"To Popularize the Nude in Art":
Comstockery Reconsidered

Alyssa Picard
University of Michigan

Of all the figures in the struggle over turn-of-the-century vice reform, Anthony Comstock is perhaps the last one might expect to encounter immortalized in the nude. He acquired his fame as a censor of nudity, among other offenses: from 1873 to his death in 1915, Assistant United States Postmaster Comstock lent his name and his enthusiasm for law enforcement to the prosecution of the "Comstock Laws," the eponymous statutes which restricted the dissemination of vicious images and information through the United States mail. In his government post and as the head of New York City's private Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock prosecuted quack physicians, abortionists, lottery runners, purveyors of lewd literature and art, free love advocates and physical culture devotees. By the end of his career, he had arrested more than 3,700 people and burned over fifty tons of obscene books, 3,984,063 obscene pictures, and 16,900 photographic plates.1	1
Historians have imagined Comstock as an exemplar of the repressive Victorian sensibilities about sex that have long been associated with the turn of the century. And it is for this reason, among others, that we would be surprised to find him warily sketching a female nude, then posing in the buff for a group of male art students. Yet this is precisely as he exists in a 1906 political cartoon satirizing his raid on the New York Art Students' League, during which he confiscated that year's student-produced art catalog. The image is a mockery, but it is perhaps a richer historical source than a photograph of Comstock unclothed ever could be, for it reflects not only an undocumented legacy of creative resistance to Comstock's censorship, but also the multiple, contradictory facets of the reform program contemporaries saw buried in layers of flesh and bombast.	2
Comstock's campaigns, which attacked lotteries and gambling as well as abortion and obscene literature, can hardly be dismissed as being simply anti-sex. But a more recent interpretationÑthat Comstock's popularity reflects contemporary fear of immigrant penetration of the urban middle class2Ñdoes not unpack the multiple meanings of Comstock's work, or account for his longstanding popularity with even working-class New Yorkers. Using Comstock's published writings, sympathetic and unsympathetic newspaper accounts about him, and the commentary produced by various targets of his censorship campaigns, this essay explores Comstock's attempts to restrict the circulation of representations through New York communities. In so doing, it suggests the limitations of the "public/private" binary that has been used by historians of sexuality and vice reform to understand the moral geography of turn-of-the-century America. It produces new evidence suggesting that Comstock's interest in censorship cannot be explained by his desire to maintain a rigid distinction between public and private: he was suspicious of private behavior as well as public, and both feared and relied upon publicity for the success of his vice reform campaign.	. . .