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One: The Vice Societies in the Nineteenth Century
- University of Wisconsin Press
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ONE The Vice Societies in the Nineteenth Century When Americans of the 1920S grew bored by Mah-Jongg, Lindbergh, or Wall Street, they frequently turned for diversion to the seemingly endless series of book censorship cases which punctuated the decade. D. H. Lawrence, James Branch Cabell, H. L. Mencken, and James Joyce-not to mention Voltaire, Petronius, Boccaccio, and Rabelais-all at one time or another fell under the ban, to a full accompaniment of fervent approval and outraged protest. Many of these censorship efforts proved upon examination to be the work of self-constituted organizations dedicated to the suppression of vice-particularly when "vice" appeared between the covers of a book. Gradually these vice societies, as they were called, came to typify mindless, prudish hostility 1 2 PURITY IN PRINT to creative literary endeavor. As these groups became the butt of ridicule, a somewhat distorted version of their history won general acceptance. According to this version, Americans until shortly after the Civil War enjoyed all manner of printed ribaldry in Edenlike innocence, untroubled by the serpent of censorship. But then, for reasons never fully explained, misguided groups of fanatics, busybodies, and repressed individuals had banded together to impose on the nation, by a variety of underhanded maneuvers, a rigid censorship which harrassed American literature for over fifty dark years. One may as well grant at the outset that the most famous early champion of the vice-society movement sufficiently resembles this caricature to lend it a certain plausibility. Anthony Comstock, who ranks with Thomas Bowdler in that select company of men whose names have become common nouns, was a centrally important vice-society figure whom students of book censorship ignore at their peril. Born in 1844 to devout Connecticut farm parents, this child of destiny arrived in New York City in 1867, a Civil War veteran with five dollars in his pocket. He tried his hand at clerking in a dry-goods store, but in 1872 realized his true calling when he noticed the shocking books and pictures his fellow-employees were surreptitiously passing about. Securing the arrest of one purveyor, Comstock at once began to publiCize his awful findings. Wealthy patrons rallied to his support and in 1873 joined him in founding the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the organization he led for over forty eventful years until his death in 1915. In the course of these four decades Anthony Comstock earned a permanent niche in the gallery of American folk heroes. His outlandish appearance-potbelly, thick neck, jutting jaw, mutton-chop whiskers-and vivid prose, lush with "Base Villains" and "Pathetic and Awful Cases," are legendary. He was devoid of humor, lustful after publiCity, and vastly ignorant. Still remembered are his impromptu belly-dance before a roomful of reporters in 1893 (to illustrate the evils of the Chicago World's Fair) and his 1906 Art Students' [44.211.228.24] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:16 GMT) THE VICE SOCIETmS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 3 League raid, which culminated in the daring arrest of a frightened young secretary. His 1913 attack on an obscure and charmingly innocent painting known as "September Morn" was parlayed into a fortune by shrewd promoters. Even the genuinely dramatic chapters in Comstock's life had their ludicrous tinge; his enemies once mailed him a package of smallpox scabs, but the ominous gift proved upon examination sterile and completely harmless.! Comstock's towering reputation seems in little danger of fading away. As recently as 1953 Margaret Anderson wrote that a 1917 issue of her Little Review had been "suppressed by Anthony Comstock." The magazine was censored, all right, but not by Comstock. In 1917 the venerable vice-hunter had been in his grave for two yearsl2 It seems clear that this man from New Canaan has so dominated our thinking about book censorship that we mustregretfully -leave his colorful personality aside in order to obtain a fresh view of the vice-society movement and the men behind it. We should be clear about the early history of these organizations, if only to comprehend fully the magnitude of their later fall. The vice-society movement was, in essence, a response to deep-seated fears about the drift of urban life in the postCivil War years. The origin of Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the first organization of its type in America, is illustrative. Throughout the nineteenth century, as today, New York City possessed a magnetic...