achieved equal marvels in the field of religious organization and by
exactly the same methods. One needs be no psychologist to perceive in
all this a good deal less actual religious zeal than mere lust for
staggering accomplishment, for empty bigness, for the unprecedented and
the prodigious. Many of these great religious enterprises, indeed, soon
lost all save the faintest flavour of devotion--for example, the Y. M.
C. A., which is now no more than a sort of national club system, with
its doors open to any one not palpably felonious. (I have drunk
cocktails in Y. M. C. A. lamaseries, and helped fallen lamas to bed.)
But while the war upon godlessness thus degenerated into a secular sport
in one direction, it maintained all its pristine quality, and even took
on a new ferocity in another direction. Here it was that the lamp of
American Puritanism kept on burning; here, it was, indeed, that the lamp
became converted into a huge bonfire, or rather a blast-furnace, with
flames mounting to the very heavens, and sinners stacked like cordwood
at the hand of an eager black gang. In brief, the new will to power,
working in the true Puritan as in the mere religious sportsman,
stimulated him to a campaign of repression and punishment perhaps
unequalled in the history of the world, and developed an art of militant
morality as complex in technique and as rich in professors as the elder
art of iniquity.
If we take the passage of the Comstock Postal Act, on March 3, 1873, as
a starting point, the legislative stakes of this new Puritan movement
sweep upward in a grand curve to the passage of the Mann and Webb Acts,
in 1910 and 1913, the first of which ratifies the Seventh Commandment
with a salvo of artillery, and the second of which put the overwhelming
power of the Federal Government behind the enforcement of the
prohibition laws in the so-called "dry" States. The mind at once recalls
the salient campaigns of this war of a generation: first the attack upon
"vicious" literature, begun by Comstock and the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice, but quickly extending to every city in the land;
then the long fight upon the open gambling house, culminating in its
practical disappearance; then the recrudesence of prohibition, abandoned
at the outbreak of the Civil War, and the attempt to enforce it in a
rapidly growing list of States; then the successful onslaught upon the
Louisiana lottery, and upon its swarm of rivals and successors; then the
gradual stamping-out of horse-racing, until finally but two or three
States permitted it, and the consequent attack upon the pool-room; then
the rise of a theatre-censorship in most of the large cities, and of a
moving picture censorship following it; then the revival of
Sabbatarianism, with the Lord's Day Alliance, a Canadian invention, in
the van; then the gradual tightening of the laws against sexual
irregularity, with the unenforceable New York Adultery Act as a typical
product; and lastly, the general ploughing up and emotional discussion
of sexual matters, with compulsory instruction in "sex hygiene" as its
mildest manifestation and the mediaeval fury of the vice crusade as its
worst. Differing widely in their targets, these various Puritan
enterprises had one character in common: they were all efforts to combat
immorality with the weapons designed for crime. In each of them there
was a visible effort to erect the individual's offence against himself
into an offence against society. Beneath all of them there was the
dubious principle--the very determining principle, indeed, of
Puritanism--that it is competent for the community to limit and
condition the private acts of its members, and with it the inevitable
corollary that there are some members of the community who have a
special talent for such legislation, and that their arbitrary fiats are,
and of a right ought to be, binding upon all.
§ 4
This is the essential fact of the new Puritanism; its recognition of the
moral expert, the professional sinhound, the virtuoso of virtue. Under
the original Puritan theocracy, as in Scotland, for example, the chase
and punishment of sinners was a purely ecclesiastical function, and
during the slow disintegration of the theocracy the only change
introduced was the extension of that function to lay helpers, and
finally to the whole body of laymen. This change, however, did not
materially corrupt the ecclesiastical quality of the enterprise: the
leader in the so-called militant field still remained the same man who
led in the spiritual field. But with the capitalization of Puritan
effort there came a radical overhauling of method. The secular arm, as
it were, conquered as it helped. That is to say, the special business of
forcing sinners to be good was taken away from the preachers and put
into the hands of laymen trained in its technique and mystery, and there
it remains. The new Puritanism has created an army of gladiators who are
not only distinct from the hierarchy, but who, in many instances,
actually command and intimidate the hierarchy. This is conspicuously
evident in the case of the Anti-Saloon League, an enormously effective
fighting organization, with a large staff of highly accomplished experts
in its service. These experts do not wait for ecclesiastical support,
nor even ask for it; they force it. The clergyman who presumes to
protest against their war upon the saloon, even upon the quite virtuous
ground that it is not effective enough, runs a risk of condign and
merciless punishment. So plainly is this understood, indeed, that in
more than one State the clergy of the Puritan denominations openly take
orders from these specialists in excoriation, and court their favour
without shame. Here a single moral enterprise, heavily capitalized and
carefully officered, has engulfed the entire Puritan movement, and a
part has become more than the whole.[43]
In a dozen other directions this tendency to transform a religious
business into a purely secular business, with lay backers and lay
officers, is plainly visible. The increasing wealth of Puritanism has
not only augmented its scope and its daring, but it has also had the
effect of attracting clever men, of no particular spiritual enthusiasm,
to its service. Moral endeavour, in brief, has become a recognized
trade, or rather a profession, and there have appeared men who pretend
to a special and enormous knowledge of it, and who show enough truth in
their pretension to gain the unlimited support of Puritan capitalists.
The vice crusade, to mention one example, has produced a large crop of
such self-constituted experts, and some of them are in such demand that
they are overwhelmed with engagements. The majority of these men have
wholly lost the flavour of sacerdotalism. They are not pastors, but
detectives, statisticians and mob orators, and not infrequently their
secularity becomes distressingly evident. Their aim, as they say, is to
do things. Assuming that "moral sentiment" is behind them, they override
all criticism and opposition without argument, and proceed to the
business of dispersing prostitutes, of browbeating and terrorizing weak
officials, and of forcing legislation of their own invention through
City Councils and State Legislatures. Their very cocksureness is their
chief source of strength. They combat objection with such violence and
with such a devastating cynicism that it quickly fades away. The more
astute politicians, in the face of so ruthless a fire, commonly profess
conversion and join the colours, just as their brethren went over to
prohibition in the "dry" States, and the newspapers seldom hold out much
longer. The result is that the "investigation" of the social evil
becomes an orgy, and that the ensuing "report" of the inevitable "vice
commission" is made up of two parts sensational fiction and three parts
platitude. Of all the vice commissions that have sat of late in the
United States, not one has done its work without the aid of these
singularly confident experts, and not one has contributed an original
and sagacious idea, nor even an idea of ordinary common sense, to the
solution of the problem.
I need not go on piling up examples of this new form of Puritan
activity, with its definite departure from a religious foundation and
its elaborate development as an everyday business. The impulse behind it
I have called a _Wille zur Macht_, a will to power. In terms more
homely, it was described by John Fiske as "the disposition to domineer,"
and in his usual unerring way, he saw its dependence on the gratuitous
assumption of infallibility. But even stronger than the Puritan's belief
in his own inspiration is his yearning to make some one jump. In other
words, he has an ineradicable liking for cruelty in him: he is a
sportsman even before he is a moralist, and very often his blood-lust
leads him into lamentable excesses. The various vice crusades afford
innumerable cases in point. In one city, if the press dispatches are to
be believed, the proscribed women of the Tenderloin were pursued with
such ferocity that seven of them were driven to suicide. And in another
city, after a campaign of repression so unfortunate in its effects that
there were actually protests against it by clergymen elsewhere, a
distinguished (and very friendly) connoisseur of such affairs referred
to it ingenuously as more fun "than a fleet of aeroplanes." Such
disorderly combats with evil, of course, produce no permanent good. It
is a commonplace, indeed, that a city is usually in worse condition
after it has been "cleaned up" than it was before, and I need not point
to New York, Los Angeles and Des Moines for the evidence as to the
social evil, and to any large city, East, West, North, South, for the
evidence as to the saloon. But the Puritans who finance such enterprises
get their thrills, not out of any possible obliteration of vice, but out
of the galloping pursuit of the vicious. The new Puritan gives no more
serious thought to the rights and feelings of his quarry than the gunner
gives to the rights and feelings of his birds. From the beginning of the
prohibition campaign, for example, the principle of compensation has
been violently opposed, despite its obvious justice, and a complaisant
judiciary has ratified the Puritan position. In England and on the
Continent that principle is safeguarded by the fundamental laws, and
during the early days of the anti-slavery agitation in this country it
was accepted as incontrovertible, but if any American statesman were to
propose today that it be applied to the license-holder whose lawful
franchise has been taken away from him arbitrarily, or to the brewer or
distiller whose costly plant has been rendered useless and valueless, he
would see the days of his statesmanship brought to a quick and violent
close.
But does all this argue a total lack of justice in the American
character, or even a lack of common decency? I doubt that it would be
well to go so far in accusation. What it does argue is a tendency to put
moral considerations above all other considerations, and to define
morality in the narrow Puritan sense. The American, in other words,
thinks that the sinner has no rights that any one is bound to respect,
and he is prone to mistake an unsupported charge of sinning, provided it
be made violently enough, for actual proof and confession. What is more,
he takes an intense joy in the mere chase: he has the true Puritan taste
for an _auto da fé_ in him. "I am ag'inst capital punishment," said Mr.
Dooley, "but we won't get rid av it so long as the people enjie it so
much." But though he is thus an eager spectator, and may even be lured
into taking part in the pursuit, the average American is not disposed to
initiate it, nor to pay for it. The larger Puritan enterprises of today
are not popular in the sense of originating in the bleachers, but only
in the sense of being applauded from the bleachers. The burdens of the
fray, both of toil and of expense, are always upon a relatively small
number of men. In a State rocked and racked by a war upon the saloon, it
was recently shown, for example, that but five per cent. of the members
of the Puritan denominations contributed to the war-chest. And yet the
Anti-Saloon League of that State was so sure of support from below that
it presumed to stand as the spokesman of the whole Christian community,
and even ventured to launch excommunications upon contumacious
Christians, both lay and clerical, who objected to its methods.
Moreover, the great majority of the persons included in the contributing
five per cent. gave no more than a few cents a year. The whole support
of the League devolved upon a dozen men, all of them rich and all of
them Puritans of purest ray serene. These men supported a costly
organization for their private entertainment and stimulation. It was
their means of recreation, their sporting club. They were willing to
spend a lot of money to procure good sport for themselves--_i.e._, to
procure the best crusading talent available--and they were so successful
in that endeavour that they enchanted the populace too, and so shook the
State.
Naturally enough, this organization of Puritanism upon a business and
sporting basis has had a tendency to attract and create a type of
"expert" crusader whose determination to give his employers a good show
is uncontaminated by any consideration for the public welfare. The
result has been a steady increase of scandals, a constant collapse of
moral organizations, a frequent unveiling of whited sepulchres. Various
observers have sought to direct the public attention to this significant
corruption of the new Puritanism. The New York _Sun_, for example, in
the course of a protest against the appointment of a vice commission for
New York, has denounced the paid agents of private reform organizations
as "notoriously corrupt, undependable and dishonest," and the Rev. Dr.
W. S. Rainsford, supporting the charge, has borne testimony out of his
own wide experience to their lawlessness, their absurd pretensions to
special knowledge, their habit of manufacturing evidence, and their
devious methods of shutting off criticism. But so far, at all events,
no organized war upon them has been undertaken, and they seem to
flourish more luxuriantly year after year. The individual whose common
rights are invaded by such persons has little chance of getting justice,
and less of getting redress. When he attempts to defend himself he finds
that he is opposed, not only by a financial power that is ample for all
purposes of the combat and that does not shrink at intimidating juries,
prosecuting officers and judges, but also by a shrewdness which shapes
the laws to its own uses, and takes full advantage of the miserable
cowardice of legislatures. The moral gladiators, in brief, know the
game. They come before a legislature with a bill ostensibly designed to
cure some great and admitted evil, they procure its enactment by
scarcely veiled insinuations that all who stand against it must be
apologists for the evil itself, and then they proceed to extend its aims
by bold inferences, and to dragoon the courts into ratifying those
inferences, and to employ it as a means of persecution, terrorism and
blackmail. The history of the Mann Act offers a shining example of this
purpose. It was carried through Congress, over the veto of President
Taft, who discerned its extravagance, on the plea that it was needed to
put down the traffic in prostitutes; it is enforced today against men
who are no more engaged in the traffic in prostitutes than you or I.
Naturally enough, the effect of this extension of its purposes, against
which its author has publicly protested, has been to make it a truly
deadly weapon in the hands of professional Puritans and of denouncers of
delinquency even less honest. "Blackmailers of both sexes have arisen,"
says Mr. Justice McKenna, "using the terrors of the construction now
sanctioned by the [Supreme] Court as a help--indeed, the means--for
their brigandage. The result is grave and should give us pause."[44]
But that is as far as objection has yet gone; the majority of the
learned jurist's colleagues swallowed both the statute and its
consequences.[45] There is, indeed, no sign as yet of any organized war
upon the alliance between the blackmailing Puritan and the
pseudo-Puritan blackmailer. It must wait until a sense of reason and
justice shows itself in the American people, strong enough to overcome
their prejudice in favour of the moralist on the one hand, and their
delight in barbarous pursuits and punishments on the other. I see but
faint promise of that change today.
§ 5
I have gone into the anatomy and physiology of militant Puritanism
because, so far as I know, the inquiry has not been attempted before,
and because a somewhat detailed acquaintance with the forces behind so
grotesque a manifestation as comstockery, the particular business of the
present essay, is necessary to an understanding of its workings, and of
its prosperity, and of its influence upon the arts. Save one turn to
England or to the British colonies, it is impossible to find a parallel
for the astounding absolutism of Comstock and his imitators in any
civilized country. No other nation has laws which oppress the arts so
ignorantly and so abominably as ours do, nor has any other nation handed
over the enforcement of the statutes which exist to agencies so openly
pledged to reduce all aesthetic expression to the service of a stupid
and unworkable scheme of rectitude. I have before me as I write a
pamphlet in explanation of his aims and principles, prepared by Comstock
himself and presented to me by his successor. Its very title is a
sufficient statement of the Puritan position: "MORALS, Not Art or
Literature."[46] The capitals are in the original. And within, as a
sort of general text, the idea is amplified: "It is a question of peace,
good order and morals, and not art, literature or science." Here we have
a statement of principle that, at all events, is at least quite frank.
There is not the slightest effort to beg the question; there is no
hypocritical pretension to a desire to purify or safeguard the arts;
they are dismissed at once as trivial and degrading. And jury after jury
has acquiesced in this; it was old Anthony's boast, in his last days,
that his percentage of convictions, in 40 years, had run to 98.5.[47]
Comstockery is thus grounded firmly upon that profound national
suspicion of the arts, that truculent and almost unanimous Philistinism,
which I have described. It would be absurd to dismiss it as an
excrescence, and untypical of the American mind. But it is typical, too,
in the manner in which it has gone beyond that mere partiality to the
accumulation of a definite power, and made that power irresponsible and
almost irresistible. It was Comstock himself, in fact, who invented the
process whereby his followers in other fields of moral endeavour have
forced laws into the statute books upon the pretence of putting down
John Doe, an acknowledged malefactor, and then turned them savagely upon
Richard Roe, a peaceable, well-meaning and hitherto law-abiding man. And
it was Comstock who first capitalized moral endeavour like baseball or
the soap business, and made himself the first of its kept professors,
and erected about himself a rampart of legal and financial immunity
which rid him of all fear of mistakes and their consequences, and so
enabled him to pursue his jehad with all the advantages in his favour.
He was, in brief, more than the greatest Puritan gladiator of his time;
he was the Copernicus of a quite new art and science, and he devised a
technique and handed down a professional ethic that no rival has been
able to better.
The whole story is naïvely told in "Anthony Comstock, Fighter,"[48] a
work which passed under the approving eye of the old war horse himself
and is full of his characteristic pecksniffery.[49] His beginnings, it
appears, were very modest. When he arrived in New York from the
Connecticut hinterland, he was a penniless and uneducated clod-hopper,
just out of the Union army, and his first job was that of a porter in a
wholesale dry-goods house. But he had in him several qualities of the
traditional Yankee which almost always insure success, and it was not
long before he began to make his way. One of these qualities was a
talent for bold and ingratiating address; another was a vast appetite
for thrusting himself into affairs, a yearning to run things--what the
Puritan calls public spirit. The two constituted his fortune. The second
brought him into intimate relations with the newly-organized Young Men's
Christian Association, and led him to the discovery of a form of moral
endeavour that was at once novel and fascinating--the unearthing and
denunciation of "immoral" literature. The first, once he had attracted
attention thereby, got him the favourable notice, and finally the
unlimited support, of the late Morris K. Jesup, one of the earliest and
perhaps the greatest of the moral _entrepreneurs_ that I have described.
Jesup was very rich, and very eager to bring the whole nation up to
grace by _force majeure_. He was the banker of at least a dozen
grandiose programs of purification in the seventies and eighties. In
Comstock he found precisely the sort of field agent that he was looking
for, and the two presently constituted the most formidable team of
professional reformers that the country had ever seen.
The story of the passage of the Act of Congress of March 3, 1873,[50]
under cover of which the Comstock Society still carries on its campaigns
of snouting and suppression, is a classical tale of Puritan impudence
and chicanery. Comstock, with Jesup and other rich men backing him
financially and politically,[51] managed the business. First, a number
of spectacular raids were made on the publishers of such pornographic
books as "The Memoirs of Fanny Hill" and "Only a Boy." Then the
newspapers were filled with inflammatory matter about the wide dispersal
of such stuff, and its demoralizing effects upon the youth of the
republic. Then a committee of self-advertising clergymen and "Christian
millionaires" was organized to launch a definite "movement." And then a
direct attack was made upon Congress, and, to the tune of fiery moral
indignation, the bill prepared by Comstock himself was forced through
both houses. All opposition, if only the opposition of inquiry, was
overborne in the usual manner. That is to say, every Congressman who
presumed to ask what it was all about, or to point out obvious defects
in the bill, was disposed of by the insinuation, or even the direct
charge, that he was a covert defender of obscene books, and, by
inference, of the carnal recreations described in them. We have grown
familiar of late with this process: it was displayed at full length in
the passage of the Mann Act, and again when the Webb Act and the
Prohibition Amendment were before Congress. In 1873 its effectiveness
was helped out by its novelty, and so the Comstock bill was rushed
through both houses in the closing days of a busy session, and President
Grant accommodatingly signed it.
Once it was upon the books, Comstock made further use of the prevailing
uproar to have himself appointed a special agent of the Postoffice
Department to enforce it, and with characteristic cunning refused to
take any salary. Had his job carried a salary, it would have excited the
acquisitiveness of other virtuosi; as it was, he was secure. As for the
necessary sinews of war, he knew well that he could get them from Jesup.
Within a few weeks, indeed, the latter had perfected a special
organization for the enforcement of the new statute, and it still
flourishes as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; or, as
it is better known, the Comstock Society. The new Federal Act, dealing
only with the mails, left certain loopholes; they were plugged up by
fastening drastic amendments upon the New York Code of Criminal
Procedure--amendments forced through the legislature precisely as the
Federal Act had been forced through Congress.[52] With these laws in his
hands Comstock was ready for his career. It was his part of the
arrangement to supply the thrills of the chase; it was Jesup's part to
find the money. The partnership kept up until the death of Jesup, in
1908, and after that Comstock readily found new backers. Even his own
death, in 1915, did not materially alter a scheme of things which
offered such admirable opportunities for the exercise of the Puritan
love of spectacular and relentless pursuit, the Puritan delusion of
moral grandeur and infallibility, the Puritan will to power.