This Day in Legal History (Anthony Comstock, Anti-Vice Crusader, Born)

March 7, 1844—Anthony Comstock, who mercilessly pursued litigation and legislation against obscenity in the Victorian Era, was born in New Canaan, Conn.

Over four decades, Comstock used the organization he founded, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, to range across and rage against the cultural landscape. Starting with halting the promotion and sale of birth control and abortifacients, he ended up broadening his reach to plays, art and even medical texts, leading one of those he pursued, playwright George Bernard Shaw, to come up with a neologism for the anti-vice crusader. 

It wasn’t a compliment. “Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States,” he complained to a New York Times reporter in September 1905, after Comstock had attempt to censor the Anglo-Irishman’s 1892 play about prostitution, Mrs. Warren’s Profession.

In the post-Civil War Era, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, watching in dismay at the Northern cities they once controlled swelled to accommodate immigrant tide, countered with measures to deal with these ills. Some were benign attempts at uplift, such as public libraries. Others were sometimes questionable attempts to sanitize elections and governance through referenda, initiatives, and recall attempts. Others were more frankly hostile, like post-Famine deportations of Irish indigents in 11 Eastern states and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Still others, though ostensibly applied across the board, were purity crusades that stigmatized marginalized racial and ethnic groups disproportionately, such as Comstock’s anti-vice campaigns.

Once he came to New York City in 1866, Comstock could not get over what he encountered: prostitution, drug addiction, and bookstores that all kinds of pornography.  

By 1873, Comstock began in earnest his counteroffensive by persuading Congress to pass federal legislation making illegal the transportation and delivery of “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials. Due to his license as a “special agent” and inspector for both the Society and the United States Postal Service, that measure became so associated with him that it became known simply as the Comstock Act.

 

To his own version of the purity campaign, Comstock brought the energy of the demented to his quest—by his own admissions, destroying 160 tons of obscene materials; trying to ban adventure books and romance novels; helping to put out of commission the Louisiana lottery, the only legal lottery in the country at the time; and writing articles and lecturing college students to warn them against the licentious life he foresaw for them. 

I’m not sure how anyone who calls himself a Christian could brag about causing a suicide, but Comstock did—and not just one person, but 16, including abortionist Ann Lohman.

 One of the few modern defenses I’ve read of Comstock was Helen Andrews’ 2008 article in The Hedgehog Review. Although I disagree strongly with her sympathy for Comstock, I found fascinating her observation that the elite “who bankrolled Comstock were not about to invite him to dinner at their homes or to their private clubs.”

Indeed, another author, Nicola Beisel in her book Imperiled Innocents, has noted that the major contributors to his campaign were members of the upper crust who feared that their children, corrupted by the forces that Comstock inveighed against, might lose the social standing their parents had labored so hard to obtain.

Comstock’s last major target was Margaret Sanger for promoting her views on birth control. But midway through the campaign to make her cease and desist, Comstock died, leaving Sanger with another five decades to fulfill her destiny as a pioneer birth-control advocate.

Even after Comstock’s death in 1915, the Society for the Suppression of Vice continued to exist, albeit with steadily diminishing impact, under his successor, John S. Sumner, who pursued his own campaigns against James Joyce’s Ulysses, James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.  

As late as the 1930s, the Society’s reports identified the ethnicity of those it tagged as miscreants, as if this were relevant to the offenses. (It even claimed, according to its own statistics, that "less than one-third of [obscenity] offenders were of real American stock.")