"Public Foes": Secularism and Vice Suppression in Nineteenth-Century New York

• In Event: Policing Religions: Secularism, Race, and Governance

Abstract

The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), led by Anthony Comstock, partnered with the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) to root out the various urban vices afflicting the young citizens of New York. Unlike most other moral reform and vice suppression organizations, the NYSSV had the power to arrest. They were, in a very real sense, a police organization. In this paper I examine two sets of data. First, I focus on Comstock’s public writing, especially his book *Frauds Exposed* (1880) and his public debates about effective practices in policing and governance. I highlight the use of the category “fraudulence,” especially the way Comstock used it to create religo-racial others on the basis of their (lack of) trustworthiness. In so doing, he also argued that proper religion and public citizenship both were based in forthrightness and the virtue of sincerity. The untrustworthy, then, were threats to public order. Second, I place these qualitative analyses into conversation with the NYSSV’s arrest records, which are currently housed at the Library of Congress. I have transcribed the written records and produced quantitative analyses of them, i.e., statistics on arrestees’ race, nation of origin, age, religion, and other information. These records offer insight not only into the rhetoric of vice, policing, and crime, but into the lived effects of the NYSSV’s racialized campaigns.

The paper advances a few arguments. Most centrally, I argue that the regulation of religion (which includes the assignment, classification, and recording of religious identities) is a central component of secular governance. Rather than see Comstock’s project as a singularly “religious” crusade, I argue that it is secular in the sense that it involved state-sponsored exercises of power in the governance of subjects’ lives. Here, the public/private division in traditional secularization theories is troubled, because the NYSSV relied in part on theo-political conceptions of (good) religious belief’s positive effects on public life and the threat posed by bad, duplicitous religions (or irreligions). Furthermore, Comstock addressed the public in order to mobilize them against threats. In his words, he aimed to “arouse public sentiment against the vampires who are casting deadly poison into the fountain of moral purity in the children; and at the same time expose to public indignation the infidels and liberals who defend these moral cancer-planters” (*Frauds Exposed*, 5). Here I show how Comstock constructed “the public” as an affectively bonded community, defined by love for “their” children and over and against their monstrous others. Most broadly, then, this paper argues that “religion” has been an important category for domestic and foreign policing, especially as it intersected with other categories, such as race, class, nationality, and gender, that have received more attention in American studies scholarship.

Author

• Charles McCrary, Florida State University