Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [806]
Jesup, himself a Connecticut immigrant of devout but impoverished background intent on imposing an unambiguous moral code on the metropolis, took an instant liking to Comstock. On May 9, 1872, Jesup invited him to meet a group of YMCA backers—leading businessmen (including J. P. Morgan), clergy, and lawyers, men as determined to restore decency to cultural affairs as political ones. They agreed to support his work as a vice fighter by giving him a stipend to supplement his income and a clerk.
Much buoyed by this powerful backing, Comstock now took on Victoria Woodhull, who had been more or less constantly pilloried since her emergence as a feminist spokesperson, with associates and relatives of Henry Ward Beecher prominent among the assailants. On November 2, 1872, she struck back with an article in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly intended to “burst like a bombshell into the ranks of the moralistic social camp.” That it did. Within hours New Yorkers were scrambling to read “The Beecher-Tilton Case,” in which Woodhull laid bare the story of Henry Ward Beecher’s adultery with Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of Theodore Tilton, one of his closest friends and associates.
Woodhull condemned not Beecher’s philandering but his hypocrisy. This was, after all, the minister who had maligned Jim Fisk as a “glaring meteor, abominable in his lusts and flagrant in his violation of public decency.” Indeed Woodhull praised Beecher’s “physical amativeness,” claiming him (with tongue in cheek) as a covert member of the Free Love ranks, and urging him to accept a leadership role in its future endeavors.
Beecher frostily ignored the piece, but Anthony Comstock did not. He approached the district attorney (a leading member of Beecher’s Plymouth Church) with a request for an arrest warrant on grounds that Woodhull and Claflin had violated state law by sending obscene literature—the exposes in the Weekly— through the mails. The DA found the argument compelling, and Comstock, in what would prove to be the opening salvo of a decades-long campaign to suppress public discussion of sexual matters, summoned two police officers to his aid, arrested both Woodhull and her sister, and had them incarcerated in the Tombs, where they spent the month of November. When released on bail in December, Woodhull promptly circulated the hot issue on the black market and gave a dramatically unrepentant speech. Comstock arrested her again. She got herself bailed out again. He grabbed her a third time in February, but after a June 1873 trial, a judge threw out the charges, saying the 1872 law didn’t apply to newspapers.
In 1872, while doing battle against Comstock and Beecher, Woodhull campaigned for President on the People’s Party ticket, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate. This scene, reprinted from M. F. Darwin’s pamphlet, “One Moral Standard for All,” depicts her nomination at Apollo Hall on May 10 of that year. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Woodhull now expanded her attacks on the sexual hypocrisy of New York’s male bourgeoisie. She publicly exposed the Rabelaisian masked balls—those gatherings of “the best men” and “the worst women in our city” in which the boxes of the Academy of Music were used “for the purpose of debauching debauched women; and the trustees of the Academy know this.”
While Woodhull pressed onward, Comstock pressed for stronger legislative weaponry. In January 1873, again with powerful YMCA backing, he traveled to Washington to lobby for federal legislation that would ban obscenity from the mails. His timing was excellent. The Grant administration, swamped by corruption scandals, was in no position to be seen supporting immorality. It didn’t hurt that federal authorities were more dependent than ever on access to New York capital, access controlled by the likes of YMCA stalwart J. P. Morgan. After Comstock exhibited some obscene books and postcards