Автору этих законов и тем, кто с ними боролся, посвящена недавняя книга “The man who hated women”. Рецензентам книга напомнила о скандале с Лимбо и о том, что история движется не по прямой, а по спирали.
In his heyday, from about 1870 to 1910, Comstock was America’s most prominent (or as some might say, most loathed) defender of decency, especially when women’s chastity, fertility, or frigidity seemed to be in peril. Initially a self-appointed young anti-smut crusader, he rose to national prominence when he browbeat Congress into passing a federal anti-obscenity law, making it a felony to use the U.S. Postal Service to disseminate illicit materials of any kind. The 1873 law, later known as the Comstock Act, was eventually used to prosecute sellers of contraceptives, publishers of anatomy textbooks, free love advocates, and purveyors of calendars featuring copies of a gauzy French nude painting titled September Morn. Comstock reveled in his power. He boasted about the thousands of porn vendors he had put behind bars, and he gleefully kept a running account of the many victims he had driven to suicide. <..> This discomfiting reality demonstrates the enduring power of the Comstock playbook. He dehumanized his victims, misrepresented their views, exaggerated their impact, and then encouraged newspapers to publicize their names and addresses, in a 19th-century version of doxxing. Comstock’s books would provide a thesaurus of steaming epithets for Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, et al. In Comstock’s world, free love advocates were “an enervated, lazy, shiftless, corrupt breed of human beings, devoid of common decency, not fit companions, in many cases, to run with swine.” Making contraceptives available to married couples would “debase sacred things, break down the health of women and disseminate a greater curse than the plagues and diseases of Europe.” One national group that opposed his efforts was “so liberal that it would give the vilest and lowest of criminals freedom to send their engines of moral death into your very families to destroy your children at your firesides.” <…> Because the lesson we should take from this book is that, in the American political world, no battle is ever permanently lost nor permanently won. Anthony Comstock versus Emma Goldman morphs into Phyllis Schlafly against Gloria Steinem, which devolves into Rush Limbaugh attacking Sandra Fluke, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Although we may prefer to see ourselves as warriors on the social vanguard, boldly going where no man (or woman) has gone before, history brusquely reminds us that we are mere foot soldiers in a political Hundred Years’ War, taking, losing, and retaking the same bloody disputed territory. This is the reason that history matters-not as a pious genuflection to people who once were brave and now are dead, but as a reminder that the culture wars we fight today are deeply, perhaps permanently rooted in the American character. The principles that animated Comstock and his followers do not simply vanish. They fade, ebb, and dissipate, like viruses, only to resurge unexpectedly in a more contagious and virulent form. https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2021/the-20th-century-smut-shamer/
The fact that blanks occur in the translated pages of "Zola," of "Boccaccio," and of many modern and ancient classics is due to Mr. Comstock. He protested against the appearance of many plays here, notably "Mrs. Warren's Profession," and George Bernard Shaw was added to the long line of humorists and satirists who have exercised their talents on the noted Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Where public opinion and the courts held that Mr. Comstock had been wrong in finding evil in what purported to be art, the controversy was the finest of advertising. "September Morn" is the most recent instance. In May, 1913, Mr. Comstock threatened to arrest a local art dealer who had the original by Paul Chabas on exhibition. The arrest was never made, but the public soon got a chance to decide whether "September Morn" was art or not, because hundreds of thousands of lithographic reproduction were on sale in stores in every part of the United States in a few weeks. Up to 1914 Mr. Comstock had caused the arraignment in State and Fedeal courts of 3,697 persons, of which 2,740 either pleaded guilty or were convicted. In these cases, fines were imposed to the extent of $237,134.30 and imprisonment to the total of 565 years, eleven months and twenty days. Several hundred arrests and several thousand dollars in fines were added in 1914 and 1915. <…> One of the most discussed of Mr. Comstock's raids was upon the Art Students' League in the American Society of Fine Arts Building, at 15 West Fifty-Seventh Street. On Aug. 2, 1906, he cause a police patrol wagon to be backed up in front of the league's doors, where it was loaded with about 1,000 copies of "The American Art Student," a catalogue published for students. The alleged offense of the catalogue was the showing of five nude figures which had been selected by the Board of Control of the league as examples of the work don by its students. Miss Anna Robinson, book-keeper of the league, was arrested. Gutzon Borgium and other noted artists denounced the action in unmeasured language, and the case was finally dropped at the instance of District Attorney Jerome, although the captured catalogues were destroyed. Mr. Comstock made a large number of his arrests personally and was frequently in violent fights in which he was well qualified to hold his own, even in his later years, by reason of his huge physique and his experience as an arresting officer. Early in his career he was slashed across the face with a bowie knife by one of his prisoners. On half a dozen occasions he was knocked down and beaten, but more often attempts at force ended badly for his prisoner. Mr. Comstock leaves a widow, Mrs. Margaret Comstock, and one daughter, Adele Comstock, who were both at his bedside when he died. https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/NYT/NYT_1915_09_22.html
Продолжателем традиции борьбы с непристойностью был Чарльз Китинг с организацией Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL), которая послужила прообразом других консервативных организаций, созданных путём массовых почтовых рассылок.
Even as CDL grew less active on the ground, though, it paved the way for future conservative mobilizations. A 1971 contract with direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie - who later helped build the entire interlinked New Right infrastructure of groups like the Moral Majority - is preserved in the papers of obscenity defense attorney Stanley Fleishman at UCLA, and reflects the shift from grassroots organizing to direct-mail fundraising. Indeed, Keating’s shift from opposing filth to filthy lucre was quickly reflected in CDL’s operating budget, almost 90 percent of which went into administration and further fundraising, rather than actual activism against smut. By 1974, CDL had raised $3.5 million through Viguerie’s campaigns, but $2.9 million went back to Viguerie, and only $609,000 went into anti-porn activity. States from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to Florida began to deny the group permission to fundraise, and the attorney general of New York accused CDL of filing a “deceptive financial statement” to the state. Most ominously, and linking CDL to Keating’s much-less-decent future financial activities, the Cincinnati press reported in 1974 that CDL had begun investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in American Financial Corp., the holding company of which Keating was vice president. A few years later, Keating had moved to Arizona and begun the new set of corporate fronts that would culminate in the S&L scandals. He remained politically connected - Ronald Reagan even attempted to appoint him ambassador to the Bahamas in 1981, before the public was reminded that Keating had already been repeatedly investigated for suspicious financial activities - but allowed other leaders of the New Right to beat the morality drum in his place. CDL itself casts a long shadow. Indeed, when George W. Bush sought to reinvigorate obscenity prosecutions in 2004, he relied on former CDL general counsel Bruce Taylor. More significantly, Keating’s tactics helped pave the way for a distinctly modern style of conservative activism, shorn of the backward-looking reputation that it had gained at midcentury by association with Charles Lindbergh and the Scopes trial. The groups that followed CDL, from Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP-ERA to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and beyond, replayed everything from its structure to its endless fundraising fetish. Meanwhile, from the anti-gay movement’s insistent use of ostensible (if laughable) social-science data rather than outright homophobia, to climate-change deniers careful to frame their arguments in the language of science even as they reject overwhelming scientific consensus, today’s conservatives are his descendants. Even those railing against the present do not want to be seen as part of the past. https://www.salon.com/2014/04/13/meet_the_spiritual_forefather_of_conservatives_war_on_women/
После Китинг сел в тюрьму за финансовое мошенничество.
Bond buyers were not told the condition of American Continental, or that its bonds were uninsured, prosecutors said. A witness in a lawsuit years later produced a Lincoln memo advising its bond salesmen to remember that “the weak, meek and ignorant are always good targets.” American Continental went bankrupt in 1989, and an insolvent Lincoln was seized by the government. Some 23,000 customers were left holding $250 million in worthless bonds, the life savings of many, and taxpayers paid $3.4 billion to cover Lincoln’s losses. It was the largest of 1,043 S.&L. failures from 1986 to 1995. Authoritative studies show that they cost the savings and loan industry $29 billion and taxpayers $124 billion. The government sued Mr. Keating for $1.1 billion, but he said he was broke. Convicted of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy in state and federal trials, Mr. Keating went to prison for four and a half years. Both verdicts were overturned on appeals in 1996. California dropped its case, and on the eve of a federal retrial in 1999, Mr. Keating, who always insisted he had done nothing wrong, pleaded guilty to four counts of wire and bankruptcy fraud and was sentenced to time already served. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/business/charles-keating-key-figure-in-the-1980s-savings-and-loan-crisis-dies-at-90.html
Ларри Флинт, которого Китинг пытался засадить за порнографию, смеялся последним.
In 1977, a year before he was shot and paralyzed by a white supremacist angered by an interracial Hustler photo layout, the Citizens for Decency had a triumph. Flynt was charged with engaging in organized crime and pandering obscenity by selling his porn magazine Hustler in Cincinnati. The magazine, with a circulation of 2 million and photos that were more sexually explicit than those in soft-core publications like Playboy and Penthouse, wasn't written, edited or printed in Cincinnati; but it was sold there, so prosecutors filed charges. A jury convicted Flynt, who faced up to 25 years in prison. He spent less than a week behind bars before winning bail. The case was overturned, and a state court ordered a new trial. But rather than refile the case, prosecutors in 1985 agreed to drop the charges in exchange for Flynt paying $6,000 in court costs and agreeing not to sue local officials for false arrest and malicious prosecution. By that time, Keating had left Ohio and purchased Lincoln Savings & Loan, a stodgy Irvine thrift that he would turn into his personal piggy bank, leaving depositors broke and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. "Even while he was stealing all that money from those old people up there, he was still trying to prosecute my case," said Flynt. https://www.chicagotribune.com/la-me-ra-larry-flynt-on-charles-keating-20140404-story.html
Автору этих законов и тем, кто с ними боролся, посвящена недавняя книга “The man who hated women”. Рецензентам книга напомнила о скандале с Лимбо и о том, что история движется не по прямой, а по спирали.
In his heyday, from about 1870 to 1910, Comstock was America’s most prominent (or as some might say, most loathed) defender of decency, especially when women’s chastity, fertility, or frigidity seemed to be in peril. Initially a self-appointed young anti-smut crusader, he rose to national prominence when he browbeat Congress into passing a federal anti-obscenity law, making it a felony to use the U.S. Postal Service to disseminate illicit materials of any kind. The 1873 law, later known as the Comstock Act, was eventually used to prosecute sellers of contraceptives, publishers of anatomy textbooks, free love advocates, and purveyors of calendars featuring copies of a gauzy French nude painting titled September Morn.
Comstock reveled in his power. He boasted about the thousands of porn vendors he had put behind bars, and he gleefully kept a running account of the many victims he had driven to suicide. <..>
This discomfiting reality demonstrates the enduring power of the Comstock playbook. He dehumanized his victims, misrepresented their views, exaggerated their impact, and then encouraged newspapers to publicize their names and addresses, in a 19th-century version of doxxing. Comstock’s books would provide a thesaurus of steaming epithets for Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, et al. In Comstock’s world, free love advocates were “an enervated, lazy, shiftless, corrupt breed of human beings, devoid of common decency, not fit companions, in many cases, to run with swine.” Making contraceptives available to married couples would “debase sacred things, break down the health of women and disseminate a greater curse than the plagues and diseases of Europe.” One national group that opposed his efforts was “so liberal that it would give the vilest and lowest of criminals freedom to send their engines of moral death into your very families to destroy your children at your firesides.” <…>
Because the lesson we should take from this book is that, in the American political world, no battle is ever permanently lost nor permanently won. Anthony Comstock versus Emma Goldman morphs into Phyllis Schlafly against Gloria Steinem, which devolves into Rush Limbaugh attacking Sandra Fluke, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Although we may prefer to see ourselves as warriors on the social vanguard, boldly going where no man (or woman) has gone before, history brusquely reminds us that we are mere foot soldiers in a political Hundred Years’ War, taking, losing, and retaking the same bloody disputed territory.
This is the reason that history matters-not as a pious genuflection to people who once were brave and now are dead, but as a reminder that the culture wars we fight today are deeply, perhaps permanently rooted in the American character. The principles that animated Comstock and his followers do not simply vanish. They fade, ebb, and dissipate, like viruses, only to resurge unexpectedly in a more contagious and virulent form.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2021/the-20th-century-smut-shamer/
Reply
Некролог New York Times из 1915:
The fact that blanks occur in the translated pages of "Zola," of "Boccaccio," and of many modern and ancient classics is due to Mr. Comstock. He protested against the appearance of many plays here, notably "Mrs. Warren's Profession," and George Bernard Shaw was added to the long line of humorists and satirists who have exercised their talents on the noted Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.
Where public opinion and the courts held that Mr. Comstock had been wrong in finding evil in what purported to be art, the controversy was the finest of advertising. "September Morn" is the most recent instance. In May, 1913, Mr. Comstock threatened to arrest a local art dealer who had the original by Paul Chabas on exhibition. The arrest was never made, but the public soon got a chance to decide whether "September Morn" was art or not, because hundreds of thousands of lithographic reproduction were on sale in stores in every part of the United States in a few weeks.
Up to 1914 Mr. Comstock had caused the arraignment in State and Fedeal courts of 3,697 persons, of which 2,740 either pleaded guilty or were convicted. In these cases, fines were imposed to the extent of $237,134.30 and imprisonment to the total of 565 years, eleven months and twenty days. Several hundred arrests and several thousand dollars in fines were added in 1914 and 1915. <…>
One of the most discussed of Mr. Comstock's raids was upon the Art Students' League in the American Society of Fine Arts Building, at 15 West Fifty-Seventh Street. On Aug. 2, 1906, he cause a police patrol wagon to be backed up in front of the league's doors, where it was loaded with about 1,000 copies of "The American Art Student," a catalogue published for students. The alleged offense of the catalogue was the showing of five nude figures which had been selected by the Board of Control of the league as examples of the work don by its students. Miss Anna Robinson, book-keeper of the league, was arrested.
Gutzon Borgium and other noted artists denounced the action in unmeasured language, and the case was finally dropped at the instance of District Attorney Jerome, although the captured catalogues were destroyed.
Mr. Comstock made a large number of his arrests personally and was frequently in violent fights in which he was well qualified to hold his own, even in his later years, by reason of his huge physique and his experience as an arresting officer. Early in his career he was slashed across the face with a bowie knife by one of his prisoners. On half a dozen occasions he was knocked down and beaten, but more often attempts at force ended badly for his prisoner.
Mr. Comstock leaves a widow, Mrs. Margaret Comstock, and one daughter, Adele Comstock, who were both at his bedside when he died.
https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/NYT/NYT_1915_09_22.html
Reply
Продолжателем традиции борьбы с непристойностью был Чарльз Китинг с организацией Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL), которая послужила прообразом других консервативных организаций, созданных путём массовых почтовых рассылок.
Even as CDL grew less active on the ground, though, it paved the way for future conservative mobilizations. A 1971 contract with direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie - who later helped build the entire interlinked New Right infrastructure of groups like the Moral Majority - is preserved in the papers of obscenity defense attorney Stanley Fleishman at UCLA, and reflects the shift from grassroots organizing to direct-mail fundraising. Indeed, Keating’s shift from opposing filth to filthy lucre was quickly reflected in CDL’s operating budget, almost 90 percent of which went into administration and further fundraising, rather than actual activism against smut.
By 1974, CDL had raised $3.5 million through Viguerie’s campaigns, but $2.9 million went back to Viguerie, and only $609,000 went into anti-porn activity. States from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to Florida began to deny the group permission to fundraise, and the attorney general of New York accused CDL of filing a “deceptive financial statement” to the state. Most ominously, and linking CDL to Keating’s much-less-decent future financial activities, the Cincinnati press reported in 1974 that CDL had begun investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in American Financial Corp., the holding company of which Keating was vice president.
A few years later, Keating had moved to Arizona and begun the new set of corporate fronts that would culminate in the S&L scandals. He remained politically connected - Ronald Reagan even attempted to appoint him ambassador to the Bahamas in 1981, before the public was reminded that Keating had already been repeatedly investigated for suspicious financial activities - but allowed other leaders of the New Right to beat the morality drum in his place.
CDL itself casts a long shadow. Indeed, when George W. Bush sought to reinvigorate obscenity prosecutions in 2004, he relied on former CDL general counsel Bruce Taylor. More significantly, Keating’s tactics helped pave the way for a distinctly modern style of conservative activism, shorn of the backward-looking reputation that it had gained at midcentury by association with Charles Lindbergh and the Scopes trial. The groups that followed CDL, from Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP-ERA to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and beyond, replayed everything from its structure to its endless fundraising fetish. Meanwhile, from the anti-gay movement’s insistent use of ostensible (if laughable) social-science data rather than outright homophobia, to climate-change deniers careful to frame their arguments in the language of science even as they reject overwhelming scientific consensus, today’s conservatives are his descendants. Even those railing against the present do not want to be seen as part of the past.
https://www.salon.com/2014/04/13/meet_the_spiritual_forefather_of_conservatives_war_on_women/
Reply
Bond buyers were not told the condition of American Continental, or that its bonds were uninsured, prosecutors said. A witness in a lawsuit years later produced a Lincoln memo advising its bond salesmen to remember that “the weak, meek and ignorant are always good targets.”
American Continental went bankrupt in 1989, and an insolvent Lincoln was seized by the government. Some 23,000 customers were left holding $250 million in worthless bonds, the life savings of many, and taxpayers paid $3.4 billion to cover Lincoln’s losses. It was the largest of 1,043 S.&L. failures from 1986 to 1995. Authoritative studies show that they cost the savings and loan industry $29 billion and taxpayers $124 billion. The government sued Mr. Keating for $1.1 billion, but he said he was broke.
Convicted of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy in state and federal trials, Mr. Keating went to prison for four and a half years. Both verdicts were overturned on appeals in 1996. California dropped its case, and on the eve of a federal retrial in 1999, Mr. Keating, who always insisted he had done nothing wrong, pleaded guilty to four counts of wire and bankruptcy fraud and was sentenced to time already served.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/business/charles-keating-key-figure-in-the-1980s-savings-and-loan-crisis-dies-at-90.html
Ларри Флинт, которого Китинг пытался засадить за порнографию, смеялся последним.
In 1977, a year before he was shot and paralyzed by a white supremacist angered by an interracial Hustler photo layout, the Citizens for Decency had a triumph. Flynt was charged with engaging in organized crime and pandering obscenity by selling his porn magazine Hustler in Cincinnati.
The magazine, with a circulation of 2 million and photos that were more sexually explicit than those in soft-core publications like Playboy and Penthouse, wasn't written, edited or printed in Cincinnati; but it was sold there, so prosecutors filed charges.
A jury convicted Flynt, who faced up to 25 years in prison. He spent less than a week behind bars before winning bail. The case was overturned, and a state court ordered a new trial.
But rather than refile the case, prosecutors in 1985 agreed to drop the charges in exchange for Flynt paying $6,000 in court costs and agreeing not to sue local officials for false arrest and malicious prosecution.
By that time, Keating had left Ohio and purchased Lincoln Savings & Loan, a stodgy Irvine thrift that he would turn into his personal piggy bank, leaving depositors broke and costing taxpayers billions of dollars.
"Even while he was stealing all that money from those old people up there, he was still trying to prosecute my case," said Flynt.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/la-me-ra-larry-flynt-on-charles-keating-20140404-story.html
Reply
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