The Trouble with Tom (19 page)

Eventually water closets evolved into the familiar tank-and-chain model. But water is an imperfect medium for waste. For one thing, what water was to be found in cities was not very palatable to begin with. Some wells located near graveyards even had what was delicately termed "a churchyard taste" to their water, and discharging massive amounts of fecal matter into the groundwater and into rivers hardly helped. And the underwater decomposition of sewage is inefficient; it's an anaerobic process that works much more slowly
than aerobic decomposition.

So if water was the problem, why not remove the water? Earth closets were, not to put too fine a point upon things, a wooden box you squatted over. Equipped with a little beach shovel and a bucket of ashes and dirt to scatter over your pile—a primitive charcoal system—it both covered up the smell and speeded your waste's conversion into usable farm manure. But earth closets, in the early days, sometimes had the look of. . . well, a
contraption
.

Foote's insight was that it was no good to sermonize people into doing the right thing: that only works briefly with most people, and permanently with the conscientious few. Most have to see why something is in their own interest, and it needs to be made convenient and attractive. And so the burnished mahogany Wake-field earth closets hawked by Dr. Foote were handsome, refined—rather like relieving oneself into a really nice piano. It featured an array of levers and spring-loaded slats to automatically cover everything up for you. And as they improved in design over the years, earth closets did indeed have their converts. In Britain, the Lancaster Grammar School found them splendid for schoolboys, as their old water closets had kept getting clogged up "by reason of marbles, Latin grammar covers, and other properties being thrown down them."

I suppose earth closets had other healthful advantages too. Any number of Victorian sexual neuroses become understandable when you learn that one water commode mass-produced in Lancashire was named the Clencher.

But August Woehler was a dissatisfied customer. A very dissatisfied customer. He wanted his
life
—his health, his love, his manhood—back from the doctor who had stolen it from him. Yet when Foote insisted to detectives that he hadn't recognized his assailant, the doctor was telling the truth. Foote had to be, because once his assailant was well enough, the fellow had gone back to the corner of Twenty-eighth and Lexington every night since, and nearly every day. And there he lurked, holding his injured hand, watching the house. The doctor had gone about his business again, unaware that just yards away stood August Woehler: watching, waiting, deciding on the best moment to kill him.

"I have been trying to throw it off mind, and not die a murderer, but when night comes on I can't help myself," agonized one unsent letter in Woehler's pocket. "The nearer I come to this house, the more I feel like committing the deed."

He had come close—so close—that afternoon in Foote's examination room. "I was thinking how, in a few minutes, he would be shot in the bowels, and he would lie there, with his brains blown out. But things did not turn out that way," he admitted in another letter. "I might have shot him in the back," he mused, "but I did not want to do that, for it would have looked kind of mean."

And so there, on a cold November night, this thoughtful wouldbe murderer and his careless would-be victim went about their separate business. The world would find out about the gunman's life soon enough; Foote's was already well-known. For while Paine's boldest assertion—that we had no need of kings—was laid forth from the outset of
Common Sense,
its medical namesake was more circumspect but no less stunning. Hidden in the back of
Medical
Common Sense
is a short section marked "The Prevention of Conception." It contains perhaps the single most important sentence written by any American author of his time:

"I shall be wiling to direct married people in this important matter,
who apply in writing."

Traveling through the West when it was still at its wildest, the writer George Macdonald kept finding that one man had apparently preceded him everywhere he went—and it didn't matter just how far into the wilderness he ventured. "I went into a shack where a wood chopper lived alone," he marveled. 'There was one room, one shelf, and two books on the shelf." One was an almanac; the other was by Edward Bliss Foote.

It is hard to realize today how profound—or how profoundly forgotten—he impact of Dr. Foote's little book was.
Medical
Common Sense
sold 250,000 copies, and an expanded 1870 version retitled
Plain Home Talk
went on to sell 500,00—(blockbuster numbers even today, and an absolutely immense run back then. The contraception advice alone would have saved many from death in childbirth, and changed the economic prospects of innumerable others. Publishers in New York, London, and Berlin sold editions in English and German, featuring endless permutations of size and content—excerpted pamphlets, weighty family editions covering all facets of health, and little easy-to-hide editions focused on sex.

When Foote inserted that fateful line "I shall be willing to direct married people in this important matter," he was opening a cultural floodgate. Trickles had been seeping in for years already, beginning with the first smuggled copies of Richard Carlile's
Every
Woman's Book. By 1830, New Yorkers could prevent the "social brutality of illegitimate pregnancy" with the vaginal sponges described in Robert Dale Owen's
Moral Physiology
, while Dr. Charles Knowlton's similar Fruits of
Philosophy
(1832) proved so popular that, even after Knowlton was convicted of obscenity in Massachusetts, a juror came up to him afterward and asked if he could buy a copy.

But these guides were often published or pirated under the murkiest of circumstances, with pseudonyms and a "correspondence system" of different publishers in each city, and then distributed at railway stations and other locales fit for quick and anonymous transactions. In what must be the beginning of targeted spam, marital aid manufacturers and publishers would cleverly slip pamphlets for their goods under the doors of couples whose marriages had been announced in local newspapers. Books directed to married couples, at least, were less liable to be prosecuted; one, Frederick Hollick's
Marriage Guide
, went through an astonishing two hundred printings between 1850 and 1860.

What made E. B. Foote different from his predecessors was his shamelessness. Foote was perhaps the first American sexual reformer to hide in plain sight. He gave you his addresses, his prices, and his products. And sex—though admittedly "his favorite subject—was only part of the continuum of his health services for everything from indigestion to consumption. He was not a dirty old man at the railway platform; he had nothing to hide; he was a
physician
.

Business at the doctor's new Manhattan office boomed. Foote patent medicines like Magnetic Ointment and Dr. Foote's Eye Sharpener turned handsome profits. Meanwhile, Magnetic Anti-Bilious Pills were also hawked for impotency and-for your inevitable return visit after that first cure-for syphilitic sores and gonorrhea. Foote pamphlets claimed that his offices at 120 Lexington Avenue were flooded with letters from grateful patients: 'They are convincing. They are overwhelming! . . . There are cords of letters—actually cords—which the doctor has no time to look over."
The New York Times
carried Foote ads trumpeting OLD EYES MADE NEW WITHOUT SPECTACLES and COMFORT FOR THE RUPTURED, and the enticing CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION FOR THE MARRIED.

His letters probably also included a fair number of attorney bills. As befitted a leading birth control publisher, Foote was also the inventor and manufacturer of his own line of condoms—made from the membranes of specially selected Rhine fish, and "flexible, and silky in texture, and a perfect conductor of electricity and magnetism"—and he also sold his own patented rubber diaphragms. For his inventive troubles, Foote found himself squarely in the sights of postal inspector Anthony Comstock. As Comstock's moral grandstanding and influence grew, so did Foote's problems. After Congress passed the so-called Comstock Law in 1873, which outlawed contraceptive advertising, Special Agent Comstock's very first act was to indict the man he considered the worst sexual menace in the country: Dr. Edward Bliss Foote.

And yet it proved peculiarly difficult to peg Foote as some sort of nasty little pervert. Like a medical Walt Whitman, E. B. Foote saw nothing impure in human bodies. He sang the body electric. He also sang the "electro-magnetic preventive machine," a worthless birth control gizmo hawked for $15 by his mail-order business. But for a man denounced in early credit reports as "a splendid specimen of the genus humbug," Foote was an extraordinarily successful and respected entrepreneur. He even ran for Congress, albeit unsuccessllly—for, as one friend mused, Foote was in "every party that never carried an election." But the money kept flowing in, and when Comstock came after him, Foote could afford good lawyers: not only did he get off from his charges with a fine, he then went on to finance the legal defense of Susan B. Anthony and other persecuted colleagues. Foote was also helping finance, of all people,
Comstock's own father.
Apparently the old miscreant had been thrown out of the house, nearly penniless, by his morally zealous son.

By the time E. B. Foote revised
Medical Common Sense
in 1870, his book had become a veritable Sears catalogue of the latest radical idealism for the 1870 season: everything from animal rights ('The dawn of the millennium cannot light up human hands and arms red with blood of slaughtered animals . . . The ingenious Yankee will invent a substitute for leather, and we already have enough substitutes for ivory and bone.") to dancing lessons being included in Christian masses. Eat lots of fruits and vegetables, Foote recommends heartily: try shiatsu and botanical remedies! These are now all the stuff of Style section and
Mother Jones
ads; the only surprise is finding them in Victorian garb. Other predictions by Foote are familiar in a more haunting way, though:

It is urged by many that capital punishment restrains people from committing crimes for which that penalty is inflicted; but statistics show that more murders are committed in Massachusetts where the death penalty is rigidly administered, than in Wisconsin where it has been for several years abolished. People laboring under violent passion seldom pause to consider consequences . . . Remove this barbaric example from high places and the example will be Christianizing to the whole human family.

Foote felt confident that people would eventually adopt the rational approach: "The death penalty, happily, is becoming unpopular."

Well, it has indeed remained deeply unpopular among the many people now slated to
receive
it. Over a century later, Foote's hopes would still seem to many some distant and even hopeless utopia. Yet he had seen a utopia: he had shaken hands with its inhabitants. Foote had some years earlier paid a visit at one of the branches of the Oneida Community—an extraordinary Christian sect of self-proclaimed "Perfectionists." As laid out in their 1847 pamphlet Biblical Communism, this sect recognized neither private property nor private relations: they were polyamorous communists.

It's hard to imagine a combination of beliefs more likely to whip up small-town residents into a scandalized froth: Perfectionists were run out of towns and endured decades of pulpit attacks and bigamy prosecutions. They shrugged these off and diligently built up businesses in lumber and blacksmithing; meanwhile, their children were raised by the community, instead of by parents; they had both open marriages and open parenting. These children, visiting doctors marveled, grew up remarkably robust and healthy. The Perfectionists had, in short, created precisely the sort of society that Paine's old friend John 'Walking" Stewart had envisioned decades before. If there was ever a community not for everyone, Oneida was surely it. And yet, Foote mused, those who were there did seem happy. Since he'd first read
Common Sense
, Foote had come to see the wisdom of the exact inverse of Paine's great proverb: he realized that a long habit of not thinking a thing
right
gives it a superficial appearance of being wrong. Upon careful thought, he could not find anything actually
wrong
with Oneida.

And so Foote came to this startling conclusion: "Freedom of affection,
and even sexual promiscuity
, do not necessarily degrade or demoralize women or generate diseases." He had seen no degradation at Oneida. No, he decided: it was legal codes and bans on condoms that were the source of that. It was the Anthony Comstocks of the world who were degrading women. If women were granted control of their bodies, Foote announced, there would be no need of Mr. Cornstock and chivalrous efforts on behalf of their honor:

The conservative man exclaims, 'We worship them as angels" . . . Gallantry is mistaken for justice, and soft soap for equity. Even these exist only on the surface. They compose the cream that rises to the top of polite society, and this is fed only to the handsome, rich, and otherwise fortunate; all below that is skim milk, and this is dealt out sparingly and grudgingly to toiling women, unhappy wives, and to all, indeed, who most need sympathy and help. But let no man who suddenly awakes to this injustice, suppose in his arrogance that he can give woman her rights. The very fact that men talk of
allowing
women this or that liberty is evidence that authority itself has been usurped. As well might a pickpocket talk of giving a port-monnaie to someone from whom he had clandestinely filched it. I tell you, reader, we men have no rights to
give
women; she possesses naturally the same rights as we do.

Fine words. But how exactly might a woman secure these natural rights?

A modern reader of old medical guides and women's magazines might wonder why there are so many ads for syringes . . . but not for
needles.
Victorian women knew why. Their most popular form of contraception was douching after sex—and though crude and potentially even dangerous, the commonly used weak solutions of vinegar or borax could indeed have prevented pregnancy. You'll gain an appreciation for modern central heating upon learning that spirits were sometimes added so that the solution would not freeze sitting on the nightstand. But even to use that solution, you still needed a way to deliver it.