Lust on Trial

February 5, 2018
Werbel (Thomas Eakins), an associate art history professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, undertakes an insightful and entertaining critical examination of the prominent American censor Anthony Comstock (1844–1915). Werbel provides biographical detail, notably Comstock’s pious upbringing by a Congregationalist minister father, to contextualize his mission as secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873. She also focuses more widely on the cultural currents of late-19th- and early-20th-century America. From the passage of the Comstock Act, which banned “obscene literature and articles of immoral use” in 1872 up until his death, Comstock battled perceived immorality in everything from contraceptives and sex toys to the theater and cigar cases, and persecuted both the famous (artist Thomas Eakins; Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger) and the forgotten (professional daredevil Steve Brodie; early standup comic Russell Hunting). Based on an impressive amount of research into both primary and secondary sources, Werbel’s writing possesses a scholarly formality, but also accessibility, elegance, and wit (Comstock’s “connoisseurship was rooted not in the head or the heart, but rather in the groin”). She closes this fascinating, page-turning study by rebuking Comstock and connecting her subject to modern concerns: “Our endurance as a democratic nation will be determined far more by our openness, our honesty, and our empathy than by our purity.”

April 15, 2018

Art historian Werbel (Thomas Eakins) offers an engaging history of professional activist Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) and his campaign against American vice. After two chapters sketching out Comstock's youth, service in the Civil War, and early attempts at policing licentious materials and behaviors, Werbel structures the narrative around the three surviving volumes of Comstock's meticulous case records (1871-1915), which document his output and catalog the obscene literature he and his collaborators seized and destroyed. Navigating the many layers of censorship at work in the Comstock era, from direct, government-sponsored censorship to the social, regulatory, and self-censorship activities that contributed to enforcing prevailing norms of permissible cultural production, Werbel also touches on the resistance to Comstock's attempts at suppression. He did not always win in the court of law or public opinion, and at times his fury could increase interest in sexually explicit art and literature. Werbel's art history lens draws particular attention to the visual material Comstock found unacceptable, including dozens of illustrative examples. VERDICT A thoughtful new addition to the literature on Comstock and 19th-century sexual mores.--Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2018
The combative life of a man who "spread shame."For 40 years, Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) mounted a vigorous, often obsessive campaign, in the courts and in the press, to stamp out vice. For much of his notorious career, he was the sole arbiter of obscenity. Werbel (History of Art/Fashion Institute of Technology; Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia, 2007) offers a richly detailed examination of Comstock's life and mission, which she presents as a cautionary tale for our own time, when evangelical Christianity seeks to impose its values on the nation. For Comstock and his supporters in the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, repressing sexuality was "the only solution to pressing social problems." He opposed women's empowerment, condemned abortions and the women who died from botched procedures, and viewed "child sex trafficking as largely the fault of the victims." Fueled by religious zeal and supported by others who shared his Christian ideology, Comstock worked to initiate and expand state and federal anti-obscenity statutes that criminalized "anyone who facilitated the arousal of lust and sexual gratification other than for procreative purposes within marriage." As Secretary of the NYSSV, he energetically ferreted out lust, collecting material from a wide range of sources, including publishers, artists, photographers, merchants, theatrical producers, brothels, men's clubs, and art galleries. By 1876, he had sent to pulp mills more than 21,000 pounds of books and 202,000 images and photographs. For the bulk of the book, Werbel draws on Comstock's three-volume "Records of Arrests," his detailed chronicle of his "efforts to defeat Satan in America." This material reveals the trajectory of Comstock's influence and power, which plummeted after 1884, when artists, wealthy art collectors, and lawyers, judges, and juries thwarted him, questioning his credibility as a judge of "depravity." He became a butt of jokes, skewered in derisive cartoons and criticized widely in the press.An incisive history of the futility of censorship.

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