Their moral philosophy textbooks provide insights into an important intellectual justification for the censorship of obscene literature as well as their opposition to the free love movement.
In fact, one of Whitman's earliest reviewers proclaimed Leaves of Grass to be a manifestation of the "lecherous lips" of the burgeoning free love movement.
In the eyes of Homer Sprague, president of the New England Society, the "self-styled reformers" of the free love movement wanted to "reconstruct society on a new foundation" by "bringing back the golden age of monkeydom and--liberty
125) Whitman's reluctance to be identified with Heywood and the free love movement was not entirely unusual even among social progressives in the 1870s and 1880s.