Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock

by Amy Werbel

Overview

Anthony Comstock was America’s first professional censor. From 1873 to 1915, as Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock led a crusade against lasciviousness, salaciousness, and obscenity that resulted in the confiscation and incineration of more than three million pictures, postcards, and books he judged to be obscene. But as Amy Werbel shows in this rich cultural and social history, Comstock’s campaign to rid America of vice in fact led to greater acceptance of the materials he deemed objectionable, offering a revealing tale about the unintended consequences of censorship.

In Lust on Trial, Werbel 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. Born into a puritanical New England community, Anthony Comstock moved to New York in 1868 armed with his Christian faith and a burning desire to rid the city of vice. Werbel describes how Comstock’s raids shaped New York City and American culture through his obsession with the prevention of lust by means of censorship, and how his restrictions provided an impetus for the increased circulation and explicitness of “obscene” materials. By opposing women who preached sexual liberation and empowerment, suppressing contraceptives, and restricting artistic expression, Comstock drew the ire of civil liberties advocates, inspiring more open attitudes toward sexual and creative freedom and more sophisticated legal defenses. Drawing on material culture high and low, including numerous examples of the “obscenities” Comstock seized, Lust on Trial provides fresh insights into Comstock’s actions and motivations, the sexual habits of Americans during his era, and the complicated relationship between law and cultural change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231547031
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	04/17/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	34 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Amy Werbel is associate professor of the history of art at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is the author of Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (2007).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. Anthony Comstock, From Canaan to Gotham
2. Onward Christian Soldiers: Creating the Industry and Infrastructure of American Vice Suppression
3. Taming America’s “Rich” and “Racy” Underbelly (Volume I: 1871–1884)
4. Artists, Libertarians, and Lawyers Unite: The Rise of the Resistance (Volume II: 1884–1895)
5. New Women, New Technology, and the Demise of Comstockery (Volume III: 1895–1915)
Conclusion: Postmortem
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Selected Books, Articles, and Digital Resources
Index

Editorial Reviews

04/15/2018
Art historian Werbel (Thomas Eakins) offers an engaging history of professional activist Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) and his campaign against American vice. After two chapters sketching out Comstock's youth, service in the Civil War, and early attempts at policing licentious materials and behaviors, Werbel structures the narrative around the three surviving volumes of Comstock's meticulous case records (1871–1915), which document his output and catalog the obscene literature he and his collaborators seized and destroyed. Navigating the many layers of censorship at work in the Comstock era, from direct, government-sponsored censorship to the social, regulatory, and self-censorship activities that contributed to enforcing prevailing norms of permissible cultural production, Werbel also touches on the resistance to Comstock's attempts at suppression. He did not always win in the court of law or public opinion, and at times his fury could increase interest in sexually explicit art and literature. Werbel's art history lens draws particular attention to the visual material Comstock found unacceptable, including dozens of illustrative examples. VERDICT A thoughtful new addition to the literature on Comstock and 19th-century sexual mores.—Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc.

Library Journal

02/05/2018
Werbel (Thomas Eakins), an associate art history professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, undertakes an insightful and entertaining critical examination of the prominent American censor Anthony Comstock (1844–1915). Werbel provides biographical detail, notably Comstock’s pious upbringing by a Congregationalist minister father, to contextualize his mission as secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873. She also focuses more widely on the cultural currents of late-19th- and early-20th-century America. From the passage of the Comstock Act, which banned “obscene literature and articles of immoral use” in 1872 up until his death, Comstock battled perceived immorality in everything from contraceptives and sex toys to the theater and cigar cases, and persecuted both the famous (artist Thomas Eakins; Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger) and the forgotten (professional daredevil Steve Brodie; early standup comic Russell Hunting). Based on an impressive amount of research into both primary and secondary sources, Werbel’s writing possesses a scholarly formality, but also accessibility, elegance, and wit (Comstock’s “connoisseurship was rooted not in the head or the heart, but rather in the groin”). She closes this fascinating, page-turning study by rebuking Comstock and connecting her subject to modern concerns: “Our endurance as a democratic nation will be determined far more by our openness, our honesty, and our empathy than by our purity.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

A work more relevant now than ever . . . [A] titillating manuscript.

The Gotham Center for New York City History - Marcela Micucci

In this meticulously researched study, Amy Werbel traces the rise—and eventual decline—of the figure whose name became synonymous with censorship in nineteenth-century America. She delineates how Anthony Comstock’s policing of erotic imagery touched on diverse areas of the nation’s civic life, from religion, politics, and the law to art and popular culture. In so doing, she illuminates the distinctive commingling of prudishness and prurience that shapes the American cultural imagination to this day.

Michael Lobel

A richly detailed, deeply researched and lavishly illustrated account of Comstock’s career and legacy.

Times Literary Supplement

Amy Werbel's Lust on Trial offers a brilliant analysis of the life and times of Anthony Comstock, the fiercely religious moralist who led the national campaign to rid the United States of sexual expression from 1873 until his death in 1915. As Werbel powerfully demonstrates, Comstock's efforts to persuade the nation that such expression "corrupts the mind . . . and damns the soul" perilously threatened our nation's separation of church and state. This lesson in how religious fanaticism can destroy our freedom is now more important than ever.

Geoffrey Stone

Intensely researched and thought-provoking work.

Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy - Christine Schultz-Richert

A visually striking book. . . . Historians will appreciate Werbel’s attention to uncovering the stories of everyday Americans who found themselves in Comstock’s crosshairs, and her book will make a lively addition to undergraduate and graduate courses on the histories of art, obscenity, and sexuality.

H-SHGAPE

Meticulously researched study.

Panorama - Mary Campbell

Amy Werbel probably now knows more about Anthony Comstock than anyone alive today. (And oh, how deliciously unpleasant some of that knowledge is!) There’s a sense of discovery that keeps this narrative moving.

Susan Jacoby

Werbel’s book is well worth reading; it adds to our understanding of the transformation of American culture in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Winterthur Portfolio

Amy Werbel’s new study turns up other surprises that will make the work of interest to students of art history as well as readers with an interest in gender and LGBTQ history.

American Historical Review

[A] dense and enjoyable book.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Anthony Mostrom

Making good use of recent monographic studies of mass media and the history of sexuality, the author, an associate professor of the history of art at the Fashion Institute of Technology, places the architect and chief executor of U.S. anti-obscenity law in a thick social and cultural context.

Inside Higher Education - Scott McLemee

In this vibrant history, Amy Werbel explores the legal and cultural battles surrounding the censorship of "obscene" materials in late nineteenth and early twentieth century New York. Lust on Trial not only mines the history of censorship and repression in a modernizing America, but also sheds light on its legacy for current debates.

Nadine Strossen

2018-01-22
The combative life of a man who "spread shame."For 40 years, Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) mounted a vigorous, often obsessive campaign, in the courts and in the press, to stamp out vice. For much of his notorious career, he was the sole arbiter of obscenity. Werbel (History of Art/Fashion Institute of Technology; Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia, 2007) offers a richly detailed examination of Comstock's life and mission, which she presents as a cautionary tale for our own time, when evangelical Christianity seeks to impose its values on the nation. For Comstock and his supporters in the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, repressing sexuality was "the only solution to pressing social problems." He opposed women's empowerment, condemned abortions and the women who died from botched procedures, and viewed "child sex trafficking as largely the fault of the victims." Fueled by religious zeal and supported by others who shared his Christian ideology, Comstock worked to initiate and expand state and federal anti-obscenity statutes that criminalized "anyone who facilitated the arousal of lust and sexual gratification other than for procreative purposes within marriage." As Secretary of the NYSSV, he energetically ferreted out lust, collecting material from a wide range of sources, including publishers, artists, photographers, merchants, theatrical producers, brothels, men's clubs, and art galleries. By 1876, he had sent to pulp mills more than 21,000 pounds of books and 202,000 images and photographs. For the bulk of the book, Werbel draws on Comstock's three-volume "Records of Arrests," his detailed chronicle of his "efforts to defeat Satan in America." This material reveals the trajectory of Comstock's influence and power, which plummeted after 1884, when artists, wealthy art collectors, and lawyers, judges, and juries thwarted him, questioning his credibility as a judge of "depravity." He became a butt of jokes, skewered in derisive cartoons and criticized widely in the press.An incisive history of the futility of censorship.

Kirkus Reviews