SMUT

A historian chronicles an 1883 trial concerning the sale of pornographic materials.

Kammen, who “fell into doing local history” by virtue of being the wife of a new hire in the History Department at Cornell University, describes the trial of a married couple, Jefferson and Helen Beardsley, for disseminating explicit images in the “village” of Ithaca, New York (it was not yet a city). Founded in 1865, Cornell was headed by a scholar rather than a preacher and had no religious affiliation, earning it the epithet “Godless Cornell.” Kammen argues that the trial of the Beardsleys, who had sold photographic negatives of nude men and women in sexual congress, came about because of collective anxiety that without god at Cornell, community morals would have to be policed through other channels. Thus, the Society for the Prevention of Crime came into being, ostensibly to “defend the new university’s shaky early reputation.” The society, comprised of “one hundred fine men”—white community leaders bent on preserving a moral code—took its cues from Anthony Comstock, whose efforts got the Comstock Laws enacted, prohibiting obscene materials, including information about birth control, from passing through the U.S. postal system. Those laws, Kammen pointedly notes, were cited in Project 2025 as rendering a federal abortion ban unnecessary—since abortion pills and related medical supplies travel through the mail, Comstock’s reach, if enforced, would effectively function as one. The author observes that those who deemed certain material disagreeable in 1883 sound “tremendously like groups and politicians who work today to regulate women’s lives.” The trial transcript is not the most gripping of historical documents, but Kammen’s writing is engaging throughout, and her argument connecting 1883 to the present day is persuasive.

A narrow slice of local history that opens, unexpectedly, onto the present.