The Weeder in God’s Garden
A moral crusader from his early years, Anthony Comstock was born in New Canaan, Connecticut in 1844. His father, Thomas, was a prosperous farmer who also owned two sawmills. While the family had plenty of money, it was through the influence of Comstock’s fervent Congregationalist mother Polly, who like her husband had descended from Puritan stock, that the seven Comstock children led very austere lives marked by hard work, religious instruction, and precious little fun. Among his siblings, Anthony was the only one who clung fiercely to his mother’s fire and brimstone sensibilities. Polly died when Anthony was ten, but by then he knew full well Satan was a very real force in the world, and the only way to stay right with God was to remain pure in thought and deed, resisting the ever-present temptations presented by the Prince of Lies. Alcohol, tobacco, gambling and especially sex were all tickets straight to Hell, a belief he inflicted on everyone around him. This made him, no doubt, a very annoying child.
As a student in the local public school, Comstock never got a firm grasp on reading or spelling, which he considered useless anyway. He also found his growing sense of moral outrage enflamed by his fellow students, those godless little miscreants, who among other things would surreptitiously pass around ads for packs of those French playing cards with the pictures of the girls on them. No, the only education he needed he learned through the Old Testament stories his mother had read him, those tales of a vengeful God and the awful fate awaiting sinful, wicked men who ally themselves with the forces of evil.
When the Civil War broke out, Comstock, then 19, volunteered for the union army and was packed off to Florida. Much to his horror, he quickly discovered that certain Northern businesses, hoping to ease the burden of those proud soldiers willing to sacrifice everything in defense of, well, whatever it was, were in the habit of delivering shipments of not only whiskey and tobacco to the camps, but pornography as well. Although he saw precious little action, he immediately became an enormous pain in the ass to the fellow soldiers in his regiment. Forget about the Confederate army—it was the smoking, drinking, cursing and gambling among those in camp with him that would prove their downfall, and he let them know it on a daily basis. He would claim in his diary to have converted two or three of his fellow soldiers to the ways of righteousness, promising Comstock they would neither drink nor chew tobacco for the duration of the war. But given the evidence of his diary entries, it seems Comstock’s own wartime vice was porn.
In a 1863 diary entry he wrote: “Again tempted and found wanting…Sin, sin. Oh how much peace and happiness is sacrificed on thy altar.” Other entries make it clear the early morning temptations he failed to resist took the form of self abuse.
(In psychological terms, as history has shown time and again, Comstock’s weakness for porn is hardly a shock considering his coming crusade.)
Comstock was not exactly a wholly freelance operator when it came to his wartime proselytizing. He allied himself with The Christian Commission, a project spearheaded by the YMCA which sent missionaries to the front in order to try and save the souls of both Confederate and Union soldiers. His association with the Christian Commission would prove very profitable in the years following the war.
After leaving the army, Comstock moved to New York and took a job at a dry goods store in Manhattan. While most commentators seem baffled by Comstock’s decision to move to the very heart of American vice, a growing dirty metropolis where taverns, gambling join’s, contraceptive devices, prostitutes and erotic literature were all plentiful and accessible, his motivation as a crusader made the move an obvious one. If your self-appointed mission is to stamp out vice, then you go where the vice is.
And sure enough, the bookseller next door to the dry goods store where Comstock worked, a Mr. Conroy, did a brisk business selling pornographic pictures and erotica to those heathens deaf to the word of the Lord. Understandably outraged by this, Comstock entered the store, purchased an obscene book, brought it straight to the police and then led them to the man who sold it to him.
Although the police took Conroy into custody, the bookseller was soon free again and back to his godless business. Every time Comstock demanded the smut merchant be arrested, he was freed again in a matter of hours, convincing Comstock (and correctly) the cops were in cahoots with the city’s purveyors of vice, though this epiphany in no way tempered his holy mission.
Entrapment not being a major legal roadblock in the late 19th century, Comstock would use the same technique—making an illicit purchase, then fingering the seller—to wage his one-man war om smut peddlers throughout the city.
His tireless crusade soon not only earned Comstock coverage in the local papers, in 1872 it also brought him to the attention of the founders of the YMCA. It was the YMCA’s Christian Commission, after all, which had pushed for an amendment to the 1865 postal bill making it a misdemeanor to send obscene material through the mail. Impressed by Comstock’s efforts to eradicate vice, the YMCA’s brass began introducing the young zealot to a number of wealthy and powerful men around the city who who likewise felt something needed to be done about New York’s shocking moral degradation. Comstock seemed to be just the reformist warrior they were looking for. With their financial backing and political connections supporting him, Comstock founded The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
Under the guise of the NYSSV, and with the enthusiastic encouragement of local and federal politicians, wealthy conservatives, and evangelicals, Comstock expanded his efforts, demanding the confiscation of not only blatantly pornigraphic materials and the arrest of those who sold them, but the banning of books, artwork and plays he deemed obscene, though his definition of “obscene” was so broad and so vague it essentially boiled down to “anything Comstock didn’t like.” Over the years this would include medical textbooks, classic literature and newspaper editorials condemning his campaign. The efforts to ban works of art and literature willy-nully came to be known, in a term generally if inaccurately attributed to George Bernard Shaw, as “Comstockery.”
Although Comstock did have any number of outspoken enemies around town, especially among early civil libertarians and women’s rights groups, no one seemed capable of stopping, or even curtailing, his efforts. Because of this, his sense of personal invincibility grew, as did his political clout. People were scared to death of him, even if they hated him and everything he stood for. Cross Comstock, and you could find yourself in prison for sending a Mother’s Day card.
It’s been argued that Comstock’s war on obscene material was, at it’s core, really a war against contraception and abortion, given he argued that the reading of obscene materials inevitably led to the sort of behavior that would bring contraception and abortion into play. Inspired by the 1865 postal law, with the help of his political backers, in 1873 what came to be known as The Comstock Act was passed. The law not only forbade sending obscene material through the mail, but any product or information related to contraception or abortion. Three years later, the Comstock Act (aka The Comstock Law) was amended, its powers greatly expanded. The amended version read:
“Every obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, writing, print or other publication of an indecent character, and every article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion, and every article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent or immoral use, and every written or printed card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or of whom, or by what means, any of the hereinbefore mentioned matters, articles, or things may be obtained or made, and every letter upon the envelope of which, or postal card upon which, indecent, lewd, obscene, or lascivious delineations, epithets, terms, or language may be written or printed, are hereby declared to be non-mailable matter, and shall not be conveyed in the mails, nor delivered from any post-office, nor by any letter-carrier.”
After the Act was passed, Comstock was made a Special Agent of the US Postal Service, a position that gave him police powers and the right to carry a gun. Although he received no pay as a postal inspector, it was a position he undertook with gusto, as it granted him the power to make his own arrests without bringing those corrupt cops into it. Returning to the same technique he first used to nab that smut peddler Conroy, Comstock, under a false name, would order material through the mail that was covered under his namesake law, and upon receiving it, would order the arrest of the seller, who would then be charged with a federal offense. This included the publisher of anatomy textbooks, two journalists who had written a piece about the sexual improprieties of a well-known religious figure, even one activist who, as a test, had sent some of the Bible’s racier passages through the mail.
In Charles Gallaudet’s 1913 biography, Anthony Comstock, Fighter: Some Impressions of a Lifetime Adventure in Conflict with the Powers of Evil, Comstock would boast he had destroyed 284,000 pounds of printing plates used to create obscene books, 15 tons worth of printed material, nearly 100,000 “articles made of rubber for immoral purposes,” and millions of pornographic images.
It’s also been rumored, and I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if it was true, that in the process of destroying all that material, Comstock quietly squirreled away a massive secret personal library of confiscated books and images, which he would freely share with his wealthy and powerful friends
By his own account, Comstock arrested some four thousand people over the course of his four-decade career as a “weeder in God’s garden,” as he termed himself. Of these, no case received more press than the arrest of D.M. Bennett, a Free Thinker and publisher of The Truth Seeker magazine. As noted in its first issue, the magazine sought to promote "science, morals, free thought, free discussions, liberalism, sexual equality, labor reform progression, free education, and whatever tends to elevate and emancipate the human race.” This, needless to say, did not include religious zealots or self-righteous political opportunists, and so found itself in Comstock’s crosshairs.
Comstock had Bennett arrested for both sending a pamphlet advocating Free Love through the mail, and fore writing an editorial for his magazine entitled “An Open Letter to Jesus Christ.” At the close of the highly-publicized trial, Bennett was found guilty and sentenced to thirteen months in prison for violating The Comstock Act.
Comstock was also mighty proud his efforts had driven at least fifteen lost souls (again by his own reckoning) to commit suicide. One was an abortionist who’d been arrested for giving a bottle of pills to Comstock, after he approached her claiming to be the husband of a woman whose current pregnancy was putting her life at risk. Another was Ida Craddock, the author of several explicit marriage manuals, who was arrested after mailing them to her naive and confused customers. Craddock killed herself the day before reporting to federal prison, leaving behind a blistering note condemning Comstock and his supporters.
Comstock’s final arrest and court case came in January of 1915, when he arrested Bill Sanger, husband of pioneering feminist and contraception-rights activist Margaret Sanger, for distributing her pamphlet “Family Limitation.” Like most of those targeted by Comstock, Sanger was found guilty.
Although Comstock took aim at some worthwhile targets in his war on vice, including medical quackery and economic fraud, he will always be remembered as America’s foremost book-burner, a man whose influence would linger for half a century after his 1915 death. His postmortem influence over what Americans could and could not legally read or see would only be broken in June of 1964, when the Supreme Court ruled Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was not obscene.
Yeah, Anthony Comstock was a real asshole, a man utterly incapable of minding his own goddamn business. But like Joe McCarthy he still has his ardent supporters among the pro-life and evangelical set, pinch-faced types who pine for the days when abortionists were jailed and books they didn’t understand were burned. In fact one of Comstock’s devotees recently published a graphic novel based on the 1913 biography, which itself was turned into a crudely animated film for those True Believers who remain as illiterate as Comstock himself.
by Jim Knipfel