Comstock laws

The symbol of Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

The Comstock Law was a federal act passed by the United States Congress on March 3, 1873, as the Act for the "Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use". The Act criminalized usage of the U.S. Postal Service to send any of the following items:[1]

In places like Washington D.C., where the federal government had direct jurisdiction, the act also made it a misdemeanor, punishable by fine and imprisonment, to sell, give away, or have in possession any "obscene" publication.[1] Half of the states passed similar anti-obscenity statutes that also banned possession and sale of obscene materials, including contraceptives.[2]

The law was named after its chief proponent, Anthony Comstock. Due to his own personal enforcement of the law during its early days, Comstock received a commission from the postmaster general to serve as a special agent for the U.S. Postal Services.[1]

Text of the federal law

The text of the federal bill read, in part:[3]

Be it enacted.... That whoever, within the District of Columbia or any of the Territories of the United States... shall sell... or shall offer to sell, or to lend, or to give away, or in any manner to exhibit, or shall otherwise publish or offer to publish in any manner, or shall have in his possession, for any such purpose or purposes, an obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing or other representation, figure, or image on or of paper or other material, or any cast instrument, or other article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion, or shall advertise the same for sale, or shall write or print, or cause to be written or printed, any card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind, stating when, where, how, or of whom, or by what means, any of the articles in this section…can be purchased or obtained, or shall manufacture, draw, or print, or in any wise make any of such articles, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof in any court of the United States... he shall be imprisoned at hard labor in the penitentiary for not less than six months nor more than five years for each offense, or fined not less than one hundred dollars nor more than two thousand dollars, with costs of court.

Objective of the law

The Comstock Act targeted pornography, contraceptive equipment, and such educational materials as descriptions of contraceptive methods and other reproductive health-related materials. Of particular note were advertisements for abortifacients found in penny papers, which offered pills to women as treatment for "obstruction of their monthly periods." [4]

Comstock's ideas of what is "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" were 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]

Definition of obscenity

The Comstock Act clearly hinges on definitions, particularly of obscenity. Though the courts originally adopted the British Hicklin test, an American test was put into place in Roth v. United States, in which it was determined that obscenity was material whose "dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest" to the "average person, applying contemporary community standards," and was, "utterly without redeeming social importance."[6]

Origins

According to Paul R. Abramson, the widespread availability of pornography during the American Civil War (1861–1865) gave rise to an anti-pornography movement, culminating in the passage of the Comstock Act in 1873,[7] but which also dealt with birth control and abortion issues. The main support and active persecutor for the moral purposes of the Comstock laws was the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, led by Comstock.

YMCA

In February 1866, the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) of New York's Executive Committee privately distributed a report that was written by Cephas Brainerd and Robert McBurney entitled, "A Memorandum Respecting New-York as a Field for Moral and Christian Effort Among Young Men." This memorandum linked the main message of the Y.M.C.A. to facts and figures that were drawn from the census, tax data, and licensing reports. All of this data was used to support the fact that many of the younger, more unsupervised members of the society had more than enough free time in the evenings to spend in billiard saloons, gambling halls, porter houses, and houses of prostitution and assignation.

The 1866 memorandum supported a plan to construct a centrally located building to better serve the younger men of New York. Not only was the building to support the spiritual, mental, and social well-being of the young-men, it was also suggested to benefit their physical condition.[1] However, the memorandum was also used as a "call to action" to investigate whether or not a law was in place to reprimand and confiscate "obscene" literature. After conferring with a district attorney, a committee was organized to write up a bill to be pushed through the New York State legislature. In 1868, the bill was passed however it was not as strong as the association would have liked it to be. After the passing of the bill, the Y.M.C.A appointed a committee to oversee the enforcement of the law. This law included the important power of search and seizure which authorized magistrates to issue warrants that allowed police officers "to search for, seize and take possession of such obscene and indecent books, papers, articles and things" and hand them over to the district attorney. If the indicted party ended up being found guilty, the materials that were confiscated in the raid were destroyed.[1]

Anthony Comstock

Anthony Comstock stated that he was determined to act the part of a good citizen, meaning that he had every intention of upholding the law. He started off by beginning a campaign against the saloons in his Brooklyn, New York neighborhood.

The biggest contributor to igniting Comstock's mission to rid of any and all obscene material was when one of his dear friends died. Comstock blamed his death on him being "led astray and corrupted and diseased" which suggests that the friend contracted a venereal disease that was connected to masturbation, nervous disability, and susceptibility to illness. As for a person to blame, Comstock laid all of it on Charles Conroy, who had sold his friend "erotic materials" from a basement on Warren Street. After this incident, continued on with the crusade all throughout his neighborhood and in doing so, he kept a ledger that had a record of every single arrest he had made.

Comstock became linked with the YMCA shortly after writing a financial request to Robert McBurney to continue with his efforts. Once the current President, Morris Jesup, became aware of the letter he immediately went to see Comstock and allocated the funds towards his efforts. On top of the money allocated for Comstock's efforts, Jesup also gave him a bonus for his efforts.

Comstock was invited to speak before the YMCA's Committee on Obscene Literature, which was later renamed the Suppression of Vice, and present how was used the funds allocated for him. Comstock was hired by the association to help them fight for the suppression of such vices.

The event that catapulted Comstock's urge to get a bill passed through Congress was "The Beecher-Tilton Scandal Case" and the publicity displayed towards the case by Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin in Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly. After Woodhull's acquittal, Comstock was reminded of one of the weaknesses of the 1872 law. The federal statute did not include newspapers, nor did it specify that birth control information and appliances were "obscene". It was Comstock's mission to somehow include these measures in a new law (later known as the Comstock Law).

To do this, Comstock drafted a new federal bill and with the sponsorship of Representative Clinton L. Merriam, he met with members of the House and proved his point by exhibiting obscene materials. Through past connections, Comstock got Justice William Strong to introduce the bill to William Windom, a senator from Minnesota, to take the bill to the floor of the Senate. While the bill was undergoing further revision, a provision was coordinated in a federal appropriations bill. This provision was authorized by Congress, which essentially created a new position—special agent in the United States Post Office. This position held the power to confiscate immoral materials sent in the mail and arrest those that were sending it.[1]

Although Comstock was awarded the position of special agent, the Committee for the Suppression of Vice requested that he not be given a government salary.[8] In the spring of 1873, the committee became separate from the YMCA, as New York gave them a charter as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. While the Comstock Law originally authorized police assistance to the group in censoring materials and gave half of the fines collected under this law, the rewards were removed a month later. By preventing Comstock from receiving a federal salary, as well as any monetary rewards from the state, the organization’s directors attempted to prevent claims of self-interested motives. They also tried to ensure that Comstock was dependent on their donations.

Comstock derived his full-time salary from the vice society. At the same time, he was able to hold a federal commission that allowed him to secure warrants for arrests and take and destroy publications and other materials. Therefore, New York, as well as the federal government, gave him most of the responsibility to implement moral censorship. They entrusted that responsibility to Comstock for forty-two years until his death in 1915. Over that period of time, he filled the two positions, one in the Post Office and the other in the New York vice society.

Judicial views

Obscenity

In 1957, Samuel Roth, who ran a literary business in New York City, was charged with distributing "obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy" materials through the mail, advertising and selling a publication called American Aphrodite ("A Quarterly for the Fancy-Free"). The publication contained literary erotica and nude photography. The Comstock Law was terminated in 1957, just before the Roth v. United States court case, but it defined obscenity laws as anything that appealed to the prurient interest of the consumer. In a similar case, Alberts v. California, David Alberts ran a mail-order business from Los Angeles and was convicted under a California statute for publishing pictures of "nude and scantily-clad women." The Supreme Court confirmed the conviction and affirmed the Roth test.

Under the Comstock laws, postal inspectors can bar "obscene" content from the mails at any time,[9] thus having a huge impact on publishers of magazines.

[10] In One, Inc. v. Olesen (1958), as a follow-on to Roth, the Supreme Court granted free press rights around homosexuality.[11]

The Comstock laws banned distribution of sex education information, based on the premise that it was obscene and led to promiscuous behavior[12] Mary Ware Dennett was fined $300 in 1928, for distributing a pamphlet containing sex education material. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), led by Morris Ernst, appealed her conviction and won a reversal, in which judge Learned Hand ruled that the pamphlet's main purpose was to "promote understanding".[12]

Contraception

In 1915, architect William Sanger was charged under the New York law against disseminating contraceptive information.[13] His wife Margaret Sanger was similarly charged in 1915 for her work The Woman Rebel. Sanger circulated this work through the U.S. postal service, effectively violating the Comstock Law. On appeal, her conviction was reversed on the grounds that contraceptive devices could legally be promoted for the cure and prevention of disease.[14]

The prohibition of devices advertised for the explicit purpose of birth control was not overturned for another eighteen years. During World War I, U.S. Servicemen were the only members of the Allied forces sent overseas without condoms.

In 1932, Sanger arranged for a shipment of diaphragms to be mailed from Japan to a sympathetic doctor in New York City. When U.S. customs confiscated the package as illegal contraceptive devices, Sanger helped file a lawsuit. In 1936, a federal appeals court ruled in United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries that the federal government could not interfere with doctors providing contraception to their patients.[14]

Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) struck down one of the remaining contraception Comstock laws in Connecticut and Massachusetts. However, Griswold only applied to marital relationships.[15] Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) extended its holding to unmarried persons as well.[16]

For the law

As the chief proprietor of the law, many of Comstock's justifications revolved around the effects that all of the obscene literature would have on children. He argued that the corruption in the schools and in the home were because of all of the obscene literature that the youth had easy access to. He also argued that the vast amounts of "obscenity" would cause for the sanctity of marriage to be corrupted along with the power of the church. Comstock mainly focused on voicing his concerns to families of privilege; this is how he gained a majority of his support.[2]

Clinton L. Merrian, who introduced the bill to the House of Representatives played on the idea that obscenity was a direct threat to manhood and that in order to protect the children, obscene materials needed to be confiscated.[2]

Opposition to the law

The Free Love Movement was the only group that had any sustained attempts to repeal the Comstock Laws and discredit anything related to the anti-vice movement. This movement despised the law because they believed it embodied the sexual oppression of women. The free lovers argued that neither the church nor the state had the right to regulate an individual's sexual relations and that women were sexually enslaved by the institution of marriage. This made the free lovers the number one target of Comstock and his crusade against obscenity.[2]

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Rereading Sex. New York: Random House, 2002.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Beisel, Nicola. Imperiled Innocents. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.
  3. ↑ The Comstock Act 17 Stat. 598
  4. ↑ "Mrs. Bird, female physician To the Ladies--Madame Costello". Library of Congress. Library of Congress. Retrieved June 9, 2015.
  5. ↑ Paul D. Buchanan. The American Women's Rights Movement. p. 75.
  6. ↑ Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957).
  7. ↑ Paul R. Abramson (2002). With Pleasure: Thoughts on the Nature of Human Sexuality. Oxford University Press US. p. 180. ISBN 0195146093.
  8. ↑ Starr, Paul (2004). The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. New York City: Basic Books. pp. 243–244. ISBN 978-0465081943.
  9. ↑ Paul, James C.N. and Murray L. Schwartz (Dec 1957). "Obscenity in the Mails: A Comment on Some Problems of Federal Censorship". University of Pennsylvania Law Review 106 (2): 214–253. doi:10.2307/3310237.
  10. ↑ Murdoch, Joyce and Deb Price (2001). Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court. New York: Basic Books. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-456-01513-1.
  11. ↑ One, Inc. v. Olesen, 355 U.S. 371 (1958).
  12. 1 2 Walker, Samuel (1990). In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU. Oxford University Press. p. 85. ISBN 0-19-504539-4.
  13. ↑ Staff Reporters (September 11, 1915). "Disorder in Court as Sanger is Fined: Justices Order Room Cleared When Socialists and Anarchists Hoot Verdict" (pdf). The New York Times: 7.
  14. 1 2 "Biographical Note". The Margaret Sanger Papers. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass. 1995. Retrieved 2006-10-21.
  15. ↑ Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).
  16. ↑ Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972).

Further reading

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