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. This blog post spotlights one understudied arm of the apparatus: Robert W. McAfee. 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.
The Ghosts of Great Lakes
In 1918 in the northern suburban fringe of Chicago, an insidious illness killed twice the number of naval personnel in two months than combat did during the entire First World War. The so-called Spanish influenza epidemic swept through Great Lakes Naval Training Station “like the Black Plague,” recalled Martin Birkham, a YMCA volunteer at the training station.[1] The hard choices made at Great Lakes should haunt us today.