Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  The Episcopal priest William Rainsford, who had mildly supported Craddock during her New York trials, was the first to throw Comstock off his game, calling him out two days afterward for his part in her suicide: “I would not like to be in your shoes,” he wrote the vice crusader. “You hounded an honest, not a bad woman to her death. I would not like to have to answer to God for what you have done.” Soon Rainsford escalated his attack, publicly calling for Comstock’s removal from office. Comstock was absolutely dismayed to see a Christian minister turn on him like this. He called on Rainsford repeatedly to mend fences, but the rector remained aloof, disdaining Comstock as “a moral tyrant.”

  Comstock knew this mud-slinging breach was terrible for public relations—and also, potentially at least, for his finances. While he continued to enjoy federal authority, he always relied on a faith-based voluntary society to meet most of the expenses of his work. How could Rainsford, a well-placed cleric in a very wealthy congregation, attack him “without any regard to whether you divert from the support of this great cause, funds necessary to sustain it and carry it on”? When Rainsford still scorned him, Comstock threatened to have the priest arrested for criminal libel, a spectacle the media relished. Then, as an added damage-control measure, Comstock enlisted his Executive Committee, a powerhouse group of New York businessmen, to offer a public declaration of unqualified support for his handling of the Craddock case.63

  As Comstock scrambled to defend himself, freethinking liberals were going on the attack across the board and were doing their best to turn “The Craddock Tragedy” into a cause célèbre. In a fortuitous coincidence Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the great elder of women’s suffrage, died of heart failure on Sunday, October 26, at age eighty-five, nine days after Craddock’s suicide. Despite the outpouring of somber reflection that Stanton’s passing occasioned, that grief hardly distracted social radicals from the rage they were feeling over Craddock’s demise at age forty-five. The day of Stanton’s death a memorial service in Chicago gathered 1200 attendees at Handel Hall to honor Craddock and to blast away at Comstock. Alice Stockham spoke, and so did Juliet Severance, another physician who combined the cause of women’s rights with spiritualist convictions.64

  Both Stockham and Severance eulogized Craddock for having died a heroic death in her efforts to enlighten Americans on “tabooed subjects.” Stockham’s elegy survives only in snippets from press coverage of the event, but Severance’s thoughts on Craddock’s death were later published in full and offer a good sense of liberal ire:Are we a race of slaves that we tamely submit to having our mails rifled, the right of free thought and free speech trampled in the dust, the press muzzled under the pretense of subserving the interest of morality? . . . Shall we submit to a denial of free discussion and opportunity for education on sex matters, because forsooth some filthy minded idiot is of the opinion that it is obscene to discuss matters that pertain to every human life, and on which life depends? It is a momentous question. Ida C. Craddock was a pure-minded, intelligent woman, working with a clean conscience for the good, as she believed, of humanity. . . . Poor outraged woman! driven to death to escape the tyranny of . . . the saintly Anthony Comstock.

  The rhetoric was rapidly heating up in liberal circles: Craddock was “every inch a martyr,” and Comstock an “unspeakable fiend.”65

  The next month the battle lines in the Comstock vs. Craddock affair got drawn even more sharply. Craddock had already been scoring posthumous points through published excerpts of the suicide note written to her mother, a letter presented as tender and touching—full of pathos—in journalistic commentary. Then Chamberlain released the open letter denouncing Comstock that Craddock had secretly mailed just before her suicide. Word of it had already begun circulating, but the letter appeared in full in the Truth Seeker only on November 1; shortly thereafter, it was republished in Lucifer the Light-Bearer as well. In this parting letter Craddock had taken one last swing at all “the salient features of Comstockism.” She ridiculed Comstock’s use of paid informers and decoy letters, his pursuit of a religious mission under the aegis of the federal government, his seizing and burning of books, and his manipulation of evidence. Most of all, she jeered at Comstock himself. “The man is a sex pervert,” she diagnosed. “He is what physicians term a Sadist—namely a person in whom the impulses of cruelty arise concurrently with the stirring of sex emotion.” How much longer would the American public allow that “unctuous sexual hypocrite” to “wax fat and arrogant” and to trample on First Amendment freedoms? How much longer would they allow him to suppress writings on sexology and impede their ability to obtain useful knowledge about their own bodies? In fine spiritualist fashion Craddock was managing, with Chamberlain as her designated intermediary, to speak from beyond the grave and to do so with prophetic force.66

  Beyond its final blasting of Comstock, Craddock’s public letter also situated her decision to take her own life within a freethinking tradition that cast the gesture as heroic and laudable rather than sinful and pathological. Her suicide could easily have sealed her reputation as damned reprobate and madwoman—church and state were both arrayed against self-murder as immoral, illegal, and insane. Instead her action took on the grandeur, courage, and genius of history’s “Great Suicides.” “I consider myself justified in choosing for myself, as did Socrates, the manner of my death,” Craddock explained in her public letter. “I prefer to die comfortably and peacefully on my own little bed in my own room, instead of on a prison cot.”67

  As Craddock’s invocation of Socrates suggested, she imagined suicide as possessing a distinctly pagan luster. “The greatest of the Greeks for five centuries were suicides,” a freethinking tract of the period explained in defending suicide against its Christian status as a grievous sin against God. The agnostic orator Robert Ingersoll had claimed a few years before Craddock’s demise that unjust imprisonment might well be one situation in which to choose the Greek path of noble suicide. “The grave,” he said, “is better than the cell.” At minimum, Ingersoll insisted, self-destruction should not provoke denunciation and contempt, but instead sympathy for those whose sufferings had become unbearable. Judgment, he said, should be reserved for those responsible for creating such wretched suffering—“the oppressors, the tyrants, those who trample on the rights of others, the robbers of the poor.” For freethinking liberals and secularists, Craddock had managed to pack her final gesture with double power: It possessed a Socratic dignity and evoked righteous compassion—all the while casting a pall over the oppressor who had driven her to such desperation.68

  Comstock did not let Craddock’s self-representation stand unanswered. He returned fire with a public letter of his own on November 14 and followed up with a full self-defense in the vice society’s Annual Report at the close of the year. Intensely frustrated over the public-relations headache her death had created for him, he continued to fume about Craddock’s shamefulness, blasphemy, and insanity. At one point in discussing her case he reached for the unfortunate analogy of a mad dog; perhaps to some she seemed like “a small mad dog” safely left alone, but it was nonetheless “imperative that mad dogs of all sizes should be killed, before the children are bitten.” He only meant that the obscene literature produced by rabid figures like her had to be destroyed, but the tactlessness of the comparison shows that Craddock’s departing jeers, on top of her previous writings, had pushed Comstock’s evangelical vigilance to a new level of score-settling vengeance.69

  Comstock’s outrage would not shield him from the equally intense fury of Craddock’s supporters. In early December, three weeks after releasing his own public letter to the newspapers, Comstock ventured to the Brooklyn Philosophical Association to defend his work for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, but Craddock’s suicide again derailed him. “Why did you convict Ida Craddock?” a half dozen voices had called out. When Comstock predictably went off on Craddock, much of the audience joined in the uproar, demanding that Comstock answer for hounding Craddo
ck to her death. Manhattan Liberal Club president Edwin C. Walker rose to denounce him and declared the Bible to be littered with filth far worse than anything Craddock had ever published. Another old workhorse of liberal reform, Moncure D. Conway, joined the chorus, waxing eloquent about Craddock’s brilliant “literary nudity” and reminding Comstock that questions of moral character are “not confined to sex only.” After what he thought of as a stirring triumph for moral decency, Comstock was being called the real fiend—not Craddock. Enraged by the grilling, Comstock left the platform “pale with anger.”70

  Discomfited, Comstock nonetheless prevailed over critics of his conduct in the Craddock case—at least, he prevailed in the near term. He held onto his job, his power, and his esteemed board of well-positioned backers. The renewed calls for the repeal of his signature laws were once again turned back, and he was able to keep the heat on liberal obscenity peddlers for another decade and more—indeed, right up to his death in 1915. Despite his vice society’s continued reign, Comstock’s opponents had found a powerful weapon in the Craddock episode. “In the suicide of that bright, brainy woman, Ida C. Craddock,” a correspondent had written excitedly to Moses Harman, “liberals have a gatling gun.” If they failed to mow down Comstockian censorship in 1902, they certainly had dinged up the vice society’s moral armor and roused many Americans to question Comstock’s faithful endeavor “to do God’s will” through relentlessly policing the postal system.71

  If not quite a Gatling gun, Craddock’s case had helped generate a new phase of liberal organizing in the defense of civil and religious liberties. Thanks in large part to her battle with Comstock, Manhattan liberals had organized the Free Speech League, which over the next two decades would significantly subvert the evangelical and legal certitude about the suppression of obscene literature. The very concept of obscenity would be witheringly criticized in these circles as an entirely subjective notion, an invention of the prudish observer. Obscenity, by this line of argument, was not a definable “quality of literature,” but instead a fussy “contribution of the reading mind.” That will-o’-the-wisp quality had made American obscenity laws hopelessly arbitrary in their application—Shakespeare could be plenty bawdy, so why were his plays more acceptable than Walt Whitman’s poetry or James Joyce’s fiction? Free-speech activists would also keep skewering obscenity’s clichéd equation with blasphemy. Since that conflation was specifically employed to protect the Christian church and its clergy from offense, how could that not be a violation of church-state separation? Craddock’s case had helped incite liberal activism in support of a much larger constitutional reassessment of the scope of free expression and religious liberty.72

  The Craddock affair had also given new life to efforts to open up discussion of sexuality and reproduction in American culture. It had made that reform cause look courageous, even heroic; this was obviously a struggle that required gutsy activists, a reputation that Margaret Sanger would fully exploit in the next decade as she pushed forward with her birth-control campaign in the face of violent opposition. “The maxim that ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church’ holds good in other matters than religion,” one physician wrote in 1903 with Craddock’s example in mind. Comstock’s “self-righteous zeal” in persecuting Craddock, the physician was sure, had only heightened public awareness of the sexual matters for which she had suffered. Three decades later in Living My Life Emma Goldman would recall Craddock as one of the country’s “bravest champions of women’s emancipation.” Certainly, it was Craddock’s Comstock-defying insistence on the importance of “sexual enlightenment” that Goldman had in mind.73

  In elevating the causes of sex reform and civil liberties, Craddock’s case loosened Comstock’s hold on the moral high ground of public decency. The whole debacle had made Comstock look perverse, if not sadistic, for finding satisfaction in Craddock’s self-destruction. A quarter century earlier Comstock had largely gotten away with reveling in the suicide of Madame Restell, a prominent provider of abortions and contraceptive devices in New York City. “A bloody ending to a bloody life,” he had remarked remorselessly when Restell slit her own throat rather than face imprisonment on Blackwell’s Island. Comstock found it much harder to take any glory in Craddock’s demise. “Who is this highly moral American censor who is always averse to sex knowledge, sex literature?” another of Harman’s correspondents asked rhetorically. The answer: He was a monster in the shape of a man, the “spawn of utter vileness,” a Jack the Ripper whose weapon was not a knife but moral fanaticism. Mystical lover and metaphysical speculator, Craddock was an unlikely martyr for liberal secularism, but her “foul murder” had proven unusually effective in pounding Comstock in the fight for free speech, religious liberty, and sexual emancipation.74

  CHAPTER SIX

  One Religio-Sexual Maniac

  “MISS CRADDOCK WAS INSANE.” So Clark Bell,the editor of The Medico-Legal Journal, opined in a one-sentence paragraph that opened his postmortem on the Craddock-Comstock affair in late 1902. Even though he shared the liberal viewpoint that Comstock had Craddock’s blood on his hands, Bell was more interested in the mystic’s madness than the crusader’s fanaticism. A lawyer, Bell made the case against Craddock’s soundness of mind in a lecture at the Manhattan Liberal Club just a couple of weeks after her suicide. He based his diagnosis on an extended interview the two had conducted of one another some months earlier: She had been looking into retaining him as counsel for one of her trials; he had been wondering about the wisdom of taking her on as a client; and they had ended up talking past one another. Informing Craddock that the only acceptable defense was an insanity plea, Bell had refused to take her case without her agreeing to confess that she was “the victim of an insane delusion.” The issues that her struggle raised about civil and religious liberties, about free speech and “the advancement of woman,” paled in his analysis before the question of her mental derangement.1

  The lynchpin for Bell’s diagnosis was Craddock’s spiritualism—specifically, her experiences as a heavenly bride. In his lecture Bell recounted Craddock’s basic claim to having a spirit husband—a notion that she had first divulged in late 1893 at the time of the Danse du Ventre controversy, but that she had hardly made the centerpiece of her public reflections on religion and sexuality thereafter. “She believed herself to be the wife of the departed spirit of a young man whom she had rejected as a suitor for her hand before his death,” Bell explained of Ida’s mystical love affair. “Her views of the marriage relation,” he elaborated, “were based on what she had learned and experienced in her conjugal relations [with] her spirit husband, as tinged and colored by her distempered fancy.” Whether Craddock’s delusion warranted her confinement in a mental ward, Bell was as uncertain after her death as he was before it—but of her lunacy he was adamant. The angelic husband was the primary symptom of Craddock’s disease—a disturbing apparition that Bell thought might have been dispelled through proper psychiatric treatment in or out of an institution.2

  Even as experts like Bell focused on Craddock’s spirit marriage for their diagnostic conclusions, other factors were clearly coloring posthumous accounts of her mental health. Thomas W. Barlow, the assistant district attorney in Philadelphia who had joined forces with Ida’s mother to institutionalize her in 1898, revealed those various considerations in a letter he wrote two weeks after her death:Miss Craddock was insane; but her intellect was so brilliant, her powers of persuasion were so great, her control over her actions, when necessary, so apparently sane, that most people were deceived as to her real mental condition. She had for years fixed delusions, and she was a nymphomaniac, writing things and saying things which were lewd and obscene, the expressions of a disordered mind.

  Barlow’s postmortem appeared inadvertently ambiguous. Craddock had been brilliant, persuasive, and self-controlled; she had shown few outward signs of insanity; and, yet, underneath that rational exterior, she had been a sexual cauldron bubbling with crazy passions—a woman
with too many obscene notions in her head and at least one too many spirits in her bed. By identifying Craddock as a nymphomaniac—an all-too evocative diagnosis in the era’s psychosexual literature on women and nervous disorders—Barlow equated her pathology with a surging of uninhibited female desire. Nymphomania was a disease that usually revealed more about the fears and titillations of the medical men who deployed it than the ills of the patients who were diagnosed with it. (Satyriasis, the male counterpart to nymphomania, inevitably generated a small fraction of the interest that its female complement did.) Clearly, Barlow’s lawyerly use of the term nymphomaniac in regard to Craddock was intended to be repressive, not healing—to bury her further, not to spare her reputation.3

  Not all of Craddock’s diagnosticians measured her mental health solely in terms of her spiritualist love life—and those who did not usually had brighter views of her general well-being. The physician R. W. Shufeldt, who had served as an expert witness in Craddock’s defense before the Court of Special Sessions in New York, thought she was of perfectly sound mind. Having read her pamphlets and having met with her on several occasions, Shufeldt was far more impressed with Craddock’s courage as an outcast sexologist than he was concerned about the religious experiences she claimed as inspiration for taking on that maligned public role. If she had simply been accorded the proper intellectual space to study medicine and biology as well as her constitutional right to free expression, Shufeldt was quite sure that Craddock would have been just fine. Utterly dismissive of Bell’s legal opinion on Craddock’s mental state, Shufeldt claimed to have no difficulty as a medical expert in placing her “taxonomically” among the sane.4