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The Perfect Storm: Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago Sex Radicals: Moses Harman, Ida Craddock, Alice Stockham and the Comstock Obscenity Laws

On the afternoon of New Year's Day 1907 at the Masonic Temple in Chicago, Moses Harman, the publisher of Lucifer the Light Bearer, and newly released from prison, received a rousing welcome from the seven-hundred people gathered to greet him. Several speakers vowed to join Harman in jail should he face further confinement in his fight against the "Comstockian misuse of the obscenity laws." They asked all assembled to take this pledge as well, and almost the entire audience rose in solidarity. The seventy-six year old Harman had served part of his prison time at the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet, breaking rocks for eight-and-a-half hours a day in the dead of winter. He contracted bronchitis and spent the last part of his ten-month sentence at the prison hospital in Leavenworth, Kansas. Many prominent reformers spoke at the gathering. Those present also heard letters of support sent by colleagues of Harman unable to attend the reception.1 Among those who sent letters were two reformers personally involved with Moses Harman. Theodore Schroeder, an attorney and secretary of the Free Speech League, wrote that the editor's persecution caused him to give "much thought to the legal status of our 'freedom of the press.'" He promised to have more to say in the future.2 Dr. Alice Bunker Stockham, a social purity reformer, the head of a prosperous Chicago publishing firm, and an internationally known author of works on sexual relations and women's health, also addressed free speech issues in her letter. She called for "more light - more knowledge upon hitherto forbidden topics, and the freedom guaranteed by the constitution of the United States to disseminate this knowledge."3 In 1905 Dr. Stockham battled the federal obscenity law and lost. Ida Craddock, another social purity reformer and a sex therapist, was missing from the scene. Rather than face a long prison sentence for defying the Comstock Act, she committed suicide.4 Moses Harman, Alice B. Stockham, and Ida C. Craddock shared a common vision - they each sought to educate the public about sexual relations. This discussion will focus on how the three came to know each other and the role they played in the struggle to publicly discuss sexual matters. Harman's New Year's Day reception offered a rare glimpse of some the men and women of the time who dared to challenge the federal and state obscenity laws. The struggle over sexual discourse in Chicago and elsewhere exposed the conflict inherent in American Victorian society about both public and private sexual behavior. The social purity movement, which grew out of the need of an expanding middle class to control sexual conversation and "create a single sexual standard," helped to frame the argument. The organization evolved "from local grass-roots origins in the 1870s to a national, institutionalized and more conservative movement in the 1890s." In order to "curb male sexuality," social purists called for laws to make prostitution illegal. They endorsed "voluntary motherhood," and emphasized "women's control of their own bodies." Over time internal tensions developed in the movement, since its proponents views regarding sexual relations covered a broad spectrum of beliefs. A number of purity crusaders voiced concerns about the growing "danger of vicious literature," supporting "the suppression of sexual expression in the public and the confinement of sexuality to reproduction."5 In direct response to the clamping down on sexual discourse, a legal struggle ensued over free speech issues.6 David M. Rabban writing in Free Speech: in Its Forgotten Years proposes that an "extensive and diverse history of free speech" existed in America between 1870 and 1920. According to Rabban, prior to World War I, there was pervasive judicial hostility "to virtually all free speech claims." Libertarian radicals countered by mounting a comprehensive defense demanding"broad protection for almost every expression."7 At the center of what became a perfect storm was the "Comstock" Postal Act. …