In spearheading the national campaign against obscenity, Comstock was hardly a Protestant rarity. Working within the precedents of English common law and its American corollaries, Comstock viewed the government as the strict guardian of public morals. Federal, state, and local statutes should create a seamless legal fabric for the protection of commonly recognized standards of decency. The nation’s judicial and police powers were to be deployed against anything that threatened to corrupt public morality, whether a poem, novel, painting, photograph, dance, phonograph recording, or contraceptive device. A particular alertness needed to be shown in regulating those materials that had a marked tendency to corrupt inexperienced youth or harm innocent children. Obscenity was not so much defined in this legal tradition, but imagined as a sinister force that depraved people’s imaginations and damaged the public welfare.
The emblem of Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice featured a reformer tossing bad books into a bonfire and an officer pushing a wrongdoer into a prison cell. Nineteenth Annual Report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (New York: n.p., 1893), cover.
Late nineteenth-century American jurisprudence on obscenity was particularly beholden to a specific British precedent of 1868 known as the Hicklin standard. That benchmark made no bones about placing the control of indecent printed matter above the freedom of the press. Lascivious acts were not even at issue: For a published work to be suppressed in its entirety, all it had to contain was a single passage deemed a stimulant of lewd thoughts. The bar for conviction could thereby be set very low: If an item was considered capable of making an impure impression on the most innocent member of a community, that was enough to label the piece obscene and prosecute its vendors. Comstock often displayed a cocksure attitude about the cases he sent to trial—and no wonder given the way obscenity standards were being interpreted in American courts in the late nineteenth century. Comstock had put Ezra Heywood, the founder of the New England Free-Love League, behind bars and had snared the freethinker D. M. Bennett as well for distributing one of Heywood’s publications. Doing battle with obscenity laws by asserting a right to free expression proved, time and again, a losing proposition well into the twentieth century.3
On the other liberty that Craddock wanted to claim—the freedom of religion—the legal messages were slightly more mixed. At first glance, it looked like the minders of Christian orthodoxy were losing their ability to treat blasphemy as a prosecutable offense. Abner Kneeland, a Massachusetts freethinker, had been famously convicted of the crime in 1838, but thereafter, American courts had shown greater wariness in taking up cases involving blasphemy charges, especially in comparison to their English counterparts. Though the laws remained on the books in most states, only the rare infidel actually got hauled in for blasphemy after the Civil War. Charles B. Reynolds in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1887 and Charles C. Moore in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1894, were two examples, but the results were hardly what the prosecutors were seeking. In the New Jersey case, the judge handed down a token fine, and the agnostic orator Robert Ingersoll scored big publicity points with his theatrical closing argument for the defense. In the Kentucky case, the judge expressly found the notion of blasphemy irreconcilable with American formulations of religious freedom and church-state separation. “There is no place for the common law crime of blasphemy,” the judge concluded, in a constitutional system of government that prized religious liberty above erstwhile legal offenses such as heresy, apostasy, and profane scoffing.4
Despite the difficulties involved in prosecuting blasphemy, it was not simply given a pass in the late nineteenth century. A reputation for outrageous infidelity made it a lot easier for the prosecution to press the obscenity charge. The Kentucky agitator Charles Moore, a few years after the judge had dismissed the blasphemy indictment against him, faced an obscenity trial in Ohio for distributing an issue of his paper, the Blue-grass Blade, that had ventured near the dangerous terrain of Free Love. Marriage reform was hardly his leading cause, but Moore, the grandson of the famed revivalist Barton W. Stone, had grown weary of the “holy hush” surrounding the “sex question.” That Free-Love flirtation was enough to attract the attention of the postal inspectors: The Comstock law against mailing obscene literature prevailed where the blasphemy charge had failed; Moore received a two-year sentence in the state penitentiary in Columbus. Not too long after his release Moore, as recalcitrant as ever, would turn the pages of the Blue-grass Blade over to the fiery defense of Craddock. 5
Indecency, as Moore’s fate indicates, had come to represent a greater legal vulnerability for freethinkers than irreverence. Expressing contrary views about God, Jesus, the Virgin Birth, or the Bible won them few public friends, but, as long as those anticlerical notions were not laced with bawdy vulgarities, infidels were generally at liberty to vent them. So when Comstock proclaimed that Craddock was guilty of blasphemy, that allegation was socially damning more than it was legally hazardous; it provided a rhetorical flourish to the much weightier legal charges he brought of lewdness and indecency. In short, the growing heft accorded obscenity provided a way for censors to keep harassing cheeky freethinkers and Free-Love liberals, while sidestepping the church-state issues that the blasphemy statutes raised.
That the charge of obscenity could be used to attack freethinking dissidents certainly muddied the waters of religious liberty, but what made American religious freedom even murkier was the way Protestant Christianity remained the standard by which church-state relations were refereed in the nineteenth century. When in 1892 the Supreme Court pronounced a clear consensus on the fact that the United States was a Christian nation, the justices meant, above all, a Protestant Christian nation. Craddock hoped that her case would allow a hearing for a more expansive view of church-state separation and the free exercise of religion. Her legal struggles, she thought, “differed from those of previous sex reformers, in that my religious rights had been invaded.” As she explained her stand, “Now, the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States says, expressly; ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ But the postal law passed by Congress against the use of the mails for obscene literature, has been twisted so as to . . . exclude my religious teachings.” She considered that infringement unconstitutional and very much wanted her lawyers to turn this into a religious freedom case: “I am taking my stand in the last ditch,” she wrote to her patron William Stead, “in this appeal for my religious liberty.” 6
Craddock deeply hoped that the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment would trump the regulation of obscenity, but that plan remained a risky leap of faith. Free-exercise cases were primarily a matter of later twentieth-century jurisprudence, not nineteenth-century precedent, so her legal foundation for this last-ditch stand was shaky at best. The maintenance of public morality, safety, and decency through the suppression of obscenity would almost certainly eclipse claims about individual religious liberty. The bedrock for church-state relations remained a virtuous Protestant republic, and that foundation still had a determinative effect on how the edges of religious freedom were defined. The courts were to preserve the generalized moral standards of a Christian nation, not to protect the religious liberty of dangerous eccentrics who openly subverted those values. Craddock was, in sum, proposing an unlikely free-exercise gambit—that her avowed spiritualism provided a constitutional protection for her frank sexology.7
“Comstock vs. Craddock,” as the face-off came to be known, put all the chips on the table: obscenity and First Amendment liberties, Protestant orthodoxy and freethinking blasphemy, vice suppression and sexual enlightenment. Anteing up more than he had initially imagined necessary, Comstock wagered his reputation and that of his sponsoring society in his efforts to silence Craddock. With not much respectability left to gamble away, Craddock at least had her personal liberty, but she was now quite ready to risk that as well. If Comstock liked a good ruse in the se
rvice of evangelical morality—the use of decoy letters with assumed identities was a staple for him—he was hardly bluffing about fines, prisons, and insane asylums. He once reminisced that as a boy he had enjoyed building stone-traps in the woods; when the rabbit or squirrel nibbled on the bait, it would be crushed to death by a large falling stone. Just as Satan devised snares to catch his victims—Free Lovers, fine-art aficionados, and liberals were among the devil’s fiendish lures—Comstock had to counter with his own godly contrivances to flatten his smut-mongering quarry. Craddock looked like easy enough prey, but the showdown she triggered would prove anything but trouble-free for Comstock.8
ALTHOUGH CRADDOCK ONLY appeared in Comstock’s logbook in 1898, he was surely aware of her well before that arrest. Perhaps her tenure as corresponding secretary for the Comstock-bashing American Secular Union had first drawn the great vice reformer’s attention. He was certainly on constant guard against liberal organizers with their inflated sense of free expression. “Liberals and infidels are the only class who have undertaken by a systematic and organized effort, to defend the dealers in obscene literature,” he claimed, “or repeal the laws of Congress prohibiting the transmission through the mails of this infamous matter.” Comstock had five chapters on “so-called liberals” in his sensational Frauds Exposed (1880) and two more on them in his equally lurid Traps for the Young (1883), manifestos in which he pictured pornographers and freethinking liberals as yoked at the hip in a diabolical alliance against him.
Comstock pointed to the National Liberal League, the direct precursor of the American Secular Union, as the brain trust for the unholy coalition opposing his reform efforts. He clearly kept an eye on that organization’s leadership, “their blasphemous speeches and publications.” “The National Liberal League through its officers has become the champion of obscenity,” he remarked. Craddock was small fry compared to some of the more vocal and visible Liberal Leaguers—infidel Robert Ingersoll always topped the list; Free-Lover Moses Harman was not far behind—but the president and corresponding secretary remained obvious personifications of the group’s efforts to roll back Comstock’s trademark laws. The hybrid image of “the Liberal obscenity peddler” was a well-established character type in Comstock’s mind, and it would be easy for him to see Craddock as the latest player of that abominable part.9
If her role in the American Secular Union had not already sealed Craddock’s reputation with Comstock as one of the devil’s sharpshooters, then certainly her part in the small-scale culture war over the Danse du Ventre did so. Comstock’s local agents in Philadelphia had immediately put Craddock on legal notice that her essay on belly dancing was considered obscene and could not be sent through the mails. Toward the end of November in 1896, as she was preparing a handful of pamphlets for the cause (including a revised version of the Danse du Ventre essay), she received a harsh warning from Philadelphia’s Post Office Inspector, Warren P. Edgerton. He reminded her in no uncertain terms of the illegality of sending such indecent materials through the mails. That encounter left her, to say the least, “quite down in the mouth”; she “cried and cried” that late autumn afternoon.10
The extent of the ban, as Edgerton presented it to her, felt utterly stifling, and she began to despair of her “beautiful gospel” getting any hearing at all. Edgerton’s lecture had been so severe that it left her doubting whether she could safely keep up a private correspondence with her pupils. “If a printed pamphlet cannot thus go through the mails, is a written letter any more exempt?” she asked bleakly in her diary. “Can I give advice by mail, as a correspondent on social purity, to people seeking to live aright? . . . Apparently not.” She feared, moreover, that the postal inspector was even warning her against conferring with friends on personal matters through the mail. “No matter how I may yearn for the wise counsel of some earthly friend, I am forbidden by law to write to that friend to ask for counsel, if the advice sought has anything to do with right living in the sexual relation,” she despaired. “Is it not terrible?” One legal adviser she consulted at the time reassured her that her private letters were safe from interference, but Craddock did a lot of frank marital advising through correspondence and so she remained justifiably anxious. Certainly, the authorities were going to do nothing to relieve those worries. It served the government’s correctional purposes to have Craddock “fretting my heart out.”11
With the written word looking like a risky medium across the board, Craddock turned to spoken communication as a refuge for her teachings. Now there was only “one thing to do—teach orally,” Craddock resolved in her diary. By the spring of 1897 she had started running advertisements in local newspapers, which were aimed initially at women as her chosen audience: “INSTRUCTION GIVEN TO WOMEN UPON SCIENTIFIC MOTHERHOOD AND RIGHT LIVING IN THE MARITAL RELATION.” While she ended up working just as much with men as with women, she always saw women as more promising and fitting customers—on religious, social, and sexual grounds. Twisting the usual association of hysteria with women, Craddock explained her preference for female clients in her diary: “Women are less hysterical over sexual matters than are men, so that there is some chance of having women study up right sexual living in seriousness and from a high plane; whereas a majority of men are liable to have sexual hysterics while discussing the physiology and hygiene of sex.” Given how many of her male students wound up occupying anything but a spiritual plane in their behavior toward her as a teacher, Craddock no doubt often wished that she had stuck with this initial mission of instructing women only.12
Despite the damper that Inspector Edgerton had placed upon her labors, Craddock held at least a frail hope for success through the shift to oral instruction. “I may succeed in this. But Heaven knows what infernal laws may be brought into requisition to choke me off even here,” she acknowledged. Scraping together seven dollars in rent for a modest space on Arch Street not far from her secretarial job at City Hall, she set up shop. Even though this little office had “once been a small bathroom,” she was thrilled with it, the skylight, the pale blue wallpaper, the refinished wood floor. It was hers, “a dear little box of a room.” Being able to conduct face-to-face instruction had become, in Craddock’s reckoning, the last citadel for “my soul’s freedom of speech.” She was ready, she now started telling her friends, to fight hard for this liberty, come what may: “I cannot and will not be silenced!”13
The satisfaction Craddock took in having her own office for counseling and study soon collided with grimmer realities. However much Edgerton’s warning had rattled her in late 1896, the effects of it gradually wore off over the next several months. Perhaps she needed the mail-order income; perhaps she had gathered renewed courage to speak her mind; perhaps she was courting persecution—“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” she reminded herself in her diary. Whatever the combination of reasons, she started sending out her new pamphlets and actively promoting them little more than six months after Edgerton had spooked her. That move did not go unnoticed for long: A formal postal complaint was filed against her on November 13, 1897, this one for depositing Helps to Happy Wedlock and Letter to a Prospective Bride in the mails. Except for another grave warning from Edgerton not to mail her pamphlets—and now he added Alice Stockham’s Karezza to the list of books that Craddock was forbidden to distribute—no immediate federal action was taken.14
For a brief moment it looked like Craddock was going to get off with another slap on the wrist. Two days later, however, her renewed involvement in sex reform received a more severe smack when she was abruptly fired from her municipal job at the Bureau of Highways. Her extracurricular activities on behalf of sex reform had caught the notice of a coworker and raised the ire of her boss. The close timing of her firing and Edgerton’s latest warning might have been mere coincidence, but that seems unlikely. Craddock was moving up on the postal inspector’s watch-list, and that added attention was starting to catch up with her. In any case, Craddock’s job loss doubled the financial
squeeze that was being put on her: It cut off a reliable source of income at the same time the post office was trying to close down her mail-order business. Cruelly, Craddock now felt keen pressure simply to return remittances rather than risk fulfilling orders by sending her pamphlets through the mail. Her livelihood had been all but extinguished.15
Just how far and fast Craddock was sinking into a legal quagmire became evident the spring after her dismissal from the Bureau of Highways. On May 13, 1898, a second postal offense was registered against her, this time for mailing her other two pamphlets, Advice to a Bridegroom and The Danse du Ventre. There was no room left now for more warnings: Craddock was summarily arrested for depositing obscene literature in the mail.
The chain of events following Craddock’s arrest moved swiftly. She was arraigned in federal court by the end of the month, her case sent to the grand jury for likely indictment. It was now at the end of May 1898 that Craddock entered Comstock’s record keeping for the first time. The gravity of her predicament was not lost on Craddock. “I have come to grief at last,” she wrote her long-time ally Edward Bond Foote in early June. After her initial hearing, but before any actual trial, the “Post Office authorities” had made it clear to her that all four of her pamphlets were now considered contraband. “This prohibition covers the entire United States,” she reported to Foote. “As I have been dependent, somewhat, on my mail business, I shall now give up my office, and betake myself to Chicago—that Mecca of Freethought.” There, while awaiting the grand jury’s decision, she hoped to start up her practice of oral instruction again and somehow steer clear of any further legal entanglements.16
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