Essay on Sources

For Business and Pleasure: Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890–1933

Essay on Sources

This project started out as a history of drug use, but I quickly discovered two things. First, excellent work already existed on drug use. And second, people at the turn of the century, both reformers and users, saw connections between nonmedical drug use and other aspects of urban culture. While historians now see dancing, drinking, gambling, sex, and drug-taking as issues more separate than connected, contemporaries subsumed them under the single heading of “vice.” As a result, I broadened the scope of this book from drugs to vice. In so doing, I sought to synthesize various strands of historiography.

DRUGS

David Musto and David Courtwright set the gold standard for studying the history of drugs in America. Musto, in his landmark book The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control, expanded ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), emphasized the interplay between changing medical practices and the politics of regulation. In contrast, Courtwright, in Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America before 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), detailed how the demographic shift among opiate users from middle-class female medical addicts to young working-class men using drugs recreationally affected popular attitudes toward drugs and their legality. Although very different in focus, together Musto’s and Courtwright’s books complement each other and provide the best introduction to the field. Joseph Spillane’s Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), similarly well-written and thoroughly researched, offers a superb scholarly discussion of the marketing, medical application, and recreational use of cocaine.

Charles Terry and Mildred Pellens’s The Opium Problem (New York: Committee on Drug Addictions, in Collaboration with the Bureau of Social Hygiene, 1928) serves as the essential source for primary material. With stunning breadth and depth, it covers a wide range of topics published between 1867 and 1927. For those unwilling to wade through the two massive tomes comprising The Opium Problem, H. Wayne Morgan’s Yesterday’s Addicts: American Society and Drug Abuse, 1865–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974) is a good starting point for printed primary sources. Like Terry and Pellens, Morgan assembled a range of representative medical and reform sources.

For more personal accounts of drug use in the early twentieth century, Bingham Dai’s Opium Addiction in Chicago (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, [1937] 1970) contains oral histories of addicts living in Chicago in the 1930s. In Addicts Who Survived: An Oral History of Narcotic Use in America, 1923–1965 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), David Courtwright, Herman Joseph, and Don Des Jarlais collected interviews with methadone users living in New York City who were over sixty years old. Organized thematically, the book offers insight into different aspects of drug addicts’ lives, including getting hooked, scoring, and attempts to get clean.

ALCOHOL

Since the regulation of vice focuses more on coercion than persuasion, I found the literature on the temperance movement less useful than the books that concentrated on altering the alcohol trade. The best of that literature includes Perry Duis, The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); K. Austin Kerr, Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); and Richard Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). The Saloon, by offering a comparison between Boston and Chicago, demonstrates how different legislative and enforcement strategies shaped the working-class drinking culture of two major American cities. More of an organizational history than Duis’s social history, Kerr described how middle-class antipathy toward the saloon united moderate wets with temperance advocates. This alliance, institutionalized in the Anti-Saloon League, oversaw the passage of National Prohibition. Taking a more juridical approach, Hamm analyzed the legal origins of Prohibition in Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment. Focused explicitly on the relationship between drinking and the law, this tour-de-force study explores the legislative assault on alcohol production, distribution, and use. But Hamm did not stop there; he went further, lucidly detailing the way alcohol producers, sellers, and drinkers dodged reformers’ attempts to restrict their business and their pleasure.

Among contemporary sources, Frederic H. Wines and John Koren’s The Liquor Problem in Its Legislative Aspect (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897) serves as admirable introduction to moderate attitudes on late nineteenth-century alcohol reform. Funded by the Committee of Fifty, an academically oriented organization, The Liquor Problem describes both drinking habits and their regulation.

PROSTITUTION

The books on prostitution vary widely in terms of approach, intended audience, and quality of research. Without question, the best for the Progressive era include Ruth Rosen’s The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Mark Thomas Connelly’s The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Timothy Gilfoyle’s City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); and Roy Lubove’s “The Progressives and the Prostitute,” Historian 24 (May 1962): 308–330. Connelly and Lubove primarily focused on the anti-vice movement, while Rosen and Gilfoyle adopted a more expansive approach. Gilfoyle adeptly portrayed the integration of prostitution into Manhattan’s neighborhoods. Rosen, on the other hand, excelled at analyzing the social relationships in which prostitutes found themselves enmeshed.

Among primary sources, vice commission reports provide the best printed material available. The groundbreaking Social Evil in Chicago: A Study of Existing Conditions, with Recommendations (Chicago: Gunthorp-Warren, 1911) stands as the exemplar, but all the published reports yield insight into the business of prostitution, the movement against the sporting world, and the particularities of vice in different cities. George Kneeland’s Commercialized Prostitution in New York City, rev. ed. (New York: Century, 1917), an investigation sponsored by the Rockefeller-funded Bureau of Social Hygiene, is another excellent city-specific study.

SYNTHESIS

Although most scholarship concentrates on a single vice, two types of work adopt a more synthetic approach: those that focus on reform and those that center on neighborhood life. In the first category, Paul Boyer’s Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978) does an excellent job describing the cyclical patterns of moral reform in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), Morton Keller bundled moral reform with other topics, including immigration and protective legislation, to discuss Progressive-era attempts at social engineering.

If Boyer and Keller provide the best overviews, the city-centered books of Arthur Goren, Al Rose, and Herbert Asbury show the interconnected networks of labor, leisure, politics, and crime. One of the most beautifully written books I have ever read, Goren’s New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment, 1908–1922 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) illuminates the cultural and class tensions in Jewish attempts to investigate and decrease crime on the Lower East Side.

Al Rose’s Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974) and Herbert Asbury’s many popular city histories, from Gem of the Prairie: An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, [1940] 1986) to The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1936) and The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1933), take a significantly less-academic tone, but these books stand out because Rose and Asbury presented the sporting world within the larger context of urban life, including each city’s popular recreation and popular politics.

Although he does not write about one city as such, Ivan Light, in “From Vice District to Tourist Attraction: The Moral Career of American Chinatowns, 1880–1940,” Pacific Historical Review 43 (1974): 367–394, explored the dynamics of vice and neighborhood development with analytical nuance, historical specificity, and great theoretical utility.

I found three published primary sources particularly helpful for thinking about vice in its urban context: Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Dover, [1890] 1971); Jane Addams’s The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, [1909] 1972); and Michael Gold’s semiautobiographical novel, Jews Without Money (New York: H. Liveright, 1930). Although Riis famously exposed the horrors of tenement housing in How the Other Half Lives, he did so in part by describing the evils of intermixing residences with criminal haunts and low-down dives. Addams directly addressed the problem of commercialized prostitution in A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1912), but her less-famous The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets examines a wider range of influences that drew urban youths into less-reputable recreation. Finally, Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money provides the perfect counterpart to Goren’s New York Jews and the Quest for Community. Both bring the Lower East Side alive, and neither underplays the criminal culture that added to the neighborhood’s distinctive character.

POPULAR CULTURE

Four exceptional books defined the historical study of American popular culture: Roy Rosenzweig’s Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Lewis Erenberg’s Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981); John Kasson’s Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978); and Kathy Peiss’s Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). Rosenzweig, Erenberg, Kasson, and Peiss looked at phenomena such as holiday picnics, the dance craze, amusement-park attendance, and going to the movies. In the process, they made working-class leisure a vibrant area of inquiry. I disagree with their representation of commercial vice as preceding reputable recreation, and I particularly dispute their contention that commercial popular culture is distinct from disreputable leisure, but I could not have written this book without the foundation they established.

The next generation of historians complicated existing categories by exploring additional facets of urban popular culture. Three works stand out: Kathy Ogren’s The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Elizabeth Clement’s Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Through both argument and anecdote, these books plumb the boundless excitement that the new popular culture seemed to promise its participants.

RACE

The question of race in red-light districts is particularly fraught, because segregation by reputation shifts the practices of Jim Crow in complicated ways. Other than Kevin Mumford’s Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), few works address the issue in any sustained manner. Instead, the topic comes through in fragments in books devoted to other subjects, usually the history of black or Asian communities in specific cities.

Race riots are the other area where historians talk about race in red-light districts. In the early twentieth century, a number of race riots occurred in and around vice districts. Charles Crowe’s two articles, “Racial Violence and Social Reform: Origins of the Atlanta Riot of 1906,” Journal of Negro History 53 (July 1968): 234–256, and “Racial Massacre in Atlanta: September 22, 1906,” Journal of Negro History 54 (Apr. 1969): 150–173, offer the best discussion of the Atlanta riot. Roberta Senechal’s The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot: Springfield, Illinois, in 1908 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990) covers the Springfield riot with greater felicity than the title would suggest. And both Elliott M. Rudwick’s Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964) and William M. Tuttle Jr.’s Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970) deserve their status as classics in the field.

ECONOMIC AND LEGAL CHANGE

As a cultural historian, I first encountered the relationship between economic and social change in Richard Fox and Jackson Lears’s collection Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). Whether discussing cultural hegemony or the adoption of an outer-directed ethos of therapeutic release, the essays in this collection brought an updated Marxism to the study of American culture that I never quite abandoned. On the other hand, except for Daniel Horowitz’s The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), a close scholarly analysis of the shifts Lears broadly outlined, the books that most influenced this study are much more old-fashioned. Samuel P. Hays’s The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) and Thomas Cochran and William Miller’s The Age of Enterprise, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, [1942] 1961) offer excellent overviews of social, economic, and industrial change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The legal histories on which I relied for my conceptual framework share the clarity that comes with a strong thesis, good narrative structure, and a scrupulous evidentiary base. Over the years, I turned repeatedly to Morton Horwitz’s The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Herbert Hovenkamp’s Enterprise and American Law, 1836–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Although not directly on the topic of vice, these books contextualize the legal changes happening in urban reform.

CITY GOVERNMENT

Early in my research I decided that, during the Gilded Age, the most exciting political fights of the era took place not on Capitol Hill, but in the streets of city wards. This realization opened up whole new vistas for understanding the dynamism of late nineteenth-century reform. From the period, my favorite works include Charles Park-hurst’s vituperative Our Fight with Tammany (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1895), George Washington Plunkitt’s wickedly amusing opinion pieces, collected by journalist William L. Riordan in Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (New York: Signet Classic, [1905] 1996), and the more measured but still delightfully cynical Guarding a Great City (New York: Harper & Bros., 1906) by William McAdoo, a former police commissioner of New York City.

The best histories of Manhattan’s urban machine also originate from the early twentieth century. Gustavus Myers first published The History of Tammany Hall (New York: Dover, 1971) in 1901, and he presented a revised and enlarged edition in 1917. Together with M. R. Werner’s Tammany Hall (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), these books offer the most comprehensive portrayal of New York’s ward politics in the late nineteenth century. A modern work, Daniel Czitrom’s “Underworld and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New York, 1889–1913,” Journal of American History 78 (Sept. 1991): 536–558, gives an in-depth analysis of the political career, economic networks, and social milieu of a single, important Tammany politician.

For a well-researched view into the machine politics of a city other than New York, I recommend George M. Reynolds’s Machine Politics in New Orleans, 1897–1926 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth, new ed. (New York: Macmillan, [1888] 1911), an exceptional survey of government in the United States, includes descriptions of the machines in several cities.

Martin Schiesl’s The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1880–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) presents an absolutely invaluable framework for understanding city government. No other book on the topic approaches its clarity and insight. Finally, although not addressing municipal politics per se, Richard L. McCormick’s “The Party Period and Public Policy: An Exploratory Hypothesis,” Journal of American History 66 (Sept. 1979): 279–298, makes a eye-opening argument about what happens when the government moves from primarily distributive practices to regulatory functions.

CITY SPACE

As I shifted my focus from drug use to the topic of vice more generally, I realized that my story would emphasize the history of red-light districts. Neil Larry Shumsky’s “Tacit Acceptance: Respectable Americans and Segregated Prostitution, 1870–1910,” Journal of Social History 19 (Summer 1986): 665–679; his “Vice Responds to Reform: San Francisco, 1910–1914,” Journal of Urban History 7 (Nov. 1980): 31–47; and his collaboration with Larry M. Spring, “San Francisco’s Zone of Prostitution, 1880–1934,” Journal of Historical Geography 7 (Jan. 1981): 71–89 provided early inspiration for thinking about the relationship of vice to city space. On a more theoretical level, Robert Park and Edward Burgess’s The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925) remains as intellectually useful today as when it set the agenda for the Chicago School of Sociology.

When seeking a context for vice districting, I found Seymour Toll’s Zoned American (New York: Grossman, 1969) an excellent introduction to the specifics of controlling urban development. Spiro Kostoff’s visually beautiful and lucidly argued book, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), also helped me think about the cultural implications of the organizational choices that people make.

DISCOURSE

Since I used a diversity of historical sources, I relied on a range of structuralist and poststructuralist theorists to further my understanding of discursive developments. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, which he enunciated in Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1968) and in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), was essential for analyzing the back-and-forth between reformers and the machine, and reformers and the sporting world.

When examining official language, I found J. G. A. Pocock’s exploration of enduring discourses especially useful. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975) best represents his life’s work, but the essays collected in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971) provide excellent examples showing how people took particular discourses and altered them to make them relevant to their immediate situation.

Michel Foucault also tracked long-term discursive change. Interestingly, since the United States lagged behind Europe in the widespread medicalization of sex, Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) proved more relevant for the questions it raised than for the answers it offered. Indeed, because of the strength of his argument and its powerful influence on historians, I knew I needed to address why medicalization did not have as strong an influence on anti-vice discourse in the United States.

For that I turned to Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971) and Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). Although extremely different works, they both explored the implications of analogical reasoning and the diverse ways in which people use symbolic language. Frye’s discussion of modes and genres was especially enlightening for understanding how people could work within the same analogical framework yet adopt utterly different narrative styles.

WORLD WAR I

The Great War significantly shifted the way that the federal government and private associations fought urban vice. Alan Brandt’s No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) best describes the attempts to close the districts and the impact that the war effort had on the medicalization of anti-vice enforcement. In Making Men Moral: Social Engineering During the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 1996), Nancy Bristow offered a more in-depth discussion of the Commission on Training Camp Activities and its efforts to reshape male attitudes toward sex, drinking, and recreation.

Published just after the war, Joseph Mayer’s The Regulation of Commercialized Vice: An Analysis of the Transition from Segregation to Repression in the United States (New York: Klebold Press, 1922) gives a concise overview of the wartime demise of red-light districts.

THE TWENTIES

Most of the cultural histories of the 1920s adopt an atmospheric approach: champagne corks were popping, bathtub gin was flowing, jazz played in every club, and gangsters ruled the streets. Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen Twenties (New York: Harper & Row, [1931] 1964) and Stanley Walker’s The Night Club Era ([New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1933] Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) remain, without a doubt, the exemplars of this genre. Similarly, one of the best efforts at chronicling the history of organized crime is also one of the earliest. I highly recommend James O’Donnell Bennett’s Gangland Chicago: The True Story of Chicago Crime (Chicago: Chicago Tribune, 1929), reprinted in volume four of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, Enforcement of the Prohibition Laws, 71st Cong., 3d Sess., 1931, S. Doc. 307, also known as the Wickersham Report.

As for the relationship between criminals, cops, and seemingly respectable community members, V. O. Key Jr.’s “Police Graft,” American Journal of Sociology 40 (Mar. 1935): 624–636, and Mark Haller’s articles, especially “Urban Crime and Criminal Justice: The Chicago Case,” Journal of American History 57 (Dec. 1970): 619–635; “Organized Crime in Urban Society: Chicago in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Social History 5 (Winter 1971–72): 210–234; and “Urban Vice and Civic Reform: Chicago in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Cities in American History, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson and Stanley K. Schultz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972): 290–305, best illustrate what happens when laws conflict with social norms.

Finally, David Kyvig’s Repealing National Prohibition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) presents an excellent institutional history describing the end of the “noble experiment.” His discussion of the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform and their use of gender politics proved particularly compelling, both as a narrative and as an example of how much urban reform changed after the war.