A New Direction

Much has happened in the many months since I last visited my web site. The most important of which are a new direction, a new energy, a new determination, and a new support structure to finish this damned project. More on most of that new business later. For now, I have a partial answer to the "new direction" bit. After months of exploratory writing, I "settled" on the topic of "vice" reform in San Francisco. I jumped right into writing up ideas for chapters and vignettes when it occurred to me that I didn't really put down into words, in one place, what I thought my new direction was. So here is my partial attempt to do that:

My topic is vice reform in San Francisco in the early twentieth century.  

In the simplest terms, I am examining the attempts by San Franciscans to contain or eliminate behaviors labeled as “vice,” highlighting the gendered implications of those efforts, emphasizing the resistance reformers faced as a central explanation for their repeated failures, and finally the tracking the transformation of those behaviors from condemned to commercial.

Simultaneous with the growth of San Francisco as a major population center, seaport, trading entrepôt, and way-station for gold miners heading to the hills to strike it rich, the city also developed a district and well-earned reputation for drinking, dancing, and illicit sexual relations. These types of behaviors–termed “vice” by contemporaries–in turn resulted in repeated attempts by a “respectable, reforming” class composed of religious leaders, middle-class professionals, and civic and business leaders to “put a lid” on the places and people that enjoyed such activities. The actions by San Francisco’s anti-vice crusaders stretched over half a century, long before and after the customary dates of the Progressive Era (1890-1920). Although reformers talked about corrupt party bosses, or the need to project a “moral,” “modern” image to the world, or a desire to protect the city’s youth, many of the actions taken by the Board of Supervisors and Police Commission targeted female workers and patrons as the source of the trouble. Those efforts often met such fierce resistance by those women and the broader communities they set upon that few reforms could be called successful. Nevertheless, there was a transformation in the perceptions of vice such that heterosocial nightlife became an accepted form of commercial amusement for the city’s residents by the 1920s. 

The questions this projects hopes to answer include: how did the city’s regulatory system develop or respond to the repeated failures to control undesirable behavior? What were the gendered dimensions of “vice” reform? What role did class play in the gradual acceptance of most forms of “vice”? 

These questions of course suggest a belief that municipal leaders had to confront the difficulties of controlling social behaviors and the role of city government adjusted as a result of the repeated failures to do so. Gender and female sexuality were central to the intentions and attempted implementation of vice reforms. And, finally, class played a central role in the transformation of the public’s perception of what acceptable commercial leisure looked like by the early 1930s. 

I will begin by outlining several of the earliest concerns and reform efforts by the “respectable, reforming class” during the late nineteenth century. Much of the earliest energy was aimed at “dives,” low-end drinking establishments, concentrated in the city’s “notorious” vice district, the Barbary Coast. The great earthquake and fire of 1906 dramatically altered the city’s landscape, physically and metaphorically. Many of the city’s sites of cheap amusement were destroyed in the fire and city officials viewed the destruction as an opportunity to modernize the city’s landscape and morality. For the period between 1906 and 1933, I will look at three different expressions of vice and reform. 

The first was the practice of slumming… 
The second were the attempts to incarcerate “delinquent” women and prostitutes… 
The third was the city’s response to Prohibition…

I will expand on each of those three parts next and condense the foregoing into a brief “elevator pitch” type statement.

TTFN