At the age of 75, Moses Harmon had spent much of his life fighting for the rights of women and for freedom of speech. For these efforts, Harmon was sentenced to one year of hard labor in Joliet (the same prison that John Belushi was released from in Blues Brothers.) Unlike “Joliet” Jake Blues, Harmon was sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary (the same prison where the Birdman of Alcatraz actually had his birds) after his health deteriorated. After his release from Leavenworth, he moved to Los Angeles, where he died on January, 30, 1910, a little less than four years after his release.
Harmon was born on October, 12, 1830, in West Virginia. In 1838, his family moved to Crawford County, Missouri, after living briefly in Ohio and Indiana. He lived in Missouri until 1879, fathering three children (two of whom survived.) Shortly after the death of his third child and his wife, Susan, he moved to Jefferson County, Kansas, where he married Isabel Hiser. It was here, in the town of Valley Falls, that life got more interesting. Harmon became co-editor of the Valley Falls Liberal, a publication of the Valley Falls Liberal League in 1881. In 1883, after he took over full editorship and divorced the paper from the Liberal League, he changed the name of the publication to Lucifer, The Lightbearer. Provocative, right? But that was the point. Harmon wanted to inspire readers to think and respond. The name evoked not only Satan, but an ancient name for the planet Venus, the Morning Star. He sought to shed light on his readership.¹
Harmon was a dedicated reformer. His paper ran a free dialog from a wide range of contributors, which Harmon did not censor. Despite being married twice, Harmon opposed marriage as an oppressive institution (keep in mind, at the time wives were often little more than chattel property.) He advocated the use of birth control and the right of a woman to her own body.
The main trouble Harmon ran across in his journalistic endeavors was that of obscenity, by way of the Comstock Act which forbade the mailing of “obscene” materials. The first time he ran afoul of the law was in February, 1887, after publishing a letter by Dr. W. G. Markland in which he broached the subject of whether forced sex within a marriage would constitute rape. (The answer to that question, of course, is yes.) There were three more letters included in this first indictment, one dealt again with marital rape, another with contraception, and the final with a married woman who bore four children from four different fathers (daytime talk show, anyone?) This indictment would begin the legal tribulations that would plague him for the rest of his life.
In the midst of his tribulations, Harmon moved his paper from Valley Falls, to the nearby Topeka, Kansas², believing the city to have a more enlightened atmosphere.
After three years of legal wrangling, Harmon was sentenced to five years imprisonment and ordered to pay a fine of $300. Five months to the day after his sentencing, Harmon was released from prison on appeal. On January, 1891, Harmon was brought to trial over another letter published in Lucifer. He was sentenced to another year of imprisonment. Harmon’s sentence was delayed during his appeal process, but was ultimately upheld and by June, 1892, he was in prison again. Oddly enough, the judge who upheld his sentence ordered his release in February, 1893.
On June 2, 1895, Harmon returned to prison to serve a year’s hard labor (which fortunately for him turned out to be not all that hard.) He was released early, on April 4, 1896. The same month, Harmon left Kansas behind in favor of Chicago where he lived in relative peace until his aforementioned sentencing to Joliet.
Moses Harmon finished out his years in Los Angeles, California. He had changed the title of Lucifer to The American Journal of Eugenics in 1906, two years before his move to California. The right of women to select an ideal mate with which they could produce healthy children had long been part of Harmon’s advocacy. With the change in title, the paper took on a narrower focus, centering around the “Science of Right Borning.” He died on January 30, 1910. His paper followed shortly after.
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1. Harmon made further changes, introducing his own system for dating the paper, eschewing the traditional Gregorian Calendar. His dating system began with the execution of Giordano Bruno in 1601 A. D. His calendar marked the year as the beginning of a new era which he called the Era of Man, denoted as E. M.
2. An interesting and entirely unrelated note about Topeka is that for the North American release of Pokemon, Mayor Joan Wagnon changed the city’s name to “ToPickachu” for a day. That’s right; venerated state capitol, or city-sized marketing ploy? You can read the Topeka Capitol-Journal article about it here.
For more on Moses Harmon, check out my sources:
http://www.kancoll.org/khq/1971/71_1_west.htm
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=17
http://www.kshs.org/portraits/harman_moses.htm
You can also read this article written by Voltairine de Cleyre or this issue of Lucifer.
