The Ghost of An Idea

BRIAN BALOGH: We just heard about one of the government’s early efforts to muzzle political opinion. But later in the 19th century lawmakers went after another type of speech.

ED AYERS: In 1873, Congress passed legislation outlawing quote “obscene, lewd, or lascivious materials in the mail.” It became known as the Comstock Law, named after the moral reformer, who lobbied for the Act. The US Post Office appointed this same Anthony Comstock to enforce the law.

That meant that Comstock and his agents could legally open anyone’s mail in search of obscene material. Today Comstock is synonymous with heavy handed censorship. The word Comstockery is actually in the dictionary.

But less well known are the names of those he tried to silence. BackStory producer Nina Earnest has a story of one of Comstock’s more colorful opponents.

NINA EARNEST: In the 1890s, a stenographer named Ida Craddock embarked on a new career as a couples counselor.

LEIGH SCHMIDT: A little Dr. Ruth how you could improve your sex life, but also a marriage therapists trying to figure out what’s gone wrong in these relationships and why there’s so much estrangement in any given marriage.

NINA EARNEST: This is Leigh Schmidt, a historian at Washington University in Saint Louis. He says that Craddock was in a unique position, as there weren’t a lot of self-styled sex therapists in buttoned up, Gilded Age America. But Craddock herself was unmarried in her late 30s. So when she started talking publicly about sex and sex reform, some wondered how a chaste woman would know anything about this topic.

LEIGH SCHMIDT: And she said, well, the reason I have this knowledge is I think I can speak of this as a wife. It’s just that she’s a wife of a spirit.

NINA EARNEST: In other words, she believed she had a husband who was a ghost. Craddock, like many Americans of her era, was swept up in the spiritualist religious movement. She believed that she had reconnected with an old love who had died and that she was now having intimate relations with this spirit.

Schmidt says that Craddock knew the public would think she was crazy. So she wrote–

LEIGH SCHMIDT: How far the reader make value my testimony is being the result of my personal experience–

ACTOR AS IDA CRADDOCK: He will, of course, decide according to his bias for or against the possibility of communication with our deceased friends beyond the grave. However, I can truthfully say that I have gained from it a knowledge of sex relations that many years of reading and discussions with other people never brought me.

NINA EARNEST: Armed with her celestial sexual expertise, Craddock wrote six pamphlets full of advice for married couples. These templates supplemented her meager income. Customers would request a copy. And she would sell them for about $0.50 a piece.

But she had to mail them. And that’s how she ran up against Anthony Comstock and his censorship regime.

CRAIG LAMAY: He basically worked under the aegis of the post office and seized anything that he found to be offensive.

NINA EARNEST: This is Craig LaMay, a journalism professor at Northwestern University. He says that it didn’t take much to offend Comstock. The moral reformers saw obscenity everywhere, not just in dirty pictures, but in works of art and even medical textbooks.

CRAIG LAMAY: Anytime he learned about someone engaged in some activity, whether it was an art gallery or a physician offering contraceptive services, or whether it was a book dealer, he would basically make a solicitation for services or products. And then the moment they were provided to him, he would arrest them. He basically did entrapment.

NINA EARNEST: Comstock claimed that he and his network of informants confiscated 160 tons of allegedly obscene material and prosecuted over 3,500 people. The eccentric Ida Craddock was one of them.

Post office agents appalled by her pamphlets explicit references to sexuality brought federal cases against her in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington DC.

LEIGH SCHMIDT: All you have to do to prove that something is obscene literature is to point to a single passage in a text and show that that passage could insight lascivious thoughts in someone.

NINA EARNEST: Prosecutors would read her marital advice out loud in the courtroom. In one pamphlet, called “The Wedding Night,” she wrote that it was a wife’s duty to, quote, “perform pelvic movements.”

LEIGH SCHMIDT: Women have been so taught to be passionate, have been so taught that they try not to show any feelings. So she’s trying to get people to move. And you read that in court, you’re pretty much guaranteed you’re going to be seeing as wildly obscene.

NINA EARNEST: Craddock fought Comstock by claiming that she had the protection of the First Amendment, you know the one that says, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. There was just one problem.

CRAIG LAMAY: For the most part what he did nobody thought of then as raising any kind of First Amendment issue.

NINA EARNEST: That’s Craig LaMay again. He says the Supreme Court didn’t set the precedent for our modern understanding of freedom of speech until later in the 20th century. So for Craddock and others the most famous amendment wasn’t a ready defense against Comstock and its agents.

CRAIG LAMAY: They didn’t have any legal precedent to rely on. I mean, there weren’t any First Amendment cases to fall back on. So they might have argued in some abstract way for a right to speak freely. But they simply would not have formulated the arguments that way. And they didn’t.

NINA EARNEST: Craddock never won a case. But she did manage to avoid jail time– at least until 1902. That year, she relocated to New York City. And despite knowing the risks, she continued to send out her pamphlets.

LEIGH SCHMIDT: I think at that point, she really saw herself as standing for religious freedom, freedom of press, freedom of expression. And in some ways, I think she’s courting this climactic showdown with Comstock.

NINA EARNEST: This time Comstock arrested her in person. She first had a state trial, which he lost and spent three months in a work house. The prison was overcrowded, filled with vermin, and had no running water.

LEIGH SCHMIDT: It’s after she gets out of jail for that three-month sentence, and she’s awaiting the federal trial, that she’s very fearful at this point that because she’s been tried so many times and is such a repeat offender that she’s going to get the maximum sentence. So she’s got it into her head she’s going to get a five-year sentence.

NINA EARNEST: She was 45. And based on her three months in the work house–

LEIGH SCHMIDT: She doesn’t think she’s going to survive jail.

NINA EARNEST: Craddock lost her federal trial. She had nothing to do but wait for sentencing on October 17, 1902. That day she was found dead in her apartment. Ida Craddock had sealed the room, filled it with gas, and slit her wrists. The marriage reformer left two note behind, one for her mother and one to the public.

ACTOR AS IDA CRADDOCK: I resolved that if again attacked by Comstockism, I would stand my ground and fight to the death. Perhaps the American people may be shocked into investigating the dreadful state of affairs, which permits that unctuous, sexual hypocrite Anthony Comstock to wax fat and arrogant and to trample upon the liberties of the people, invading in my own case, both my right to freedom of religion and freedom of press.

LEIGH SCHMIDT: She stages it well. Her suicide becomes this cause celeb among free speech activists. And they pound Comstock for, as they see it, driving this innocent, pure-minded woman to her death. It’s a setback for him. It becomes one of the cases that really he has a hard time living down.

CRAIG LAMAY: And she was by no means the only one. He’s used to boast about people who committed suicide. When he prosecuted people and they committed suicide, he through his work was done. He took credit, I believe, for at least 15 different suicides.

NINA EARNEST: Her death didn’t bring Comstock down. He was on a crusade to protect American youth from obscenity, a major concern for the public. So he kept his position until he died in 1915.

CRAIG LAMAY: Comstock is, most people now view him, as kind of a blot on the American history of free expression. OK, I buy that. But at the same time, for most of his career, he had the support of the press. He had the support of powerful people. And he public opinion on his side.

NINA EARNEST: In the 20th century, the Supreme Court would expand Americans’ right to free expression, too late for Ida Craddock.

ED AYERS: Nina Earnest is one of BackStory’s producers.