No. 600
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
March 30, 2023

Comstockery.

Anthony Comstock was on a personal mission to protect America from vice.
May 1, 2012
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Via Newspapers.comThis week, we visit a haunted house that has a bit of Mystery Blood thrown in.  The "Glen Elder Sentinel," August 20, 1903:A remarkable ghost sensation is disturbing the serenity of St. Peter Port, Guernsey, where a local photographer has just vacated his residence on the ground that he and members of his family have been terrified by supernatural visitations. The photographer
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Strange Company - 3/29/2023
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When Patrick  H. Doherty joined the Fall River Police Department in 1885, he might have been astounded to learn that he would be involved one day in two notorious murder cases- both involving hatchets and axes.  Patrick Doherty was born in Peoria, Illinois on August 10, 1859 to John and Mary Walsh Doherty.  Later the family moved east to Fall River, and we find Patrick Doherty living at 104 Columbia St. (off South Main) and working as a laborer for a time employed by Fall River Iron Works and the Fall River Line steamboat company.  He married Honora (Nora) E. Coughlin on April 25, 1887 at the age of 28, when he was employed at the Fall River Police Department as a patrolman.  The couple would have seven children:  Charles T., Frank., Grace, Robert, Helene, Margaret (called Marguerite), and John. Doherty, (as were several other patrolmen), was promoted to the rank of captain after their work in the case of the century, the Borden Murders of 1892.  Doherty had arrived at #92 after George Allen on the morning of the murders, and was very quickly in the thick of the action, questioning Lizzie upstairs, looking at the bodies with Dr. Dolan, running down to Smith’s pharmacy with Officer Harrington  to question Eli Bence, prowling the cellar for weapons with Medley, Fleet and Dr. Bowen, and making note of Lizzie’s dress.  Doherty stayed on the job on watch at the Borden house until he was relieved at 9 p.m.  When it came time for the inquest, it was Doherty who slipped down to 95 Division St. to collect Bridget, who had been staying with her cousin, Patrick Harrington after the murders.  He would testify at the Preliminary and the 1893 trial in New Bedford. In the midst of the excitement in New Bedford as Lizzie’s trial was about to get underway, yet another hatchet killing took over the front page, the murder of Bertha Manchester on May 30th.  It was a brutal attack to rival the Borden’s with the weapon being most likely a short-handled axe or possibly a hatchet. Doherty went out to the Manchester place with Marshal Hilliard, Captains Desmond, and Connors and Inspector Perron  on June 6th with the  suspect, Jose Correa de Mello, who revealed his hiding place for the stolen  watch taken from the victim and her purse at that time.  De Mello served time and then was sent back to the Azores, banned from stepping upon U.S. soil again. The Dohertys moved to 1007 Rock St. in 1897 and Patrick was pleased to walk his daughter Margaret (Marguerite) down the aisle in 1913. Patrick Doherty retired from the force in 1915 and succumbed to interstitial nephritis on June 28, 1915.. He, and some of his children are buried in St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Fall River. Resources: Ancestry.com, Parallel Lives,: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and her Fall River, Find-a-Grave.com. and Yesterday in Old Fall River: A Lizzie Borden Companion Fall River Globe June 28, 1915
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 3/3/2023
Bernard Gussow was born in Russia in 1881. But by 1900 he’d made it to the Lower East Side, where he was described as an “East Side artist” in a New York Times article about paintings he displayed at an art show at the Educational Alliance settlement house on East Broadway. [“Subway Steps”] Gussow would […]
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Ephemeral New York - 3/27/2023
An article I recently wrote for the British online magazine, New Politic, is now available online. The article, “The Criminal Origins of the United States of America,” is about British convict transportation to America, which took place between the years 1718 and 1775, and is the subject of my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: […]
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Early American Crime - 12/17/2021
 17-year-old James E. Nowlin murdered George Codman in a Massachusetts stable in January 1887. Then he took an axe and chopped Codman’s body into pieces. As he traveled home in a sleigh, he threw the pieces into the snow along the road.Read the full story here: Massachusetts Butchery.
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Murder By Gaslight - 3/25/2023
Roped-inOmaha Daily BeeJune 25, 1884(Click image to enlarge)  OSSIBLE VICTIM OF THE JEFFERSON R. SMITH GANG.  Omaha Daily Bee June 25, 1884 COLORADO. Col. Fletcher, a tourist from Boston, was roped-in by the bunko men of Denver and relieved of $1,000. NOTES: $1,000.00 in 1884 is the equivalent of $33,472.95 in 2023. According to the Rocky Mountain News there were at least two,
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 3/12/2023
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately engaged as a carrier of wine, because he and his brother, with the help of […]
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
The Feejee Mermaid. | Sharkey Escapes!

Comstockery.

Anthony Comstock, founder of The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was on a personal mission to protect America’s youth from any art or literature which he deemed objectionable. His name became so tightly bound to the war on smut that one of Comstock’s famous targets, George Bernard Shaw, named this peculiarly American censorship crusade, “Comstockery.”

comstock Anthony Comstock

Comstock first became interested in dirty books in1868 after a friend of his contracted a venereal disease from a visit to a brothel.  Comstock believed that his friend’s moral downfall had begun with the purchase of an obscene book. He paid a visit to the bookseller, purchased and obscene book himself, then reported the transaction to the police and had the seller arrested.

NYSSV NYSSV

Comstock repeated this operation in bookstores throughout New York City and in 1872 he got the attention of the Young Men’s Christian Association, whose Committee for the Suppression of Vice was perusing an anti-smut campaign of its own. The committee funded Comstock’s crusade and eventually became an independent organization, New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, with Comstock as its head. The NYSSV became a quasi-official law enforcement organization and under its aegis, Comstock arrested at least three thousand people for obscenity.

The campaign was begun to protect American youth from the corrupting influence of lower-class pornography, but Comstock soon realized that some literary classics also contained corrupting influences. He expanded his campaign against smut to include authors such as Ovid, Boccaccio, and Walt Whitman. When it became clear that not all of Comstock’s financial backers would agree to the banning of classics, Comstock explained that it was not the works, per se, that were objectionable, but how they were presented to the public, saying:

“These works, heretofore carefully concealed from public view, and kept by booksellers only to meet what some consider the legitimate demand of the student, or gentlemen’s library, are now advertised and sold by certain parties as “rich, rare, and racy” books, “amorous adventures,” “spicy descriptions,” “love intrigues on the sly,” etc.”

Nude-Art

Comstock had a similar approach to the visual arts: he did not object to elite society viewing nude paintings in the context of a museum, but when a gallery began selling photographic reproductions of nude paintings to the masses, he shut them down.

In 1873 Comstock and his organization sponsored a set of federal laws—commonly known as the “Comstock Laws”—which made it a federal crime to send “obscene, nude or lascivious” material through the U. S. Mail. This included information about birth control and abortion. Anthony Comstock was appointed a special agent of the Post Office to enforce the laws.

While publications like The National Police Gazette still routinely ran advertisements for racy pictures, abortifacients, and rubber goods (condoms), Comstock claimed to have seized 130,000 pounds of books, 194,000 “bad” pictures, 5,500 indecent playing cards, and 3,150 pills and powders used by abortionists, in the first year alone.

Comstock2

Expanding the campaign to include birth control and abortion set him against a whole new class of notorious opponents. Pretending to be seeking birth control information for his wife, Comstock entrapped Madame Restell, New York’s most infamous abortionist. While out on bail she committed suicide by cutting her throat. He brought legal proceedings against George Bernard Shaw and got the city of New York to ban Margaret Sanger’s work on family planning. When free love advocate, Victoria Woodhull, published a story charging Reverend Henry Ward Beecher with adultery, Comstock had her arrested. Woodhull, who at the time was the presidential candidate for the short-lived Equal Rights Party, had to spend Election Day in jail.

Comstock fought his last battle in San Francisco while attending the International Purity Congress. He initiated prosecution against a San Francisco department store for dressing nude mannequins in the store window in public view. He lost the case and never recovered from the ridicule that it generated.

Though Anthony Comstock died in 1915, his laws lived on. The Comstock Laws were not fully repealed until the 1990s.

 

  


Sources:

 

  • Beisel, Nicola Kay. Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and family reproduction in Victorian America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.
  • Miller, Neil. Banned in Boston: the Watch and Ward Society's crusade against books, burlesque, and the social evil. Boston: Beacon Press, 2010.
  • Sante, Luc. Low life: lures and snares of old New York. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991.