Abstract of Book Project in Process:
American
Visual Culture during the Reign of Anthony Comstock
Between 1872 and 1915, Anthony Comstock confiscated and
destroyed a vast array of American visual culture intended to
inflame desire. During his forty-two years as Secretary of the
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) and
Inspector for the U.S. Postal Service, his haul of “obscenities”
included more than three million pictures and postcards; thirty
thousand negative, steel, and copper printing plates for books;
seven hundred pictures hung in saloons; three-and-a-half million
circulars; eighty-eight thousand newspapers advertising sexual
materials; and twenty thousand “figures and images.”
Most of Comstock’s raids took place in the vicinity of his
office in lower Manhattan, however thanks to far-reaching
telegraph wires his activities soon became a common topic of
conversation throughout the United States.
H.L. Mencken termed Comstock a “Puritan Gladiator” – the
most successful censor in American history – for his dogged and
relentless efforts to police the nation’s morals.
The ultimate failure of Comstock’s campaign to rid America of
arousing culture is inarguable – for all his labors men (and
some women) continued to produce and buy enormous and increasing
quantities of explicit images. Nevertheless, there can be little
doubt that his influence was profound.
Artists, photographers, gallery owners, collectors,
curators, publishers, theatrical promoters, saloon managers, and
private citizens all learned to analyze images through a
Comstockian lens, one that focused more on an image’s prurience
than its artistic value. Pornographers were forced to shift
their modes of production and distribution, and numerous
organizations formed both pro and con -- from the New England
Watch and Ward Society to the forerunners of the American Civil
Liberties Union.
While many Americans adopted self-censorship, others took
advantage of Comstock’s fame, and purposefully crafted
provocative displays designed to attract his prosecutorial
attention, and with it profitable news coverage.
By publicizing each new manifestation of vice, Comstock
unwittingly played a pivotal role in the evolution of indecency
as a hallmark of American modernity.
His aggressive tactics had another unintended
consequence: spurring legislatures and courts to reform judicial
procedures to better protect
a defendant’s rights and basic civil liberties.
Extensive and original research conducted in dozens of public
and private archives makes it possible for the first time to
fully tell the story of Comstock’s censorship of visual culture,
and to publish examples of the “obscenities” he suppressed.
American Visual
Culture during the Reign of Anthony Comstock offers an
unadulterated and surprising new view of the risqué behaviors,
beliefs, and complex sexualities of Americans in the Gilded Age
and the Progressive Era.
Comstock’s story offers profound lessons for the study of
American sexuality, culture, and art, as well as our nation’s
quest to live up to the promise of the First Amendment.