Anthony Comstock was an anti-vice activist and United States Postal Inspector who opposed obscene literature, abortion, contraception, gambling, prostitution, and nudism. 
He is responsible for the Comstock Laws, a set of federal acts passed in 1873, which criminalized the use of the USPS to distribute obscenity.
Famous texts that were suppressed as obscene under the Comstock Laws included Ulysses, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, The Decameron, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and many more.
“In the 1870s, Ezra Heywood, a feminist who studied women’s role in society, wrote Cupid’s Yokes, in which he asserted that women should have the right to control their own bodies. Comstock considered this obscene and arrested Heywood.” Src: mtsu.edu/first-amendmen…
Proprietors of newsstands who were suspected of selling “obscene” material were frequently arrested under the Comstock Act and Comstock’s social purity movement.
Comstock also sought to eliminate nudity from art. “In 1906 postal inspector Anthony Comstock raided the Art Students League of New York, seizing its publication The American Student of Art and [prosecuting] the clerk who handed him the magazine.” journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…
Worse were the ways in which the Comstock Laws restricted the sale and use of contraceptives. In Connecticut,“married couples could be arrested for using birth control in the privacy of their own bedrooms, and subjected to a one-year prison sentence.” pbs.org/wgbh/americane…
Birth control advocate #MargaretSanger first challenged the Comstock Act after her arrest for opening America’s first birth control clinic. “The case resulted in the 1918 Crane decision, which allowed women to use birth control for therapeutic purposes.” pbs.org/wgbh/americane…
American nudism's earliest magazine Sunshine & Health was also prosecuted under Comstock's laws, led by a Comstock successor in the Postal Service named Arthur Summerfield.
"Between 1948 and 1956, [S&H] faced three separate investigations by the Post Office, in which issues were seized. Each case was eventually dismissed, but the effect on the magazine's distribution caused a significant financial burden." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_…
"In New York City in 1951, several newsstand clerks were arrested for selling copies of Sunshine & Health..., violating a state statute prohibiting the distribution of obscene materials." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_…
One such victim of the USPS's frequent campaigns against peddlers of obscenity was a man named #SamuelRoth, a publisher and provocateur who was frequently incarcerated for dealing in banned materials.
It would be Roth’s appeals to these convictions which would deal a definitive death blow to the Comstock Laws, when the Supreme Court ruled in his favor in the landmark case Roth v. US, 354 US (1957), redefining the Constitutional test for obscenity. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roth_v._U…
The precedent set by the Roth case gave way to a landslide of re-litigation by publishers who had been similarly persecuted. Sunshine & Health had its day in court with Sunshine Book Co. v. Summerfield (1958) which exonerated nudist literature as safe to publish in the US.
#AnthonyComstock restricted the lives of Americans for generations with his political power and his puritanical crusades. In many ways the effects of his influence is still felt in media today, as this great article by Quinn Anex-Ries explores.
washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/0…
washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/0…
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