Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [807]
To enforce the act, Congress instituted the office of special agent of the United States Post Office and gave the job to Comstock. He accepted it, without pay, and would keep it for the next forty-one years of a career devoted (as he said) to hunting down violators “as you hunt rats, without mercy.” Roaming New York City—and, by rail, other cities—armed with warrants, revolver, and handcuffs, he broke down doors, arrested the inhabitants, and confiscated smut. By January 1874 he had seized a small mountain of it—130,000 pounds of books, 194,000 “bad pictures and photographs,” and fifty-five hundred indecent playing cards. No publishers were safe—even those previously considered respectable. Comstock kept Frank Leslie, editor of the well-known weekly, under arrest for advertising obscene books until Leslie promised not to print whatever he disapproved of. He arrested the editor of Fireside Companion for issuing dime novels that Comstock found excessively racy (in later years, Horatio Alger would find his works proscribed).
Comstock steadily broadened his definitions of obscenity. He banned any depiction, no matter how indirect, of the act of intercourse; one arrestee “had box containing figures of hen and rooster which by pulling out lid placed it in indecent posture and was offensive to decency.” He banned any discussion of sexual acts, words for sexual parts, or overly frank discussion of changes in the institution of marriage. He arrested Dr. E. B. Foote, author of Medical Common Sense, a book filled with criticism of sexual taboos that had, by 1870, sold 250,000 copies. “Obscene,” said Comstock, and his was the opinion that counted.
Comstock’s backers were a bit dismayed by this whirlwind of action, especially as some of it generated bad publicity for the YMCA. But they had no intention of abandoning their urban vigilante: though nervous at the notoriety, they applauded the action. After generations of fruitless exhortation, here was someone who would, if need be, coerce people into proper behavior. The Times too applauded the assumption of public power into private hands; true, it resembled the work of “vigilance committees, regulators, or lynch policemen,” but that was a point in its favor.
Still, this was not the sort of image appropriate to the YMCA. The solution was to cut Comstock loose and set up a new organization just to support his crusade. In May 1873 the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice was incorporated, with Anthony Comstock as agent and secretary. Behind him was a blue ribbon board. It included Jesup, J. P. Morgan, William Dodge Jr. (heir to the Phelps-Dodge copper fortune), Samuel Colgate (head of the New Jersey soap business), Alfred S. Barnes (the textbook publisher), and lawyer William C. Beecher (Henry Ward’s son).
Comstock now expanded his purview to encompass the behavior of New York’s bourgeois women.
“THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS
After the war the American Medical Association had renewed its prewar efforts to suppress abortion. Doctors asserted abortion was morally wrong, in itself and because it helped women evade their maternal duties. An 1868 study found perhaps two hundred full-time abortionists at work in the metropolis and estimated that one out of five New York City pregnancies ended in abortion. This latter number—which included many reputable married females of the better classes—suggested a widespread selfishness, claimed Dr. Horatio Storer, a leader of the crusade to punish both those who performed the operation and the women who sought it. Ladies, Storer said, were aborting simply to seek “the pleasures of a summer’s trips and amusements.” By diminishing the native Protestant birth rate, moreover, they were allowing immigrant Catholics to advance demographically. It was time, therefore, to reaffirm that woman’s place was in the nursery,