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.

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