If we take the passage of the Comstock Postal Act, on March 3, 1873, as
a starting point, the legislative stakes of this new Puritan movement
sweep upward in a grand curve to the passage of the Mann and Webb Acts,
in 1910 and 1913, the first of which ratifies the Seventh Commandment
with a salvo of artillery, and the second of which put the overwhelming
power of the Federal Government behind the enforcement of the
prohibition laws in the so-called "dry" States. The mind at once recalls
the salient campaigns of this war of a generation: first the attack upon
"vicious" literature, begun by Comstock and the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice, but quickly extending to every city in the land;
then the long fight upon the open gambling house, culminating in its
practical disappearance; then the recrudesence of prohibition, abandoned
at the outbreak of the Civil War, and the attempt to enforce it in a
rapidly growing list of States; then the successful onslaught upon the
Louisiana lottery, and upon its swarm of rivals and successors; then the
gradual stamping-out of horse-racing, until finally but two or three
States permitted it, and the consequent attack upon the pool-room; then
the rise of a theatre-censorship in most of the large cities, and of a
moving picture censorship following it; then the revival of
Sabbatarianism, with the Lord's Day Alliance, a Canadian invention, in
the van; then the gradual tightening of the laws against sexual
irregularity, with the unenforceable New York Adultery Act as a typical
product; and lastly, the general ploughing up and emotional discussion
of sexual matters, with compulsory instruction in "sex hygiene" as its
mildest manifestation and the mediaeval fury of the vice crusade as its
worst.
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