Anthony Comstock

Anthony Comstock

American war against hard drink had the evangelical spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers. America has always been a land of righteous persecution, whether under the banner of Calvinism, purity, anti-Communism or anti-racism. In the 19th century, Prohibition went hand in hand not only with anti-slavery but with anti-obscenity. Anthony Comstock was an abolitionist who fought fanatically for the Union in the Civil War and a noted campaigner against alcohol. But his chief work in life was to be secretary, for forty-three years, to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. His personal and public war against obscene publications is told in his books, Frauds Exposed (1880), Traps for the Young (1883), and Moral Versus Art (1887). He virtually founded the Society in 1873, and the same year the US Post Office made him a special agent which allowed him to go into any US Post Office and search for mail he suspected to be obscene. He persuaded Congress to amend an 1865 law, so that it became a crime knowingly to send obscene material through the mails. He also got Congress to amend legislation so that it became criminal to send information about, or to advertise, obscene publications, contraception, or abortion. This was the Comstock Law. His Society being subsidized by, among others, J. Pierpont Morgan, William F. Dodge Jr, the car manufacturer, and Samuel Colgate, the toothpaste tycoon.

Abraham Lincoln thought ‘intoxicating liquors’ came forth ‘like Egyptian angel of death, commissioned to slay the fairest born of every family.’ He said he did not drink ‘because I like it so much.’

In the 1840s a businessman called Neal Dow in Portland, Maine, made a study of the effects of alcohol there and discovered that an astonishing range of evils, from family violence, crime, and poverty to incompetence and loss of production in factories, were, as he put it, ‘alcohol-related.’ In 1851 he persuaded the state legislature to pass the ‘Maine Law,’ which banned the sale of alcohol. Thirteen of the thirty states had similar laws by 1855. After the Civil War militant women took up the cause and it was women who were chiefly behind the Anti-Saloon League of America, which in 1895 held its first annual convention. Enlisting Protestant congregations as basic campaigning units, the ASL was astonishingly adept at guiding legislatures through a cumulative series of reforms ending in total abolition. It was notable that ‘dry’ legislatures usually favored women’s suffrage too. By 1916 twenty-one states had banned saloons. That year the national elections returned a Congress where dry members outnumbered wets by more than two to one. In December 1917 Congress submitted to the states the Eighteenth Amendment, which, when ratified in 1919, changed the Constitution to ban ‘the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors.’ The Volstead Act, making America dry, had already been passed: the amendment finally made it constitutional.

The imposition of Prohibition shows the widespread belief in America that utopia can be achieved in the here-and-now and the millennium secured in this world, as well as the next.

William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner led a campaign in conjunction with the Central Methodist Church and the Police Department to shut the Barbary Coast down. They got the state to enact the Red Light Abatement Act, eventually declared constitutional by the California supreme court (1916), and enforcement began on January I, 1917.

What a Wonderful World
Louis Armstrong