Tony was not the kind of guy anyone enjoyed hanging out with. To call him boring would be a little bit of an understatement. The man's idea of a dirty joke involved two pigs sitting together in the mud. His claimed view of a perfect day involved strolling through a meadow discussing the bible, though in reality it probably more involved sticking his nose where it was none of his business. He didn't drink, smoke, gamble, or do any kind of vice whatsoever. A veteran of the Civil War, Tony's biggest complaint of military life was all the profanity. You've probably never heard of this kill-joy, but it is sufficient to say that he had a greater effect on censorship than any other American.
To be fair to Tony, it wasn't like he had that great of a start. Born and raised in an ultra-conservative household, Tony found himself living in a world that was making him decidedly uncomfortable. The America of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a rapidly changing place. Old Victorian ideals were beginning to give way to more liberal views towards art, sex, and women's rights. At first, Tony had little to do with any of this. He seemed mostly content to support his young family and work at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), which at the time did not have certain connotations suggested by the popular song by the Village People. However, after his only child died in infancy, Tony seemed to completely lose his shit. Grief can express itself in many ways. For Tony his grief expressed itself via a declaration of war on moral corruption.
Tony became a founding member of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), which soon became famous for its work to suppress and ban any literary works it considered smutty. Supported by the YMCA, Tony and the NYSSV roamed the streets of New York, monitoring newsstands for anything indecent. In cases where smut was found, the dealers were quickly handed over to the proper authorities, who in thanks gave the NYSSV half of all fines levied as a result. However, these early attempts did little to prevent the promulgation of smut, most of which traveled via the mail. Tony, fully aware of this, began concentrating his energies into politics. For some reason, few of the politicians of the day wanted to be branded the protectors of perverts, the result being that Tony got what would become known as the Comstock Act passed through Congress. The Comstock Act made it illegal for anyone to mail erotica, contraceptives, abortion aids, sex toys, any materials with information regarding the previous, and even personal letters alluding to any sexual content. To top it all off, Tony was given a position with the postal service as a special inspector, giving him the ability to go through people's mail as he pleased.
Given that at the time the Comstock Act was in effect, everything was mailed, this meant that nearly everything was censored in the U.S. For Tony, the removal of smut was a matter of life and death. In his view, smut led to a moral degradation which in turn led to venereal diseases, alcoholism, and drug addiction. What exactly was smut you might ask? Well, it was pretty much whatever Tony decided was smut, and his view on the matter was quite broad to the level that he even banned the mailing of anatomy textbooks. Literature, plays, art, and science - none of it was safe from Tony's prudish wrath. He quickly became the bane of most of the early civil liberties groups, but the darling of most of the church groups. Regardless of what anybody thought of him, it does have to be admitted that Tony was a clever son of a bitch. One of his favorite tactics was to, while pretending to be someone else, order lascivious items through the mail, only to have the senders arrested soon after the items’ arrival. Over time Tony's investigations grew to include not just the distribution of pornography and contraceptives, but also women's rights materials and items related to commercial fraud. Tony called himself “the weeder in God's garden”.
Over the four decades of Tony's career it is believed that he destroyed 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates used for printing, and nearly 4 million pictures. Tony also liked to boast that he was responsible for 4,000 arrests and 15 suicides. Many people chose to kill themselves rather than face the shame of a public trial, amongst them a prominent abortionist and the author of the first marriage manual. For a time, J. Edgar Hoover studied under Tony to learn about his methods. Late in life Tony was bashed over the head by an anonymous attacker. This attack only made him more zealous in his cause. Tony died at the age of seventy-one, unable to hold back the steadily rising tide of smut. Throughout the 1920's and 1930's, court cases struck down the Comstock Act bit by bit. However, the last parts weren't repealed until the 1970's.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anthony_Comstock.jpg