Made In America - Bill Bryson [201]
Among other Americanisms connected with sex we find red light district from the 1890s (it comes, as you might guess, from the practice of burning a red light in the front window of a brothel); hustler from 1900; floozie, trick, to be fast and loose, and cat house from the early 1900s; john for a prostitute’s customer, and call girl, both from the 1930s.28
Inevitably, all the loose talk of promiscuity and sexual assertiveness, and the growing availability of smut (an English dialect word related to smudge, and first recorded in 1722) in all its many forms brought forth a violent reaction. It was personified most vigorously in the beefy shape of Anthony Comstock, one of the most relentless hunters-down of vice America has ever produced.
A former salesman and shipping office clerk, Comstock had little education – he could barely read and write – but he knew what he didn’t like, which was more or less everything, including even jockstraps. As founder and first secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, he lobbied vigorously for a federal law against obscenity. The difficulty was that the Constitution reserved such matters for the states. The federal government could involve itself only in regard to interstate commerce, chiefly through the mail. In 1873 it passed what came immediately to be known as the Comstock Act. Described as ‘one of the most vicious and absurd measures ever to come before Congress’, it was passed after just ten minutes of debate. In the same year Comstock was appointed Special Agent for the US Post Office to enforce the new law, and he went to work with a vengeance.
In a single year, Comstock and his deputies impounded 134,000 lb. of books, 14,200 lb. of photographic plates, almost 200,000 photographs and drawings, 60,300 miscellaneous articles of rubber, 31,500 boxes of aphrodisiacal pills and potions, and 5,500 packs of playing-cards.29 Almost nothing escaped his ruthless quest to suppress vice wherever it arose. He even ordered the arrest of one woman for calling her husband a ‘spitzbub’, or rascal, on a postcard.
By 1915 it had become Comstock’s proud boast that his efforts had led to the imprisonment of 3,600 people and caused 15 suicides. Among those trampled by his zeal was one Ida Craddock, whose book The Wedding Night, a work of serious literature, had been found obscene by a jury that had not been allowed to read it.
Comstock’s efforts were in the long run largely counterproductive. His merciless bullying earned sympathy for many of his victims, and his efforts at suppression had an almost guaranteed effect of publicising the attacked object beyond the creator’s wildest dream, most notably in 1913 when he turned his guns on a mediocre painting by Paul Chabas called September Morn – which featured a young woman bathing naked in a lake – and made it a national sensation. Before the year was out practically every barber-shop and gas station in the country boasted a print.
Strangely, the one thing the Comstock Act did not do was define what constituted lewd, obscene or indecent material. Congress happily left such judgements to Comstock himself. Not until 1957 did the Supreme Court get around to considering the matter of obscenity, and then it was unable to make any more penetrating judgment than that it was material that appealed to ‘prurient interests’ and inflamed ‘lustful thoughts’. In effect it ruled that obscenity could be recognized but not defined – or as Justice Potter Stewart famously put it: ‘I know it when I see it.’30 In 1973 the court redefined obscene works as those that ‘appeal to the prurient interest, contain patently offensive conduct, and