Comstockery

   Comstockery, an overzealous censorship of literature and other forms of art, was coined by George Bernard Shaw in reference to Anthony Cornstock (1844-1915). People in this day and age may have a hard time believing that one narrow-minded person had the power to ban all the books and plays he felt were corrupting. But Comstock succeeded at doing it. And not simply banned: About 160 tons of books, stereotyped plates, magazines, and pictures were destroyed.

   Comstock was the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an organization that advocated the banning of all literature deemed to be salacious or corrupting. Comstock did the deeming—he was the self-appointed censor of books, plays, and pictures. He also led many campaigns against abortion, birth control, and pornography. Through his influence certain types of literature, especially that concerning birth control, were excluded from the mail by federal passage of the Comstock laws. Appointed special agent of the Post Office Department, he arrested more than three thousand persons supposedly in violation of the laws that bear his name. The Comstock Postal Act, in H. L. Mencken's words, "greatly stimulated the search for euphemisms": Pregnant became "enceinte," syphilis and gonorrhea were changed to "social diseases," and so forth.

   The inquisitor took aim at Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession. Shaw retaliated when he coined the word comstockery. Thus the self-righteous moral censor has attained a dubious immortality.

   Inspired by Comstock's censorious repression of thought and with Comstock as the guiding spirit, Boston's Watch and Ward Society was organized in 1876. The society proved to be ever vigilant in guarding the morals of the good burghers of Boston. Publishers were pleased to have their books banned because to advertise that a book was "banned in Boston" was a sure way of spurring sales throughout the nation.