Anthony Comstock crusaded against what he saw as vice in all its manifestations, from contraceptives to pornography. He personally arrested at least 3,000 persons for selling obscene pictures, contraceptive articles, abortifacients, and gambling materials. In 1913 he told the Evening World that he had “convicted persons enough to fill a passenger train of 61 coaches, 60 coaches containing 60 passengers and the 61st almost full,” and driven 16 people to their deaths by suicide or misadventure.

Born in Connecticut in 1844, Comstock settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after the Civil War. Shocked to find such works as “The Lustful Turk” widely available through stationers and pushcart vendors, he spearheaded the YMCA’s efforts to suppress pornography. In 1873 his militant, uncompromising activism having discomfited the YMCA’s leadership, Comstock established the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

The same year saw him obtain the enactment of the so-called Comstock Law, a federal statute barring the mailing of any “obscene, lewd, and lascivious” publication (including birth control information) and making mailing such “non-mailable” objects subject to imprisonment and fines of up to 10 years and $10,000. Comstock was appointed a postal inspector charged with enforcing the law, particularly by seizing mail he deemed objectionable.

Comstock loved to approach peddlers of “French postcards” and ask for something spicy. They often took him to their homes and showed him their entire stock. Then he would flash his badge. Using leads from peddlers, he raided and closed their suppliers’ printing plants. By January 1, 1874, Comstock had seized 194,000 pictures and photographs, 134,000 pounds of books, 14,200 printing plates, 60,300 rubber articles (condoms), 5,500 sets of playing cards, and 31,150 boxes of aphrodisiac pills. By 1880, he had “substantially suppressed” the production of pornography in America.

But his zeal led him to attack anyone or anything that even alluded to sex in image or print. He prohibited the mailing of certain anatomy textbooks to medical students and censored or suppressed “Tom Jones,” “The Canterbury Tales,” and the works of Balzac, Rabelais, and Zola. He did so under judicial precedents that held that if any part of a work could be found obscene, the entire work was obscene. Thus he eventually became a useful tool for master publicists.

George Bernard Shaw was struggling for fame in 1905 when “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” which suggests prostitution was a symptom of economic as well as sexual exploitation, was closed by the NYPD on opening night at the Garrick Theater, upon Comstock’s complaint. Comstock, who had denounced Shaw as an “Irish smut-dealer,” had neither seen nor read the play. Shaw, seeing his opportunity, denounced Comstock’s obsession with suppressing anything he found objectionable as “Comstockery.” He also proclaimed that he had spent his life awakening the public conscience, while Comstock had been examining and destroying 93 tons of indecent postcards. The Court of Special Sessions found the play not actionable. The publicity made it boffo box office.

Paul Chabas’s “September Morn,” an oil of a nude woman bathing, won a medal at the 1912 Salon (this may explain Comstock’s claim that the painting had been “exhibited in the Saloons of Paris”). Nonetheless, it had been rejected for reproduction in a barroom calendar, leaving art dealer Braun & Company at 13 West 46th Street stuck with 2,000 unsalable prints. The dealer hired publicist Harry Reichenbach to move the inventory. Reichenbach had the dealer put the picture in his window. Then Reichenbach and friends flooded Comstock’s office with calls complaining “September Morn” was corrupting the city’s youth. When Comstock, curiosity piqued, arrived at the gallery, he found several boys outside “pointing at the picture, uttering expressions of unholy glee.” Reichenbach had paid each lad 50 cents for the performance.

Comstock ordered the picture removed from the window. The dealer refused. The ensuing battle, orchestrated by Reichenbach, briefly made “September Morn” an icon nearly as familiar as the “Mona Lisa.” Reichenbach wrote, “Overnight, the lithograph … became a vital national issue. Songs were written about it, actors wisecracked about it, reformers denounced it, and seven million men and women bought copies of it at a dollar apiece, framed it and hung it on the walls of their homes.” According to writer Curtis Mac-Dougall, there “were ‘September Morn’ dolls, statues, and umbrella and cane heads,” not to mention “postcards, candy boxes, cigar bands … pennants, [and] suspenders.” The painting now graces the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Nonetheless, in 1915, President Wilson appointed Comstock a delegate to the International Purity Congress in San Francisco. There Comstock initiated a prosecution of department-store window dressers for garbing nude mannequins in full view of the public. A local judge dismissed the charges, saying, “Mr. Comstock, I think you’re nuts.” Exhausted by the struggle to impose purity on an impure world, he returned home to die, of pneumonia, on September 21, 1915.