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.

The existence of a female gambling house in Boston has been suspected by some,and known to a few favored ones for some time past—in fact, ever since the opening of the institution. At first it bloomed and flourished during the winter months at the reception department of two ladies whom we shall style Miss Mary Laudon and Mme. Burgoine. These two feminines passed for mother and daughter, and by their industry and modest deportment won their way into the family acquaintance of some of the best families in the city.

It was left to an occasional contributor of the NEWS to rediscover the retreat of these now notable females, and give an idea of the way in which fast girls and boys pass the nights, as some of them say, "out of town on business."

The secret leaked out through a colored girl, who was recently discharged for some irregularity, and imparted by her to another person, who visited the "retreat." They call it the "retreat" because of its charming privacy and apparent obscurity. It is on a street not far from the State-house. The front of the building would appear to the ordinary observer as a building unoccupied. The windows are darkened above, and were it not for the side-door, left open night and day, but which is seldom used, no one would suppose the upper part of the building occupied. But it is now discovered to be the popular place of resort, for various classes of people, who nightly assemble to play with and provoke Dame Fortune as represented by her most fascinating votaries. But let the last victim tell his own story:

"It was a strange sight —one that fairly astounded one at first glance. Here in a room gaudily but not richly decorated and brilliantly lighted, were assembled at least thirty men and women, three-fourths of whom were engaged in the fascination of games of chance, At one table sat the quondam seamstress, Miss Landon, attired in a loose, white lace wrapper, her fingers glittering with pearls. She was dealing faro for the amusement of a young merchant of Boston, and two women, both strangers to me. Four or five persons sat by the table, looking lazily on, smoking and sipping refreshments. At an adjoining table two men and two women were engaged in a game in which bright, new half-dollars passed for checks, and gold pieces occasionally passed current.

"One of the women, a 'girl of the period,' smoked her cigar with the nonchalance of an adept, while her neighbor on the right, a middle aged woman of means, kept a record of the game on paper. They appeared to be playing whist. At two small tables in the far corner of the room six or seven women, with one or two men, were interested in games of chance, apparently poker or euchre, and money appeared to be passing freely, but rather silently. Taking down a billiard-cue, we acceptedthe challenge of Mme. Burgoine, and engaged, with our friend and a girl who had just prepared to start for home, in a friendly game of billiards. These are a few of the observations made during a short visit to a retreat whose existence is unknown to even the business men in its vicinity."

Illustrated Police News, October 28, 1876.