DEFINING “VICE”

The Morning Call, April 4, 1892

For Progressive-era reformers, “vice” in a city represented a sickness, unhealthy habits antithetical to the dignity of modern American society, although ironically, seemingly woven into its very fabric. To many Americans of the period, vice meant anything that did not conform to expected–reformers would say “traditional”–middle-class values. There were several gradations of vice from the most depraved conduct such as prostitution and gambling, which were increasingly outlawed by states, to those that became commercialized and attracted large crowds such as dancing, drinking, or attending moving picture shows. Observers often traced a great many of society’s ills to the failure to address vice. The relationship of vice to a “lack of self-control, of feeble-mindedness, of poor environment, of low amusements and alcoholism, of congested rooms, of bad working conditions and low wages, of ignorance and false standards,” according to one prominent reformer of the twentieth century, was “now recognized.”[1] The sources or consequences of vice were variously understood to be environmental, hereditary, or individual choice.

One of the features that made vice so alarming was the crime–robberies and assault usually–that supposedly originated in places such as dance halls and saloons. A phrase popular during an 1892 crusade in San Francisco referred to such places as “Crime Hatcheries.”[2] A joint survey of dance halls in 1918 by the San Francisco Police Department and one of the city’s leading female reform organizations, the San Francisco Center, concluded that “the halls served as feeders to prostitution, dope selling, drunkenness; they were centers for gang fights, crime planning, etc.”[3] Critics of vice frequently made the claim that a city’s police force would be unnecessary once proper vice prohibitions were put in place due to a subsequent lack of crime.

“Commerciality” or the new consumer ethic of the era represented another distinguishing mark of vice to many reformers. Victorian forms of leisure, typically segregated by sex, class, and race, helped create boundaries between groups of people.[4] In instances of mixed-crowd leisure activities, they would be enjoyed by an entire family, with multiple generations, and in a neighborhood setting.[5] The cross-class, heterosocial, multiracial commercial amusements in San Francisco broke down those boundaries.[6] Urban nightlife that featured “movies, dance halls, cabarets – offered women entertainment and the chance to mingle with their peers” away from the watchful eye of family.[7] Opponents spoke frequently about the “commercialization of vice,” to warn of the scale it began to assume and the ease of access to anyone with wages to spend.[8] One of the most troubling aspects to reformers was the commercialization of female sexuality.[9] From the “beautiful women” who dealt cards and turned roulette wheels to the “beer waitresses” that “seduced” men into buying drinks or dancing, the price put on access to a woman’s attention struck at the very core of Victorian gender ideals.[10] Finally, as historian Michael McGerr argues, “The whole point of going out to these attractions,” such as the movies or dancing, “was to have a good time for one’s self.”[11] And this self-interest was antithetical to the core of Progressivism that valued the community’s interests over the individual. Anti-vice activists saw in the for-profit motive of commercial leisure the undermining of tradition and forms of social control.[12] In the stories that follow, the nature of vice and threat various vices posed will be explored in more context-specific detail.

[1] Joseph Mayer, “The Passing of the Red Light District–Vice Investigations and Results,” Social Hygiene 4, no. 2 (April, 1918): 207.

[2] See for example, “Crime Hatcheries,” Call (4 April 1892); “They Are With Us,” Call (18 April 1892); “Crime Hatcheries,” Call (4 June 1892); “Stamping Out Vice,” Call (6 June 1892).

[3] Maria Lambin, Report of the Public Dance Hall Committee of the San Francisco Center of the California League of Women Voters (San Francisco: San Francisco Center of the California Civic League of Women Voters, 1924), 14. Lambin wrote her report in 1924 but referenced the 1918 report.

[4] Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 5-6.

[5] Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), Kindle location 321.

[6] Mara L. Keire, For Business & Pleasure: Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890-1933. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 30.

[7] Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 18.

[8] William S. Scott to Louise Herrick Wall, 24 March 1913, LWV, Prostitution and Public Dance Halls, CHS; Edwin E. Grant, “Vice Repression in San Francisco,” National Municipal Review 13, no. 5 (May 1924): 268; George J. Kneeland, “Commercialized Prostitution and the Liquor Traffic,” Social Hygiene 2, no. 1 (January 1916): 78.

[9] Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930. Women in Culture and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Sharon R. Ullman, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

[10] Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco, 502, 641-2; “A Ringing Protest,” The Morning Call (30 May 1892).

[11] Michael E. McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920(New York: Free Press, 2003), Kindle locations 4829, 4853-4855. See also John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 189. For a contemporary account with a similar argument see Richard Henry Edwards, Popular Amusements (New York City: Association Press, 1915), 134.

[12] For additional works that explore the tension between the new middle-class ethic of consumerism and the ways in which it broke down traditional structures of socialization see T. J. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); Jessica Ellen Sewell, Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).