Emancipation not only paved the way for African Americans to become increasingly influential (albeit in the face of massive and violent resistance) but also sparked efforts to achieve equal treatment by other groups, most notably, women, Chinese Americans, and Native Americans. Many of the leaders of these groups—and of groups resisting these quests—expressed views of vice that enhanced their group’s power. Another group, too, was making its way by joining in these frays. Scientists, until now bit players on the American stage, began getting bigger speaking roles by expressing views of vice that, in some instances, enhanced the power of one of the groups and, in other instances, enhanced the power of its opponent—but in all instances enhanced the power of scientists.
Not surprisingly, most scientific views of vice served the interests of those who held the biggest whip. “In the city of Charleston,” statistician Frederick L. Hoffman reported, “the number of deaths from syphilis for the period 1889–94 was 66 among the colored population, as against 10 among the white population.” Hoffman also collected data on drunkenness, drug addiction, and crime. From this data, he concluded, “The root of the evil lies in the fact of an immense amount of immorality, which is a race trait. . . . It is not in the conditions of life, but in the race traits and tendencies that we find the causes.”1 In other words, relax, white folks, the vices of blacks have nothing to do with you. The correlations in Hoffman’s data are startling. Left out, however, was an even more startling statistic: over 99 percent of all murderers drank milk as children. This example is an axiom of data analysis—correlation does not prove causation—an axiom that Frederick Hoffman, a professional statistician, opted to ignore.
Bad science, but not bad for scientists, based on the hypothesis of the biggest whip. “It is the best book yet issued on the subject, the fruit of close study of the subject and absolutely free of bias,” proclaimed the New Orleans Times-Democrat. South Carolina senator Benjamin R. Tillman expressed hope that it would become required reading for “every student of our political sociological and ethnological conditions.”2 Ohio State University professor Matthew Hammond cited Hoffman’s data to support his own research coming to the conclusion that “it is not to be regretted that the majority of negroes . . . have not acquired ownership of land.”3
Not all scholars were fooled. One professor at Atlanta University identified the faults in Hoffman’s data analysis (and the data itself), then spoke, in effect, of the use of views of vice when he declared that this kind of science was an example of how “Anglo-Saxon prejudice had shut nearly every avenue of advancement in [African American] faces.”4 The byline of this book review bore one of those four-word names no college kid wants to argue grades with—William Edward Burghardt Du Bois—more widely known today as W. E. B. Du Bois. He was the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard University, and he went on to become one of the preeminent voices of his generation for equal rights.
In his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois pointed out how racism was often intertwined with views of vice to maintain the power of the well-to-do. “In the higher walks of life,” he wrote, “. . . the color-line comes to separate natural friends . . . [but] at the bottom of the social group, in the saloon, the gambling-hell, and the brothel, the same line wavers and disappears.” Du Bois’s own background, racially and economically, straddled those lines. For this reason, perhaps, even he spoke of the vice of “shiftlessness” in The Souls of Black Folk. Commenting on an instance in which he witnessed laziness and irresponsibility by two African American workers, he wrote, “Shiftless? Yes, the personification of shiftlessness.” But Du Bois vindicated this vice by writing, “They are careless because they have not found that it pays to be careful; they are improvident because the improvident ones of their acquaintance get on about as well as the provident.”5 In this remark, Du Bois became one of the first to maintain that when views of vice are used to maintain inequality, the inequality they maintain contributes to vice. As time will tell, he was correct. And not only in the case of African Americans.
During this same era, many scientists also put forth views of vice that served to advance their influence by enhancing that of those seeking to suppress the growing power of mankind’s oldest nemesis: womankind. “The weight of the average female brain,” A. Hughes Bennett, MD, told readers in the February 1880 issue of Popular Science, “has been estimated at from five to six ounces less than that of the average male brain. . . . As the organ of intellect in the female is smaller and lighter than that in the male, we may fairly assume . . . her weaknesses and vices are greater.”6
May we? How, then, can we explain, beginning in 1848, the extraordinary political organization taking shape at annual woman’s rights conventions? Not to mention (though we will later) the leadership of women in the temperance movement? Both of these movements amassed enough power to get the Constitution amended.
One way to explain these indications of women’s intelligence, if one opted not to believe it, was through views of vice. In 1848, that landmark year for woman’s rights, Columbus, Ohio, enacted an ordinance prohibiting women, or men, from appearing in public wearing the clothing of the opposite sex. Coincidence? If so, it’s a curious coincidence, since going around in drag was already punishable in Ohio—and every other state. As early as 1805, for example, a Connecticut law stated, “If any man shall wear women’s apparel, or if any woman shall wear men’s apparel . . . such offenders shall be corporally punished or fined.”7 Why, then, was Columbus, Ohio, enacting this ordinance in 1848? Indeed, why did more than thirty other cities and states enact similar laws between 1848 and 1920, the year in which the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote, was ratified?8 The answer can be seen in an 1851 editorial on the woman’s rights movement. “Termagants [shrewish females or, in the parlance of contemporary insults, bitches] and men-women may hold conventions and pass resolutions about the rights of the sex—the inconvenience of their dress, the tyranny of men, etc.,” the Cincinnati Times scoffed, then, for adornment, it wove another vice (public farting) into the same sentence when it concluded, “But they are the gaseous exhalations of the corruptions of the times, as fleeting as the air.”9
Phew! That was one crowd-fleeing use of views of vice.
As if women joining together to challenge the status quo wasn’t enough, Chinese people began arriving in the United States about this time, having been attracted by the 1848 discovery of gold in California. Industrialists discovered gold of a kind, too: Chinese workers. Coming from what was then a deeply impoverished nation, workers from China were willing to accept lower wages than their American counterparts. One way white workers combatted this challenge to their wages, which already hovered around the level of bare subsistence, was by using views of vice. The recently formed Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC, though the party could have doubled the Ws, the added one standing for White) declared of the Chinese neighborhood in San Francisco: “There we behold dens of iniquity and filth, houses of prostitution of the vilest sort, opium dens, [and] gambling houses.” Much as scientists sought to enhance their power by promulgating views of vice that served the interest of groups with more power than they, so too the WPC sought to enhance its power by viewing vice in ways that added to the influence of a more powerfully established group: scientists. The WPC statement said of San Francisco’s Chinatown: “There it is from whence leprosy, this inherent factor, this inbred disease of Chinese, is infused into our healthy race by the sucking of opium-pipes, which have been handled by those already afflicted.”10
But did scientists return the favor? Some in California did, since the gold rush there was where their bread was buttered. Two San Francisco physicians, for example, were among those who signed the WPC statement. But numerous physicians in the United States and elsewhere had already noted that leprosy’s infectiousness was not so simple, and American doctors knew the disease was more prevalent in areas of Louisiana and the Midwest than in Chinese-infested San Francisco.11 By opting for empirical facts that, over time, proved more valid than moral myths, these physicians ultimately increased the influence of their group.
As for industrialists, they tended to view Chinese vice—and virtues—differently. “The aptitude of Chinese for commerce surpasses even that of the Anglo-Saxon, and to that aptitude there is joined a scrupulous probity”—probity being legalese for morality, and these words being those of an attorney whose client supplied Chinese labor to industries. “I do not think the Chinamen are all angels,” he conceded, but in his view, “not one out of twenty uses opium.” Agreeing with the WPC about the crisis of vice in California, this mouthpiece for business interests U-turned that concession into a moral whack at white labor when he said, “California was originally settled by gamblers and this early passion has continued to the present day. . . . It is no cause for surprise that our boys and girls—our boys and girls, not those of the Chinaman—do not grow up the models of virtue and propriety. We furnish billiard rooms, whiskey saloons, dance cellars, melodeons, and brothels all over town.”12
The Chinese Exclusion Act closed the gates to their entry in 1882, but what about the ones who were already here? To whack that, Congress passed another law in 1909—the first of its kind on the federal level: the Opium Exclusion Act. With its enactment, America’s national war on drugs commenced.
And was declared on a group whom most whites did not want.
Opium was big business, as is the drug trade today. Back then, however, the muscle that most effectively enforced the will of the drug lords was the British military, often along with that of France and later the United States. To varying degrees, these nations engaged in two Opium Wars with China (1839–42, 1856–60) and intervened to suppress its Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), which threatened Western opium dealers. Officially, these wars were for trading privileges; unofficially, those privileges included paying for Chinese products not with silver, as Chinese law required, but with opium, which China’s emperor forbade. In nineteenth-century China, opium was a popular pain reliever for poverty and hopelessness, despite its side effect: addiction. When, midcentury, Chinese workers began pouring into California, opium smokers were among them.
Before the federal government enacted the Opium Exclusion Act, California had already passed antiopium legislation, and before that San Francisco had given it a go.13 As had been the case with colonial laws prohibiting whites from providing alcohol to Indians, these opium laws turned out to be largely ineffective. More to the point, and also as with their colonial counterparts, these laws were not enacted to protect substance abusers; they were enacted to protect those in power and their loved ones. That cat was let out of the bag when, soon after San Francisco passed its 1875 antiopium law, a news item from the Los Angeles Herald reported, “The first raid under the new ordinance against white persons who frequent opium dens was made at two o’clock this morning by a force of police.”14 In point of fact, the ordinance did not specify white persons. In point of reality, however, the statement was accurate. As one New Hampshire newspaper told readers, “It is a familiar fact that the Chinese inhabitants of the United States are almost entirely addicted to the use of opium, but it is not so generally known that there are fully 200,000 victims of the pernicious drug in this country, more than two-thirds of whom are from the best classes of the white race.”15 Again, factually not even close, but absolutely accurate in regard to whom these laws sought to protect: white people. The WPC cited opium in its list of Chinese vices that “destroy . . . the manhood and the health of our people.” But laws emanating from this view of vice weren’t aimed only at protecting manhood. “Young white girls are frequently enticed into [Chinese] laundries and opium joints, degraded and ruined,” one book from the era asserted.16 Unexplained but intriguing is how one entices a girl into a laundry.
Not all Americans viewed opium use through the lens of race. Viewing it through the lens of (and thus seeking to acquire influence for) behavioral science, John V. Shoemaker wrote in 1904, “There is a certain class of young people who are weak enough to look on such experiences as an evidence of their knowledge of the world.”17 Wanting to be like adults—a more empowered group than youth—many teens, then and now, will vindicate a vice (despite its risks) in an effort to assert their individual power. Adding to that allure back then were a number of influential figures in the Opium Users Hall of Fame. They included the widely read poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Thomas De Quincey, author of one of that century’s longest-running best sellers, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.18
Also widely admired at the time was Ezra Jennings, an opium-smoking detective in what was for several decades a highly popular novel from 1868, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (who was also known to use opium). Though Ezra Jennings is all but forgotten today, take a look at this sequence in which his client expresses uneasiness about drug use and see if this opium-imbibing detective reminds you of anyone:
“I thought the influence of opium was first to stupefy you, and then to send you to sleep.”
“The common error about opium, Mr. Blake! I am, at this moment, exerting my intelligence—such as it is—in your service, under the influence of a dose of laudanum.”19
More on laudanum (a mixture of opium and alcohol) shortly, but what about the voice of Ezra Jennings? Sound like that still-popular drug-using sleuth Sherlock Holmes?
Making his debut two decades later, Sherlock Holmes continues to astound readers with his amazing mental powers. Unlike for Ezra Jennings, however, the drug of choice for Sherlock Holmes was cocaine, the significance of the difference being that opium “had connotations of association with low-class Chinese,” in the words of Martin Booth in his biography of Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. “Such a drug as opium would never do for such a high-class man as Sherlock Holmes.”20
In the United States, the view of opium use as a Chinese vice emanated less from the groups in power than from a group seeking power: white industrial workers. As for cocaine, neither America’s powers-that-be nor powers-that-wannabe viewed the use of cocaine as a vice of high-class men. In 1902 the Atlanta Constitution reported on “the alarming growth of the use of cocaine among the negroes.” A state law already existing in Georgia required a doctor’s prescription for cocaine. But here we find one of those gaps in which so much history is stashed. “No effort has been made by the authorities to enforce it,” the article reported. Why wasn’t it enforced? Check out the sentence that followed: “Physicians state that if the habit among the negroes is not suppressed . . . it will mean the utter ruin and final extermination of the race in the South.”21 It wasn’t enforced because, in the words of the previously mentioned veteran of television vice, Homer Simpson, “Just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand.”
Many, if not most, whites feared blacks. And if physicians and other scientists said that cocaine was, in effect, causing self-genocide, those whites preferred that outcome to law enforcement helping to sustain that race. But the science guys were wrong. Genocide wasn’t the result. Crime was. By 1914 it was abundantly evident that to obtain this illegal substance, addicts did illegal things. To provide added power to law enforcement, moral myths were deployed. Black cocaine users were now characterized as “a constant menace” by (why am I not surprised?) a medical doctor, Edward Huntington Williams, who informed white America, “His whole nature is changed for the worse by the habit. Sexual desires are increased and perverted, peaceful negroes develop a degree of ‘Dutch courage’ that is sometimes almost incredible.” But the doc was just warming up his myth pitches. He went on to get a second opinion from a police officer whom he quoted as saying, “The cocaine nigger is sure hard to kill,” before adding, “Many of these officers in the South have increased the caliber of their guns for the express purpose of ‘stopping’ the cocaine fiend when he runs amok.”22 Even that “fact” was just this physician’s opening moral myth pitch. Check out his depravity spitball, on which he’d affixed police chief D. K. Lyerly of Asheville, North Carolina:
In attempting to arrest a hitherto peaceful negro who had become crazed by cocaine, Lyerly was forced to grapple with the man, who slashed him viciously with a long knife. In self-defense the officer drew his revolver, placed the muzzle over the negro’s heart, and fired—“for I knew I had to kill him quick,” the chief explained. The revolver he used, be it understood, was not the short-cartridge, pocket weapon carried by most Northern policemen, but a heavy army model . . . [that] will kill any game in America. And yet this bullet did not even stagger the crazed negro, and neither did a second bullet which pierced the biceps muscle and entered the thorax. So that the officer had finally to “finish the man with his club.”23
For the record, Edward Huntington Williams, MD, wasn’t some isolated quack. He was a widely respected professor of medicine at Iowa State University, and these statements of his were reported at length in newspapers and cited in scholarly journals.24
The moral of this story is that moral myths, used to promulgate views of vice that are in turn being used to impose power, are more than intellectually interesting. They can be deadly.
Still, why were white Americans now using such heavy artillery, both literally and with extraordinary myths about blacks and cocaine? Crime alone can’t account for it; Frederick Hoffman, as we saw, was cooking up statistics on black vice and crime twenty years earlier.
In the interim, however, an organization was created that, if its growth went unchecked, could challenge white dominance. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1909. To make matters worse (in the view of white supremacists), its founders included a handful of influential whites. In the past there had also been whites who viewed blacks as equal, but, being few and far between, they never formed an organized movement. In response to efforts such as the creation of the NAACP, an amped-up view of “Negro vice” became one of the weapons of white supremacists.
Housewives were another group that appeared as a result of industrialization. In agricultural regions, wives in middle-income and even in many upper-income rural families engaged in tasks required to maintain the farm or ranch. Not so among their urban counterparts. Urban families that had sufficient wealth promoted the view that industriousness was virtuous by viewing as indolent or incompetent men whose incomes required their wives to work. As for the wives in those more fortunate families, they only had to clean the house, cope with the kids, and cook the meals—or, if they were more “fortunate,” not even that. Many found these tasks mind-numbing and depressing. But a new form of relief appeared in the nineteenth century: laudanum. Having the added benefit of not being viewed as either a Chinese or a Negro vice, it became the drug of choice among housewives.
Laudanum addiction was by no means limited to women, but when data began to be collected in the early twentieth century, the statistics indicated addiction to it among housewives far exceeded that of their husbands.25 Obtaining the drug was no problem, as laws did not yet restrict its use. It was frequently sold as a pain reliever or cough suppressant or, for some, simply as a perker-upper. And it wasn’t some bogus elixir: for each of these maladies its mix of opium and alcohol did the trick. Few at first were aware of its addictiveness, including pharmacists and physicians. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, this risk was well known. As was the reason so many housewives, even knowingly, took it. “Its effects upon her spirits were most exhilarating,” one physician wrote of a laudanum-addicted patient in 1867. “She felt lively and cheerful, and could accomplish almost any amount of household work.”26
By the turn of the century, some number of housewives acquired an addiction to another opium derivative: morphine. “Many authorities have pointed out the danger of morphinism in women,” physician Thomas Crothers wrote in 1902. We might assume that Dr. Crothers’s views on morphinism in women, as opposed to men, were based on facts rather than myths, since he was a scientist. But no. “Capriciousness of mind, irritability, selfishness, restlessness, and excitability are the natural characteristics of many women, who quickly become morphinists,” he pseudoscientifically asserted.27 In other words, relax, guys, none of her problems have anything to do with you.
Still, something had to be done about drug-addicted women, if for no other reason than the housework wasn’t getting done—though there were other reasons. Love, for one. One husband repeatedly told his local pharmacist not to sell laudanum to his wife, but the husband didn’t have the power to dictate to whom the pharmacist sold what. The husband could, however, sue the pharmacist on the basis of—and here’s where power resided in this view of this vice—damaging the husband’s property. And he won. As did other husbands, because, in the words of one such ruling in 1897, “The husband, as a matter of law, is entitled to [his wife’s] time, her wages, her earnings, and the product of her labor, skill, and industry. And it seems to be a most reasonable proposition of law that whoever willfully joins with a married woman in doing an act which deprives her husband of her services . . . is liable to the husband in damages for his conduct.”28
But the lawsuit route was cumbersome and costly. Lawyers may have liked it, but another group suggested a different approach. “Laws should be enacted forbidding the sale of preparations containing the [addictive] drugs, except on prescription only,” physician J. J. McCar-thy told readers in the August 1910 issue of Pearson’s Magazine.29 Which is to say, give this power to doctors.
Which is not to say it was a bad idea.
Four years later, Congress did just that. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Harrison Narcotics Act, which required a doctor’s prescription for “opium or coca leaves or any compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, or preparation thereof.”30
During the same years that various groups were engaged in combatting urban vice, out on the western frontier, Uncle Sam’s favorite nieces and nephews, white people, were beleaguered by a different problem, that being the Apaches, Lakotas (aka Sioux), Navajos, Hopis, and others whose tribes were native to those lands. Among the weapons used to overpower these people were views of vice.
In the realm of drugs, peyote, a hallucinogen derived from a type of cactus, was the first upon which the crosshairs of vice were trained. Members of several tribes in the Southwest used peyote to transport themselves into spiritual realms during religious rituals. In 1889 the Bureau of Indian Affairs made it a criminal offense for them to do so.31 One might be inclined to think the intention of this regulation was good, though its proponents provided no evidence that peyote use in these tribes was harmful.
Ironically, this dictum was undermined by a separate effort to weaken tribal power. Two years earlier, passage of the General Allotment Act commenced a program in which the federal government altered the ownership of tribal land. Rather than being owned by the tribe, the land was distributed in a way that the head of each family in the tribe owned (and could sell) his allotted parcel. Along with this shift toward, shall we say, the American way of life, those Indians now acquired citizenship. And thus Uncle Sam’s right hand whacked its left, since, as citizens, Native Americans could claim that their religions were now protected by the Bill of Rights. In 1918 the dictum on peyote was downsized to permit its use in religious rituals. By then, however, it and other weaponry had sufficiently succeeded in scattering the western embers of Native American power.
Peyote was not the only Indian tradition targeted with views of vice. In 1899 Oklahoma’s territorial legislature outlawed the practices of Indian medicine men. The reasoning was based on the view that, as the Chicago Tribune reported, “the magician and prophet of the American Native is a power for evil.”32 Or, in other words, witchcraft.
Witchcraft wasn’t the only colonial era vice summoned from the past. Views of dancing as punishable vice were also brought back to the moral armory of the powers-that-be. What, we may wonder today, was the big deal about Indians getting together to dance? The big deal for many whites was that Native American dance ceremonies were viewed (correctly) as gateways to tribal cohesiveness—and tribal cohesiveness was strength.
In this respect, whites most feared the Ghost Dance. Commencing in the late nineteenth century among the Lakotas/Sioux in present-day South Dakota, this dance ritualized their growing belief that the arrival of a Native American messiah was imminent. This messiah would reunite the Indians with their dead ancestors and replenish their hunting grounds with new earth that, in some versions, would cover all white people. The Ghost Dance thus aroused fears that it presaged an uprising.33 “Reds Must Stop Dancing,” headlined a front-page story in the November 25, 1890, Chicago Tribune, reporting that U.S. troops were positioned outside the Pine Ridge Reservation to make clear to the Sioux, in the words of Gen. Nelson Miles, that “there will be no nonsense about quelling an outbreak.”
And indeed no outbreak occurred, though violence did. On December 29 the troops entered the reservation in the vicinity of Wounded Knee Creek. By day’s end, over 150 of the tribe’s men, women, and children lay dead, with some 100 more mortally wounded. Because of a dance.34
At the risk of repetition, using views of vice to impose power can be—and not infrequently is—deadly.
Other Native American dances were also viewed as punishable vice during this era. The federal government prohibited the Sun Dance, an integral part of the ceremony in which boys were inducted into manhood in several of the tribes that inhabited the Great Plains. Its self-inflicted violence was horrific to white culture. The ritual, however, was entirely consensual—a fact that was known and reported at the time. “No Sioux is obliged to undergo it,” the Washington Post told readers in a December 28, 1890, feature. “The youth has his choice, when arrived at manly age, of being a woman-man or of proving by the tortures of the Sun Dance that he is fitted to be a warrior.”35 Expansionist whites particularly needed to weaken the cohesiveness of Indian tribes with men fit for war. Among the ways to overpower them was emasculation via the imposition of white views of vice.
Which brings us to another cohesive view of Native Americans: male sexuality. “If he prefers to be a woman-man,” the Post article continued, “he will not be ill-treated or even scoffed at. . . . He must dress like the women, and like them he is left at home when the braves go hunting or to battle. In fact, this treatment is such a matter of course that a stranger might visit a camp and encounter any number of these persons and have no reason to suppose that they were other than women.”36
Which, in turn, brings us to how views of sexual vice helped win the West. The federal government also cracked down on sexualized dances that were rituals among some of the tribes. Tippy-toeing between reporting the news without getting whacked for obscenity, one 1923 newspaper article referred to an “unprintable report” describing such dances among the Hopis in New Mexico and Arizona and agreed with the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs that “the time has come when the Indians should be discouraged, at least in his abandonment to filthy and immoral practices.”37 And, by federal fiat, they were.
Since it’s no longer unprintable, let’s take a peek at that government report (which, to keep these various reports clear, was written in 1915). It described dancers “imitating animals in the act of sexual intercourse,” then went on to say of a group of male dancers costumed as what whites would call clowns, “Each pulled his penis from under his breech cloth and . . . women marched by either kissing or taking a bite of the clown’s penis.” Yikes. Though they may have been wagging clown cocks, since elsewhere this same report told of various fruits and vegetables carved to resemble male and female sexual organs.38
The newspaper article that refrained from printing these details approvingly cited the government’s justification for prohibiting such Indian dances, noting that “girls and boys, after careful instruction in morals in the boarding schools, go back to the Hopi villages to be engulfed in filthy practices and immoralities that too often accompany the dances.” Explicitly employing this view of vice on behalf of white power, a teacher from one such school was quoted as saying, “Unless we attend to the uncivilizing influences among the Indians, we might as well stop our attempts toward civilizing.”39
Witchcraft, drugs, and dancing weren’t the only realms in which views of vice were used to stomp out Native American power. So too was what in the white world was called free love, along with its handmaiden, alternate views of marriage. “The marriage relation is one requiring the immediate attention of the agent,” Secretary of the Interior Henry Taylor declared in an 1883 report that called for the suppression of several Indian dances. In addition, Taylor expressed alarm at those tribes that accepted “plural marriages” and at tribes in which “the marriage relationship, if it may be said to exist at all . . . is exceedingly lax in its character.”40
In contrast to the declining power of Native Americans, a new group whose power was rapidly rising was the Mormons. Though the early history of the Mormons is obscured by the dust and blood of claims and counterclaims, clearly there were reasons to fear that the Mormons who followed Brigham Young to present-day Utah may have considered the possibility of forming their own nation. After all, whites in the South were doing the same thing. Although there were some military skirmishes between the Mormon militia and the United States Army, the most effective weapon used to overpower the Mormons was a view of vice.
That vice was polygamy, which was and remains widely viewed as a punishable vice in the United States and many other parts of the world.41 Mormon leaders, for their part, used their view that polygamy was not vice as a means of acquiring power—and not just, if at all, power over women. Though polygamous, the Mormons in Utah granted women the right to vote in 1870, preceded only by (curious as it may seem today) Wyoming. Congress, however, had the power to revoke that right, since Utah and Wyoming were still territories and therefore did not have the power that states then had to regulate marriage. And revoke it Congress did. In Utah. In Wyoming, Congress let women vote. Wyoming had few Mormons and a law against polygamy. Here, then, is one of this country’s clearest examples of views of vice being employed for purposes of power. It was the weapon of choice in the duel for power between the Mormon Church and the federal government.
En garde: In 1862 Congress passed the (inadvertently but aptly punned) Morrill Act, which banned polygamy in the Utah Territory. But for any law to work, the government has to be able to convict those who violate it. “Would you call on twelve petit jurors with twelve wives each to convict?” Senator Stephen A. Douglas asked when this approach was proposed.42 Douglas’s doubts were correct. Lunge deflected.
While some may call it bad form, Congress did achieve a touché in 1882 when the Edmunds Act authorized the federal government to confiscate the assets of the Mormon Church, based on the church conducting federally forbidden polygamous marriage ceremonies. The law also required monogamy oaths in the Utah Territory in order to vote or serve on a jury. Such oaths enabled the federal government to bring perjury charges against anyone who lied in order to vote or serve on a jury. Of course, as with the 1862 law prohibiting polygamy, its effectiveness depended on there being jurors willing to enforce the perjury charges.
While the 1882 oath requirement may appear to have been little more than a legislative coupé flick, the scratch that resulted ultimately proved fatal for polygamy. During the 1880s, the growing population of Utah came to include an increasing percentage of non-Mormons, so much so that the Chicago Tribune reported on February 12, 1890, “The gentile [non-Mormon] victory in the municipal election at Salt Lake City strikes another deadly blow at the Mormon iniquity. . . . The test oath, which disenfranchises all who cannot satisfy its provisions, succeeded in purifying the lists and the battle was won.” As for the confiscation enabled by the 1882 law, the article went on to credit that provision with “the complete paralysis of the power of the Mormon Church as a political agency.” Nine months later, the Mormon Church announced it would no longer sanction plural marriage. Eight years after that, Congress was convinced that the Mormons no longer threatened the nation’s established powers and elevated Utah to statehood.
Which brings us to what might be called the State of Vice: Utah’s neighbor, Nevada. Gambling galore. Legal whores. But that’s now. Back then . . . Actually, gambling was legal then, too. As for prostitution, on that Nevada law was clear: “It shall be unlawful for any owner, or agent of any owner, or any other person to keep any house of ill-fame, or to let or rent to any person whomsoever [etc., etc.] . . . for the purpose of prostitution [etc., etc. again] . . . situated within four hundred yards of any school house or school room used by any public or common school.”43
What? Whorehouses were okay so long as they weren’t within shouting distance of a schoolmarm?
Why would Nevadans have such a different view of vice? Were there no religious leaders? There certainly were in Utah. Or were there no others whose interests were threatened by commerce in sex? Indeed, in Nevada there were not a lot of either. Nevada is comprised almost entirely of land its neighboring states did not want. Called by geographers: the Great Basin. Called by the rest of us: desert. Aside from some precious metals to be mined, Nevada had little arable land other than one small region with abundant vegetation, known to colonial era Spaniards as las vegas. To make money in Nevada took some doing.
Still, even though Nevadans vindicated gambling and prostitution because of their need for the revenue, why would Congress allow these activities while, at the same time, getting its feathers all flustered over polygamy in Utah? Not only did Congress turn a blind eye to legalized gambling and prostitution in the Nevada Territory, it relinquished its power to prohibit them when it granted statehood to Nevada in 1864. Was Nevada too sparsely populated to matter? Only 6,857 white people lived there, according to the 1860 census. According to Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, however, its white population was between 30,000 and 45,000. Why such wildly different numbers? For the same reason that Congress turned a blind eye to legalized gambling and prostitution in Nevada.
Power.
The fact is, there weren’t 30,000 (let alone 45,000) white folks in Nevada in the early 1860s. Consequently, those who did gamble and frequent whorehouses from among Nevada’s 7,000 or so whites constituted very little threat to the nation’s power structure. On the other hand, the fiction that 30,000 to 45,000 whites lived there was necessary for Nevada to qualify for statehood during those Civil War years. The Republican Party, with its narrow plurality in the Thirty-Eighth Congress, hoped to endear itself to Nevadans and thereby better enable Union troops to secure the route to gold-rich California. Plus, President Lincoln had reason to fear his bid for reelection in 1864 might be very close, and even Nevada’s votes might make the difference.44
What we have, then, is the vindication of gambling and prostitution to gain power in wartime conditions. Which you could call a gamble, or you could call prostituting one’s morals. Or you could call it what Congress did: Nevada.