¹ Bates, Anna Louise, “Protective Custody: A Feminist Interpretation of Anthony Comstock's Life and Laws” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 1991), xvi.Google Scholar

² Beisel, Nicola, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, 1997).Google Scholar

³ Comstock's legal authority as Assistant Postmaster was national and his leadership of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice provided a model for anti-vice reformers all over the country. As an argument for historical revision, however, this paper engages other historians on their own terms, and therefore emphasizes Comstock's career in New York.

⁴ Gilfoyle, Timothy, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York, 1992), 19.Google Scholar

⁵ Arneil, Barbara, “Women as Wives, Servants and Slaves: Rethinking the Public/Private Divide,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 34 (March 2001): 29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

⁶ Gurstein, Rochelle, The Repeal of Reticence: A History of America's Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Ari (New York, 1996), 125.Google Scholar

⁷ Ibid., 3.

⁸ McGarry, Molly, “Spectral Sexualities: Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism, Moral Panics, and the Making of US Obscenity Law,” Journal of Women's History 12 (Summer 2000): 19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹ D'Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle, Intimate Matters (New York, 1988), 106.Google Scholar See also Horowitz's, Helen Lefkowitz recent article, “Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s,” Journal of American History 87 (September 2000): esp. 403CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “When Victoria Woodhull and Anthony Comstock confronted each other [over the Beecher-Tilton scandal] in 1872, they embodied the extreme ends of a lengthy and complex conversation about sexual representation.”

¹⁰ This, at least, is the philosophy as stated by tabloid publishers. Latter-day students of these tabloids, like their contemporary critics, came quickly to the conclusion that many readers coveted them for their entertainment value rather than for their crime stopping potential. See the following paragraph.

¹¹ “Foes to New Journalism,” New York Times, March 30, 1897.

¹² Editorial note, National Police Gazette, January 12, 1884.

¹³ Comstock, Anthony, Traps for the Young (1883, reprinted Cambridge, MA, 1967), 205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the importance of children in the reproduction of the middle-class family, see Beisel, Imperiled Innocents.

¹⁴ Sennett, Richard, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York, 1990), 21.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Comstock, , Traps for the Young, 138.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid., 136.

¹⁸ Ibid. Comstock's concerns were in no way disproportionate to those of contemporary medical practitioners. For more on the disease concept of masturbation, see Engelhardt, H. Tristram, “The Disease of Masturbation: Values and the Concept of Disease,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48 (Summer 1974): 234–48.Google ScholarPubMed

¹⁹ The editorial board also included Booker T. Washington, who edited the “Race Problems” section of the journal.

²⁰ “Protect That Boy,” Our Day 16 (August 1896): 441.

²¹ Comstock, , Traps for the Young, 142.Google Scholar

²² Ibid., 224. The structure of the contemporary US postal system was central to the formulation of Comstock's anti-vice concerns. As John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman have pointed out, the lewd materials to which Comstock objected were only available for postal distribution because of the innovative second-class postal rates which made it possible to mail novels and story papers at low cost. D'Emilio and Freedman, , Intimate Matters, 158.Google Scholar

Remarkably similar concerns about the anonymity of the US mail have once again emerged in the light of recent mail-mediated bioterrorism attacks. In the fall of 2001, many news agencies reported that the US mail was an obvious medium for such activity because it was an anonymous and inexpensive means of distribution, easily hijacked for the transmission of — now literal — contagion into American homes.

²³ Comstock, Anthony, “Lotteries and Gambling,” North American Review 154 (February 1892): 223.Google Scholar

²⁴ Comstock, , Traps for the Young, 155.Google Scholar

²⁵ Beisel, Nicola, “Morals Versus Art: Censorship, the Politics of Interpretation, and the Victorian Nude,” American Sociological Review 58 (April 1993): 150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ McGarry, , “Spectral Sexualities,” 18.Google Scholar

²⁷ Comstock, Anthony, “Indictable Art and Corrupt Classics,” Our Day 13 (September-October 1894): 404.Google Scholar

²⁸ Broun, Heywood and Leach, Margaret, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (New York, 1927), 225.Google Scholar

²⁹ Letter to the editor, Photographic Times and American Photographer 18 (August 24, 1888), 403, in Mensel, Robert, “‘Kodakers Lying in Wait’: Amateur Photography and the Right of Privacy in New York, 1885–1915,” American Quarterly 43 (March 1991): 33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ This writer's gripe about the reproduction of photographic images of beachgoers comes closer to meeting McGarry's description of Comstock's misgivings about photographs man Comstock himself ever did. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” McGarry argues, “would ‘put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself.’” McGarry, “Spectral Sexualities,” 18. Comstock, I would argue, would have objected to the practice of sunbathing as well as to the practice of photographing sunbathers.

³² Comstock, , Traps for the Young, 172.Google Scholar

³³ “Comstock's Cranks,” National Police Gazette, November 16, 1878.

³⁴ I am arguing, then, that Comstock embraced a common-law formulation of obscenity, which Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz suggests that lawmakers and jurists since Blackstone had rejected. “One can be drunk alone in one's room and, although engaged in sinful behavior, be beyond the reach of the law. However, if one is drunk ‘publicly, in the face of the world, its evil example makes it liable to temporal censures.’ One could not locate obscene words and images in this category of offense. They belonged among libels [in a criminal prosecution for which] the only issue is the tendency ‘to create animosities, and to disturb the public peace.’” Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol 4: Of Public Wrongs (1765–1769; Chicago, 1979), 41–42Google Scholar, in Horowitz, 421.

³⁵ “Anthony Comstock — An Heroic Suppressor or an Unconscious Protector of Vice?” Current Opinion 56 (April 1914): 288.

³⁶ Ibid., 289.

³⁷ “Art Students Jeer at Comstock's Raid,” New York Times, August 4, 1906.

³⁸ “Shaw's Play Unfit; The Critics Unanimous,” New York Times, October 31,1905.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Comstock, Anthony, “Vampire Literature,” North American Review 153 (August 1891): 161.Google Scholar This passage, in which Comstock contrasted the SSV's tactics to those of agencies which continually confiscated obscene items but avoided confronting those items' producers, epitomizes another difference in outlook between Comstock and other urban reformers. Where they emphasized the primacy of social and economic conditions among the causes of vice, Comstock was comfortable referring to the authors and publishers of lewd books as “the fountain-heads” of viciousness.

⁴¹ Anna Louise Bates made this discovery during the writing of her 1991 dissertation. See Bates, , “Protective Custody,” 254.Google Scholar

⁴² Lystra, Karen, Searching the Heart: Women, Men and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1989)Google Scholar is one example.

⁴³ Gilfoyle, , City of Eros, 207.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Comstock, , Traps for the Young, 164.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ See, for example, Parker, Alison, Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873–1933 (Urbana, 1997), 56–62.Google Scholar Parker does not mention the Gazette's appeals to Comstock, or his occasional voluntary appearance therein (see below), but both tend to confirm her broader claim that, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, censorship was popular across class lines. See Parker, 46–49.

⁴⁶ “The Lotteries,” National Police Gazette, February 14, 1880.

⁴⁷ “Left to Our Own Destruction,” National Police Gazette, April 17, 1880.

⁴⁸ “The Quack Gang,” National Police Gazette, March 27, 1880.

⁴⁹ Fox's diatribe, however, capitalized most strongly on the reading public's association of “quack” physicians with the abortion trade. This association had been formed, in part, by the recent professionalization campaigns of allopathic physicians who seized on the abortion issue to differentiate themselves from the other practitioners. For further explication of the tension between “quack” and “ethical” physicians and the role of abortion in that tension, see Luker, Kristin, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley, 1984), esp. 31.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ “Left to Our Own Destruction,” National Police Gazette, April 17, 1880.

⁵¹ Parkhurst, Charles H., Our Fight With Tammany (New York, 1895), 7.Google Scholar For Parkhurst, “diminutive game” meant any target other than the police who failed to enforce existing anti-vice laws. He thus implicitly attacked not only the ethics of the immigrant police machine but the usefulness of nearly all of Comstock's work.

⁵² Ibid., 194.

⁵³ ffigham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1955), 38.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Ibid., 38–39.

⁵⁵ Johnson, Richard, “Anthony Comstock: Reform, Vice and the American Way” (Ph.D. diss, University of Wisconsin, 1973), 158.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Ibid., 161.

⁵⁷ See Markel, Howard, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore, 1997).Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Comstock, , Traps for the Young, 205.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Higham, , Strangers in the Land, 55.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Comstock, , “Indictable Art and Corrupt Classics,” 400.Google Scholar

⁶¹ Ibid., 415–16,420. Comstock's disgust at the circulation of erotic images, however, recognized no borders beyond those of the United States. He had this to say of the ancient Romans: “A gentleman who recently visited the buried ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, after viewing some of the sculptures, carvings, and decorations, which have lately been unearthed by the spade of the explorer, said that ‘he did not wonder that the Almighty buried these cities in lava and ashes.’” Ibid., 401.

⁶² Ibid., 77.

⁶³ See Beisel, Imperiled Innocents.

⁶⁴ For more discussion of the link between eugenics and turn-of-the-century vice reform, see Pernick's, Martin excellent discussion in The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York, 1996), esp. 55–60.Google Scholar For discussion of the differences between the eugenics Comstock embraced and that advocated by his social-radical political opponents, especially their differing attitudes towards contraception, see Kevies, Daniel, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA, 1995), esp. ch. 6.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Comstock and his anti-abortion physician constituency parted ways, however, over Comstock's desire to censor anatomically explicit medical texts and journals, which the physicians regarded as essential to scientific medical education. See Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's valuable formulation of this division as a generational clash over the proper relationship of “sexuality to new notions of the body, mind, and health,” in Horowitz, 407.

⁶⁶ “Comstock's Fight for the Fig Leaf,” Brush and Pencil 18 (1906): 168.

⁶⁷ For an excellent discussion of Borglum's role in the sculpting of this controversial monument, and for an examination of the significance of the monument itself, see Hale, Grace Elizabeth, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York, 1998), esp. ch. 6.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Ibid., 171.

⁶⁹ “United States' Mail,” The Hebrew American, March 16, 1894. The item was extensively footnoted in Yiddish for the paper's readers of German Jewish origin, whose fellow immigrants were disproportionately represented in Comstock's arrest rolls.

⁷⁰ Comstock, , “Indictable Art and Corrupt Classics,” 408.Google Scholar

⁷¹ “The player is apt to think that his chance of making a hit is as good as any other person's, and if he should win there's nobody injured; especially since, as the pool is made up of small sums, this loss will not be felt by the players.” Ibid., 89.

⁷² Ibid., 219, italics Comstock's.

⁷³ Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993), 205.Google Scholar

⁷⁴ Comstock, Anthony, Traps for the Young, 208.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Comstock spent three weeks in Washington coaxing legislators already harried with the details of the Credit Mobilier scandal to attend to his proposed anti-obscenity legislation. Richard Johnson notes that while in the Capital, Comstock attended a White House reception where he was introduced to President Ulysses S. Grant and where he “found many of the women ‘…brazen-dressed extremely silly…low dresses…disgusting.‘” Johnson, , “Anthony Comstock: Reform, Vice, and the American Way,” 70.Google Scholar During his one-man drive to see the obscenity bill passed, Comstock comforted himself with the notion that he endured these offenses while serving the interests not only of society at large, but of the Lord Himself. “I feel impatient and yet I know the Master knows best,” he wrote in his diary. “His will be done, not mine.” Ibid., 69.

⁷⁶ Comstock, , Traps for the Young, 164.Google Scholar

⁷⁷ It was implied that he did so without retaliating physically. Comstock's much-heralded opposition to fistfights was one way in which he differentiated himself from the new, violent “masculinity” of which Gail Bederman writes. See note 82, below.

⁷⁸ Offices of the two organizations coexisted in the Times Building in Manhattan. Parker, , Purifying America, 33.Google Scholar

⁷⁹ Ibid., 39–40.

⁸⁰ “Get Out, Says Pool to Anthony Comstock,” New York Times, October 7, 1905.

⁸¹ “Art Students Jeer at Comstock's Raid,” New York Times, August 4, 1906.

⁸² See Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, 1995), 18–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸³ “[S]hopping and consumer spending emerged as an important component of urban middle-class identity in the decades after the Civil War. Women…became, suddenly, central to that identity. … ‘Men are subordinate in America only in shop windows,’ English visitor Katherine Busbey declared effusively.” Abelson, Elaine, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York, 1989), 13, 69.Google Scholar

⁸⁴ The image from The Masses is reprinted in Gilfoyle, , City of Eros, 190.Google Scholar Also see Bederman, , Manliness and Civilization, 18–19.Google Scholar For more on The Masses, and on the magazine's political engagement with Comstockery, see Zurier, Rebecca, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911–1917 (Philadelphia, 1988), esp. 96–97.Google Scholar For more on Minor's visual critiques of Comstock, see Richard Fitzgerald, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator (Westport, CT, 1973), esp. 98–100.

⁸⁵ For a discussion of the significance of Bougereau's painting in turn-of-the-century New York, see David Scobey, “Nymphs and Satyrs” (Program in American Culture, University of Michigan, photocopy), esp. 12: “The painting made a stir because it both expressed and contained transgressive female sexual power. Its theme of dangerous eroticism would have been obvious, of course, to any Gilded-Age observer.”

⁸⁶ “Art Students' League Raided by Comstock,” New York Times, August 3, 1906.

⁸⁷ Comstock, , Traps for the Young, 241.Google Scholar

⁸⁸ Comstock, Anthony, in “Pugilism: The Manly Art of Boxing Considered in All Its Bearings,” National Police Gazette, January 28, 1888.Google Scholar

⁸⁹ “The Passing of Saint Anthony,” Harper's Magazine (July 3, 1915): 11.

⁹⁰ The last vestiges of the national versions of the Comstock laws remained in effect as late as 1972, when the US Supreme Court ruled that single women were entitled to free access to the contraceptive information that had been restricted by Comstock's tactics. Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 US 438 (1972).