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By Root 1863 0

Men (and women) ran houses as a business; policemen, from patrolmen to captains, were on the take. Most shocking of all (to some) was that many of the women looked on prostitution as simply a job. They chose prostitution over starvation, or grueling factory work at starvation wages. John H. Warren, Jr., a self-described reformer and detective, writing in the 1870s, put part of the blame on “love of ease and luxurious living.” He wagged his finger at the “system of female education which fosters a contempt for the mother that delves among the pots and kettles in the kitchen, while the accomplished daughter just home from school, armed with her diploma, thumps away at the piano in the drawing room.”66 On one level, this is nothing but a piece of Neanderthal moralizing. Behind it, though, are hints of a complex web of contradictions: between the cult of success and the cult of female domesticity and subservience; between economic reality—women’s need to earn their bread—and the myths of morality.

Prostitution, like all illegal activities, was a precarious business, since its survival depended so much on informal bargains and corruptions. Its relationship with criminal justice was necessarily jagged and stormy. There were sporadic spasms of enforcement, usually stimulated from outside the police department: sometimes it came from the top-down (from city officials, at the demands of moral leaders); sometimes it was the voice of the poeple, or, to put it simply, the mob. In Boston in August 1823, Mayor Josiah Quincy led a posse of volunteers against the vice center of Boston, known as “the Hill,” in the West End. Mass arrests of prostitutes continued through the fall of 1823. Two years later, a mob of hundreds of men in blackface, carrying pitchforks, tin pans, drums, and whistles, attacked brothels in the North End, beginning with “the Beehive,” a three-story building on North Margin Street, where a widow, Marm Cooper, ran a house of prostitution.67

In Detroit, Michigan, in the 1860s, the police made frequent raids, particularly on lower-class houses. Sometimes the superintendent of police himself led the attack. In 1866, there was a raid on twenty houses; more than fifty arrests were made. A state law of 1869 specified three years in the Detroit House of Correction for convicted prostitutes over the age of fifteen.68

Despite these bursts of moral energy, enforcement officials adopted, for the most part, what one author has called a policy of “maintenance.” After all, large numbers of respectable citizens had no real interest in rooting out this evil weed, or did not think it possible. They wished merely to control it, which could mean “driving prostitution underground, confining it to specific areas, or prosecuting only its most disorderly or lowly haunts.”69

A newspaper editorial published in 1892 put the point rather precisely. Prostitution, the writer said, “is ineradicable.” But, “if handled properly, it can be curtailed.” “Houses of illfame” were tolerable, “so long as they are not located in respectable neighborhoods.” The writer also made the “delicate” point that “such places” were “a necessary evil.” What was “necessary” about the evil? Well, they ministered to the “passions of men who otherwise would be tempted to seduce young ladies of their acquaintance.”70 Thus, prostitution helped maintain the “hydraulic” system of self-control and (male) discipline; it provided an outlet for overheated men. The flesh was weak, the sex drive strong. Prostitution helped maintain a system in which nice women could be put on a pedestal, could be required to stay chaste, virtuous, virginal, and fairly sexless, at least before marriage—and not all that different thereafter.71

This theory was not often aired in public. And, of course, there were always those who wanted to stamp vice out absolutely. They never had the muscle to prevail. By the middle of the 1870s, the police in Detroit had lapsed again into peaceful coexistence. They raided disorderly houses only when they became truly disorderly. The vice district had achieved stable