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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2025
Anthony Comstock is synonymous with the Gilded Age crusade against vice. The 1873 “Act of the Suppression of the Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” – better known, then and now, as the “Comstock Act” – secured its namesake’s enduring notoriety. Most federal laws with an appellation honor a congressional sponsor, or, in more recent years, a victim of the issue that the law aims to address. Only the Comstock Act memorializes a man who was both the chief civilian proponent of its passage and the government bureaucrat tasked with its enforcement.1
1 Gilded Age and Progressive Era statutes with congressional namesakes include the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), Mann Act (1910), and Volstead Act (1919).
2 Escoffier, Jeffrey, Strub, Whitney, and Colgan, Jeffrey Patrick, “The Comstock Apparatus,” in Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality and Governance in Modern U.S. History, ed. Canaday, Margot, Cott, Nancy F., and Self, Robert O. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 41–55 Google Scholar.
3 Escoffier, Strub, and Colgan, “Comstock Apparatus,” 48–52. On the variety of state obscenity laws and the lack of historical record surrounding their passage, see Bailey, Martha, “‘Momma’s Got the Pill’: How Anthony Comstock and Griswold v. Connecticut Shaped U.S. Childbearing,” American Economic Review 100 (Mar. 2010): 104–06CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brodie, Janet Farrell, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 257 Google Scholar, 266, 349 n.37.
4 Discussions of McAfee include, for example, Carpenter, Daniel P., The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 85 Google Scholar; Escoffier, Strub, and Colgan, “The Comstock Apparatus,” 54; Elizabeth Bainum Hovey, “Stamping out Smut: The Enforcement of Obscenity Laws, 1872–1915” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1998), 15–16, 174, 257–58; Werbel, Amy, Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 75, 220–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 “Jackson Bound Over,” Daily Democrat (Clinton, Missouri), Feb. 19, 1897. For what seems to be the only published photograph of McAfee, see “Chicago Loses Its Anthony Comstock,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 24, 1909.
6 Ruth W. McAfee to Ralph Ginzburg, Mar. 18, 1960, folder 5, box 15, Ralph Ginzburg Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.
7 Comstock’s notorious attack on the danse du ventre at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition is one such example. See Werbel, Lust on Trial, 233–41; Shirley J. Burton, “Obscene, Lewd, and Lascivious: Ida Craddock and the Criminally Obscene Women of Chicago, 1873–1913,” Michigan Historical Review 19 (Spring 1993): 1–7.
8 On Comstock’s strategic use of publicity, see Escoffier, Strub, and Colgan, “Comstock Apparatus,” 45, 55–56.
9 Biographical summary drawn from Necrological Reports and Annual Proceedings of the Alumni Association of the Princeton Theological Seminary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1919), 4:105; “From Woods-McAfee Memorial,” appended to McAfee to Ginzburg, Mar. 18, 1960.
10 Escoffier, Strub, and Colgan, “The Comstock Apparatus,” 53; Paul Charles Kemeny, The New England Watch and Ward Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). On immigration, see Nicola Kay Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 104–27Google Scholar.
11 “Guilty!” Oakland (California) Morning Times, May 8, 1892; “Bennett in Stripes,” San Francisco Call, Nov. 14, 1897.
12 Robert W. McAfee to J. H. Dulles, Nov. 9, 1908, Alumni File of Robert W. McAfee no. 1875, Special Collections, Wright Library, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey.
13 See Report of the Post-Master General of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1886), 138; Broun, Heywood and Leech, Margaret, Anthony Comstock, Roundsman of the Lord (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1927); 136–37Google Scholar; 220, 255–56; Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 84–88; Fuller, Wayne E., Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 231 Google Scholar; Werbel, Lust on Trial, 75–76. Based on a survey of government documents, three other names appear fleetingly as unsalaried inspectors, including Bennett (prior to his fall from grace), but Comstock and McAfee are the only mainstays. See the Official Register of the United States (published biennially by the Government Printing Office, 1873–1909); and the annual Post Office Rosters (1898–1909), entry 234, Records of the Post Office Department, Record Group 28, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Although Comstock and McAfee were eligible to earn witness fees, we know that Comstock turned his over to the NYSSV. See Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, 255–56.
14 Although Comstock and McAfee held a unique position in the Post Office, many government operations depended upon private-public partnerships in this period. See, for example, Masarik, Elizabeth Garner, The Sentimental State: How Women-Led Reform Built the American Welfare State (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2024)Google Scholar; Pearson, Susan J., The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laura Savarese, “Witnesses for the State: Children and the Making of Modern Evidence Law,” Law and History Review, May 13, 2024: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248024000099 (accessed June 12, 2024).
15 Western Society for the Suppression of Vice, Nineteenth Annual Report (Cincinnati, 1896), inside back cover, SCP 23911, Special Collections, Wright Library, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey.
16 Chattanooga Daily Times, Jan. 7, 1898; “Shepard Placed on Trial,” Salt Lake Herald, May 1, 1906. McAfee’s appointment caused – or at least coincided with – a major increase in obscenity arrests and indictments in Chicago and Illinois. Burton, “Obscene, Lewd, and Lascivious,” 15; Carpenter, Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 87.
17 For examples of this breadth, see, respectively, Shepard v. United States, 160 F. 584 (8th Cir. 1908); Grimm v. United States, 156 U.S. 604 (1895); Andrea Weingartner, “Sex Radicals in America’s Heartland: Redefining Gender and Sexuality, 1880–1910” (PhD diss., University of Missouri, 2013), 177–91; Shirley J. Burton, “Obscenity in Victorian America: Struggles over Definition and Concomitant Prosecutions in Chicago’s Federal Court, 1873–1913” (PhD diss., University of Illinois Chicago, 1991), 196; United States v. Moore, 19 F. 39 (N.D. Ill. 1883).
18 McAfee to Dulles, Nov. 9, 1908.
19 Western Society for the Suppression of Vice, 19th Annual Report (Cincinnati, 1896), supplemental insert, SCP 23910, Special Collections, Wright Library, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey.
20 On Breed, see Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (New York: Scribner, 1968), 7.
21 Western Society for the Suppression of Vice, 31st Annual Report (Cincinnati, 1908), 11, SCP 23913, Special Collections, Wright Library, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey.
22 Ex parte Jackson, 96 U.S. 727, 733, 735-36 (1878); Burton, “Obscenity in Victorian America,” 80, 195–96.
23 R. Frankenstein, Victim of Comstockism (Chicago: Wilson, 1894), 12; Grimm v. United States, 156 U.S. 604, 609-11 (1895). For judicial criticism of decoy letters, see United States v. Whittier, 28 F. Cas. 591 (C.C.E.D. Mo. 1878).
24 Fair Play (Valley Falls, Kansas), July 14, 1888.
25 Burton, “Obscenity in Victorian America,” 184–85; Burton, “Obscene, Lewd, and Lascivious,” 8. The prosecution of Ida Lincoln exemplifies this process. See United States v. Dr. Ida Lincoln alias Ladies’ Medical Home (May 8, 1899), box 168, entry 231, Record Group 28, NA-DC; United States v. Ida Lincoln (1899), Case #3050, box 83, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Criminal Case Files, National Archives, Chicago, Illinois.
26 “Gave Salary to Government,” Daily Review (Decatur, Illinois), Mar. 25, 1909; Necrological Reports, 4:105.
27 See Werbel, Lust on Trial, 268–78, 290–96.
28 On the movement for salarization, see Nicholas Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
29 33 Stat. 1257 (Mar. 3, 1905), ch. 1484, § 3679.
30 Official Opinions of the Assistant Attorneys General for the Post Office Department (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 4:243–47 (Opinion No. 1432, Nov. 8, 1906).
31 Official Register of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907), 2:14, 18.
32 Dana F. Angiers, secretary of the WSSV’s Chicago branch, stepped in to fill McAfee’s shoes as a salaried postal inspector, but his ambit seems to have evolved into general mail fraud, rather than obscenity in particular, as the WSSV “dropped from view” by the 1920s. Western Society for the Suppression of Vice, 31st Annual Report, inside front cover; “Promoted to Inspectors,” Evening Star (Washington, DC), July 10, 1911; “Unearthing Mail Frauds,” Brown County Democrat (Ainsworth, Nebraska), Aug. 30, 1929; Boyer, Purity in Print, 138.
33 “Anthony Comstock Dies in His Crusade,” New York Times, Sept. 22, 1915.
34 “John S. Sumner, Foe of Vice, Dies,” New York Times, June 2, 1971. See Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 131–34.
35 Siegel, Reva B. and Ziegler, Mary, “Comstockery: How Government Censorship Gave Birth to the Law of Sexual and Reproductive Freedom, and Again May Threaten It,” Yale Law Journal 134 (forthcoming 2024)Google Scholar, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4761751 (accessed June 11, 2024), 37–38, 58–67 (June 7, 2024 revision).
36 On 1930s cases and their impact, see Siegel and Ziegler, “Comstockery,” 53–60. On continued barriers and biases in reproductive healthcare, and on the emergence of the reproductive justice movement, see, for example, Luna, Zakiya, Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice (New York: New York University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nelson, Jennifer, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Reagan, Leslie J., When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973, rev. ed. (1996; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022)Google Scholar; Roberts, Dorothy, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2017)Google Scholar; Schoen, Johanna, Abortion after Roe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
37 For one example of how vice policing developed at the municipal level, see Lvovsky, Anna, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the endurance of private-public partnerships, see, for example, Balogh, Brian, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.