St. Anthony Comstock, the Village nuisance

Anthony Comstock, as a monk, thwarts shameless displays of excessive flesh, whether that of women, horses, or dogs, with a “Jane Doe Warrant.”

comments and context

Comments and Context

Anthony Comstock, father of “Comstockery” — the assertion of Victorian moral values on society — continued his crusades past the Victorian Era, to his death in 1915. The term has survived because some people maintain that his puritanical attitudes have survived to today.

His initial dander was up over the publication and dissemination, especially through the mails, of obscenity. The his definition of obscenity broadened, and his fulminations spread to birth-control information, free-love and socialist tracts, prohibition, Sunday-opening ordinances, and suppression of nude sculptures and paintings like the 1913 semi-nude “September Morn, “which resulted in extraordinary publicity and reprinting of the fairly chaste image.

Comstock, for years a representative of the Young Men’s Christian Association, was able incite the banning of books from public libraries. His name was — and still is — an adjective for censorship, and the YMCA founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, with Comstock as its leader, in 1873. The same year, Congress designated him as Special Inspection Agent of the Post Office. From those offices Comstock’s eponymous crusades were launched, and many of today’s postal regulations — dangerous goods, inspections, safety checks, were initiated by him.

In addition, postal regulations against bank fraud, illegal currency transactions, stock schemes, and dangerous contents like explosives and tainted medicines, can be traced to Comstock’s work.

Until 1906 he worked for the federal Post Office without pay, and the commencement of compensation likely attracted Puck‘s notice. Cartoonist L. M. Glackens had great fun with Comstockery-to-the-extreme, as many cartoonists did; but also humorously peeked into the future.

The monk’s cowl in three of the drawings connoted more than religious fervor. By an accident of birth Comstock (not a Catholic) was the bearer of the Christian name Anthony. St. Anthony is famous for, among other attributes, his severe reflections on sins and guilt. We know him best in contemporary times from Gustave Flaubert’s mysterious and profound masterpiece The Temptation of St. Anthony, the result of the French novelist’s thirty years of creativity; and the English translation by Lafcadio Hearn, as much a unique literary work as the original.

In this book, St. Anthony is portrayed as a believer who contends with temptation as much as sin itself, with his own weaknesses as much as the world’s seductions, and with Satan as a projection of human failings as much as a negation of God or agent of evil. The title of Flaubert/Hearn’s book, perhaps more than a close affinity with the ancient saint, was seduction enough for cartoonist Glackens — for it isn’t the cowl that makes the monk, as the old proverb maintained — yet the robe fit the iconic, side-whiskered crusader well.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1906-08-22

Creator(s)

Glackens, L. M. (Louis M.), 1866-1933

Period

U.S. President – 2nd Term (March 1905-February 1909)

Repository

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Page Count

1

Record Type

Image

Resource Type

Cartoon

Rights

These images are presented through a cooperative effort between the Library of Congress and Dickinson State University. No known restrictions on publication.

Citation