Pornography and the Post Office
TALKING POLITICS
Catherine Carr
4.7 • 2.5K Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2019
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Gary Gerstle tells the story of Anthony Comstock, the man who tried to stamp out pornography in the final decades of the nineteenth century, using the US Postal Service as his weapon. Where he succeeded and how he ultimately failed still has echoes now, even in the age of the internet.
Talking Points:
States were exempted from the Bill of Rights from the 1790s until essentially the 1960s.
- Some states pursued extraordinary influence over the lives of their citizens.
- There were always states that were more liberal and more repressive.
- For many Americans, the government was the state government.
Anthony Comstock was a moral crusader who used the postal service as the vehicle of anti-vice politics at the federal level.
- The federal government can only exercise the powers mentioned in the constitution.
- The constitution doesn’t give the government the power to regulate morals but it does give the government power over the post office.
- The post office was a large and efficacious bureaucracy.
- Any mail traveling between states was carried by a federal agency; Comstock seized upon this as a national censorship mechanism.
Today, the dynamics have largely reversed. Instead of seeing the federal government as a way to control states, today’s moralists want to punt things back to the states.
- This has been particularly effective in the case of abortion.
Further Learning:
- ‘Sex and the Constitution,’ more on Comstock and the moralists
- The history of the post office
- A profile of Anthony Comstock
And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In the second episode of our American history series, Gary Gerstall is going to tell us the story of the man who tried to stop pornography in America at the end of the 19th century and how he used the post office to do it. |
| 0:28.4 | Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books. |
| 0:34.1 | This Christmas hits Thoughts that counts. Give everyone you know a subscription to the LRB for just 1999 and they'll throw in a free 2020 calendar featuring some of the |
| 0:40.9 | best of their fantastic cover art. Find this special festive offer at LRB.me forward slash Christmas. |
| 0:53.7 | Gary maybe we should start with the figure who's at the heart of this story, Anthony Comstock. |
| 0:59.3 | It's an American story because he came from relative obscurity to national prominence. |
| 1:04.9 | Who was he? |
| 1:06.4 | Anthony Comstock was born into a Protestant family in New Canaan, Connecticut, one of seven children. |
| 1:13.8 | Nondescript childhood, except that he had personal tragedy. |
| 1:17.7 | His mother died when he was 10, and his father soon abandoned him in his six siblings, |
| 1:22.0 | so they had to do a lot of scrambling and raising of themselves. |
| 1:25.8 | He grew up in a devout congregationalist home. That was a |
| 1:29.6 | derivative of Calvinism. And they redoubled on that, and his source of comfort became hard |
| 1:37.0 | religion, hard confidence in the inerrancy of the Bible. And he became preoccupied with the |
| 1:43.3 | crisis of morals that he thought was |
| 1:44.9 | engulfing America. And when he grew up, he made his way to New York, I think first by happenstance, |
| 1:50.8 | but then discovered there the center of the publishing industry and the center of an underground |
| 1:54.9 | publishing industry full of erotic, what he considered obscene, depravity. And this was a man who was very concerned |
| 2:04.0 | about every sexual act out of the procreative act as being immoral and unacceptable. And he |
| 2:11.6 | flagellated himself metaphorically for his own masturbation when he was a soldier in the Civil War. |
| 2:17.4 | And this was a man who |
| 2:18.4 | decided to take on the challenge of purifying America and making sex for procreation only. It was |
... |
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