Americans have been reading a lot lately about the state of speech on college campuses. Stories about canceled contracts, resignations, disinvited speakers, racist songs, sexist banners, and trigger warnings have spilled into mainstream news outlets and the blogosphere. This year, September 21 is a fine day to reflect on the lessons of history as we consider the future of speech in higher education: It’s the 100th anniversary of the death of Anthony Comstock.
His is no longer a household name, but Comstock was an important national figure, because he held immense and unique prosecutorial authority to control and suppress speech. He was a U.S. postal inspector and secretary and a special agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an organization empowered by state statute to supervise the morality of the public. Comstock was a Christian evangelical convinced that if provocative texts, images, and objects were eliminated, souls would be saved and a better and more civil society would result. As our contemporary culture demonstrates, his efforts resulted in epic failure.
Comstock’s crusade certainly didn’t fail because he was insufficiently powerful, assiduous, or earnest. He pursued indecency and obscenity from 1873 to 1915 with persistence and resilience, despite being stabbed, thrown down stairs, attacked in the press, and lampooned by caricaturists. He was able to pass dozens of new laws and to seize or suppress vast quantities of images and objects, including more than three million pictures, 106,000 pounds of books, and 373,000 rubber contraceptives and sex toys. His efforts also led to the incarceration of nearly 4,000 perpetrators.
As much as Comstock’s career demonstrates that American speech can be suppressed, it more potently illustrates the reverse. By 1915, when he died, the nation’s visual culture was far more indecent than when he started, with rising hemlines, racy paintings of nudes on display, and a profusion of published, staged, and cinematic erotica. A century of pushback in courtrooms and legislatures soon followed.
This should serve as a cautionary tale for those who believe that campus culture today can be improved through the suppression of speech.
The first lesson of Comstock’s failure is that suppression of speech tends to generate far more interest in the condemned ideas. His obituary in The New York Times neatly summarized the matter: “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.” Comstock was indeed the best friend of lewd commerce. A mere hint that he was going to shut down a play, burn a book, or ban a postcard from circulation was gold to promoters, publishers, and printers, who increasingly sought to provoke his attention and profit from the inevitable increase in sales.
On college campuses today, a similar effect is evident in the steep rise in fraternity membership. As The Washington Post reported in March, membership has steadily increased over the past decade, despite the terrible press and severe punishments for many chapters. Although we might have hoped that students would be disgusted by the vile behavior described in news stories, unfortunately they have instead rallied around that dubious flag.
On the professorial front, the reported effort of Northwestern administrators to censor an essay in a bioethics journal resulted in a similar flurry of attention. The work in question, “Head Nurse,” which discusses an example of therapeutic oral sex, now comes up as the No. 1 response to a Google search for that term, instead of information about an important leadership position in hospitals.
Additionally problematic for Comstock was that the well-publicized arrests he ordered had the ironic effect of undermining his credibility. In 1905, when George Bernard Shaw coined the term “Comstockery,” it rapidly joined common parlance as a way to discredit prudishness, much in the way “political correctness” is used as a dismissive term today. In both examples, censorship eroded the credibility of the censor and strengthened opposition.
In this light, we might view Phyllis M. Wise as a modern Comstock. She is the administrator who last year effectively rescinded a faculty position offered to Steven Salaita on the basis of his anti-Israel tweets. Her subsequent resignation as chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign followed a judicial rebuke of her actions. Whether or not the Salaita affair was the principal cause of her downfall, her credibility was inarguably diminished when she intervened in a normal hiring process because of speech she found disagreeable.
This brings us to another important lesson from the life of Comstock: It’s about due process. Comstock cared not at all about the First Amendment, or about the Fourth, which limits government searches, or the Fifth, which guarantees that no person can “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” His procedures included seizing and destroying evidence even when the defendant was acquitted. Making the world safe from evil was the only cause that really mattered to him. In the end, his efforts resulted chiefly in a century of successful efforts to expand our constitutional freedoms.
One hundred years after Comstock’s death, we are entering a similar moment of pushback, as publicly funded institutions struggle to cope with a rising number of successful lawsuits claiming that the censorship of speech violates students’ First Amendment rights. The threat of legal liability is likely to increase as advocacy groups pursue an ambitious array of lawsuits across the country.
For Comstock as well as for Wise, standing on principle undoubtedly felt satisfying in the moment, but they ignored the rule of law at their peril, and the result was the reverse of their expectations. This is the most important lesson to take away from the life of Anthony Comstock: Censorship never achieves its intended goals in the long run, but it does achieve a lot of unintended consequences.
