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Anthony Comstock was an anti-vice activist, United States Postal Inspector, and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who was dedicated to upholding Christian morality. He opposed obscene literature, abortion, contraception, masturbation, gambling, prostitution, and patent medicine.

Anthony Comstock (March 7, 1844 – September 21, 1915) was an anti-vice activist, United States Postal Inspector, and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), who was dedicated to upholding Christian morality. He opposed obscene literature, abortion, contraception, masturbation, gambling, prostitution, and patent medicine. The terms comstockery and comstockism refer to his extensive censorship campaign of materials that he considered obscene, including birth control advertised or sent by mail. He used his positions in the U.S. Postal Service and the NYSSV (in association with the New York police) to make numerous arrests for obscenity and gambling. Besides these pursuits, he was also involved in efforts to suppress fraudulent banking schemes, mail swindles, and medical quackery.[2]

Life and work

Coat of Arms of Anthony Comstock

Comstock was born in New Canaan, Connecticut, the son of Polly Ann (née Lockwood) and Thomas Anthony Comstock.[3][4] As a young man, he enlisted and fought for the Union in the American Civil War from December 1863 to September 1865.[3] He served without incident in Company H, 17th Connecticut Infantry,[3] but he objected to the profanity used by his fellow soldiers.[5]

In 1867, he moved to New York City, where he worked as a porter, a stock clerk, and a wholesale dry goods salesman.[3] He also worked for the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in New York City.[6] On March 5, 1873, he was appointed a special agent of the U.S. Postal Service, a position he held until January 1907.[3]

Comstock lived in Summit, New Jersey, from 1880 to 1915.[7] In 1892, he built a house at 35 Beekman Road, where he lived until he died there in 1915.[8]

Comstock wrote three books whose theme was the oppression of vice: Frauds Exposed; or, How the People Are Deceived and Robbed, and Youth Corrupted (New York: J. Howard Brown, 1880); Traps for the Young (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1883); and Morals versus Art (New York: J. S. Ogilvie and Company, 1877).[9]

Efforts for censorship

Christian religiosity

Motivated by first-hand experience with what he saw as a constant barrage of debauchery among fellow Union soldiers during the Civil War, when he gained power it was not long before Comstock aroused intense loathing from early civil liberties groups and strong support from church-based groups that were worried about public morals.[6] Comstock, the self-styled "weeder in God's garden", arrested D. M. Bennett for publishing "An Open Letter to Jesus Christ" and later had the editor charged for mailing a free-love pamphlet. Bennett was prosecuted, subjected to a widely publicized trial, and imprisoned in the Albany Penitentiary.[10]

During his career, Comstock made many and diverse enemies, such as Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger. In her autobiography, Goldman referred to Comstock as the leader of America's "moral eunuchs." In later years his health was affected by a severe blow to the head from an anonymous attacker. He lectured to college audiences and wrote newspaper articles to sustain his causes. Before his death, Comstock attracted the interest of a young law student, J. Edgar Hoover, who showed interest in his causes and methods.[11]

U.S. government services

In 1873, Comstock created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an institution dedicated to moral supervision of the American public.[6] Later that year, Comstock successfully influenced the United States Congress to pass the Comstock Laws, which made illegal the delivery by U.S. mail, or by other modes of transportation, of "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material, as well as prohibiting any methods of production or publication of information pertaining to the procurement of abortion, the prevention of conception and the prevention of venereal disease.[12]

Some of Comstock's ideas of what were "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" could be seen by many modern Westerners as quite broad; during his time of greatest power, some anatomy textbooks were prohibited from being sent to medical students by the United States Postal Service.[5][6]

1887 letter from Anthony Comstock to Josiah Leeds.

He was a savvy political insider in New York City and was made a special agent of the United States Postal Service with police-level powers, including the right to carry a weapon. With this power, he prosecuted those that he suspected of either public distribution of pornography or commercial fraud. He was also involved in shutting down the Louisiana Lottery, which was the only legal lottery in the United States at the time and was notorious for corruption.[6]

Opposing suffragettes

Comstock was also opposed to woman suffragists, notably Victoria Claflin Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Celeste Claflin. The men's journal The Days' Doings popularized images of the sisters for three years and was instructed by its editor (while Comstock was present) to stop producing lewd images. Comstock also took legal action against the paper for advertising contraceptives. After the sisters published an exposé of an adulterous affair between the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton, he had the sisters arrested under laws forbidding the use of the postal service to distribute "obscene material", specifically citing a mangled quotation from the Bible that Comstock found obscene. They were later acquitted of the charges.[13]

Less fortunate was Ida Craddock, who died by suicide on the eve of reporting to federal prison for distributing via the U.S. mail various sexually explicit marriage manuals that she had written.[13] Her final work was a lengthy public suicide note specifically condemning Comstock.

Comstock also arrested the prominent abortion care provider Madame Restell. In 1878, he posed as a customer seeking birth control for his wife. Restell provided him with pills and he returned the next day with the police, and arrested her. Rather than face the resulting trial, she committed suicide soon after it began.[14]

Destruction of books

Through his various campaigns, he destroyed 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates for printing "objectionable" books, and nearly 4,000,000 pictures.[5] He claimed that "books are feeders for brothels."[15]

Comstock boasted that he was responsible for 4,000 arrests[16] and claimed he drove 15 persons to suicide in his "fight for the young".[17]

Death

On September 21, 1915, Comstock died of pneumonia at the age of 71 at his home in Summit, New Jersey.[18]

Works

Frauds Exposed (1880)

Traps for the Young (1883)

Gambling Outrages (1887)

Morals Versus Art (1887)

He wrote numerous magazine articles relating to similar subjects.

Legacy

The term "comstockery", meaning "censorship because of perceived obscenity or immorality", was coined in an editorial in The New York Times in 1895.[19] George Bernard Shaw used the term in 1905 after Comstock had alerted the New York City police to the content of Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession. Shaw remarked that "Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all."[6] Comstock thought of Shaw as an "Irish smut dealer."[20] He is thought to be a major influence for the main antagonist of BioShock Infinite, Zachary Hale Comstock, as they share the same last names and have numerous idealogical similarities.

Biographies

Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord by Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech of the Algonquin Round Table examines his personal history and his investigative, surveillance, and law enforcement techniques. It was written in 1927.

Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock presents a colorful journey through Comstock’s career that doubles as a new history of post–Civil War America’s risqué visual and sexual culture.[21] It was written by Dr. Amy B. Werbel[22] and published by Columbia University Press in 2018.

The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, And Civil Liberties In The Gilded Age focuses on Comstock's impacts on society, the Comstock Laws, and eight women charged with violating the law.[23] It was written by Amy Sohn and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2021.[24]

See also

Biography portal

Birth control movement in the United States

Comstock Act

New York Society for the Suppression of Vice

Jack Thompson (activist)

Anthony Comstock was a US postal inspector and politician who advocated for the suppression of obscenity and vice throughout the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Comstock considered any sexually explicit material like pornography and literature related to birth control and abortion as obscene. In 1873, Comstock lobbied US Congress to pass an anti-obscenity law titled “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” also called the Comstock Act. The law penalized individuals for sending material classified as obscene through the US postal services, which Comstock, as a special agent of the United States Post Office, could enforce. Comstock’s role in passing and enforcing the Comstock Act influenced the social and political restriction of birth control, hindering women’s access to contraceptives.

Comstock was born on 7 March 1844 to Polly Ann Lockwood and Thomas Anthony Comstock in New Canaan, Connecticut. He was one of ten children, of which seven survived to adulthood. Comstock’s mother and father owned a farm. Comstock’s father expanded his farm to 160-acres, employed farm hands, and owned two sawmills. According to Comstock’s biographer, Anna Bates, Comstock’s father focused on his business, which led to Comstock’s mother to have a stronger influence on raising him and his siblings.

Comstock had a religious upbringing. Comstock’s parents attended the New Canaan Congregational Church in New Canaan, Connecticut. His father led a daily prayer service, his mother attended all-day services, and his family attended church every Sunday. Comstock’s mother read bible stories to her children, and biographers noted that she emphasized the importance of maintaining purity, resisting temptation, and following God’s words. Comstock’s teachers at the New Canaan district school instructed the students to recite bible verses during class. In 1854, Comstock’s mother and Theophilus Smith, the reverend of the New Canaan Congregational Church, died. According to Bates, those deaths traumatized Comstock and strengthened his resolve to follow his religious education.

After the New Canaan district school, Comstock attended the New Academy run by the New Canaan Congregational School where he learned to write. Comstock then attended the New Britain high school in New Britain, Connecticut. Comstock attended high school intermittently until 1862, at which point he became a clerk in a general store in Winnipauk, Connecticut. While working at the general store, Comstock tried to convince the town sheriff to close down the local saloon for opening on Sundays and illicitly selling alcohol to women and children. When the sheriff ignored his complaints, Comstock drained all the saloon’s alcohol barrels and threatened to destroy the saloon. Following Comstock’s actions, the owner of the saloon closed and left town.

In 1863, Comstock voluntarily enlisted in the Union Army during the US Civil War after his older brother died in battle. According to Bates, Comstock viewed the war as a moral battle against slavery, which he believed was cruel. She stated that Comstock’s near-death experiences in the army increased his resolve to complete God’s work. Furthermore, Comstock’s enlistment provided him with money that he used to support his younger siblings, as his father had gone into debt after the death of his wife and creditors had taken the farm. During his time in the army, Comstock opposed the drinking, gambling, and smoking of his fellow comrades. Comstock poured his cup of whisky, which soldiers received as part of their daily meal, onto the ground instead of giving it to another soldier because he claimed that the consumption of alcohol was immoral.

After being discharged from the army in the summer of 1865, Comstock moved to New York City, New York, to become a dry goods merchant. He worked first as a porter for a company called Ammidon, Lane, and Company, and later as a shipping clerk for the same company. While working in New York, Comstock lived with other young men in a crowded lodging house. Those men visited saloons, attended theaters, and hired prostitutes. According to Bates, Comstock viewed their actions as sinful.

Comstock’s arrival in New York mirrored the migration of many people from small towns to cities. After the end of the Civil War, many young men and women moved to cities where they were exposed to environments that often clashed with popular Christian beliefs. The availability of alcohol and sexual literature led to new habits that concerned the moral leaders of the time period. Two federal laws, one passed in 1842 and one passed in 1865, attempted to halt the distribution of obscene materials. The 1842 law criminalized the importation of French postcards deemed pornographic, and the 1865 law attempted to stop individuals from sending allegedly obscene books and photos through the mail. However, neither law stopped the distribution of such materials. According to Bates, the Young Men’s Christian Association, in New York City, New York, tried to promote Christian behavior and warn young men away from the temptations of vices in New York City.

In 1866, Comstock joined the Young Men’s Christian Association, or YMCA. The organization shared Comstock’s views, opposing gambling, consumption of alcohol, and purchase of sexual literature. Comstock attended a lecture in 1868 hosted by the YMCA. The lecture discussed obscenity in printed material, such as pornographic fiction. According to Bates, that lecture inspired Comstock to voice his own views about the vices of New York City in a letter to the director of the YMCA. Shortly after sending the letter, Comstock began to arrange for the arrest of various booksellers for selling literature he deemed obscene. He arranged for those arrests by buying copies of the books from the sellers and turning them into the police as evidence.

After Comstock quit his job at Ammidon, Lane, and Company in 1869, he pursued jobs as a dry goods clerk. At one of his jobs, Comstock met Margaret Hamilton. They married in January 1871. Comstock was ten years younger than his wife. On 4 December 1871, Comstock’s wife gave birth to a girl, Lillie. However, the infant died on 28 June 1872, after becoming ill. Comstock and his wife adopted a daughter, named Adele, that year.

Although Comstock achieved his earlier goal of becoming a dry goods merchant, his interest in suppressing what he considered to be vice persisted and he continued supporting the actions of the YMCA. In June 1872, the YMCA helped pass federal anti-obscenity legislation strengthening previous laws that had been ineffective at stopping the circulation of sexually explicit literature such as half-dime novels and photos. However, according to Bates, the law did not halt the distribution of obscene literature, and after its passage, Comstock decided to lobby a more effective anti-obscenity law to US Congress in Washington, D.C.

To garner support for a stronger anti-obscenity bill, Comstock began to travel to Washington, D.C., in 1873. Members of the YMCA referred him to Republican US Representative from New York, Clinton L. Merriam, who had supported their 1872 bill. Comstock lobbied various representatives to support his bill, which unlike previous laws, emphasized punishing offenders for sending obscene material through the postal services. Additionally, the bill criminalized the importation and distribution of obscene material through the mail. Comstock’s proposed bill applied to a broader category of items, including those related to contraception and abortion, which previous laws had not mentioned. Comstock created a presentation that included various pieces of obscene literature and visuals to shock representatives into supporting his bill.

Comstock arrived in Washington on 6 February 1872 to monitor the progress of his bill after representative Merriam presented it to the US House of Representatives. According to Bates, Comstock’s bill was presented to the House in lieu of other pending anti-obscenity bills because it was more specific and encompassed many of the restrictions proposed by other bills. While Comstock’s original draft of his bill specified that physicians could prescribe contraception, the clause was deleted during one of the revisions completed by William Buckingham, a Republican US Senator from Connecticut. According to Bates, Buckingham’s revision prevented physicians from prescribing contraceptives to patients, a right that Comstock never intended to restrict. On 3 March 1873, after several delays caused by legislators wanting to amend the wording of the bill, Comstock’s bill passed as “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” The bill specified a $5,000 fine and possible jail sentence for those who violated the law. The bill, also called the Comstock Act, led to the creation of anti-obscenity laws at the state levels. Three days after the passage of the Comstock Act, Congress appointed Comstock a special agent of the United States Post Office. In that position, Comstock had the authority to enforce the bill that he had helped pass.

On 16 May 1873, Comstock’s supporters in the YMCA formed the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in New York City, New York, after receiving a charter from the New York State legislature. The formation of the society enabled the YMCA to separate its image from Comstock. According to historian Charles Trumbull, some members of the YMCA feared being blamed by opponents of the Comstock Act for Comstock’s actions and voted to distance themselves from his actions. Comstock became secretary and special agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The organization’s character granted Comstock the power to act as a police officer and make arrests. In addition, the character specified that whenever Comstock arranged for arrests, a portion of the money the violator of the law paid went to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Society used those funds to pay Comstock a salary, as his US Post Office appointment provided none.

With his newly salaried appointment, Comstock quit his job as a dry good seller and focused on his position as special agent of the United States Post Office. Comstock worked from an office in New York City, with the help of hired staff, to identify and arrange the arrests of individuals violating the Comstock Act. On 31 October 1874, Comstock traveled to Newark, New Jersey, to arrest printer Charles Conroy for distributing obscene advertisements. Conroy assaulted Comstock by stabbing him in the face with a pocketknife. Comstock survived, despite physicians’ prediction that he would die. Many of Comstock’s enemies, most of them people he had arranged to be arrested, sent him threatening letters. According to Bates, one opponent sent Comstock a letter containing a homemade bomb that failed to detonate.

Following the passage of the Comstock Act, Comstock suppressed other activities he considered sinful. In 1875, Comstock began arresting gambling hall owners with the help of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. In 1880, Comstock published a book titled Frauds Exposed that detailed many of the vices he discovered and suppressed during his career as special agent. In 1883, he published Traps for the Young. In that book, he emphasized the importance of saving youth from moral corruption by dangerous vices such as gambling, obscene novels, and sexually explicit artwork. He also began to oppose lotteries in 1877. Comstock’s career provided him with the income to move his family to a larger house in Summit, New Jersey, in 1886. Several years later, Comstock proposed a law to ban advertising lotteries and US Congress passed the Anti-Lottery Act of 1890.

Throughout the early 1900s Comstock continued to arrest individuals who he said violated the Comstock Act. During that time, women began advocating for the right to vote and for access to contraceptives to control their own reproduction. That movement caused concern for many individuals who argued that if women had access to birth control they would start having sex outside of marriage. In 1912, Comstock read articles about birth control written by Margaret Sanger, a birth control and women’s rights activist. He believed her articles written for a newspaper titled The New York Call and for a journal called The Women Rebel violated the Comstock Act. Comstock helped prevent three of Sanger’s articles about birth control from being distributed in the mail.

In 1914, Comstock arranged to arrest Sanger for violation of the Comstock Act after Sanger wrote a pamphlet titled “Family Limitation,” about controlling family size through the use of birth control. However, Sanger had fled from the US to England a month earlier to avoid being placed on trial after Comstock’s initial condemnation of her articles in The New York Call and The Women Rebel as obscene. Unable to arrest Sanger, Comstock arranged for his assistant to visit Sanger’s husband and trick him into giving him a copy of her article on 19 January 1915. That tactic enabled Comstock to arrest Sanger’s husband, who later went on trial and subsequently spent time in jail after being charged for distributing obscene literature.

In August 1915, Comstock traveled to San Francisco, California, as a US delegate at the International Purity Conference at the San Francisco Exposition. There, he caught a cold that progressed to pneumonia. On 21 September 1915, Comstock died at the age of 71 in Summit, New Jersey.

Anthony Comstock, (born March 7, 1844, New Canaan, Conn., U.S.—died Sept. 21, 1915, New York, N.Y.), one of the most powerful American reformers, who for more than 40 years led a crusade against what he considered obscenity in literature and in other forms of expression. The epithet “comstockery” came to be synonymous with moralistic censorship.

A Union Army veteran of the American Civil War, Comstock began about 1872 to work with the Young Men’s Christian Association in New York City. In 1873 he lobbied successfully for the enactment of a severe federal statute known as the Comstock Law, which outlawed the transportation of obscene matter in the mails. From that year until his death he served (without pay until 1906) as a special agent of the U.S. Post Office Department. Also in 1873 he founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Ordinarily, Comstock attacked commercial pornography rather than serious writing, but he sometimes took action against established modern works and the classics on the principle of “morals, not art or literature.” Personally vindictive toward “libertines,” he is said to have boasted of the number of persons he had driven to suicide. More creditable were his efforts to suppress fraudulent banking schemes, mail swindles, and medical quackery.

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Introduction

Early restrictions

Obscenity laws in the 18th and 19th centuries

Developments in the 20th century

Obscenity in the Internet age

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obscenity, legal concept used to characterize certain (particularly sexual) material as offensive to the public sense of decency. A wholly satisfactory definition of obscenity is elusive, however, largely because what is considered obscene is often, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. Although the term originally referred to things considered repulsive, it has since acquired a more specifically sexual meaning.

Early restrictions

Legal restrictions on the content of literature and works of visual art have existed since ancient times. Traditionally, however, governments were much more concerned with sedition, heresy, and blasphemy, and it was not until relatively modern times that sexuality became a major preoccupation of political and religious authorities. One of the first systematic efforts to regulate literature was undertaken by the Roman Catholic Church, which banned heretical works as early as the 4th century. By the Middle Ages the list of banned works had grown dramatically. In 1542 Pope Paul III established the Sacred Congregation of the Roman Inquisition—the precursor of the modern Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—one of whose responsibilities was the suppression of heretical and immoral books. In 1559 Pope Paul IV published the Index Auctorum et Librorum Prohibitorum (see Index Librorum Prohibitorum), a comprehensive list of forbidden books that went through numerous editions before it was abolished in 1966. Immoral works also were suppressed in Protestant countries such as England, where, prior to the 18th century, restrictions were applied almost exclusively to antireligious or seditious acts or publications, rather than to obscene material in the modern sense.

Obscenity laws in the 18th and 19th centuries

Modern obscenity law emerged as a direct response to social and technological changes—particularly the development of the printing press in the 15th century—that permitted the wide and easy distribution of what was then considered sexually explicit material. By the 17th century such books and prints had become widely available throughout Europe; governments and church authorities responded by arresting and prosecuting publishers and distributors. A similar sequence of events occurred in Japan, where the development of colour woodblock printing ended up soon creating a sizable industry in erotic pictures. In 1722 the Japanese government introduced the first of several edicts against unlicensed materials, whether erotic or political.

In the early 18th century the temporal courts of England failed to pass judgment on defendants charged with obscenity because there was no law against the publication of such material. The offense of obscene libel subsequently developed to enable the prosecution of people of “wicked and depraved mind and disposition” for publishing materials that corrupted the morals of society by creating “lustful desires.” In the 1720s bookseller Edmund Curll became the first person to be convicted on a charge of obscenity in England in the common law (as opposed to the ecclesiastical) courts, for his publication of a new edition of Venus in the Cloister; or, The Nun in Her Smock, a mildly pornographic work that had been written several decades earlier; his sentence, a fine and one hour in the pillory, was delayed because no punishment was then specified in the law. Thereafter obscenity was recognized as an indictable misdemeanour under common law. (Because the charge of obscene libel applied only to publications, obscene acts were prosecuted on the charges of conspiracy to corrupt public morals and conspiracy to outrage public decency.)

Not surprisingly, it was often difficult to draw a sharp distinction between the suppression of published materials for moral reasons and for reasons of political control or repression. Thus, the 18th-century English laws that regulated indecent or suggestive materials were also used to suppress criticism of government ministers and other favoured political figures. In the 1760s the journalist and politician John Wilkes, a leading government critic, was charged with seditious libel for his periodical North Briton and with obscene libel for his poem An Essay on Woman, a parody of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man. Prosecutions for obscenity in other European countries also betrayed a merging of moral and political concerns. Perhaps the most celebrated obscenity trial in 19th-century France was that of Gustave Flaubert, who was charged with “outrage to public morals and religion” for his novel Madame Bovary (1857). Although the book was indeed sexually frank by the standards of the day, the prosecution, which was unsuccessful, was motivated primarily by the government’s desire to close down Revue de Paris, the magazine in which the work first appeared.

By the mid-19th century the spread of Victorian notions of morality resulted in harsher legislation against the publication and distribution of sexually explicit material. In Great Britain such material was prohibited on purely sexual grounds for the first time by the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. The legislation, which failed to define obscenity, faced strong opposition but was passed after the lord chief justice guaranteed that it would be used to prosecute individuals for works “written for the single purpose of corrupting the morals of youth and of a nature calculated to shock the common feelings of decency.” A legal definition of obscenity was subsequently established in Britain in Regina v. Hicklin (1868), in which the court held that obscene material is marked by a tendency “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” It was understood that this test could be applied to isolated passages of a work, and the ruling made it possible to label a work obscene not on the basis of the intended readership but on how it might influence anyone in society (e.g., women and children). This perspective later formed the basis of antiobscenity laws in legal systems influenced by British law, particularly in countries that were at one time part of the British Empire.

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Beginning in the 1820s, state governments in the United States began passing obscenity laws, and in 1842 the federal government enacted legislation that allowed the seizure of obscene pictures. The most comprehensive federal legislation of the era was the Comstock Act (1873)—named for its chief proponent, Anthony Comstock—which provided for the fine and imprisonment of any person mailing or receiving “obscene,” “lewd,” or “lascivious” publications. The act became notorious as the basis for the widespread suppression not merely of pornographic books and pictures but also of publications containing legitimate medical information about contraception and abortion, as well as contraceptive devices themselves.

Developments in the 20th century

The variability of legal definitions of obscenity is well illustrated by court cases in the United States. Until the middle of the 20th century, the standard definition used by U.S. courts was the one articulated in the British Hicklin case. On this basis several novels, including Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (published privately in 1928), were banned. In 1934 a New York circuit court of appeals abandoned the Hicklin standard in legalizing the publication of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, holding that the proper standard for judging obscenity was not the content of isolated passages but rather “whether a publication taken as a whole has a libidinous effect.” Two decades later, in Roth v. United States (1957), the U.S. Supreme Court held that the standard of obscenity should be “whether, to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.” In subsequent years the court struggled to develop a more adequate definition. The difficulty of the task was reflected in Associate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), which dealt with the alleged obscenity of a motion picture: he wrote that, though he could not define obscenity, “I know it when I see it.” In a 1966 ruling on John Cleland’s novel Fanny Hill (1748–49), the court declared that, in order to be pornographic, a work must be “utterly without redeeming social value.”

In the 1970s the Supreme Court began to move in a more conservative direction. In Miller v. California (1973), it devised a three-part test to determine whether a work was obscene: (1) “the average person, applying contemporary community standards,” would judge that the work appeals primarily to prurient interests; (2) “the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law”; and (3) the work “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Although the Miller decision expanded the legal basis for suppressing many sexually explicit books and motion pictures, the public’s increasingly permissive attitude toward issues related to sex and marriage made such prosecutions difficult to pursue in the late 20th and early 21st century.

Reflecting this shift in sexual morality, obscenity laws in Australia, Canada, the United States, and western European countries were gradually relaxed beginning in the 1960s. Similar developments occurred in countries in eastern Europe following the collapse of communism there in 1989. For example, in the Czech Republic and Poland in the 1990s, sizable pornography industries developed, and they faced little legal intervention or censorship from the government. Generally, the new legal environment in North America and Europe favoured greater sexual permissiveness and the right to individual privacy. Perhaps the most significant development in this regard was the decriminalization of homosexuality in many countries and the removal of proscriptions against depictions and discussions of homosexual relationships in books, motion pictures, and other media. (Countries in Africa and Asia generally were slower to liberalize such laws, and former British colonies, such as India, often maintained the older British obscenity laws and definitions.)

An important exception to the general trend toward greater permissiveness were laws against the sexually explicit depiction of minors (the definition of which varies from country to country). Indeed, such restrictions were strengthened, especially in the English-speaking world; in the United Kingdom, for example, the Protection of Children Act (1978), which was designed to safeguard children from sexual exploitation, effectively outlawed child pornography. Beginning in the late 1970s, a series of increasingly strict laws in the United States criminalized the possession of photographs of nude children or of children in sexually suggestive poses, though similar pictures of adults would have been deemed merely indecent rather than obscene. In New York v. Ferber (1982), the Supreme Court upheld the use of strict standards of obscenity in cases involving children, maintaining that the government’s interest in protecting children was “compelling” and “surpassing.” In Osborne v. Ohio (1990), the court upheld a law that criminalized the private possession of a photograph of a nude adolescent.

Throughout the 1980s, feminist groups campaigned against pornography not because it offended traditional sexual morality but because, in their view, it degraded women, violated their human rights, and encouraged sex crimes. Feminist arguments had some influence on obscenity laws in certain countries, notably Canada, which in the 1980s clamped down on pornography (in particular, those materials imported by businesses catering to homosexuals). The implementation of such laws pitted feminist reformers against those supporting a more libertarian approach. The feminist approach prompted some U.S. cities to pass local ordinances against pornography. However, many of these regulations were struck down by U.S. federal courts in the 1990s.

Although most countries suppress obscene material through the criminal law, many also attempt to control it through administrative or regulatory agencies such as customs, the postal service, and national or local boards for the licensing of motion pictures or stage performances. In some countries, notably those that grant a privileged position to Muslim concepts of law (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Iran), special religious agencies play a powerful role in defining and suppressing obscenity.

Obscenity in the Internet age

In the late 20th and early 21st century, differences between countries regarding legal definitions and cultural conceptions of obscenity became increasingly important with the development of the Internet, which enabled anyone with a computer to view materials—including texts, images, and motion pictures—originating from virtually anywhere in the world. The ease with which sexually explicit material could be viewed over the Internet complicated the regulation of child pornography in many jurisdictions, in particular because of differences between countries regarding the legal definition of childhood, the legal age of sexual consent, and tolerance of suggestive or indecent images of children. Various solutions were attempted, particularly in the United States, to limit access to what were considered obscene Internet sites (e.g., by requiring that libraries deny access to Web sites of a sexual nature). However, the courts in the United States showed little sympathy toward such efforts. Particularly problematic was that material considered obscene by some may be considered to have social merit by others (e.g., information about breast-cancer prevention or sex education). Countries that had some success in reducing access to Internet pornography (e.g., China and Saudi Arabia) adopted stringent restrictions on most Internet access. Despite these problems, there were moves in Western countries to adopt consistent policies toward child pornography, often along the lines of the relatively strict laws of the United States.

John Philip Jenkins

censorship

Table of Contents

Introduction

Concerns relevant to censorship

History of censorship

Character and freedom

Fast Facts

censorship summary

Recent News

Jun. 25, 2023, 1:17 PM ET (AP)

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The American Library Association's annual conference is underway in Chicago, where librarians are discussing topics including countering book challenges, fighting legislative censorship, and ensuring information access and the freedom to read

censorship, the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good. It occurs in all manifestations of authority to some degree, but in modern times it has been of special importance in its relation to government and the rule of law.

Concerns relevant to censorship

The status of "individuality”

Censorship, as a term in English, goes back to the office of censor established in Rome in 443 BCE. That officer, who conducted the census, regulated the morals of the citizens counted and classified. But, however honourable the origins of its name, censorship itself is today generally regarded as a relic of an unenlightened and much more oppressive age.

Illustrative of this change in opinion is how a community responds to such a sentiment as that with which Protagoras (c. 490–c. 420 BCE) opened his work Concerning the Gods:

About the gods I am not able to know either that they are, or that they are not, or what they are like in shape, the things preventing knowledge being many, such as the obscurity of the subject and that the life of man is short.

This public admission of agnosticism scandalized Protagoras’s fellow Greeks. Such statements would no doubt have been received with hostility, and probably with social if not even criminal sanctions, throughout the ancient world. In most places in the modern world, on the other hand, such a statement could be made without the prospect of having to endure a pained and painful community response. This change reflects, among other things, a profound shift in opinion as to what is and is not a legitimate concern of government.

Whereas it could once be maintained that the law forbids whatever it does not permit, it is now generally accepted—at least wherever Western liberalism is in the ascendancy—that one may do whatever is not forbidden by law. Furthermore, it is now believed that what may be properly forbidden by law is quite limited. Much is made of permitting people to do with their lives (including their opinions) as they please, so long as they do no immediate and evident (usually physical) harm to others. Thus, Leo Strauss has observed, “The quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of ‘individuality.’ ”

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All this is to say that individualism is made much of in modernity. The status, then, of censorship very much depends on the standing of government itself and of legitimate authority, revealing still another aspect of the complicated relation between “the individual and the state.”

Requirements of self-government

One critical source of the contemporary repudiation of censorship in the West depends on something that may be distinctive to modernity, an emphasis upon the dignity of the individual. This respect for individuality has its roots both in Christian doctrines and in the (not unrelated) sovereignty of the self reflected in state-of-nature theories about the foundations of social organization. Vital to this approach is the general opinion about the nature and sanctity of the human soul. This general opinion provides the foundation of a predominantly new, or modern, argument against censorship—against anything, in fact, that interferes with self-development, and especially such self-development (or, better still, “self-fulfillment”) as a person happens to want and to choose for himself. This can be put in terms of liberty—the liberty to become and to do what one pleases.

The old, or traditional, argument against censorship was much less individualistic and much more political in its orientation, making more of another sense of liberty. According to that sense, if a people is to be self-governing, it must have access to all information and arguments that may be relevant to its ability to discuss public affairs fully and to assess in a competent manner the conduct of the officials it chooses. Thus, “freedom of speech,” which is constitutionally guaranteed to the people of the United States, first comes to view in Anglo-American legal history as a guarantee for the members of the British Parliament assembled to discuss the affairs of the kingdom.

In the circumstances of a people actually governing itself, it is obvious that there is no substitute for freedom of speech and of the press, particularly as that freedom permits an informed access to information and opinions about political matters. Even the more repressive regimes today recognize this underlying principle, in that their ruling bodies try to make certain that they themselves become and remain informed about what is “really” going on in their countries and abroad, however repressive they may be in not permitting their own people to learn about and openly to discuss public affairs. Whether anyone who thus rules unjustly, or otherwise improperly, can be regarded as truly understanding and hence truly controlling his situation is a question not limited to these circumstances.

“Freedom of expression”

The shift from the more political to the more individualistic view of liberty may be seen in how the constitutional guarantees with respect to speech and the press are typically spoken of in the United States. Restraints upon speaking and publishing, and indeed upon action generally, are fewer now than at most times in the history of the country. This absence of restraints is reflected as well in the very terms in which these rights and privileges are described. What would once have been referred to as “freedom of speech and of the press” (drawing upon the language of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States) is now often referred to as “freedom of expression.”

To make much of freedom of expression is to encourage a liberation of the self from the constraints of the community. It may even be to assume that the self has, intrinsic to it or somehow available to it independent of any social guidance, intimations of what it is and what it wants. Thus, liberation may be seen in the desire of most people to be free to pursue their own goals and life plans—which may involve a reliance upon standards and objectives that are solely their own. It is tempting, in such circumstances, to adopt a radical subjectivism that tends to result in a thoroughgoing relativism with respect to moral and political judgments. One consequence of this approach is to identify an ever-expanding array of forms and media of expression that are entitled to immunity from government regulation—including not only broadcast and print media (books and newspapers) but also text messaging and Internet media such as blogs, social networking sites, and e-commerce sites.

On the other hand, if the emphasis is placed upon the more traditional language, “freedom of speech and of the press,” the requirements and prerogatives of a self-governing people are apt to be made more of. This means, among other things, that a people must be prepared and equipped to make effective use of its considerable political power. (Even those rulers who act without the authority of the people must take care to shape their people in accordance with the needs and circumstances of their regime. This kind of effort need not be altogether selfish on the part of such rulers, since all regimes do have an interest in law and order, in common decency, and in a routine reliability or loyalty.) It should be evident that a people entrusted with the power of self-government must be able to exercise a disciplined judgment: not everything goes, and there are better and worse things awaiting the community and its citizens.

What is particularly difficult to argue for, and to maintain, is an arrangement that, while it leaves a people clearly free politically to discuss fully all matters of public interest with a view toward governing itself, routinely prepares that same people for an effective exercise of its considerable freedom. In such circumstances, there are some who would take the case for, and the rhetoric of, liberty one step farther, insisting that no one should try to tell anyone else what kind of person he should be. There are others, however, who maintain that a person is truly free only if he knows what he is doing and chooses to do what is right. Anyone else, in their view, is a prisoner of illusions and appetites, however much he may believe that he is freely expressing himself.

There are, then, two related sets of concerns evident in any consideration of the forms and uses of censorship. One set of concerns has to do with the everyday governance of the community; the other, with the permanent shaping of the character of the people. The former is more political in its methods, and the latter is more educational.

History of censorship

It should be instructive to consider how the problem of censorship has been dealt with in the ancient world, in premodern times, and in the modern world. Care must be taken here not to assume that the modern democratic regime, of a self-governing people, is the only legitimate regime. Rather, it is prudent to assume that most of those who have, in other times and places, thought about and acted upon such matters have been at least as humane and as sensible in their circumstances as modern democrats are apt to be in theirs.

Ancient Greece and Rome

It was taken for granted in the Greek communities of antiquity, as well as in Rome, that citizens would be formed in accordance with the character and needs of the regime. This did not preclude the emergence of strong-minded men and women, as may be seen in the stories of Homer, of Plutarch, of Tacitus, and of the Greek playwrights. But it was evident, for example, that a citizen of Sparta was much more apt to be tough and unreflective (and certainly uncommunicative) than a citizen of Corinth (with its notorious openness to pleasure and luxury).

The scope of a city-state’s concern was exhibited in the provisions it made for the establishment and promotion of religious worship. That “the gods of the city” were to be respected by every citizen was usually taken for granted. Presiding over religious observances was generally regarded as a privilege of citizenship: thus, in some cities it was an office in which the elderly in good standing could be expected to serve. A refusal to conform, at least outwardly, to the recognized worship of the community subjected one to hardships. And there could be difficulties, backed up by legal sanctions, for those who spoke improperly about such matters. The force of religious opinions could be seen not only in prosecutions for refusals to acknowledge the gods of the city but perhaps even more in the frequent unwillingness of a city (no matter what its obvious political or military interests) to conduct public business at a time when the religious calendar, auspices, or other such signs forbade civic activities. Indicative of respect for the proprieties was the secrecy with which the religious mysteries, such as those into which many Greek and Roman men were initiated, were evidently practiced—so much so that there does not seem to be any record from antiquity of precisely what constituted the various mysteries. Respect for the proprieties may be seen as well in the outrage provoked in Sparta by a poem by Archilochus (7th century BCE) in which he celebrated his lifesaving cowardice.

Pericles

Athens, it can be said, was much more liberal than the typical Greek city. This is not to suggest that the rulers of the other cities did not, among themselves, freely discuss the public business. But in Athens the rulers included much more of the population than in most cities of antiquity—and freedom of speech (for political purposes) spilled over there into the private lives of citizens. This may be seen, perhaps best of all, in the famous funeral address given by Pericles in 431 BCE. Athenians, he pointed out, did not consider public discussion merely something to be put up with; rather, they believed that the best interests of the city could not be served without a full discussion of the issues before the assembly. There may be seen in the plays of an Aristophanes the kind of uninhibited discussions of politics that the Athenians were evidently accustomed to, discussions that could (in the license accorded to comedy) be couched in licentious terms not permitted in everyday discourse.

Socrates

The limits of Athenian openness may be seen, of course, in the trial, conviction, and execution of Socrates in 399 BCE on charges that he corrupted the youth and that he did not acknowledge the gods that the city did but acknowledged other new divinities of his own. One may see as well, in the Republic of Plato, an account of a system of censorship, particularly of the arts, that is comprehensive. Not only are various opinions (particularly misconceptions about the gods and about the supposed terrors of death) to be discouraged, but various salutary opinions are to be encouraged and protected without having to be demonstrated to be true. Much of what is said in the Republic and elsewhere reflects the belief that the vital opinions of the community could be shaped by law and that men could be penalized for saying things that offended public sensibilities, undermined common morality, or subverted the institutions of the community.

The circumstances justifying the system of comprehensive “thought control” described in Plato’s Republic are obviously rarely to be found. Thus, Socrates himself is recorded in the same dialogue (and in Plato’s Apology) as recognizing that cities with bad regimes do not permit their misconduct to be questioned and corrected. Such regimes should be compared with those in the age of the good Roman emperors, the period from Nerva (c. 30–98 CE) to Marcus Aurelius (121–180)—the golden times, said Tacitus, when everyone could hold and defend whatever opinions he wished.

Ancient Israel and early Christianity

Much of what can be said about ancient Greece and Rome could be applied, with appropriate adaptations, to ancient Israel. The stories of the difficulties encountered by Jesus, and the offenses he came to be accused of, indicate the kinds of restrictions to which the Jews were subjected with respect to religious observances and with respect to what could and could not be said about divine matters. (The inhibitions so established were later reflected in the manner in which Moses Maimonides [1135–1204] proceeded in his publications, often relying upon “hints” rather than upon explicit discussion of sensitive topics.) The prevailing watchfulness, lest someone say or do what he should not, can be said to be anticipated by the commandment “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain” (Exodus 20:7). It may be seen as well in the ancient opinion that there is a name for God that must not be uttered.

It should be evident that this way of life—directing both opinions and actions and extending down to minute daily routines—could not help but shape a people for centuries, if not for millennia, to come. But it should also be evident that those in the position to know, and with a duty to act, were expected to speak out and were, in effect, licensed to do so, however cautiously they were obliged to proceed on occasion. Thus, the prophet Nathan dared to challenge King David himself for what he had done to secure Bathsheba as his wife (II Samuel 12:1–24). On an earlier, perhaps even more striking, occasion, the patriarch Abraham dared to question God about the terms on which Sodom and Gomorrah might be saved from destruction (Genesis 18:16–33). God made concessions to Abraham, and David crumbled before Nathan’s authority. But such presumptuousness on the part of mere mortals is possible, and likely to bear fruit, only in communities that have been trained to share and to respect certain moral principles grounded in thoughtfulness.

The thoughtfulness to which the Old Testament aspires is suggested by the following counsel by Moses to the people of Israel (Deuteronomy 4:5–6):

Behold, I have taught you statutes and ordinances, as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should do them in the land which you are entering to take possession of it. Keep them and do them; for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”

This approach can be considered to provide the foundation for the assurance that has been so critical to modern arguments against censorship (John 8:32): “And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Further biblical authority against censorship may be found in such “free speech” dramas as that described in Acts 4:13–21.

It should be remembered that to say everything one thought or believed was regarded by pre-Christian writers as potentially irresponsible or licentious: social consequences dictated a need for restraint. Christian writers, however, called for just such saying of everything as the indispensable witness of faith: transitory social considerations were not to impede, to the extent that they formerly had, the exercise of such a liberty, indeed of such a duty, so intimately related to the eternal welfare of the soul. Thus, we see an encouragement of the private—of an individuality that turned eventually against organized religion itself and legitimated a radical self-indulgence.

Ancient China

Perhaps no people has ever been so thoroughly trained, on such a large scale and for so long, as the Chinese. Critical to that training was a system of education that culminated in a rigorous selection, by examination, of candidates for administrative posts. Particularly influential was the thought of Confucius (551–479 BCE), with its considerable emphasis upon deference to authority and to family elders and upon respect for ritual observances and propriety. Cautiousness in speech was encouraged; licentious expressions were discouraged; and long-established teachings were relied upon for shaping character. All in all, it was contrary to Chinese good taste to speak openly of the faults of one’s government or of one’s rulers. And so it could be counseled by Confucius, “He who is not in any particular office has nothing to do with plans for the administration of its duties” (Analects [Lunyu], 7:14). It has been suggested that such sentiments have operated to prevent the spread in China of opinions supportive of political liberty.

Still, it could be recognized by Confucius that “oppressive government is fiercer than a tiger.” He could counsel that if a ruler’s words are not good, and if people are discouraged from opposing them, the ruin of the country can be expected (Analects, 13:5). Blatant oppressiveness, and an attempt to stamp out the influence of Confucius and of other sages, could be seen in the wholesale destruction of books in China in 231 BCE. But the Confucian mode was revived thereafter, to become the dominant influence for almost two millennia. Its pervasiveness may well be judged oppressive by contemporary Western standards, since so much depended, it seems, on mastering the orthodox texts and discipline.

Whether or not the typical Chinese government was indeed oppressive, effective control of information was lodged in the authorities, since access to the evidently vital public archives of earlier administrations was limited to a relative few. In addition, decisive control of what was thought, and how, depended in large part on a determination of what the authoritative texts were—something that has been critical in the West, as well, in the establishment of useful canons, both sacred and secular. Thus, Richard McKeon has suggested, “Censorship may be the enforcement of judgments based on power, passion, corruption, or prejudice—political, popular, elite, or sectarian. It may also be based on scholarship and the use of critical methods in the interest of advancing a taste for literature, art, learning, and science.”

Medieval Christendom

Galileo

Among the heirs of Greece and Rome and of Israel were the Christians of varying professions. Perhaps the most dramatic form of censorship in Christendom was that displayed in the development by the Roman Catholic Church of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of proscribed books, the origins of which go back (in a primitive form) to the 5th century CE and which continued to have official sanction well into the 20th century. The most spectacular instance of the silencing of a thinker of note may well have been the restrictions placed upon Galileo in 1633.

The orthodoxy protected by an institution such as the Index probably had to be a system of thought in which much was made of certain books, particularly if other publications should seem to challenge in significant respects the teachings of the canonical texts. This must have appeared even more acute a problem when means became available, especially after the invention of printing, to produce and distribute books in large quantities.

The establishment of a fairly precise orthodoxy led to a perhaps unprecedented recourse to creeds. Thus, for example, the Nicene Creed was promulgated in 325 CE. It was devised to fend off a heretical threat to Christian doctrine—and it led, partly because of a unilateral change in wording made by the Western church, to a schism that has continued since 1054 between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.

Thus, it very much mattered which doctrines people were taught and what came to be believed—and this was largely determined, as it usually is, by the action of some authority, ecclesiastical or temporal. Similar developments can be seen in the Islamic world to this day.

It is difficult to distinguish religious and nonreligious elements in some of the more celebrated controversies of the medieval Christian world, just as it is today among Islamic peoples. The persecutions of witches—which ranged across much of Europe from the 14th to the 18th century and cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives—can be understood as due to various political, social, and psychic disturbances as well as to strictly religious differences.

The trials of Joan of Arc in France (1431) and of Thomas More in England (1535) are notorious illustrations of the difficulty in distinguishing religious from political differences. Indeed, it has been common, because of the experiences of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance, to see the cause of political liberty as intimately related to the cause of religious liberty (and especially the liberty to do without religion).

The Enlightenment, beginning in the 17th century, attempted to purge Europe of the censorship that found political despotism allied with religious traditionalism. Alexis de Tocqueville was astonished to find in the United States, in the 1830s, that it was possible for ordinary men who stood for political freedom to be, and to remain, religiously devout. This was not the typical combination in the Europe of his day.

Even so, it should be recognized that the rigorous medieval theological-political regime against which Moderns have rebelled did have at its core a principle that subjected the exercise of will (or sovereignty) to the test of wisdom. This principle, upon which the contemporary dedication to freedom of speech may ultimately depend, is reflected in Thomas Aquinas’s insistence in De veritate, “To say that justice depends simply upon the will is to say that the divine will does not proceed according to the order of wisdom, and that is blasphemous.”

The 17th and 18th centuries

The struggle against censorship in the Anglo-American world in the 17th and 18th centuries took two principal forms. There was the effort to keep government from reviewing, before publication, any manuscript, and there was the effort to keep government from penalizing, after publication, any text that expressed forbidden sentiments. (There were throughout the Western world developments with respect to these matters similar to those in Great Britain and the United States, but they usually occurred later.)

John Milton

The effort to eliminate “previous restraints” (also known as prior restraints) in Great Britain and in America had its roots in English constitutional experience. Previous restraint (or licensing) came to be regarded as an inheritance of Roman Catholic practices. And so, when the Anglican successor to the Roman Catholic Church was disestablished by the Puritans, it was evidently something of a shock to John Milton to find Parliament reinstating licensing in 1643.

Milton’s “Areopagitica” (1644) has remained the classic statement of the arguments against censorship, particularly in the form of previous restraint. Milton conceded that criminal prosecutions might, perhaps even should, follow upon the publication of certain writings. He insisted, however, that such works must not be suppressed before publication.

Critical to Milton’s position in support of freedom of the press is something that may not have been implicit in the traditional pre-Miltonian position against censorship—his confidence that truth, “in a free and open encounter,” will be able to overcome error. Related to this opinion is the assurance that it is a positive good for mankind to be exposed to error; only in this way may virtue be tested, strengthened, and made adequate to the trials of earthly life. Milton cannot praise “a fugitive and cloister’d vertue.” All this seems to rest upon a Christian view of the world: truth may indeed win out in its encounter with error, if the struggle continues long enough and if divine aid is thrown into the balance, as Milton seems to assume it will be; a person not only must act virtuously but must also personally choose to do so; he must be prepared to be exposed to alternatives, as inevitably he will be, and he must choose rightly if he is to merit and secure eternal salvation.

A reliance upon due process of law (which Milton in effect calls for) is the vital concession that the community can be led to make to reason: it provides a safeguard that must be so well established in times of calm and reflec

Anthony Comstock (1844–1915), a dogged reformer, imposed his Victorian values on a rapidly urbanizing United States, sometimes in disregard for the protections afforded by the First Amendment.

Born in New Canaan, Connecticut, Comstock was raised in a strict religious family. He fought for the Union Army in the Civil War and later settled in New York City, where he found employment as a commission house porter. Consumed by but also appalled by urban life, he took as his mission the refortification of American morality.

Comstock Act limited mailing obscene material

In 1873 Comstock organized an independent New York branch of the London Society for the Suppression of Vice. The society crusaded against pornography and persuaded Congress to pass federal legislation, known as the Comstock Act, making illegal the transportation and delivery of “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials.

Using his position as a postal agent, Comstock then set out to ensure that the law was enforced. Culling the mail for improper materials, Comstock and his colleagues later claimed that they had destroyed 160 tons of obscenity.

Comstock efforts violated First Amendment freedoms

Little troubled by the impact of his efforts on freedom of expression and freedom of the press, Comstock even tried to halt the circulation of certain anatomy textbooks. He turned as well against adventure books and romance novels, on the theory that they corrupted American youth.

In 1905 he tried to suppress Mrs. Warren’s Profession, a play by George Bernard Shaw allegedly sympathetic to prostitution. Bemused as well as offended by Comstock’s narrow-mindedness, Shaw coined the term comstockery to refer to prudish censorship activities.

Comstock tried to build up American morality

Comstock disliked gambling and chance taking and was instrumental in ending the Louisiana lottery, the only legal lottery in the country at the time. He also opposed the use of birth control medications and devices and played a role in the late 19th century criminalization of abortion by various state legislatures.

In the early 20th century, Comstock wrote newspaper articles and lectured college students on what he considered to be their waywardness. Late in his life, Comstock influenced a law student named J. Edgar Hoover with his determination and methods.

As late as 1960, the American legal system was not hospitable to the idea of birth control. Thirty states had statutes on the books prohibiting or restricting the sale and advertisement of contraception. These laws stretched back almost a century, reflecting an underlying American belief that contraception was lewd, immoral and promoted promiscuity.

Comstock's Crusade

The driving force behind the original anti-birth control statutes was a New Yorker named Anthony Comstock. Born in rural Connecticut in 1844, Comstock served in the infantry during the Civil War, then moved to New York City and found work as a salesman. A devout Christian, he was appalled by what he saw in the city's streets. It seemed to him that the town was teeming with prostitutes and pornography. In the late 1860s, Comstock began supplying the police with information for raids on sex trade merchants and came to prominence with his anti-obscenity crusade. Also offended by explicit advertisements for birth control devices, he soon identified the contraceptive industry as one of his targets. Comstock was certain that the availability of contraceptives alone promoted lust and lewdness.

Making Birth Control a Federal Crime

In 1872 Comstock set off for Washington with an anti-obscenity bill, including a ban on contraceptives, that he had drafted himself. On March 3, 1873, Congress passed the new law, later known as the Comstock Act. The statute defined contraceptives as obscene and illicit, making it a federal offense to disseminate birth control through the mail or across state lines.

Public Support for Comstock Laws

This statute was the first of its kind in the Western world, but at the time, the American public did not pay much attention to the new law. Anthony Comstock was jubilant over his legislative victory. Soon after the federal law was on the books, twenty-four states enacted their own versions of Comstock laws to restrict the contraceptive trade on a state level.

The Most Restrictive States

New England residents lived under the most restrictive laws in the country. In Massachusetts, anyone disseminating contraceptives -- or information about contraceptives -- faced stiff fines and imprisonment. But by far the most restrictive state of all was Connecticut, where the act of using birth control was even prohibited by law. Married couples could be arrested for using birth control in the privacy of their own bedrooms, and subjected to a one-year prison sentence. In actuality, law enforcement agents often looked the other way when it came to anti-birth control laws, but the statutes remained on the books.

Sanger's Crusade

These laws remained unchallenged until birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger made it her mission to challenge the Comstock Act. The first successful change in the laws came from Sanger's 1916 arrest for opening the first birth control clinic in America. The case that grew out of her arrest resulted in the 1918 Crane decision, which allowed women to use birth control for therapeutic purposes.

Changing Laws for Changing Times

The next amendment of the Comstock Laws came with the 1936 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, United States v. One Package. The decision made it possible for doctors to distribute contraceptives across state lines. This time Margaret Sanger had been instrumental in maneuvering behind the scenes to bring the matter before the court. While this decision did not eliminate the problem of the restrictive "chastity laws" on the state level, it was a crucial ruling. Physicians could now legally mail birth control devices and information throughout the country, paving the way for the legitimization of birth control by the medical industry and the general public.