Anthony Comstock

Anthony Comstock
Photograph of Anthony Comstock from a 1913 publication
Born	(1844-03-07)March 7, 1844 New Canaan, Connecticut, United States
Died	Summit, New Jersey, United States
Occupation	United States Postal Inspector
Organization	United States Postal Inspection Service
Known for	Creation of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice Comstock law
Awards	Queen's Police Medal Prime Minister's Above and Beyond award

Anthony Comstock (March 7, 1844 – September 21, 1915) was a United States Postal Inspector and politician dedicated to ideas of Victorian morality. The terms "comstockery" and "Comstockism" were used for his extensive campaign to censor indecent and obscene materials.

Biography

Comstock was born in New Canaan, Connecticut. As a young man, he enlisted and fought for the Union in the American Civil War from 1863 to 1865 in Company H, 17th Connecticut Infantry. He served without incident, but objected to the profanity used by his fellow soldiers. Afterwards he became an active worker in the Young Men's Christian Association in New York City.

In 1873, Comstock created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an institution dedicated to supervising the morality of the public. Later that year, Comstock successfully influenced the United States Congress to pass the Comstock Law, which made illegal the delivery by U.S. mail, or by other modes of transportation, of "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material, as well as prohibiting any methods of production or publication of information pertaining to the procurement of abortion, the prevention of conception and the prevention of venereal disease.

The term "comstockery", meaning "censorship because of perceived obscenity or immorality", was coined in an editorial in The New York Times in 1895. George Bernard Shaw used the term in 1905 after Comstock had alerted the New York City police to the content of Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession. Shaw remarked that "Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all." Comstock thought of Shaw as an "Irish smut dealer."

Comstock lived in Summit, New Jersey from 1880 to 1915. He built a house there in 1892 at 35 Beekman Road, where he died in 1915.

Comstock's ideas of what might be "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" were quite broad. During his time of greatest power, even some anatomy textbooks were prohibited from being sent to medical students by the United States Postal Service.

1887 Letter from Anthony Comstock to Josiah Leeds

Comstock aroused intense loathing from early civil liberties groups and intense support from church-based groups worried about public morals. He was a savvy political insider in New York City and was made a special agent of the United States Postal Service, with police powers up to and including the right to carry a weapon. With this power he zealously prosecuted those he suspected of either public distribution of pornography or commercial fraud. He was also involved in shutting down the Louisiana Lottery, which was the only legal lottery in the United States at the time and was notorious for corruption.

Comstock is also known for his opposition to Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Celeste Claflin, and those associated with them. The men's journal The Days' Doings had popularized images of the sisters for three years and was instructed by its editor (while Comstock was present) to stop producing lewd images. Comstock also took legal action against the paper for advertising contraceptives. When the sisters published an expose of an adulterous affair between Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton, he had the sisters arrested under laws forbidding the use of the postal service to distribute 'obscene material'–specifically citing a mangled Biblical quote Comstock found obscene–though they were later acquitted of the charges.

Less fortunate was Ida Craddock, who committed suicide on the eve of reporting to Federal prison for distributing via the U.S. Mail various sexually explicit marriage manuals she had authored. Her final work was a lengthy public suicide note specifically condemning Comstock.

Comstock, the self-labeled "weeder in God's garden", arrested D. M. Bennett for publishing his "An Open Letter to Jesus Christ" and later entrapped the editor for mailing a free-love pamphlet. Bennett was prosecuted, subjected to a widely publicized trial, and imprisoned in the Albany Penitentiary.

During his career, Comstock clashed with Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger. In her autobiography, Goldman referred to Comstock as the leader of America's "moral eunuchs". Comstock had numerous enemies, and in later years his health was affected by a severe blow to the head from an anonymous attacker. He lectured to college audiences and wrote newspaper articles to sustain his causes. Before his death, Comstock attracted the interest of a young law student, J. Edgar Hoover, who was interested in his causes and methods.

Through his various campaigns, he destroyed 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates for printing 'objectionable' books, and nearly 4,000,000 pictures. Comstock boasted that he was responsible for 4,000 arrests and claimed he drove fifteen persons to suicide in his "fight for the young".

A biography of Comstock written in 1927, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord by Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech of the Algonquin Round Table examines his personal history and his investigative, surveillance and law enforcement techniques.

Works

• Frauds Exposed (1880)
• Traps for the Young (1883)
• Gambling Outrages (1887)
• Morals Versus Art (1887)

He wrote numerous magazine articles relating to similar subjects.

References in fiction and culture

• Comstock is one of many prominent New Yorkers of his time that appear in the historical fiction novel The Alienist, by Caleb Carr.
• The protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Beautiful and Damned is named for Comstock by his own reformist grandfather. “Emulating the magnificent efforts of Anthony Comstock, after whom his grandson was named, he leveled a varied assortment of uppercuts and body-blows at liquor, literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres."
• James Branch Cabell was prosecuted on obscenity charges relating to his novel Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice after lobbying by the Society. Cabell retaliated with a chapbook entitled The Judging of Jurgen (later inserted into subsequent reprints of the novel), in which the title character is consigned to oblivion for being "obscene, lewd, lascivious and indecent" in a trial presided over by a dung beetle who swears "by Saint Anthony".
• Anthony Comstock is one of the four "point of view" characters in Marge Piercy's novel Sex Wars. Piercy explores Comstock's personal history and mindset as he goes from clerk to active "vice" suppressor.
• Comstock makes a cameo (rescued from a burning building) in Jack Finney's novel Time and Again.
• He is portrayed by Rod Steiger in the 1995 made for TV film Choices of the Heart: The Margaret Sanger Story.
• Comstock is the antagonist of the fictional midwife, Axie Muldoon in the novel, "My Notorious Life", by Kate Manning. The novel describes the career of a character loosely patterned on the life of Ann Trow Lohman, a women's health practitioner in the nineteenth century.
• The main antagonist of the 2013 video game BioShock Infinite was named Zachary Hale Comstock, the religious totalitarian ruler of the early 1900s flying city of Columbia. Known as "the Prophet," he leads a perfectionist driven society ridden with racism and propaganda, often portraying American-like patriotic symbols and Christianesque religious references. The aspect of Comstockery involving the broad censorship of society is a defining aspect of BioShock Infinite's antagonist Comstock, appearing to bring reference to the historical figure Anthony Comstock.

See also

• Birth control movement in the United States
• Comstock Act
• New York Society for the Suppression of Vice
• Jack Thompson (activist)

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