CHAPTER FIVE
The War on Vice, 1910–1919
The economic critique of commercialized vice gave the Progressive era movement its intellectual coherence. It also set its programmatic agenda: closing down the segregated red-light districts found in most cities across the country. To achieve this goal, reformers worked nationally to build an anti-district consensus, but in the seven years before the United States entered the First World War, the most difficult battles for anti-vice reformers occurred in the city-by-city fight to close and keep closed the once-tolerated tenderloins. Through municipal vice commissions, Progressive reformers exposed the unalloyed greed of those who lived off of the ill-gotten proceeds of commercialized vice. At the same time, reformers used the commissions’ reports to debunk the argument that urban order required red-light districts. A powerful weapon on the local level, vice commissions also served a purpose nationally. The findings of each commission received press coverage across the country. Through this publicity, what happened in one locality affected the reform movement in other places. Urban leaders in successive cities closed their districts to show their solidarity with the national quest for morally clean municipalities, but they also embraced anti-vice reform as an integral element in the competition between municipalities to prove their city’s civic superiority.
The sporting world resisted the clamp-down on disreputable leisure, but as public opinion turned against vice districts, the sporting class adapted to the increasingly stringent regulations governing urban entertainment. By first targeting brothels, anti-vice reformers effectively used red-light abatement laws to eliminate the tenderloin’s main draw. A concurrent crackdown on open solicitation in other district venues created further difficulties for a city’s sports. Closing the districts fundamentally altered the market structure of urban vice, making it both less profitable for insiders and less accessible to outsiders seeking a good time.
On the eve of the United States’ entry into World War I, anti-vice reformers could point to significant gains. Over eighty cities had abolished their tenderloins, but local initiatives had reached their limit. Persuasion only went so far, and without federal authority, anti-vice reformers struggled to convince those municipalities supporting the sporting world that red-light districts hurt their cities rather than helped them. Martial rhetoric sounded superb when mobilizing a movement, but it took an actual war to eradicate tolerated vice districts from America’s cities.
MOBILIZING A MOVEMENT
Since the 1890s, urban reformers across the nation kept apprised of the happenings in other cities through private correspondence, memberships in organizations such as the National Municipal League, and subscriptions to Charities and Commons, renamed the Survey in 1909. After the formation of the American Vigilance Association in 1911, anti-vice reformers used their own national organization to track the fight against red-light districts and advise other Progressives on how to join in the battle. Despite this development, anti-vice reform remained a local issue. When reformers wished to show their commitment to the fight against red-light districts, they organized municipal vice commissions to investigate their city’s immoral entertainment. Although urban Progressives participated actively in the national movement to eliminate commercial vice, they did so through local campaigns.
The Chicago Vice Commission galvanized the national movement for anti-vice reform. Mayor Fred Busse’s creation of the commission in 1910 was a canny move. When accused of tolerating vice, the mayor neither denied the charges nor ordered diversionary raids; instead, he forced the reformers themselves to investigate the problem. Led by Walter T. Sumner, dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, thirty prominent Chicago citizens proceeded to examine the situation in the full view, not just of the city, but of the whole country. Graham Taylor, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago, organizer of the Chicago Commons Settlement House, member of the vice commission, and contributing editor to the Survey, used his ties to the journal to publicize the commission’s findings and the political response to them.1 Thus primed, the national reform community awaited the publication of the Chicago Vice Commission’s report with great anticipation.
Upon its release, the report, The Social Evil in Chicago, garnered immediate coverage in newspapers across the country, and its initial print run of 25,000 copies soon sold out.2 J. Frank Chase, the secretary of the New England Watch and Ward Society, proclaimed it a “national monument,” while Walter Lippmann condemned The Social Evil in Chicago as “well meaning but unmeaning.”3 In contrast, Maude Miner, the guiding force behind the New York Probation Association, commented most presciently. She predicted that “one of the greatest results that can follow from the study into conditions in Chicago will be that this investigation and report will point the way to other similar investigations.”4 The report itself presented the facts baldly, using excerpts from the investigators’ accounts. With code numbers assigned to the names of people and places, the report achieved a gloss of academic legitimacy that the more passionate white slavery exposés lacked. As with other Progressive initiatives, the social sciences benefited the anti-vice movement, a fact that did not escape reformers in other cities.5 In both its style and content, the Chicago Vice Commission report marked a turning point in the war on vice. For years to come, anti-vice reformers would confess that they once supported reputational segregation, but after they read The Social Evil in Chicago they converted to the belief that only the annihilation of red-light districts and the persistent repression of vice’s commercial manifestations would suffice.6
The resulting fervor drove the members of scattered anti-vice committees and sex hygiene associations to create a single, national organization. In 1911, the National Vigilance Committee joined forces with the American Purity Alliance to create the American Vigilance Association. Based in Chicago, the Association included veterans of the Chicago Vice Commission, notably Walter Sumner, and stalwarts in the crusade against white slavery, such as Clifford Roe and physician O. Edward Janney of Baltimore.7 The AVA pledged to coordinate the national effort to eliminate red-light districts, encourage the passage of uniform state laws to fight the problem, and publish propaganda in support of a single sexual standard.8 Even after the American Vigilance Association merged with the American Federation of Sex Hygiene in 1914 and moved its headquarters from Chicago to New York, the new American Social Hygiene Association continued to give anti-vice investigations, legislation, and law enforcement higher priority than medical issues like venereal diseases.9 Although ASHA subsequently shifted its attention to ensuring the country’s venereal health, at its inception, ASHA fought for the suppression of commercial vice.
The American Social Hygiene Association created a sense of community and shared purpose for its members. ASHA kept its readers current on the news from cities across the country in a monthly bulletin that came free with membership, while its quarterly journal, Social Hygiene, provided more in-depth articles. These publications distributed information about best practices, a service that the Association supplemented with pamphlets that members could buy to distribute locally.10 ASHA also provided more direct and tangible aid. For example, Bascom Johnson, head of the legal department, tracked the most effective dance-hall regulations, nameplate ordinances, and red-light abatement acts. Before lobbying their respective state legislatures, local reformers consulted Johnson’s legal department for advice on how to write the law in order to withstand the legal challenges sure to follow.11 ASHA’s officers ensured that the lessons learned in one locality benefited anti-vice reformers everywhere, thus building a foundation for the rising national consensus against tolerated vice.
Despite ASHA’s significance, the municipal vice commission always stood as the symbolic centerpiece of the prewar movement. Convening a commission signaled a city’s commitment to anti-vice reform. Between 1910 and 1917, twenty-eight cities and four states conducted investigations into vice in their localities.12 “As soon as a town or city desires to join the campaign against commercialized vice, the American Vigilance Association will be prepared to assist it,” Clifford Roe announced shortly after the AVA’s formation. “The association recommends first, a careful survey and study of vice conditions similar to that made by the Vice Commission of Chicago; then, based upon a convincing and reliable report, a campaign to arouse the public conscience to its moral and civic duty.”13 In city after city, anti-vice reformers followed this template for action. They formed a commission, sponsored an investigation, wrote up a report, and proposed a set of key laws to the city council and state legislature.14 Predictably, the reports shared a similar style and drew comparable conclusions.
This isomorphism did not, however, result merely from reformers embracing an idea whose time had come, but also because of ASHA’s active role in supporting municipal vice commissions.15 For a fee, city leaders could hire ASHA’s investigative team. Led by George Kneeland, the man who spearheaded the investigations in Chicago and New York, ASHA detectives provided both credibility and competency to the commissions for which they worked.16 Before the First World War, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Syracuse, New York, and eleven other cities took advantage of ASHA’s investigative department to further their local movement to suppress commercialized vice.17 Indeed, the Association provided a $500 subsidy to the Lexington, Kentucky, Vice Commission to help cover the cost of its investigation.18 Thus, even though ASHA provided an invaluable service in coordinating the assault against red-light districts and ensuring consistency in the recommendations of different vice commissions, anti-vice reform continued to operate as a locally driven, city-centered movement.
The anti-district consensus did not occur without some coercion. Over the summer of 1912, while the Atlanta Vice Commission conducted its inquiry, the Atlanta Constitution published anti-vice bulletins by the Men and Religion Forward Movement in order to influence the Commission’s conclusions.19 Reformers’ agitation grew urgent in September, when word reached the Atlanta newspapers that the vice commissioners intended to endorse strict reputational segregation when they submitted their report to the mayor in early October.20 Two weeks before the report’s submission, after consultation with the city’s ministers and the leaders of the Men and Religion Forward Movement, Chief of Police James Beavers made a preemptive strike. On 24 September 1912, he ordered all “houses of ill-repute” to close within five days.21 The next few weeks produced a frenzy of activity as the police raided open resorts, reformers tried to rescue the women within them, and the city officials who supported segregation protested the police chief’s unilateral action.22 The vice commissioners, however, succumbed to community pressure. On the last two pages of their report, they recommended “a policy of repression” and commended Beavers. “Whatever differences of opinion might have previously existed as to the best method of handling this most difficult of all municipal problems, it is the duty of all good citizens . . . to sustain the police authorities to break up vice and crime in this city.”23 Atlanta’s anti-vice reformers, with the police chief’s backing, won the battle against the district’s supporters. Just as importantly, Beavers’s actions enabled anti-vice activists in cities across the nation to claim that all the country’s vice commissions unanimously condemned red-light districts.24
For all its symbolic importance, a vice commission, and the publication of its report, rarely signaled the end of a city’s fight against commercialized vice. Not every municipal government acted on the recommendations set forth. Nor did the problems cease when a city closed its vice district. Indeed, the vice commissions in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Hartford, Connecticut, convened after their respective cities had already eliminated their vice districts.25 Following up on a tenderloin’s closure required the cooperation of the police and the municipal courts, an uncertain prospect at best during the Progressive era.26 In Atlanta, Chief Beavers lost his job as a result of his anti-vice enforcement, having alienated too many members of the city’s machine.27 Even when a municipality succeeded in closing its district, no guarantees existed that the next administration would honor the policies of its predecessor. Moreover, maintaining gains required following through on the tedious work of overseeing the new status quo. In 1915, a year after the publication of the Syracuse Moral Survey Commission’s report and the closure of the city’s district, Frederick Betts, the commission’s chairman, observed that “the end is not yet. There will be no more spectacular events. It is a state of siege. Our aim is unchanged.”28 Nevertheless, anti-vice reformers believed that with persistence and the implementation of a few key laws, they could suppress the old-time red-light district with its wide-open brothels. Of all these laws, they considered the red-light abatement act the most important. Between 1910 and 1920, thirty-five states followed Iowa’s lead and passed injunction and abatement laws that empowered private citizens to proceed against parlor houses and other places of ill repute.29
“Development of Eight Outstanding Social Hygiene Laws.” The chart shows the growth of the anti-vice movement as measured by the passage of legislation. Joseph Mayer, The Regulation of Commercialized Vice: An Analysis of the Transition from Segregation to Repression in the United States (New York: Klebold Press, 1922), 8.
The passage of California’s red-light abatement act involved a particularly dramatic battle. As usual, the referendum posed the greatest hurdle to its enactment, and, as usual, Northern Californians rebelled against restrictions on their personal liberties. In 1913, Los Angeles did not have a tolerated red-light district, while San Francisco boasted not just one, but three tenderloins, including the infamous Barbary Coast, which specialized in dance-hall prostitution.30 The people of San Francisco believed so strongly in the benefits of segregated vice that they went a step further than any other municipality during these years and founded a venereal clinic in 1911 to monitor the physical health of the city’s prostitutes. Although the clinic closed in 1913, after only two years in operation, its mere presence showed the depth of San Francisco’s commitment to the controlled toleration of prostitution.31
The vote on the red-light abatement law reflected Northern Californians’ opposition to anti-vice control. The bill went through the California Legislature with majority support in 1913, but the vote fell along strict regional lines. Out of the eighty-seat Assembly, seventeen voted against the bill, with twelve of those seventeen coming from San Francisco. Similarly, in the forty-seat Senate, five of the eleven who voted against the bill represented that city’s constituents.32 Despite their defeat, the bill’s opponents rallied almost immediately and petitioned for a referendum.33 California’s Progressives found the situation insupportable and pledged themselves to obtaining the red-light abatement act. Nonetheless, muck-raker Franklin Hichborn and other seasoned campaigners knew that such strong support from San Francisco meant yet another battle for the state’s reformers. Even as a statewide initiative, the fight for the injunction and abatement act still centered on local politics and the issue of municipal control.
After forming the California Committee for the Red-Light Abatement Law to battle the “tenderloin interests,” its leaders immediately divided it into a Northern Committee and a Southern Committee, with the Tehachapi Pass as the territorial dividing line. The Southern Committee focused on making certain that supporters of the bill actually voted in the referendum, while the Northern Committee devoted its members’ efforts to debunking the “astonishing misrepresentations” touted in “practically every saloon of the state, most cigar stores and barber shops, and many club centers.”34 A massive propaganda campaign followed. Over the next eleven months, the Northern Committee sent out 1,250,000 copies of four pamphlets to rally support for the injunction and abatement act.35 Nor did matters rest there. Members of the organization combed through California’s newspaper for articles that supported segregation and derided the red-light abatement bill. “Upon the notification of the publication of such an article, if it contained mis-statements, the committee at once took the matter up with the editor of the paper, giving him the facts, well-backed by examples.” If the newspaper persisted in its opposition to the law, the Committee contacted its supporters within the community and gave them the “data for effective refutation . . . and to show the publisher where he was in error.”36 This barrage of information produced results, and in 1914, with a margin of almost 50,000 votes, the injunction and abatement bill won the referendum and became law.37
Hichborn and other anti-vice reformers across the country fought so hard for the red-light abatement statute because they not only saw its effective use by public officials, they also witnessed its devastating application by private citizens. Chicago’s Committee of Fifteen, in particular, wielded the red-light abatement law with extraordinary virtuosity in the ongoing fight against protected vice. Incorporated in 1911 in the immediate aftermath of the Chicago Vice Commission, by 1914 the Committee of Fifteen “directed its efforts chiefly to the work of destroying market places for traffic in women.”38 More ready to call on the press than New York’s Committee of Fourteen, the Chicago Committee of Fifteen used a combination of publicity and law to put pressure on Chicago’s landlords. With the injunction and abatement act as their main weapon, the Fifteen conducted title searches on properties used for “immoral purposes.” Notifying both the owners and then, shortly thereafter, the city’s newspapers of their findings, they found the threat of exposure almost as effective as the injunction proceedings themselves in eliminating vice.39 As Samuel Thrasher, the Committee’s general secretary, reported, within the first ten months after Illinois passed the act in 1915, the Committee contacted the owners of 205 properties, warning them to change their property’s use. The threat of injunction and abatement was so effective that they only took four owners to court for noncompliance.40 The Progressives knew that reform through self-policing and self-interest had a greater chance of changing urban vice than the self-serving theatrics of pre-election crusades.
In 1917, after seven years of persistent effort, anti-vice reform reached a plateau. With the use of red-light abatement laws and the old standby of reporting liquor-license violations, Progressive anti-vice reformers focused on managing their city’s morality and keeping its district closed. A problem remained, however. While ASHA could effectively advise anti-vice reformers seeking to alter their city’s social policing, unless a municipality had strong community support, neither local nor national reformers had sufficient authority to break the stalemates between those who opposed and those who supported segregated vice. Over eighty-five cities embraced the new anti-district paradigm, but recalcitrant municipalities such as New Orleans, San Antonio, and San Francisco continued to run their towns wide open, blatantly disregarding national disapproval and overriding the efforts of local anti-vice advocates.41
THE RETRENCHMENT OF THE SPORTING WORLD
When anti-vice reformers boasted that “the old, wide-open district is closed bang tight,” they meant that they had shut down their town’s brothels.42 Eliminating a city’s vice district involved closing everything from the cheapest cribs to the poshest parlor houses. Every subsequent action, from forbidding mixed-sex drinking in the back rooms of saloons to requiring that all women who entered dance halls had escorts, supplemented the initial strike against brothels. Without open houses, customers did not know where to go for prostitution. As reformers intended, closing a vice district fundamentally altered the market structure of a city’s commercial vice. The sporting class adapted to the changes, sometimes evading regulatory restrictions with innovative creativity, but many of its members suffered great financial losses.
The clamp-down devastated business within the vice district. Nellie Busbee, an Atlanta madam, committed suicide, damning Chief Beavers “to hell” rather than face her losses, while another madam asked the bitter rhetorical question, “Did you ever stop to think what an order to move in less than a week’s time means to a woman who has $40,000 tied up down here?”43 Two years after Syracuse’s district closed, the chairman of the Moral Survey Committee boasted that an excise official “reports that on an evening not long ago he counted only three women in a group of cafés, at 11 p.m. where, one year ago, Clement Discoll, of the Bureau of Municipal Research of New York, said he could count seventy-five girls almost any evening, at the same hour.”44 Saloonkeepers who rigorously implemented a policy of men-only suffered a similar loss of business.45 When asked, members of the sporting world agreed that they had not received “a square deal.”46
Prostitution did not disappear just because madams posted “for rent” signs on their brothels’ front doors. Pro-district supporters often prophesied that ending segregation would result in scatteration, the spread of the sporting class into the rest of the city. Anti-vice reformers, however, argued the opposite, asserting that under segregation more prostitution existed outside the district than within it. In other words, scatteration already existed, but closing the district would shut down a city’s most easily accessed source of vice.47 Prostitutes did relocate to new venues when a district closed, but instead of deluging respectable residential districts, as segregation’s advocates predicted, they moved into the cheap hotels and lodging houses of the central business district, or the dance halls, cafés, and cabarets of the adjacent white-light district.48 Even such minor moves made life more difficult for men-about-town. Without an obvious destination, customers struggled to fulfill their quest for pleasure. Madams, saloonkeepers, and other venue owners did what business they could, running things “on the q.t.” and restricting their dealings to people they knew. Even when locals vouched for an outsider, strangers frequently got the brush-off and were told “nothing doing.”49 If they made an effort, seasoned sports usually discovered where their peers relocated, but outsiders and out-of-towners lacked the necessary connections.50 When an investigator in Bridgeport, Connecticut, met some “fellows” after the closure of the city’s district, he observed that “no one knew where to go. We walked for awhile, then went to (—G—) cabaret, from there to the (—E—) cabaret. Then the party broke without having been able to ‘pick up’ any girls.”51 The “new popular culture” benefited from the business the tenderloin lost. The fellows in Bridgeport might not have stayed at either cabaret, but as men acclimated to life without vice districts, they spent more time in such places. As a sport complained in early 1917 about Little Rock and Argenta, Arkansas, “the only choice a man has in these towns during the week is to go to the movies or else to bed—On Sundays the movies are closed.”52 When the sporting class scattered to other parts of a city, reformers succeeded in making vice both less visible and less viable. Eliminating the districts did not stop people from going out on the town, but it shifted their patronage to more respectable venues. Anti-vice activists knew that red-light abatement and license revocation would work as effectively in closing venues outside the district as they did within it. Reformers soon realized, however, that a lack of customers would drive many sports out of business before they even needed to proceed against them.53
In the new post-district sexual economy, both supply and demand decreased. Many prostitutes left town rather than face the insecurity of working outside a brothel. Besides the problems of inclement weather, streetwalkers lacked protection from violent johns and needed pimps to coordinate their “dates” to a greater degree than when they worked in a house. Streetwalkers and café prostitutes could charge more per trick, but they serviced fewer customers and experienced far harsher conditions while earning less money to compensate for the difficulties.54 Since reformers usually followed the initial closure of the brothels with subsequent restrictions to clean up the venues of disreputable leisure, independent prostitutes never knew if dance-hall managers or café proprietors would cease tolerating their presence. Similarly, hotel owners offered no guarantees that they would continue to rent their rooms to sporting women.55 Even when prostitutes worked through a call house, they earned less money than they would in an open parlor house. Running their business quietly, with no women residing in the apartments, call-house madams coordinated far fewer transactions. Men needed insiders to vet them, and then they usually waited either a couple of hours or maybe even until the next day to meet a woman.56 Many men decided that the difficulties in finding prostitutes outweighed the pleasure of having sex with them. As a rule, these complications made vice more expensive for customers, less profitable for prostitutes and resort owners, and generally required a degree of discretion at odds with the sporting ethos.
When they could, sports resisted the changes. Some used their connections to the machine and tried to influence municipal administrations. Others decided to wait out this clamp-down as they had all previous crusades. Buoyed by past experience which showed that “the lid” always “tilted” back in their favor, many sports believed that they just needed to hold fast until support for the campaign waned.57 “Wait till [sic] things get settled after this coming election. . . . My friend says they are going to oust the judge and the prosecuting attorney. Things will hum again,” an out-of-work madam in Hartford, Connecticut, assured herself and her listeners. “Everybody is anxious to have the sports back again. They didn’t bother anyone but gave money to the town.”58 In many cities, however, the sporting world waited with misplaced faith. The Progressive reform of urban government decreased the power of city councils and increased the importance of nonpartisan appointments to executive-branch positions, depriving the tenderloin interests of the influence they once possessed. Moreover, anti-vice reformers were themselves veteran participants in pre-election crusades. They swore that this campaign would differ from the rest, and that the gains made would outlast any particular municipal administration.
In Chicago, the city’s sports deviated from a purely political approach and formed a professional association, the Chicago Hotel Keepers’ Protective Association, to fight reformers. Its members attracted national attention in December 1915 after they plastered fifteen thousand posters across the city condemning the menace of paid reformers. The Association’s members, for the most part owners and managers of “assignation hotels,” claimed that reformers hurt Chicago’s reputation and drove away conventioneers and “the travelling public” from the city.59
Interestingly, instead of turning people against the Committee of Fifteen, the unnamed target of the broadsides, the Protective Association weakened the already-precarious reputation of smaller hotels. The Hotel Association of Chicago, which represented the city’s larger hotels, repudiated the Protective Association’s claims. They asserted that they had just had the “most profitable year in their history” and endorsed the Committee of Fifteen’s efforts. Concurrently, the American Hotel Men’s Association, which was in Chicago for its national convention, “took a strong stand against the illicit use of their buildings” and sought to prohibit smaller places, many of which tolerated prostitution on their premises, from calling their businesses hotels.60 A year earlier, the Cook County Real Estate Board, the Chicago Real Estate Board, and the Apartment Buildings Association bolstered their own positions by declaring their solidarity with anti-vice reformers and pledging not to rent or sell to any disreputable clients.61 Like the Brewers’ cooperation with New York’s Committee of Fourteen to eliminate saloon prostitution, the hoteliers hoped that their advocacy of Progressive values would increase their standing within the business world. Even if they lost a percentage of their profits, repudiating the sporting class improved their status and forestalled external regulation.62 Once again, self-policing, a professional prerequisite, worked to the advantage of anti-vice reformers seeking to make the urban environment inhospitable to the sporting world.
Perhaps the most profound economic effect the new prohibitory ethos had on commercialized vice was the disaggregation of services previously provided under one roof.63 No longer could a sporting man go to a brothel, have a couple of drinks, share a dance or two with a prostitute, then adjourn to her room, bottle of champagne in hand, and only pay the madam once for the services provided. Now, both prostitutes and customers negotiated multiple, separate transactions. When possible, streetwalkers reached accords with the police on their beat, while prostitutes who wished to work indoors sought out café and cabaret owners who would allow them to solicit in their venues for at least part of the evening.64 But under the new post-district regulatory regime, proprietors required deniability. Prostitutes needed to act with greater decorum, make their solicitations more subtle, and generally appear more like customers than employees. Some cities demanded that women in commercial amusement resorts have male escorts, while others forbade women from moving between tables or making overtures to strangers.65 These rules increased the importance of pimps and other male gobetweens, adding yet another layer to the independent prostitutes’ daily negotiations. To succeeded in such a difficult market, sporting women sought to ensure that waiters, bartenders, and cabaret managers would send tricks to them rather than to other sporting women.66 Even after a prostitute hooked a john, she still needed to establish her price and find a place for them to have sex. Sporting women usually worked a circuit of hotels where they knew the management tolerated transient trade.67 Once at the hotel, the customer paid the desk clerk directly and the prostitute separately. If the man wanted a drink, he needed to buy it from a nearby saloon or from an enterprising hotel employee.68 These separate transactions complicated the previously streamlined process of going to a brothel and getting laid. Reformers hoped that the hassles of the new regulations would drive sporting women out of the business, even as they reduced the number of customers to those truly dedicated to commercial sex.69
Life also changed for pimps. Besides complaining that their “humps” did not bring in the money that they once did, pimps themselves needed to work harder to ensure that their prostitutes got what little business they did.70 In some cases, that meant finding employment as a waiter or bartender, both to supplement the family income and to act as a go-between for a prostitute and her potential customers.71 In other cases, pimps acted as escorts in resorts that only admitted women with male partners. Once inside the venue, pimps drummed up business for their “girls,” since many entertainment venues forbade women from approaching men they did not know.72 Similarly, when former brothel prostitutes worked as singers and dancers in a cabaret, they relied on their male partners in the audience to make dates for them after the show.73 But pimps did not remain within the confines of the sex trade. In 1912, a messenger boy from Philadelphia complained bitterly that “the pimps are taking to selling opium and cocaine, too.” Before the police started closing down the parlor houses, “the night messengers used to do that business. . . . But now that the women didn’t make much, the pimps are making something on the side.”74 This trend accelerated after the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914 made it more difficult for pharmacists to sell opiates and cocaine to “recreational” users without a doctor’s prescription.75 Pimps took over this newly illicit trade, profiting from the higher prices they could charge tenderloin addicts. In a few years’ time, after the passage of National Prohibition, these same men would move into bootlegging. For the moment, they scrambled to replace the income they once received from district prostitutes.
Rather than fight the ever-increasing restrictions, many prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, and other people with little local investment relocated when a city closed its district.76 A significant portion of the sporting class usually came from the immediate region, but more often than not, a good percentage came from elsewhere. For example, in Newark, New Jersey, although less than 10 percent of the prostitutes interviewed by the vice commission were immigrants, over three-quarters of the 102 women questioned came from outside of the city. Even in cities with less-mobile populations, approximately one-half to two-thirds of the sporting women had already moved at least once in their search for better opportunities.77 If a town grew too dead and their profits too meager, sporting men and women went to places with better prospects. As a Hartford waiter observed, “the girls will have to hunt new hunting grounds or starve.”78 One woman’s quest for financial success took her from Louisville, Kentucky, to Portland, Oregon, via the Hawaiian Islands.79 Most sports, however, took less circuitous routes. Other Portland madams came from Chicago, San Francisco, Spokane, and Lincoln, Nebraska.80 Nevertheless, with the closure of the districts, an already-mobile population started traveling with even greater frequency.
Inevitably, when one city cracked down on vice, other cities gained the sports who left. After Atlanta closed its district, a journalist reported that most sporting women “are going to other cities. Birmingham, Macon, Memphis, New Orleans, Louisville and Richmond are the points to which a majority have emigrated.”81 Neither the resident sports nor the local reformers appreciated the in-migration. “We do not need any of these women here,” a Macon madam warned Atlanta women. “There are already about 150 recognized prostitutes in Macon and that is a few too many for a city of 40,000 people.”82 Meanwhile, Macon’s ministers called for a vice commission and the chief of police in Dawson, Georgia, at the urging of the mayor and city council, ordered its tenderloin’s residents to leave town.83 In more than a few cities, the sporting world’s mobility caused reformers to reassess their position on segregated vice and pursue their own campaigns against red-light districts rather than harbor the influx of sports from other places.84
Unlike their more mobile employees, district proprietors who owned their venues stood to lose the most, but they also had the capital to fight reformers. Used to the pro forma raids by the police and the occasional arrest for keeping a disorderly house or for liquor-law violations, sporting men and women knew how to negotiate the city’s criminal justice system. Red-light abatement laws, however, went through the courts of equity, which had a different set of judges and no juries ready to sympathize with the plight of small-business owners. Yet these disadvantages did not prevent brothel owners from contesting the validity of the laws.85 Despite these challenges, reformers won both in the courts and in the red-light districts. The differences between equity and criminal law confounded most tenderloin attorneys, while the threat of padlocking a place for a year, and selling off its furnishings and fixtures, deterred even the most profligate district proprietors.
Rather than give up, some venue owners shifted the apparent purpose of their resorts. Already well-versed in exploiting the loopholes in liquor-licensing laws for maximum hours and the widest possible clientele, proprietors embarked on reconfiguring their venues yet again. Brothel owners faced the most difficulties. They could try to turn their place into a hotel or lodging house, but anti-vice reformers looked askance at such a marginal recasting of a brothel’s intended purpose.86 As a result, many madams abandoned their parlor houses. Landlords found it extremely hard to rent out the buildings, although they occasionally found “respectable colored families” willing to take up residence.87 In contrast to sporting-house owners, saloonkeepers had more options. Turning their upstairs into separate hotels, boarding houses, or apartments, and renaming their back rooms cafés, cabarets, or grill rooms, they added exterior entrances to each of these subdivisions and closed off the interior doors that once connected the upstairs, the barroom, and the back room.88 Owners of venues with sufficient square footage took advantage of the dance craze, hiring singers, dancers, and multipiece bands. These changes represented more than just structural renovations; they also indicated a cultural shift. As anti-vice reformers hoped, when faced with the choice between closure or toning down behavior in their resorts, many owners opted for respectability over bankruptcy.89 Frederick Betts, chairman of the Syracuse Moral Survey Committee, reported that “the manager of the worst offender among the cafés, where once we found a pimp at the piano and from twenty-five to thirty-five girls plying their trade, is trying to run his place decently and is succeeding fairly well.”90 Although Betts’s definition of success differed from that of the sporting world’s, some proprietors did make a successful transition from the red-light to the white-light district.
To make this shift from disreputable to respectable, proprietors sidelined sex as the primary purpose of their venues. Vice districts had always offered a range of entertainment to draw in customers, but more often than not, these amusements provided the backdrop for the sexual flirtations that everyone knew would end in an economic exchange. In the post-district world of urban entertainment, however, no such guarantee existed that the customer would get laid or that the woman would get paid. Cabarets provide a particularly striking example of the changing social relationships. Although some prostitutes had previously worked within cabarets, they now formed part of the audience. They could still arrange business on the side, but they needed to act with greater discretion so as not to attract the attention of either the police or possible anti-vice investigators.91 Once a mainstay of vice-district conviviality, sporting women’s outrageous antics only had a place in the new post-district world when confined to the stage. Between acts, female performers still emulated the saloon prostitutes of old and encouraged drinking, but they downplayed the concomitant sexual solicitation. With rules about apparel and limits on performers interacting with patrons, managers needed to police their employees for fear of losing not just their liquor licenses, but also their dance-hall or cabaret licenses, as Progressive reformers added layers of regulation in their quest to limit transgressive recreation.92
The sharpening distinction between patron and performer fractured the sporting class. Although the sporting world accorded a higher status to those who worked in the district over those who played in it, the ethos they espoused emphasized the ideal of equality through pleasure. Everybody should have a good time together. Seasoned prostitutes, youths just off the farm, shop girls sporting on their night out, gamblers dealing stuss, fat-cat politicians glad-handing their constituents—all of them belonged to the sporting world if they so chose. But when proprietors and performers could no longer mix with their patrons, and women could not enter venues without a male escort, the easy intermingling that the sporting ethos prized became as much of an anachronism as the open parlor house.
On the eve of World War I, urban entertainment stood in the balance. In the cities where reformers had successful clamped down on commercialized vice, the newly configured entertainment districts showcased the possibilities of more respectable recreation. The sporting world adapted to the new regulatory circumstances with resilience, but the creativity with which its members eluded reformers’ restrictions did not hide a fundamental restructuring of the sex trade. Disaggregating services previously offered as part of a package made prostitution more difficult for both sporting women and their customers. In order to stay in business, resort owners shunted sexual solicitation to the sidelines and emphasized other types of entertainment. This shift in focus disrupted the old continuum linking respectable and disreputable leisure. Thrilled with the successes of their economic and cultural manipulations, anti-vice reformers pledged themselves to changing urban entertainment across the country. World War I provided the ideal opportunity to realize their vision. With the authority of the War Department behind them, anti-vice reformers crushed their political opposition and overrode local compromises concerning the acceptable parameters of commercial leisure.
GOING TO WAR
The United States mobilized for World War I with lightning speed. Even while ostensibly still a neutral nation, government officials and private citizens readied themselves for war. In their preparations, America’s anti-vice reformers looked to the 1916 border conflict with Mexico to predict the moral readiness of the army. Newton Baker, the newly appointed Secretary of War, sent Raymond Fosdick, one-time Commissioner of Accounts of New York City, author of European Police Systems, and future president of the Rockefeller Association, to determine the truth of rumors about drunken revelry among the troops.93 What Fosdick and subsequent investigators saw disgusted them. Border towns already had a reputation for raucous red-light districts, but the tenderloins of southwestern cities such as Douglas, Arizona, El Paso, Texas, and Columbus, New Mexico, exceeded even the most dire expectations of debauchery. Barely able to keep up with demand, enterprising members of the sporting world, many of whom gravitated to the region in hopes of a quick profit from the troops, erected cheap, shoddily built cribs and saloons to service the soldiers.94 Later, Fosdick recalled that the “red-light districts . . . were crowded with hundreds of troops and drunken riots which were not infrequent had to be suppressed by the Provost Guard. Meanwhile the venereal disease rates were soaring.”95 Swearing that such scenes would not replay during a mass mobilization of troops, the United States’ top anti-vice reformers plotted how to safeguard the moral and physical health of new recruits.96 To that end, Newton Baker devised the idea of a Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) that would provide “wholesome” amusement to the troops even as it suppressed less-acceptable recreation.
When Congress issued the Selective Service Act on 18 May 1917, it included the infamous Sections 12 and 13, which empowered the War Department to effect the coercive side of Baker’s plan. Section 12 prohibited the sale of alcohol to soldiers and allowed for the establishment of dry zones around the camps. Similarly, Section 13 authorized the secretary of war “to do everything by him deemed necessary to suppress and prevent the keeping or setting up of houses of ill fame, brothels, or bawdy houses within such distance as he deem needful of any military camp.”97 Baker set five miles as the radius for the dry zone and ten miles as the radius within which no prostitution could exist; however, as he warned the mayors in cities near cantonments, the War Department would not tolerate “any restricted district” or “places of bad repute” outside the zones yet “within easy reach of the camp.”98 Quite a few resort-keepers protested the War Department’s authority to interfere with local vice control, but the federal courts, to which the members of the sporting class appealed, saw the matter differently. In successive cases, judges decided that “war powers” superseded the states’ “police power.”99 Once formed, the Commission on Training Camp Activities had the right to dictate moral standards to both soldiers and civilians for the duration of the war.
Ordered to expunge all disreputable entertainment within reach of the training camps and to replace it with more socially acceptable alternatives, the CTCA embodied both the constructive and destructive sides of Progressive reform. Raymond Fosdick, now in charge of the CTCA, relied heavily on already-existing organizations when he implemented the Commission’s programs. Joseph Lee, president of the Playground and Recreation Association of America, John R. Mott, the general secretary of the International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations, and Lee F. Hanmer of the Russell Sage Foundation served as three of the eight commissioners under Fosdick.100 In addition to working with the CTCA, these men brought with them the people and resources of their organizations. Similarly, many of ASHA’s employees moved into the army, continuing the type of work they did before the war.101 For example, Bascom Johnson, the influential head of ASHA’s legal department, ran the law-enforcement division of the new Commission. To do his job, he regularly worked with ASHA’s investigative team and frequently tapped into the resources of the local reform associations that had previously turned to ASHA’s legal department for advice on fighting commercialized vice.102 Even some of the CTCA’s funds originated from the same sources that supported the prewar movement. The Rockefeller Foundation donated $200,000 to the Playground and Recreation Association of America for its programs at the cantonments and $100,000 to the CTCA for educating the troops about venereal disease and for stamping out vice near the camps. Out of that $100,000, the Foundation specified that $20,000 cover the salaries of ASHA personnel working for the CTCA.103 In the CTCA, some of the Progressive era’s most influential anti-vice reformers came together to fight for their long-held dream of destroying tolerated vice districts. Programs, people, networks, and funding recapitulated the old private associations, but now anti-vice reformers had the power of the federal government to back their agenda.
With a ready-made organizational infrastructure, the CTCA wasted little time implementing its plans. As the Playground Association and the American Library Association supplied the camps with sports equipment and books, ASHA’s investigators did what they knew best: finding out whether a municipality tolerated a vice district, determining the accessibility of a city’s disreputable venues, and evaluating the likelihood of “keeping the lid on” after an initial cleanup.104 Some cities anticipated the War Department’s objections and made preemptory strikes against the sporting world. Indeed, Shreveport closed its district in the hopes of attracting a training camp to the area.105 But other municipal leaders protested the CTCA’s demands. Southern officials, in particular, resisted abandoning reputational segregation. As one ASHA investigator observed about Macon, Georgia, “from the patrolman in Tybee (the old district) to the mayor and the state’s solicitor general, every official thought the government was making a great mistake to close the district.”106 The CTCA had powerful leverage, however. If a city refused to eliminate its red-light district, the government would remove the camp from the vicinity.107 With camps averaging over nine thousand soldiers when operating at their minimum capacity and almost thirty-nine thousand soldiers when working at their maximum, even the most ardent supporters of segregated vice renounced their principles in favor of the business the armed forces brought to town.108 “We are under no illusions as to some of the motives back of this,” four of San Diego’s leading reformers wrote to Newton Baker, “but we are very glad to have it so.”109 In the end, all of the major cities complied with the War Department’s order to close their districts, even New Orleans. From July 1917 to September 1918, over a hundred cities eliminated their tenderloins, resolving longstanding stalemates between reformers and the political machines that had kept the red-light districts open.110
The two main aims of anti-vice reform—keeping the districts closed and cleaning up urban amusement—did not change during the war, but the movement’s rhetoric altered radically. When prostitution did not disappear, despite the closure of the districts, and soldiers continued to have sex, the training camp commissioners stopped blaming the commercializers of prostitution and started blaming the women themselves.111 By ordering men to “keep away from prostitutes priced and private,” the CTCA made money irrelevant to a woman’s reputation as a whore.112 Indeed, the disgust reformers leveled against charity girls and “patriotic prostitutes” exceeded their antipathy for professional prostitutes. At least the monetary motive of the professionals made sense, but the “‘khaki mad’ girl” who gave away sex for a night on the town could not even plead poverty as an excuse for her actions.113 H. L. Mencken parodied the shift in discourse when he lampooned the dangers posed by “predatory country girls,” but neither Frederick Whitin nor Raymond Fosdick saw the humor. Indeed, Fosdick dismissed Mencken as “a superficial writer with no ideas” whose attack on the CTCA did not deserve a reply. Unfortunately, even though Mencken honed in on the contradictions of the Commission’s propaganda with his characteristic insight, Fosdick correctly judged the idiosyncrasy of Mencken’s opinion.114 During the war, anti-vice reformers stopped describing prostitution as an institutional problem based on the economic exploitation of innocent women and started blaming women for men’s sexual adventuring.
Focusing on the health of the recruits medicalized the anti-vice movement. Reformers abandoned the interlocking economic arguments against the Vice Trust and began defining prostitution as a medical problem of diseased individuals, specifically disease-spreading women.115 From the CTCA’s perspective, all women who had sex with soldiers, for whatever reason, deserved the severest censure. After all, as one wartime pamphlet explained, if a woman was “willing to ‘give you a good time,’” she must “have either [the] clap or syphilis or both.”116 Thus, even though statistics showed that more women named soldiers as the source of their infection than the reverse, the CTCA insisted on classifying women as the “carriers of venereal disease” and soldiers as their target for contagion.117 Reducing women to disease vectors discounted the structural causes of commercialized vice, but even more importantly, it legitimated a virulent misogyny that allowed government authorities to treat women with a callous disregard for their civil liberties.
The new contempt toward sexually active women not only permeated War Department propaganda, it also affected the CTCA’s administrative structure. In September 1917, Raymond Fosdick ordered the creation of a Committee on the Protective Work for Girls to address the issue of “young girls” in the neighborhood of the military camps. He envisioned the Committee addressing “reformative problems” as a means of preventing “an increase in delinquency.”118 Headed by Maude Miner, nationally renowned advocate of probation and parole, the CPWG aimed to protect impressionable young women from the “lure of the uniform” and the soldiers who would take advantage them.119 With protective workers posted to the vicinity of the camps, the CPWG policed places of amusement for “dangerous intimacies,” and when they found girls succumbing to soldiers’ charms, the Committee proposed “to study the personal problems of the girl, to awaken her to the foolhardiness of her course, and when possible to give her new, wholesome interests.”120 As initially planned, protective workers hoped to reform the girls’ self-destructive tendencies, but within six months of the Committee’s formation, the CTCA forced the CPWG to abandon such idealism. Dismantling the Committee, the CTCA eschewed protective work for girls and focused on the protection of boys: the troops.121
In April 1918, the CTCA established the Section of Women and Girls in the commission’s Law Enforcement Division.122 The new section treated “promiscuous” women with draconian severity. Where once the CTCA did not care where sexually active women went, as long as they left the vicinity of the camps, now they insisted upon their imprisonment, when practicable.123 In the pamphlet Next Steps, written to advise communities on what to do after the closure of their vice districts, Bascom Johnson asked and answered the following questions: “How can we protect young girls? . . . By providing detention houses. . . . How can we make prostitutes hard to find? By internment in State reformatories, etc.”124 The money for the detention facilities came from President Wilson’s War Emergency Fund. He allotted $250,000 to the CTCA either to renovate existing buildings or construct new ones.125 In an irony that went unrecognized at the time, when section workers sought buildings suitable for detaining the diseased women, they sometimes found that abandoned parlor houses provided the best accommodations. With large reception rooms, many bedrooms, and a disproportionately high number of bathrooms, brothels made ideal detention houses. Government contractors usually only needed to fit the brothel with an infirmary and add a high wall topped with barbed wire to complete the conversion.126 In the prewar white slavery narratives, reformers elaborated on the economic imprisonment of innocent women, pleading forgiveness for society’s prodigal daughters, but during the war they made the metaphor real by confining women in sporting houses as punishment for their sexual transgressions.
According to the new strictures, both the military and civilian police could apprehend anyone they suspected of suffering from venereal disease. Moreover, any woman arrested for a sexually related offense underwent a mandatory medical examination. If a woman’s tests came back negative, her case proceeded through the normal channels of criminal justice. But if she suffered from venereal disease, the authorities sent her to a reformatory or to a detention house, depending on the presumed malleability of her character. Jettisoning habeas corpus, the CTCA held women on indeterminate-length sentences, until doctors pronounced them cured. In many states, the disease-free women then returned to court to face the original charges leveled against them.127 Women’s constitutional rights mattered little in the quest to protect soldiers from venereal infection.
Over the course of the war, the CTCA interned 15,520 women in federally funded reformatories and detention houses. The length of stay averaged a year in reformatories and ten weeks in detention houses.128 But these figures only hinted at the impact of the CTCA’s new policies. Federal officials did not count women incarcerated in local jails or quarantined in local hospitals when they tallied the number of women interned during the war. For example, in Puerto Rico, authorities arrested over a thousand women on vice-related charges from the beginning of July 1918 to the beginning of January 1919. Of these, they convicted and confined 809 women. In addition, the U.S. District Court found 58 women guilty of sex offenses and ordered them imprisoned in Puerto Rican jails. These arrests and convictions resulted directly from War Department policy. In contrast, between 1917 and 1918, the Puerto Rican jails housed an average of 790 prisoners at any given time, of which only 25 to 30 were women.129 The internment of diseased women altered the lives of thousands, but their punishment represented only the most extreme consequence of the new antipathy toward women.
Official misogyny and the demonization of sexually active women, whether prostitutes or “uniform-crazed” girls, sanctioned a street-level disregard for women’s self-determination. In the entertainment venues of the prewar vice district, women initiated sexual solicitations more often then men. Outside of brothels, both men and women could approach each other with impunity, but women usually determined both the price and place of the sexual exchange. The closure of the districts, and the wartime crackdown on female promiscuity, created a new social distance between men and women, with men now brokering sexual meetings. During the war, men started talking about women differently. In the commercial dance halls and cabarets where they gathered in search of sex, men reduced women in their conversations to objects of exchange incapable of agency. The change in market negotiations, combined with female deference toward enlisted men, precipitated a sharp decline in women’s status.
The Commission on Training Camp Activities’ reforms disrupted long-term gender dynamics in urban recreation. Men and women participating in urban nightlife adopted new social scripts, scripts that shifted the power to initiate sexual negotiations from women to men. Wartime repression and the closure of the districts caused many prostitutes to mute their professional signifiers, making it more difficult for men to judge whether someone was, in their words, “out for the sugar” or just wanted a “good time.”130 As a result, soldiers, sailors, investigators, and ordinary customers turned to male insiders to decipher the sexual codes of a particular dance hall or cabaret and categorize the women around them. Since regulations frequently forbade men from approaching women they did not know, men relied on waiters, bartenders, and managers to inform them which women were “charity girls” and which ones were “money girls.” Then, if a man seemed like a “good fellow” and a heavy tipper, a waiter would “stake” him to a woman.131 To reassure their customers that a charity girl was a “regular fellow” who would “go the limit,” the waiter would tell the interested party that he, or someone else he knew, “had made her.”132 Besides telling their customers which women offered sex willingly, bartenders also coached customers on how quickly they could push a woman for sex. An evening with a charity girl cost less, especially since managers made sure to warn their customers if the women who interested them were “bleeders,” a term that denoted women’s economic exploitation of men, even as it connoted their sexual unavailability because of menstruation.133 Although not pimps per se, waiters, bartenders, doormen, and managers facilitated other men’s search for sex by labeling the women around them.
During the war, men’s sexual objectification of women manifested itself most clearly in their profanity. In a noticeable discursive shift, men started referring to women by their sex organs. For example, in March 1917, one New York City waiter in an Eighth Avenue venue observed that “there aint one girl that remains here at this hour that aint ‘C——t’ . . . they are all hall way rubs.”134 Another declared that “there is so much gash around that he is sick of it.”135 Indeed, by 1919, waiters and their male patrons had reduced these exchanges to a kind of shorthand, with “gash” or “cunt” as an umbrella term to describe all sexually willing women. Only then would they go on to qualify which women were prostitutes (“hustlers,” “whores,” or “gold diggers”) and which women were only out for a “good time” (“charity,” “charity bums,” or “charity gash”).136 More women could participate in the cleaned-up cabarets and dance halls without irrevocably damaging their individual reputations, but the virulence of the wartime campaigns against sexually active women encouraged a marked misogyny.137
When men in the dance halls lumped all the women around them under the category of cunt, they followed the lead of the Commission on Training Camp Activities, which set the tone by describing all sexually willing women as “dirty sluts.”138 Like male waiters and their customers, the CTCA elided social distinctions for venereal distinctions. The men in the dance halls reduced women to “gash,” but training camp officials reduced women to a “dirty dose.”139 The CTCA reinforced this symbolic diminishment of women through metaphors that compared sexually willing, ergo venereally diseased, women to any other object or animal that spread death and disease: German bullets, malarial mosquitoes, venomous vipers, and, in the most extreme version of women as a disposable object, other men’s toothbrushes.140 The vilification of women in wartime propaganda gave official sanction to men’s objectification of the women they met in dance halls and other heterosocial arenas. Although the misogynistic propaganda from World War I was ephemeral, what would remain from the War Department’s campaign against women was men’s ready reduction of all women to their sex organs.
With the closure of the districts during World War I, the anti-vice movement lost both its programmatic and its conceptual cohesion. With an increasing focus on social hygiene, in particular the venereal health of newly drafted soldiers, anti-vice reformers stopped seeing prostitutes as innocent white slaves and started viewing them as diseased predators.141 These wartime portrayals repudiated the Progressive-era characterizations of prostitutes, a discursive reversal made possible because Progressive-era anti-vice reformers had never fully redeemed the white slave. When they incorporated anti-trust metaphors into their rhetoric, the white slavery writers adopted anti-monopolism’s systemic critique, but they never embraced its republicanism. Without virtue, prostitutes could never be citizens. By denying prostitutes their rights, social-hygiene reformers turned prostitutes from blameless victims into self-conscious sexual psychopaths.
At the end of World War I, reformers congratulated themselves on a job well done. The American troops maintained the lowest venereal infection rates of all the combatants, and, at home, the CTCA succeed in closing, and keeping closed, the red-light districts in all of America’s major cities, and more than a few of its minor ones as well. These successes came at a cost, however. Federal intervention ignored local politics and local compromises. The CTCA forced a single sexual morality on communities across the country, despite a diversity of opinion regarding the management of urban entertainment. Ironically, this emphasis on the venereal health of the troops encouraged a resurgence of the double standard for men and women. No longer seen as innocent victims of male exploiters, women now bore the responsibility for corrupting men morally and physically. The War Department chided soldiers for their sexual peccadilloes and forced them to undergo painful prophylactic treatment, but, when possible, the CTCA arrested and imprisoned the women with whom soldiers had intercourse.
Not all Progressives endorsed this change in policy. Maude Miner resigned rather than remain associated with the CTCA’s punitive programs.142 Some women, such as Ethel Sturges Dummer and Jessie Binford, stayed on, but they did so in the hopes that they could ameliorate the impact of the new policies.143 They found themselves in a small minority. Most male reformers and many female reformers, especially those with medical experience, supported the quarantining of infectious women and the prophylactic treatment of sexually active soldiers. To them, the American Plan made infinite sense.144 Yet to anyone who knew the history of international anti-vice reform, the plan rankled. That ASHA, a successor to the American Purity Association—an organization founded in solidarity with Josephine Butler’s crusade against the British Contagious Diseases Acts—supported the venereal inspection and incarceration of diseased women in order to protect the health of soldiers and sailors proved a bitter irony. After all, Butler and her allies fought for over fifteen years for the repeal of just such a policy. When challenged, the CTCA and its defenders protested that the American Plan and the Contagious Diseases Acts in no way resembled each other because the CTCA did not issue women with medical certificates, but opponents to the plan found the argument specious.145 Nevertheless, public health and the arrest of errant individuals dominated the efforts against prostitution in the post-war period.
The anti-vice movement stagnated after demobilization. The League of Women Voters joined forces with male Progressives after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women’s suffrage, to ensure that the red-light districts did not reopen.146 As old-time tenderloins appeared increasingly anachronistic, and relatively reputable entertainment absorbed the former patrons of the districts’ tawdry amusements, anti-vice reformers believed that they had achieved the movement’s aims. The sporting class lost its cultural coherence, parlor houses no longer dominated notorious thoroughfares, and streetwalkers and café prostitutes eked out a precarious existence at the criminal margins of society. The Eighteenth Amendment—National Prohibition—not only closed saloons, it also closed their back rooms, the standby for prostitutes going through tough times. But National Prohibition brought with it a myriad of new problems. Organized crime replaced commercialized vice as the greatest obstacle to urban order.
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