Robert W. McAfee: The Comstock of Chicago

Anthony Comstock is synonymous with the Gilded Age crusade against vice. The 1873 “Act of the Suppression of the Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” – better known, then and now, as the “Comstock Act” – secured its namesake’s enduring notoriety. Most federal laws with an appellation honor a congressional sponsor, or, in more recent years, a victim of the issue that the law aims to address. Only the Comstock Act memorializes a man who was both the chief civilian proponent of its passage and the government bureaucrat tasked with its enforcement.¹

Comstock the tireless and cantankerous crusader makes for a compelling historical villain, but he alone could not patrol an entire nation’s mail. After all, the 1873 act represented an unprecedented federal incursion on personal privacy and state police power that required new enforcement mechanisms. As scholars Jeffrey Escoffier, Whitney Strub, and Jeffrey Patrick Colgan urge, we need to look beyond Comstock’s fanaticism to understand the innovations in “statecraft” on which the law’s enforcement depended. The “Comstock Apparatus,” as they call it, was broader than the federal act alone and required the simultaneous development of several “structural elements,” including the proliferation of state-level “little Comstock laws” and of private anti-vice societies that served quasi-public prosecutorial roles. ² While the federal law’s constitutional legitimacy rested on regulation of the national postal service, state laws could criminalize a wider range of behavior and thus represented a large share of obscenity cases. By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly every state had enacted or revised some sort of anti-obscenity statute, and eight of the country’s ten largest cities had an anti-vice society. ³ Comstock would not live in such historical infamy without these auxiliary elements.

This essay spotlights one understudied arm of the apparatus: Robert W. McAfee. Dubbed the “Anthony Comstock of Chicago,” McAfee, founding secretary of the Western Society for the Suppression of Vice (WSSV), served as agent to the Post Office for more than thirty years. Across the corpus of works written on Comstock, McAfee reliably garners a brief mention but never a dedicated study. ⁴ Although McAfee never rivaled Comstock’s prominence in the press and in public imagination, he was instrumental to the expansion and daily operation of the Comstock regime across stretches of the Midwest, Upper South, and Great Plains. McAfee followed Comstock’s lead but was not an exact facsimile: whereas Comstock was notoriously rotund, his face accentuated by fluffy muttonchops, McAfee was “[t]all, thin and angular, with tawny beard and sharp features.” ⁵ Where Comstock sought the spotlight, McAfee held a “deep desire to keep himself out of the picture.” ⁶ McAfee may not have been as colorful as Comstock, but he was equally as cunning. Lest he be upstaged by McAfee, Comstock kept a close eye on the WSSV and directly involved himself in high-profile midwestern matters. ⁷ Comstock’s cult of personality was an important part of the Comstock Apparatus, but mythologizing Comstock risks masking the machinery behind the man and the constraints on free speech and reproductive choice that persisted long after his death. ⁸

Robert W. McAfee was born in 1848 to a Presbyterian family who settled in a tiny town in northeastern Missouri. After graduating from Highland University in Kansas in 1872, he entered Princeton Theological Seminary but dropped out after one semester, apparently due to a debilitating eye condition. Determining that he was not cut out for a bookish life in the ministry, McAfee identified another mission: combatting vice. He returned to Missouri and organized a branch of the American Railway Literary Union, a group dedicated to purifying train travelers’ reading choices. He grew interested in Comstock’s work and, by 1877, united local groups in Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis to form the WSSV. ⁹

The WSSV was one of several regional organizations modeled off Comstock’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV). Other influential societies were established in Boston, Baltimore, and San Francisco – all cities with high rates of immigration, where reformers capitalized on xenophobia and concern for the protection of native-born white youth. ¹⁰ Each society’s success depended upon a zealous secretary with immaculate morals. The model faltered if the secretary did not practice what he preached: San Francisco’s society suffered a blow when its leader, C. R. Bennett, was sentenced to San Quentin prison for attempting to murder the father of a young woman he had reportedly seduced and then pushed to obtain an abortion. ¹¹ McAfee, with his reserved personality and spotless reputation, was much better suited to the job. In 1884, he was appointed as a Post Office inspector, in the same unique – and unpaid – role as Comstock. ¹² The Post Office employed a fleet of inspectors, who policed obscenity alongside other mail offenses and were generally paid a salary well over $1,000. Comstock and McAfee, however, specialized in a particular class of crimes and received only a nominal annuity that they routinely declined, relying instead on the financial support of their private vice societies. ¹³ Forgoing a government salary was a savvy strategy that signaled their dedication to the cause and afforded them some political autonomy. ¹⁴

McAfee’s dual role took him far and wide. By 1896, the WSSV boasted new branches in Omaha, Lincoln, Minneapolis, and Des Moines. ¹⁵ Although McAfee was most active in Chicago, his name appeared in obscenity cases everywhere from Atlanta to Salt Lake City. ¹⁶ Like Comstock, McAfee targeted a wide range of “obscene” materials: he did go after abortifacients and contraceptives but more often pursued erotic literature and images, publications promoting free love, threatening or defamatory letters, and lotteries. ¹⁷ Whether acting on a citizen complaint or merely following a hunch, McAfee traversed more than 1.5 million miles investigating the purveyors of allegedly obscene content. ¹⁸ McAfee was, Comstock praised, “a whole regiment in himself.” ¹⁹ Yet he worked closely with prosecutors and Post Office leadership, and he likely sent regular updates to Cincinnati’s William J. Breed, the long-serving president of the WSSV and a wealthy manufacturer of funeral supplies. ²⁰ Over the span of McAfee’s career, the WSSV claimed credit for 978 arrests, 818 convictions or guilty pleas, nearly $170,000 in fines, and millions of confiscated items, including books, pamphlets, photographs, pills, powders, and rubber goods. ²¹

Prohibited from opening first-class sealed mail without a warrant, postal inspectors developed other strategies for policing private correspondence. ²² One particularly controversial strategy was the use of decoy letters, where inspectors would pose as interested customers to try and solicit incriminating replies from suspected purveyors of obscenity. Although many writers and some judges denounced the practice of “us[ing] the post office machinery to make the criminal,” the U.S. Supreme Court in Grimm v. United States (1895) rejected the argument that the use of decoy letters was unjust entrapment. ²³ McAfee, whose adoption of the pen name “Herman Huntress” spurred the dispute in Grimm, had a prolific stock of pseudonyms. As one critic charged, “if you do not care to call him McAfee you can address him by any of the following aliases and hit the same meddler every time, Nellie B. Clark, R.W. Williams, Nettie G. Harlan, Nellie Stratton and Charles Stratton.” ²⁴ Although providers of abortifacients and contraceptives were not McAfee’s primary targets, he often utilized decoy letters in such cases. With the help of an assumed name and a roving Post Office box, McAfee and his associates preyed upon doctors’ sympathies by impersonating women pleading for information about how to access contraception or end a pregnancy. ²⁵

Eventually, life on the road – and a chronic kidney condition – caught up with McAfee. With little fanfare, newspapers announced that the “Anthony Comstock of Chicago” had “dropped dead” in the middle of Chicago’s State Street on March 23, 1909. ²⁶ McAfee’s sudden death spared him an uncertain future. Historians have charted how Comstock’s reign was in jeopardy by the first decade of the twentieth century, as many of Comstock’s original supporters passed away and his attacks on fine art earned him new, even fiercer critics. ²⁷ Less well-known are the simultaneous revisions to postal policy that threatened both Comstock and McAfee’s distinctive mix of government power and private pay. For decades, the duo had somehow been spared the scrutiny of civil service reform and the push for salarization. ²⁸ When Congress in 1905 strengthened restrictions on voluntary service by government officers, Post Office leadership took a hard look at Comstock and McAfee’s positions. ²⁹ In a memorandum to the Postmaster General, the Chief Inspector concluded, “I am clearly of opinion that there is no authority of law for appointing them as post-office inspectors either at a nominal salary or without salary.” ³⁰ Reform was swift: by 1907, Comstock and McAfee were each salaried at $1200. ³¹ This change – both a raise and a demotion – signaled their waning power. Although the WSSV did not disband after McAfee’s death, its presence faded and its ties to the Post Office weakened. ³² On September 21, 1915, amid rumors that the Post Office intended to terminate his inspectorship, Comstock passed away, concluding a career that spanned forty-two years and ten presidents. ³³ John Saxton Sumner led the NYSSV until 1950, but he shifted the Society’s priorities and never received a postal appointment. ³⁴

In some ways, the deaths of Comstock and McAfee marked the end of an era – one in which federal anti-obscenity law rested on delegation and deference to a strange breed of privately funded public official. Comstock’s outsized reputation inflated perception of his geographic reach and the threat of enforcement, contributing to the “chill” that persisted after his death. ³⁵ Comstock was, many may hope, an inimitable figure. Yet, associating the Gilded Age anti-obscenity campaign with any one person – whether that be Comstock or McAfee – obscures the vast network of bureaucrats and citizens that its administration required and the array of individuals that resisted its spread. Moreover, focus on a figurehead does not explain the subsequent salience of the federal and state Comstock laws through much of the twentieth century. Even as courts in the 1930s constrained the reach of the federal law’s prohibitions on contraception, stigma surrounding reproductive healthcare lingered and access remained difficult, dangerous, and inequitable. ³⁶ Meanwhile, states and cities vigorously policed other forms of “vice,” such as gay bars and queer social spaces, and many government operations continued to rely on private-public partnerships. ³⁷ Thus Comstock’s cult of personality, while an important part of his power, past and present, cannot alone explain the reasons why his namesake regime took hold and the ways in which it endured.