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...

The Metaphor of Dead Young Men

Continuing The Undressing of America with some thoughts on the cultural forces and metaphors driving our evolving ideas about "purity" and "filth."

It is difficult, from our distance, to realize that the perception of indecent literature as a source of social and psychological harm was once a new one.

      There had been attacks on obscenity for centuries, including mass burnings of it and the persecution of people who made it, often led by Calvinists like Comstock. But in the middle 19th Century, Calvinism was fading as a dominant force in American life, eclipsed especially by heterogeneous, secular cultures of New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The mores of New York, in particular, had grown steadily more lax in the decades before the Civil War: risqué entertainment and scandal had become accepted topics of polite discourse, and the prostitute had become a common subject of literature and journalism, a symbol both of what was most tragic and most romantic about modern city life. Religious attacks on immorality generated little interest. But a new conception of forbidden stories and images began coming into focus in mid-century: pornography as a negative social force, a force that a generation needed to be protected against; a force, almost like a disease, worthy of being dealt with through public policy.

       Much of this was simply the worried response of the affluent and established classes to what the common man was seeing. Educated opinion was ambivalent about this still-young medium of mass print: clearly it made the masses more literate and aware, but who knew what sorts of bad ideas or dangerous stimulation it would bring to the uneducated and the impressionable young? When pornography had been consumed only by men of a certain level of wealth and therefore, implicitly, of sophistication, it had been easily dismissed as a matter of personal moral failing. But when one considered the young men who every day arrived in the city fresh from small towns or their parents’ farms, already feeling the heady freedom and countless distractions of the city, one could easily imagine them being aroused and made curious by those magazines and books they could find at any newsstand. And since those same newsstands also sold guides to local brothels and newspapers advertising condoms and questionable medicines for the prevention of social diseases, they might be led to act on that new curiosity; a curiosity that led not only to moral decline but likely to syphilis, that incurable gate to madness, shame, and family devastation.

       Pornography led young men even more certainly often to other deeds, deeds rarely spoken of in public but ever more frequently worried about in private. During those very years a growing mass of medical authorities and educators warned of the physical and psychological danger of masturbation, once a vice that troubled some clergymen but was otherwise of little general interest, now recast as an incipient destroyer of young men’s energies and mental capacities.

       The intensity of concern inspired by pornography, however—intense enough that it apparently came to worry Morris Jesup and other officers of the New York YMCA more than the brothels and diseases themselves—show that we are entering the realm of cultural metaphor, of common patterns of thought and perception shaped by the larger fears, hopes, and daily preoccupations of the time.

       This was a moment of tremendous change. Industrialization was still young in America, its transformation of life, work, physical environment, and common thought still in its fluid days, still bringing soaring dreams, deep terrors, and vast mystery. The cities especially were changing rapidly, and none more quickly or dramatically than New York. The centralization of capital and industry, and the accompanying federalization of power in the wake of the Civil War had raised new questions of national identity and new expectations of government. Ideas of progress and reform, the conviction that change was not only here and inevitable but noble and desirable, dominated nearly every field. Young men made up the new workforce that would drive American industry and commerce during the post-war years, but they became more than that in popular thought: they became symbols of change itself, omens of the future. In the behavior of a generation, older people looked then as they do now for signs of coming prosperity or ruin, indications that the future would be as bright as they hoped or as dark as they feared.

       The Civil War gave new poignancy to that metaphor. The slaughter of so many thousands of young men had made that generation seem not only precious but fragile. The horror of those young bodies scattered over the battlefields, maimed and diseased and blown apart, haunted the national imagination, evoking horror at what we might do to our young, inspiring an overarching protectiveness, a desperation to identify and prevent future harm.

       In the popular imagination grew up a sentimentalization of young men that nearly amounted to a new national myth. Even as Anthony Comstock was beginning his pursuit of indecency in the mass press, another New England Congregationalist, Horatio Alger, was using that same medium to tell stories about plucky, hardworking adolescent boys in New York finding their ways to riches and respectability through courage and moral virtue. Alger himself had a romantic, even erotic, vision of young men, and it struck a loud chord, immediately making him the most popular American writer in the cheap press. Thus mass print became the great promoter of the potential of young men, which tightened the popular association of cheap publications with the moral and intellectual formation of the new generation. If Alger’s stories were to be embraced as good for boys, then Alger’s opposite numbers must be denounced as bad for them.

       There was, however, a bigger metaphor than this at work. The industrial revolution was changing the social and political worlds, creating new models of business and new ways of working, forming a new kind of city, and requiring new forms of regulation and coordination. It was also bringing a profound change to common views of the world. People were seeing that vast changes could be wrought by human design and effort that no one had ever imagined could be made before. Industry, driven by science, was transforming the physical world and taking control of powers that had been assumed to lay beyond human mastery. The ages-long acceptance of the great forces and inevitabilities of life was, in the span of just a few generations, giving way to dreams of a world in which anything might be changed, of existence shaped not by what God had made but by what men wanted it to be.

      And so came the idea that mankind itself might be reshaped by design and will. The “social sciences” came to prominence, promising to bring a rational mastery of human society equivalent to what chemistry and physics brought to the material world. Against the pessimism about man’s fallen nature that informed Christianity, especially Calvinism, there arose the idea that human behavior and human society might be, if not perfected, then at least reformed beyond what anyone had dreamed possible. Through superior knowledge, rigorous design, and coordinated effort, a new human reality might be made in the same way that new transportation, materials, and energy sources were made.

      The driving metaphor, then, was of the rational mind subduing and marshaling the organic. This was not, though, a monastic punishing of the organic or a gnostic attempt to leave it behind. Following the industrial metaphor, in which science and design are the controlling elements but sheer physical might is the maker of change and the force on which everything depends, the body and its energy were seen as essential to the perfect whole. The body in this new model of human perfection would be healthy, strong, and well-trained, but entirely subject to the requirements of the mind; and not only the individual mind, but the plan set by the leaders of society.

      This was such a powerful idea, and so well fueled by the technological and economic currents of the day, that devout Christians began to form their world views around it. A self-described “Purity Movement” began in England in mid-century and spread to America. It was a Protestant Evangelical movement, stressing purity of soul foremost, preaching against alcohol and sexual stimulation; but it also advocated elements of diet, physical fitness, and purity from chemical contaminants, drawing many of its ideas from medical sources. The founders of the YMCA drew heavily on the Purity Movement in their emphasis on physical fitness; and although that emphasis was mainly on fitness through diet, sobriety, and adequate sleep during the Association’s first years in England, as soon as the New York branch opened it began to emphasize exercises and physical games. The body was to be made fit, its energies were to be first stirred and then marshaled. In some ways this Christian focus on health was an answer to threats raised by industrialism and urbanization, but in other ways it grew straight from the underlying suppositions and dominant metaphors of the new world of industry and science. So we are always shaped by our opposites.

      The energy that most needed to be marshaled, from both the Protestant and industrial viewpoints, was sexuality. Industrial logic demanded that resources not be expended on the unproductive, and that no one’s energies should turn inward. Where children would be produced, sexuality was encouraged. Where they would not be, it would be discouraged in a way it had not been before: because the issue at hand was not simply unwanted pregnancy, the threat of disease, or the saving of the soul, but a use of precious resources. Metaphors of waste and depletion, as well as of energy and production, run through 19th Century discussions of sex. In that regard, the anxiety over masturbation was a fundamental one. If the marshaling of sexual energy to the growing vigor of the young man was essential not only to his health but to his value to the world, then the squandering of that energy was a cost the world could not approve.

       The concept of purity drew Christian and scientific beliefs together into a new metaphor: impurity as disease. People’s relationships with illness then was very much marked by that same combination of hope and fear that filled their visions of the future and the young generation. Science made rapid advances in understanding and fighting disease, raising hopes that illnesses could be conquered that mankind had always accepted with tragic resignation. As the roles that sewers and stagnant water played in cultivating cholera, malaria, and other diseases became clearer, vast public works, driven both by the new technology and the new systems of organizing labor, made the cities cleaner and safer. But at the same time, industry introduced new contaminants into the atmosphere, causing physical problems that mankind had never to contend with before, providing no relief from fears of deadly impurity.

      The more bodily health became linked to mental, spiritual, and social health, the more mental and spiritual influences were viewed as bearers of disease. The young mind was perceived as pure in the way the body free of disease and contamination was pure, and the elements that might corrupt it were seen not as ideas but as poisons and disease agents. Comstock’s association of pornographers with mad dogs, simple and reflexive as it was, contained in it some of the most potent metaphors and assumptions of his moment.

      Calvinists like Comstock and Jesup, in fact, found themselves strangely relevant to the larger concerns of society in the years after the Civil War. No one was better suited to funnel the anxieties of the time into a course of action, a mission of public cultural reform; and no one had a comparable zeal to fight the battles that such a mission required. They shared the industrialists’ belief in group control of the individual and the authority of expertise, but their area of expertise was morality, and the source of it they believed to be the word of God. Further, as Comstock quickly demonstrated, cultural reform might require far more than battles against the publishers of naughty stories and dirty pictures. For there were voices out there calling for a different sort of cultural reform, envisioning a different America to come.

To be continued...

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...