The Comstock Act and Its Impact on Libraries Today

Can librarians resist the criminalization of their work?

Passed in 1873 and named for Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the act prohibits “the use of the mail and common carriers (such as today’s UPS or FedEx) to transport all medications and obstetrical supplies used in abortion care.” Since 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to abortion, the use of mifepristone and misoprostol, two drugs that can induce a medical abortion, has increased. Because these drugs are often delivered by mail, conservatives are reviving the Comstock Act in an effort to extinguish access to them.

Will this effort succeed? Too early to tell. The Supreme Court has already turned away one attempt to restrict access to mifepristone. However, there is another troublesome section of the Comstock Act, one that has nothing to do with abortion rights. This section makes it illegal to send “obscene, lewd or lascivious,” “immoral,” or “indecent” publications through the mail, as well as to sell, give away, or even possess such material.

In other words, the Comstock Act allows the government to ban books.

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Book banning is not a modern invention. Rather, it was present during the United States’ earliest days. In 1637, the English lawyer Thomas Morton published New English Canaan, a description of the New World inspired by his own disastrous visit in the 1620s. Because the book criticized the Puritans’ harsh treatment of Native Americans, Puritan authorities outlawed it in the colonies. A decade or so later, William Pynchon, called by writer Daniel Crown the “forgotten founding father of colonial New England,” saw his book The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption burned by officials in Boston, Massachusetts.

Other one-off bans followed, most religious in nature, until the Comstock Act whetted a national appetite for literary restriction. This appetite was fed by Comstock’s New York society and others like it. By the turn of the century, the United States had become reform-minded, committed to stamping out the misery caused by prostitution, gambling, alcohol abuse, “impure literature,” and other social ills. Society leaders took it upon themselves to enforce moral standards and suppress what they considered immoral behavior.

Of course, not everyone embraced this sort of paternalism. The publisher D. M. Bennett, a leading figure in the nineteenth-century “freethought” movement, circulated a petition to revise the Comstock Act, along with his pamphlet Anthony Comstock: His Career of Cruelty and Crime. The petition received seventy thousand signatures. On August 1, 1878, an anti-Comstock group called the National Defense Association held a protest in Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Six thousand people attended.

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Despite these protests, the Comstock Act remained on the books, though its enforcement waned over the years. Perhaps its most famous application came when Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, owners of a Chicago-based magazine called The Little Review, began publishing segments of James Joyce’s Ulysses. An April 1920 excerpt, the so-called “Nausicaa” section, describes Leopold Bloom masturbating on a beach as a young woman, Gerty MacDowell, flashes him a bit of thigh while watching fireworks with her friends.

"[Gerty] would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow, the cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely! O, so soft, sweet, soft!"

Some subscribers complained, and the US Postal Service began seizing and destroying issues of the magazine. In September 1920, John Sumner, Comstock’s successor at the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, filed a complaint. A month later, Heap and Anderson were arrested, tried, and fined $100. A dejected Anderson quit the magazine not long after, ceding control to Heap. By 1929, it had ceased publication altogether.

The Comstock Act has been scarcely used in decades. Modern freedom to read advocates, however, think the act is poised to surge back into prominence. One such advocate is professor and author Amy Werbel, who, in a 2024 interview, noted recent conservative efforts to do one of the things the Comstock Act allows: prosecute distributors of allegedly obscene books. 

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“According to the Washington Post,” she said, “there are at least 17 states that are considering laws that strip protections for librarians from prosecution for the distribution of ‘harmful’ or ‘obscene’ content.” These laws promise hefty fines and, in some cases, jail time. The lawmakers are inspired by “the same mix of political opportunism and genuine spiritual, evangelical mission” that motivated Comstock, leading to “culture war issues that they can use to activate a certain percentage of their electorate.”

What will be the impact of such laws on libraries? Werbel thinks it will be minimal: “Libraries are really popular. Most of us grew up having our early literacy shaped and formed by having access to a couple of libraries.” For her, it’s one thing to draft a law criminalizing librarians’ actions; it’s another thing to enforce it. “Americans,” she said, “are not going to be impressed by the sight of librarians prosecuted and hauled off to detention facilities.”

I think that underestimates how radicalized the issue has become. Look at the case of Little v. Llano County, when the county librarian was fired and the entire board of trustees replaced over a series of challenged books. Look at the firing of Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress. Look at libraries that have split apart, shut down (almost), or lost funding over book tussles. Some have had bomb threats. There is a lot to be said for the staying power of librarians, but it’s naive to assume we will always win out.

Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

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