Anthony Comstock

Postal Inspector

• Born: March 7, 1844
• Birthplace: New Canaan, Connecticut
• Died: September 21, 1915
• Place of death: Summit, New Jersey

Identification: American crusader against “vice,” especially pornography

Significance: The most conspicuous figure in the history of American censorship, Comstock effectively promoted the passage of the nation’s strongest antiobscenity law, which he helped enforce as a postal official

Raised in a modest family of ten children, Comstock experienced the early death of his mother and a strict upbringing in fundamentalist Puritanism. After being forced to leave school at eighteen, he went to work as a clerk in a general store in Winnipauk, Connecticut. Serious and pious at that age, he killed a loose rabid dog, then smashed up the liquor store of the dog’s owner. Comstock later pointed to this incident as prophetic of his career, and he often referred to his opponents as “mad dogs” who endangered the community.

Comstock’s Early Career

During the Civil War, from late 1863 until the summer of 1865, Comstock served as a volunteer in the Union Army. During this period he kept a diary, which reveals a person obsessed with the notion of sin, especially in the realm of sexuality. After the war he worked in New York City as a shipping clerk and dry-goods salesman, and at the same time he became an active member of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), an organization that shared his moral values. As early as 1868, after a friend was allegedly “led astray and corrupted” by pornographic books, Comstock began a crusade to promote the enforcement of the state’s antiobscenity laws. These first efforts led to the conviction of three publishers, one of whom attacked and wounded Comstock with a knife. After a publicized attack on two free-thinking editors, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, Comstock went to work as a full-time reformer and activist for the YMCA in 1873. That same year he was the principal founder and first secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which he served as secretary until his death.

Immediately after the Civil War, the Congress had made it illegal to use the mails for sending any “publication of a vulgar or indecent character.” In 1873 Comstock successfully lobbied a sympathetic Congress to make the postal regulations more restrictive. The resulting Federal Anti-Obscenity Act, commonly called the “Comstock Law,” was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant in March. The law provided for criminal penalties of up to five years for the first offense of sending books and other materials judged to be “obscene, lewd, or lascivious,” including birth control materials. The law also created special agents in the Post Office Department, giving them broad discretion to seize and prosecute suspected materials. Comstock himself was appointed an unpaid agent, a position of great power that he retained until his death forty-one years later.

The Mature Crusader

Comstock was tireless in his efforts to enforce the 1873 law. He had little interest or ability to distinguish between good art and bad; with a characteristic lack of subtlety, he was generally impatient with any art or literature that deviated from his own standards of Victorian morality. After his first year as a postal official, he could boast that he had seized 130,000 pounds of “bad books,” 194,000 indecent pictures and photographs, and 60,300 “articles of rubber used for immoral purposes.” By the time of his death, it was estimated that he was personally responsible for the destruction of 160 tons of “obscene” materials.

Comstock usually concentrated his efforts on keeping the grosser forms of commercialized pornography out of the mails, but his list of prohibited works included such “respectable” writers as Theodore Dreiser, Margaret Sanger, Havelock Ellis, and Sigmund Freud. He was especially opposed to works such as Marie Dennett’s practical manual on sexuality, written from a liberal point of view. Comstock was normally willing to allow classical works containing eroticism, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, to be sent to libraries where they could be read by mature scholars, but he was determined to keep such works out of the hands of impressionable young people. Comstock’s personal standards usually prevailed in courtrooms because of the “Hicklin rule,” which allowed for confiscation and prosecution based on the harmful influence of isolated passages on the most susceptible person in society.

In pursuing his censorship aims Comstock was ruthless and inspired a great deal of fear. It is estimated that he was responsible for the arrest of more than thirty-six hundred men, women, and children. One of his major methods was to use agents posing as customers in order to entrap dealers of illegal materials, and then he would strike with furious and well publicized raids. Convinced of the righteousness of his cause, he never expressed any sympathy or pity for those he prosecuted. For example, when Madam Restell, a prominent abortionist and dealer in contraceptives, committed suicide after being tricked into a confession in 1878, Comstock commented, “A bloody ending to a bloody life,” and boasted that Restell was the fifteenth person whom he had driven to suicide. In addition to fighting against obscenity, Comstock directed many of his efforts against dishonest advertisers and promoters of fraud and medical quackery. When he was prosecuting such abuses, even his critics admitted that he did some useful work.

Comstock’s views about morality and vice are clearly expounded in his two books and several pamphlets. Frauds Exposed (1880) is his account of a “moral hero” (basically a self-portrait) who struggles against cowardly villains who are agents of Satan. Traps for the Young (1883) warned about “Satan’s traps” for boys and girls, especially half-dime novels, materialistic advertisements, gambling, the practice of free-love, and the antireligious messages of “infidels and liberals.” In his pamphlet, Morals Versus Art (1887), Comstock insisted that he was not against serious art in museums, but he warned that lewd pictures and photographs “appeal to passions and create impure imaginations.”

Comstock’s Last Years

By the end of the nineteenth century, Comstock’s views were increasingly outside those of the mainstream of public opinion, and he was becoming less successful in his efforts to proscribe art and literature. With his overweight body and prominent whiskers, he became a favorite subject of political cartoonists, and George Bernard Shaw coined the term “comstockery” as an epithet for moralistic censorship. Nevertheless, Comstock continued to have many prominent supporters, and he continued to seize contraband and make arrests until the last year of his life. He died shortly after President Woodrow Wilson appointed him to represent the United States at the International Purity Congress. In spite of the ridicule of libertarians, his Comstock Law remained on the books, and the courts did not significantly liberalize its enforcement until almost half a century after his death.

Bibliography

Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech’s Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (New York: A. & C. Boni, 1927) provides a critical portrait. Charles Gallaudet Trumbull’s Anthony Comstock, Fighter: Some Impressions of a Lifetime Adventure in Conflict with the Powers of Evil (2d ed. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1913) is excessively adulatory but useful. James Paul and Murray Schwartz’s Federal Censorship: Obscenity in the Mail (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961) and Robert Haney’s Comstockery in America: Patterns of Censorship and Control (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974) provide informative accounts of the legal history. Paul Boyer’s Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (New York: Scribners, 1968) also includes much interesting information.