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By Root 1633 0

the “suppression of vice” became active in many cities. The Boston Watch and Ward Society was particularly notorious. 36 Elite society fostered the movement and gave it the money it needed. The list of contributors to the Watch and Ward Society was practically a “roll call of the Brahmin aristocracy,” including the Cabots and the Lodges, who (according to the old joke) spoke only to each other, or to God.37 In New York, the YMCA was an active focus for the crusade. One of its members, a dry-goods salesman from Connecticut named Anthony Comstock, became totally obsessed with the campaign, making it his life’s work.38 (We have already quoted his views on corrupting the young.) Comstock’s ceaseless lobbying led to the first landmark achievement of the new movement, the so-called Comstock Law, which Congress enacted in 1873. Under this law it was a crime to send through the mails any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” book, or any “article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.”39

The Comstock Law was, in a way, the opening shot in the new campaign, a new phase in the never-ending legal struggle against the forces of the devil. Many states strengthened their own laws against obscenity. In Oregon, for example, it was a crime to give or sell to a minor “any book, pamphlet, magazine, newspaper, or other printed paper devoted to the publication ... of criminal news, police reports, or accounts of criminal deeds or pictures, and stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust, or crime.” In Ohio, an obscenity statute passed in 1885 made it a crime to distribute a newspaper or periodical “devoted to the publication of criminal news or police reports, accounts or stories of deeds of lust, immorality or crime”; even adults in Ohio had to be protected from this trash.40

The Comstock Law, and its state counterparts, were not the only victories in the battle. Sex laws were tightened, on paper, at least. This occurred, for example, with regard to the crime usually known as “statutory rape.” A man commits this crime when he has sex with a girl who, even though she says yes, is, legally speaking, too young for that sort of thing. The “age of consent” is the age that fixes the boundary between fornication and the much more serious crime of rape. The common law fixed the age (believe it or not) at ten. Toward the end of the century, the states began to raise the age; in California it went to fourteen in 1889, then to sixteen in 1897. The effect, of course, was to make teenage sex a serious crime.41 Even more dramatic changes were to take place in the early twentieth century. ab

There was also a renewed attack on gambling; this vice, like a deep-rooted garden weed, was hardy and could sprout back with amazing speed. The lottery was a particularly obnoxious form of weed: it was extremely “open and notorious,” and indeed, unlike other forms of gambling, it had the stamp of official approval. At one time, state lotteries had been very popular. The war on lotteries began early, as we have seen. The lottery survived in only a handful of states by the time of the Civil War. But as late as the 1870s, New Yorkers, for example, flocked to buy tickets in the Havana Lottery, the Kentucky State Lottery, and the Missouri State Lottery.42 In 1895, Congress took a decisive step against the lotteries: Congress made it illegal to sell lottery tickets across state lines, or through the mails, or to import lottery tickets from overseas; these provisions were a death blow to the (legal) lottery business.43ac

This period, too, developed a more rigid attitude toward what is now known somewhat stuffily as substance abuse, which does not, of course, mean abusing the substance but abusing the body with substances (namely, liquor or narcotics). Prohibition movements flared up again in the latter part of the century. Kansas embraced prohibition in 1881, putting the ban on liquor into its constitution. An amendment (section 10) to Article 15 of Kansas’s Constitution, adopted at a general election held on November 1, 1880, provided