Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [428]
McDowall’s statistics were wildly off, but he was responding to a real phenomenon. Commercial sex had become ever more ubiquitous. By the 1830s the Five Points was notorious, with twenty-seven of the forty-three blocks surrounding Paradise Square hosting brothels in whose windows girls in varying stages of undress paraded to lure street trade. In more genteel zones, the expensive carriages of judges, merchants, lawyers, and statesmen could routinely be seen lined up in front of their owners’ favorite parlor houses, and some clients went so far as to pay traditional New Year’s calls on madams. These gentlemen, some of them in flight from the new domesticity, could indulge their lustful pastimes reasonably sure that no one would trumpet their misdeeds.
This tacit approval of officially illicit sex extended to the vast numbers of visiting businessmen for whom parlor-house patronage was fast becoming a customary part of commercial transactions. During 1835 New York’s leading hotels housed nearly sixty thousand guests, many of them country merchants come to arrange credit and place orders. More than a few banks and businesses dispatched “drummers” to show them a good time. As one critic described the process in 1836, drummers invited potential clients “to champagne parties, to the theatre, and to houses of infamy, with the offer to bear all the expense.”
Into this civic conspiracy of masculine silence stepped John Robert McDowall, loudly blowing the whistle. Not surprisingly, his Magdalen Reports/as greeted with an avalanche of criticism, which the Evening Post summed up by saying: “The report should never have been printed, and being printed should be as speedily as possible suppressed.” Gentlemen of standing argued that McDowall’s lurid picture of urban vice was itself prurient and pornographic—“a disgraceful document,” said Philip Hone. Even more shocking, as William Cullen Bryant observed, its statistics of whoredom had been read out at a public meeting “composed three-fourths of respectable females.” City boosters protested its slandering of New York’s fair name and pronounced it bad for business. Workingmen and freethinkers denounced it as yet another theocratic initiative by church and state busybodies. Some suggested that McDowall’s zealotry stemmed from a morbid fascination with vice. This accusation was not entirely off base; as Lewis Tappan remarked of his brother, Arthur—McDowall’s patron and one who also liked to boldly “explore [the] recesses of Satan”—he “gloried in all the soiling that attaches to one in such efforts.”
Knickerbockers who resented the rising social influence of New Englanders in the city were much in evidence at an August 1831 meeting in Tammany Hall that called for and swiftly obtained a grand jury investigation of McDowall’s charges. This body could locate a mere 1,438 working girls—a deflated claim the press found risible—but it nevertheless flayed Tappan and the Magdalen trustees. Members of the society, even female ones, were verbally abused and threatened with ostracism. In short order, the campaign for public reticence triumphed. Tappan, taken aback by the rage and respectability of his opponents, quit the Magdalen Society, McDowall resigned his chaplaincy in September, and by November the group had suspended its activities and disposed of its asylum.
Utterly isolated, McDowall was about to give up and leave the city when two groups of genteel Presbyterian women—most of them wives of businessmen or of ministers—joined his purity crusade, thereby transforming the debate over sexuality in the city.
In December 1832 the New York Female Benevolent Society (FBS) was formed to help fallen females who “manifested] a desire to return to the paths of virtue from which they have swerved.” By May 1835