Blair radically improved mail transportation, too. For decades, postmasters had wrapped the letters they received with paper and twine and sent them by stagecoach or train to large distribution post offices called the Great Mails. There, clerks unwrapped the bundles and sorted the letters, tossing them into racks of pigeonholes representing different cites and addresses. Then they wrapped them up again and sent them on to the next large post office in the Great Mail chain. Because of all the stops, it could take as long as two weeks for a letter to travel from Maine to Florida.
Now that railroads crisscrossed the country, Blair thought it made more sense for clerks to ride trains and sort mail while it was in transit. In 1864, Blair gave George Armstrong, an assistant postmaster in Chicago, permission to start what has been called the first official railway mail service between his city and Clinton, Iowa, on the Chicago & North Western Railway. Joseph Medill, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, told Armstrong it would never work. “It is impractical,” Medill said. “Why, the government would have to employ a regiment of men to follow the postal cars for the purpose of picking up letters that would be blown out of the car and left along the track.”
Armstrong invited Medill along for the first trip, and the newspaper publisher became an important supporter of the new service, helping Armstrong overcome opposition from powerful postmasters in cities like Philadelphia and Boston as he rolled out the service nationally. These urban postal officials feared that Armstrong would poach some of their clerks to work on his trains and that they would lose a percentage of the commissions they received for every letter, newspaper, or book sorted in their building. That’s exactly what happened, but Armstrong had Blair and Medill behind him, so the postmasters had to make the best of it.
The Railway Mail Service became an elite operation within the Post Office Department. Clerks who rode the rails threw bags of letters from speeding trains and grabbed incoming ones with hooks. They memorized as many as 4,000 post office addresses in order to sort mail faster. They practiced at home using portable pigeonhole cases, and they were frequently tested on both their memory skills and their letter-tossing techniques. The men who survived this grueling process developed a uniquely collective sprit. They slept together in dormitories on the upper floors of big city post offices and developed their own slang, referring to letters with wrong addresses as “nixies,” registered letters as “reds,” and, much later, airmail as “flypaper.”
Blair had less success when he tried to do away with franking abuses. It was bad enough that members of Congress used the post office to freely blanket their districts with copies of speeches that no one paid attention to in Washington. Politicians also sent their dirty laundry home to be cleaned without paying, simply by signing the packages with their names. One congressman reportedly sent a piano through the mail without paying. Blair wasn’t able to stop senators and congressmen from franking but he was able to rein in postmasters who allowed friends and family members to frank their mail. “The postmaster cannot leave his frank behind him for the use of his family when he is traveling on pleasure or business,” Blair wrote. “Therefore, if a person enjoying the privilege of a frank is known not to be in the vicinity, the frank is to be disregarded, the letter rated, and postage marked due.”
Blair also vastly expanded the duties of postal inspectors, then known as “special agents.” Much of their work was unglamorous. They examined the books at post offices and the department’s dealings with stagecoach and steamboat companies to make sure it wasn’t overcharged. Early special agents also spied on postmasters to make sure they encouraged customers to vote for the political party in power with sufficient zeal.
But postal inspectors also solved crimes. James Holbrook’s Ten Years Among the Mail Bags; or, Notes from the Diary of a Special Agent of the Post-Office Department, published in 1855, became a best seller and is thought to have helped inspire the modern detective novel, with its tales of mail robbers and malefactors who tried to use the public mails for nefarious purposes. “A mail bag is an epitome of human life,” Holbrook wrote in the opening section of his book. “All the elements which go to form the happiness or misery of individuals—the raw material so to speak, of human hopes and fears—here exist in a chaotic state.” Someone had to protect it.
In 1864, Blair noted that the Post Office had only 16 special agents for 29,047 post offices, if he included the “disloyal” post offices in the South, which of course, he did. But as the postal system became cheaper, faster, and more convenient to use, strange items began to flow though it. Thanks to cheaper printing technology and the development of the daguerreotype, publishers could produce inexpensive pornographic books with arresting photographs that they could mail to customers. Blair was shocked to discover that Union troops read such material at their camps. The deeply religious Blair feared indecent literature would weaken the resolve of the Union Army, and he called for legislation barring obscene material from the mail. In 1865, Lincoln signed a new law stating that “no obscene book, pamphlet, picture, print, or other publication of a vulgar and indecent character, shall be admitted into the mails of the United States.” By this time, it should be noted that Blair, who resided in the border state of Maryland, had resigned from his position because radical members of his party didn’t consider his antislavery position strong enough.
However, the new law didn’t eradicate pornography. After the war, young men in search of jobs poured into the cities, where they could buy obscene books openly on outdoor stands. Morris Jesup, a wealthy banker and one of the founders of the Young Men’s Christian Association in New York, believed such literature served as a gateway to a debauched existence. He sent Anthony Comstock, his eager 28-year-old protégé—broad shouldered, thick legged, and extravagantly side-whiskered—to Washington in 1873 to lobby Congress for a new law that would make it easier for the federal government to prosecute malefactors who sent sexually explicit material by mail.
At an early age, Comstock felt he was destined for glory. As a child in New Canaan, Connecticut, he was enchanted when his mother read him stories from the Bible about saintly heroes battling satanic foes. Comstock never smoked. He shared a bottle of homemade wine with a friend one night, woke up with a violent hangover, and became a lifelong temperance advocate. Comstock later claimed that as an adolescent, he rid the area of a local saloon keeper, breaking into his establishment late at night, turning on the taps, and warning the barkeep in an anonymous note to leave New Canaan or else. But for all his professed virtue, Comstock’s own diaries reveal that he was also a chronic masturbator, which filled him with guilt and may have had much to do with his eventual calling as an anti-pornography crusader.
After his older brother Samuel died at Gettysburg, Comstock enlisted in the Union Army. Stationed in St. Augustine, Florida, Comstock tried to get the other soldiers to attend church with him. They didn’t appreciate his nagging and let him know, trashing his room in the barracks one night. Comstock tried to laugh it off, writing in his diary that “the boys” were giving him an initiation, even though he had been in St. Augustine for a year and perhaps it was a little late for that.
After the war, Comstock found a sales job at a dry goods store in New York, bought a house in Brooklyn, and married Margaret Hamilton, a minister’s daughter who was 10 years older. They had one child, a daughter who died soon after her birth. Comstock found solace in a new crusade. As Comstock told it, a fellow employee at the dry goods store become afflicted with a sexually transmitted disease after developing an interest in erotic literature. Comstock went to the bookstore where his friend made his purchases, bought some illicit reading material, and returned with a police captain who arrested the dealer.
Newspapers picked up the story of the valiant dry goods salesman. One columnist suggested cheekily that if Comstock wanted to prove himself as a purification agent, he should visit St. Ann’s Street, where vendors openly hawked such books. Comstock invited a r
eporter to join him this time, collaring several more smut dealers and earning more glowing coverage. After that, he grew more ambitious. He figured out that a handful of publishers produced a total of 169 sexually explicit books available in New York. He believed that if he put them out of business, the supply of obscenity would dry up. William Hayes, a Brooklyn surgeon, was the most prolific of them; he took his life when he learned of Comstock’s interest. Comstock tried to purchase the late doctor’s printing plates from his wife so he could dissolve them in acid at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. The widow wanted $650. Comstock didn’t have that kind of money, but he knew where to find it.
He wrote to the New York YMCA asking for the funds. Morris Jesup intercepted the letter and was so moved that he wrote Comstock a check for $650 and installed him as the secretary of the YMCA’s newly formed Committee for the Suppression of Vice. Within a year, Comstock seized more than twelve tons of offensive literature, and 200,000 salacious items including photographs, rings, knives, song-lyric sheets, playing cards, and what he referred to as “obscene and immoral rubber articles.” He kept his collection at the American Tract Society Building on Nassau Street in lower Manhattan, where it could do no harm. But even with the money and imprimatur of the YMCA, Comstock didn’t always succeed in putting smut merchants behind bars. It was the era of Boss Tweed, and the city was a lawless place. Pornographers bribed prosecutors to drop the charges against them. Corrupt state judges tossed out cases against booksellers and rubber goods dealers.
Comstock didn’t get very far when he attempted to have his adversaries prosecuted under the federal postal law. He jailed the early suffragette sisters Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin for publishing details about a prominent minister’s liaison with a married woman in their newspaper and mailing it to subscribers. But a federal jury acquitted the two women after the judge explained that the law made no mention of newspapers. The triumphant sisters mocked Comstock in their paper. “From Maine to California, we believe the new order of Protestant Jesuits called the YMCA is dubbed with the well-merited title of the American Inquisition,” they wrote. “We do not mean by this to assert that its leaders are like those of the Spanish institution of the same character. We should no more think of comparing Comstock . . . with Torquemada, than of contrasting a living skunk with a dead lion.”
So in February 1873, Comstock asked Jesup to send him to Washington to plead for a more stringent federal postal law. Jesup bought him a ticket and Comstock boarded the train with an assortment of offensive items from his trove. Congress was in turmoil. Republican president and Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant had recently won a second term by a wide margin, trouncing his Democratic opponent, newspaper publisher Horace Greeley. But Democrats were attacking members of Grant’s administration, including Schuyler Colfax, his vice president, for accepting bribes from a bank underwriting the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad.
Despite the scandal, or perhaps because of it, Republican leaders gave Comstock an enthusiastic welcome. Colfax allowed Comstock to set up an exhibit of his unspeakable wares in his Senate office. Comstock pleaded with members of the House and Senate to pass a stronger antiobscenity law that banned offensive newspapers, along with mention therein of contraception and abortion, from the mail. “All were very much excited and declared themselves ready to give me any law I might ask for, if only it was within the bounds of the Constitution,” Comstock wrote in his diary.
William Strong, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, who had tried without success to insert the word “God” into the Constitution, helped Comstock craft a proper bill. Colfax promised that it would be passed before the end of the legislative session; Comstock stuck around Washington to make sure it did. He attended a reception at the White House where he shook President Grant’s hand and gazed disapprovingly at the female guests. “They were brazen—dressed extremely silly—enameled faces and powdered hair—low dresses—hair most ridiculous and altogether most extremely disgusting to every lover of pure, noble, modest woman,” Comstock scoffed. “How can we respect them? They disgrace our land and yet consider themselves ladies.”
Comstock’s bill cleared both the Senate and the House post office committees, but newspaper publishers complained that it threatened the freedom of the press and it was sent back to committee for amendments. Comstock worried that it might die there. House Speaker James Blaine told him not to worry; he would get it through before the end of the lame-duck session. Comstock stayed in the House past midnight on the final night. He waited as Blaine called for votes on hundreds of bills, but the speaker made no mention of his.
It was now early Sunday morning. Comstock felt compelled to abide by his mother’s wish that he keep the Sabbath holy and he departed for his hotel, walking through chilly darkness full of rage. How could God have so forsaken him? Lying in bed, Comstock began to doubt his faith and could feel Satan in his hotel room, tempting him to abandon it. “The Devil seemed determined to claim me as his servant.” he wrote in his diary. “He tempted me and made my heart rebellious. Yet a stronger hand was over me. I felt oh so crushed, so broken down, so tempted to sin against God. . . . O I felt almost like distrusting God, doubting and rebellious and then I went to bed, to pass the night beset by the Devil.”
Comstock awoke exhausted and, assuming that he had lost his congressional battle, attended church. He didn’t learn until early afternoon that the House had passed the antiobscenity bill at 2 am. The Senate blessed it, and on March 3, 1873, President Grant signed what would become known as the Comstock law. There was more good news for Comstock. His admirers in Washington had persuaded John Creswell, Grant’s postmaster general, to appoint him as a special agent in charge of enforcing the antiobscenity act. Comstock readily accepted the position, but he refused a government salary, saying the YMCA would take care of him financially. “I do not want any fat office created, whereby the Government is taxed or for some politician to have in a year or two,” he wrote. “Give me the authority that such an office confers and thus enable me to more effectually do this work and the salary and honors may go to the winds.”
Three days after the passage of the Comstock law, its namesake placed his hand on the Bible and swore to uphold his country’s postal laws. He received an inspector’s badge and a trail pass entitling him to travel anywhere in the nation by rail, free, in pursuit of those who besmirched the mails. The Post Office now employed 63 special agents, but Comstock enjoyed an exclusive status. He didn’t have to audit post offices; he was free to focus all his considerable energies on exciting investigative work. He targeted people who used the mail to peddle fake medicines and fraudulent financial schemes. Comstock is credited with shutting down the many so-called state lotteries that used the postal system to sell tickets, most notably the popular Louisiana lottery, whose leaders attempted to bribe Comstock with a generous donation to his society if he left them alone. Comstock politely declined the offer.
But Comstock was best known for his antiobscenity cases. Within a year of the Comstock law’s enactment, he made 55 arrests under the new law, and he had a scar on his face from an encounter with a knife-wielding pornographer in Newark, New Jersey, whom he still managed to subdue, showing that he wasn’t someone to trifle with. “The mail of the United States is the great thoroughfare of communication leading up into all our homes, schools and colleges,” Comstock wrote. “It is the most powerful agent to assist this nefarious business, because it goes everywhere and is secret. It surely needs no argument here to convince the most exacting of all decent men, that no department of Government should be prostituted to serve this infamous traffic, nor become party to it, by continuing to serve these loathsome creatures after the character of their hellish business . . . is known.”
No matter what Comstock did, the newspapers knew about it and generally lavished him with praise, though not everybody approved of his grandstanding. The YMCA thought the special agent attracted too much attention to the
vice trade and severed its ties with his society. Comstock was happy to be free of the Y; he suspected that its leaders were jealous of him. He reconstituted his organization as the independent New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Jesup remained on the board along with J. Pierpont Morgan, the powerful financier, and toothpaste magnate Samuel Colgate. Comstock encouraged the founding of satellite societies around the country. R. W. McAfee, another special postal agent, presided over the Western Society for the Suppression of Vice, with branches in Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis. Thanks to the efforts of Comstock and his followers, states around the country enacted their own versions of the Comstock law.
By 1877, Comstock had largely shut down the obscenity trade. That year, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice lamented in its annual report that there would be fewer front-page seizures of pornographic goods. The vice business had fallen on hard times. But Comstock still needed to make arrests so that his financial backers would continue to underwrite the society’s annual $10,000 budget. He went hunting for new forms of obscenity, harassing the publishers of medical volumes with anatomical studies of the human body and importers of European art books with nude portraits. Comstock also became the scourge of freethinkers who championed sexual liberation in Victorian America.
Ezra Heywood was a radical contrarian. A handsome, dark-haired graduate of Brown University, he was a staunch abolitionist, but refused to fight in the Civil War because of his strong pacifist beliefs. He insisted that marriage was unfair to women, calling it “legalized prostitution.” Yet Heywood enjoyed a happy union to his wife Angela. Ezra and Angela, who lived in Princeton, Massachusetts, published the Word, a newspaper devoted to free love and labor reform. They were also among the founders of the New England Free Love League.
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