For Business & Pleasure: Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States (review)

For Business & Pleasure is the latest in a long line of books about sex for sale at the turn of the twentieth-century. The continued interest in the subject of prostitution is hardly surprising. But Mara L. Keire artfully expands her lens to look at vice as a whole, including gambling, drug use, and the consumption of alcohol. Such a unique approach allows her to offer a new and compelling take on the relationship between vice and politics.

Keire argues that red light districts did not arise naturally, but instead were created by a set of elite reformers intent on breaking the hold urban machines had on their respective cities. These reformers, the mugwumps who preceded the Progressives, identified the bribes derived from operating illegal institutions as providing a substantial proportion of the machine’s financial base. Mugwumps believed that eliminating this financial well could break the machines. They used a range of strategies to create districts that would deprive the machine of its steady income of bribes: everything from legally sanctioning sex districts to recruiting judges to more stringently sentence vice offenders operating outside a district’s limits. It was only the next generation of reformers—the Progressives—that saw closing the red light districts as a means of controlling urban vice. Therefore Keire, like Chad Heap’s recent book Slumming, has intervened to show that “reputational” segregation emerged out of political ethics more even than sexual morality. Keire also uses this wider lens to reinterpret the white slavery scare. Here too the reform was intended to deal with political rather than moral ethics. She argues that the white slavery scare was a manifestation of the anti-trust sentiment. For Progressive contemporaries, the business of vice seemed like “a trust composed of allied interests,” which profited from the prostitutes’ involuntary servitude. These claims resonated with the larger economic critiques of the Progressive movement. In this she echoes Ruth Rosen and Amy Dru Stanley, who have also identified prostitution as striking reformers as a crisis in the market as much as a crisis of gender.

Keire’s significant contribution does not end there. She also shows that the establishment of formal red light districts produced a host of unintended consequences. First, vice became more visible rather than less with its confinement to one area of the metropolis. Like Heap, Keire argues it was seemingly impossible to segregate vice away from the rest of the city. In fact, sometimes the links between vice districts and reputable downtowns were embedded in the landscape itself. For example, the lights from the respectable white-light theater district led seamlessly into the lights of the illicit red-light district. Second, the establishment of such districts near racial ghettos meant that vice districts became a notorious site of race mixing. Keire uncovers a few cases where such mixing led to race riots. This in turn produced the demand for racial segregation, which was then instituted voluntarily at first and through residential segregation ordinances a decade later. The lessons of this chapter are unexpectedly poignant; whereas the confinement of vice to a single district was seemingly impossible to maintain from the beginning, racial segregation was much more easily maintained and reinforced to varying degrees for decades. This juxtaposition of racial and vice segregation makes the power of racial segregation that much more apparent. And finally, the districts created crime cartels to replace the informal distributors of vice that had previously hawked the commodities associated with immorality. Such cartels were much more insidious than the individuals they replaced.

The book does raise some unanswered questions, however. In some ways, the unintended consequences of the creation of vice districts are more carefully laid out than the history of their construction. A more detailed account of what the world of vice was like before the districts’ creation would allow us to address a couple cloudy issues. First, Keire acknowledges...