Three Parts

Continuing from my previous post wherein I named three different moments of vice and reform I propose to examine. This is a further explanation of each.

The first was the practice of slumming. Slumming had a long history by the time San Franciscans took it up in the early twentieth century. The definition of slumming has several variations that depends on the relationship of the visitor to the slum. In both London, where the practice seems to have originated, and in San Francisco, the practice had several different rationales. Initially, it was a way for the wealthy or reformers (oftentimes one and the same) to gain an understanding of urban poverty, “to see the conditions for herself” as the Mayoress of London once put it [1]. The justification for spending time in urban slums bears a resemblance to that given for the placement of settlement houses in poor neighborhoods or the work of Progressives such as Jacob Riis. Some journalists regularly used the label “slummer” and “social worker” interchangeably[2]. However, a tour of urban slums was not always done as a way to increase the empathy of the visitors or among those with whom the slummers shared their impressions. Just as often, visitors used slumming tours as a way to gather “evidence” (read, confirm suspicions of degradation and immorality with salacious details) to support punitive or regulatory actions.[3] Along similar lines, archaeologists Paul R. Mullins and Lewis C. Jones, claim slum discourses, or the “aesthetics of marginality” justified the abuse of slum dwellers by publicizing, often in sensational terms, their living conditions.[4]  “In these examples, poverty was an aesthetic attraction that could be toured, imagined in slum tourists’ accounts, or viewed through photographs” thus removing even the physical presence of a would-be slummer.[5]

San Francisco Chronicle, 10 March 1890

A more common understanding of slumming–and one in which writers deliberately used to undermine reformers by connecting it with their social work–was visiting a slum as a means of entertainment. This definition also contains degrees of difference between visitors in the city’s earliest years who took enormous risks with their safety to twentieth-century,  “eastern tourists” that made use of “slumming balconies” built after 1906, which made the practice more voyeuristic than participatory.[6] It is this last iteration of slumming, one that conformed to the commercialized leisure ethos of the early twentieth century and taken up by a growing middle-class that helped transform activities found in vice districts such as dancing and drinking into mainstream, culturally-accepted behaviors. In San Francisco, slumming also had gender implications. In their attempts to limit the appeal of vice, reformers labeled any female patron of dance halls and dives as slummers, and sought to prohibit their presence in certain districts of the city.[7]

The second area of vice reform I will examine were two attempts to incarcerate prostitutes and “delinquent” women that challenged prevailing ideas of proper female sexuality. The first occurred during the Great War at the behest of the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA). In an effort to protect soldiers from venereal disease and alcohol-fueled entanglements with local law enforcement, the Selective Service Act of 1917 authorized the CTCA to prohibit suspected prostitutes within close proximity of military bases, resulting in the internment of between 15,000 and 30,000 women during the war. The nullification of a citizen’s constitutional rights during war has been a regular occurrence of American law since the Civil War and in this case satisfied both military and reformer objectives.[8]

The second case took place shortly after the war. In 1919, the California legislature approved an act “to establish an institution for the confinement, care and reformation of delinquent women.” As with the contemporaneous statutes passed by California’s legislature approving the involuntary sterilization of young women with nonconforming sex lives, this law allowed for the confinement of any women found guilty of“prostitution, soliciting for prostitution, keeping a house of ill fame or residing in such house, frequenting any dance hall, hotel, grooming house, or other public place, for the purpose of prostitution, or of vagrancy because of being a common prostitute or a common drunkard.”[9]

The third vice reform effort is perhaps the most well-known: Prohibition. This chapter will examine the conflicts over the passage and enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment in San Francisco. Just as the Great War spawned a federal agency authorized to detain women suspected of being sex workers and the fear of a crime wave enveloping the nation after the war lead the state legislature to establish a prison for women, Prohibition brought the power of state and federal governments to bear on the problem of alcohol.[10] San Francisco officials flat-out rejected enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment as well as California’s Red Light Abatement Act (a state law that intended to close houses of prostitution) illustrating “the city’s reputation for toleration.”[11] The local, and ultimately national, failure of Prohibition marked the end of anti-vice crusades in the city and the mainstream acceptance of many behaviors once deemed as vice. 

Taken together, these three reform efforts: anti-slumming, the mass detainment of women suspected of sexual deviance during and shortly after the Great War, and Prohibition demonstrate the resistance reformers of social behavior faced, particularly from the women they targeted.

An elevator-like summary: My project looks at the relationship between moral reform and resistance in early twentieth-century San Francisco and the transformation of previously unsanctioned behaviors such as drinking, dancing, and casual sex into the city’s cultural mainstream. Other issues include the relationship between governmental regulations and morality (what role should or even can the government play in regulating private morality); the middle-class co-option of working class culture; and the abuse of power by government to infringe a citizen’s rights during a time of war, and the limits of that power to control social behavior. No small motivation for this project also comes as a reaction to Progressive Era histories that focus exclusively on the reforming class and, more importantly, those that stop the story of reform at the moment a reform becomes law. In many ways, the passage of legislation was the easy part. How or even whether a law was enforced is more important in terms of its consequences and that is where I intend to focus my analysis.[12]

[1] “London has a Slumming Boom,” Chronicle, 16 January 1910. For a Progressive-era American example see Bessie Van Vorst, “The Woman that Toils: Experiences of a Literary Woman as a Working Girl,” published in Everybody’s Magazine between September, 1902 and January, 1903.

[2] Annie Wilde, “Mistakes in Night Court Cause of Uneasiness Among Slummers,” Chronicle, 14 January 1917.

[3] See for example, “Slumming in Chinatown,” Chronicle, 18 July 1895. “San Francisco’s Morals Upheld by Dr. Clampett,” Call, 17 February 1913.

[4] Paul R. Mullins and Lewis C. Jones, “Archaeologies of Race and Urban Poverty: The Politics of Slumming, Engagement, and the Color Line,” Historical Archaeology 45 no. 1 (2011): 34.

[5] Mullins and Jones, “Archaeologies of Race and Urban Poverty,” 36.

[6] See for example, “Wrecked on the Barbary Coast,” Daily Alta California, 29 September 1868; “‘Conditions as Bad as Elsewhere,’” Call, 11 February 1913; Asbury, Barbary Coast, 284; Carmelita Higginbotham identifies two main types of slumming in Harlem in the 1930s, “watching” and “participating,” in “At the Savoy: Reginald Marsh and the Art of Slumming,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 82 no. 1 (2008), 23.

[7] “More Regulations Given the Coast,” Chronicle, 18 February 1913.

[8] 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), 105-9, cites 15,520 women interned over the course of the war; Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 125 cites 30,000 women detained as suspected prostitutes.

[9] For a detailed examination of the involuntary sterilization of delinquent women see Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), chapter 2; W.H. Hyatt, editor, Henning’s General Laws of California, 3rd edition, volume 1 (San Francisco: Bender-Moss Company, 1921), 310-312.

[10] Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016).

[11] Issel and Cherny, San Francisco 1865-1932, 207.

[12] I have been influenced on this important point by three important works, all on immigration interestingly enough, that do just this; that is, they look beyond the passage of immigration restrictions to understand the implementation of new laws and the effects on local communities: Martha Mabie Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870-1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Mae M Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).