AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

By this time in my little subjective history of the United States, a laundry list of the nations’s highs and lows, the things we should be proud of and the thing we should atone for, America is about a hundred years old. It’s not yet a world power. The big guns on Earth at the time were almost exclusively European. England and France ruled the lands and seas as far as their armies and navies could reach. Germany and Italy had very recently unified, becoming sovereign countries for the first time. Russia was a sleeping giant. China wanted to be left alone. Japan was so standoff-ish that it’d occasionally bombard a foreign ship that had wandered into its territorial waters.

The US was still about a half century away from becoming the geopolitical behemoth it remains to this day. Perceptive observers, though, might have sensed that this burgeoning industrial giant that was drawing in immigrants from every corner of the planet would be the next big thing.

Even though the first woman, Victoria Woodhull, had run for president in 1872, women for the most part were legally prevented from voting in this country. Susan B. Anthony, for one, tried to vote — illegally — in New York in the ’72 presidential election. She was arrested and charged. The judge, realizing she would go to the Supreme Court if he fined her, decided not to do so. Who knew what any activist Justices might have ruled. They might have okayed women’s suffrage, for chrissakes!

Susan B. Anthony

The world was changing.

And those in charge wanted to put the brakes on some of the change.  For instance, women were fast coming to the realization that they could be something more than baby incubators. Loads of men were aghast that so many women were availing themselves of the contraceptives of the day. Other women even had abortions. By golly, it all had to be stopped. On March 3, 1873, Congress passed the Act of Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, popularly known as the Comstock Law. The main thrust of the law was to prevent information about birth control to be sen via the US Mail.

Anthony Comstock was the secretary for the New York Society for ther Suppression of Vice. And there was no greater vice than that of a woman engaging in sex for any reason other than procreation. Pleasure? Enjoyment? Fulfillment? Simply other words for sin.

Comstock despised “libertines,” and dedicated his own life to making theirs hell. In fact, he often bragged about how many people he’d driven to suicide by hectoring, harassing, and otherwise terrorizing them for their pleasure-seeking ways.

Born in rural New Canaan, Connecticut in 1844, Comstock was raised by a strict, pious mother who fed him a steady diet of Bible stories. He grew up thinking he was destined to become a modern day David, fighting against the Goliath of sin and lewdness. He fought in the Civil War where his fellow Union soldiers mocked him for his over-the-top religious zeal.

Comstock

He moved to New York City where he worked as a salesman. Comstock was disgusted by the open suggestiveness of the day, the way women dressed and the smut in books and pictures. Hell, people in New York could buy postcards featuring women in languid pases, revealing their ankles and/or shoulders. And prostitutes! Good god in heaven, they seemed to be on every street corner. It was all too much for him. Comstock took it upon himself to feed the police information about bordellos, hooker strolls, gambling joints, and other deadfalls so they could make splashy busts. He’d often purchase what he considered obscene materials and then return to the shop with the police so they could arrest the seller. In other words, he was the city’s self-appointed hall monitor.

Vintage Pornography

In 1872, Comstock wrote a bill banning contraceptives and making the buying and selling as well as the exchange of information about them through the mail or across state lines illegal. His bill also targeted any and all forms of obscenity in books and poeridicals. Obscenity, in the bill, was not defined. But Comstock knew, in his heart, what it was — just about everything that smacked of enjoyment and gratification, and anything else he deemed to be alien. He moved to Washington, DC and began lobbying Congress to enact his law. He didn’t have to twist too many arms because the House and the Senate quickly passed his draft law, pretty much verbatim. At the same time, Congress appointed Comstock an at-large postal inspector. He became, for all intents and purposes, the nation‘s hall monitor.

Contraception and, of course, abortion, for the next fifty years and more were virtually outlawed in most states. It wasn’t until Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 and traveled the country as an evangelist for birth control that things started, slowly, to change. It took another 56 years for the US Supreme Court to rule women had a right to abortion and then a further fifty years before the Court reversed itself and allowed the states to outlaw abortion again.

Sanger

The spirit of Anthony Comstock remains strong to this day.

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The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.