Society for the Suppression of Vice (New York)

Founded: 1873

Type of organization: Censorship organization founded by Anthony Comstock

Significance: Following the passage of the Comstock Act in 1873, this society became a model for procensorship organizations in the United States and was instrumental in several significant censorship trials

During the 1800’s reformers in the United States tackled issues such as temperance, prison reform, andslavery. With the wave of industrialization and urbanization following the Civil War, reformers feared that young people who came to the cities alone looking for work would be vulnerable to corruption and vice. These fears were confirmed when a Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) survey of young men working in New York City in 1866 revealed widespread gambling, pornography, and prostitution. Besides their concerns about crime and morality, reformers feared that the rapid spread of venereal diseases then occurring might threaten public health. The YMCA immediately began campaigning for stricter obscenity laws; in 1872 a committee was formed to combat the spread of vice.

Anthony Comstock

One of the most vocal people involved in the YMCA campaign against vice was Anthony Comstock, the man primarily responsible for the passage of the federal Comstock Act of 1873. On May 16, 1873, Comstock’s committee, renamed the Society for the Suppression of Vice, was chartered as an independent organization by the New York State legislature. Just as the Comstock Act set the standard for antiobscenity legislation in the United States, this group was the archetype for organized vice reform in America. Its most notable offshoot, the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, was formed later in 1873 and soon became known as the Boston Watch and Ward Society.

Although its appeal was neither universal nor widespread, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice did attract influential members. Those involved in the original incorporation included banker John Pierpont Morgan, copper magnate William E. Dodge, textbook publisher Alfred S. Barnes, lawyer William C. Beecher (the son of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher), feminist author Julia Ward Howe, and the country’s first female licensed doctor of medicine, Elizabeth Blackwell. The society’s first president, New Jersey soap manufacturer Samuel Colgate, served until his death in 1898; Comstock himself served as executive secretary until his own death in 1915. By law, the group received 50 percent of all fines collected from the successful convictions of cases prosecuted by its agents. Other funding came from hundreds of donors, including such notable figures as Andrew Carnegie, Mrs. Russell Sage, Louis C. Tiffany, John Wanamaker, and Charles Olmstead. The organization’s largest benefactor was Comstock’s close friend and society vice-president Morris Ketchum Jesup—the banker and railroad financier who became president of the New York State Chamber of Commerce in 1899. Jessup donated a million dollars to found the American Museum of Natural History.

The group’s strongest opposition during its early years came from Robert G. Ingersol’s National Liberal League, which by 1878 had collected fifty thousand signatures petitioning the repeal of the Comstock Act, and the National Defense Association, formed in 1879 to investigate questionable instances of prosecution under that law. Neither group had enough social or financial resources, however, seriously to deter Comstock’s new organization.

The Society for the Suppression of Vice used a combination of legal pressure and social influence to attack obscenity and vice. The group’s actions were generally affirmed by the city’s two largest newspapers—The New York Tribune and The New York Times—and state and local courts convicted more than 90 percent of those prosecuted. Initially, the accused were mostly small-time publishers and importers of erotica and vulgar true-crime stories, materials deemed obscene by the genteel elite. Established publishing houses had little trouble with the society until the 1890’s, when early naturalist fiction, such as Stephen Crane’s Maggie (1893) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) came into question. The society worried that such books would incite readers to lust, thereby promoting crime and disease.

During the Progressive Era reformers tackled such issues as child labor, sanitation, housing, and social hygiene. A wave of prostitution reform began in 1910 with the publication of The Social Evil in New York, a report by a committee of fifteen people, several of whom were supporters of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. As Comstock’s influence increased, along with public concern over vice and prostitution, the society started censoring more established writers and books. Around 1915, when U.S. involvement in the war in Europe began to look inevitable, the military feared that prostitution and venereal disease would cripple American troops. The Navy called for the closing of red-light districts, and combating vice became a patriotic occupation. At the same time, however, opposition to Comstock and his reformers grew among such intellectuals as George Bernard Shaw, who feared the suffocating effects “Comstockery” was having on literature and the arts. Comstock died on September 21, 1915, leaving leadership of the society to John Sumner.

John Sumner and the Later Years

During his first decade as president of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, Sumner launched two plans attempting to regain momentum for its procensorship cause: the “book jury” plan after World War I, and the “clean books” campaign of 1923-1925. However, these plans failed to attract much support. After the war a new generation of liberal publishing firms began printing books and periodicals with racier subject matter. Despite conservative opposition, authors such as Dreiser gained respect from the intellectual community and influential supporters such as Horace Liveright and H. L. Mencken.

Works charged with obscenity during Sumner’s tenure as president included James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen (1919), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), and Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (1946). In 1924 Sumner announced that the society had confiscated an average of 65,000 pictures per year since its formation. By 1946 it had conducted 5,567 arrests and confiscated nearly 400,000 books and magazines, 3.5 million postcards, more than 3 million catalogs, and more than 8 million other items.

After World War II public opinion shifted away from systematic censorship, and by Sumner’s retirement in 1950, the society had greatly diminished. While vestiges of its procensorship agenda continued to exist among some conservative organizations, the Society for the Suppression of Vice soon ceased officially to exist.

Bibliography

Paul S. Boyer’s Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (New York: Scribner, 1968) offers the most comprehensive overview of the society’s relationships with similar groups throughout the United States, especially the Boston Watch and Ward Society. Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech’s biography, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1927), explores Comstock’s role in the formation and early activities of the society. Robert W. Haney’s Comstockery in America: Patterns of Censorship and Control (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960) discusses the fervor of the procensorship movement, as does Morris L. Ernst and Alan U. Schwartz’s Censorship: The Search for the Obscene (New York: Macmillan, 1964). Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963) focuses on the stifling effects censorship has had on American scholars and artists. The best source for the society’s influence on prostitution reform is Willoughby C. Waterman’s Prostitution and Its Repression in New York City, 1900-1931 (New York: AMS Press, 1968).