As Craddock’s three-month term wound down in mid-June, New York liberals geared up to celebrate her release from prison and to give her a hero’s welcome. Edwin C. Walker, scandalous cohabitator with Moses Harman’s daughter and by now president of the Manhattan Liberal Club, made plans to fête Craddock with an indignation banquet at the Clarendon Hotel on Friday, June 20. Sparked to action by Craddock’s conviction and looming federal trial, Walker, Foote, and company had spun off a new group, the Free Speech League, to hoist the banner for free expression. The Craddock dinner, honoring “the latest victim of Comstockism,” attracted about one hundred attendees and served as the Free Speech League’s inaugural event. From its humble beginnings with the Craddock banquet, the Free Speech League emerged over the next decade as an important antecedent of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which would be chartered eighteen years later in defense of pacifist activism during World War I. In advance of most other progressives, including the ACLU’s Roger Baldwin, the Free Speech League would become an important legal resource for both Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger in their joined causes for birth control and free expression.46
Predictably, the Free Speech League dinner for Craddock proved to be as much of an opportunity for the liberal movement to consolidate its indignant energy as it was a chance to honor a single martyr in its ranks. Walker presided at the dinner and introduced the main speaker, the labor radical Moses Oppenheimer. An ex-convict himself, Oppenheimer took the platform and offered a rousing defense of minority points of view in the face of tyrannical majorities. From there, the dinner unfolded as a mix of testimonials to Craddock’s courage, blasts at “censorship by idiots,” and tributes to a free press. Even as they warmly welcomed Craddock’s release, several of the speakers found it necessary to keep her at arm’s length. “Some say that her utterances are spiritualistic and unscientific,” Walker admitted. “This may be true, but she is being prosecuted . . . because she expressed her views on a tabooed subject. Her opinions do not concern us; we simply stand for liberty.”The free-speech principle did not depend on approval of Craddock’s brand of sexology, but instead on the protection of her right to verbalize her ideas, however eccentric.
Walker’s cautious remarks notwithstanding, Craddock appeared “greatly touched by the reception given her,” and yet she also knew her audience. When it came time for her to speak, she steered clear of spiritualism, Divine Science, and yoga. Voicing her “confidence in the success of Liberalism and Freethought,” she vowed to carry on the fight for free expression at her federal trial. It had been a long while since she had helped lead the American Secular Union or had lectured on sex worship at the Manhattan Liberal Club, but Craddock still knew how to work this particular crowd.47
Out of jail, but with the federal trial still on the horizon, Craddock returned that summer to her counseling work. It was in these months that she advised Eunice Parsons and her uncomfortable fiancé on how to overcome their divergent views on married sexuality. Craddock’s legal predicament, though, shadowed even those face-to-face relationships as Eunice worried about the intertwined fates of her teacher and her writings. Comstock’s behavior in this case, Eunice wrote Ida, “makes me boil.” “I hope you will win,” she continued, “you must, for the sake of us young people, and the older ones too.” Eunice was also fearful that she herself might become a target of investigation, since her local “Postmistress” knew that she was corresponding with Craddock and was clearly suspicious. Eunice had received copies of the contraband books through the mail and had circulated them among her friends. Until Craddock’s writings were legally vindicated, she wanted to be very cautious; if victory could be achieved, then she was ready to become a publicist for the pamphlets. “Everyone will want them,” Eunice told Ida in September, three weeks before the federal case went to trial in New York.48
Much of Craddock’s time that summer was spent preparing for a climactic fight with Comstock in federal court. Her rise to liberal celebrity as a free-speech martyr had only served to make her a more prominent target for Comstock and to raise the stakes for the impending trial. As she wrote one of her supporters after her release from Blackwell’s Island, “I am making this stand not for my own liberty—that is only incidental—I am standing for the liberty of the press and freedom of religion. I have an inward feeling that I am really divinely led here to New York to face this wicked and depraved man Comstock in open court and to strike the blow which shall start the overthrow of Comstockism.” By design and by necessity, Craddock would use her trial to fight for the broader principles for which she had long aligned herself.49
Craddock’s mother, when she heard of her daughter’s resolve to “roast Comstock” in the courtroom, was duly alarmed. Lizzie immediately wrote to Foote to nix the scheme by which her daughter would try to turn the tables on Comstock. “He is too well entrenched for anything she could say to affect him,” Lizzie reasoned as she worried anew over her daughter’s well-being. “And it would rebound and hurt her in the eyes of the Court.” Instead, Lizzie wanted Ida to cut her losses and once again to plead insanity—surely, the asylum was better than prison, all the more for someone like her daughter with “a weakness of the brain.”50
One thing, in particular, Craddock had to do that summer was find a new attorney. Pentecost, having become “quite pessimistic” about her prospects, had stepped aside for the federal case. Craddock could not have been sorry to see him go: Word was that several of her strongest supporters had been dissatisfied with his performance at the March trial for not being enough of “a fighter.” They wanted to hand Craddock’s case over to someone ready to spew more venom at Comstock, someone who would delight in the combat, and that was definitely Ida’s inclination as well. Edward W. Chamberlain, a legal architect in the defense of both Moses Harman and Ezra Heywood, entered the breach created by Pentecost’s departure. Having already weighed in on the travesty of Craddock’s trial in the Court of Special Sessions, Chamberlain was fully primed for his latest free-speech battle. Once again, though, Craddock would go into a trial with a lawyer who set off the alarm bells of more upstanding citizens. Her legal opponents simply referred to her new defender as “Free-Love Chamberlain.” Not that Chamberlain avoided name-calling: He dubbed Comstock “Smutty Tony” for his fixation with obscenity.51
When Craddock’s case went to trial on October 10, no one in her camp seemed to think that she had much chance of prevailing. Perhaps in defending herself on the stand she would win the sympathy of jurors and effectively expose Comstock’s abuse of power. That seemed like a remote possibility, given Comstock’s lengthy run of courtroom successes, but Chamberlain and company were at least hoping for some good theater through which they could win favor in the court of public opinion, even if they lost in the court of law. They knew that Comstock could be made the fool—just as he had been when he performed his own laughable rendition of the Danse du Ventre. Perhaps this time, Chamberlain hoped, “our modern St. Anthony” would be revealed for what he was, a “pious scoundrel” and “loathsome rogue.”52
Comstock’s public image was not undercut the way that Craddock’s defenders had wished—at least, not on the day of the trial. Judge Edward B. Thomas, sometime Republican politician and author of legal textbooks, reportedly saw Craddock much the way Comstock did—as a “very dangerous woman.” He took the obscenity question to be the only one that mattered and ruled unilaterally on that issue: Craddock’s writings were indeed “lewd, lascivious, [and] dirty.” That determination left the jury to decide only whether she had placed the aforesaid material in the U.S. mail. Since no one disputed the fact that she had deposited her pamphlets at a Manhattan post office, Thomas’s ruling rendered moot both Chamberlain’s defense and Craddock’s own explanations, including their overarching invocation of First Amendment freedoms. With only that very limited issue to determine—the obscenity laws had again simply swept aside the question of civil liberties—the verdict was obvious.
The judge, lea
ving little room for suspense in the jury’s deliberations, had provided plenty of opportunity for Comstock to crow about the slam-dunk prosecution: The jury, he rejoiced, had been able to convict Craddock “without leaving their seats.” It was, her backers howled, “a judicial outrage,” “a complete overthrow of our jury system.” The jury had been turned into “a mere ornament” with nothing to do but parrot the judge who had predetermined the outcome. For her part, Craddock remained defiant—she would exhibit no stoic silence this time. She declared, the New York Sun reported, that she would “continue in her educational mission in spite of a dozen Comstocks.”
Craddock’s sentencing date was set for a week later on October 17. Even as Chamberlain pledged to appeal the decision, Craddock fully expected, as an impenitent recidivist, to receive the harshest possible penalty—five years in prison.53
ON THE DAY OF CRADDOCK’S sentencing, her long-suffering mother had planned to accompany her daughter to the courtroom. Lizzie still harbored hopes that Ida would end up in an insane asylum rather than in prison. Expecting to meet her at a Manhattan restaurant, Lizzie grew concerned when Ida did not appear. Had she taken flight again under a new pseudonym? Was she once more on her way to London with Stead as her rescuer? When it came to her mother, Craddock was something of an escape artist—and for good reason. Chamberlain had warned her just before the federal trial to continue to keep her distance from Lizzie and “not to be caught in a trap.” “The disposition to rebuke you,” he reported, “seems stronger than the mother love.” Perhaps this missed appointment was simply another stealthy move on the part of a daughter who surely did not trust her mother’s good intentions in wanting to serve as courtroom escort. “Oh, mother, I cannot, I will not consent to go to the asylum,” Craddock swore to Lizzie the day before the sentencing, “as you are evidently planning to have me go.”54
Used to tracking her daughter down, Lizzie headed over to Ida’s room on West 23rd Street. She walked up to the stairs to the fourth floor to her daughter’s small office; on the door was the tag, “Ida C. Craddock, Instructor of Divine Science.” Perhaps her mother took a little comfort in that modest identification; at least, the card did not say “Student of Phallic Antiquities,” “Expert in Sexology,” or “Pastor of the Church of Yoga.” Lizzie knocked, she knocked again, but there was no answer.
Lingering by the door, wondering where to look for her wayward daughter next, Lizzie noticed the smell of gas. Alarmed, she notified the police. When the officer arrived, he broke down the door. Craddock was lying in her bed in her nightgown with a rubber tube running from one of the building’s gas jets toward her mouth. The windows were meticulously sealed, and the odor of gas filled the room. Ida’s left wrist was slit open, and the blood had run into a pail on the floor.55 At one point in her diary Craddock had recalled lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s elegy for the poet Bayard Taylor: “Dead he lay among his books;/ The peace of God was in his looks.” Now dead she lay among her books, what remained of them after Comstock’s raid—and, whether or not the peace of God was upon her face, by now it was a little late for that grace.56
Though her room was strewn as usual with books and papers, it was nonetheless plain that Craddock had planned her death with tidy care. She had bundled up several packages for friends and left a long suicide note for her mother. She was unwilling, Ida explained in her letter to Lizzie, to let her lifework die a slow death in the penitentiary or in a hospital for the insane: “I maintain my right to die as I have lived, a free woman.” Craddock knew, she confessed to her mother, that she had been “a hindrance to your respectability,” but she tried to assuage Lizzie’s pained disappointment with her by looking poignantly to the future. Ida rhapsodized about a social order in which subsequent activists had made marriage reform triumphant and about a spiritual world “where Anthony Comstocks and corrupt judges” were unknown. “Some day,” Ida predicted to Lizzie with a sad yet hopeful air, “you will not be ashamed of me or my work. Some day you’ll be proud of me.”57
In taking her own life, Craddock had made two distinct gestures—one of reconciliation and another of unmitigated spite. On the one side, she had tried to right her relationship with her mother and to envelop the years of animosity in eternal love: “We shall be very happy together some day, you and I, dear mother; there will be a blessed reality for us both at last. I love you, dear mother; never forget that. And love cannot die.” On the other side, Craddock was not looking for any appeasement in her long embattled relationship with Anthony Comstock. So, in addition to the carefully crafted suicide note to her mother, Craddock had composed a public letter attacking Comstock as a liar and hypocrite, addressed it to her lawyer Edward Chamberlain, and—with a fine sense of irony—placed it in the U.S. mail the night before she took her life. Craddock’s sly parting shot at Comstock was not immediately known and had to wait a little longer to play itself out.58
On the day Craddock’s body was discovered, headlines blared the news in the evening editions of the New York papers. “PRIESTESS OF YOGA A SUICIDE—Miss Ida Craddock, the Leader of a Peculiar Religious Sect, Kills Herself Rather Than Go to Prison,” shouted New York’s Evening World; “DEATH, NOT PRISON—Miss Craddock, Yoga Priestess, Kills Herself,” reported the Evening Sun. The next day newspapers across the country picked up the story. “FEARING JAIL, SHE KILLS SELF—Miss Ida Craddock, High Priestess of Yoga, Inhales Gas—SHE WAS AN ADMIRER OF THE DANCE DU VENTRE,” read the front-page headline in the Atlanta Constitution. So it went from Washington, D.C., to Denver to Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, lurid accounts of the death of a priestess.
In that first burst of coverage, it looked like Craddock’s death would be safely pigeonholed as the suicide of a religious eccentric, the female “scholar,” “pastor,” and “sexologist” turned into an exotic and libidinous “priestess.” “Phallic worship was to her a pure religion, and she did not hesitate to say so,” the Evening World recalled of her New York lectures nearly a decade ago, alleging that her lewd presentations had almost raised riots among her listeners. There were some hints in the accounts that she had been “persecuted” for the oddity of her views—“a conglomeration of Oriental religions,” as the New York Times described her “peculiar beliefs”—but there was a stronger sense that “the Craddock woman” was a crazy Free-Lover with a long arrest record whose objectionable activities had finally killed her off. Given “the woman’s history,” Comstock looked like a justified prosecutor.59
However much (or little) Lizzie grieved Ida’s passing—she reported “feeling miserable as to health” because of all “this excitement and trouble”—the new spate of juicy publicity surrounding her daughter certainly compounded her sense of affliction. Rallying, Lizzie found Comstock’s gloating outrageous and was especially sickened by his claim that her daughter had aimed to corrupt underage girls, a charge she knew in her bones to be a vicious twisting of Ida’s “pure” intentions. She discreetly retrieved her daughter’s body from the coroner and took it back to Philadelphia for a private funeral service in her own home. Craddock’s long-time pastor from the Spring Garden Unitarian Church, Frederic Hinckley, presided and “said lots of good things about her and uttered some strong liberal views,” so Lizzie reported to Edward Bond Foote, who had wanted to make sure Ida was given “a good send off.”60
An earlier sermon of Hinckley’s sheds some light onto how the pastor might have eulogized his departed congregant. In a funeral sermon four years earlier for Robert Purvis, a noted abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, Hinckley had sung the praises of those “heroic men and women, who for conscience sake and for freedom’s sake” were willing to antagonize the powers that be. “Farewell unselfish reformer, upright citizen, prophet of an enfranchised humanity,” Hinckley had preached in Purvis’s elegy. Perhaps Craddock’s passing had offered another chance for him to extol those who were fighting to eliminate “artificial distinctions on account of sex,” but, if so, his words were spoken without public fanfare. Lizzi
e had wanted a quietly inconspicuous funeral for Ida, and, at last, the mother could impose discretion upon the daughter.61
Craddock was buried in a plot at the Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia. Her mother, Lizzie Decker, joined her two years later; Lizzie’s name took pride of place above Ida’s on the obelisk that memorialized them both. Photograph by Rachel Lindsey.
Ida was peacefully laid to rest in a plot in Woodlands Cemetery, a lush Victorian funerary landscape just down the road from the University of Pennsylvania, on October 20, three days after her suicide. Her mother joined her daughter two years later in December 1904; buried side by side under the same obelisk, they ended up sharing a peculiarly phallic marker (at least as Ida would have seen it). Perhaps the combined monument and the tight proximity of their remains symbolized the heavenly resolution of their earthly conflicts, but Lizzie’s name was chiseled above Ida’s—as if to signal the restored order of maternal authority.
Notwithstanding the secluded funeral service that Lizzie had designed for her, Ida’s death generated far more outraged protest than rest-in-peace calm. The indignation of activists directly involved in her case quickly rippled outward into wider liberal circles. The furor cast a shadow over Comstock’s success and threatened to turn Craddock’s conviction into a pyrrhic victory for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Comstock was caught off-guard by this heated reaction; he had anticipated neither the effectiveness of Craddock’s final communications nor the vehemence of her supporters in coming after him for payback. “Mrs. Craddock’s death, horrible as it was, has resulted in some good,” one of her advocates concluded shortly after her suicide. Namely, it had “put Comstock on the defensive,” actually decidedly so.62
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