Anthony Comstock, founder of The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was on a personal mission to protect America’s youth from any art or literature which he deemed objectionable. His name became so tightly bound to the war on smut that one of Comstock’s famous targets, George Bernard Shaw, named this peculiarly American censorship crusade, “Comstockery.”

Anthony Comstock

Comstock first became interested in dirty books in1868 after a friend of his contracted a venereal disease from a visit to a brothel.  Comstock believed that his friend’s moral downfall had begun with the purchase of an obscene book. He paid a visit to the bookseller, purchased and obscene book himself, then reported the transaction to the police and had the seller arrested.

NYSSV

Comstock repeated this operation in bookstores throughout New York City and in 1872 he got the attention of the Young Men’s Christian Association, whose Committee for the Suppression of Vice was perusing an anti-smut campaign of its own. The committee funded Comstock’s crusade and eventually became an independent organization, New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, with Comstock as its head. The NYSSV became a quasi-official law enforcement organization and under its aegis, Comstock arrested at least three thousand people for obscenity.

The campaign was begun to protect American youth from the corrupting influence of lower-class pornography, but Comstock soon realized that some literary classics also contained corrupting influences. He expanded his campaign against smut to include authors such as Ovid, Boccaccio, and Walt Whitman. When it became clear that not all of Comstock’s financial backers would agree to the banning of classics, Comstock explained that it was not the works, per se, that were objectionable, but how they were presented to the public, saying:

“These works, heretofore carefully concealed from public view, and kept by booksellers only to meet what some consider the legitimate demand of the student, or gentlemen’s library, are now advertised and sold by certain parties as “rich, rare, and racy” books, “amorous adventures,” “spicy descriptions,” “love intrigues on the sly,” etc.”

Comstock had a similar approach to the visual arts: he did not object to elite society viewing nude paintings in the context of a museum, but when a gallery began selling photographic reproductions of nude paintings to the masses, he shut them down.

In 1873 Comstock and his organization sponsored a set of federal laws—commonly known as the “Comstock Laws”—which made it a federal crime to send “obscene, nude or lascivious” material through the U. S. Mail. This included information about birth control and abortion. Anthony Comstock was appointed a special agent of the Post Office to enforce the laws.

While publications like The National Police Gazette still routinely ran advertisements for racy pictures, abortifacients, and rubber goods (condoms), Comstock claimed to have seized 130,000 pounds of books, 194,000 “bad” pictures, 5,500 indecent playing cards, and 3,150 pills and powders used by abortionists, in the first year alone.

Expanding the campaign to include birth control and abortion set him against a whole new class of notorious opponents. Pretending to be seeking birth control information for his wife, Comstock entrapped Madame Restell, New York’s most infamous abortionist. While out on bail she committed suicide by cutting her throat. He brought legal proceedings against George Bernard Shaw and got the city of New York to ban Margaret Sanger’s work on family planning. When free love advocate, Victoria Woodhull, published a story charging Reverend Henry Ward Beecher with adultery, Comstock had her arrested. Woodhull, who at the time was the presidential candidate for the short-lived Equal Rights Party, had to spend Election Day in jail.

Comstock fought his last battle in San Francisco while attending the International Purity Congress. He initiated prosecution against a San Francisco department store for dressing nude mannequins in the store window in public view. He lost the case and never recovered from the ridicule that it generated.

Though Anthony Comstock died in 1915, his laws lived on. The Comstock Laws were not fully repealed until the 1990s.

Sources:

• Beisel, Nicola Kay. Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and family reproduction in Victorian America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.
• Miller, Neil. Banned in Boston: the Watch and Ward Society's crusade against books, burlesque, and the social evil. Boston: Beacon Press, 2010.
• Sante, Luc. Low life: lures and snares of old New York. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991.

Kate Fox

Maggie Fox

Leah Fox

In March of 1848 two young sisters in Hydesville, New York—Maggie Fox, age 15 and  Katie Fox, age 11 ½ — devised a plan to fool their superstitious mother. They would discretely crack their toes and claim that the resulting “knocks” or “raps”  were communications from the spirit world. Little did they dream that this simple deception would spawn a new religion with millions of followers worldwide.

Fox Home in Hydesville

The Fox family moved into a small farmhouse in Hydesville in December 1847. Out of boredom that winter, the two sisters devised several plans to convince their mother that the house was haunted. The most effective was to crack their toes on the floor in such a way that the sound would resonate through the house. They convinced their mother that the sounds were being made by a ghost who haunting their house.

On March 31, 1848, the girls set up a performance for their family during which they purported to communicate with the spirit haunting the house. Katy would peer into the darkness and say boldly, “Mr. Split-foot, do as I do,” then snap her fingers several times in succession. The responding knocks, coming as if from the darkness, would imitate the snaps. Her mother asked the spirit questions that could be answered with a series of knocks. It was determined that the spirit was a thirty-one-year-old man with five children, who had died two years previous. Neighbors were summoned to witness the performance. They arrived skeptics and left believers.

This occurred during a period known as the “Second Great Awakening” of religious fervor in America, and in a section of New York State that had been dubbed the “burned-over district” for the number of times the inhabitants had been fired up by religious movements. The area had seen the birth of the Latter Day Saints, the Millerites, the Shakers, and the Oneida Community. The spirit communication of the Fox Sisters found a receptive audience and their fame spread quickly through western New York.

A third sister, Leah Fox Fish, who was nineteen years older than Maggie, learned of the deception through her daughter Lizzie. Leah took over management of her sisters’ performances and soon they making money throughout the state. The girls were examined by medical experts in Rochester and Buffalo and were pronounced to be legitimate.

The Fox Sisters began holding private séances and public meetings in Albany, New York City and throughout the east coast. Prominent men such as editor Horace Greely and author James Fennimore Cooper became adherents.  As the Spiritualist movement grew, it attracted more mediums, with even more dramatic performances. Soon the movement had millions of adherents worldwide.

But there were skeptics as well. In his 1866 book The Humbugs of the World, P. T. Barnum—himself an unabashed dealer in humbuggery—included a section on Spiritualism and a chapter devoted to the Fox Sisters. His description of how the Fox Sisters produced their raps was fairly accurate. But the accounts of skeptics had no effects on the true believers.

Then in July 1888, while on tour in England, Maggie Fox herself began to reveal, on stage, how the noises were produced. When she returned to New York, she was joined by her sister Katie in revealing the secret.  On October 21 the two sisters appeared on the stage of the New York Academy of Music and together revealed how they had deceived the world for forty years.  Newspapers proclaimed the death of Spiritualism, but the Spiritualist claimed that this performance was the fraud. The two sisters now both alcoholics with little income had renounced their gift in order to make money.

A national tour following the Academy of Music performance failed to generate the revenue they hoped for and in 1889 Maggie reversed herself again. She recanted her previous expose, claiming it was made at the direction of an unscrupulous manager.  But by now, little attention was paid to anything she said and the Fox Sisters faded into obscurity. Both women died of alcoholism, Katie in 1892 and Maggie in 1893.

Sources:

• Barnum, P. T. The humbugs of the world An account of humbugs, delusions, impositions, quackeries, deceits and deceivers generally, in all ages.. New York: Carleton, 1866.
• Stuart, Nancy. The reluctant spiritualist: the life of Maggie Fox. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005.
• Todd, Thomas Olman. Hydesville: the story of the Rochester knockings, which proclaimed the advent of modern spiritualism. Sunderland [Eng.: Keystone Press, 1905.

 The Fox Sisters: Spiritualism's Unlikely Founders