Villa Park, an enclave along Wreck Pond in modern Spring Lake, had one prominent family at its start. Reverend Frank Chandler was the minister of the Freehold Presbyterian Church and then the Director of the Young Ladies Seminary there. His brother-in-law, Anthony Comstock, built cottages for both of them on the 400 block of Ocean Road. They were not wealthy enough to purchase a Spring Lake beach lot and cottage, but they were well known. Prim and proper Spring Lake was a perfect place for this crusader. Comstock bought four lots in the resort in 1876, next to the Villa Park House.
The old Villa Park House is now a private home
Anthony Comstock made his mark as the Nation's foremost advocate against vice.
After calling the police on dozens of smut merchants, he watched them quickly return to their trade. Backed by the YMCA and Banker Morris K Jessup, he lobbied for the passage of the Comstock Act in 1873. This postal law was actually called "An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use." and was intended to make the US Mail off limits to obscenity, fraudsters, and flim flam artists. This was the hammer used by Comstock to arrest on federal charges anyone sending items through the mail that he felt were unwholesome. It also prevented the operators from paying off local police to look the other way. He fashioned himself, “The Weeder of the Garden of the Lord”.
The moral crusader, Anthony Comstock
He formed the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and convinced Jessup, fellow banker J.P. Morgan, Samuel Colgate, soap baron. and copper millionaire William Dodge to join the board. The wealthy men paid Comstock's salary. He added speaking engagements to rally his cause and pad his income.
He was feared. He shut down the very profitable Louisiana Lottery, and many of the local games, confiscated truckloads of books, pamphlets, and playing cards, rubber objects of pleasure, abortion, and contraceptive literature. He closed dozens of operators and arrested their owners. Conviction carried heavy fines and up to a five-year federal sentence for every offense.
Comstock’s brother in law ran the Freehold Ladies Seminary
Comstock or a straw buyer would purchase the objectionable items, and then arrest the seller. The Post Office deputized him to make arrests. There was no limit to where he would go. In 1877, he mailed a letter requesting a newsletter, under a pseudonym, from the Squan post office to one of his harshest critics, D.M. Bennett.
Bennett published the Free Thinker, a provocative magazine that challenged religion and some of the most puritanical practitioners. He did not pull punches at Comstock's censorship. “Comstock is virtually a Ku Klux,” Bennett declared, “and his Christian clique is a Ku Klux Klan.” His articles promoted reason, science, and free discussion over tradition and religion. Comstock wanted to send a message, and he looked to silence Bennett.
The two “obscene” articles that caused Bennett’s arrest were his "An Open Letter to Jesus Christ" and Arthur B. Bradford’s science article "How Do Marsupials Propagate Their Kind?" In highly public trials, Bennett was convicted and sentenced to 13 months of hard labor in the Albany Penitentiary for distributing obscenity.
Lotteries used the mail to collect entries. They even set up offshore. They were a prime target of Comstock
In 1878, Comstock captured an even larger prize. He arrested Madame Restell, a fabulously rich woman whose business was very quiet and lucrative. She sold special powders that prevented or ended pregnancy, and had also been performing abortion operations for over thirty years. An early ad noted that Ann Trow’s pseudonym was the name of her grandmother, the inventor of the powders. As Madame Restell, she sold:
"Celebrated powders for married ladies. Hundreds have availed themselves of their use with a satisfaction and a success that has at once dispelled the fears and doubts of the most timid."
By then, she operated from a massive Fifth Avenue townhouse purchased with her earnings. Posing as the husband of a woman looking for Madame Restell’s pills, Comstock had Restell arrested for distributing abortion related material and literature.
When the Madame was found dead by a servant in her bathtub with a slit throat just before her trial, Comstock coldly bragged she was the 15th suicide he had caused. "A bloody end to a bloody life" he wrote.
In 1882, Comstock reached too far. His target was classic literature. Two traveling book sellers in Asbury Park worked for a New York publisher, James Miller. They sold books via auction at a rolling booth at the seaside resort.
One of their titles was The Heptameron, a 16th-century French collection of 72 short stories by Margaret of Navarre. Some of the stories were spicy enough to raise eyebrows. but the book was also highly regarded with famous quotes: Here are some samples:
"Is it better to speak or to die?" "There are few words that cannot be mended, but life once lost can never be regained".
"I hold that if our love be based on the beauty, grace, love, and favour of a woman, and our purpose be pleasure, honour, or profit, such love cannot long endure; for when the foundation on which it rests is gone, the love itself departs from us."
The book in question had many stories. The threat was that any library book could be subject to this type of analysis. (Project Guttenberg)
A young law student named Andrew Bailey, likely a plant by Comstock, purchased the book and complained to James Bradley, who would be the lead witness for the prosecution. He underlined the scandalous sections of the book, like the story of Geburon, which tells of a Franciscan friar who abducts the wife of a gentleman, and she enjoys the forbidden encounter.
New Jersey and 23 other states had enacted their own "Little Comstock Laws" to make the distribution of obscenity illegal through any means, not just the mail. Obscenity was judged by its effect on the most impressionable members of society, particularly children and adolescents, even if it were just part of a work.
James Bradley, brush manufacturer and the founder of Asbury Park, had called in Comstock, who had been giving lectures in Ocean Grove and Freehold in support of his morals crusade. Bradley was trying to keep his resort attractive to the religious. He had just completed the building of his own Presbyterian Church on the Hill. He would hire Frank Chandler as the second minister there in 1888.
Victorian norms were integral to the formation of the Jersey Shore Beach resorts. Polite people covered up completely. No one walked in the streets in bathing clothing in a fine resort. If you did not use a bathhouse, you could not use a beach without being labeled a "dripper". Much of the formality of Victorian life was to socially separate those who knew and had the means to follow the rules from those who did not.
The exposure of skin and the public discussion of anything of a sexual nature in public were viewed as “shoddy”. A tan was a dead giveaway that you worked outdoors. Ocean Grove was founded to provide a pious Methodist enclave. James Bradley's Asbury Park mimicked some of the rules of the Grove with better accommodations. Part of the resort's appeal was to"protect" people from common vices.
The reputation of Long Branch to the north had been ceded to the shoddyites, New York entertainers, gamblers, and drinkers. Vice was freely available, whereas Spring Lake was considered most proper, dry outside of your hotel, and chaste. Men felt safe leaving their wives and daughters while they worked in the cities.
This culture celebrated Comstock. His talks warned parents that access to the penny press and other forms of smut was ruining the minds of their innocent children. “O let us clean out the pockets of our boys, and clean out our homes, and banish this evil from the land. You care for the body and the stomach of your child, why not care for the moral nature of the soul? To allow this evil, to neglect to apply the remedy, is a crime against children; a crime against society and an insult to God.”
The Asbury Park case was widely examined. This was not some rag or back-room booklet; this was a classic work included in many libraries. Publishers watched the testimony closely.
In a rare loss for Comstock, the defendants were acquitted, not necessarily on the literary arguments, but perhaps due to the limited number of sales. But the unusual defeat was celebrated by the book publishers.
Comstock, was stung. He told the Monmouth Democrat that he didn’t “instigate” the case and only showed up late to offer “legal citations”. This was clearly not true. NYSSV records and his own testimony confirm he led the raid, gathered evidence, and pushed for a conviction. Comstock was dodging blame when the gavel fell against him.
James Bradley slowly lost his tight moral control over Asbury Park. He eventually embraced a more commercial resort, bringing in bands and beauty contests, leading to the modern, vibrant, progressive, and artistic community.
Anthony Comstock's long shadow of censorship lingered well past his 1915 death, with the last of the Comstock laws being enforced until the 1960s. And the primness of Spring Lake still gave citations to girls for wearing bathing suits on the streets into the 1950s. The Comstock home in Villa Park is long gone, but the Villa Park house still stands, now a private residence at 417 Ocean Rd.
The federal act is still on the books, although it lies dormant due to interpretations of privacy, the First Amendment’s free speech clause, and case law. Our founding fathers freely quoted John Milton, who said, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” But Comstock happened anyway. Our right to write and say what is on our mind is only as good as our enthusiasm to support others’ right to the same.