Newton Arvin and the Police: Contexts for The Scarlet Professor

Abstract

My task is to give viewers of The Scarlet Professor some background as they think about Newton Arvin and his arrest in 1960. To do this, I have to go back to the Comstock Law of the 1870s and then back even deeper in the nineteenth century to the clashing worlds of evangelical Christianity and sporting culture—a conflict that brought into being the laws governing censorship of obscenity through the US mails, provoked an array of state statutes dealing with buying and selling of obscene materials, and brought the Massachusetts State Police to Newton Arvin's door.In 1952, Arthur Summerfield became Postmaster General of the United States, appointed by President Eisenhower. His only qualification was that he was a successful auto dealer and Republican stalwart. His sanitized biography tells of how he modernized the postal service. Barry Werth tells a different story: how he aspired to be the second Anthony Comstock and remove what he perceived as smut from the mails. Obscenity had become a big business. Summerfield was, as he put it, determined to cut off the pornography sent through the mail by “merchants of filth to warp and pervert young minds for products.”I began to study the origins of the Comstock Law with a seemingly simple question: How did Americans imagine sex in the nineteenth century? As I researched old books and pamphlets, I uncovered no familiar conflict between Victorian repression and expression, but rather four cultural frameworks that shaped the ways that information about and imaginative depictions of sex were conveyed and received.By the time of the repressive 1872 Comstock Act, four conceptions of sexuality were at work and in motion in American culture: Evangelical Christianity with its distrust of the flesh;A many-centuries-old popular culture based on humoral theory that carried with it an erotic edge;A nineteenth-century consciousness linked to new notions of the body, nerves, health, and the relation of mind and body; andAn emerging sensibility that placed sex at the center of life.At the heart of the evangelical movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century called the Second Great Awakening was a call to traditional morality. Revivalists thundered against the temptations of the devil. Lust became a preeminent deadly sin, its fiery rages threatening both soul and body.The evangelicals were not necessarily preaching to the converted, however. It has been estimated that in 1835 less than 25 percent of Americans were members of a Protestant church. The evangelical wing was growing, however, strengthened by Sunday schools and missionary, bible, and tract societies. These unleashed campaigns against alcohol, prostitution, slavery, stimulating food and drink, desecration of the Sabbath, and obscene images and words.The popular culture of many men and women opposed the evangelical one. This was an unofficial culture, seldom noted and never regarded as legitimate. As it portrayed sex, this culture looked back deep into the European past to the medical perception of the body as governed by the four humors, with heat and blood as the source of sexual desire. Though largely conveyed by oral tradition, this culture's best written expression is the composite Aristotle's Master-piece. Its imagined sexual acts are male-centered, looking to sharp arousal and release. The vernacular sexual culture of America was the source of bawdy humor, many popular terms, and, as literacy spread, numerous sexually arousing texts. Erotica is thus intertwined with this second framework. In a world of getting by, some sought to cash in on the public's hungry interest in representations whose explicit intention were to arouse sexual feeling. Thus, the early nineteenth century saw a lively commerce—albeit one partially hidden to history—in erotic printed materials, both words and pictures, available on the street.Religious revivals and their call for collective supervision of morality also provoked an educated opposition in a small band of free thinkers gathered around Fanny Wright. They demanded open discussion of sexual matters. Prodded by them, a new literature of sexuality began to emerge in the 1830s, creating the third framework. Underlying this third vision was a different understanding of the hydraulics of sex that focused on new notions of the body, nerves, and the relation of mind and body. Sex was in the mind, not merely in bodily organs, and it originated in messages sent from the brain through the nerves. Thus emerged new understandings of romantic love that put feeling and its expression at the center of sexuality and began to advocate birth control. Locating sex in the mind at a time when poems and fiction centered on heightened emotion gave increasing power—and thus, to some observers, increasing danger—to imaginative literature.The fourth framework arose from the third one, from the outset divided by voices urging restraint and inhibition on the one hand and those arguing for the naturalness of the body's sexual appetites and desires on the other. At the latter's far reaches, the emerging fourth framework placed sex at core of being. Although initially focused on heterosexual intercourse as the most vital facet of life, this framework is significant in its more expansive demand for its free expression on the grounds that any diversion or repression of sexual urges from their “natural expression” was harmful.A sexual conversation can take place within groups and between members of groups. But when the legal system interjects itself into the conversation, it has special power. It can set the ground rules for debate and the authority to prosecute, convict, and imprison those who break them. The persons who manage its apparatus—police, judges, juries, legislators, and lawyers—are, as sons, brothers, fathers, at one level participants in the sexual conversation. But in courtrooms, their words take place within an institutional structure derived from England and modified by actions of legislatures and courts. As legal scholars have shown, the legal system works conservatively, as an important principle behind it is precedent. On issues such as obscenity, judicial judgment does not mirror public opinion but lags long behind it, responding only very slowly to changing standards.Male “sporting” culture was the impetus for the repression that followed during and after the Civil War. In ways that are hard to recover, sex in the mid-nineteenth-century city was wide open. To many observing New York, sex seemed in the air, everywhere—in conversation, print, on the streets. The pantaloons covering antebellum piano legs turn out to be myths, but the “waiter girls” uncovering their own legs near saloon pianos were real. Prostitution was brazenly open on the major thoroughfares of New York and other American cities. With changes in printing that made magazines and tracts affordable to a wider audience came news reporting and fiction emphasizing the lurid and the sensational. Newspapers advertised sexually enhancing medications and implements as well as contraceptive devices and abortionists' addresses.In the cities, an urban culture of young unattached men emerged. The apprentice system was gone, and as young men left family farms to come to the city for jobs, many of them reveled in a world without masters in which they were free after hours. Young male clerks—living in boardinghouses and having money to spend—sought enjoyment in the city. They found it in games, such as cockfighting and bare-knuckle prize fights, liquor, theatrical entertainment, and commercial sex. Their needs and desires became sources of opportunity for others eager to make a buck—leading to gambling houses, the ring, saloons, theaters, brothels, and a network of printers and distributors of erotic literature. These commercial establishments undergird male “sporting” culture in the antebellum years. A key element in its ethos was unrestricted male heterosexuality. In the world of “sporting men,” the male version of the second sexual framework—based on the four humors in which sexual relations consisted of sharp arousal and release—became part of the new commercial world of print.As the young fellows reveled in their freedom, they evoked fear and anguish in others, including supporters of women's rights seeking for women greater access to the public world and New York City merchants looking at sporting culture through the lens of evangelical Christianity. In 1852, these men formed the Young Men's Christian Association to offer safe havens for “moral” recreation to young clerks living amid the enticements of the city. From early on, the YMCA was particularly concerned about the dangers of reading.With the Civil War, the moral issues of the YMCA shifted to the front and the temptations that the war posed to the young men of the Union Army. The YMCA formed the Christian Commission to protect Northern soldiers from their own moral weaknesses, and it sent ministers, Bibles, and tracts, as well as cooks, soup kitchens, and blankets, to the field. It created small traveling libraries of respectable books and magazines; and in 1865, it pressed for a provision in the 1865 Post Office bill making it a misdemeanor to send any “obscene book, pamphlet, picture, print, or other publication of a vulgar and indecent character” through the mail.At the close of the war, the YMCA of New York returned to its central mission to young men in the city and focused intensely on a campaign against the obscene books and papers easily available at newspaper stands. In 1868, it sought and got a state bill that prohibited the sale or possession with intent to sell of obscene material. In 1871, Morris Jesup chaired a meeting that formed a Committee on Obscene Literature. It was at this moment that Anthony Comstock entered their world.Comstock was born in 1844 in rural New Canaan, Connecticut; his consciousness was grounded in the Second Great Awakening. In the Union Army in the Civil War, he volunteered for the Christian Commission. Following the war, he came to New York and got a job as a clerk. An ambitious man, Comstock considered his career as a store salesman stagnant, and in 1871, he began a campaign to enforce the law on Sunday closing of Brooklyn saloons. As that battle closed, he turned to seek the arrest of Manhattan bookdealers selling sexually explicit material. These 1872 raids against sellers of erotic materials gained him quick notoriety in the press and—most importantly—the financial and moral support of the board of the YMCA of New York City.Comstock believed that obscene literature was part of the noxious toxin infecting society. As he put it, all erotic material was “a deadly poison, cast into the fountain of moral purity.” Comstock shared with contemporaries the primary fear surrounding “racy” literature, that it served as a tool for sexual arousal. It was, as he put it, one of the “devil-traps” leading male youth to what he regarded as a soul-destroying and life-threatening practice of masturbation. The erotic book, as he put it, “breeds lust. Lust defiles the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart, and damns the soul. It unnerves the arm, and steals away the elastic step.” Comstock was drawing on familiar language, first voiced by 1830s reformers within the third sexual framework who urged inhibition and restraint. Like many others in his era, Comstock did not limit the danger of sexually exciting words and images to masturbation. He saw them as the cause of more generalized sexual disorder and crime.In March 1872, Comstock went to the New York YMCA secretary with an appeal for financial aid to pursue his work. The directors of the YMCA of New York, long engaged in a fight against obscenity, possessed great wealth and influence.The leaders responded warmly to Comstock's efforts and bankrolled Comstock. They were seeking a federal bill to strengthen the 1865 law they had gotten against obscenity through the mail, and Comstock seemed to be the energetic young man to lobby for it in Washington. In one of the vice president's rooms in the Capitol, Comstock set up an exhibit of confiscated obscene material supposedly sent to children in boarding schools.On 3 March 1873, Comstock and the YMCA were successful, and Congress passed the 1873 federal act for the “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” This federal act gave the US Postal Service vague and broad powers: It strengthened the US Postal Service—by giving it vague and broad powers.It made it illegal to send through the mail: erotica, contraceptive materials, substances intended to cause an abortion, sexual implements, contraceptive information, and advertisements for contraception or abortion.It gave judges the power to issue warrants for search and seizure and destruction of all these materials. At the same time that Congress passed the 1873 statute, it created a new position, Special Agent in the United States Post Office, with power to confiscate immoral matter in the mail and arrest those sending it. Anthony Comstock was slated from the outset to fill that position. Beginning 6 March 1873, Comstock received the commission from the postmaster general for the office that he would hold until his death in 1915. The 1873 law was so identified with Comstock's efforts as lobbyist and Special Agent during these years that it has been known as the Comstock Law ever since. In its wake, many states passed “little Comstock Laws,” expanding state laws against perceived obscenity.Summerfield's language echoed Comstock's of more than eighty years before, as did his actions. Summerfield first went after Sam Roth and then after many books circulating through the mail that he deemed were perverting the youth of the nation. He used the same rhetoric as Comstock—protecting children and the relation of obscenity with crime. He had the help of Rep. Kathryn Granahan in Congress for an amendment to strengthen the Comstock Law. Under its provisions, not only senders but also receivers of material judged to be obscene could be prosecuted. Granahan, like Comstock, set up a “Chamber of Horrors,” filled with pornography.In Massachusetts, the commonwealth passed a law making it a felony to possess obscene materials and set up an antismut unit. And on 2 September 1960, two Boston state policemen assigned to the unit and one police officer local to the area were sent to Northampton to Newton Arvin's door.