Debbie Nathan

Ah yes, children and porn. Children consuming porn, I mean: a venerable American past time. Did you know you can check out its history for free, next time you visit our nation’s capital? I did and here’s what I learned.

Exactly a century ago, in 1908, a middle-aged storekeeper named Pasquale Eliseo, of 119th Street and First Avenue in New York City’s East Harlem, was busted on obscenity charges. His arrest happened after notorious vice Czar Anthony Comstock, sneaking around town undercover, watched while Eliseo “gleefully showed his rot” to some children.

What sort of rot? Eliseo, according to Comstock, “Dealt in most sacrilegious and blasphemous books & papers. Awfull!!” (Yes, “awfull” with two “l’s”.) According to Comstock, Eliseo kept “ob.” – Comstock’s shorthand for “obscene” –- materials in his store and “took young men into [the] basement to sell them books.” Worse, he peddled ob. right on the street, where he made a habit of “exposing pictures in full view of boys and girls.” These were probably “French postcards,” and when Comstock happened upon Eliseo, the latter was hawking them at a penny apiece. It’s not clear if he had any paying customers, but he clearly attracted some very enthusiastic young window shoppers.

Such details come from a tall, narrow logbook that Comstock kept for decades. He used it to tabulate his obscenity arrests — in muddy, cramped handwriting, and language so fevered that it often came out misspelled and weirdly punctuated. The logbook has been microfilmed by the Library of Congress, in Washington. It’s a popular item in the rare manuscripts collection there, and recently while visiting DC, I skipped the Lincoln Memorial and instead enjoyed the fruits of my taxpayer money by perusing Comstock’s records.

What a glorious institution the LOC is! It houses a copy of almost every book ever published in this country (and many from other countries besides). Its librarians practically trip over themselves to help patrons. Reading rooms are well-appointed and inviting; the cafeteria food scrumptious and cheap. There’s no charge to use these facilities. The LOC: a people’s palace for research and knowledge. Makes you feel downright patriotic!…Even as you follow the creepy archival trail of federal official Comstock as he harassed citizens and worked hard to repress our culture.

A small town druggist turned moral crusader, Comstock came to power after the end of the Civil War, when he was appointed by New York State and the U.S. Post office as the big-wig, anti-obscenity cop. At first, he mainly went after people who advocated for and provided birth control, sex education, and other means of sexual pleasure – including toys. One such early Comstock victim is listed in his logbook is a “shrewd villain” who was “Notorious as an abortionist.” There’s also the “low ignorant laborer” who “advertised himself as an MD and celebrated physician for treatment of female complaints” –- yet was really “An abortionist.” Thanks to Comstock, this man got one year and three months at an upstate penitentiary.

Also arrested was someone named Brinckerhoff and “one Travis of Goodyear Rubber Glove Co.,” who jointly “invented a substitute for a dildoe.” Comstock gloated that he actually seized “the article.” He added that the subsequent guilty verdict made this a “test case of great importance.”

Comstock was also obsessed with protecting children from dirty materials. He wrote that he arrested a man who “used to loan the vilest Books, to young boys & girls, and sell to school children. His wife to girls & he to boys & young men. He was convicted in Special Sessions, in Summer of 1868, by myself.” Comstock dissed this defendant as the “Worst man in N.Y.” He was sent to Blackwell’s Island.

But Comstock’s prosecutions were partly a losing battle.

By the 1870s, sexy pictures, texts and tchotchkes were everywhere, in full view of the kids. In 1875, for instance, Thomas Early, 23, was arrested by police in Yonkers and given three months at hard labor. His crime: Distributing handbills for Kahn’s Museum, on Broadway in Manhattan. Kahn’s was where the public went to look at fetuses in jars, preserved cadavers, and medical specimen genitals. In Victorian America, this was how ordinary people –- including women – learned about anatomy and the biology of sex. Comstock caught Early giving Kahn’s flyers “indiscriminately to boys & girls.” As a result, he noted in his crabbed handwriting, one child “found a book & took it to her mother to know what ‘penis’ meant.”

Another log entry, from 1877, describes the arrest of Timothy P. Ide, 19, for mailing obscene pictures and books. “He advertised for ‘Boys only’ in various ‘Boys Weekly’ papers. He had three new books & was getting up another. He is a cool deliberate villain. Young as he is he surpasses many older criminals.”

That same year, Mrs. Sarah E. Summers got a year of hard penal labor after Comstock’s investigators found hundreds of letters and circulars in her possession, as well as articles “to prevent conception [and] procure abortion.” Not only that, Comstock wrote, but Mrs. Summers had, in a popular publication, advertised the following offer: ‘Girls. Secret. How to gain the love of any man for $1.00.’” For each dollar she received, Mrs. Summers sent out “her circular & a powder with written instructions to girls to mix with their own menses and administer in cold drink.” Most of the letters seized were from young females, Comstock noted, including “a 16-year-old minister’s daughter.” Comstock must have raided this teenager’s bedroom: The log notes that when discovered, she had already “sent for and administered one powder & another all prepared was found on her person.”

The year 1877 also saw hanky panky with magic lanterns – contraptions that projected images in sequence to create the illusion of movement. Tremendously popular, they were forerunners to the motion picture camera. Comstock recorded that a New Yorker, Andrew Trosch, age 60, who sold stereopticons and magic lanterns on Broome Street in Manhattan, gave a magic lantern show on the Bowery. Apparently he was projecting French postcards, or maybe just Kahn’s Museum flyers. “His obscene views,” Comstock wrote, “disgusted spectators. He was arrested for selling same views.”

A year later, Kahn’s museum tormented again. It was displaying “wax figures of females life size, some pregnant & some otherwise & 37 cases of filthy penises. These cases were disposed of before Judge Gildersleeve.”

As time passed things only got worse. In 1895, Alfred S. Thompson, of 106 E. 14th Street, was arrested for being the “manager of 6 fat women at Huber’s Museum who dress in tights and ride bicycles. A nauseating display.”

Alfred’s wife, Alice, was also charged. Comstock listed her occupation as “Show Woman” and went after her because she “Sells pictures of herself in tights in a bawdy attire and posture.”

Not long after, 36-year-old Pauline Sheldon, of W. 98th Street, was apprehended for working at clubs such as the Black Rabbit’s and The Maquet Union, on Bleeker Street. Comstock’s log describes Sheldon as “A hermafadite [sic] & exhibited herself at $1 per person.” She was charged with indecent exposure. Her destination was the Tombs.

During Comstock’s earlier years, his busts were lauded by the establishment, including the New York Times. By the turn of the 20th century, though, he was going stale. That’s around the time he went after Ida Craddock –- who today could well be described as this country’s first “Dr. Ruth.” A former shorthand instructor and head of “The Church of Yoga,” Craddock was famous for her sex education classes and pamphlets for married couples. They extolled foreplay as vital for female pleasure, and gave detailed instructions on how to accomplish it. And to avoid unwanted pregnancy, Craddock taught men how to prevent ejaculation. All this infuriated Comstock. Craddock was busted and imprisoned so many times that the last time it happened, she couldn’t take it anymore. She committed suicide by gas oven in an apartment on 23rd Street in 1902. The public was remorseful. Comstock was widely seen as a villain.

But he still had an ace in the hole: the danger of “ob.” to children. Yet the kids themselves were now starting to make and distribute ob. Already in 1900, for instance, 12-year-old Emil Grossmann, of 81 E. 11th St., had been picked up by Comstock because he “Used foul language in school room. Sent obscene letter to his teacher.” Emil, Comstock wrote in his log, was “Very bawdy. A bad fellow.”

Next year, Dominick Gavarse, of East Harlem, got canned for “sending obscene writing by mail to a lady teacher” at the school he attended, PS 83. “A bad boy,” Comstock reiterated in his log. Dominick, 12 years old, was sent to the Tombs.

Things were getting so out of hand by then that even honor students were going wild. Louis Evenson, age 13, was arrested in 1902 for sending “2 ob. Letters & 1 postal card.” Comstock seemed puzzled “A well behaved boy in school,” he wrote in his log. “Influenced by bad boys. Father is a Rabbi.”

Perhaps if Louis and his ilk had all been unwashed, Eastern or Southern European immigrants, Comstock could have kept on going full speed. But the lad was a “German Jew,” noted the logbook, and the Evensons lived right off Fifth Avenue. This junior “ob’ber” came straight out of “Our Crowd,” and when New Yorkers of his stratum started crossing paths with Comstock, it couldn’t have boded well for the latter’s career.

Still, little Louis was a minor. Moral panic about ob’s dangers to the tender aged has fueled many an inheritor to Comstock -– in the bloom of the 20th century and hard into the 21st. The new porny-kid “German Jews” of Fifth Avenue may be those who reside in the toney suburbs of the whole nation. Or the techno-luxe cyberville of Youtube, MySpace, Facebook — and even, as in the case of Justin Berry, on their own, private websites.