Anthony Comstock: Junk Mail Justice
Read Chapter 4: The Pirates of Park Row, or view all previous Junk Mail America history articles.
Anthony Comstock had two things in common with J.M. Pattee. One that he was brought up on a farm, the other that he left it. But they emerged with different world views.
Comstock, whose mother died when he was 10, had happy memories of day-long church services followed by warm cherry pie at home. Yet the religion he embraced was an intolerant one. He broke into a tavern at age 17, “opened the faucets and drained off on to the floor every drop of liquor in the place.”
He brought this moral ardor to the Army, where he lectured fellow soldiers about blasphemy and drink, and to the rooming houses he inhabited in New York after the war while working as a dry goods clerk. Some male boarders enjoyed “obscene pictures and literature,” and the thought of it brought him to tears.
Combining morality with an eye for the main chance, Comstock found out where one fallen soul had bought such books—a basement on Warren St.—and went there to purchase one himself. He then tipped off the police, and watched as they arrested the seller Charles Conroy.
This was the first of several actions as a vigilante. Comstock, although still working as a clerk, gained notoriety and the support of moralists like the banker Warren K. Jessup. With their help, he took over the YMCA Committee for the Suppression of Vice, and started a ledger of all the police actions he instigated.
When Conroy was arrested for the second time, Comstock recorded his age (36), his nationality (Irish), his religion (Catholic), his education (Common), his offense (obscene books and circulars) and the disposition of his case ("Through mismanagement of Police & ignorance of law he was discharged"), and he did the same with young John Gordon (“education poor"): "As some 40 ladies were leaving the Harlem boat at Fulton Market slip, this scoundrel jumped up on the fish crates lying on slip and made a gross exhibition of himself."
But there were bigger things in the offing. It was the winter of 1873. Congress, preoccupied with Credit Mobilier, was taking its sweet time passing a bill to ban obscenity from the mails. Comstock toured Congressional offices with his collection of lurid pictures. Historians disagree on the impact he had, but one thing is certain: On March 2, the House passed the bill later known as the Comstock Act, and Comstock was appointed as an unpaid special agent of the post office.
Now empowered by a badge, Comstock took it upon himself to decide what obscenity was, and he saw it in everything from birth control literature to art. “Anthony Comstock apparently had a mind which was unable to distinguish between indecencies and sex hygiene,” the Voluntary Parenthood League said in a 1919 direct mail piece. “He reflected and even magnified the perverted idea, handed down from the days of asceticism, that anything relating to sex is low.”
This moral certitude was accompanied by a mean streak. Comstock bullied people, and was known to pull a gun even on unarmed women. One regular target was Charles Conroy, who in 1874 found himself being arrested for the third time. He decided he’d had enough. “While whining in pathetic tones, Conroy plunged his dirk into my face, severing four arteries,” wrote Comstock, who completed the arrest at gunpoint, and then was guided home by “the same One who has ever kept me.”
Conroy drew a two-year jail term for assault with intent to kill, and Comstock grew muttonchop whiskers to disguise the scar tissue. And they were hardly done with each other, for as Haywood Broun wrote, Comstock was “truculent and gave ground to no man.”
The YMCA committee was by now known as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and Comstock was its secretary, a law unto himself. Too famous to entrap people in person, as he had done with Conroy, he took to doing it by mail. For example, he ordered a catalog of birth control devices, and when it arrived arrested the sender for selling obscene literature.
Some critics disapproved of entrapment. “It remains a grave question whether Government may employ agents to stimulate commission of offences for the purpose of punishing the acts done,” The New York Times wrote in an editorial. But Comstock persisted. And he noticed something: That every time he mailed a letter to a suspect, he was deluged with circulars from other illegal enterprises. He concluded that anyone who replied to an advertisement “is liable to have a large circle of correspondents. The name once obtained must go the round of the fraternity, and, when thus used, is either kept for a new scheme by the same fraud or else sold to another one of the brotherhood.”
Comstock thus discovered the mailing list business, and he set out to document its practices. He found, for one thing, that smut peddlers often got names from boarding school catalogues.
“At last the child reaches the school, and his or her name appears upon the roll and is printed in the catalogue,” he wrote. “These catalogues are sought for by those who send circulars through the mails advertising obscene and unlawful wares.”
Lists could also be built by “buying old letters from other dealers for the sake of the names, or by sending circulars to postal clerks and others through the country, offering prizes for a list of the names of youth of both sexes twenty-one years of age, or by purchasing addressed envelopes of those who make a business of collecting names, and then addressing envelopes to supply parties doing business through the mails,” Comstock added.
Comstock was mostly trying to protect the youth, but he also stumbled onto schemes aimed at adults—very foolish adults:
“Dear Sir:—If you have no conscientious scruples regarding how men get money, I write to say that I am in a position to supply you with an ‘article that—for commercial purposes—is as good as gold,” said a typical letter of this genre.
If the reader was too dense to grasp what he was being offered, an attached clipping, looking like it came right out of the New York Sun newspaper, would set him straight.
“A COUNTERFEITER GOES FREE”
“The country flooded with $2.000,,000,000 of counterfeit money in the past year, and pronounced by Government experts to be as good as the genuine greenback.”
Most people got little mail of any kind, let alone letters from a stranger inviting them to commit a crime. But the note stated a truth obvious to many in that age of robber barons—“People are growing rich around you every day (no one knows why), why not you?”
After getting and passing a sample—usually a genuine one-dollar bill—the would-be millionaire would muster whatever money he had for ten times that amount in counterfeit notes (there was a sliding scale through which the customer received a better percentage the more he paid).
Unfortunately, on that happy day his order arrived by express mail, he would tear open the box to find not the greenbacks he expected, but sawdust or strips of green paper. To whom was he going to complain? Certainly not Comstock. “Any person who sends money for counterfeit money should lose every cent of it,” he wrote.
The vice crusader summed it up for anyone who didn’t get it. “The circular sent through the mail is sent for purpose of obtaining money from the recipient for the benefit of the sender of the circular.”
But there was an even bigger fraud going on, and Comstock was urged to fight it by an unlikely supporter. The New York Times, which had condemned his practice of entrapping people, now recanted. “If Anthony Comstock’s decoy system of obtaining evidence is ever justifiable, it is so when employed against the thieving lottery concerns,” it said in an editorial.
The call to duty had been sounded. And Comstock, who professed to live by the Talmudic saying, “Where no man is, be thou a man," was ready.
NEXT WEEK: The Great Chase
Copyright 2008 by Ray Schultz
