Craddock could do little more than watch as Comstock conducted his raid. Scanning the shelves of her private library, he found sixty-one books and 536 circulars worthy of removal, all of which he could use as evidence against her before once again pulping such filth. A heavy-set man with mutton-chop sideburns and creased blue eyes, Comstock had been at this for a while, having led the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice since its incorporation in 1873. For three decades now he had been frustrating the designs of shady booksellers, sketchy impresarios, dime novelists, condom distributors, abortion providers, birth-control advocates, and taboo-breaking artists. Imbued with a strong sense of Christian discipline from his Connecticut youth, he had further honed his self-control through prayerfully resisting the temptations of army life during the Civil War—the whiskey drinking, coarse language, and tobacco chewing that marked the camaraderie of his fellow soldiers. “Boys got very drunk,” Comstock noted of his army mates at one point in his diary. “I did not drink a drop. . . . Touch not. Taste not. Handle not.”2
After the war Comstock had settled in New York City where he got a job working as a clerk in a dry goods store. Still in his early twenties, he navigated his way through the urban streets with the moral compass of the Young Men’s Christian Association. Metropolitan leisure looked, if anything, even worse than army unruliness; the snares of the city, Comstock decided, required systematic efforts at vice suppression. He soon formed a local obscenity-busting committee, and, with the help of well-heeled allies in the Protestant business community, he built it into one of the most powerful agencies of evangelical reform in the country’s history. Shrewdly targeting the U.S. mails as the chief conduit for the national dissemination of printed matter, Comstock established himself as a special agent of the U.S. Post Office, a role that gave him far-reaching authority to monitor and control the circulation of any and all indecent materials. The federal postal system, with its transcontinental reach, became his ticket for limiting the flow of objectionable media. By the close of 1903, he calculated that his vice society had obtained 2,712 arrests and 2,009 convictions through its inspective vigilance. He also proudly tabulated the seizure and destruction of thirty-eight tons of obscene books, pamphlets, and periodicals, not to mention 1,023,655 lewd pictures and photographs. Adding a few pounds of contraband from Craddock’s shelves hardly looked like much of a haul in light of Comstock’s weighty caseload.3
The zealousness of Comstock’s campaign for moral purity made him an outsized figure in Victorian America. To his evangelical admirers, he was a broad-shouldered, sinewy hero; to his lusty caricaturists, he was a corpulent, greasy villain. Few looked on his two-hundred-and-ten-pound frame with indifference: Was that a fighter’s build or a Falstaff ’s belly? From one side, Comstock appeared a godsend to a Christian nation, the great protector of American family values; from the other, he looked like the joyless face of an evangelical theocracy, the destroyer of American liberties. Craddock was only one among thousands of his targets, and yet her case ended up giving this cultural divide an almost mythic cast. “[Miss] Craddock was a surprisingly lovely woman,” one observer sympathetic to her plight noted. “She and Comstock were the Beauty and the Beast.”4
Craddock’s pretty lady-like exterior never fooled Comstock. She always stood out in his mind as a particularly repulsive troublemaker: “I do not know of any obscene book . . . that contains matters more dangerous to the young, than the matters this woman has published,” Comstock wrote at the time of her arrest. “It is not a question of sympathy, or lack of sympathy for this poor woman. But it is a question of preventing the youth of this great country, from being debauched in mind, body and soul.” In the Society’s Annual Report for 1902, which detailed the group’s usual successes against America’s “Moral-Cancer-Planters,” the coverage of Craddock’s indictment far outstripped that of all other cases. For a group that combated everything from bawdy plays and gambling dens to contraceptive devices and indecent pictures on the walls of saloons, Craddock had somehow become the focal point in Comstock’s crusade against obscenity and vice. The author of “indescribably nasty books” and the purveyor of “outrageous blasphemy,” she was, Comstock swore, “a disgrace to her sex” and a danger to the public peace.5
Anthony Comstock, standing in his office of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice,has the look of a man grown weary—if no less determined—through the ceaseless combat of sin and sleaze. WHi-4495, Wisconsin Historical Society.
During her battle with Comstock in New York City in 1902, Craddock became an icon among social radicals. This particular photograph, inscribed with the notation “Ida Craddock Comstock Victim,” was likely used as part of efforts to generate money to support her legal defense. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan.
Having already been arrested in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, DC, on similar charges, Craddock well knew that Comstock and his three deputies had come to her apartment to take her into custody. All were playing their expected parts, but, as Craddock stood waiting for Comstock to finish inspecting her belongings, she heard the great “apostle of purity,” as she wryly called him, whistling a tune with a peculiarly composed and calm air. Craddock took it to be a sign that his imagination, so prone in her view to salacious and even sadistic fantasies, was drifting off into its favored territory of erotic reverie. With a disturbing coolness, the federally appointed protector of innocent youth was humming the music of “the Koochy-Koochy Dance,” a notorious form of belly dancing only recently introduced to American audiences and one that had quickly become a byword for sensually charged dancing, the Hootchy-Kootchy or Danse du Ventre.6
Perhaps, as Comstock inspected her bookshelves, he had alighted on a stray copy of the second edition of Craddock’s own Danse du Ventre, “revised and enlarged, bound in yellow,” a remarkable defense of just such hip-shaking performances. Craddock certainly made that connection herself; shortly after her arrest she sent a copy of the pamphlet to her lawyer, marking it as “especially important . . . because Anthony evidently objects to pelvic movements being written about,” despite, she noted bitterly, having had belly dancing very much on his mind as he rummaged through her office. Or, perhaps Comstock, a man who definitely liked to keep close count of his wins and losses, had not drifted into erotic fantasy at all, but was whistling a premeditated victory song. Perhaps he was taunting Craddock, shaming her by scandalous association—just as he did later in taking her to jail aboard the elevated train, loudly calling attention to her with “opprobrious epithets” about the filth and blasphemy of her writings. No doubt he wanted to bring her to justice, but even more he wished to bring her into disgrace. After all, with this search-and-seizure operation, he was evening an old score, one that went back at least a decade to the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 and one that would come to a crushing end in October 1902 eight months after this raid.7
CHICAGO HAD MADE A manifesto of the 1893 World’s Fair, conjuring up a vision of triumphal progress on the shore of Lake Michigan. Dubbed the Columbian Exposition in honor of the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s globe-altering voyage, the fair declared the nation’s achievements through an array of giant pavilions dedicated to American plenty and ingenuity. A sequence of sixty different statues of Abundance adorned Agricultural Hall, and nearby at the Electricity Building, a heroic sculpture of Benjamin Franklin paid him the tribute (in Latin) of having stolen heaven’s thunderbolt and broken the tyrant’s scepter. Not to be outshone, the Palace of Mechanic Arts contained a vast twenty-three acres of floor space for displaying the prodigious machinery of American industry—the cranes, forges, pumps, boilers, and furnaces that fueled the country’s economic growth and material prosperity. Westinghouse, for example, exhibited thirteen of its latest and most powerful engines, while the country’s vast textile mills flaunted their ever-improving technologies for the mass production of consumer goods, a nonstop stream of readymade mittens, jeans, hosiery, and handkerchiefs. Fittingly eno
ugh, winged angels carrying laurel victory wreaths crowned the palace’s soaring towers.
Even more than serving as a showcase for the country’s commercial and industrial accomplishments, this “Dream City,” as it was celebrated at the time, was America’s claim to cultural prestige on a transatlantic level. Many of the other grand expositions of the nineteenth century had been held in such European hubs as London, Paris, and Vienna; while the United States had hosted a variety of international fairs, only the nation’s Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 had rivaled those Old World stages. For the gleaming design of Chicago’s fair, the planners drew on the most renowned architectural firms from across the country, enlisting the talents of such giants as Frederick Law Olmsted and Louis Sullivan. The monumental statuary, stately colonnades, cascading fountains, great domes, spacious rotundas, and colossal art galleries—all announced America’s own full-blown renaissance. Chicago was presented as an American Venice, and, thanks to Olmsted’s architectural landscaping, the fair’s meticulously sculpted grounds possessed the canals, lagoons, and gondolas to make that comparison quite literal.8
The Columbian Exposition’s grand staging radiated both a boastful chauvinism and a bracing cosmopolitanism. That was nowhere more apparent than in the World’s Parliament of Religions, a much watched assembly convened during the final weeks of the fair in September 1893. The exposition generated a plethora of auxiliary congresses dedicated to almost every conceivable subject—from astronomy to psychology to folklore to woman’s suffrage to peace arbitration to meteorology. None of these gatherings created a greater buzz than this seventeen-day parliament of faiths. To most Protestant observers, the convention looked like a prime opportunity to dramatize the superiority of Christian civilization, the crown jewel of the world’s religions and cultures. In the eyes of many religious liberals, by contrast, the parliament appeared the advance wave of a more cosmopolitan tide of interfaith exchange and solidarity.
From whatever angle Americans viewed it, the World’s Parliament of Religions presented a spectacle unlike any they had witnessed before. With Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Jain, Confucian, Roman Catholic, and Unitarian representatives, it offered an unusually broad platform for religious plurality. More than a few of the parliament ’s participants imagined themselves as harbingers of a resplendent universal faith. They were builders of the new temple that the British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson had envisaged just the year before: “Neither Pagod[a], Mosque, nor Church,/ But loftier, simpler, always open-doored/ To every breath from heaven.” In a city of magical dreams, that vision of religious concord and openness was among the most dazzling. Whether listening to the addresses of Swami Vivekananda, the Buddhist monk Anagarika Dharmapala, or the Muslim convert Alexander Russell Webb, many Americans were drawn for the first time to the new spiritual possibilities that the parliament disclosed.9
For all of its scientific, artistic, and religious ambitions, the Columbian Exposition very much indulged as well the country’s fondness for the showman, huckster, and carnival barker. The fair’s most reliable product was not cultural renaissance or spiritual uplift, but popular amusement, the well-hyped road that ran from P. T. Barnum’s American Museum to Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West shows. The Midway Plaisance was the fair’s three-ring circus. A boulevard of curiosities, it included a panorama of a Hawaiian volcano, a Javanese village, an ostrich farm, an American Indian pageant, a Moorish palace, and a model of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The Midway also boasted the debut of the Ferris wheel, which carried visitors more than 250 feet into the air and turned on a seventy-ton axle, “the largest piece of steel ever forged,” its promoters bragged. In the wheel’s gargantuan shadow was Cairo Street, where tourists could watch the reenactment of a wedding procession that included bejeweled camels, “donkey boys,” and “tom-tom beaters.” As if that were not enough to leave spectators awestruck, there followed impersonators of the “priests of Luxor,” staging the semblance of ancient pagan mysteries, “the rites of Ammon-Ra, Mout, and Chons.” At the end of it all, some lucky visitors were afforded their own precarious camel ride, a sight that the rest of the crowd found wildly amusing.10
Cairo Street’s open-air spectacles made it a very popular destination, but what sealed its fame were the performers of the Danse du Ventre at the Egyptian Theatre. A dozen or so young women, usually taking the stage one at a time, swayed their hips to the accompaniment of tambourines, flutes, drums, and castanets. With “numerous bangles and neck chains” accentuating their chests and with tassels adorning their waists, the dancers displayed “powerful contortions of the abdomen” to the wonderment of the spectators. Not surprisingly, this scandalously exotic exhibition held the rapt attention of the country’s journalists as much as it did other fairgoers. The dancer “commences to sway her body in a dreamy way,” one typical account related, “while a turbaned Turk in the background strikes a throbbing, whirring monotone from a one-stringed instrument. . . . The mind is thus prepared for a dance quite as un-American as the surroundings.” By the end of 1893, the media’s excited coverage had effectively introduced the belly dance to the American public on a national scale.11
The Ferris wheel, “the chief wonder of the Fair of 1893,” loomed over the international exposition. Its popularity among sightseers—27 million of whom visited this magic city—became legendary. Halsey C. Ives, The Dream City: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition (St. Louis: Thompson, 1893), n.p.
Among the most discussed sites at the fair was Cairo Street with its exotic staging of the Orient. A popular destination on the Midway Plaisance, it combined Egyptian gods, faux mosques, and ornamented camels. Halsey C. Ives, The Dream City: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition (St. Louis: Thompson, 1893), n.p.
The newspaper reports on this “astonishing anatomical exercise” offered at the same time a fine miniature of how the American imperial imagination worked in the late nineteenth century. Predictably belly dancing conjured up fantasies of harems and seraglios, exotic Oriental worlds made especially vivid in the West through the colonial enterprises of Britain and France. But those foreign climes were not all the Danse du Ventre evoked for American journalists. Some quickly linked the performances in the Egyptian Theatre to the dances of American Indians, noting a parallel between the “vulgar” rites of the Oklahoma territory and these “writhing exponents of African barbarism” on the Midway. A particularly troubling association in that regard was the Ghost Dance, a pan-Indian movement of the late nineteenth century centered on the performance of a prophetic spirit dance. Deeply linked to Lakota Sioux resistance, the Ghost Dance had been a factor in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. That was not the only native ceremony, though, under federal ban at the time: Indian dances across the board were routinely subject to policies of suppression and reform—as if any unregulated form of indigenous dance was inimical to the progress of American empire. Red versus white, primitive versus civilized, immoral versus moral, Orient versus Occident, the Danse du Ventre managed to stir up a series of free-associated images, variations on the dangers and occasional allures of striking cultural difference. The media, not surprisingly, thrived on such spectacular comparisons and multiplied them with gusto.12
All the sensationalism helped engender a considerable public debate over this exotic new dance. Were the Cairo Street dancers presenting a program that was safe for public consumption, or were they instead purveyors of a barbarous vice that required suppression? Could the performance be “tolerated in a civilized and Christian community”? Was this “heathen show” simply “so demoralizing, and so disgusting” that it had to be shuttered? Or might it somehow prove a useful lesson in social evolution, if not cultural variety? The Harvard ethnologist Frederic Ward Putnam, a chief planner of the exposition’s archaeological and anthropological exhibits, argued for leniency. Every nation has its own curious dance forms, he insisted: “Is it not probable,”
he asked, “that our waltz would seem equally strange to these dusky women of Egypt?” Putnam had to concede, though, that many Americans regarded the Dance du Ventre as “low and repulsive” and feared any exposure whatsoever to such base exhibitions. Putnam’s highbrow curiosity hardly stilled those deeper cultural apprehensions: Why risk contaminating the country with the waste of “Oriental slums”?13
A group of tourists pose with “natives” in Cairo Street in front of the “Dancing Theatre,” which became a focal point of controversy and fascination. Halsey C. Ives, The Dream City: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition (St. Louis: Thompson, 1893), n.p.
Protestant moralists, in particular, wanted the “horrible orgie” closed down, and they instinctively called on the most powerful and determined inspector of the day, Anthony Comstock, for help. By no means confining himself to his headquarters in New York City, Comstock commonly logged thousands of miles a year in tracking obscenity to its source. (It helped that his commission as a special agent of the Post Office Department afforded him free travel by rail, steamboat, and stage all across the country.) With a keen sense of civic and religious duty, he quickly headed to Chicago in late July 1893 to tour the theaters of the Midway. Leading an investigative entourage, Comstock predictably discovered a scene of dance-crazed debauchery. He wasted no time in rallying the faithful to clean up these “indecent exhibitions” and to rout the “shameless women” who were degrading true womanhood. As one member of his inspection team professed, “I would sooner lay my two boys in their graves than that they should look upon the sights I saw.” Or, as another despaired upon exiting the show, “I have been to the mouth of hell to-day.”14
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