A Renegade History of the United States Read online

  Bad women pioneered racial integration. Mollie Johnson, the “Queen of the Blondes” in roughneck Deadwood, South Dakota, broke through just about every barrier for white women in Victorian America. She celebrated the success of her brothel by parading through the streets in carriages, dressed in the highest fashions of the time. She and her “ladies” frequently appeared in press reports of their wild and public debaucheries. And in 1878 she married the local stage performer Lew Spencer, also known as “Dutch Nigger” Lew Spencer. Johnson continued her profession through her marriage and, as one historian puts it, “didn’t ‘act’ much like any other married woman.”

  Archivists at the Montana Historical Society found from studying nineteenth-century censuses that black Montanans were not segregated into separate neighborhoods as they were in most of the United States. Rather, they lived side by side—sometimes even in the same domicile—as peers with white Montanans. The red-light districts in early Los Angeles were notorious not just for their dens of vice but also for their multihued populations. City ordinances created in 1876 confined prostitution to poor and mixed-ethnic neighborhoods. For many decades, Los Angeles police rarely interfered in the red-light districts, contributing to their renegade character. This, according to historian Mark Wild, “encouraged participants in the sex trade (both workers and customers) to converge on those neighborhoods regardless of their ethnoracial background.” Whites in Los Angeles, “who might have segregated themselves in other social contexts, therefore came much closer to other Angelenos when they bought or sold sexual favors.” The integration of desire was not just black and white. When Protestant ministers launched a campaign to eliminate the city’s red-light districts in 1903, they distributed fliers offering to “rescue” prostitutes, written in English, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and French. In 1917 the California Commission of Immigration and Housing named the major red-light district “the most cosmopolitan district of Los Angeles.” One year later, the Church of All Nations, a Methodist missionary organization in the district, counted forty-two nationalities in its vicinity.

  This is not to suggest that prostitutes were morally committed to racial justice, but that like all good renegades they were committed to no morality. When asked by a university researcher in the early 1930s why they serviced customers of other races, a white prostitute and a black prostitute gave similarly self-interested answers. “It ain’t that I’m so crazy about Colored men,” the white woman explained, “but I can make more money here among them.” The black woman was motivated as well by only one thing: “I like to have white trade because they will pay more.”

  The “Great Migration” of African Americans from the rural South to cities, which began in great numbers during World War I, when large numbers of industrial jobs opened up as white men left for military service, and peaked in the 1920s, also produced an exodus across the sexual color line. In Chicago and New York, moral reformers reported on the proliferation of brothels that sold the violation of America’s greatest taboo. Some brothels in the cities during this period “were for whites, some for blacks,” according to the historian Kevin J. Mumford, “but the majority were probably black-white clubs, the institutional descendants of Black and Tans.” Many of these establishments “catered to a particular black-white dyad, whether black men seeking white prostitutes or white men seeking black.” In 1928, one year before Martin Luther King Jr. was born and decades before the civil rights movement began, undercover investigators of “Speak-easy Houses of Prostitution” found racial integration nearly everywhere they looked. One particularly thriving New York establishment called Spann’s advertised itself as a club of “white inmates for colored men.” Another speakeasy was described by investigators as employing “white inmates, operated for colored men only.” When a Chicago reformer visited a black-white club, he found “nine white women, eight of whom were there in the company of black men.” The moral reformers surveilling this underground scene were particularly appalled when they saw white women enticing black men with dancing that was “very sexual and indecent,” “degenerate,” and “obscene.” A Chicago vice investigator reported on a club in which “black men were seen dancing with white girls and vice versa.” The “actions of these people,” of course, “were absolutely disgusting.” Worst of all were the white prostitutes who liked servicing black customers, such as the woman in a New York speakeasy who worked part-time as a “hostess in a Broadway nightclub” but also “consorted with black men” in Harlem and declared that she preferred “the colored man’s technique.”

  Like their counterparts in the western boomtowns, the proprietors of black-white brothels in the northern cities were pure renegades who cared little for morality, social conventions, or the wishes of the community. As one put it, “We take anybody that has the money.” And like all renegades, they opened freedoms for countless people. As Mumford puts it, “Despite the power of the taboo and the strictness of its enforcement, the fact remained that for black men migrating to the North, the availability of white prostitutes in predominately black urban areas must have represented a significant change from life under Jim Crow. What was held up in the South as both most desirable and most taboo—white womanhood—was in the North readily available to the African American man able to spend five or six dollars.”

  Prostitutes set loose pleasures and freedoms that became part of legitimate American culture, but they were punished nonetheless.

  SOCIAL PURITY

  Beginning in the 1870s, prostitution was hit by waves of attacks. Some medical authorities and police officials wanted to force prostitutes to register with the state and be placed under close surveillance by doctors and police. The “regulationists” argued that prostitution could never be eliminated due to the “debauchery of the degenerate … already past hope of redemption.” Far more successful was the movement to abolish prostitution entirely. Organizations formed all over the country that were devoted to the eradication of not just the oldest evil but also to newer ones such as pornography, which they defined broadly. What came to be called the “social purity” movement was the spiritual descendent of the Founding Fathers’ virtuous republicanism, the abolitionists’ attack on the debauchery of slavery, and the Freedmen’s Bureau mission to civilize the ex-slaves. The movement was led largely by women who helped create modern feminism. Organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the National Purity Association became training grounds for the suffrage movement and were enormously powerful lobbying groups between the 1870s and World War I. There were some men involved, and not every social purity activist supported women’s suffrage or property rights, but, as Ruth Rosen puts it, “feminism and social purity were very much intertwined, with members of each movement supporting causes of the other.”

  In the 1910s, semilegal vice commissions were formed in virtually every major city with the goal of the “absolute annihilation of the Social Evil.” They carried ominous names like the New England Watch and Ward Society, the New York Committee of Fourteen, and the Los Angeles Morals Efficiency Committee. Headed by august gentlemen but staffed mostly by female social workers, the vice commissions conducted investigations using undercover agents, publicized their findings in local newspapers, and lobbied aggressively for municipal and state authorities to take action against brothels, madams, prostitutes, and their clients. Between 1910 and 1915, some thirty-five vice commissions issued reports declaring that prostitution was “an intolerable fact of life.” Special courts were established to handle the new wave of prosecutions, including the Domestic Relations Court in Philadelphia, the Morals Court in Chicago, and the Women’s Court in New York. Several states built prostitute reformatories. Inmates were made to practice sewing, cleaning, and cooking. More often, judges sent convicted prostitutes to county workhouses. The federal government did its part in 1910 with the passage of the Mann Act, also called the White Slave Traffic Act, which made illegal the transportation of women across state lines for “immoral p
urposes.”

  Between 1909 and 1917, thirty-one states passed “red-light abatement” laws allowing courts to shut down buildings for “immoral purposes.” Further, in the 1910s, most states specifically made illegal the keeping of a “disorderly house” or in any way managing prostitutes as a madam or a pimp. No city completely eliminated prostitution. “In most cases, however,” reports Ruth Rosen, “the chief of police responded to civic pressure simply by ordering the closing of the [red-light] district.” In cities from coast to coast, prostitutes were forced onto the streets. Arrests for street-walking “skyrocketed across the nation,” and most of the arrested women were sent to reformatories and workhouses. Without the protection of a madam and the four walls of a brothel, facing hostile police and sometimes sadistic customers, prostitutes had nowhere to turn but to male criminals. “Given these conditions,” writes Rosen, “it is not surprising that pimps began dominating the practice of prostitution.” With its banishment, prostitution was moved from female power to male power. Though they were certainly exploited in brothels, “madams and prostitutes had wielded considerable power in their relations with customers. Now prostitutes became the easy targets of both pimps and organized crime. In both cases, the physical violence faced by prostitutes rapidly increased.”

  Responding to the argument made by moral reformers that sinful behavior was genetically determined, by 1913, twelve states had passed laws that allowed judges to order the sterilization of criminals, “perverts,” “idiots,” and the “feebleminded.” Prostitutes were generally thought to belong to all four categories. As one investigator in Massachusetts put it:

  the general moral insensibility, the boldness, egotism and vanity, the love of notoriety, the lack of shame or remorse, the absence of even a pretense of affection or sympathy for their children or for their parents, the desire for immediate pleasure without regard for consequences, the lack of forethought or anxiety about the future—all cardinal symptoms of feeblemindedness—were strikingly evident in every one …

  Maude Miner, a leading feminist and suffragist and director of the Waverly House for Women, a reformatory in New York City, claimed that one-quarter of prostitutes under her tutelage acquired their attitudes and behaviors from “some actively vicious element or clearly degenerate strain, drunkenness or prostitution.” Between 1907 and 1950, some forty thousand American women were forcibly sterilized, most for selling sex.

  Prostitutes joined the urban rabble and “bad niggers” as martyrs for our freedom.

  Part Two

  HOW WHITE PEOPLE LOST THEIR RHYTHM

  5

  A RHYTHMLESS NATION

  In its formal definitions, America has always been a rhythmless nation. And “good” Americans have never been able to dance. Indeed, one of the first accomplishments of the original settlers from Europe was to stop themselves from dancing.

  The Puritan pilgrims left England in large part because it was full of people who used their bodies for pleasure. Next only to fornication, the most sinful use of one’s body was to move in sensual and playful ways. In 1583 the Puritan writer Philip Stubbes had this to say about dancing:

  If you would have your son soft, womanish, unclean, smooth-mouth, affected to bawdry, scurrility, filthy rimes, and unseemly talking; briefly if you would have him, as it were, transnatured into a woman or worse, and inclined to all kinds of whoredom and abomination, set him to dancing school and to learn music, and then you shall not fail of your purpose. And if you would have your daughter riggish, bawdry and unclean, and a filthy speaker, and suchlike, bring her up in music and dancing and my life for yours, you have won the goal.

  Another leading Puritan thinker, William Prynne, in 1632 denounced

  all mixt effeminate, lascivious, amorous dancing … [as] utterly unlawful unto Christians, to chaste and sober persons; as sundry Councels, Fathers, moderne Christian, with ancient Pagan Authors and Nations have resolved; though it be now so much in use, in fashion and request among us, that many spend more houres (more dayes and nights) in dancing, then [sic] in praying, I might adde working too.

  So once in America, where they had the opportunity to create a perfect world, the Puritans set out to lock bodily movements to the rules of God. In 1635 John Cotton, one of the principal ministers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, declared that the new land should forbid “[l]ascivious dancing to wanton ditties, and amorous gestures and wanton dalliances … [which] I would bear witness against as a great flabella Libidinis [fanning of sexual desire].” In that same year Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, saw in the dances of the Indians a near and dangerous temptation, “for after once being in their Houses, and beholding what their worship was, I durst never be an eye witnesse … [lest] I should have been partaker of Satans inventions and worships, contrary to Ephes. 5.14.”

  Early in their adventure, the Puritan pilgrims had to deal with what was perhaps the most renegade act in American history. In 1625 an Englishman named Thomas Morton organized a non-Puritan settlement, Merrymount, north of Plymouth at the present site of Quincy, Massachusetts. By many accounts, Merrymount was everything the Puritans feared. Whiskey and beer flowed freely, and whites and Indians cavorted, copulated, and danced wildly around a maypole, a Pagan invention that had become the symbol of fun and leisure in villages across England. Morton later recalled that the inhabitants of Merrymount:

  did devise amongst themselves … Revels and merriment after the old English custome; [they] prepared to sett up a Maypole upon the festivall day … and therefore brewed a barrell of excellent beare [beer] … to be spent, with other good cheare, for all commers of that day … And upon May day [a Pagan festival welcoming summer] they brought the Maypole to the place appointed, with drumes, gunnes, pistols and other fitting instruments, for the purpose; and there erected it with the help of Savages, that came thether to see the manner of our Revels.

  Puritans in England and the New World called for banning the maypole and May Day festivals. But Merrymount’s population grew at an alarming rate, and so in 1628 the Pilgrims in nearby Plymouth Colony dispatched Captain Miles Standish and an armed force to destroy their libertine competitors. Morton was nearly killed in the assault, then hauled into a Plymouth court and deported back to England. The maypole was chopped down and burned.

  Shortly thereafter, New England authorities made it illegal for men and women to touch each other while dancing, and many towns in the seventeenth century outlawed organized dances. “In fact,” writes Bruce C. Daniels, a historian of early American leisure, “virtually no organized dances or mixed-sex dancing took place in the first generation of New England’s settlement.” But ministerial wrath and legal punishment did not eliminate dancing. People did it privately, inside their houses or away in the woods.

  And then the French came. In the 1670s, migrants from the land of decadence arrived in New England, bringing with them expertise in decidedly lascivious movements. Worse yet, they opened schools in which they taught colonists dances that simulated carnal acts. When the authorities became aware of one of these schools of vice, they shut it down and prosecuted the proprietor. But the French dance schools continued to appear throughout the colonies. In 1684 Increase Mather set out to put an end to this with a precisely titled book, An Arrow Against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing Drawn out of the Quiver of the Scriptures. Not all dancing was bad, said Mather. It was perfectly appropriate “where men vault in their Armour, to shew their strength and activity,” or when it was “sober and grave Dancing of Men with Men, or of Women with Women.” (Mather did not anticipate later problems with same-sex dancing.) But “Mixt or Promiscuous Dancing” such as the kind he saw performed at a “frolick, reveling feast, and a ball, which discovers their corruption,” or which he observed at “wanton Bacchanallian Christmasses,” had “become customary amongst Christians” and “cannot be thought on without horror.” Mather counseled governmental authorities to declare such dancing “to be utterly unlawful, and that it cannot be tollerated i
n such a place as New-England, without great Sin.” Defining exactly what constituted “The unchast Touches and Gesticulations used by Dancers” that had “a palpable tendency to that which is evil” was a challenge. Certainly any dancing in which a man and a woman touched each other was evil. But what kind of bodily movement led one to hell? Mather called it “mincing,” which biblical authorities had defined as a rapid and repeated swaying of the body. It was, according to Martin Luther, a “wag” or “waggle” resembling “the affected gait of coquettish females.” It was feminine, irregular, disorderly, and sexual. It was authored by Satan and embodied in women. It was rhythm.