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In 1815, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania handed down a verdict against a defendant, Jesse Sharpless, who “did exhibit and show for money, to persons … a certain lewd, wicked, scandalous, infamous, and obscene painting, representing a man in an obscene, impudent, and indecent posture with a woman, to the manifest corruption and subversion of youth, and other citizens, to the evil example of all others in like case offending, and against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
Thus the first conviction by a United States court for obscenity occurred in connection with a picture. Six years later, in 1821, the first obscenity case involving a book was heard in Massachusetts. The defendant Peter Holmes was convicted for publishing John Cleland's Fanny Hill.
The courts were beginning to assume the power of censorship formerly exercised by the various churches. However, in the absence of actual statutes defining and regulating obscenity, these early decisions were equivalent to legislation, an uncomfortable task for American law courts, with which they were to flounder for some forty years, until 1873 when Congress passed the Comstock laws.
Though the Comstock laws purported to give the courts something to interpret, the laws were actually so emotionally conceived and hastily written that the courts were virtually left to flounder for another forty years with the issue of obscenity and its censorship. Moreover, Anthony Comstock, the fanatic crusader who lobbied the laws through Congress (with the support of J. P. Morgan and the YMCA) and who went on to be appointed special agent for the execution of the laws, reigned so ruthlessly as official censor that the courts had few opportunities to formulate legal concepts of censorship. The leading publishers simply bowed to Comstock's “Society for the Suppression of Vice.” Even the obstreperous H. L. Mencken found himself seeking absolution from Comstock's offices, rather than legal relief from the courts, for