CHAPTER ONE
Segregating Vice, 1890–1909
Reformers closed the red-light districts, but first they created them. In the 1890s, elite good-government advocates proposed the establishment of vice districts as a way to isolate working-class politicians from their more unsavory constituents. By repudiating the moral extremes of prohibition, the symptomatic focus of social hygiene, and the individualized efforts of rescue work, these Gilded-Age reformers broke with previous anti-vice movements and offered reputational segregation as a pragmatic solution to the social and political ills of urban life. They thought that municipalities should tolerate brothels, saloons, and gambling dens, as long as the venues associated with vice stayed inside designated geographic confines. Reformers believed that without neighborhood saloons in which to meet the locals, or payoffs from brothels and gambling dens to finance their candidates, the city’s working-class partisan political organization, popularly called the machine, would lose its stranglehold on urban government. Embracing a contingent view of public morality, these municipal reformers, also known as mugwumps, sought to change both the structure of municipal politics and the organization of urban space. At the end of the nineteenth century, the mugwumps cracked down on politically protected vice, fighting brutal battles in cities across the United States to move disreputable leisure out of residential neighborhoods and into the commercial downtown.
The mugwumps gained their reputation as anti-corruption elitists during the 1884 presidential election. Instead of supporting the candidacy of Senator James “Boodle” Blaine, known for kowtowing to the “railroad interests,” they bolted from the Republican party and voted for Grover Cleveland, the New York State governor who made his name opposing New York City’s Irish-run, Democratic party machine, Tammany Hall.1 As political cartoonist Thomas Nast explained when endorsing Grover Cleveland: “We love him most for the enemies he has made.”2 The prime movers behind this campaign against political corruption came out of the urban social elite and included bankers, industrialists, career philanthropists, and upper-class clergy from liturgical Protestant denominations, mainly Episcopalians and Presbyterians. They believed that the “best men” should govern, mistrusted democracy, and despised “professional” politicians for their unabashed political corruption. If mugwumps generally advocated limited government and the enforcement of existing laws on national issues, they willingly accepted political initiative and police power at the local level when it was located in the right hands—their own hands. Announcing that they would rather vote their conscience than blindly follow party precepts, the mugwumps led the way in nonpartisan political reform.3
If the mugwumps represented a venerable patrician tradition that advocated elite rule, then members of the urban machine spoke for both the reputable and disreputable working class. Men like “Boss” William Tweed, “Honest” John Kelly, and “Big Tim” Sullivan grew up in the inner city and earned their livings as artisans, dock workers, newsboys, and boxers before devoting themselves to rising within the ranks of the local Democratic party organization.4 As full-time politicians who worked even when the legislature was in recess, these men built the machine’s constituency through the favors they traded. If the son of a loyal party member needed a job, ward captains asked around about open positions in the city government or businesses run by other party faithfuls. These men also prided themselves on no-questions-asked charity. If a family within their ward lost its home, machine politicians arranged new accommodations. Big Tim Sullivan burnished his reputation in New York City’s Bowery by distributing thousands of shoes to the poor without once asking about the recipients’ moral standing. Likewise, other party leaders made their names organizing picnics and excursions, entertaining everyone who came so long as they understood on election day that the machine provided the largesse.5 For all their generosity, machine politicians expected to benefit financially from their participation in the party organization. While George Washington Plunkitt, “the sage of Tammany Hall,” distinguished between “honest graft” (profiting from preferential contracts) and “dishonest graft” (extracting payoffs from brothels and gambling dens), not all machine politicians made these fine distinctions.6 As a result, the mugwumps presumed that the machine received a substantial part of its financial backing from the proprietors of commercialized vice.
Unsurprisingly, given their completely incompatible cultural and political values, mugwumps and the members of the machine disagreed over the role of commercial vice in urban society. The machine wanted to maintain the status quo of unconfined leisure, while good-government advocates wanted to reconfigure the geography of American municipalities before the cities grew too big to change. In their efforts to realize this ambitious project, late nineteenth-century reformers devoted themselves to defeating the machine. But before their battles began, the mugwumps outlined their vision of urban life, an integral part of which included segregated vice districts.
DEFINING THE DISTRICT
Vice districting, a distinctly American phenomenon, arose out of the United States’ creole cultural heritage and the new science of city planning. Usually located near a city’s commercial downtown, red-light districts abutted the respectable theater district and were easily accessible from the train station. The most famous of these districts included New York’s Tenderloin, Chicago’s Levee, San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, and New Orleans’s Storyville, but smaller cities such as Bridgeport, Connecticut, Louisville, Kentucky, and Tacoma, Washington, also featured vice districts.7 Sociologist Robert Park considered the clustering of drinking, gambling, and prostitution into distinct neighborhoods a spontaneous phenomenon, but the records of city councils and local reformers reveal a different story.8 Although never entirely successful in concentrating all of a city’s vice into the commercial downtown, the mugwumps made the tolerated tenderloin a part of America’s urban landscape.
In Europe, reglementation, or the venereal inspection of prostitutes, served as the official norm for controlling the sex trade. Unlike American reformers, European regulators generally left city space unchanged. As a policy based on public health, not urban planning, reglementation did not require geographic concentration.9 That is not to say that city leaders in the United States never proposed public-health measures for managing urban immorality. In 1870, St. Louis’s city council enacted its notorious Social Evil Ordinance, requiring the venereal inspection of prostitutes. Four years later, after a vituperative campaign against the program, the Missouri legislature nullified the law. The outcry over the St. Louis “experiment” not only killed the ordinance within the city, but its failure discouraged other cities from implementing similar programs, despite support from most medical doctors.10 The rejection of reglementation in the United States carried important consequences. While the public-health approach to prostitution existed as a possible policy throughout the Gilded Age and the Progressive era, reglementation never gained enough adherents to serve as a politically viable alternative to either suppression or segregation.
To American reformers, restructuring the city’s moral geography mattered more than monitoring the health of already-errant sinners. The mugwumps wanted to rethink how municipalities managed the business of vice, not how they handled the detritus associated with that business. This institutional emphasis explains why urban reformers did not concern themselves solely with prostitution. The proprietors of saloons, gambling dens, and dance halls needed to pay “blackmail money” to the machine as much as brothel-keepers did. This comprehensive view of urban immorality distinguished the mugwumps from rescue workers, who hoped to save prostitutes by returning them to a righteous path. By contrast, the mugwumps, unwilling to settle for rerouting a few fallen women, used districting to reconfigure entire city streets, physically altering the organization of urban environments.
Despite their lofty goals, Gilded-Age reformers recognized with rare pragmatism that the demand for drinking, gambling, and prostitution would not disappear. They hoped that by restricting vice to the downtown—and forcing men to travel out of their neighborhoods if they wanted to engage in disreputable activities—they would decrease urban youths’ accidental introduction to illicit vice and sever regular patrons’ ties to the politics of a particular ward.11 Men like good-government advocate George Frederick Elliott argued that controlled toleration in designated areas would satisfy the demand for disreputable pleasure without reinforcing the negative impact laissez-faire leisure had on urban neighborhoods.12 During a heated campaign before the 1901 municipal elections in New York City, social hygienist Prince Morrow condemned “a vice crusade that would scatter the vicious all over the city,” but William H. Baldwin, railroad magnate and anti-vice reformer, countered Morrow’s criticisms by arguing for the segregation of vice: “Logic has it that the social evil must tend to particular localities. . . . I would rather see a little hell than a big hell.”13 In creating their “little hells,” municipal mugwumps fought to remove commercial leisure from residential neighborhoods.14 They intentionally homogenized workingmen’s pastimes by divorcing them from the ethnic and political particularities of different city neighborhoods. The mugwumps believed that geographic separation would decrease the impact of disreputable leisure on the city as a whole.
The most notorious way to concentrate illicit vice was to adopt municipal ordinances that explicitly defined the boundaries outside of which prostitutes could not practice their trade. New Orleans’s Storyville remains the best-known district created through city ordinances, but other cities, including Shreveport, Houston, and El Paso, also enacted red-light ordinances.15 Despite the claims in the Blue Books, directories promoting New Orleans’s vice, Storyville was not the only legal district; it was, however, the only red-light district vetted by the U.S. Supreme Court.16 Shortly after Storyville’s establishment in 1897, George L’Hote, Bernardo Gonzales Carbajal, and the Church Extension Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church challenged the legitimacy of Councilman Sidney Story’s ordinance, arguing that the new district constituted both a public and a private nuisance. The Justices disagreed and ruled in 1900 that districting involved legitimately exercised local police powers.17 As the U.S. Supreme Court saw it, municipalities had “one of three possibilities” when it came to the regulation of disorderly houses: “First, absolute prohibition; second, full freedom in respect to place, coupled with rules of conduct; or, third, a restriction of the location of such houses to certain defined limits.”18 In other words, cities could officially segregate vice.
L’Hote v. New Orleans declared districting constitutional, but most of the time neither the city council, the police commissioners, nor the citizen’s associations found it necessary to define red-light districts quite so explicitly. Informal methods worked just as well and caused significantly less controversy. Through tacit localization, the position of a city’s red-light district stayed more customary than codified.19 Yet, even if a core of brothels and disreputable saloons already existed within a city, at the turn of the century, municipal politicians sought to sharpen the district’s boundaries. They fought to limit saloons to the commercial downtown, and when they could not directly regulate dance halls, pool parlors, and shooting galleries based on their primary purpose, they concentrated these venues through their control of liquor licenses. Just as importantly, though, urban reformers ordered the police to pull prostitutes, gamblers, and other disorderly individuals out of places in respectable neighborhoods and push them into venues within the red-light district. The police accomplished this relocation through the unequal enforcement of the law, arresting those who loitered outside the district’s designated confines.
In the 1890s, a decade marked by an “outburst of investigations” into police corruption, reform-minded law enforcement officials sided with the mugwumps and quietly offered reputational segregation as a solution to reduce crime, corruption, and the open, uninhibited expression of urban vice.20 Commissioners like New York’s William McAdoo believed that restricting vice to certain neighborhoods reduced crime throughout the city.21 Going beyond the often-cited cliché that prostitutes served society because they saved respectable women from sexually importunate men, police commissioners argued that districting reduced crime because, sooner or later, most criminals patronized prostitutes, who then provided a ready-made pool of informants.22 From the police perspective, the centrality of the city’s vice district made the surveillance and apprehension of the city’s criminals easier.23 Long after Progressive reformers stopped advocating districting as a disciplinary measure for managing urban immorality, the police continued to support segregation as a means of controlling vice.
The city courts also played their part in concentrating vice within defined limits.24 Judges, many of whom sympathized with municipal reformers, favored localization and reinforced their city’s red-light district by sentencing vice offenders more harshly if they operated outside of the district’s understood limits.25 As housing advocate Lawrence Veiller observed thirteen years after the passage of New York’s 1901 Tenement House Law, the “theory . . . was to make the penalty for prostitution in tenement houses so much more severe than it was for prostitution in ordinary disorderly houses as to make it attractive for the prostitutes to leave the tenement houses and to go into regular houses of prostitution.”26 Although less systematic than districting through city ordinance, tacit localization garnered the support of key municipal officials and, at the turn of the century, it aroused little outrage from the general public.27 Indeed, some found it quite advantageous.
Real estate speculators, in particular, strongly supported vice districting. While individual homeowners decried the presence of commercialized vice near their residences, absentee landlords endorsed the centralization of vice at the edges of the central business district.28 Landlords who owned property near the commercial downtown often based their investment on the eventual expansion of the business district. When leasing to tenants engaged in illicit but profitable activities, absentee landlords demanded higher rents from their disreputable tenants than they could ever ask of respectable ones. Thus the owners of real estate within red-light districts raked in exorbitant sums while they awaited the further development of the downtown to increase the value of their land.29 In Shreveport, aware of the inflated rents that they could ask within the district, landlords with property adjacent to St. Paul’s Bottom successfully lobbied the city council to redraw the Bottom’s boundaries to include their properties.30 Although most landlords showed greater circumspection in their support of vice districts, few objected to a policy that made a long-term landholding strategy profitable in the short term.
Vice districts proved viable because a couple of key constituencies supported them. With allies in the excise department, police department, and the city courts, the mugwumps reordered city space with the specific intention of changing the way men and women socialized when out on the town. Yet for all their concerns about popular morality, municipal elites at the turn of the century saw vice districting as a way to attack the urban machine.
THE POLITICS OF DISTRICTING
The creation of vice districts was a high priority on the anti-machine agenda of elite reformers. Municipal mugwumps sought to concentrate drinking, gambling, and prostitution in the commercial downtown in order to separate disreputable leisure from popular politics. By restricting saloons, and their attendant vices, to a distinct district, reform politicians hoped to denature the political function of drinking establishments and limit the power of saloonkeepers within city government.31 Similar to reformers’ attempts to remove polling places from saloons, centralize the police force, and eliminate wards altogether through a commission form of government, vice districting constituted part of their larger project to detach ring politicians from their neighborhoods.32
Districting held particular importance to the mugwumps because of its perceived financial ramifications. Convinced that payoffs from vice proprietors constituted the financial backbone of the machine, reformers like Charles Parkhurst, minister of the elite Madison Square Presbyterian Church in midtown Manhattan, argued that his crusade between 1892 and 1894 to close brothels and gambling halls weakened Tammany Hall.33 In the sermon that started the campaign, Park-hurst swore to rid the city of “the polluted harpies that, under the pretence of governing the city, are feeding day and night on its quivering vitals.”34 More practically, Parkhurst and his compatriots in the Society for the Prevention of Crime raided disreputable venues to show the underworld that despite the blackmail money paid to ward leaders, Tammany Hall could not protect them from arrest.35 By exposing the extent of machine corruption to reputable voters and discrediting ward politicians’ promises to disreputable voters, Parkhurst and other anti-machine agitators endeavored to influence elections, unseat ring politicians, and usher reformers into office.36
In New York City, reformers’ attempts to concentrate vice into just a few neighborhoods were particularly public, extended, and never entirely successful.37 Consequently, Manhattan never had a red-light district as such, but identifiable pockets of disreputable entertainment always existed. Five Points, the Tenderloin, the Lower East Side along the Bowery, “Little Coney Island” around 110th Street and Cathedral Parkway, and, later, part of Harlem, north of 125th Street on Lenox and Seventh Avenues, all gained national reputations as red-light districts.38 The concentration of brothels, saloons, dance halls, and cheap theaters distinguished these neighborhoods from other areas of poor repute, but immorality alone did not define a vice district. The sheer commerciality of the entertainment offered there gave these areas an identity distinct from neighborhoods with more casually proffered immoral services. Over the years, these places of persistent immorality garnered the attention of entertainment entrepreneurs, graft-taking government officials, and urban reformers trying to improve the city’s image. Then, as now, city leaders asked what they should do about such places. New York City at the turn of the twentieth century was no different.
In 1900 and 1901, against the backdrop of the charter battles to unify Brooklyn and Manhattan, New York’s Committee of Fifteen attempted to eradicate prostitution and gambling from the tenements and consolidate these activities into a limited number of commercial districts. When Tammany Hall established an anti-vice committee, the Committee of Five, in early November, New York City’s Chamber of Commerce battled back by forming the Committee of Fifteen. Despite its official-sounding name, the Committee of Fifteen was a private association founded by a self-appointed mix of Manhattan’s most successful bankers, lawyers, publishers, industrialists, and clergymen.39 Inspired by Charles Park-hurst’s successful unseating of machine candidates in the 1894 election, the Fifteen swore to uncover the Tammany-tolerated vice they believed the Committee of Five would endeavor to hide.40
The Committee of Fifteen was composed of New York’s “best men,” including railroad magnate William H. Baldwin, banker Jacob Schiff, publisher George Haven Putnam, and renowned academic E. R. A. Seligman.41 Sparing no expense, they hired a team of detectives to document the moral geography of Manhattan. From their investigators’ reports, the Fifteen created a precinct-by-precinct catalog that mapped the organized toleration of prostitution and gambling in Manhattan. At the same time, they used the investigators’ notarized testimony to prosecute illicit activity occurring in the tenement districts. In the latter endeavor, the Committee of Fifteen worked hand-in-hand with the newly formed Tenement House Commission to drive prostitutes out of tenement apartments and to fine landlords a thousand dollars for each documented instance of immorality.42 As the Fifteen moved prostitution and gambling out of residential neighborhoods and into commercial centers, the New York Times endorsed their efforts at vice districting, observing that “the diffusion of vice . . . is more to be dreaded than the localization of it.”43 Playing to the press throughout their tenure, the Committee of Fifteen fronted their every move against the backdrop of Tammany corruption.44
Earlier in November 1900, Tammany’s Executive Committee had appointed a Committee of Five to “investigate the moral conditions of the city.” Following a well-publicized letter condemning Tammany’s toleration of vice that Episcopal Bishop Henry C. Potter sent to Mayor Robert A. Van Wyck, Tammany Boss Richard Croker ordered the formation of the Committee of Five to demonstrate the speciousness of Potter’s accusations.45 To repair Tammany’s reputation, the Committee tried to construct the rampant toleration of vice as purely a problem of police corruption, independent of any Tammany involvement. The Five argued that the police kept all the payoffs they received and that not a single cent went into Tammany coffers, despite easily exposed examples of political patronage. Many members of the force, from the lowest beat cops to the police chief himself, received their positions as a reward for their partisan support of the Democratic machine. As a result, the Committee of Five neither persuaded the press of its claims concerning the police nor of its sincerity in rooting out political corruption.46 Even the crackdowns the Committee conducted received censure. During its tenure, the Five orchestrated a series of spectacular raids against pool rooms and brothels, but the district attorney attested that these raids produced insufficient evidence for prosecution.47 A Harper’s Weekly cartoon illustrated the extent to which the Progressive press discredited the Five’s investigation. With a poster in the background announcing “The Greatest Show on Earth”—an overt reference to the Barnum and Bailey Circus—the foreground showed the Five riding the Tammany tiger while it chased its tail. The subtitle asked, “Just suppose we should catch up with ourselves?”48 But they never did. The Committee of Five tried to use popular disgust with police corruption to deflect criticism of Tammany practices; however, in the end they did more to show the extent of corruption riddling city government than to burnish the reputation of Tammany politicians.49
The Five reached only one area of accord with the Fifteen: they both favored reputational segregation. As 1901 progressed, New York’s newspapers published successive proposals from the Committee of Fifteen and the Committee of Five concerning the regulation of vice. Eventually, the Five joined the Fifteen in supporting segregation, but the two committees never reached a consensus about who should oversee districting and how those supervisors should deal with vice outside of designated district confines. This disagreement involved process more than policy, but the Committees controlled neither. As ephemeral commissions, the Five and the Fifteen could recommend solutions, but they left implementation to the politicians they endorsed. In the short run, the Chamber of Commerce and the Committee of Fifteen triumphed—Seth Low and the Fusion ticket won the 1901 elections—but after the elections, and with the dispersion of the Committee of Fifteen, the pressure to police neighborhood vice eased.50 By 1904, the lid was off and New York City was once again wide open. Tenement prostitution had decreased, but the Raines Law hotels, which combined the worst of saloons and brothels, became the new bête noire of New York’s anti-vice reformers.51
“An Awful Possibility,” cover, 1901. Mugwump cartoonist W. A. Rogers lampoons the likelihood of the Tammany-appointed Committee of Five discovering any politically tolerated vice in New York City. Harper’s Weekly 45 (26 Jan. 1901).
The 1901 campaign taught important lessons to both machine politicians and municipal reformers. Police corruption remained an intransigent problem, and a touchstone in election rhetoric, but in segregation ring politicians found a way to manage vice without seeming to favor a wide-open city. Moreover, Tammany politicians ably appropriated the reformers’ rationale for districting and managed to present themselves as moderate, pragmatic candidates.52 The Committee of Fifteen, on the other hand, learned the limitations of raiding. As an enforcement technique, raiding accomplished little, merely pushing prostitutes and gamblers into other parts of an unregulated city, while as a political message, repetitious raiding wearied a sophisticated electorate.53 Nevertheless, the Committee of Fifteen showed that a private association could, with the proper leverage and a departmental ally in the city’s executive branch, police urban vice and successfully suppress some of its manifestations.
Before disbanding, the Fifteen called for the end of “spasmodic” reform and the establishment of a permanent organization to apply persistent pressure on the police and vice proprietors; a call that the Committee of Fourteen answered four years later in 1905.54 As the century turned, and mugwumps became Progressives, the component parts of larger campaigns developed into causes of their own. Like other points in the anti-machine platform, anti-vice reform gathered the momentum to turn into its own movement.55
WORKING THE SYSTEM
The Committee of Fourteen, which existed from 1905 to 1930, was a highly influential anti-vice association. From the start, the Committee of Fourteen’s members supported vice districting. Although they later rejected segregation, their early acceptance of vice districting meant that the Fourteen’s method for managing urban entertainment was both flexible and contingent.56 Adopting a sliding scale to judge a venue’s acceptability, they took into account the functional distinctions of place and purpose. Their ratings depended not only on the establishment’s roughness, but also on its proximity to reputable mixed-sex entertainment like the theater district, and whether eating, drinking, gambling, dancing, or sex served as the venue’s primary purpose. For the Fourteen, districting turned into an almost invisible issue. Whether they assumed, accepted, expected, or rejected segregation, they built it into their system of social regulation.57
Although it was the self-designated successor of the Committee of Fifteen, the Committee of Fourteen was less elite and more diverse than its predecessor.58 The Fourteen included more women, Catholics, and Jews than the Committee of Fifteen ever even considered.59 Still, the Committee hardly qualified as a plebeian organization. Both its membership and its approach toward anti-vice reform reflected its strong bourgeois bias. Certain of the righteousness of their efforts, the clergymen, businessmen, and settlement-house workers who comprised the Fourteen had few qualms about bypassing the legal process or sitting in judgment on saloonkeepers and their patrons. While some of its members also belonged to neighborhood vigilance associations, the Committee of Fourteen set itself a much larger task. The Fourteen sought to impose their vision of appropriate morality on patrons in entertainment venues throughout New York’s five boroughs. It mattered little to them whether this standard clashed with neighborhood customs. Instead, the Fourteen saw themselves as an extra-legal solution to the problem of a negligent city government.60 If city officials would not police New York’s bar-rooms, then the Fourteen decided they would.
The Committee of Fourteen initially focused on the infamous Raines Law hotels, which they considered responsible for the spread of commercialized prostitution into residential neighborhoods.61 The much-vilified Raines Law hotels resulted from a legal loophole in an 1896 excise law that decreed that hotels could serve alcohol on Sundays, a right that saloons did not share. A hotel was, however, any place that offered something resembling a restaurant and had at least ten bedrooms. Therefore enterprising proprietors throughout the city added ten rooms to their saloons and started providing lunch, serving alcohol on Sundays, and renting out those ten extra bedrooms to prostitutes. What State Senator John Raines intended as a reform measure to limit prostitution quickly turned into an unanticipated bonanza for saloonkeepers throughout the city.62
On first considering how to attack the Raines Law hotels, the Committee of Fourteen’s members decided to fight for new legislation. Members reasoned that since a legal loophole created the Raines Law hotels, they should lobby to alter the law; however, in implementing this plan, they found only frustration. During the first half of 1905, the Fourteen’s representatives in Albany, New York’s state capital, endured countless delays and endless filibustering. By the end of the session the law remained unchanged.63 Even after the state legislature compromised and amended the law in their second session, the situation did not improve in Manhattan, despite the Fourteen’s best efforts. Under the amended Raines Law and with the cooperation of the Building Department, the Excise Department, and the Police Department, the Committee of Fourteen organized raids on over a hundred Raines Law hotels. Unfortunately, the Committee soon discovered that police action did not suffice. Not only did a number of judges dismiss the cases, but some judges even went so far as to grant the proprietors protection against police interference in their business.64 At this point, the Committee of Fourteen reached the conclusion that guided its members for the next twenty-five years: laws are an inadequate instrument for social control.65
This conclusion differentiated the Fourteen from their predecessors. Where the Committee of Fifteen and the Committee of Five conducted their investigations as an election tactic, the Committee of Fourteen separated itself from electoral politics at both the municipal and the state levels. As an organization with an open-ended tenure, the Fourteen wanted to maintain a working relationship with commissioners in the Excise Department despite changes in the Mayor’s Office.66 The Committee of Fourteen saw laws as potentially useful supplements, but only as supplements, to more effective means of anti-vice enforcement. Distanced from electoral politics, and disillusioned with legislation, the Fourteen instead embraced an entirely different model of municipal politics: the back-room bargaining table.
New York was a “high-license” state, which meant that the economics of alcohol distribution gave brewers tremendous power over saloon proprietors. By their sheer expense, high-license fees kept the number of saloons down, the fly-by-nighters out, and, not incidentally, increased government revenue.67 The mechanics of licensing required that each alcohol retailer pay the Excise Department $1,200 for its liquor license and then take out an additional bond of $1,800 from an insurance company to cover penalties incurred during the revocation or forfeiture of the license.68 These costs posed an enormous problem for most saloonkeepers and made them vulnerable to corporate control. Breweries often owned the building, held a chattel mortgage on the bar fixtures, or fronted the money for the excise-tax certificate and bond. When a brewer subsidized the license, the saloonkeeper usually signed over power of attorney to the brewer.69 The Committee of Fourteen used these complexities of the liquor trade to coerce city saloonkeepers into policing their venues according to the standards the Fourteen set.
The Committee found its strongest allies in New York’s Brewers Association. Fearing increased support for prohibition, the Brewers needed the goodwill that a cleanup might incur.70 In 1905, the Association’s representatives approached the Committee of Fourteen and offered to help them reform the Raines Law hotels.71 Peter Doelger, chairman of New York’s Lager Beer Brewers Board of Trade, argued that “the purification of the saloon is essential to the continued existence of the liquor traffic with the consent and approval of the Public.”72 Although New York remained a wet state, the Brewers feared that without positive action showing their good intentions toward home and family, the stalemate between the wets downstate and the drys upstate might collapse into an anti-saloon, if not anti-alcohol, consensus.73 For this reason, they aided the Fourteen in the Committee’s campaign to reshape sociability.
Starting in 1906, a month before the Excise Department renewed the year-long liquor licenses, two representatives of the Committee of Fourteen met with five representatives from the Brewers Association and two from the Reinsurance Association. At this meeting, the Fourteen presented its “Protest List,” in which they categorized whether a place was too disreputable to continue, needed some improvement, or ran just fine.74 This committee, sometimes referred to as the Joint Committee, then proceeded to wrangle over which places they would close and which proprietors they needed to intimidate. Over the next month, the Brewers and the Committee of Fourteen threatened saloonkeepers, while the surety companies refused to write bonds until the Committee of Fourteen gave them the go-ahead.75 The Fourteen’s Protest List, together with the cooperation that they received from the Brewers and the Reinsurance Association, provided the necessary leverage for the Fourteen’s successful, extra-legal manipulation of saloon proprietors.
If the Protest List dominated the Fourteen’s negotiations with the Joint Committee, then “promissory notes” symbolized the Fourteen’s coercion of saloon-keepers. In order for blacklisted saloonkeepers to upgrade their standing to probationers, they needed to go to the Fourteen’s offices, plead their case, and, if given a second chance, sign a letter pledging that in the future they would more strictly control the behavior of their patrons. Generally, the letters required proprietors to promise that they would observe the one o’clock closing time and prohibit un-escorted women from patronizing the premises at night; but the Committee also tailored these pledges to fit specific activities that the Fourteen found offensive in a saloon. Depending on the conditions in their barrooms, some proprietors also needed to agree to forbid dancing, stop serving mixed-race parties, and keep gangsters and drug dealers from making their saloon a hangout.76 After a saloonkeeper signed the letter, the Fourteen then sent a note to their brewer and surety agent saying that the saloonkeeper was back in good standing—this year.77 If at any time, however, the Fourteen’s investigators found that the saloonkeeper had broken his or her parole, the brewers stopped supplying beer and, if they controlled the venue’s liquor license, they removed it, effectively closing down the saloon.78 When the brewery did not control the license, the Fourteen filed violation complaints with the Excise Department. If the Excise Department did not revoke the offending venue’s license by the end of the excise year, the Fourteen contacted all the surety companies that covered excise bonds to make certain no one would insure the blacklisted proprietor.79 The thoroughness of the Committee of Fourteen’s astonishingly overt blackmail left resort-keepers with little legal redress to counter the Fourteen’s manipulation.
By 1912, the Committee of Fourteen’s scheme for limiting sexual immorality in saloons worked, and it worked well. Over the next few years, the Joint Committee faced occasional problems, but nothing that compromise and a little financial pressure could not settle. The Fourteen liked to brag that “its policy is to clean up, not to close up the doubtful or disorderly places.”80 Frederick Whitin, the general secretary, confided to Mrs. Barclay Hazard, one of the Fourteen, that he thought that the Committee of Fourteen’s anti-Raines Law efforts had succeeded in making hotel saloons as moral as feasibly possible.81 A number of outside observers agreed. Reformers from Chicago, Boston, and Minneapolis all lauded the Fourteen’s endeavors, but they could not duplicate the Committee of Fourteen’s scheme, with its complicated checks and balances.82 Early innovators in the Progressive-era fight against vice, the Fourteen remained alone in their idiosyncratic approach to managing urban morality.83 Other Progressive reformers needed to look outside of New York City for a working model that they could apply in cities across the country. They found that model in Chicago.
CHICAGO, THE SECOND CITY
In Chicago, a city as wracked with political corruption and as rife with reformers as New York, the open toleration of vice appeared as an almost intractable problem. Reformers wondered which organization contained more corruption: the police, the city council, or the mayor’s office. Frustrated by the strength of the machine, and stymied by its well-oiled electorate, municipal reformers did not even have the excise law on their side; Illinois was a local-option state. Secure in their position, or at least well ensconced in Chicago, the brewers had no incentive to cooperate with reformers to monitor saloon morality. Instead, municipal reformers relied on an investigative commission, and a well-researched report, to instigate change.84
As in New York City, Chicago’s anti-vice investigations began with the crusade of an outraged individual. When British journalist W. T. Stead visited Chicago for the World’s Fair in 1893, he blasted the city’s open toleration of vice, but unlike Charles Parkhurst, who directed his anti-vice agitation against Tammany Hall, Stead aspired to loftier goals. Best known for his article “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” which rallied sentiment against the Contagious Diseases Act (the forced medical inspection of prostitutes), Stead came to the United States hoping to inspire a cross-class, civic revival that would throw out the “host of unclean spirits” corrupting the city.85 Despite the publication of his sensational book, If Christ Came to Chicago, Stead failed in his mission. Many Americans frowned on prostitution; however, they shied away from Stead’s evangelical fervor in fighting it. Even Stead’s successes failed. He helped establish the Chicago Civic Federation, but without his insistent presence, Federation members quickly turned their efforts to campaigning against Chicago’s machine. In the 1890s, municipal reformers cared more about electing a good-government slate, which they thought would solve a myriad of problems, than in directly tackling the rampant toleration of vice.86
Nevertheless, in Chicago, as in other cities, the 1890s marked an increased effort to address the political impact of urban vice. In 1898, at the governor’s request, Illinois reformers initiated an investigation into police malfeasance in Chicago. Taking New York State’s Lexow Commission as their model, state legislators crafted their report to make the partisan point that the current city administration openly and defiantly protected organized gambling. Predictably, the results of the report proved ephemeral, their significance hardly lasting beyond election day.87 In 1904, to remedy official inaction, Chicago’s City Club hired Alexander Piper, a former deputy police commissioner from New York City, to uncover police corruption. Finding numerous prostitutes openly soliciting in neighborhoods throughout the city, Piper, a compatriot of William McAdoo, suggested that, as in New York, better-defined districts would benefit Chicago.88 He concluded that “prostitution should be hammered and kept down . . . but do not . . . hammer it to the extent of scattering it all over the city and into the residential portions.”89 City officials accepted Piper’s suggestion with alacrity and concentrated prostitution and gambling into three already vice-ridden neighborhoods. Chicago politicians never codified the North, West, and South Side districts through city ordinances, but they explicitly defined the three districts’ boundaries in published police instructions.90 Up to this point, Chicago’s official anti-vice endeavors imitated the efforts of other cities, but in 1910 city officials and social reformers created something new and different: the landmark Chicago Vice Commission.
Initially, the formation of the Vice Commission fit the typical template for an anti-vice crusade. Walter T. Sumner, another Episcopal divine, wrote a well-publicized letter to Chicago’s mayor complaining about police toleration of prostitution. The Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, where Sumner served as dean, was in the heart of the West Side red-light district, and Sumner found the flagrant solicitation intolerable.91 Whereas, in New York City, Bishop Potter’s letter to Mayor Van Wyck triggered a Tammany investigation into Tammany corruption, in Chicago, Mayor Fred A. Busse, who was also a machine politician, made a much more canny move. Instead of waiting for the Chamber of Commerce or a similar organization to convene a retaliatory committee to expose machine complicity in tolerating vice, in March 1910 Busse established a nonpartisan vice commission, appointing thirty local notables and designating Sumner as its chairman.92 Busse charged the Commission, which included department store magnate Julius Rosenwald and University of Chicago professor W. I. Thomas, to settle the question about the desirability of vice districts once and for all.93 Although most members started out in favor of vice districting, after months of exhaustive research and regular meetings, the Commission unanimously condemned reputational segregation. In its place, they offered almost one hundred different recommendations for actions the city, the state, and the federal government to take. These suggestions had less effect, however, than the Commission’s fervent declaration against segregated vice: “CONSTANT AND PERSISTENT REPRESSION OF PROSTITUTION THE IMMEDIATE METHOD: ABSOLUTE ANNIHILATION THE ULTIMATE IDEAL.”94
Carter Henry Harrison IV, Busse’s successor and an outspoken advocate of segregated vice, did not close the city’s three districts, but the Chicago Vice Commission marked the end of municipal reformers’ already weakened support of vice districting. During the 1900s, Progressive reformers quietly endorsed the mugwumps’ efforts at localization, but after 1911 they invariably explained how, once they read the Commission’s report, The Social Evil in Chicago, they realized the fallacy of their former position.95 After the Chicago Vice Commission, urban Progressives could not support reputational segregation and still maintain credibility as committed anti-vice reformers.
Reconstructing the political antecedents of Progressive-era anti-vice reform demystifies reformers’ repudiation of red-light districts. The strength of their early acceptance fueled the virulence of their later rejection. After the successful election of nonpartisan mayors failed to reduce commercial vice, or crush the urban machine, anti-vice reformers grew disillusioned with the efficacy of districting as a political expedient. Nevertheless, despite these disappointments, the mugwumps did achieve the dubious distinction of turning red-light districts into a well-recognized feature of early twentieth-century cities.
To the disgust of the mugwumps and their heirs, the segregation of vice also failed culturally. Reformers at the turn of the century sought to clarify the distinction between respectable and disreputable leisure and reduce the visibility of vice within a city as a whole, but the location of tolerated tenderloins near commercial downtowns made vice more conspicuous, not less. Indeed, proximity to the business and theater districts imputed an unspoken legitimacy to activities within the vice district. At the same time, geographic consolidation significantly strengthened an already-existing subculture that flouted mainstream norms concerning sex and sociability. At a time when commercial leisure played an increasingly important role in urban recreation, red-light districts allowed the sporting class to expand its cultural influence. Toleration and geographic concentration gave the advocates of urban vice the stability they needed to create a world in which they welcomed everyone who chose to enter, even as they endorsed an anti-bourgeois ethos distinctly their own.
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