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I n t roduc t ion | 7
souvenirs on the streets, and soon spread through the rapidly expanding industries of photography and commercial advertising. Opportunists even created new and profitable private anti-vice societies during the last years of the nineteenth century. Some of these, such as Charles Parkhurst’s Society for the Prevention of Crime, were legitimate, but others served as little more than façades for blackmail. In both cases, competition for prosecutorial targets diluted the efforts of the NYSSV at the same time that Progressive Era social reformers began insisting that civil servants and police, rather than private societies, take responsibility for law enforcement. Comstock’s efforts to remove erotic visual culture from homosocial spheres such as saloons (both low and high) contributed to his increasing personal and professional difficulties in sustaining friendships and political support. Despite his many seizures, “obscenities” flourished, not merely in New York City but in far-flung corners of the country as well, as faster transportation networks enabled the flow of commerce. Speech about pornography in the public sphere also vastly increased during these years, as stories about Comstock’s raids and targets were reprinted across the country. Americans responded to this new information, and the new sense of threat posed by Comstock, in extraordinarily diverse ways, ranging from self-censorship to even more loudly broadcasting their diverse sexual expressions. Finally, chapter 5 follows Comstock’s descent from 1895 to his death in 1915. Volume III begins with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, in which viewers were both shocked and thrilled to see a level of public exposure of nudity never before exhibited in America, in statuary, paintings, photography, and live performances. Artists including Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Frederick MacMonnies used the opportunity to vastly expand the size and specificity of details in their nude statuary. On the controversial “Midway” in Chicago, performers presented stereotypical views of scantily clad belly dancers and Dahomean villagers. This influential exhibition set a new standard for public display of the nude that thwarted Comstock’s best efforts to use censorship to shape a less sexualized public discourse.