Swearing Allegiance: Street Language, US War Propaganda, and the Declining Status of Women in Northeastern Nightlife, 1900–1920

In September 1917, in the midst of the US mobilization for World War I, Baltimore journalist H. L. Mencken wrote an article satirizing the Commission on Training Camp Activities’ campaign to keep the new military recruits morally pure. Mencken, the consummate master of the American language, condemned the contradictions in the War Department’s campaign by juxtaposing prewar white slavery narratives, which portrayed prostitutes as innocent victims, with wartime discourse, which depicted all sexually active women, prostitutes or not, as diseased harpies. Mencken used the evocative oxymoron “predatory country girls” to emphasize the incompatibility of prewar and wartime representations of prostitutes.¹ In this article, I will, like Mencken, juxtapose the strikingly different prewar and wartime descriptions of sexually active women. Unlike him, I will not focus primarily on the language of reform. Wartime characterizations of prostitutes as vipers, vultures, and disease-spreading votaries in reform literature represented a sharp shift from the evocation of white slaves, innocent country girls, and prodigal daughters during the white slavery scare of 1907 to 1914, but it also corresponded with a marked difference in the way men talked about women when the two sexes met in the very vice resorts that reformers condemned. The influence of wartime programs and propaganda went well beyond the realm of official discourse and had a detrimental effect on working-class women’s status through the street vernacular that both men and women used in saloons, dance halls, nightclubs, and other entertainment establishments of ambiguous reputation.

In order to show the decline in women’s sexual status during the First World War, this article analyzes the most obscene conversations that undercover investigators heard while patrolling diverse vice-related venues before the war and in commercial dance halls, cabarets, and other establishments where men and women met socially during the war. Drawn from the documents of private New York antivice associations, mainly the Committee of Fourteen, these conversations came from reports written by working-class men hired to fit into the disreputable and quasi-reputable settings they investigated. Before the war, these investigators visited venues in New York City and, later, during the war, in cities throughout the northeastern United States from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Providence, Rhode Island. Often written using rough street vernacular, antivice reports provide rare insight into the sexual codes central to the commercial recreation of the urban working class.² Although the investigators’ records are not transparent, they nevertheless expose a striking change in the way men and women used obscene language before and during the war. Like printed pornography, spoken crudities in saloons and dance halls revealed in bold strokes the opinions that people downplayed in polite society, but unlike the often equally obscene verbal epithets recorded in defamation cases, these labels went unchallenged and rarely entered the public record.³ As an illustrative extreme, sexual swear words and their conversational context provide a key to understanding changes in gender hierarchies. Shifting street vernacular shows that during World War I, men gained power to the detriment of women’s self-determination.

While Mencken perceived the shifting discourse of social reformers as a negative development for women, cultural commentators, from popular historians Frederick Lewis Allen and Henry May to more recent scholars like Kathy Peiss, David Nasaw, and Susan Cahn, have portrayed World War I as a turning point for sexual manners and mores in America—a liberatory loosening up of the sexual restrictions on women.⁴ But as Susan Sontag warned in 1973, “Sex as such is not liberating for women. Neither is more sex.”⁵ Since 2000, more historians, notably Elizabeth Clement, Jennifer Fronc, and Courtney Shah, have recognized World War I’s complicated legacy for women in public, arguing that the war encouraged a sense of masculine entitlement among the troops.⁶ But these historians have mostly focused on the way the War Department persecuted all sexually active women, overlooking the way official misogyny sanctioned a street-level disregard of women’s self-definitions. In this article, I build on Clement’s...