| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America. By Wayne E. Fuller. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xvi, 264 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-252-02812-0.)
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that Christianity was not so much proclaimed as it was plowed into Western history. Wayne E. Fuller tells the riveting story of how nineteenth-century evangelical Christians tried to control the produce that grew out of a soil increasingly fertilized by urbanized, multicultured, secularized nutrients spread out by the postal innovations of a massive communications revolution.	1
From 1810, when Congress scandalized evangelicals by opening post offices on Sun-days, to 1872, when Anthony Comstock, a twenty-eight-year-old dry goods store clerk, studiously seized 182,000 obscene photographs and five tons of obscene books and pamphlets in raids on bookstores as special agent of the Society for the Suppression of Vice of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), evangelicals struggled to defend the sabbath, Christian marriage, the sacred name of God, and the oath in the face of an innovative postal system that threatened the moral order with sabbath hours, Sunday newspapers, birth control advertisements, lottery tickets, blood-and-thunder novels, flash paperbacks, and pornography.	. . .

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