Comstockery

The term refers to immoderate censorship, especially of literary texts, on the grounds of assumed immorality. Comstockery is now the equivalent in American English for Bowdlerism in British English, both terms deriving from the censoring activities of individuals. But whereas Dr. Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825) and his immediate family were self-appointed censors who took it upon themselves to bowdlerize or expurgate major texts like Shakespeare and the Bible, Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) was a radical moral crusader who founded the Society for the Suppression of Vice and operated constitutionally by prosecuting or seeking to suppress the publication of numerous literary works. Comstockery was coined in 1905 by George Bernard Shaw as an ironic riposte when Comstock attacked Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession as “one of Bernard Shaw’s filthy productions” by “this Irish smut dealer.” In a letter to the New York Times (September 26, 1905), Shaw responded: “Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States.” As censorship has become less entrenched, the term has become increasingly dated.

Comstock and his followers represented a resurgence of the extreme puritanism that had flourished in England in the seventeenth century. His early career was devoted to making arrests for obscenity; he then worked for the Young Men’s Christian Association, which had set up a Committee for the Suppression of Vice, subsequently the Society for the Suppression of Vice. In 1873 he got through Congress an act popularly termed the Comstock Act, the “Act for the Suppression of the Trade in, and Circulation of Obscene Literature and Articles for Immoral Use.” The act was comprehensive in its restrictiveness, closing the mails to “obscene and indecent matter,” and expanding the definition of “literature” to include even publications dealing with contraception, such as Margaret Sanger’s The Woman Rebel (1914) and Mary Ware Dennett’s pamphlet The Sex Side of Life, an Explanation for Young People (1919).

Comstock took his duties very seriously, personally conducting raids, and was not above acting as an agent provocateur , inducing booksellers to acquire obscene or banned books, thus becoming liable to prosecution. He prosecuted more than 3,500 people (although less than ten per cent were found guilty) and destroyed more than 160 tons of allegedly obscene literature. He once boasted that he had driven fifteen people to their deaths. He was appointed a special agent in the Post Office for enforcing the Act, a position he held until his death. Of his publications, Morals Versus Art (1887) most summed up his philosophy.

The successes and failures of Comstock and his followers are summed up in the entry for censorship. What finally brought Comstockery into disrepute was the indiscriminacy of prosecutions for obscenity and the arbitrary interventions of the U.S. Postal Service and U.S. Customs, whose confiscations included works by Aristophanes, Petronius, Giovanni Boccaccio, François Rabelais, Daniel Defoe, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Henri Balzac. The bans on these works remained in force until 1930, when a notable legal victory led to some relaxation of the Tariff Act. There was also a slow liberalization of attitude toward censorship, encouraged by the articulate opposition of some robust individuals. These included Theodore Schroeder, a lawyer and a champion of literary freedom, who attacked Comstock directly in 1906, arguing that “there is no organized force in American life which is more pernicious than Comstockery.” Schroeder argued ingeniously that “Mr. Comstock is also an unconscious witness to the harmlessness of obscenities,” since “he has for forty years ‘stood at the mouth of a sewer,’ searching for and devouring ‘obscenity’ for a salary,” but has been left or made “so much purer than all the rest of humanity” (1911, 101-3). His successor, John S. Sumner, was not nearly so successful in his tenure. Vestiges of the Comstock Act survived into the 1990s. The legacy of Comstock is somewhat ironic: the 15,000-volume collection of pornography held in the Library of Congress is based on material confiscated by the U.S. Post Office and Customs in terms of the Comstock Act of 1873.