Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  26 IC, “Brief Account,” 5-7; Washington Post, April 25, 1901, 2. The relevant police court records have not survived.

  27 IC, “Brief Account,” 7; IC to Moses Harman, in LLB, Aug. 10, 1901, 239.

  28 On her financial squeeze, see IC to Katie Wood, [Aug. 1, 1901], box 1, f. 1; IC, “Account of Expenses,” Aug.-Sept. 1901, box 1, f. 3; IC to WTS, Sept. 10, 1901, box 1 , f.1, ICP.

  29 The note on her landlord’s son and his two friends is in her “Account of Expenses.” On the role of her Baptist landlord, E. D. Garnsey, see IC to Hugh O. Pentecost, March 12, 1902, box 2, f. 2, RGP. On decoy letters and her New York arrest, see IC to Hugh O. Pentecost, Feb. 9, 1902; IC to Editor Sun, Feb. 21, 1902, box 2 , f. 2, RGP, and IC to Hugh O. Pentecost, Feb. 4,1902, box 1, f. 1, ICP.

  30 Twenty-Ninth Annual Report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (New York: n.p., 1903), 10-11.

  31 Ibid.; Anthony Comstock to Henrietta Westbrook, Feb. 28, 1902, box 2, f. 2, RGP. Details on the New York case are recorded in U.S. v. Ida C. Craddock, Criminal Case C-2738, March-Oct. 1902, U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York, National Archives, Northeast Region, New York City. The detail on her limited print runs is from IC to Pentecost, March 12, 1902. The Truth Seeker later printed a copy of what they said was a failed decoy letter that Comstock sent to Craddock under the assumed name of “Miss Frankie Streeter.” See “Comstock and His Methods,” Truth Seeker, Nov. 8, 1902, 710. The journal included a letter from Craddock refusing to send her pamphlets to a minor without parental consent. See IC, “Craddock’s Reply,” Truth Seeker, Nov. 8, 1902, 710.

  32 IC to Editor Sun, Feb. 21, 1902; “Alleged Misuse of Mails: Woman Held on Charge of Circulating Forbidden Literature,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 19, 1902, 1; “Dr. Rainsford Sent Approval,” New York Sun, Feb. 19, 1902, 7.

  33 IC to Editor Sun, Feb. 21, 1902; “Alleged Misuse of Mails,” 1; “Dr. Rainsford Sent Approval,” 7.

  34 R. W. Shufeldt, “Critique of the Trial of Ida C. Craddock,” BI, April 5, 1902, box 20, f. 15, RGP.

  35 IC to Editor Sun, Feb. 21, 1902; IC to Pentecost, Feb. 4, 1902 and Feb. 9, 1902; Shufeldt, “Critique of the Trial”; IC to EBF, June 18, 1902, box 1, f. 2, ICP; Hugh O. Pentecost, “One-Ideaed People,” Truth Seeker, Nov. 22, 1902, 738-739. For Pentecost’s polemics against religion, see Hugh O. Pentecost, What I Believe (New York: Twentieth Century, 1891); Hugh O. Pentecost, “Persistence of Superstition,” Truth Seeker, Jan. 25, 1902, 58; and Hugh O. Pentecost, “Superstitions of Liberals,” Truth Seeker, Oct. 17, 1903, 658-659.

  36 EBF, “Comstock versus Craddock,” LLB, Feb. 27, 1902; EBF, “Comstock versus Craddock,” Truth Seeker, Feb. 22, 1902, 120; EBF, “Craddock Fund,” box 1, f. 3, ICP; EBF, “Comstock vs. Craddock—Again,” Truth Seeker, March 15, 1902, 168. Foote’s piece appeared in various radical publications and as a stand-alone circular. For a copy of the latter, see box 20, f. 16, RGP. Foote received dozens of letters and donations in favorable response to it, the evidence for which survives in ICP.

  37 “Mrs. Craddock Goes to Jail,” New York Sun, March 18, 1902, 5; R. W. Shufeldt, “Letters from Gotham,” BI, newspaper clippings, box 2, f. 2, RGP. The other two doctors who were subpoenaed as defense witnesses were Elmer Lee and George Knipe, New York physicians who were supportive of her labors. See IC to EBF, March 12, 1902, box 1, f. 1, ICP. Another medical authority, Byron Robinson, chimed in with a letter of endorsement from Chicago. There were conflicting reports about whether the three-judge panel allowed the doctors to testify as expert witnesses on Craddock’s behalf. Shufeldt’s first-person account claims he took the stand, and he was still complaining three years later about the discourtesies he suffered “in the witness chair” during her trial. See R. W. Shufeldt, “The Medico-Legal Consideration of Perverts and Inverts,” Pacific Medical Journal 48 (1905): 385-386. But, see also Cyrus W. Coolridge, “Ida Craddock and Anthony Comstock,” BI, newspaper clippings, box 20, f. 16, RGP, where it is claimed the doctors were prevented from testifying. By Shufeldt’s account, his testimony was cut short, and he was not allowed to answer a question put to him directly by Craddock. Only the docket books survive for the Court of Sessions for this period, so the official legal documents for this trial are very thin. For an account that squares with Shufeldt’s’s version of events, see “Ida Craddock’s Case,” Truth Seeker, March 29, 1902, 199-200.

  38 “Mrs. Craddock Goes to Jail,” 5.

  39 Ibid.; “Mrs. Craddock Sentenced,” New York Times, March 18, 1902, 7; “Ida C. Craddock Convicted,” LLB, April 3,1902, 89-90; Elizur Brace Hinsdale, Autobiography with Reports and Documents (New York: J. J. Little, 1901), 16, 81-83; “John Most Gets Year in Jail,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 15, 1901, 16; “Family Ties Sundered,” New York Times, April 30, 1884, 2. On Most’s radicalism, see Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 41-68.

  40 “Mrs. Craddock Goes to Jail,” 5; EBF, “Convicted of ‘Blasphemy’: Craddock Crushed and Comstock Crowing,” Truth Seeker, April 12, 1902, 230-231. For biographical information on McKean, see “Justice McKean Dead,” New York Times, June 14, 1908, 11.

  41 Shufeldt, “Critique of the Trial”; Edward W. Chamberlain, “The Persecution of Craddock,” LLB, May 1, 1902, 120-121.

  42 “Mrs. Craddock Goes to Jail,” 5; EBF, “Convicted of ‘Blasphemy’: Craddock Crushed and Comstock Crowing,” 230-231; “Craddock’s Case,” 199-200; “Mrs. Craddock Sentenced,” New York Times, March 18, 1902, 7; Shufeldt, “Letters from Gotham”; Shufeldt, “Critique of the Trial”; Edward W. Chamberlain, “The Persecution of Craddock”; Twenty-Ninth Annual Report, 7.

  43 Shufeldt, “Critique of Trial,” 5; Chamberlain, “Persecution,” 121; Edward W. Chamberlain, “The Blackmailing of Mrs. Craddock,” LLB, July 17, 1902, 210.

  44 Edward W. Chamberlain, “Craddock Assaulted,” LLB, May 22, 1902, 148; Moses Harman, “Mrs. Craddock’s Workhouse Experience,” LLB, Aug. 14, 1902, 243- 244; IC to EBF, May 12, 1902 and June 1, 1902; IC to Hugh O. Pentecost, March 19, 1902; Henrietta Westbrook to EBF, April 10, 1902, box 1, f. 2, ICP; “The Work-House—Blackwell’s Island,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 33 (1866): 696. For an excellent examination of the political and social consequence of the anti-vaccination movement among late Victorian liberals, see Nadja Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

  45 IC, “‘In Durance Vile’: Mrs. Craddock’s Story of Her Imprisonment under the Reign of Comstock,” Truth Seeker, Aug. 9, 1902, 504-505.

  46 “Defense Fund,” LLB, June 19, 1902, 181; “By the Way,” LLB, July 3, 1902, 196; Cyrus W. Coolridge, “The Craddock Dinner,” LLB, July 10, 1902, 201-202; “The Craddock Dinner,” Truth Seeker, June 28, 1902, 409. There were other free-speech cases of moment, including one involving a group of social radicals in Home, Washington, that sparked Foote and Walker to organize the Free Speech League, but Craddock’s jailing, release, and federal trial were the most immediate precipitating events. See, for example, how the connection is made in Philip G. Peabody to EBF, May 16, 1902, box 1, f. 2, ICP. For an excellent overview of free-speech activism in this era, including the importance of the Free Speech League’s cutting-edge radicalism, see David M. Rabban, Free Speech in its Forgotten Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. 64-76. For particular delineation of the father-son duo behind much of this early activism, see Janice Ruth Wood, The Struggle for Free Speech in the United States, 1872-1915: Edward Bliss Foote, Edward Bond Foote, and Anti-Comstock Operations (New York: Routledge, 2008).

  47 Coolridge, “Craddock Dinner,” 201-202; R. W. Shufeldt, “The Release of Mrs. Craddock,” BI, July 5, 1902, newspaper clippings, box 20, f. 15, RGP.

  48 Eunice O. Parsons to IC, Sept, 21, 1902; Sept. 25, 1902; and Sept. 30, 1902, box 1, f.2. ICP.

  49 E. Elmer Keeler, “The Wedding Night,” The Clinic (Syracuse, NY), newspaper clippings,
box 20, f. 16, RGP.

  50 Lizzie S. Decker to EBF, March 29, 1902 and May 9, 1902, box 1, f. 1-2, ICP.

  51 IC to EBF, June 18, 1902; Hugh O. Pentecost to EBF, Nov. 5, 1902, box 2, f. 2; Edward Chamberlain to Lizzie Decker, Nov. 17, 1902, box 2, f.2, RGP.

  52 “A Spiritualist to Editor,” LLB, Dec. 25, 1902, 394; Chamberlain to Decker, Nov. 17, 1902.

  53 The details on the federal trial are from: “Mrs. Craddock Convicted,” New York Sun, Oct. 11, 1902, 9; “Ida Craddock Convicted Again,” Truth Seeker, Oct. 18, 1902, 661; “Ida C. Craddock’s Last Words,” LLB, Nov. 13, 1902, 344-346; Twenty-Ninth Annual Report, 12; Coolridge, “Craddock and Comstock,” 11; “The Craddock Tragedy,” Torch of Reason, Nov. 6, 1902, 4.

  54 Edward W. Chamberlain to IC, Sept. 10, 1902, box 2, f. 2, RGP; “Ida Craddock’s Letter to Her Mother,” Truth Seeker, Oct. 25, 1902, 680.

  55 “In Jail’s Shadow Ida Craddock Died,” New York Herald, Oct. 18, 1902; “Priestess of Yoga a Suicide,” Evening World (New York), Oct. 17, 1902; “Another Comstock Victim: Ida C. Craddock Driven to Suicide by the Mendacious Anthony,” unidentified newspaper clipping. All three of these accounts are from newspaper files in box 20, f. 16, RGP. See also “Escapes Prison by Death,” New-York Tribune, Oct. 18, 1902, 6. Her death was widely covered in the newspapers, and the reported details were not entirely consistent. Did she cut both of her wrists? Was the rubber tube in her mouth or at her side? Did one police officer come to her mother’s aid or two? But, the basic outline of events is evident from multiple sources.

  56 DPE, 190. Craddock recalled the lines as being from James Russell Lowell, but they are from Longfellow.

  57 “Letter to Her Mother,” 680.

  58 Ibid.

  59 “Priestess of Yoga a Suicide,” Oct. 17, 1902; “Death, Not Prison,” Evening Sun (New York), Oct. 17, 1902, newspaper clippings, box 2, f. 2, RGP.

  60 Lizzie Decker to EBF, Oct. 21, 1902, box 2, f. 2, RGP; “Ida C. Craddock’s Mother Speaks,” LLB, Nov. 20, 1902, 354.

  61 Frederic A. Hinckley, Sermon Preached at the Funeral of Robert Purvis (Washington, DC: Judd and Detweiler, 1898), 5-6, 10.

  62 Coolridge, “Craddock and Comstock,” 11.

  63 Twenty-Ninth Annual Report, 13, 15; “Attacks Anthony Comstock,” New York Times, Oct. 29, 1902, 16; “Says Comstock Hounded Woman to Suicide,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 28, 1902, 5; W. S. Rainsford, The Story of a Varied Life: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1922), 339, 342; “Threatens Dr. Rainsford,” New-York Tribune, Nov. 4, 1902, 1; “Vice Society for Comstock,” New York Sun, Nov. 4, 1902, 3.

  64 “Memorial of Ida C. Craddock,” LLB, Nov. 6, 1902, 340. For an example of the Stanton-Craddock conflation at the time, see “Stanton, Austin, Craddock, the Humanitarian Trinity,” Blue-grass Blade, Nov. 30, 1902, 3.

  65 “Memorial of Ida C. Craddock,” 340; “The Craddock Tragedy: What Should Be Done About It,” Torch of Reason, Nov. 6, 1902, 4; Edwin C. Walker, “The ‘Trial’ and Death of Ida C. Craddock,” LLB, Oct. 30, 1902, 328-329: Juliet H. Severance, “Thoughts on the Death of Ida Craddock,” Truth Seeker, Nov. 1, 1902, 698; “George Macdonald on the Craddock Case,” LLB, Dec. 11, 1902, 377; “Ruminations,” LLB, Nov. 13, 1902, 348.

  66 “Ida Craddock’s Last Words: Like Socrates, She Chooses for Herself the Manner of Her Death,” Truth Seeker, Nov. 1, 1902, 694-695; “Craddock’s Last Words,” LLB, Nov. 13, 1902, 344-346.

  67 “Craddock’s Last Words,” 345.

  68 Robert G. Ingersoll, Is Suicide a Sin? Robert G. Ingersoll’s Famous Letter, Replies by Eminent Men, and Col. Ingersoll’s Brilliant Rejoinder, Prefaced by a Startling Chapter, Great Suicides of History! (New York: Eckler, n.d.), 5, 16, 65. Hugh Pentecost, who continued to dislike his former client, took the contrarian view in dismissing the nobility of her final act, labeling her a “quitter”: “If you have a gospel worth preaching at all, it is worth preaching until somebody else kills you. Do not give it up.” See Pentecost, “One-Ideaed People,” 739.

  69 Twenty-Ninth Annual Report, 17.

  70 “Comstock Tells His Part in the Ida Craddock Case,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle , Nov. 14, 1902, newspaper clippings, box 20, f. 15, RGP; Anthony Comstock, “Public Morals and the Law,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Nov. 14, 1902, 6; “Warm Time for Comstock at Philosophical Society,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec. 8, 1902, newspaper clippings, box 14, f. 1, RGP; “Mr. Comstock Denounced,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 1902, 2; “Comstock Knocked Out,” Richmond Dispatch, Dec. 9, 1902, 11; Cyrus W. Coolridge, “Anthony Comstock under Fire,” LLB, Jan. 1, 1903, 401- 402; “Comstock in Cold Type,” Truth Seeker, Dec. 27, 1902, 822-824. Conway had become interested in the Craddock case only after her death, but he then displayed a hearty enthusiasm for her heroic witness. See Moncure D. Conway, “The Inner Heritage of Secularism,” Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the American Secular Union and Freethought Federation (New York: Truth Seeker, 1902), 86-89. Walker used the December encounter over the Craddock case as the jumping off point for a full-scale attack on Comstock’s censorship apparatus. See Edwin C. Walker, Who is the Enemy; Anthony Comstock or You? (New York: n.p., 1903), 6-10, 32-33.

  71 Flora W. Fox, “Repeal the Comstock Laws,” LLB, Nov. 20, 1902, 354; “Livesey Hits Comstock,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Nov. 13, 1902, 9.

  72 TS, ‘Obscene’ Literature and Constitutional Law, 56, 271.

  73 Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931; Salt Lake City: Smith, 1982), 553.

  74 Broun and Leech, Comstock, 156; “Instruction in Sexual Matters for the Laity,” North American Journal of Homœopathy 18 (1903): 514; “Repeal the Comstock Law,” LLB, Dec. 25, 1902, 394; Conway, “Inner Heritage,” 87; James F. Morton Jr., “The Fight for Free Speech,” LLB, Nov. 12, 1903, 345.

  Chapter 6: One Religio-Sexual Maniac

  1 [Clark Bell], “Ida Craddock and Anthony Comstock,” Medico-Legal Journal 20 (1902): 429-433; “Comstock and the Craddock Case,” New-York Tribune, Nov. 8, 1902, 2. Bell previously outlined his reasons for refusing her case in a letter to EBF, March 3, 1902, box 1, f. 1, ICP.

  2 Bell, “Craddock and Comstock,” 429-433.

  3 Twenty-Ninth Annual Report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (New York: n.p., 1903), 19. In defining erotomania and nymphomania many clinicians defined the former as a mental disease that took over the imagination and the latter to be a physiological, organically grounded disease that was given overt bodily expression. In practical usage, however, the two categories regularly shaded from one into the other. Theodore Schroeder would employ the terms with the clinical distinction in mind in analyzing Craddock: “Here I am using ‘erotomania’ as meaning a psychogenetic erotic obsession. By nymphomania I mean a pathological organic basis for an erotic obsession.” See TS, “Puritanism through Erotomania to Nymphomania,” 1, box 5, f. 30, ICP.

  4 R. W. Shufeldt, “Letter from Gotham,” BI, newspaper clippings, box 2, f. 2, RGP; R. W. Shufeldt, “Critique of the Trial of Ida C. Craddock,” BI, newspaper clippings, box 20, f. 15, RGP; R. W. Shufeldt to IC, Jan. 27, 1902, box 1, f. 1, ICP.

  5 “Memorial for Ida C. Craddock,” LLB, Nov. 6, 1902, 340; Shufeldt to IC, Jan. 27, 1902; TS, “One Religio-Sexual Maniac,” Psychoanalytic Review 23 (1936): 26- 45; TS, “The Physical Side of Marriage,” 2, box 6, f. 3, ICP.

  6 IC, “Miscellaneous Notes,” 16, box 6, f. 7; IC to Katie Wood, Dec. 9, 1898. For contemporary accounts of nervous disorders and prevailing therapies by two prominent physicians with ties to the Philadelphia hospital where Craddock was treated, see Francis X. Dercum, ed., A Text-Book on Nervous Diseases (Philadelphia: Lea, 1895); H. C. Wood, Nervous Diseases and Their Diagnosis (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1887). For background on the hospital’s history and its practices, including religious correctives in treating insanity, see Nancy Tomes, A Generous Confidence:Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum-Keeping, 1840-1883 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. 48, 85, 88, 98-100, 221-222.

  7 Alexander Wilder to EBF, Feb. 26, 1902, box 1 f. 1, ICP; “An Infi
del Sermon,” Blue-grass Blade, July 12, 1903, 2.

  8 IC to Katie Wood, Oct. 8, 1898, box 2, f. 2, RGP.

  9 J. E. D. Esquirol, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity, trans. E. K. Hunt (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), 320-342; Conolly Norman, “Mania,” in D. Hack Tuke, ed., A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1892), 2: 765. For the broader debates about the pathologies of religious experience, including mediumistic phenomena, see Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), esp. 142-161; Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), esp. 121-153; and Christopher G. White, Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance, 1830-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

  10 G. Stanley Hall to Sigmund Freud, Sept. 26, 1913, in Saul Rosenzwieg, ed., Freud, Jung, and Hall the King-Maker: The Historic Expedition to America (1909) (St. Louis: Rana House, 1992), 373-374; Francis X. Dercum, “An Evaluation of the Psychogenic Factors in the Etiology of Mental Disease, Including a Review of Psych-analysis,” Journal of the American Medical Association 62 (1914): 753. Hall wrote revealingly of his attractions to—and his apprehensions about—Freudian claims in his autobiography. See G. Stanley Hall, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New York: Appleton, 1923), 406-414. For the definitive biographical study of Hall, including his intricate dance with Freud, see Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).