GENERAL NOTES ON RESISTANCE
There was very little “respectable” residents or municipal officials could do to limit vice in those early years except perhaps to express outrage. For one, the city “had hardly any government at all” in its first several years.[1] And, actions municipal authorities took against vice did not usually survive long. In January 1848, city council members passed “stringent resolutions” prohibiting gambling, imposed heavy fines on gamblers, and the seizure of “all the money found on a gambling table where cards are played.” However, at the council’s next meeting, the “resolutions were all repealed.” When the city council managed to pass “a stringent ordinance regarding houses of ill-fame, making the keeping of them highly penal,” it achieved a modest measure of success in closing “the most notorious Mexican and Chinese brothels.” When attempts were made to enforce it “against fashionable white Cyprians,” that is, American or European prostitutes, madams quickly challenged it in court and won. It seemed to many contemporary chroniclers that activities such as prostitution “could not be put down by mere legislation.”[2] There may also have been a reluctance to expend too much energy on reforming a society that many viewed as only temporary. In the letters and diaries of early San Franciscans they insisted they would return home one day. The profusion of boarding houses and hotels that persisted in the city for decades reflected a lack of desire to establish permanent roots.[3]
The attitude of many residents towards vice and their city’s reputation as the “Paris of the West” also helps explain not only the failure of reformers in the city’s first decade but for the next half century as well.[4] The mythology that developed around San Francisco became a point of pride for many residents and it was during these early years that the roots of the city’s reputation as the wildest of the West first gained purchase and nurtured a perception that defined the city for many decades to come. The “Paris” moniker was hurled as an insult by reformers, meant to reference the Old World and the famed city’s lack of sexual morality; but it was also seen as a badge of honor by those who embraced it as evidence of San Francisco’s cosmopolitan and cultured status. It also served a useful purpose for attracting tourists. In a letter addressed to Reverend J.C. Westenberg, superintendent of the Pacific Coast Federation for the Suppression of Vice, Mayor James Rolph expressed pride in the city’s amusements. Rolph believed Westenberg and “all the well-meaning hysterics who have been agitating so loudly to reform other people’s morals,” ought to distinguish “between vice and amusement.” He closed his letter by reminding reformers: “We are the Portola City. We ask the world to come here and revel.”[5]
But for reformers, this reputation conjured up images of young women, “recruited from the country,” painted up to attract men and together spending the evening in unproductive revelry.[6] Three-quarters of a century later, in her report on dancing in the city, Maria Lambin explained that “For years the Barbary Coast, known from one end of the continent to the other, rivaled the most infamous resorts of Europe in abandon and picturesque vice.”[7] During an anti-prostitution campaign in the early twentieth century, Franklin Hichborn, one of the state’s leading Progressive voices, criticized the city for not only having districts where prostitution was permitted but also because its most “notorious” red-light district, the Barbary Coast, was flaunted “as one of the star attractions of the community.” “A most provincial pride,” he claimed, “was taken in the utter abandonment” of the city.[8]
Some writers recognized the overheated rhetoric accounted for at least some of the city’s reputation. In a bit of self-reflection on their own history of the city, Frank Soulé and his co-authors acknowledged “the very thought of that wondrous time is an electric spark that fires into one great flame all our fantasies, passions and experiences…The remembrance of those days comes across us like the delirium of fever; we are caught by it before we are aware, and forthwith begin to babble of things which to our sober Atlantic friends seem more the ravings of a madman, then plain, dull realities.”[9] In other words, the depths of debauchery ascribed to the city (for decades to come) may have been greatly exaggerated and thus the reforms prescribed in fits of hysteria did not resonate enough to produce meaningful changes. “With all its brave wickedness and splendid folly,” residents embraced “The City.”[10]
On occasion, historians have made reference to this reputation as a way to explain the city’s permissiveness towards vice. For example, in his extensive study of temperance and prohibition campaigns in California, Gilman Ostrander argues San Francisco’s “wild-western morality” stymied restrictions on personal freedoms.[11] The implication of such a charge is there was no law-and-order and only individual passions mattered. Of course, by itself, “wild west” does not have much explanatory power, but this cliché has some merit when viewed in light of the numerous failed attempts to impose regulations on personal habits or to bring order to the city through anti-vice measures.[12]
The social composition of the city also accounts for the reluctance to embrace anti-vice measures. In a pattern that endured into the twentieth century, those who could be found enjoying the city’s many vices were from the same class as the reforming class.[13] Rather than facing off against a poor, vulnerable, or disenfranchised class of criminals, the “Argonauts” of the city were often not lower-class rascals. Demographic studies point to a population composed primarily of “professionals, semiprofessionals, skilled craftsmen, and small merchants.” The high costs of transportation, from whichever direction one came, and setting one’s self up as a miner “were substantial.” Thus, “a winnowing process took place before the gold-seekers ever left home” and contributed to a society composed of men and women with social power parity.[14] Indeed, following the failure of an anti-vice crusade in the 1890s, a newspaper complained “The reason why our dives revel in freedom,” the paper noted, “is that the respectable class does not think it worth the while to molest them.” The “respectable class” were the patrons of the city’s “crime hatcheries” and “dens of depravity.”[15]
San Francisco, Cal. Sept 24-13 To the Clubwomen of San Francisco, In regards to the employment of the dance hall girls, I wish to state “as one of them” that the work suggested by the majority of the clubwomen in this day’s issue of the Examiner is not any better than that offered an emigrant.
A final trend I found worth noting upfront comes from a group of San Franciscans that motivated me to pursue this project in the first place: working women. I originally intended for my entire project to revolve around the different ways working women resisted attempts to reform their behaviors. Although reformers often blamed corrupt party bosses, “liquor interests,” and even organized gangs as sources of the city’s vice problem, many of the actions taken by the Board of Supervisors and Police Commissioners targeted female workers and patrons of commercial leisure. For example, in late September 1913, a “dance hall girl” wrote an angry letter to the clubwomen of San Francisco denouncing their attempts to “help” her. After the city’s police commissioners passed an ordinance prohibiting women from serving alcohol in dance halls in a small section of town, the San Francisco Center of the California Civic League attempted to find the women new jobs. However, the “work suggested by the majority of the clubwomen,” this anonymous author complained, was not any better than that offered a recent immigrant, “one who is of nondescript education and experience.” “Possibly you have failed to realize,” she continued in a chastising tone, “the majority of these girls are young, fair looking, well educated, well-groomed and have been in the habit of making more money than the average business man’s income.” Of the hundreds of women affected by the dance hall ordinance, few accepted the help offered to become billing clerks, domestic workers, or “kitchen mechanics.” One of the clubwomen lamented that their effort may turn out to be little more than “pearls cast before swine.” And, indeed, “no amount of persuasion, or even argument” could induce most of the women to so easily give up their lucrative employment. They vowed to continue their former line of work “as long as the dance halls on the Coast kept open” and indeed, they eventually became part of an entirely new form of commercial leisure, the “taxi-dance hall,” specifically invented to skirt the police order.[16]
[1] Roger W. Lotchin, San Francisco, 1846-1856: From Hamlet to City (1974 repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 136.
[2] Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco, 199, 550.
[3] Barnhart, “Working Women,” 61.
[4] Richard, “San Francisco, ‘the Paris of the West,’” SFist, http://sfist.com/2007/11/26/san_francisco_the_paris_of_the_west.php, accessed 27 December 2017; some sources referred to San Francisco as the “Paris of America.” See for example “‘Taps’ Sounded; Barbary Coast Lights Go Out,” Call (1 March 1913); Raymond Fosdick, “Prostitution and the Police,” Social Hygiene 2, no. 1 (January 1916): 15.
[5] J.C. Westenberg to chief of police, April 6, 1912, enclosed in J.C. Westenberg to James Rolph, in the James Rolph, Jr., Papers, California Historical Society, San Francisco, quoted in Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 1865-1932, 108
[6] “What Being ‘The Paris of America’ Really Means,” Call (5 June 1910).
[7] Maria Lambin, Report of the Public Dance Hall Committee of the San Francisco Center of the California League of Women Voters (San Francisco Center of the California Civic League of Women Voters: San Francisco, 1924), 14. Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet also discussed the city’s international reputation for vice, Annals of San Francisco, 501.
[8] Hichborn, Franklin, “The Organization that Backed the California Red Light Abatement Bill,” Social Hygiene 1, no. 2 (March 1915): 199. See also Raymond B. Fosdick, “Prostitution and the Police,” Social Hygiene 2, no. 1 (January 1916): 15.
[9] Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco, 217.
[10] Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco, 501.
[11] Gilman Marston Ostrander, The Prohibition Movement in California, 1848-1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 3.
[12] The examples examined in detail below fall mainly in the twentieth century. For an excellent discussion of the city’s anti-regulatory bent see Philip Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
[13] Irwin, Orsi, Bullough, and Rice, The Elusive Eden, 174. Irwin et al., also point out that the population was predominately young and male. Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco, 248-9, 216; William Taylor, Seven Years Street Preaching in San Francisco, California (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1857), 52.
[14] Mary Ann Irwin, Richard Orsi, William Bullough, and Richard Rice, The Elusive Eden: A New History of California, fourth edition (New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2012), 146.
[15] “Must Be Closed,” Call (9 August 1893); “Close the Dives,” Call (7 April 1892).
[16] Unidentified author to San Francisco Center, September 24, 1913, League of Women Voters Records, 1911-1979, Public Dance Halls, California Historical Society, North Baker Research Library [hereafter cited as LWV and CHS, respectively]. During the time of my visits, archivists at the California Historical Society were in the middle of reorganizing and reclassifying the records of the League of Women Voters. Some of the folder titles or reference numbers they used were not finalized. I have provided as much citation information as possible that may include outdated manuscript reference numbers or folder names that have since been changed.