Odd this day
Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was born. He sounds hilarious, doesn’t he? Some religious zealot, going about trying to prevent fun and jollity? Unfortunately, though, there’s a clue in the name of that society. Anthony was not, tragically, born in the sort of country which would amuse itself by pointing and laughing at him on a street corner, waving a home-made placard or sporting a handwritten sandwich-board. No, he emerged in America, where fundamentalist loons are listened to (it helps if they’re White) to the extent that their ideas can be incorporated into legislation.
The Comstock Act of 1873 was so sweeping that it made illegal to send in the post any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print, or other publication of an indecent character”. Obviously, as with any such legislation, obscenity is in the eye of the beholder, which is why Lady Chatterley’s Lover became a cause célèbre in the UK.
Comstock had been appalled at the behaviour of the men he served with in the American Civil War, so — well, of course — instead of remonstrating with them to change their behaviour (which might not have gone down very well), he decided mail order dirty books were the problem. And the terms of his Act were — good lord, how surprising — rather vaguely defined.
And — well, of course — his law also targeted
any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion
and even any
information, directly or indirectly, where or how, or of whom, or by what means either of the things before mentioned may be obtained or made.
At which point, I’m sure you’ll be astounded to hear that his favourite targets were women in middle age or older, giving him something in common with that nice man Matthew Hopkins who operated in Britain. Two centuries earlier. As author Amy Sohn has observed:
given what lifespans were at that time, to be a 67-year-old woman facing a ten-year prison sentence, you were almost certain you were going to die in prison. And that is why some of the women he went after and was able to prosecute took their own lives.
He must, indeed, have been simply a hoot at parties.
Ironically, he could have been, at least inadvertently, given that on a lobbying trip to Washington he apparently “laid out a collection of dirty materials” on the Vice President’s desk,
A crowd of legislators gathered to look at the stuff and declared themselves happy to pass the law. On his death, according to his obituary in American Art News — despite having destroyed 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates for printing ‘objectionable’ books, and nearly 4,000,000 pictures in life — he
left a remarkable collection of prints, pictures and literature, seized by him during his public career — which is said to contain a sufficient amount of really pornographic material, to enrich his heirs, could it be sold.
Well, he had to keep some of it, obviously, for comparison purposes.
Still, at least his malign influence is now a thing of the past. It’s not like this demented book about him from 1913 got reprinted by fundamentalist halfwits on its 100th anniversary, is it?
Ah.
You don’t have to read it, of course. You could, instead, learn how a Trump-appointed Texas judge thinks that — with Roe v. Wade out of the way — the Comstock Act is back:
…or this, by a Proper Actual Historian:
…if you want to punctuate your day by banging your head on a wall, that is.
