In 1876, Heywood published a turgidly written pamphlet entitled Cupid’s Yokes, in which he assailed marriage and exalted sex in pseudoscientific terms. Heywood also lambasted Comstock, calling him “a religion-monomaniac” and advocating the repeal of the Comstock law, which he called “the National Gag-Law.” Cupid’s Yokes was no fun to read and probably would have been quickly forgotten if it hadn’t attracted the interest of Comstock himself. Posing as “E. Edgewell of Squan Village, N.J.,” Comstock ordered a copy of the pamphlet from Heywood through the mail along with Trall’s Sexual Physiology, a book by a noted hydrotherapist. Once he received them, Comstock obtained a warrant for Heywood’s arrest from a Boston magistrate. He didn’t have to go to Princeton to serve it. Heywood was in Boston presiding over a meeting of the Free Love League.
Comstock gave a colorful account of what transpired in his book, Traps for the Young. When he arrived at the meeting, he found the Heywoods onstage in front of an audience of several hundred supporters. Angela Heywood delivered an impassioned speech in which she defended free love and assailed Comstock. Comstock left the building and stood outside on the sidewalk. “The fresh air was never more refreshing,” Comstock wrote. “I resolved to stop that exhibition of nastiness, if possible. I looked for a policeman. As usual, none was to be found when wanted. Then I sought light and help from above. I prayed for strength to do my duty, and that I might have success. I knew God was able to help me. Every manly instinct cried out against my turning my back on this horde of lust. I determined to try. I resolved that one man in America at least should enter a protest.”
Having fortified himself with such self-aggrandizing rhetoric, Comstock went back inside and endured more blasphemy. Just when he thought he could take no more, Ezra Heywood left the stage and wandered into the lobby. This was Comstock’s chance. He followed Heywood and confronted him. “I have a warrant for your arrest for sending obscene matter through the mail,” Comstock informed him. “You are my prisoner.”
According to Comstock’s account, Heywood made several attempts to escape. He told the special postal agent that he needed to inform the crowd that he was in police custody and would be departing sooner than scheduled, but Comstock would have none of that. Heywood next asked the vice suppressor if he would get his hat and coat. Comstock told a doorman to retrieve them. The doorman returned with Angela Heywood, who wanted to escort her husband to jail. Comstock had no interest in sharing a carriage with Mrs. Heywood. “I felt obliged out of respect to my wife, sister, and lady friends to decline the kind offer of her (select) company,” he wrote. Heywood’s supporters realized something was wrong and hurried to the lobby to see what it was. Comstock rushed his captive out of the building and shoved him into a carriage, ordering the driver to take them to the Charles Street jail. “Thus, reader,” Comstock boasted, “the devil’s trapper was trapped.”
Heywood offered a terser version of his arrest. “In Boston,” he wrote, “as I had momentarily left the chair in which I was presiding over a public convention to transact business in an anteroom, a stranger sprang upon me, and refusing to read a warrant, or even give his name, hurried me into a hack, drove swiftly through the streets, on a dark, rainy night, and lodged me in jail as a ‘US prisoner.’” Heywood didn’t discover until the next morning when his jailers finally showed him the warrant that it was Comstock himself who had arrested him. “Knowing the purity of my life and writings, the severely chaste objects and methods of my work, I scorn even to defend myself from ‘obscenity’ against the mercenary assassin of liberty!” Heywood raged.
United States District Court Judge Daniel Clark tried the case in 1878. Heywood’s supporters filled the courtroom in Boston but Clark refused to let them testify about Heywood’s character. He shut down the defense’s efforts to call witnesses who would challenge the government’s contention that Cupid’s Yokes and Sexual Physiology were obscene. Clark wouldn’t even permit the books to be read in the courtroom. He only gave the jurors copies with the objectionable parts underlined when they left the courtroom to deliberate. The jury didn’t find Sexual Physiology indecent, but it accepted the government’s contention that Cupid’s Yokes was. Clark sentenced Heywood to two years of hard labor in Dedham jail in Massachusetts.
Comstock was elated. “Another class of publications issued by Freelovers and Freethinkers is in a fair way of being stamped out,” he boasted in the Society’s annual report. “The public generally can scarcely be aware of the extent that blasphemy and filth commingled have found vent through these varied channels. Under a plausible pretense, men who raise a howl about ‘free press, free speech,’ etc., ruthlessly trample under foot the most sacred things, breaking down the altars of religion, bursting asunder the ties of home, and seeking to overthrow every social restraint.”
After the verdict, thousands of Heywood’s supporters gathered for an “indignation meeting” at Boston’s Faneuil Hall to condemn Comstock and the Post Office Department. Some contended that the special agent should confiscate the Bible, which overflowed with sex. Others insisted that Comstock was violating the sanctity of the mail by sending letters under false names to entrap people and opening packages that weren’t addressed to him. “The two ways specially sanctioned by this learned judge are the post-office decoy system and the post-office espionage system,” said Theodore Wakeman, a prominent Boston attorney. “Two plainer violations of the Bill of Rights—two meaner outrages upon liberty, decency, and morality—have never been perpetrated among our people! The learned judge did not invent them; they are old instruments of the Christian Inquisition. . . . Is this not a libel on our age and century, or have the Dark Ages returned?”
Heywood’s admirers appealed to President Rutherford Hayes to pardon Heywood. Hayes didn’t think it was a crime for a United States citizen to advocate the abolition of marriage. Nor did he find Cupid’s Yokes to be “obscene, lascivious, lewd, or corrupting in the criminal sense.” Comstock tried to change the president’s mind, but it was no use. After six months in jail, Comstock’s “devil trapper” walked out of Dedham jail a free man.
This seemed like an opportune time for freethinkers to lobby Congress to rescind the Comstock law. They collected more than 70,000 signatures and packed a hearing before the House of Representatives on the law. Comstock thought Satan’s army had descended on the nation’s capitol. “As I entered the committee room,” he wrote. “I found it crowded with long-haired men and short-haired women, there to defend obscene publications, abortion implements, and other incentives to crime by repealing the laws. I heard their hiss and curse as I passed through them. I saw their sneers and their looks of derision and contempt.” But neither the House nor the Senate wanted to overturn the antiobscenity law and face the wrath of Comstock and his followers around the country.
Comstock kept a watchful eye on Heywood, who had grown bolder since his presidential pardon. In the fall of 1882, Comstock pretended to be “J. A. Mattock of Nyack-on-the-Hudson, N.Y.” and placed an order for Cupid’s Yokes, an edition of the Word with Walt Whitman poems from Leaves of Grass, and another containing the offending advertisement for a birth control device mischievously called the Comstock Syringe. A grand jury indicted Heywood, claiming that Cupid’s Yokes and the Whitman poems were “too grossly obscene and lewd to be placed on the records of the court.” Even Whitman thought the publisher of the Word had gone too far. “Heywood is certainly a champion jackass,” the poet wrote to a friend. “I am sorry for him, but his bed is his own making, and he should have known what Comstock would do to him. . . . I only hope we shall escape the consequences that follow.”
This time, Heywood found himself in front of T. L. Nelson, a U.S. District Court judge less inclined to defer to Comstock. Nelson threw out the charge involving the Whitman poems, saying that neither was “grossly obscene and lewd.” He ridiculed the charge related to Cupid’s Yokes. “The court is robust enough to stand anything in that book,” Nelson said. In the
end, Heywood stood trial on a single count: advertising the Comstock Syringe. He took the witness stand and delivered a four-and-a-half-hour lecture, comparing himself to Jesus and John Brown and accusing Comstock of persecuting him because he advocated the repeal of the postal obscenity law.
The jury deliberated for two hours and found Heywood not guilty. The jurors said they would have acquitted him sooner, but they were entitled to one more free lunch courtesy of the federal justice system. When they heard the verdict, Heywood’s friends in the courtroom cheered and embraced each other. Comstock sat among them, trying to contain his fury. “Upon the release of their Chief Free-lover, or more properly free-luster, what did the Liberals do?” he wrote. “How did they receive the man they helped release from the penalties of the law? THEY HAD A PARTY.”
It was a rare defeat for Comstock, who continued for three more decades to arrest people for mailing literature that he found offensive. In 1892, a Post Office official acknowledged that the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice “has been so closely identified with the postal department that it is almost a part of it.” But after the turn of the century, the public grew less prudish. Judges found Comstock’s cases specious. Publishers and theatrical promoters welcomed his condemnations because they invariably translated into higher sales of tickets and books. The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw coined the word “Comstockery” to describe the postal inspector’s inability to distinguish between art and smut. “Europe likes to hear of such things,” Shaw said. “It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the old world that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country town civilization after all.”
Comstock responded with appropriate cluelessness. “George Bernard Shaw?” he told the New York Times. “Who is he? I have never heard of him in my life. Never saw one of his books so he can’t be much.”
The vice suppressor spent his final days pursuing Margaret Sanger, future founder of Planned Parenthood, who fled the country in 1914 after a federal grand jury indicted her for violating the Comstock law by mailing copies of the Woman Rebel, her monthly publication. Sanger argued that the founding fathers would have been aghast if they could have seen Comstock’s abuses of the Post Office. “When the Constitution of the United States authorized Congress to establish post offices and post roads, it was not intended that the authority should go beyond this,” she wrote. “It did not authorize it to censor the matter to be conveyed, nor to sit in judgment upon the moral, or intellectual qualities of the printed matter or parcel entrusted to it to deliver. The post office was, primarily, a mechanical institution, not an ethical one, whose business was efficiency, not religion or morality.”
After he died the following year, Comstock became a laughingstock, ridiculed by F. Scott Fitzgerald and H. L. Mencken. But the Post Office would carry on his legacy for many more years. Postal inspectors could still effectively censor books and magazines by banning them from the mail and showed the same inability to distinguish between literature and smut, between a D. H. Lawrence and a Larry Flynt. It would take a humiliating defeat in federal court to finally convince them to stop trying.
4
A Businessman
at the Post Office
After he won the presidential election of 1888, Benjamin Harrison scandalized the public with one of his cabinet appointments. In the past, presidents had awarded the job of postmaster general to men from the world of politics. While these men may not have known much about the mail, they knew who deserved a job in the department as a show of appreciation for their diligent campaign work. The public sometimes complained about the political nature of postal service hirings, but it generally accepted that this was the way the system worked.
Harrison took a decidedly different approach. He appointed John Wanamaker, a wealthy Philadelphia department store owner, to be his postmaster general. Wanamaker’s sole qualification seemed to be that he had raised $200,000 for Harrison’s triumphant campaign against Democratic incumbent Grover Cleveland. Harper’s Weekly found the selection of Wanamaker puzzling. “Wanamaker is in no sense a leader of the party, and before the late election, he had been unknown in political life,” it wrote.
The Nation was outraged by Wanamaker’s appointment. “Would he ever have been thought of for a place in the Cabinet if he had not contributed or raised this money?” asked the liberal magazine. “Shall it be established for a precedent that a certain amount of cash entitles the giver or the financier to the position of Secretary of the Navy or Postmaster-General? If so, there will never be a campaign hereafter without a boodle candidate for a Cabinet position.”
Cartoonists at satirical magazines such as Puck and Judge lampooned the new postmaster general, a bland-looking 51-year-old with a full nose, a slight chin, and thinning gray hair. Wanamaker was not only rich enough to fund a presidential election; he was deeply religious and went home to Philadelphia every weekend to teach at a Sunday school he had founded. The artists caricatured him as “Holy John,” a hypocrite who preached the gospel from a Bible in one hand while using his other to spread corruption with his money, which was reportedly used to buy votes for Harrison (Wanamaker professed ignorance).
The skeptics mocked Wanamaker still further when he vowed to bring a more businesslike approach to the Post Office Department, which they assumed meant he planned to dispense contracts and jobs to Harrison’s supporters. If that was Wanamaker’s scheme, he was in the perfect place. In the private sector, he had been master of an operation with more than 4,000 employees and millions of dollars in sales. But now he presided over what he described as “the largest business concern in the world,” with 150,000 employees and nearly 60,000 retail outlets. The year before Wanamaker’s appointment, the Post Office delivered 3.8 billion pieces of mail and had sales of $53 million, or $1.4 billion in today’s dollars.
Unlike Wanamaker’s department store, the Post Office lost several million dollars a year. He said he could make the deficits disappear, but not right away. Instead, he made a series of proposals that shocked Harrison and the rest of his cabinet. Years later, Wanamaker gave an interview to journalist Samuel S. McClure, founder of the influential McClure’s magazine. They sat in the former postmaster general’s parlor, where a portrait of Harrison hung on the wall. “Harrison still speaks to me,” Wanamaker said. “Now look at him. You remember him so well with that cold judicial appearance and his rather white skin. What do you suppose he is saying? ‘Wanamaker, are you sure of your ground?’ He says that to me every day.”
Even after John Wanamaker was wealthy enough to afford a town house on Walnut Street in Philadelphia; a suburban estate in Cheltenham with stables, a bowling alley, and a 100-foot swimming pool; and a three-story oceanfront vacation home in Cape May, New Jersey, he referred to himself as a “country boy.” It may have seemed strange but Wanamaker took pride in his humble beginnings.
John Wanamaker was born in 1838 in a farming community on the outskirts of Philadelphia called Gray’s Ferry. The son of a perennially struggling bricklayer, he went to school for only two years and didn’t get much of an education. “I never learned any more than simple arithmetic, for the teacher himself did not know any more,” Wanamaker lamented. At age 14, he went to work full-time as a messenger at a bookstore near the city’s waterfront to help pay his family’s rent. He made $1.25 a week. The other messengers made fun of his rural ways, but Wanamaker was no hayseed. After several months, he got a job that paid nearly twice as much at a men’s clothing store on the same block.
The new store’s predatory environment fascinated Wanamaker. There were no fixed prices for clothes. Salesmen gave inflated quotes, and their customers refused to pay for anything without extended haggling. When a customer finally did purchase a shirt or a pair of pants, he couldn’t return it. All sales were final in Philadelphia. Wanamaker wasn’t sure this was admirable, but he become so adept at these methods that he impressed Colonel Joseph Bennett, owner of Tower Hall, the c
ity’s largest men’s store, who hired him away.
Bennett paid Wanamaker six dollars a week and treated him like a son, buying him meals and listening to his plans. “John was certainly the most ambitious boy I ever saw,” Bennett would later say. “He would tell me how he was going to be a great merchant.” Wanamaker was eager to make good on his promise. After three years, he quit when Bennett refused his demand for an ownership stake in Tower Hall. Wanamaker stormed out of the establishment, vowing to start one of his own and bury his former mentor.
Before Wanamaker could exact his vengeance, he became terribly ill. From the time of his boyhood, he had suffered from a respiratory ailment. Now Wanamaker could barely breathe. His doctor told him to flee the city and travel to a place with pristine air. A forgiving Bennett offered to pay his way, but Wanamaker refused and used his own savings to pay for a trip to Minnesota, where he regained his health.
Wanamaker returned to Philadelphia at the end of 1857 in a different frame of mind. Rather than open his own men’s store as he had planned, he took a job as secretary for the newly constituted YMCA of Philadelphia. A devout Presbyterian, Wanamaker proved to be as good at attracting converts as he was at selling neckties. Within a year, the YMCA’s membership had grown from 57 to 2,000 men. Wanamaker founded a Sunday school and considered a career as a clergyman, but he ultimately decided to return to the business world. “The idea clung to my mind that I could accomplish more in the same domain if I became a merchant and acquired means and influence with fellow merchants,” Wanamaker said.
In 1861, Wanamaker opened Oak Hall, his own store on Market Street, with his brother-in-law, Nathan Brown. Their timing seemed inauspicious. The Civil War had begun, and young men were getting measured for military uniforms rather than sharply tailored suits. Wanamaker himself would have joined the Union Army, but his weak lungs made it impossible. “You are making a mistake in starting a business at such a time as this,” George Stuart, president of the local YMCA, warned him. “The country is entering a great war, and there will be no business. Before long, grass will be growing in the streets of Philadelphia.”
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