Comstock Act Passed – Era of Censorship Begins
Named after Anthony Comstock, a U.S. postal inspector, the Comstock Act, enacted on this day, became the most notorious censorship law in American history. The law was used to censor publications, particularly with regard to information and devices related to birth control and abortion, through the first decades of the twentieth century.
Officially an “Act of the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” the law criminalized “Every obscene, lewd, or lascivious, and every filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character, and every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for preventing conception or producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use; and every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for preventing conception or producing abortion . . . . “
Interestingly, there were hardly any criminal prosecutions for obscenity in Colonial America and in the first decades after the creation of the United States. When the Constitution was adopted in 1787, there were no laws related to sexual expression, or contraception, and sodomy laws were rarely enforced. The first state obscenity law was enacted by Vermont in 1821, according to the 1970 Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. Concerted attacks on allegedly obscene materials did not begin until a Protestant religious revivial that started in the 1790s and is often referred to as the “Second Great Awakening.”
The law and Comstock’s decades-long censorship crusade added the word “comstockery” to the American language.The term was created by the noted playwright George Bernard Shaw after Comstock had notified the New York City police that his play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession was obscene.
Comstock founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1873 and led its anti-obscenity crusade until his death, on September 21, 1915. He was succeeded as head of the Society by John Sumner, who continued his crusade.
The Comstock Law prohibited: “[any] 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 . . .”
Learn more about Anthony Comstock: Heywood Broun and Margaret Leach, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (1927)
Learn about Comstock at the U. S. Postal Inspection Service here.
And about the censorship crusade: Paul Boyer, Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (1968)
Read about the history of sex, censorship, birth control, abortion and the U.S. Constitution: Geoffrey R. Stone, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century (2017)
Read Margaret Sanger’s 1915 denunciation, “Comstockery in America”: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=303242.xml
Read the Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1970)