Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock by Amy Werbel (review)

Anthony Comstock stalked the landscape of art and literature so long in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that his surname inspired a new noun: Comstockery. Highly controversial in his own time, he is less controversial now as recent scholars have come to agree that Comstock is the finest example of all that is wrong about governmental controls on art. Fashion Institute of Technology Professor Amy Werbel's new book on Comstock is no exception. In fact, one of her main points, evident in the book's subtitle, is that Comstock's voluminous activities on behalf of purity had the opposite effect, contributing to both the rise in American taste for more explicit material as the late nineteenth century turned to the twentieth and to the movement seeking greater freedoms in expression. As she writes, "if the course of free speech in America demonstrates anything with clarity, it is that there certainly are times when a fierce and dogged opponent may in the end be a great gift" (299). Nor was this unclear at the time: Comstock's obituary in the New York Times noted that "controversy was the finest of advertising" (306).

Comstock has been studied by scholars for one hundred years. The earliest studies were written by censorship foes who ridiculed him and all censors as reactionary Puritans. That view held until Paul Boyer's 1968 Purity in Print began a more nuanced view. Boyer argued that Comstock and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice were reacting to urbanization and the disorder they saw in an increasingly diverse and open society. In the 1990s, scholars looked at Comstock's motivations through a variety of lenses, from gender and patriarchy to fears of race suicide. Some studied his effectiveness as a form of vigilantism able to arise in the absence of a strong state.

Werbel retains previous scholars' attention to the overall effect of Comstockery, but also focuses on the individuals targeted. To organize her study, she begins by grounding Comstock's unwavering and passionate censoriousness in his Connecticut upbringing and his experiences as a Union soldier. The book then moves chronologically through his amazingly prolific career, taking as its central organizational structure the three enormous volumes Comstock kept as records of his daily activities. Volume 1, encompassing his earliest and most effective censorial activities (1871 to 1884), is the basis of Chapter 3. Volume II, detailing his continuing zeal even when faced with growing resistance (1884 to 1895), forms the framework for Chapter 4. And Volume III, detailing the "demise of Comstockery" (1895 to 1915), rounds out Chapter 5. A "postmortem" conclusion offers Werbel's arguments about why Anthony Comstock matters today.

Werbel does a superb job of showing Comstock as rigid, uncompromising, unflinching, and unrelenting in tracking down his targets. He never let changing social mores get in his way, even as the world around him was "transforming with astonishing speed" and he cared nothing for the suffering he caused, as evidenced by more than a dozen suicides among his targets and the unhappiness within his own family (232). Like other scholars, Werbel shows that Comstockery, rather than succeeding, actually contributed to Americans' increasing acceptance of nudity. Overall, she persuasively argues that despite one's views of censorship, Comstock's story should tell us that attempts to control content on moral grounds via statute are not likely to succeed; that other methods, such as those chosen by the Young Men's Christian Association—providing moral instruction, healthy activities, and decent housing—were more effective, and that efforts to "put lust on trial" are "ultimately fruitless" (312). But there were positive outcomes: Comstock managed to "put art on page one" by attacking art instruction, and his actions spurred the creation of organizations that would be the forebears to the modern First Amendment bar and...