Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  Even with her newly avowed cautiousness, Craddock faced the added problem that her opponents seemed intent on drawing her right back into the fray. With the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice on red alert against her, she began to receive decoy letters designed to entrap her in one violation or another of the Comstock law. The group also relied on concerned citizens to act as informants, and unfortunately for Craddock her Manhattan landlord, a builder active in Baptist missionary work, was greatly concerned about her activities. He feared for his “Christian reputation” after learning of her teachings and had consulted Comstock directly about the matter. That Craddock had given a lesson to the landlord’s son and two of his “college chums” could not have helped the situation. All things considered, it did not take long for Craddock’s latest profession of prudence to be thoroughly undone.29

  Made aware of Craddock’s labors in Manhattan, Comstock sent her a letter of warning in late January 1902 informing her that she appeared to be in violation of both state and federal laws. It was illegal, he told her, “to debauch the minds of the young or place in their hands, matters which suggest lewd and lascivious thoughts,” and he stretched that prohibition in his cautionary notice to include her oral instruction as well as her printed matter. He would not give her long to heed his advice.30

  Comstock and three of his deputies arrived at Craddock’s room on West 23rd Street on February 4. They were there to arrest her for continuing to defy the law, to search for additional incriminating evidence, and to seize her contraband publications. The immediate warrant accused her of depositing “a sealed envelope . . . containing obscene, lewd and lascivious matter of an indecent character” at a Manhattan post office on January 30. Craddock had been working on the fly to issue new editions of The Wedding Night and Right Marital Living (all she could afford to print was 500 copies of each). She had sent both of those pamphlets, along with a circular and a diagnostic questionnaire, to a supposed customer in a New Jersey suburb. Whether or not the recipient, Frank Lea, was one of Comstock’s plants, the result was the same: He immediately turned Craddock’s mailed materials over to the postal inspectors. Indeed, “Frank Lea” may have been a cover for Comstock himself. As the vice crusader informed Henrietta Westbrook in late February when she once again rushed to her friend’s defense, “I personally secured from Ida C. Craddock, the foul stuff which she was sending through the mails in violation of the Law.”31

  Craddock was now in Comstock’s hands, and he appeared, as she remarked shortly after he came to arrest her, “as hungry as a Jersey mosquito . . . for my blood.” And, indeed, Comstock felt good about finally nabbing Craddock; he openly celebrated her detainment as a triumph for moral decency. Amid the self-congratulation he made the sinister claim that Craddock had been preying on pubescent girls with her teachings and was personally preparing them for seduction at the hands of young toughs. These were dubious allegations, given Craddock’s commitments to marriage and monogamy, but in Comstock’s view the science of sexology was little more than the science of seduction. That Craddock might be some kind of debased procurer of virgins for randy young men was an over-the-top accusation—and yet Comstock even hinted at something more ominous about her than that.32

  In running down the list of Craddock’s offenses, Comstock momentarily paused to conjure up the specter of witchcraft. Craddock’s spiritualism, he said, had left her the captive of “a familiar spirit”; in other words, a supernatural force might indeed have hold of her, but it was of the devil, not heaven. Though no doubt rumors of her having a “spirit husband” had prompted Comstock’s accusation, Craddock responded like an old freethinker, not an insulted spiritualist. She simply scoffed at Comstock’s implication that she had “an imp or a little black devil tagging around after me” and finished with a pair of caustic rhetorical questions: “Does Mr. Anthony Comstock propose, I wonder, to enlarge his present field of operations by combining the medieval business of witch-finder with that of official taster of obscene literature? Is he rolling under his tongue as a sweet morsel, the possibilities of burning me at the stake?” If Comstock’s imagination was now “running amuck” in fantasizing about Craddock’s crimes, that was hardly surprising: He always believed that he faced a demonic congress of adversaries who were hell-bent on corrupting America’s youth.33

  Given the scandal and danger he saw in Craddock, it was no surprise that Comstock pursued the case against her as aggressively as possible. At the state level, he brought criminal charges against Craddock on March 5, 1902 in New York’s Court of Special Sessions for selling The Wedding Night to one of the vice society’s undercover detectives. At the same time in the U.S. District Court he pursued federal charges against her for having knowingly deposited obscene literature in the mails. A week later on March 12, the grand jury delivered an indictment in the federal case, thus putting her in double jeopardy.

  Craddock was very much ready for a fight. She pushed her latest lawyer, Hugh Pentecost, to prepare for a serious battle for the freedoms of speech, press, and religion. There would be no plea bargains, no insanity defenses, no skipping town; rather, Craddock would take a final stand for her principles, and suffer the full wrath of the law if she lost. If she really wanted a damn-the-torpedoes approach, Craddock would have been better off with a different lawyer, Darrow perhaps rather than Pentecost. A prominent New York editor and agitator, a thoroughgoing rationalist, and an active debunker of Christian and occult superstitions, Pentecost was “one of the best known attorneys in New York City,” an account in the Boston Investigator assured. That Craddock again had a lawyer of such high repute suggested the draw of her case for social radicals, but Pentecost nonetheless proved a rather poor fit with her.34

  An open critic of Comstock and his evangelical crusade, Pentecost also took a dim view of his new client’s mystical sexology. Craddock needed a lawyer with at least a modicum of sympathy for the way she combined spirituality and sexual candor, but Pentecost was prone to expressing regret over Craddock’s excesses in both areas. Her religious views he found especially inane; her gospel, he said plainly, was of “very little importance.” She was “different from most other people,” Pentecost later remarked, and, when she talked about religion and sex, he thought he saw a strange glitter in her eyes, a sign of craziness more than intelligence. Perhaps Comstock had Craddock dead to rights, but Pentecost’s low estimation of his client’s ideas was not going to help matters. Craddock sensed Pentecost’s tepidness and tried to light a fire: “We Liberals have never had a fair chance at our sex literature cases because our lawyers have always been so apologetic for us.” It was not the first, or the last time that a secular-minded liberal would fail to connect with a religiously motivated one. Craddock had experienced that dilemma at several points in her career, yet it had never threatened her more than it did now.35

  It was the physician Edward Bond Foote, not Pentecost, who stepped forward to press Craddock’s case as an important free-speech battle. Within a couple of weeks of her arrest, Foote had produced a circular, entitled “Comstock versus Craddock,” to rally liberal supporters to her cause and to initiate a legal-defense fund for her. Foote, whose own father had run afoul of Comstock for publishing a pamphlet on contraception, was unwavering in his support for Craddock. “Sexual education, scientifically studied and plainly presented, must come eventually, but ‘woe to them’ who have not wisdom to keep but little in advance of public opinion,” he wrote. Craddock was, in Foote’s estimation, another brave reformer turned into a martyr by those who were the enemies of progress, freedom, and enlightenment. “The world is not yet entirely reconciled to hear women talk religion from pulpits or politics from platforms,” he lamented, “and the prejudice against her entering the field of remodeling the marital manners of men is simply insuperable.” Anyone who cared about a “free press” and “fair play,” anyone committed to marriage reform and women’s rights, should match those sympathies with a donation to his newly established Craddock Fund.36r />
  The criminal case in New York’s Court of Special Sessions went to trial on Friday, March 14, well ahead of the federal obscenity case that was pending in the U.S. District Court. Pentecost called three physicians as expert witnesses, including R. W. Shufeldt, an army surgeon and a member of the Medico-Legal Society, who testified both to the value of Craddock’s writings on sexology and to her sanity. Pentecost also entered two notes of support from Rev. William Rainsford, a prominent Episcopal priest in New York City, who found Comstock’s prosecution of Craddock far more troubling than anything she had published. Pentecost presented as well a strong character witness in the form of a letter from William Stead, still serving as editor of the Review of Reviews. Stead, who had sent money for her legal defense, testified to Craddock’s “lofty religious motives.” “As one who was for two years your employer when you were in England seven years ago, and who has ever since regarded it as a privilege and an honor to call you his friend,” Stead averred, “I have no hesitation in bearing the strongest possible testimony to your high moral character.” Granting that some of her phrases “may have been ill chosen” and that her zeal often ran roughshod over social convention, Stead still found the war against Craddock’s writings to be “an outrage abhorrent to the principles of religious liberty and of the freedom of the press which are guaranteed in the American Constitution.” Just as he had during his visit to Chicago in 1893, Stead again prodded Americans to remember their own principles of justice.37

  For her part, Craddock made a direct and unadorned plea in her own defense: “I have only tried to put forth plain facts, which every person ought to know,” she said. “I am not ashamed myself to speak plain truths plainly.” There was an elegant simplicity to that piece of testimony; it breathed a little bit of the old spirit of Lucretia Mott, the Quaker activist Craddock had long ago invoked as a role model. Craddock was on the stand for the country’s sexual enlightenment, and she brought to that effort a cherished idiom of American reform: plain truths, plainly spoken.38

  The defense that Pentecost presented left the three-judge panel unmoved, especially once they had heard the indelicate passages from The Wedding Night. “This is the most awful case that ever came into this court,” the senior justice, Elizur Brace Hinsdale, pronounced. The judge liked the moralizing part of his job a little too much, perhaps a residue of his own strict Presbyterian upbringing during which, as Hinsdale reported in his memoir, he had “received constant admonition in the principles of religion and morality.” A few months earlier Hinsdale had made headlines for so vehemently rebuking convicted anarchist Johann Most that the notorious incendiary had reportedly been reduced to a dead faint right there in the courtroom. Hinsdale, who in blasting Most had conjured up Emma Goldman and other offenders of “public decency,” was clearly warming to the task of “scathing denunciation” in Craddock’s case as well.

  With a strong sense of the country’s Christian character, the seventy-year-old Hinsdale was not a good judge for Craddock to face. His impassioned tirade against her made it clear that he had very little doubt about the trial’s rightful outcome. “I have never before known of such indescribable filth,” he railed. “I cannot believe that this woman is in her right mind.” (Hinsdale had some personal grounds for comparison on both points: He had committed his first wife to the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum and had been engulfed in an ugly public scandal in the early 1880s in which he had been accused of having an affair with his brother’s wife.) “No woman in her right mind, gentle born and well educated, as the literary style of this book shows, could conceive such filthy phrases,” he continued. “She has caused just such trouble as this in Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia before she came to this city. We consider her a danger to the public morals.” Hinsdale was clearly very much on the same page with Comstock.39

  Hinsdale did most of the scolding, but the second judge, Irish Catholic John Bell McKean, was every bit as incensed and hyperbolic. In reprimanding Craddock he condemned her pamphlet as “obscene, criminal, and outrageously blasphemous”—indeed, “the most blasphemous book I ever saw.” The allegation of blasphemy particularly sent tremors through Craddock’s liberal camp, suggesting to them that the justice was continuing the tradition of loading an obscenity charge with religious ballast. Although the legal proceedings clearly rested on obscenity, not blasphemy, it remained all too apparent how much the latter continued to color the former: Hinsdale and McKean, Edward Bond Foote argued, had actually arraigned Craddock for “blasphemous obscenity”—that is, for having the gall to inaugurate a Church of Yoga as much as for daring to preach sexology. Indeed, by one newspaper’s account, the prosecution had openly referred during the trial to Craddock’s pamphlet on the Wedding Night as “the book of the Church of Yoga.” This ready-at-hand conflation of blasphemy and obscenity was hardly new, but it was one that civil-liberties watchmen like Foote very much wanted to disentangle. McKean’s visceral censure of Craddock’s blasphemy, along with the prosecution’s insinuations, underscored the difficulty of rescuing unorthodox religious ideas from their routine association with indecency.40

  The third judge, Julius Marshuetz Mayer, was more cool-headed and kept his cards close to his chest. He would go on to a distinguished career as New York’s attorney general, but, at this point, he had joined the Court of Special Sessions only two months earlier and was at age thirty-six by far “the junior man on the bench.” At least one of Craddock’s supporters picked up a hint of sympathy in him for dismissing the charges: He had actually silenced Comstock at one point when the vice crusader started regaling the court with his personal assessment of Craddock’s dissolute character. Mayer, though, did nothing to challenge directly the judicial opinion of his senior colleagues, and by Monday, March 17, Craddock’s fate was sealed.41

  As Hinsdale pronounced the sentence—three months in prison—Craddock sat in “stoic silence,” so the New York Sun reported, digesting the implications of her defeat. Staring straight ahead, she was led away to a holding cell in the Tombs in preparation for her lock-up in the Woman’s Workhouse on Blackwell’s Island, a thin islet in New York City’s East River. Comstock, who had stood close by Craddock during the sentencing, rejoiced in having convicted another cankerous troublemaker—one more menace to the country’s morals cut down to size. Her backers, by contrast, were rueful: Edward Bond Foote detected a “savage glee” in Comstock’s broad smile at having “bagged his game.”42

  Nothing makes a martyr of an activist as much as a railroaded jail sentence, even a relatively short one of three months. The liberal presses were now ablaze with accounts of Craddock’s trial and imprisonment. “Of all the farces I have ever witnessed,” physician R. W. Shufeldt complained afterward in the Boston Investigator, “her trial in that court was certainly most farcical.” It was “worthy only of a place in the court records of the Dark Ages, or the history of Romish inquisition.” Another prominent civil liberties lawyer in Manhattan, Edward W. Chamberlain, lampooned the three judges involved. He pictured them patting each other on the back for having safeguarded society from “this refined delicate sensitive woman” and then later “retailing bawdy jokes at their clubs in the evening.” Chamberlain placed Craddock in a martyr’s gallery of persecuted freethinkers, including D. M. Bennett, the venerated editor of the Truth Seeker who had been sent to prison in 1878 for sending obscene literature through the mails. The comparisons soon got a lot grander when Stead chimed in from London about Craddock’s imprisonment: “So it was with Socrates, so it was with Jesus Christ, and so it ever will be with all those who endeavor to incite their fellows to attain to a purer and nobler life.”43

  To Stead, ever the progressive reformer, one of the silver linings in Craddock’s incarceration was the opportunity it presented for exposing and possibly correcting prison abuses. Not long into her time on Blackwell’s Island, word began circulating in activist circles that she had been “violently and forcibly assaulted and her person outraged” by two “attendants” at the
prison. This was not a story of rape, though certainly activist coverage was set up to suggest a moral equivalence; instead, it was a tale of compulsory vaccination. Craddock had never shown much interest before in this civil-liberties cause, but now the arguments of the Anti-Vaccination League (a branch had been organized in New York City in 1885) took on deep resonance: the right of the individual to refuse immunization, the right to conscientious objection to such governmental compulsion, and here the right even of the imprisoned to resist the “vaccine poison.” From her cell at Blackwell’s, she vociferously protested this violation of her body.

  Like so many of her other efforts, Craddock’s jail-bound attempts at reform earned her more punishment from the authorities. That Craddock so strenuously objected to vaccination made prison officials only more insistent; one of them told her that he would “vaccinate her every three days,” so that he could be sure her blood was “contaminated.” Another threatened her with the Black Cells, six solitary chambers in which unruly or insolent prisoners were thrown in total darkness without cot, chair, or blanket until they were “thoroughly mastered.” “See here, Mrs. Craddock,” the doctor in charge told her, “when you become a convict, you lose your civil rights.”44

  The horrors of Craddock’s prison experience—the overcrowding, the dearth of toilet facilities and running water, the infestations of vermin, the wretched food, the prison dress, the conscripted labor—became physical marks of her status as a martyr among secular liberals. Though she shared this fate with other social radicals and Comstock targets—Emma Goldman had already done time on Blackwell’s Island—that solidarity did little to soften the effects, physical and psychological, of being confined there. Craddock, a woman of education and culture, had been thrown into a three-tiered, four-to-a-cell, prison complex; she was one more convict indistinguishable from the drunkards, vagrants, prostitutes, and thieves with whom she now bunked. Craddock already knew, of course, what it was like to be treated as déclassé in polite society, but she nonetheless thought of the comforts and cleanliness of middle-class life as a birthright, as something that set her apart from the unwashed masses. Craddock found it difficult to endure the roughness of the workhouse without revulsion, and her supporters found it harder still to accept her treatment without outrage.45