Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [922]
The New York Committee, for its part, forced the American Medical Association to drop its plan for municipal regulation of prostitution. Instead the physicians agreed to advocate chastity as the best, indeed the only, defense against venereal disease. The New York Committee also launched petition campaigns demanding the age of consent be increased from ten, a figure that had come to seem shockingly low to the middle classes, whose members increasingly deferred the age of matrimony. Upward revision would also block brothels from legally recruiting scarcely adolescent girls, leading many working-class fathers along with the Knights of Labor to back the campaign. New York State raised the age of consent from ten to sixteen in 1889 and upped it again to eighteen in 1895—the only eastern state to do so. Now sexual behavior once merely improper was illegal.
For a short time, during the administrations of Mayors Grace and Hewitt—at the height of the transatlantic excitement over the Stead expose—purity crusaders also succeeded in getting the municipality to wage limited war on prostitution and gambling. In October 1886 Mayor Grace authorized police raids on leading concert saloons and on the West 27th Street brothels, even those under the protection of police Captain Alexander “Clubber” Williams. Mayor Hewitt continued the campaigns and drove many prostitutes out of the concert saloons, leading them to set up operations in tenements around the city.
But these efforts were of limited reach and effectiveness. They had no impact at all on brothels outside the Tenderloin, and within it the primary consequence of raids—which reformers called “shake-ups” and madams called “shake-downs”—was to increase the price of doing business, thus funneling additional funds to the Tammany machine.
To surmount such obstacles, purity reformers, like their charity counterparts, began gathering law enforcement into their own hands, establishing private preventive societies to ride herd on lax public officials. “In some degree,” the New York Times observed, “our voluntary associations for the prevention of various evils resemble vigilance committees, regulators, or lynch policemen.”
Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice (SSV) served as censorship squad. Armed with federal authority and the backing of Morris Jessup, J. P. Morgan, and other members of the Chamber of Commerce, Comstock patrolled library bookshelves, scrutinized the city’s printed pages for anything that might corrupt youthful morals, and kept would-be purveyors of birth control information in line.
Steadily expanding his definition of obscenity, Comstock began attacking art he deemed unfit for the public eye. “Nude paintings and statues,” he cautioned, “are the decoration of infamous resorts, and the law-abiding American will never admit them to the sacred confines of his home.” Lest passers-by be tempted by lascivious statuary in art gallery windows, Comstock warned dealers not to display naked pictures where the public could see them. In 1887, however, when he raided the Herman Knoedler Art Gallery on Fifth Avenue for violating this dictate, he was sharply rebuked by the Times and warned not to become “a social nuisance almost as pestilent as that which he exists to abate.” Comstock shrugged off such protests and pressed ahead. In 1890 he invaded the shop of Eugene Caret, a new art dealer on Broadway, and insisted he remove a photograph of an offending Rodin statue; the frightened dealer sold off his stock and left on the next boat.
Comstock’s SSV, along with Elbridge Gerry’s SPCC and Presbyterian minister Howard Crosby’s SPC (the Society for the Prevention of Crime he founded