ambition should be heading for the center of the nation’s business and finance: New York City. The man even offered to give Tony money to stake him. He could only afford five dollars, but that was more than Tony had. And so, in the summer of 1866, the twenty-two year old Tony Comstock arrived in America’s biggest city with three dollars and forty cents in his pocket.

      Very quickly, he discovered that other young men had left Connecticut for New York, and countless others had left every other state in the union. There were jobs, but there were men lined up for every one. After days of dogged searching he secured a place as a shipping clerk at a dry goods company. Unable to afford to live in New York itself, he had to take a cheap room in the neighboring city of Brooklyn and commute by ferry.

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

To be continued...

 

This is not a blog post

Well, it worked. I finished that very rough draft of my book by my deadline, and I see three main ways I got it done:

1. I just got really, really sick of not getting it done.

2. I enlisted the encouragement and nagging of friends, including a set of high-stakes incentives with one of them.

3. I stayed off my blog, my Facebook page, Twitter, and every other "internet presence" I have.

      The last of those tools was so helpful than now that I'm technically free to come back to my blog and strut, I'm not going to. I want to keep my focus going into the rewrite, which will be a longer and no less demanding job.

      Hardly a week goes by that I don't hear or read someone telling me that a writer these days needs to be running a regular blog and keeping a lively presence on all the social media. Maybe that'll make sense when I have a book about to come out and not a book doing everything it can think of not to get written. But when I look around, most of the writers I admire for their productivity and quality don't keep up much of an "internet presence." I just looked at Michael Chabon's website: a caricature of his latest book's cover, a skeletal appearances calendar, a few goofy pictures, and three uncollected essays, complete with typos. Why does he have no blog, no news, no discussion? Why does he have no Facebook page or Twitter account? Because the little fucker's getting his work done, that's why.

      That's why I'm not posting today. And why I'll be back soon to tell you more about why I'm not posting then either.

Interview

Just making an exception to my no-blog policy to plug an interview with me about the new graphic novel and related social issues on Examiner.com by Sona Avakian. It was fun to do, and I like how she pulled it together. It's here.

What It Really Takes

Although it is undeniably true that in this competitive, interactive, media-driven era every writer who hopes to succeed must maintain a presence in the blogosphere, it is also undeniably true that in this competitive, interactive, media-driven era every writer who hopes to succeed has to get his goddamn work done. Which is an easy fact to ignore as the rationalizations to blog and tweet and facebook come thick and fast, and so we find ourselves in that rue-inducing cycle of never finishing our books because we're so busy promoting the books that we hope to sell once we finish them.

      Sometimes it takes an ultimatum to get us to open that internet-blocking application (MacFreedom for me) and withdraw from the constant fix of networking and stay buried deep in that Word file until the writing is done. Bringing with it relief and excitement and fear, such an ultimatum has come to me. Terms were offered and I've accepted: by the end of October I have to finish the first full draft of this book. It can be a brutally rough draft, but a draft of the whole thing it has to be.

      That's a lot of writing. It's not a sure thing. But if I succeed I'll rewarded by far more than a sense of accomplishment, and if I fail I'll miss an opportunity to pursue something that I very much want to pursue. It's what I needed, this combination of carrot and stick; they say rewards are more effective than punishment for creative motivation, but I know from experience that it's too easy to be philosophical about not getting something extra, and that what I also need to keep pushing me is the fear of losing something I truly value.

      I won't be blogging until it's done. Wish me luck.