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By Root 1668 0

into vice laws; to close down red-light districts, smash the brothel trade, and end the cozy system of police protection. A survey of seventy-two cities, carried out in 1910, showed that forms of proto-zoning for vice were common, along with other sorts of unofficial regulation. No less than thirty-three of the cities—including Detroit, Galveston, Milwaukee, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Salt Lake City, and Tacoma—had segregated vice zones. In a few cities—Atlantic City, New Jersey; and Cheyenne, Wyoming—vice was “licensed in fact, though not in law.” In Cheyenne, prostitutes had to pay a fee for an examination to see if they had any “communicable diseases”; they were checked for “personal cleanliness and the sanitary condition of persons and premises.” If they passed the test, a certificate was issued to them.18

No more symbiosis; no more prostitution and gambling under the noses of the city leaders: this was the message of more and more moral leaders. The Reverend James Ely of Philadelphia, speaking in 1910, had a novel plan, which would, in effect, convert a vice district into a kind of giant reformatory. He proposed drawing a line around the district from Arch Street to Spring Garden, and from Eleventh Street to the Delaware River, making the line “so clear by police and glittering signs that no one could mistake it.” At every entrance to the vice district a large sign, suspended across the street, would announce that “The Wages of Sin Is Death.” In the middle of the district would be a “non-sectarian Christian mission, with restaurant, baths, reading rooms, and auditorium.” On top of the building, in letters of gold, would appear the words “God Is Love,” and “This Is the Way Home.” The district would be flooded with religious workers. The way into the section would be “very difficult, and the way out very easy.... No tourist or curiosity seeker should be any more allowed to visit this place than to visit a smallpox camp.”19

Needless to say, nothing came of this plan. The enemies of the “social evil” preferred blunter and more direct ways. The basic idea was simple: enforce the laws and stamp out vice. In October 1909, Rodney Smith, an evangelist (they called him “Gipsy”), led “a band of 12,000 Christian men and women” through the red-light district of Twenty-second Street in Chicago “in an attempt, like the crusaders of old, to reclaim the region to Christianity.” In 1912, 10,000 people paraded in a Chicago rainstorm, demanding the destruction of the kingdom of vice. The authorities, who were sensitive to this kind of pressure, closed down the district—for a while.20

The movement gained strength, and information, from vice commission reports. City after city, in the early part of the century, created vice commissions that met, investigated, reported. Between 1910 and 1917, no less than forty-three cities probed and poked about in their subworlds of vice and prostitution; most commissions published reports of what they found.21 The Chicago report was one of the best and most sober. Prostitution, it said, was an unmitigated evil; it was the source of loathesome disease, more horrible than a “leprous plague,” which struck down the “innocent wife and child” along with the guilty sinner. The conclusion was obvious: the city must not condone or tolerate the “Social Evil”; Chicago had to stamp it out. The “honor” of Chicago, and the “physical and moral integrity of the future generation” demanded no less.22

This was a common theme of the vice reports. No compromise was possible or desirable. Physical health was an important issue, but the main issue was moral health. Medical examination of prostitutes? Absolutely not; this would be a terrible mistake, according to New York’s “Committee of Fifteen.” Such a plan would fatally reduce the moral onus on prostitution, it would put the “social evil” on an ethical par with regulations of “the weight of the loaf of bread, or the size and quality of the yard of woollens.” Making prostitution medically safe would be “pretty sure to increase the patronage of the prostitute.” A