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By Root 1649 0

and there: the father of a young man, “prominent in society circles” in Philadelphia, has his own son arrested for adultery; the son, a married man, was carrying on in Reading, Pennsylvania, with a former servant, a “prepossessing young woman” who (it was said) received his “attentions without being aware that he was a married man.”60 In Alameda County, California, in the twenty years between 1880 and 1900, there was only one prosecution for adultery. The wife of Manuel Fritas, who ran a boardinghouse in San Rafael, ran off to San Francisco, became a prostitute, then left the sporting life and moved in with Nelson Tower, once a lodger in the boardinghouse. The outraged husband found them and filed a complaint. The wife went free; Tower was sentenced to two months in county jail.61

Most regulation of morality probably took place on the local level, and is almost invisible to researchers. An ordinance in Oakland, California, approved in 1879, made it unlawful “for any person to appear in a public place naked or in a dress not belonging to his or her sex, or in an indecent or lewd dress.” An ordinance of 1897 forbade swimming in the harbor “unless clad in a bathing suit.” If the swimmer was over twelve, he or she had to wear “trunks reaching from the waist to the thighs” and a “shirt or jersey ... covering all the upper part of the body except the head and arms,” or a “combination suit or a single garment” providing the same amount of coverage.62 Whether the police arrested many people, or anybody, for these “crimes,” is unknown.

Police reports do give some idea of the numbers of arrests for morals crimes; and the census of 1880 provides some data on prisoners. Out of some 58,000 prisoners in prisons and local jails, in the United States, a fair number (4,768) got there because of offenses “against public morals.” But the overwhelming majority in this category had been arrested as “drunk and disorderly” (3,331). There were 121 prisoners charged with incest, 63 guilty of the “crime against nature,” 257 bigamists or polygamists (only one of them in Utah), 161 jailed for adultery, 26 for seduction, 22 for “illicit cohabitation,” 85 for “fornication,” 88 for “open lewdness,” 50 for indecent exposure, and 16 for obscenity.63 These are hardly overwhelming numbers, but they are definitely greater than zero. What lies behind them, as we have said, is unknown territory; each case probably represented a separate tale, a separate incitement. In each case, somebody blew the whistle. There were no police “sweeps” for fornication, incest, or bigamy.

Enforcement of liquor laws was more complex. Millions of people thought liquor was a tool of the devil. Millions more liked to drink. It was an addiction to some; bread and butter to still others. No arrests in the nineteenth century were more common than drunkenness arrests; and on the local level, liquor violations, license offenses, and the like, were among the most common urban transgressions. In a situation of stalemate and opposition, corruption flourishes, on a small and large scale. The police and local officials were on the take in many American cities. Ida Bailey of San Diego, arrested in 1891 for selling liquor without a license, offered a “sensational” defense: she had paid an excouncilman fifteen dollars for “immunity.”64 There were similar “sensations” elsewhere as well.

Every city, in other words, had its own special history of crackdowns, campaigns, arrests—and payoffs, immunities, and shoulder-shrugging toleration. In 1882, Cincinnati ordered its saloons to close on Sundays. Afterward, the police arrested 313 saloonkeepers for various violations; of these, only five were arraigned, and exactly one was convicted. The chief of police declared the law “a dead letter.” And why? “Public sentiment does not sustain it.”65 He was almost certainly right; more precisely, there were two kinds of public sentiment, and they fought each other to a virtual standstill.66

Degenerate Man

Ideas about morality are ideas about people and their motives, not about conduct alone. The law