Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [210]
The militants used every available forum. They agitated in city halls and lobbied in legislatures. As a result, some states passed severe “abatement” laws, beginning with Iowa in 1909. By 1917, thirty-one states had their own versions.24 The Michigan law of 1915, for example, gave the state’s attorney general and “any citizen” the right to bring an action in court to abate a house of prostitution. Evidence of “the general reputation of the place” was admissible to prove this “nuisance.”25cj
Mass action on the streets and pressure on station houses were probably more effective than laws and court actions. Enthusiasm for red-light abatement spread like a virus, from city to city. In San Diego, the red-light district, called the “Stingaree,” was located between the wharf and the main business district and catered to sailors and businessmen. A local Vice Suppression Committee put pressure on the police in 1912 to do something, and in November of that year the police launched a massive raid. They arrested 138 women. All but two of the women agreed to get out of town; and the district was (theoretically) shut down.26 In Houston, bawdy houses and taverns were congregated downtown in an area nicknamed “Happy Hollow.” Despite tough state laws and some local agitation, the district survived until 1917, when it was closed down under extreme public pressure: on Friday, June 15, Happy Hollow ceased to exist. The night before, sightseers toured the area, and the pianos were going “at full blast”; it was a farewell party for Happy Hollow. By dawn, the noise had died down and the streets were crowded with moving vans. The district became a “deserted village.”27
A wave of crackdowns took place all across the country. There were loud war cries, and high hopes among the militants. Yet, almost without exception, the crusades dribbled out after a while, and what they accomplished proved superficial, temporary. Vice always bounced back. Some famous red-light districts were indeed destroyed—Storyville in New Orleans had been one of the most celebrated—but the women simply relocated, leaving town or merely changing neighborhoods. And there were always fresh recruits. In Chicago, by 1916, “the ghost of the levee” was “stalking about the streets and alleys of the south side, manifesting unmistakable desires for resurrection.” Now there was “vice in all of the ‘Loop’ hotels and in many of the cabarets and dance halls.”28 In the twenties, vice was flourishing in Chicago as if abatement had only been a dream; and it was (so people said) now under the control of organized crime. In San Diego, too, the “social evil” never actually got out of town; it simply changed its address. For example, in 1915, Julia Barton, who had run the Yellow Canary Cottage in the red-light district, was now working out of the Milan Hotel. Arrests for prostitution increased in San Diego. In 1917, the city went so far as to adopt an ordinance outlawing fornication in hotels or apartments: only married people had the right to make love in such places. This ordinance had (no surprise) “little effect, except for adding a new law to arrest prostitutes.”29 In some cities, when the red-light district was destroyed, arrests for streetwalking rose. Prostitution merely went out of doors.30
In any event, the red-light abatement movement was yet another battle in the great cultural war that began, as we have seen, in the period of the Comstock laws, reached its climax with Prohibition, and has been ebbing more or less ever since Prohibition ended. The key principle was a refusal to compromise with vice, debauchery, and sin. But the subterranean demand for vice was too great for victory. Nobody publicly defended the social evil, but the customers were not creatures from