Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [84]
In 1848 in Massachusetts, a doctor with the interesting name of Walter Scott Tarbox was indicted (and convicted) for producing an offensive advertisement. It showed “an instrument for sale by him for the prevention of conception.” He left this dreadful document on the doorsteps of respectable Boston households. Tarbox was convicted of violating the obscenity laws.22 The message was clear. Sex and its mysteries had to be covered up and disguised, like the human body; even normal and laudable aspects of human life, such as pregnancy, childbirth, and giving mother’s milk to babies retreated from public view. What was acceptable, even unavoidable, for adults, that is, adults with self-control, virtue, honor, respectability, would “corrupt” the young and the weak.
Gambling
Gambling had been punished in the colonial period, and it continued to be illegal in the nineteenth century. There were statutes against gambling in every state; often they banned a long list of habits and games, some of them still with us, some long gone. In Alabama, in 1807, the ban included “A.B.C.” and “E. O.” tables, faro, rouge-et-noir, and “rowley-powley.”23 Later in the century, the catalogue of forbidden games in Idaho included “French monte, three-card monte, E. O. or roulette, or the game commonly called the thimble game, or percentage stud-poker, or any other percentage game played with cards, dice, or any other device, for money ... or any other representative of value.”24 The Illinois Code of 1833 authorized a fine on anyone who sold or imported for sale “any pack or packs of playing cards, or any dice, billiard table, billiard balls ... or any obscene book”; it was similarly an offense to “play for money, or other valuable thing, any game with cards, ice, checks, or at billiards”; or to bet on any game.25
The statutes did not, of course, put an end to gambling; if anything, they testified to its continuing popularity. There were periodic crackdowns in various cities—no doubt without much long-term effect. But gambling was not exactly a victimless crime. The professional gambler was usually not, shall we say, an honorable man. The tricks of his trade included loaded dice and marked cards (introduced apparently in the 1830s); a shop on Liberty Street, in New York, sold various types of “advantage” playing cards and fine ivory loaded dice. Gamblers also sometimes wore special clothing, the better to hide high cards up their sleeve; or used such devices as mirrors and rods clipped under the table to conceal good cards.26 In New York, gambling was big business in the middle of the century: according to one estimate, about 6 percent of the population made a living off gambling.27 In 1872, a New York writer claimed that there were 200 gambling houses in the city, and from 350 to 400 lottery offices, “policy shops,” and other places where people gambled.28
Yet the police made very few arrests. Only fifty-nine indictments were handed down in New York between 1845 and 1851; about half of those indicted paid fines; the rest got off.29 The police in the 1870s, “for reasons best known to themselves,” did nothing about the hundreds of gambling houses, all the way from first-class “Faro Banks,” located in “magnificent” brownstone mansions, down to “policy offices” in “dingy little holes ... in the most wretched quarters of the city,” all of which did their business with “perfect openness.”30 Local government was feeble and corrupt, which explains why so little was done about gambling. Gamblers bought immunity from law enforcement with hard cash. But corruption is never random; it follows certain lines of demand. If there had not been a strong taste for gambling, gamblers would have failed to corrupt the local police. As it was, there were, in fact, periodic explosions of civic outrage, an expulsion of professional