THE WAR ON VICE

In a tiny office in the heart of New York City, Anthony Comstock studied the annual report for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. This bull-necked man, dressed in black, was physically stalwart, as grim and serious as the task he'd set for himself. Only muttonchop sideburns -- once ginger-colored but now turning white – deviated from the severe. This was a man who, serving as a 20-year-old in the Civil War, had persuaded three like-minded Christian recruits to take a pledge against swearing, drinking and chewing tobacco. He’d acted as self-appointed chaplain for his unit. Now he had a higher office, also self-appointed, of national censor.

As usual, the report began with an apology: "It is always a difficult matter to write the report for this society. The character of the evils, often found circulating among young people in institutions of learning, is so gross that no adequate idea can be given of it to the members of this society, much less to the public in general… We can neither reproduce the books and pictures nor describe their true character. We cannot name the child, family or school, nor show into what circles of society we are called to make investigations. The nearest approach to a description of the evils which we war against will be found in the following tabular statement: Book and sheet stock seized and destroyed - 52 pounds. Obscene pictures and photos - 19,260. Negative plates for making obscene photos - 842. Articles for immoral use of rubber, etc. - 1000. Boxes of pills and powders used by abortionists - 66. Circulars, catalogs, songs, poems, etc. - 7891. Newspapers containing unlawful advertisements or obscene matter - 22. Obscene pictures framed on walls of saloons: 7. Obscene plays stopped or places of amusement closed - 1."

Anthony Comstock – special agent to the U.S. Post Office and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice – did not read books. He weighed them. Depending on your point of view, he was either a Christian champion or a one-man American Inquisition. The son of a deeply religious farm couple, Comstock was born in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1844. He applied the Puritan work ethic to the rooting out of sin, of playfulness, of simple pleasure. He was repression personified. The report to the society provided career totals for Comstock’s work. Prior to 1900, he had arrested 2385 people. (By the end of his career, that figure would top 3600 – enough, he would say, to fill a passenger train of 61 coaches, 60 coaches containing 60 passengers each and the 61st almost full.) By the beginning of this century, he had destroyed 73,608 pounds of books, 877,412 "obscene" pictures, 8495 negatives for making "obscene" photos, 98,563 articles for "immoral" use of rubber, 6436 "indecent" playing cards and 8502 boxes of pills and powders used by abortionists.

Comstock looked forward to the new century. The vice report – sent out to schools and the pious with a request for funds – pointed out that in 1902, Comstock would celebrate the 30th anniversary of his crusade against smut. The society wanted to create a permanent fund of $300,000 so that it would no longer be dependent on annual contributions from the devout. Comstock was a newspaper darling and, to a certain extent, a newspaper creation. He made for good copy, with boasts that he was hunting down sinners like rats. In March 1872 Comstock, accompanied by a police captain and a New York Tribune reporter, raided two stationery stores. Comstock bought pictures and books, then declared them obscene. Six employees were arrested, and Comstock got his first headlines.

With the support of the YMCA and some of New York’s wealthiest men, he formed a vigilante group, the Committee for the Suppression of Vice. Cashing in on the notoriety from his raid, Comstock took a suitcase of the choicest items of pornography to Washington. He persuaded a scandal-ridden Congress to pass a bill intensifying the punishment of those using the mail to send obscene materials. The new law, which came to be called the Comstock Act, also added contraceptives, abortifacients, and "things intended for immoral use" to the list of materials prohibited from the mail. The politicians gave him an official appointment -- special agent of the Post Office (without salary, at first) – and a badge, then turned him loose on the country. The committee incorporated itself as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and provided Comstock with an office and a salary. According to its charter, the SSV would receive half of the fines collected from his activities.

Comstock guarded America from an invisible conspiracy that used the U.S. mail to disseminate evil. In a way, he was attacking the technology of the times, the first instrument of an emerging culture. (Of course, the Post Office dates back to Ben Franklin and the early "Post Roads," WFI Editor). The Post Office had noticed that after the Civil War the mail was being used to send erotic postcards abroad. The practice continued to increase during the Gilded Age and became a commercial form of entertainment. One could pick up the National Police Gazette and find ads for "Naked truth and secrets of nature revealed… engravings from nature" or "The Female form divine, five photos, not tights, 50 cents."

Comstock never described the objects he suppressed, but some pictures survive. Even today these postcards have the power to arouse. A series from San Juan shows a woman in a straw hat, barely able to keep a straight face as she aims a stars-and-stripes dildo at a male partner. Another shows a woman reclining on a black velvet mattress. At one end of her body, an athletic young man... at the other, a second woman plants a kiss so quickly, her hair blurs. In a third postcard a buxom woman giggles as she squeezes her partner... There is a sense of novelty, discovery or daredevil abandon before the camera.

For Comstock, these images had the danger of infectious disease. His tactics were the epitome of deceit. He posed as women and sent letters to abortionists, then arrested them when they mailed back items he deemed offensive. (This reminds one of the army of police posing as 13 and 10 year old girls in the chat-rooms of the Internet, ready to entrap stupid individuals. WFI Editor). He posed as a collector of racy prose and busted the "nefarious" publishers who solicited titillating fiction.

In "Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord," Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech write that by the turn of the century, Comstock had cleared the shelves of titles such as The Lustful Turk, Peep Behind the Curtains of a Female Seminary, Amorous Sketch Book, Voluptuous Confessions – books that might incline one’s thoughts toward the sexual, that might prompt the young to debase themselves through masturbation. By the turn of the century only a quarter of his actions involved the mail. Many states had passed mini-Comstock laws and spawned similar antivice groups. Comstock would stalk the streets of New York, intimidating store owners into removing "offensive" material. If something offended his eye, it was plucked.

Like other reformers to come, Comstock justified meddling in the affairs of adults by championing youth. He thought he was chosen by God to protect the moral purity of children. He viewed Satan as a foe who set traps for the young. He found these traps in newspapers, dime novels and saloon paintings. He despised circulars and advertisements that might lure innocent passersby. But his career as censor stretched beyond images and ideas into the realm of behavior. He was the Christian champion defending his view of the family in a war for the soul of the country. (Doesn’t that remind you of the rhetoric of a recent candidate for president? WFI Editor)

Comstock’s worldview did not go uncontested. In 1878 the National Liberal League and the National Defense Association sent a petition with more than 50,000 signatures, measuring 2100 feet, to Congress, asking that it repeal the Comstock Act. "Your petitioners… are convinced that all attempts of civil government, whether state or national, to enforce or to favor particular religious, social, moral or medical opinions, or schools of thought or practice, are not only unconstitutional but also ill-advised, contrary to the spirit and progress of our age and almost certain in the end to defeat any beneficial objects intended. That mental, moral and physical health and safety are better secured and preserved by virtue resting upon liberty and knowledge than upon ignorance enforced by governmental supervision."

Congress refused to change the law. For Comstock, sex was a controlled substance. A modern eye looks at his tabulations and thinks of other government wars. Imagine a headline: FEDS SEIZE TEN TONS OF OBSCENE LITERATURE, STREET VALUE, $6 MILLION DOLLARS and wonder, how much escaped Comstock’s snare? The figures are valuable as a measure of the nation’s appetite for sexual information.

Comstock had the government at his disposal; no one would stand up in favor of freedom for fear of being next on his list. At the trial of D.M. Bennett, a man targeted by Comstock for the circulation of obscene literature, the assistant district attorney addressed the jury: "Gentlemen, this case is not titled ‘Anthony Comstock against D.M. Bennett’; this case is not titled ‘The Society for the Suppression of Vice against D.M. Bennett.’ … It is ‘The United States against D.M. Bennett,’ and the United States (government) is one great society for the suppression of vice."

THE WOMAN WHO SLEPT WITH ANGELS

At night, Ida Craddock consorted with angels. She believed herself the wife of a divine spirit, "a heavenly bridegroom." And she felt called to relay the teachings of that angel. (Giving new meaning to the term "touched" by an angel, WFI Editor). She called herself Mrs. because at that time, it was unheard of for a single woman to express any knowledge of sex.

Craddock had been associated with the Free Love movement for years and had worked as a secretary for the National Liberal League. At the turn of the century she wrote several pamphlets, including The Wedding Night and Helps to Happy Wedlock, and a longer guide, Right Marital Living. The Wedding Night is one of the first marriage manuals in history… Her crusade would cost her life. Comstock wrote that "any refined person reading her books would find all the finer and sweeter sensibilities violently shocked, while to the ordinary mind it would be regarded as the science of seduction and a most dangerous weapon in the hands of young men, as educating them in a manner that would enable them to practice the wiles of the seducer to perfection upon innocent girls."

On February 3, 1902 Comstock wrote a decoy letter: "Madame, Would you oblige me with a copy of your Wedding Night? I enclose half a dollar. Do you admit young girls to your lectures? What do you charge for two chums who would like to come together? I am past 17 years. Please seal tight and oblige me. Address plain Miss Frankie Streeter. POBox 201, Summit, New Jersey. Enc. 50 cents.

Craddock declined, with an elegant letter: "My chief reason for not admitting minors to my lectures is that there exists a social superstition that young people should be kept as ignorant as possible of all that pertains to the marriage relation. It is thought by many people that it would somehow render young people impure if they were told previous to marriage anything of details… It does not matter how delicately and chastely the teacher may instruct that young girl or young boy; that she should instruct them at all is expatiated on as an effort to corrupt the morals of innocent youth… For this reason, much to my regret, I could not even consent to give you and your chum the desired instruction, even in a private lecture all to yourselves; nor do I care to send you The Wedding Night for a similar reason; and I return you your 50 cents herewith."

Still, Comstock arrested Craddock for sending Wedding Night through the mail to others. A judge called the work "blasphemous." She got a three-month suspended sentence. Soon after that, one of Comstock’s agents ordered a copy of Wedding Night, then prosecuted Craddock in federal court. Comstock told the judge privately that he had seen Craddock give the book to the daughter of the janitress of the building in which Craddock had her office. (The building had no janitress). The judge refused to let the jury see the booklet, calling it "indescribably obscene." The jury took his word for it and found Craddock guilty, as Heywood Broun would report, "without leaving their seats."

The day of her sentencing, Craddock placed her head in an oven and killed herself. She left a two-page public letter: "I am taking my life because a judge, at the instigation of Anthony Comstock, has declared me guilty of a crime I did not commit – the circulation of obscene literature. Perhaps it may be that in my death, more than in my life, the American people may be shocked into investigating the dreadful state of affairs which permits that unctuous sexual hypocrite Anthony Comstock to wax fat and arrogant and to trample upon the liberties of the people, invading, in my own case, both my right to freedom of religion and to freedom of the press."

The public responded. The Reverend W. S. Rainsford sent a letter to Comstock (and the press): "Mr. Comstock: I would not like to be in your shoes. 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." Newspapers picked up the campaign. To some, the Craddock case marked the beginning of the end. Contributions to the SSV fell off. The plans for a permanent fund disappeared. One by one the society’s founders would die. But Comstock was undeterred.

THE GIRL IN THE RED VELVET SWING

Evelyn Nesbit came to New York in 1901. She was 15 and accompanied by her mother. Her father had died when she was eight, and mother and daughter had worked as shopgirls at Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia. But when they realized Evelyn had a certain effect on men, they came to seek their future in the glittering city. Evelyn was beautiful. She began to pose for New York artists such as Carroll Beckwith and George Grey Barnard (for a statue called "Innocence"). Then Charles Dana Gibson sketched her hair to form the figure of a question mark and called it The Eternal Question.

Joel Feder began to use her as a fashion model. He would photograph her wearing various hats, gowns and shoes, and Sunday World and Sunday American published the images. But people were more attracted to the model than to the accessories. The city was hungry for icons. Soon newspapers began to write about Evelyn Nesbit as "the most beautiful model in America." The first supermodel. Beauty refused to be hidden.

Nesbit landed a role in the chorus of the hit musical Floradora, then moved to a part in George Lederer’s The Wild Rose. Architect Stanford White had a voracious appetite for beauty. He designed homes for the rich and, indeed, was a principal architect of the new city. He designed the arch in Washington Square, Grand Central Station, the first Madison Square Garden. It was he who placed the gilded Diana in plain view of the city. He saw Nesbit perform and went back almost every night thereafter. She was 16. He was 47 and married.

White lived in two separate worlds. The double standard – wife at home, man at large – allowed him free rein in the city. He sent Nesbit flowers, took her and her mother to lunches, paid the rent on better living quarters for both, paid for her brother’s education. This benefactor soon became the only man in Nesbit’s life. She called him Stanny. Most visits were chaperoned, either by Evelyn’s mother or another girl in the show. Evelyn would describe how, in his "hideaway" studio on West 24th Street, Stanny had asked her and the other girl to play on a red velvet swing for his amusement. They would try to kick their feet through each section of a Japanese parasol.

Finally, White paid for Evelyn’s mother to return to Philadelphia, leaving her daughter in his care. In a room full of mirrors and kimonos, he took her virginity. Nesbit would write that she fell in love with White on that weekend, that he liked to watch her swing naked on the red velvet swing, , that she would sit on his shoulders naked on the red velvet swing, watching herself in the mirrors, that he trembled in her presence, that he wanted her so naked he would ask her to remove the pins from her hair. She told how they would climb to the top of Madison Square Garden and, hanging onto the statue of the naked Diana, view the city.

She enjoyed the parties he threw in his studio and the company of some of the most interesting men in America. But she knew White could never marry her or secure her place in society. She began to dine with other men who sent her flowers, jewelry, furs. She flirted with actor John Barrymore and went on boat trips with the heir to the Collier publishing fortune. Finally, she accepted the attentions of Harry Thaw, one of the Pittsburgh Thaws, who was as eccentric as White was elegant. He was deeply envious of the architect’s success with showgirls, and he competed openly – if ineffectively – with White.

Thaw persuaded Nesbit and her mother to go to Europe for a "pre-nuptial honeymoon." There he questioned her about her relationship with White. At first she told Thaw that marriage would not be a good thing, that she had "been on the stage" and that she had "been to a great many apartments with Stanford White." Then she told him that White had "ruined" her when she was 16. Thaw became obsessed with the story of her lost virginity. He called White a beast. On one brutal night after her mother had returned to America, he tore off Nesbit’s nightgown and beat her with a dog whip. In her autobiography she told how she lay there "bracing herself for what followed." She described how Thaw would use cocaine and, eyeballs bulging, enter her room in the middle of the night to ravage her. She told how he traveled about Europe with a bag of whips, hypodermic needles, drugs and pictures of slave girls on the auction block. Nonetheless, Nesbit agreed to marry him in 1905. He was, after all, worth $40 million.

Marriage only increased Thaw’s obsession with White. He went to Anthony Comstock, telling him that White had debauched his wife and was indeed a beast who had defiled 378 virgins. He hired the vice crusader to stake out White’s studio, but nothing came of it. On the night of June 25, 1906 Nesbit and Thaw went to the opening of the gay musical comedy Mamzelle Champagne. White was seated across the room. Thaw walked over to White’s table, pulled a gun from his overcoat and shot the architect three times. The bandleader launched the orchestra into "I Could Love a Million Girls."

In the ensuing homicide trial, Thaw’s lawyer tried to paint a picture of White as a despoiler of American womanhood. He claimed that Thaw had been driven to a jealous rage by the stories Nesbit had told him. "He struck as a tigress strikes to protect her young. He struck for the purity of the American home. He struck for the purity of the American maiden. He struck for the purity of the American wife. He struck – and who shall say that if he believed, on that occasion, that he was an instrument of God and an agent of Providence, he was in error?"

The courtroom listened in rapt attention as Nesbit described the night White took her virginity. "When I woke up all my clothes were pulled off me and I was in bed. I sat up in the bed and started to scream. Mr. White was there and got up and put on one of his kimonos, which was lying on a chair. I sat up and pulled some covers over me. There were mirrors all around the bed. Then I screamed and screamed and screamed." It was a great performance. Comstock held press conferences on the steps of the courthouse, saying he had letters from the families of seven showgirls who had run away to the city and had been "befriended" by White. He claimed to have "much incriminating evidence against White and his associates in connection with their midnight revelry." He produced neither victims nor evidence.

The nation devoured the scandal. Newspapers ran stories about parties where showgirls would find $20 gold pieces under their plates, an indication that the party would turn lively later. "Those who stayed did so because they wanted to stay," said a member of the chorus of Mamzelle Champagne. "Most chorus girls considered it a great feather in their cap to be seen with Stanford White… Every girl knew what his attentions meant, and most of us would have given a year’s salary to get those attentions."

The country was spellbound by the image of the red wing, by the notion of a penthouse studio – a room that was not work, not home, halfway between heaven and earth, a secret world of sex that could only be hinted at in testimony. The tabloids stripped the veneer of propriety from the nation’s rich and famous. To most Americans Thaw was a hero; crowds outside the courtroom cheered him. When a second jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity, he was ordered to the Asylum for the Criminal Insane in Matteawan, New York. Upon his release in 1912, he filed for divorce. Evelyn Nesbit would later say that Stanford White was the only man she ever truly loved.

In 1908 a film about the Thaw-Nesbit-White triangle tried to open in New York. Anthony Comstock and a group of religious leaders protested. George McClellan, the mayor of New York, ordered every theatre in the city closed. In the furor, the National Board of Review – the country’s first movie watchdog group – was created.

WHITE SLAVERY AND MORAL PANIC

The Stanford White-Evelyn Nesbit scandal stripped bare the double standard. Men could cavort with sexually adventurous women in a secret world; respectable women stayed at home. Indeed, the term "public woman" was used to describe a woman of low repute. The city was the erotic domain of men, showgirls and prostitutes. The newspapers created a new kind of pornography, serving the nation hints of sex while moralizing sternly. The thirst for sensational stories created the perfect environment for the first great moral panic of the century. (And thus tabloid journalism was born, WFI Editor).

At the turn of the century the world was obsessed with the rumor of young women being abducted or seduced into a life of prostitution. Fueled by stories of proper women held captive in harems or, less romantically, in brothels and cribs, an international convention drew up a treaty to outlaw the practice (without ever establishing its existence). Comstock had suggested that Stanford White and his cronies were part of the white slave traffic, that they had sold innocent girls.

Historians trace the hysteria to an article in McClure’s magazine in 1907. George Kibbe Turner claimed that a "loosely organized association… largely composed of Russian Jews" was supplying Chicago brothels with women. A young Chicago prosecutor named Clifford Roe started going after brothels. He knew the value of a good headline. Roe told the Chicago Tribune: "Chicago at last has waked up to a realization that actual slavery which deals in human flesh and blood as a marketable commodity exists in terrible magnitude in the city today. It is slavery, real slavery, that we are fighting… The white slave of Chicago is a slave as much as the Negro was before the Civil War… as much as any people are slaves who are owned, flesh and bone, body and soul, by another person, and who can be sold at any time and place for any price at that person’s will. That is what slavery is, and that is the condition of hundreds, yes, of thousands, of girls in Chicago at present."

Those figures spiraled. In 1910 the superintendent of the Illinois Training School for Girls warned that "some 65,000 daughters of American homes and 15,000 alien girls are the prey each year of procurers in this traffic… They are hunted, trapped in a thousand ways… Sold – sold for less than hogs – and held in white slavery worse than death." Some thought that all prostitutes came from foreign countries. A Senate immigration report even made the claim that prostitutes from the Continent had introduced Americans to particular vices – namely oral and anal sex.

"The vilest practices are brought here from Continental Europe, and beyond doubt there has come from imported women and their men the most bestial refinements of depravity. The inclination of the Continental races to look with toleration upon these evils is spreading in this country an influence perhaps even more far-reaching in its degradation than the physical effects which inevitably follow it."

Another Chicago prosecutor, Edwin Sims, told the press: "The legal evidence thus far collected establishes with complete moral certainty these awful facts: that the white slave traffic is a system operated by a syndicate which has its ramifications from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean, with ‘clearinghouses’ or ‘distribution centers’ in nearly all of the larger cities; that in this ghastly traffic the buying price of a young girl is from $15 up and that the selling price is from $200 to $600… This syndicate is a definite organization sending its hunters regularly to scour France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Canada for victims. The man at the head of this unthinkable enterprise is known among his hunters as ‘the Big Chief.’"

The white slave panic produced two events that would change sex for the rest of the century. In Washington, the government’s newly created Bureau of Investigation (later to be known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the FBI) grew to monitor international traffic. And in 1909, Sims persuaded Congressman James Mann to sponsor the White Slave Traffic Act, or Mann Act. (The ultimate form of influence peddling is legislation deriving its impetus from the reporting of a specific newspaper or news division; the media always claims impartiality and neutrality, but starting a public hysteria that results in historic action is the stuff Pulitzer Prizes are made of. WFI Editor).

The moral panic surrounding white slave traffic allowed a certain class to discuss prostitution in the most serious tone while being titillated at the sexual detail. This was porn for puritans. They could read in the newspapers what they had refused to see with their own eyes. And reformers confronted the world of commercial sex. Men went to brothels, casino saloons and clubs for an entire evening of entertainment. They would wine, dine and watch vaudeville or live erotica. And the Senate investigators were right on at least one point. There were houses that specialized in the "French art" or the "Greek practice." There were even a few houses that offered same-sex services. One could almost say that there was a brothel on every block, a prostitute in every tenement. In New York, entire neighborhoods – such as the Tenderloin – were known for their sexual offerings. In fact, prostitution stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Who were these prostitutes? The civic-minded Committee of Fifteen described them: "First there is a large class of women who may be said to have been trained for prostitution from earliest childhood. Foundlings and orphans and the offspring of the miserably poor, they grow up in wretched tenements contaminated by constant familiarity with vice in its lowest forms. Without training, mental or moral, they remain ignorant and disagreeable, slovenly and uncouth, good for nothing in the social and economic organism. When half-matured they fall the willing victims (willing victims?) of their male associates and inevitably drift into prostitution." The committee identified another group of prostitutes as out-of-work needle women, day workers, domestics or factory hands – forced by economic necessity into the profession.

But the third category was uniquely American, "made up of those who cannot be said to be driven into prostitution either by absolute want or by exceptionally pernicious surroundings. They may be employed at living wages, but the prospect of continuing from year to year with no change from tedious and irksome labor creates discontent and eventually rebellion. They too are impregnated with the view that individual happiness is the end of life… The circumstances of city life make it possible for them to experiment with immorality without losing such social standing as they may have, and thus many drift gradually into professional prostitution."

In New Orleans, Louisiana, the city fathers sought to control the brothels, which had been proliferating at a surprising clip. Alderman Sidney Story proposed confining legal prostitution to a single neighborhood. To his chagrin, the red-light district became known as Storyville. Historian Bradley Smith describes it this way: "It became the Storyville where jazz was nursed and weaned, where every kind of sex at every price was available, where the day’s work began in the evening and ended at sunup. It was the place where men could gather to drink, gamble, tell jokes and use language that would not be tolerated at home. And they could participate in some of the violence and some of the playfulness of sex. Within this 38-block square worked more than 2000 registered whores and another 2000 servants, entertainers, bartenders and musicians. Basin Street counted 35 elaborate houses offering choice girls, expensive furnishings, good champagne and a gay, congenial atmosphere."

A traveler disembarking from a train could purchase a Blue Book – a guide to the offerings of the red-light district. Consider the following listings: "Miss May Evans, 1306 Conti Street: Miss Evans is one woman among the fair sex who is regarded as a jolly good fellow, and one who is always laughing and making all those around her likewise. While nothing is too good for May, she is clever to all who come in contact with her. Miss Evans also has the honor of keeping one of the quietest establishments in the city, where beautiful women, good wine and sweet music reign supreme."

Another ad reads: "Nowhere in this country will you find a more popular personage than Madam White, who is noted as being the handsomest octoroon in America and, aside from her beauty, she has the distinction of possessing the largest collection of diamonds, pearls and other rare gems in this part of the country. To see her at night is like witnessing the electrical display on the Cascade at the late St. Louis Exposition. Aside from her handsome women, her mansion possesses some of the most costly oil paintings in the Southern country. Her mirror parlor is also a dream."

And according to another: "To operate an establishment where everyone is to be treated exact is not an easy task, and Gipsy deserves great credit for the manner in which she conducts her house. Gipsy has always made it a mark in life to treat everyone alike and to see that they enjoy themselves while in her midst." Liberty, equality, fraternity – associating sex with upward mobility, the lifestyle of the rich and famous. It was a powerful formula.

In San Francisco, the Barbary Coast was in full swing. One could check into the Hotel Nymphia for a quickie, or spend hours at a luxuriously appointed brothel (complete with servants and fine silver). Sex was part of the American vision of upper-class life. The poor had to settle for a quick spasm on a gray sheet in a crib (where prostitutes indeed lived in conditions that approached slavery) – but the middle class could afford an entire evening of entertainment.

In Chicago two sisters opened the Everleigh Club. The establishment had rooms with names such as Moorish, Gold, Silver, Copper, Oriental, Japanese, Egyptian. There were brass beds inlaid with marble, as well as cushions, divans, statues of Greek goddesses, mirrors on the ceiling, a golden piano. Girls would flirt, converse, play parlor games. Clients could spend anywhere from $50 to $1000 for the evening’s entertainment. When asked what he wanted, one man said he was content to listen to the scratchy records on the golden-horned phonograph. To be surrounded by attentive women, liquor and music – that was a man’s American dream. And the reformers saw the power of the combination: One of the first recommendations of the Committee of Fifteen was the need to "separate recreation from vice."

THE DOUBLE STANDARD

One of the nation’s first attempts to regulate prostitution occurred in 1870, when St. Louis tried to license brothels and monitor the health of prostitutes. American women were so offended they launched a reform movement. They wanted to abolish the double standard that demanded purity of women while condoning men’s right to sow wild oats. They offered a solution – that men should be as chaste as women. Abstinence and self-control were the goal, even in marriage. It was, of course, a tragic delusion.

As long as Americans enforced a code of silence about sex, as long as the beast roamed outside the home, the illusion of the Christian family could be maintained. Some observers say that women were silent conspirators, that they traded the lives of streetwalkers for their own security and pretense of purity. One feminist summarized the feeling of the time: "The higher sense of mankind says that the family is the essential unit of the state. Our practice says that the family plus prostitution is the essential unit."

But there was a hidden cost to this lifestyle. In 1901 Dr. Prince Morrow began a study of venereal disease. He approached prostitution as a medical problem, not a moral one. And his findings were shocking. Dr. Morrow estimated that as many as 75 of every 100 men in New York City had at one time or another been infected with gonorrhea; 5 to 18 percent had syphilis. Morrow’s figures did not go unchallenged. Conservative doctors thought he inflated the numbers to fuel reform – but their own figures put the overall infection rate at 35 percent.

Morrow’s most troubling discovery was the effect of venereal disease on the centerpiece of the Victorian model – the innocent wife. In his 1904 classic Social Disease and Marriage, he claimed that "there is more venereal disease among virtuous wives than among prostitutes." The sins of the father passed through the wife to the next generation, and the cost was deadly: "Sixty to 80 percent of infected children die before being born or come into the world with the mark of death upon them." And no one in society would discuss the problem. When Morrow founded the American Society of Social and Moral Prophylaxis in 1905, only 25 doctors showed up for the first meeting.

Morrow called for education, at the same time admitting that there was an insurmountable obstacle: "The public press and periodicals which serve for the enlightenment of the masses, which have rendered such signal service in the campaign against tuberculosis and other infectious diseases through the popularizing of hygienic knowledge, are absolutely barred to mention even of the diseases which we wish to prevent… Once the crust of conventional prejudice is broken by a courageous leader, there is no doubt that the other progressive periodicals will fall in line."

In 1906 Ladies’ Home Journal attacked the code of silence and the deadly cost of the double standard. With a circulation of 1 million readers, it was the voice of middle-class America – not America as it was but as it wanted to be. And in 1906, the middle class did not want to be told about sex. Edward Bok, the editor in chief, later said that thousands of irate readers canceled their subscriptions. He tried again in 1908, attacking as the cause of this great tragedy "the parental policy of mock modesty and silence with their sons and daughters about their physical selves," and "the condoning in men what is condemned in women. Fathers and mothers and, in consequence, girls have condoned in a young man this sowing of his wild oats because it was considered a physical necessity; that ‘it would do him good’; that ‘it would make a man of him’; that ‘it would show him the world’ – all arguments absolutely baseless. With hundreds of girls, the young man who has most promiscuously and profusely scattered his ‘wild oats’ has been looked upon as the most favored one among possible husbands. To many a girl there is always something alluring to marry a man with a past, because it appealed to her vanity to ‘remake’ or ‘reform’ him. The peril to herself she has never known, for silence has been the portion meted out to her by her parents."

Another editorial put it plainly: "If parents would only believe this one vital truth – that it is ignorance that ruins little girls, not innocence that protects them." In 1909, when Paul Ehrlich found a drug that destroyed the trypanosomes that caused syphilis, his cure was assailed on the grounds that it "encouraged sin." If Americans want to fornicate, said one reformer, they must pay the wages of sin.

THE SCIENCE OF SEX

What was the state of sex education at the turn of the century? One could order a series of pamphlets that included What a Young Boy Ought to Know, What a Young Man Ought to Know and What a Young Husband Ought to Know, written by a clergyman – or its companion series, What a Young Girl Ought to Know, written by a female doctor. The series came with a commendation from Anthony Comstock and bore the subtitle "Purity and Truth."

The pamphlets were antimasturbation manuals. "Words are scarcely capable of describing the dreadful consequences which are suffered by those who persist in this practice," said one. "Boys often have to be put in a straitjacket or their hands tied to the bedposts or to rings in the wall." Many in the medical profession believed that semen was a vital bodily fluid – that it was the direct cause of virility. Semen was reabsorbed by the body, so this theory went, and turned into "new thoughts – perhaps new inventions – grand conceptions of the true, the beautiful, the useful, or into fresh emotions of joy and impulses of kindness."

Historian Bryan Strong found that sex manuals at the turn of the century linked repression to character. "The Victorian constellation of values included work, industry, good habits, piety and noble ideals. Indeed, without sexual repression the Victorians believed that it was impossible for those other values to exist in an ideal character. If a man was pure, he was also frugal, hardworking, temperate and governed by habit. If, on the other hand, he was impure, he was also a spendthrift, disposed to speculation and whiskey drinking, and ruled by his impulses."

Patricia Campbell, in her analysis of early sex manuals, reaches a more interesting conclusion: "The purity advocates," she writes, "were most especially concerned that young people should not learn ‘solitary vice.’ It was not only the significance they attached to the loss of semen, however, that inspired such strong emotions in addressing the young. The masturbatory act is done solely for pleasure: It can be carried on in secret and is easily hidden from parents; and most important, it sets a pattern for adult sexual attitudes. A teenager who masturbates is finding out that sex feels good, a very dangerous piece of knowledge by Victorian standards. On the other hand, a boy who can be taught to look at his own genitals and their needs with loathing and fear has been taught to repress sexuality all his life." (It is ironic that the Victorian era was named after a queen who, in real life, was actually a very lusty woman. WFI Editor)

These early books offered wonderful advice to a teenager troubled by sexual thoughts. Sing hymns. Think of your mother’s pure love. Read the Sermon on the Mount. Sleep on a hard bed. Take a cold bath. Sit with your testicles submerged in a bowl of ice water. Those were the milder interventions. In 1903 an ingenious inventor named Albert Todd submitted two designs for medical apparatuses to the U.S. Patent Office. One was an electric antimasturbation device – an erection would cause a bell to sound. Expansion would then trigger an electric shock sufficient for "burning the flesh." Another device was designed to limit "longitudinal extension" of the wearer’s penis. Other inventors followed with sexual armor – devices intended to keep the wearer from coming into contact with his or her own genitals. Hoag Levins, author of American Sex Machines, tells how one inventor said in 1908, "It is a deplorable but well-known fact that one of the most common causes of insanity, imbecility and feeble-mindedness, especially in youth, is masturbation or self-abuse."

The medical profession took a similar view of female sexuality. In 1900 a doctor asked the American Medical Association (AMA) to publish a monograph on the physiology of sex – what actually happens to a woman’s body during arousal. The AMA refused. Doctors would not admit that women were sexual creatures. Indeed, a woman’s interest in sex or sexual fantasy was often diagnosed as "hysteria." Among the many symptoms: swelling in the genital area, wandering of attention and associated tendencies to indulge in sexual fantasies, insomnia, irritability and "excessive" vaginal lubrication. The treatment was something to behold. In a delightful article called Socially Camouflaged Technologies: The Case of the Electromechanical Vibrator, historian Rachel Maines relates: "The therapeutic objective in such cases was to produce a crisis of the disease… Manual massage of the vulva by physicians or midwives with fragrant oils as lubricants formed part of the standard treatment repertoire for hysteria… The crisis induced by this procedure was usually called the hysterical paroxysm. Treatment for hysteria might comprise three quarters of a physician’s practice in the 19th century."

In 1904 John Harvey Kellogg described a woman undergoing "electro-therapeutics." The woman experienced "strong contractions of the abdominal muscles." And the earth moved, or at least a part of it: "The office table was made to tremble quite violently with the movement." There was a glimmer that what was happening on the exam table was sexual. One doctor suggested that "massage of the pelvic organs should be entrusted to those alone who have clean hands a pure heart." By the turn of the century, massage was replaced by electrical vibration. The Chattanooga vibrator, available in 1904, sold for $200 to doctors only. For two dollars a visit, women could achieve their hysterical paroxysms in minutes. No wonder it constituted three quarters of doctors’ visits. (By 1918 Sears, Roebuck & Co. would offer a portable vibrator, with attachments, "very useful and satisfactory for home service," for $5.95.)

THE NATURE OF SEX

It was in this atmosphere that a doctor in England decided to solve once and for all the mystery of sex. Havelock Ellis was an odd candidate for the job. In his 20s he fell in love with Olive Schreiner, a South African writer. He would recount how she would wander naked from the bathroom to discuss some idea, or on another visit ask to look at spermatozoa under a microscope. Although he provided both, relationship was never consummated. He married Edith Lees, a lesbian, in 1891. At the age of 32, he was still a virgin. Lees and Ellis had a passionate romance almost devoid of intercourse. Both had affairs. Indeed, he would find happiness after her death, when he married one of her lovers.

He brought to the study of sex a great curiosity and sincerity. Ellis collected sexual histories and used them to show that sex is varied and natural. These histories provide perhaps the most honest view of what sex was like at the turn of the century. In an essay on sexual inversion, for example, he recorded the stories of a man who had sex with everyone from maids to male classmates: "When I went home for the holidays I took a great interest in one of my father’s maids, whose legs I felt as she ran upstairs one day. I was in great fear she would complain of what I had done, but I was delighted to find that she did nothing of the sort; on the contrary, she took to kissing and fondling me, calling me her sweetheart, and saying that I was a forward boy. This encouraged me greatly…"

Ellis was the first modern sexologist, taking on both the church and the medical profession. "I do not consider that sexual matters concern the theologian alone," he wrote, "and I deny altogether that he is competent to deal with them." He attacked the Victorian notion of modesty, indicating tribes where women wore only loincloths or went completely naked, rediscovering cultures where "very beautiful maidens, quite naked, represented the sirens and declaimed poems," of foreign cultures where "everyone slept as naked as at birth." He poked fun at Americans, noting that there were some men, married 20 years, who could say they had never seen their wives entirely nude. And there were women who had never looked at their own nakedness, let alone that of a man. He laughed at America’s sex laws, "clearly a legacy of the Puritans."

Ellis refused to label masturbation a disease, saying that it formed part of the autoerotic impulse – a natural function that included erotic daydreams, fantasies and nocturnal orgasms. Sex was an expression of self, a "central part of the constitution of man." "Sex lies at the root of life," he wrote, "and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex."

He challenged the prevailing notion of women’s lack of sexuality, claiming that some women were as filled with desire as men, as capable of orgasm… He lampooned "a married lady, a leader in social purity movements and an enthusiast for sexual chastity, who discovered through reading some pamphlet against solitary vice that she had herself been practicing masturbation for years without knowing it. The profound anguish and hopeless despair of this woman in face of what she believed to be the moral ruin of her whole life cannot well be described."

Ellis’ work influenced thinking on both sides of the world. In Vienna, a young doctor named Sigmund Freud was also thinking and writing about sex. Dr. Freud’s work received mention in an American medical journal in 1908. He made his first and only visit to America in 1909, where he saw Coney Island, Niagara Falls and his first movie. He delivered a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Anthony Comstock, surprisingly, had lectured at Clark only a few months earlier. Freud brought a completely different message. He told the audience that civilized men, cursed by prudery and lasciviousness, had created a harmful moral code. "They do not show their sexuality freely," he said, but "wear a thick overcoat – a fabric of lies."

He explained that the sexual instinct needed gratification, and that abstinence was unnatural, concluding with an anecdote about an old horse that had its rations progressively cut down until it could work without food. Just when the experiment was a success, he explained, the ungrateful horse died.

At the end of his visit he expressed surprise that "in prudish America it was possible, in academic circles at least, to discuss freely and scientifically everything that in ordinary life is regarded as objectionable." Not every reader of Freud was persuaded. The dean of the University of Toronto scoffed: "An ordinary reader," he wrote, "would gather that Freud advocated free love, removal of all restraint and a relapse into savagery."

Toward the end of the decade, the tone of the annual report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice changed. Comstock added a paragraph titled, "Not a Mythical Evil." It read: "The evil which we combat is real, aggressive, insidious and deadly. It is a foe to all the higher interests of the soul. It works through the reproductive faculties of the mind, imagination and fancy, and is one of Satan’s most deadly weapons. It smothers conscience, debauches the mind, debases morals, hardens the heart, sinks virtue into the vortex of vice and sends the soul to hell’s lowest depths. Read the following tabular statement and then say whether we are dealing with a myth. Shall this work stop for lack of funds? At least examine the facts before you condemn us or withhold that moral and pecuniary support which is requisite for our success."

Comstock’s crusade was a very real battle over which view of sex would prevail in America: a puritanical myth that all pleasure was suspect, that sex was Satan’s handiwork, or a modern view that sex was a form of play as well as procreation, that sexual expression was a natural function. More important, who would control sex? The state, through law and punishment? The church, through sin and condemnation? Or the individual, through freedom and choice. The battle was just beginning.

SOURCE: Excerpted from an article entitled, "Playboy’s History of the Sexual Revolution, Part I" by James R. Petersen, Playboy Magazine, December 1996. Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.