Lust on Trial by Amy Werbel

Author:Amy Werbel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036040, History/United States/19th Century, HIS036060, History/United States/20th Century
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 4.14 George Schlegel Lithographic Co., The Altogether, 1896. Cigar Label. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library: The John and Carolyn Grossman Collection. See also color plate 10.

The Schlegel lithography firm produced several other cigar box labels with artists and models in the 1890s. These striking decorative labels, as always, were reserved for the interior of the cigar box, therefore presumably to be viewed only in homosocial environments. While the nudes stayed on the inside of the box, the exterior label often sported a bowdlerized version of the picture showing only the artist and not the model. In this manner, the men wealthy enough to buy an entire box of cigars could feel specially privileged—nudity once again served as a homosocial inside joke.

Given Comstock’s pique at theatrical presentations with tights, and especially those like The Clemenceau Case that generated great public excitement, it may seem surprising that he was not more actively involved in trying to suppress the play and novel in New York. This lacuna was probably due not to his opinions on the production but rather to some irritating and messy complications of vice-fighting in the 1890s. In yet another way in which Comstock personally was losing his war against indecency, many more individuals and organizations took up the “business” of suppression in the 1890s. Comstock had managed the neat trick of popularizing both vice and vice suppression.

Copies of Fléron’s novel The Clemenceau Case were in fact suppressed, but not by Comstock on behalf of the NYSSV. Instead, Joseph Britton, the agent who had been fired following the difficult times around the Knoedler trial, had formed his own rival vice-fighting society in June 1890: the New York Society for the Enforcement of Criminal Law (NYSECL). Fléron’s publisher, the American News Company, was one of the new society’s first targets. From the beginning, the NYSECL seems to have been devised mostly as a front for various nefarious schemes. The logo and the language of advertisements for its work published in newspapers seems hastily concocted, and the “society” never solicited contributions. Britton and his “director” Robert Gunn instead were cunning opportunists who made their money in other ways. The NYSSV recently had moved out of its offices at 150 Nassau Street to brighter quarters nearby, and Britton and Gunn rented the exact same rooms in which the NYSSV previously was housed. Whoever came to the door, and whatever mail came there mistakenly, was seized and the “business” of vice suppression effectively usurped from the NYSSV. The New York Sun quipped: “The history of BRITTON and the officers of his Society would make, it is said, interesting Summer reading.”132

Comstock was absolutely enraged by the existence of this new society, described in the New York World as “Rivals in Vice Crushing.” He told the paper that Britton had been fired “on account of the alleged discovery that Mr. Britton was a gambler, a handler of police hush money, and up to all sorts of sharp practices.” In his continuing critique of his rival’s “sharp

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