Thy Neighbor's Wife (8 page)

Bennett saw the major churches and the government as partners in the perpetuation of a compliant public, and they thus maintained their privileged status. The churches, which were exempt from taxation and therefore amassed enormous wealth and property, refrained from condemning the sometimes barbarous acts of a government at war; and the government often provided policemen to support the church’s invasion of people’s privacy. Religion’s presumption that it had the right to regulate what people did with their own bodies in bed, that it could pass judgment on the manner and purpose of sex, could control how sex was portrayed in words and pictures, could prevent through censorship the sinful specter in a parishioner’s mind of an impure thought—thereby justifying thought control—incensed the agnostic passions of D. M. Bennett, who regarded it as a violation of the antitheological basis upon which the founding fathers had established the American Constitution.

Being endlessly vituperative on this subject, and having the temerity to express it in print, made inevitable Bennett’s confrontation with the law, which did occur on a wintry day in 1877 when Anthony Comstock himself, accompanied by a deputy United States marshal, appeared at Bennett’s office with a warrant for his arrest. Comstock, stern and solemn, charged Bennett with having sent through the mail two indecent and blasphemous articles, both having appeared in
The Truth Seeker
. One article was called, “How Do Marsupials Propagate Their Kind?”; the second was “An Open Letter to Jesus Christ.”

As Comstock stood before him, Bennett quickly defended his right to publish the articles, adding that neither was indecent nor blasphemous. The piece about marsupials, written by a contributor to the newspaper, was a scientific article that answered pre
cisely and discreetly what the title asked. The letter to Christ, which Bennett had composed, did question the veracity of Mary’s virginity, but Bennett believed that he was legally entitled to ponder this miracle.

If Comstock was looking for obscenity, Bennett said, there was much of it in the Bible, and he suggested the tale of Abraham and his concubine, the rape of Tamar, the adultery of Absalom, the lustful exploits of Solomon. Comstock, impatient, told Bennett to get his coat. Comstock wanted no more of this irreverence, and so Bennett did as ordered, and was taken as a prisoner to the office of the United States commissioner in the Post Office building, on Broadway and Park Row. There his bail was set at $1,500 and a pretrial hearing was scheduled for the following week. Comstock hoped to make Bennett the first victim of the federal law against defiling the mail.

After obtaining bail, Bennett immediately began to campaign for his defense, and he published new attacks on Comstock and the law. Many people were inspired to support Bennett, including his distinguished friend and fellow agnostic, the lawyer Robert G. Ingersoll. Ingersoll, who like Bennett had been reared in Illinois, had served valorously as a colonel in the Union cavalry, being greatly motivated not by the war itself, but by his opposition to slavery. His parents had both been outspoken abolitionists more than twenty years before the war, causing his father, a Presbyterian minister, to shift from one congregation to another, spending more time in disagreeable debate with churchgoers than in communal worship, a situation that contributed to the younger Ingersoll’s early skepticism of Christian virtue.

After the war, Robert Ingersoll practiced law and frequently defended the radical causes of his day, and his abhorrence of censorship made him a natural enemy of Comstock. If the government intended to support Comstock by censoring such articles as had appeared in
The Truth Seeker
, then Ingersoll was anxious to defend Bennett’s cause up to the Supreme Court, and he so informed the Postmaster General in Washington.

The evidence against Bennett, being neither lewd nor lascivi
ous, and no doubt protected by the First Amendment, was not a case that Comstock was likely to win at the highest level of the law; and it was perhaps a belated recognition of this, following Ingersoll’s intercession, that prompted the Postmaster General to quietly drop the case against Bennett.

Most citizens in this situation, having just thwarted the government and the formidable Comstock, and perhaps anticipating the censor’s wish for revenge, might have thereafter pursued life more prudently; but not D. M. Bennett. He celebrated the occasion in his newspaper by accelerating his criticism of Comstock, by urging the repeal of postal censorship, and calling for the legalization of contraceptive instruction and devices. He also wrote and published a lengthy diatribe on Christianity, describing its history as a holy massacre, bloody conquests in the name of Christ, while its popes indulged in acts of debauchery, incest, and murder.

Bennett portrayed the apostle Paul as an impious proselyte, a hypocrite, and a woman hater who initiated the antifeminist tradition in the Roman Church. Bennett described Paul II as a “vile, vain, cruel, and licentious pontiff, whose chief delight consisted in torturing heretics with heated braziers and infernal instruments of torment.” Bennett saw the Jesuits as henchmen of secret horrors, and he called Martin Luther a man of “insane violence” and John Calvin a “calculating, cruel bigot.” Pius IV “filled the papal palace with courtesans and beautiful boys for the purpose of satisfying his sensual passions and assuaging his lubricity”; Pius VI “was guilty of sodomy, adultery, incest and murder”; and Sixtus V “celebrated his coronation by hanging sixty heretics.” After similarly describing dozens of other popes, saints, reformers, evangelists, and Puritans, Bennett concluded that Anthony Comstock “has proven himself equal to almost any of his Christian predecessors in the work of arresting, persecuting, prosecuting, and ruining his fellow beings.”

Bennett published this in 1878. In that year he was again arrested by Comstock, but the religious critique was not mentioned in the warrant, for even a work as vitriolic as that might
be considered defensible under the free speech amendment. Comstock had something better, a strictly sexual pamphlet called
Cupid’s Yokes
that advocated free love, denigrated marriage, favorably described people living in an erotic commune devoid of restrictions, and boldly asked: “Why should priests and magistrates supervise the sexual organs of citizens any more than the brain and stomach?”

While Bennett had neither written nor published this pamphlet—it was the work of an already imprisoned Massachusetts freethinker named E. H. Heywood—Bennett had reportedly been selling it, in addition to other controversial literature, at a convention near Ithaca, New York; and Comstock was confident that responsible people would be less eager to openly support Bennett now than they had been after his first arrest.

But there was rising public sentiment against Comstock at this time, it being the fifth year of his antivice crusade, and Bennett was again able to arouse through his newspaper considerable support and financial and for his defense. The case did go to trial, however, and a severe judge—introducing to American jurisprudence the illiberal English law of 1868 that declared an entire literary work obscene if any part of it was obscene and was inappropriate for youthful readers—achieved a guilty verdict against Bennett for selling the sexual pamphlet. The judge then sentenced Bennett to thirteen months of hard labor at the penitentiary in Albany.

Thousands of citizens soon petitioned President Rutherford B. Hayes to pardon Bennett, and there was talk of appealing to the Supreme Court; but these efforts were diminished when Comstock, who had somehow obtained love letters written by the sixty-year-old Bennett to a young woman, publicly condemned Bennett as a lecherous adulterer. Bennett’s admission from prison that he had written the letters did not help his cause with some people, including Mrs. Bennett and the wife of President Hayes; and it was reportedly Mrs. Hayes who urged her husband to ignore the Bennett petition.

Bennett served the full term at hard labor and was greatly
debilitated by the experience. After his release he traveled in Europe, leaving the editorship of his paper to an associate who had run it during his imprisonment. In 1881 Bennett published a book called
An Infidel Abroad
, a collection of his own typically irreverent articles and comments that had established him in the free-thought movement of nineteenth-century America, a movement that in succeeding generations would include such publishers as Emanuel Julius, whose controversial Little Blue Books in the 1920s commenced the nation’s mass-market paperback industry; Samuel Roth, who was often imprisoned between the 1930s and 1950s for dealing in books banned by the government; and Barney Rosset, who would eventually impede the postal censors in a celebrated court case.

D. M. Bennett, who died the year after publishing
An Infidel Abroad
, was long survived by his eminent tormentor, Anthony Comstock. Before Comstock’s own death in 1915 he sent many other men to jail, being particularly gratified in 1896 when the United States Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Lew Rosen, whose publication
Broadway
had traveled through the mail featuring pictures of evocative women partially covered in lamp black that could easily be erased by the subscriber at home. Although Rosen’s energetic attorneys had contested the lower court convictions with various arguments—including the fact that the copy of
Broadway
used in evidence had been mailed in response to a government decoy letter, and also that Lew Rosen himself had not been aware of the ease with which the photographed women could be deprived of their carbon covering—the Supreme Court supported the Comstock Act and Lew Rosen was forced to serve thirteen months at hard labor.

The death of Comstock did not lessen the prosecution of pornography; it was continued by postal censors and church leaders, by the antivice society in New York and similar organizations in other cities, such as the Watch and Ward Society of Boston and the Chicago Law and Order League.

The Chicago league was directed by Arthur B. Farwell, a descendant of New England Puritans whose own missionary zeal had been intensified by the disheartening news when he was younger that his father, a political leader, was financially and socially involved with certain Chicago swindlers, rogues, and a prominent madam. From then on the younger Farwell was decidedly aloof from his father, and was equally intolerant of any citizen who profited from political schemes, gambling, or sought pleasure from immoral sex.

Most Chicago brothels were closed temporarily in 1912 after constant petitioning by Farwell’s league, and it succeeded in 1915 in having Chicago’s saloons shut down on Sundays. If Farwell’s league had little success during Prohibition in curbing the profitable partnership between politicians and gangsters that produced the speakeasies and whiskey wars, it was partly because Chicago after the Volstead Act of 1919 was under the strong influence of ethnic groups—mainly the Irish—who did not share the prohibitionists’ view of whiskey as a vice, although on matters of sex the Irish were possibly more puritanical than the Puritans.

In fact, by the 1920s—as Hugh Hefner’s sober Methodist parents from Nebraska had settled into Chicago—the Irish-Catholics had more or less replaced the Farwell-type bluenose Protestants as the enforcers of sexual morality in the city. The great Irish immigration of the mid-1800s had imported into Chicago a fierce brand of Catholicism founded on sexual regulation and orthodoxy, and the city gradually reflected these values politically and socially, becoming less tolerant of unorthodox thought and behavior. Even when the Irish did not control the mayor’s office—which they did regularly since the 1920s—the orthodox Catholic view on morality and sexual censorship was reinforced by the preponderant number of Irish-American state legislators, aldermen, ward leaders, states attorneys, police officers, and politically connected clergymen. The Irish were more quickly successful than other immigrants because they arrived in the new land with an ability to speak the language, were united in their religious
beliefs, and were politically hardened and organized as a result of their shared struggle back home against the English. Fortified by their interfaith marriages and political cronyism, they slowly shaped a Chicago Democratic machine from their South Side shanties, blue-collar bungalows, and tenements that excluded blacks, and from such a neighborhood came not only Mayor Richard Daley but also the two Irish-Catholic mayors who had preceded him, Ed Kelly and Martin Kennelly.

Daley’s neighborhood was not so different from other ethnic white areas largely populated by the Polish, or Czechoslovakians, or Italians, or Russian Jews; nearly all were inhabited by socially conservative Chicagoans tightly tied to their families and trade unions, and they were more enduringly insular and immutable than the ethnic Americans living in more liberal cities, where the neighborhoods were not so formidably preserved as blocs of votes. Chicago was well organized, solid, stolid—a town of regulars who were shocked less by political chicanery and extreme racism than by an attempt of a neighborhood theater owner to show a sexy movie.

The films that Hugh Hefner had seen as a teenaged usher at the Rockne Theater, and as a patron of other cinemas, had been screened beforehand by a police censor board, whose reviewers usually included five housewives married to policemen. When Hefner was working in Von Rosen’s promotion department, Chicago’s main distributor of magazines refused to carry Von Rosen’s products because they were sexually oriented and might provoke the displeasure of City Hall and church leaders. Von Rosen’s magazines were therefore circulated circumspectly to newsstands by drivers working for a smaller, hungrier, more daring firm known within the trucking trade as a “secondary” distributor.

In almost every large American city there was a primary distributor that circulated the socially acceptable mass-market magazines, like
Reader’s Digest
and
Ladies’ Home Journal
, and a “secondary” distributor that took what the primary preferred not to touch. In Chicago the secondary was the Capitol News Agency, and, like such firms in other cities, its warehouse was lo
cated on a remote side street and had bricked-up windows so that snoopers on the sidewalk could not see what was stored within. An arriving driver with a truckload of new magazines from the printing plant, before gaining entrance to the warehouse, had to first ring a buzzer at the side door and identify himself through the intercom; then the big sliding door was elevated, the truck entered the warehouse, and, after the door had been lowered and locked shut, the shipping clerks helped the driver unload the merchandise along the interior docking area. The cartons of magazines were counted and checked against the invoice. Some of these cartons had been sent from such distant points as Los Angeles and New York, being transported by carriers who traveled the secondary routes through America, dropping off cartons along the way in places like Denver and Des Moines, Cleveland and Columbus. After the big truck had left the Chicago warehouse, smaller panel trucks owned by Capitol would deliver within the city prearranged numbers of magazines to specific news dealers, some of whom would sell the magazines under the counter or in plain brown wrappers.