Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  Her legal mess, however, proved to be only half of Craddock’s worries. She had told Foote that she planned to leave for Chicago the next week where her admired mentor Alice Stockham offered connections and temporary shelter. Craddock had aimed to depart on June 13 or 14, but that turned out not to be soon enough. Her mother, again ashamed of her daughter for getting her “name dragged through the papers,” turned for help to an assistant district attorney, Thomas Barlow, who was one of Comstock’s most dependable allies in Philadelphia. Together Barlow and Lizzie obtained from two physicians the requisite certification that Ida was “an insane person” and thereby managed to get her locked up in the Friends Asylum, located in the Philadelphia suburb of Frankford, on June 10th. Six days later the State Committee on Lunacy transferred her from that sanitarium to the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane where the doctor in charge was apparently surer about her pathology than was the head physician at Friends. To Craddock’s mother, a plea of insanity had become both necessary and accurate—for mitigating the damage to the family’s good name and for saving Ida from herself. Lizzie now had the district attorney’s office as well as the medical establishment to back up her motherly assessment.17

  Craddock’s abduction had been terrifying. Lizzie had shown up with two accompanying officers ready to detain her daughter; screaming out for help, Ida had tried to escape but was held by force. The two doctors were called in to verify the medical case against her, and her mother and two of the four men then took her away to the asylum in a carriage. Over the next several days, Craddock made repeated requests to be allowed to contact her friends as well as her lawyer, but these pleas were refused: She tried to get word to Henrietta Westbrook no less than fourteen times; she was similarly determined in her efforts to notify William Stead by cable; and she had begged to telephone her attorney.

  Craddock was eventually allowed to contact the outside world, but the initial experience of being robbed of her freedom had been unforgettably chilling. “The agony of those first few days, before I got into communication with my friends,” she wrote a couple of months afterward, “was something frightful. Had I had the slightest tendency to insanity, I should have gone stark, staring mad, with the shock and horror of it.” Craddock felt, indeed, as if her whereabouts might remain a mystery indefinitely. Since she had told all her friends that she was leaving for Chicago, she figured they would have little reason to suspect that she had been confined and thus no occasion to make a search for her. She feared that her mother had finally found a way to put an end to “my sex reform teaching” and “to get me completely and forever into her power.”18

  After the first few days of fear, Craddock regained her balance and was soon fighting for her release. Word somehow made its way to Henrietta Westbrook who, in turn, spread the news about what had happened; soon Stead was weighing in as well on Craddock’s behalf. The crucial aid in this instance, though, came from Craddock’s attorney Carrie Burnham Kilgore, the first—and for a long time only—woman admitted to the bar in Philadelphia. Unlike Craddock’s failed efforts to crack open Penn’s undergraduate program for women, Kilgore had successfully broken down the men-only barrier at the Law School, though it took her ten years of repeated petitions to do so. Going on in 1886 to win the right to practice law in the state, she was one of a small cadre of professional women who never deserted Craddock. Kilgore had informally advised Ida the first time her mother had tried to institutionalize her in 1894 and quickly came to her defense in this much more urgent instance as well. Though the details of her legal strategy have not survived, Kilgore somehow managed to bring enough heat to bear on the reigning authorities that, within three months, Ida was out of the asylum.19

  Kilgore was working at the same time on the federal charges against Craddock. The grand jury handed down an indictment on August 16, 1898, but Kilgore managed to get it dropped two weeks later, apparently by cutting a deal with the district attorney’s office: All four of Craddock’s pamphlets would remain barred from circulation through the mails, but, in promising to abide by that judgment, Craddock would not have to stand trial and hence would avoid the possibility of jail time as well as ongoing confinement in the asylum. The joined ambitions of her mother and the assistant district attorney had been to shut down all facets of Craddock’s sex-education program, including the oral instruction and the distribution of her pamphlets by hand. With Kilgore’s help, the prosecution settled for the narrower censure much to the regret of Lizzie, who had reached the sorrowful conclusion that her daughter needed to be permanently confined to a hospital for the insane, lest she continue her downward spiral to an even more humiliating end.

  Upon her release from the Pennsylvania Hospital—and even with the federal indictment resolved—Craddock knew that she had to stay far away from her mother. Kilgore had “unhesitatingly advised me to get out of the State as quickly as possible” and under no circumstances to return to her mother’s house. Ever fearful of the asylum, Craddock headed to Newcastle, Delaware, to stay with a friend, her flight complicated by the fact that Lizzie had possession of most of her clothes and furnishings (though Ida, ever the self-recorder, had somehow escaped with her typewriter in hand). A particular frustration nagged Craddock—her mother had her books. “There is a valuable Latin dictionary; a Greek Testament, dictionaries and text-books in Greek, German, French, Italian, Spanish; works on psychology, on travels, on folklore, etc.,” she enumerated, feeling very much the want of them. Her books were “like good old friends,” and she had often taken “great comfort” from just looking at the shelves and seeing her favorite volumes lined up near her. Lizzie would not relinquish any of the books or other personal articles, holding onto them for whatever leverage they offered over her “poor, misguided, insane daughter.”20

  From Newcastle, Delaware, Craddock made her way back to London with an invitation to work for Stead again, this time in the Review of Reviews office. Stead had launched that publication in London in 1890 and soon had versions of it coming out in New York and Melbourne as well. It focused on literary updates and world news, not the spiritualist frontiers represented by Borderland, the editorial office in which Craddock had worked during her first stay in London in 1894 and 1895. That latter journal, after four years of occultist reportage, had recently folded, so Stead needed to place Craddock elsewhere in his sprawling publishing enterprise.

  Craddock had been back in England all of two weeks when Stead’s plan to have her work at the Review of Reviews blew up. The office manager had gotten hold of some of Craddock’s personal correspondence with Stead and was put off by her discussions of spiritualism. (Few of his colleagues found Stead’s appetite for religious eccentrics to be his most impressive side, and certainly the occult interests that he and Craddock shared could look to skeptics like the tassels on the cultural fringe.) Also, one of the letters that the office manager discovered was actually from Ida’s mother to Stead, and that only made matters worse: Lizzie, after all, was never her daughter’s best character witness. The letter called Ida a liar for trying to pass as “Mrs. Craddock” rather than Miss Craddock. As Ida saw it, since she had been forced to masquerade as Mrs. Roberts the last time she was in London, she could not show up this time as a “Miss.” Once a Mrs., Miss was not an option. Mr. Roberts had passed on, so the story went, and Ida had returned to her maiden name. More than a cover-up of a previous disguise, though, Craddock also thought being a “Mrs.” was a useful cloak for her work as a marriage reformer. Lizzie, of course, would have none of it and no doubt provided Stead with an earful in her letter to him.

  The revelations the office manager found in this stack of correspondence proved disastrous for Craddock. Word soon passed from the snooping office administrator to Stead’s son and then on to Stead’s wife. No one suggested that the letters implied an illicit sexual relationship between Stead and Craddock; Stead’s concern for Ida’s welfare appeared “fatherly.” Nonetheless, Stead’s wife and son had come to see her as a shady and disreputa
ble character—a lying, spiritualist crank—and that disfavor, combined with the opposition of the office manager, made Craddock’s employment at the Review of Reviews untenable. After finishing up some research at the British Museum, she packed her bags and headed back across the Atlantic. So it was that in January 1899 Craddock made her way belatedly to Chicago—the onetime stage of the Danse du Ventre, now the “Mecca of Freethought”—where she hoped for a fresh start.21

  In America’s second city Craddock established a new office for marital instruction and within the next several months had obtained a large enough space to begin holding regular Sunday meetings of her new Church of Yoga fellowship. At this point she was living more by the letter of her agreement with the Philadelphia prosecutors than by the spirit of it. Although, as required, she had stopped circulating her previous four pamphlets through the mails, she was still happily selling them by hand. Also, she insisted that there was nothing stopping her from publishing a new pamphlet and circulating that one through the mails. Hence Right Marital Living, a modestly expanded version of her teachings, was out by summer. It did not take long for Chicago’s postal inspectors to react.

  On August 16, 1899, a Boston editor turned Craddock in for sending him the new pamphlet for review, and two months later she was again under federal indictment for depositing obscene literature in the mails. The irony this time was that the initial complaint to the postal inspectors came from someone whom Craddock had reason to believe was on her side: the eminent reformer Henry B. Blackwell, widower of suffragist Lucy Stone and publisher of the Woman’s Journal. Blackwell, a lionized activist for women’s rights, objected to Craddock’s separation of the physical pleasure of intercourse from its procreative function. The obscenities of a radical like Craddock threatened the good name of the suffrage movement, and Blackwell had thus taken it upon himself to become one of Comstock’s informers. That Craddock then dismissed Blackwell, with his halo of white whiskers and receding hairline, as a sexually frustrated old geezer only added to the impasse between them.22

  Craddock was saved again by a good lawyer. Clarence Darrow, the celebrated attorney for the damned, posted the $500 bail-bond for her release on October 31 and took on her case pro bono. Darrow, the very same age as Craddock at forty-one, had come to particular prominence in Chicago as the defender of the railway union leader, Eugene Debs, in 1894. Known for his snide distance from Christian orthodoxy, Darrow became infamous a quarter century later for taking on evangelical standard-bearer and populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. For his tenacious defense of teaching evolutionary biology in the public schools and for his storied cross-examination of Bryan, Darrow would be immortalized as one of America’s great freethinkers, the shrewd advocate of scientific rationality in the face of the country’s Fundamentalist bumpkins.

  If a cantankerous agnostic much of the time, Darrow nonetheless had a soft spot for spiritualism, nearly akin to William James’s attractions to psychical research. Darrow reported having visited mediums and séances in “most American cities of any importance, and many in Europe.” “I really wanted to believe it all,” he observed in his autobiography, “and therefore tried to, but in vain.” Even if his fascination with spiritualism failed to overcome his skepticism, Darrow had other facets of his religious background that very much mirrored his new client’s circumstances. He was the son of Methodist-turned-Unitarian parents who, as he described their trek, had left Christianity behind and sailed “out on the open sea without a rudder or compass, and with no port in sight.” Perhaps Craddock and Darrow were, after all, then something of a match: He liked lost progressive causes more than routine legal work, freethinkers and spiritualists more than well-anchored Christians. Craddock fit that bill perfectly.23

  Darrow entered a plea of not guilty on Craddock’s behalf on November 11th. In short order, Henry Blackwell and Anthony Comstock were both subpoenaed to testify. If Darrow was entertaining fantasies of a courtroom drama with Comstock—on the order of his later showdown with William Jennings Bryan—he did not get his chance. He quickly decided instead that Craddock’s best hope was for him to work out a plea deal. “If I wished to fight, he would make the best fight possible,” she reported. “But he warned me in advance that I was certain to be pronounced guilty and sent to the penitentiary.” Faced with that prediction, Craddock reluctantly agreed to change her plea to guilty and, in doing so, allowed Darrow to pursue a “compromise”: namely, a three-month suspended sentence rather than imprisonment. Clemency came this time at a premium—upon the condition that Craddock turn over all copies of her sex-reform pamphlets “to be burned.” As she noted, “The prosecution had me in a hole, and could practically dictate their own terms.” The entire stock of her latest manual, Right Marital Living—along with the remaining stash of her old pamphlets—went up in flames. When Comstock put the image of a book-burning reformer on his society’s seal, he very much meant the emblem to be taken literally.24

  Looking again for a more hospitable place to carry on her work, Craddock traveled west to Denver where she offered lectures, worked diligently on her big book on marriage reform, and pursued her Divine Science interests over the next year. She also published a carefully expurgated version of her teachings that she hoped would prove acceptable to the censors. Her edits included turning the word semen into generative fluid, dropping every mention of the word testicles, and eliminating her advice on different positions and lubricants. Those efforts apparently worked, at least for the time being; Craddock experienced no legal trouble in Colorado.

  In the spring of 1901, she returned east to Washington, D.C., where she would cause a far greater stir than she had out West. Ever the brainworker, she wanted to conduct research at the Library of Congress, but she also had a new publication to distribute, The Wedding Night—one that was as frank (and obscene) as ever. It seemed designed to outrage Comstock and his agents, whom she was now affectionately referring to in print and correspondence as “the Holy Fathers of the American Inquisition.” Later Comstock would specify three passages from this latest work as unspeakably nasty—one of which praised anew the “wifely duty to perform pelvic movements during the embrace, riding your husband’s organ gently, and, at times, passionately, with various movements, up and down, sideways, and with a semi-rotary movement.” The Danse du Ventre lived on in The Wedding Night, and the latter provoked the same horror of female ardor that Craddock’s original defense of belly dancing had. Indeed, her latest musings on pelvic movements seemed to condense all the furor and offense, the passage from motionless modesty to undulating passion.25

  In April 1901, the same month that Craddock had first opened an office in the nation’s capital, she once again found herself under arrest for circulating “obscene, lewd, [and] lascivious pamphlets.” A statute in the District prohibited circulation of indecent publications by hand, in addition to the usual ban protecting the mails. Craddock spent the night of April 23 in jail and was arraigned in police court the next day. The morning newspapers had picked up the story of her arrest, so the courtroom was crowded with “curiosity-seekers” hoping “to hear something spicy,” along with a smattering of “radical women” wanting to show their support. The voyeurs got what they wanted: At the hearing the prosecution read objectionable passages from The Wedding Night to make the case for charging Craddock.

  Allowed by the judge a moment to respond to the charges against her, Craddock laid claim to her First Amendment rights. The judge, unconvinced of that point’s relevance to the charge at hand, instead “took occasion to rebuke me for my supposed violation of good taste and propriety,” a scolding that she had “to swallow in silence.” With the judge having found clear grounds for proceeding to trial, the prosecutor suggested a way to put an end to the matter, jauntily remarking that Craddock “might possibly find the climate of another city better for my health.” The judge agreed, urging Craddock to leave the city rather than face trial and conviction. She acc
epted the offer and left the nation’s capital two days later.26

  Weary and dispirited, Craddock now migrated to New York City and set up a little office for oral instruction at 134 West 23rd Street. “Thus have I thrice escaped the penitentiary,” Craddock remarked of her legal battles in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, “but each time at the cost of a harder battle and greater publicity. I do not deem it prudent to risk [the] danger of a fourth time. I am now reckoned an old offender.” She knew that each brush with the law increased the likelihood that the full weight of the Comstock act would be brought down upon her—five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. She told herself and her patrons that she was withdrawing from the world of print entirely, at least until she could secure some legal protection for her writings and get them lifted out of the category of obscene literature. She would mail none of her books; she would sell none of them by hand; she would not even show them to her pupils during their office visits. Her teaching existed now “only by word of mouth,” only as a form of speech. “I am withdrawing my books from the public,” she notified readers of Lucifer the Light-Bearer in August 1901, “and confining myself to oral instruction, which, so lawyers inform me, is perfectly safe for me legally.” Surely, with that limited mission, she would be beyond Comstock’s reach, even on his home turf.27

  After her scrape in Washington, D.C., Craddock swore that discretion was the better part of valor, but she faced several obstacles in upholding that dictum for any length of time. Primarily, of course, she did not believe it: Tact was not a particularly good measure of courage and conviction in matters of sexual enlightenment. Financially, too, she was quite strapped, so economic worry readily kicked in as an incentive to restart her mail-order business. She had been reduced, at least initially, to sleeping on the floor of her New York office with a wad of blankets for a mattress. At the beginning of August 1901 she counted up her savings and found that she “had exactly $6.96 in all the world.” When an order for two of her books arrived later that day, it promised to add one dollar to the sum, should she have the wherewithal to fulfill the request.28