METROPOLITAN MORALITY
IN 1917, MAYOR JAMES H. PRESTON appointed a committee to investigate the living conditions of Baltimore’s 90,000 black residents. Disease was a particular concern. Though they made up only 15 percent of the city’s population, African Americans accounted for 40 percent of deaths from tuberculosis. The mayor suggested that the disease might have something to do with housing conditions. African Americans were crowded “into small houses in alleys and narrow streets . . . living under conditions extremely unsanitary and unhealthful.”1
Racial segregation did not figure in the official diagnosis of the problem, even though it aggravated overcrowding in black neighborhoods by artificially restricting the supply of housing available to a growing African American population. The mayor considered building new housing for blacks in areas of the city set aside for members of their race, but neither he nor his committee considered abrogating the ordinance that prevented African Americans from moving into existing houses in white neighborhoods. The ordinance would soon become irrelevant, however, because of the US Supreme Court’s ruling that it was unconstitutional. Residential segregation would then depend on restrictive covenants and the practices of realtors. The mayor sent a copy of a Chicago segregation plan to Baltimore’s real estate board, apparently hoping that realtors could enforce segregation after it could no longer be sustained by city law.2
Unlike several of his predecessors, Preston did not lend “political perfumery” to the Democratic ticket. He had been a loyal soldier of Freeman Rasin’s Democratic organization. He served two terms in the house of delegates and was briefly its Speaker, in 1894. And his political career might have taken a further turn upward had Republicans not swept the state in the Democratic disaster of 1895.3 Preston served as a member of the board of police commissioners and made an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1910. After Sonny Mahon announced that he was backing Preston for mayor in 1911, against incumbent mayor Mahool, the Baltimore Sun let loose a condemnatory editorial dismissing the candidate as a creature of the “Ring.” When first elected to the house of delegates in 1889, Preston was “a young man, who should have had high ideals and honorable aspirations.” Instead, he had “allied himself with ‘the machine’ which was then omnipotent at Annapolis and corrupt without limit.” During his brief term as Speaker, according to the paper, he had prepared the way for the Democratic defeat of 1895 by advancing nefarious legislation that granted monopoly status to the local gas company and a firm that disposed of sewage and solid waste. On what grounds, the editorialist asked, “can Mr. Preston expect the support of Democratic voters who desire public officials to be public officials and not servile politicians wearing the collar and doing the bidding of corrupt bosses?”4
John J. “Sonny” Mahon succeeded to the uncertain leadership of Baltimore’s Democratic organization after Freeman Rasin’s death in 1907.
For Sonny Mahon, the choice of Preston was a high-stakes gamble. If the voters rejected him, the Democratic machine would suffer a decisive reduction in political influence, perhaps extinction. But continuing deference to reformers and Independents may have seemed only slightly preferable to utter defeat. Mahon was ready to roll the dice, but his lieutenants apparently lacked his nerve. Democrats who held offices under the Mahool administration worried that if Preston won the Democratic nomination, the city’s electorate would turn to the Republicans, who would oust them from their city jobs. Other party loyalists were willing to abandon Mayor Mahool, but urged Mahon not to choose Preston, who was too obviously an organization man. The Sun contended that Mahon himself was “frightened by the outlook” and that “his followers, big and little, are scared to their wits’ end.”5
Mahon may have been less frightened than the Sun imagined. His selection of Preston confronted his organization’s foot soldiers with stark alternatives: a victory pregnant with patronage or a defeat that might eliminate what remained of their access to municipal offices and contracts. It was a frightful choice that would elicit their maximum effort to avoid political extinction. As Rasin’s chief deputy, Mahon had demonstrated his expertise in engineering elections, and he used his characteristic care in the campaign for Preston. A few days before the primary, for example, Mahon ordered his workers to test the candidate’s strength by canvassing their precincts. The exercise served not only as an internal opinion poll but as a means to identify Democrats who supported Preston. These were the voters who would be targeted by the organization’s “runners” on election day. To motivate its foot soldiers, the machine offered not just the prospect of city jobs but the more immediate inducement of election-day cash. In the Democratic strongholds of South and East Baltimore, the Preston campaign was expected to spend $25 to $40 per precinct for the runners.6
The organization lived up to the boss’s expectations. Turnout in the Democratic primary reached 80 percent, an all-time high, and among the 50,000 Democrats who voted, Preston defeated Mahool by more than 9,000. The machine’s triumph, however, was tarnished by the usual charges of electoral fraud. A grand jury ordered a recount of votes from precincts where irregularities were alleged, and a judge ordered that the sealed ballot boxes from those precincts be delivered to the court. But the board of election supervisors and board of police commissioners reported that the ballots from April’s Democratic primary had been emptied into sacks because the ballot boxes were needed for the state primary in August. The police commander of the district where the boxes had been stored told a different story. He claimed that the boxes were emptied only days before they were to be delivered to the grand jury. If his account were true, then the dumping of the ballot boxes would have violated the judge’s order. If the dumping occurred in August, it may have violated a state law requiring that ballots remain sealed in their boxes for six months after an election. While a convenient ambiguity enveloped the violation, the consequence was clear: the recount was impossible because, once the ballots had been dumped into sacks, there was no way to tell which precincts they came from.7
RULE OF THE RING
The resurrection of the Ring without Rasin may not have been achieved by fraud, but it was an unexpected triumph. The Sun had confidently predicted a defeat of the Democratic organization. What came next, however, was no surprise. City hall became a patronage clearinghouse for the political friends of the mayor and Sonny Mahon. Preston began by appointing his law partner, Steven S. Field, as city solicitor. “Little Danny” Loden, a Mahon loyalist, was named collector of water rents and taxes, but his main job was to oversee the administration’s lesser patronage appointments. Rewards of a more substantial value would flow to political lieutenant Robert “Paving Bob” Padgett, who won lucrative contracts to cover the city’s cobblestone streets with smooth asphalt. Mahon became a bonding agent for Padgett and other city contractors. He wrote to members of the city council announcing that he had entered the bonding business and would appreciate any clients they might refer to him.8
The new administration arrived at city hall along with a freshly authorized loan of $6 million to pave the city’s streets. The F. E. Schneider Paving Company was one of the leading bidders for these funds. Schneider was the company’s general manager, but he held just one share of its stock. The rest belonged to Robert Padgett and his wife. The company’s legal business was handled by the law firm of the mayor and the city solicitor, Preston and Field.9
Padgett came relatively late to political prominence. He had been a novice in Rasin’s Seventh Ward. While Rasin ruled, Padgett’s highest public office was sergeant at arms in the house of delegates. His political status improved abruptly with the rise of Sonny Mahon. When Mahon succeeded Rasin in 1907, Padgett became the party’s candidate for sheriff and, with Mahon’s support, got elected. He also became a member of the city’s Democratic committee. Paving Bob continued to conduct his private business while sheriff, and it was rumored that Mahon provided him with the capital to buy out a competing company and upgrade its asphalt plant. Padgett’s term as sheriff ended as Preston became mayor, but the job left him with a hangover. To cover his salary as sheriff, he had been entitled to keep $3,000 annually of the fees and fines he collected. After he retired as sheriff, the state filed suit against him to recover about $11,000 that he had allegedly kept in excess of what was due to him. The commissioners for the opening of streets also filed complaints accusing the paving company of repeatedly violating the eight-hour labor law that covered city contractors.10
If any of this bothered Sonny Mahon or Mayor Preston, their apprehensions never became public. But Padgett’s paving business soon became a political liability. His troubles began when the city’s paving commission passed over William Elder, the low bidder on two major projects, and gave the jobs to Padgett instead. The commissioners had disqualified Elder’s bids because his company had paved (at bargain rates) the concrete walkways at the home of the commission’s assistant chief engineer, and the engineer had subsequently been accused of “padding” city contracts to increase payments to Elder. Padgett, it turned out, had given the same assistant engineer a $6,200 loan for the purchase of his home. One of the engineer’s duties was to certify that paving jobs met specifications; Padgett’s work had previously been cited for repeated failures to meet these specifications. Since Elder’s firm had been disqualified as a bidder for paving contracts, Padgett seemed to merit similar treatment. Mayor Preston was reported to be furious with him, and the paving commission disqualified Padgett’s firm as a bidder on its contracts. Padgett offered to resign from his corporation to preserve its eligibility for city contracts, but the commission and the mayor stood firm. So did Mahon. Though he had sponsored his friend’s political career, he disowned Padgett in order to preserve his own alliance with Preston. Paving Bob withdrew from the paving business and leased his asphalt plant to a firm from New York.11 The mayor expelled Padgett from his inner circle of lieutenants—temporarily.
Mayor Preston had plans for Baltimore far grander than graft and much more original. The most ambitious of his ventures envisioned a radical extension of the city’s boundaries.
Preston’s plan was not simply an annexation proposal; in fact, he deliberately avoided the term. He proposed to add four self-governing and semi-independent “boroughs” to Baltimore, one in each quarter of the compass. They would increase the city’s land area from less than 32 to more than 172 square miles. In each of the proposed boroughs, the registered voters would decide whether to join the city. Each borough approving the plan would get one representative on the city council, and the residents of each would elect three commissioners of their own to oversee taxation, expenditures, and services within the borough limits. The boroughs would be subject to the supervision of only the city’s health department and school commissioners, and they would fall under the jurisdiction of the city courts. In return for this oversight, they would pay the city 5 percent of their revenue from taxes and fees. (Later versions called for 10 cents per $100 of assessed property valuation.) By negotiation with the city, the boroughs could also consolidate their police or fire departments with those of Baltimore or have their garbage collected along with the city’s.12
Preston was proposing a gradualist annexation policy, thus avoiding the usual objections raised by suburbanites who would be absorbed by an extension of the city’s limits and its taxes. He noted that “opposition always at first develops owing to the advance of taxation.” But he believed that “if the Borough System which I have proposed is carefully thought out and all the money collected within the annexed limits is spent in the main in the territory in which the money is collected it will remove opposition on this score.”13
The borough plan could play a significant role in Baltimore’s continuing campaign to attract manufacturing firms. It would give the city access to prime industrial real estate on the waterfront in Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties. The city’s factory site commission, headed by A. S. Goldsborough, worked with local realtors to identify property suitable for industrial uses. Water supply was a critical factor for manufacturing firms. The mayor sought to meet this problem by finding waterfront sites for factories so that they could draw water directly from the Patapsco instead of relying on a more expensive supply from the city’s reservoirs.14
The borough bill made its debut in the General Assembly at the 1912 session, where it quickly dropped from sight. A Sun reporter later suggested that Mayor Preston had merely been sending out “a feeler” to expose the measure’s enemies and reveal potential allies.15
Preston’s gradualist approach to annexation seems to have made headway among the suburbanites affected by it. The Hamilton Improvement Association invited him to speak about his plan at its annual dinner. George A. Frick, a banker and state legislator who had drafted the borough plan for Preston, promoted the proposal before the Pikesville Improvement Association and reported a favorable reception, not only among the area’s residents, but from Roland Park and Highlandtown community leaders who had attended to learn about the borough plan. The Roland Park Civic League appointed a committee to review the proposal. It issued a strong, unanimous endorsement. And a meeting of the Homestead Improvement Association unanimously declared its support for Preston’s proposal.16
Support also came from a number of city leaders and organizations. The Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association supported the plan from the time it became public. The City-Wide Congress—a progressive organization founded in 1911 to promote government efficiency, planning, and social reform—also endorsed the proposal, but urged that it should include a provision creating a metropolitan planning commission.17
Mayor Preston hitched his borough plan to an appeal for more equitable representation of the city in the General Assembly and more autonomy in the management of its affairs. He advanced his case for the city in a pamphlet—“Fair Play for Baltimore City: An Appeal to the Counties by the Mayor of Baltimore”—and embarked on a statewide speaking tour to stir up support for the city and the borough plan in the very backwaters of Maryland that produced the legislators who voted down the city’s pleas for equitable representation and taxation.18 The tour was timed to coincide with the state election campaign and provided Preston with a succession of opportunities to earn the good will of fellow Democratic politicians by promoting their election to the General Assembly, along with the borough plan.
The Sun never endorsed Preston’s plan. It harbored a longstanding suspicion about members of the Ring and their works. Preston regarded the newspaper with similar mistrust. The Sun made his attacks on the paper a centerpiece of its coverage.19 The mayor faced more potent opponents among the politicians of Baltimore County. His borough plan would take away their richest sources of revenue. Some of them had spoken out against the plan even before the bill was introduced in the house of delegates. County congressman J. F. C. Talbott attacked the plan because, he said, the borough residents would not have an opportunity to vote on it.20 Since the proposal included an explicit provision for voter approval, Talbott may not have read it—or was confident that no one else would.
As Preston prepared the borough plan for its second appearance in the legislature, Talbott struck again. Like the Sun, Talbott accused Preston of using his appearances on behalf of the borough plan “to further his own political ambitions.” The plan’s prospects deteriorated rapidly thereafter. Ten days after Talbott’s denunciation, the Roland Park Civic League met to consider its committee’s unanimous endorsement of the borough proposal. According to the Sun, the vote went two-to-one against the mayor. (In January 1914, the league reversed its decision on the grounds that many of those who voted in October were not league members.) In November, the Confederated Improvement and Protective Associations of Baltimore County voted against boroughs. By December, Preston faced opposition within the city itself. One of Baltimore’s state senators, William J. Ogden, attacked the borough plan because it would allow the boroughs “to get their hands into the city treasury” and drain revenues from downtown Baltimore to the far reaches of Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties. Ogden supported some extension of the city’s boundaries, but he wanted to achieve it by simple annexation and on a much smaller scale than the borough plan.21
Shortly after the opening of the General Assembly’s 1914 session, the Sun renewed its editorial assault on the borough plan. It repeated Senator Ogden’s apprehensions that the boroughs would gain disproportionately at the city’s expense, then went on to predict that the Ring and its minions would somehow control the borough commissions to secure “luscious ‘pickings’ for the ‘asphalt kings’ and other such politician-contractors,” and a host of jobs for the Ring’s dependents. By the end of the legislature’s session, the paper reported that “the famous borough plan of enlarging Baltimore’s boundaries was merrily and enthusiastically stomped to death in the House and never saw the light of day in the Senate.”22
Preston continued to promote his boroughs, but even Field, his law partner and city solicitor, advised him to drop it.23 The politically inventive plan remained a road not taken in the development of metropolitan Baltimore. It succeeded, however, in arousing a coalition for municipal expansion on both sides of the city line, and it made extension of the city’s boundaries an ongoing issue in both local and state politics.
PRELUDE TO PROHIBITION
In 1912, as Mayor Preston and George Frick were shaping the borough plan, the Anti-Saloon League came to town. The league had been a presence in Maryland for some time and had already failed in its first attempt to get the state legislature to pass a local option bill that would allow individual counties, municipalities, or districts to vote themselves “dry.” The league’s Maryland superintendent, William H. Anderson, blamed his organization’s defeat on “the pressure of the Baltimore machine.”24 Now he ventured into enemy territory to confront the machine’s mayor, characterized in league publications as a pawn of the liquor interests. Anderson and two of his colleagues met with Preston when the league’s local option proposal was headed toward its second outing before the General Assembly. The mayor claimed, implausibly, to be uninformed about local option. Anderson followed up by sending him a brief “digest” of the local option bill, along with a letter that was not brief.
While he disavowed any hostility toward Mayor Preston, Anderson noted that he was “not especially fond” of some of the mayor’s supporters—in particular, the city’s representatives in the General Assembly. There was also Sonny Mahon, who was reputed to accept large contributions from the liquor interests, but he stood outside the immediate range of the league’s vengeance because he held no public office. The Anti-Saloon forces, wrote Anderson, did not charge Preston with responsibility for his political colleagues’ fealty to the liquor industry. The mayor’s silence on local option, however, created the impression that he stood with his organization’s operatives in opposing the league’s proposal. If he remained quiet on the subject, the temperance forces would hold him accountable for everything that the city’s legislators did to block local option. Preston, as the machine’s principal officeholder, would be an obvious target for the wrath of the drys. The league, said Anderson, did not expect Preston to come out in favor of prohibition. He need only announce “that questions of this kind ought to be handed back to the people” so that they could vote their localities dry if they wished. Behind the league’s push for local option, Anderson warned, was the influence of Protestant churches. For a politician of Preston’s evident ambition, Anderson’s message was simple: “There is no political future for the man who becomes identified in the public mind with opposition to this movement.”25
Preston remained noncommittal on local option, and Anderson wrote again, charging that the mayor was orchestrating the defeat of local option in the house of delegates and warning that the league was prepared to make this charge publicly in testimony before the House Temperance Committee. The letter carries Preston’s handwritten notation, “No answer.” Anderson wrote again advising Preston, “[you] might just as well come out into the open and have a run for your money, for unless you undo the damage you have already done, we are going to make your responsibility . . . so clear that the most unsophisticated will understand.” The mayor responded not to Anderson but to the public at large, announcing that he had not asked any member of the General Assembly to oppose local option and that he would “take no part either for or against the Local Option bill.” Preston responded to letter writers who supported the bill with the disingenuous claim that Anderson had asked him to “keep ‘hands off’ the matter.”26 In the General Assembly, local option died again.
CULTURE WARS
Baltimore was morally agitated about a variety of subjects other than strong drink. The proliferation of “moving picture parlors” provoked consternation. A parish priest wrote to the president of the council’s first branch in 1911 to protest the opening of a movie house near his church and its school, because he deemed “such an enterprise detrimental to the morals of the youth under my charge.” A slightly different complaint came from a Walbrook resident. Movies, he wrote, “foster too much the spirit of daydreaming, the unreal . . . Too many, otherwise bright and useful lives, are spoiled by their blighting influence.” Hundreds of other Baltimoreans protested against the movies, not always for moral reasons, but with consistent outrage. They complained about “the annoyance and inconvenience that follow such a business.” Others mixed moral and material complaints. Movie houses reduced property values, and also had a corrupting influence: “In former years the young had their minds influenced by getting hold of the dime novel and reading its contents in some out of the way place, but now in these modern days the moving picture machine has taken the place of the old dime novel, and we extend to them an invitation to do the very thing that we tried so hard to prevent.”27
In these modern days, the city council approved a bill allowing Baltimoreans to play baseball on Sundays, igniting a furor in 1914 even more passionate than the moral anxiety prompted by moving picture parlors. On behalf of the Maryland Sons of the American Revolution, J. Frank Supplee announced his organization’s opposition. “The character of this American Republic,” he argued, was “based upon the moral obligation of a religious instinct and anything that lowers this standard will be deplored.” Sunday baseball was deplorable. For the Society of the War of 1812, the pursuit of America’s pastime on Sundays introduced a European decadence to Baltimore—“a Continental Sabbath”—that threatened to “loosen the discipline of parents over children” and “to create neighborhood disorder.” The Fuller Memorial Baptist Sunday School, “a body of men, women, and children 525 strong,” protested that Sunday baseball would “seriously erode the Spiritual development of those participating in such practices on the Lord’s Day.” And, in Hampden and Woodberry, two mill towns added to the city in 1888, a mass meeting of Protestant church congregations with 4,500 members entered an emphatic protest against the bill and expressed apprehension that “Sunday Amateur Baseball . . . is but the entering wedge for a wide open Sunday.”28
According to city solicitor Field, it was doubtful whether the city council had the authority to make law on the subject. The state legislature had already spoken on the matter of Sunday pastimes, and the council could not contravene state law.29
Mayor Preston confided that he had no personal objection to Sunday baseball, and one of his aides, A. S. Goldsborough, suggested that he approve the council’s proposed ordinance but announce that he was doing so only to “test the validity of the ordinance” in the courts. Preston declined to shift the decision to the judiciary. He sent Goldsborough the “great mass of letters and resolutions received from churches, Sunday schools, improvement associations, patriotic associations and individuals protesting against the establishment of Sunday baseball.” Professional baseball, played on occasional Sundays, in one isolated stadium with high fences, might prove no great irritant to the opponents, wrote the mayor, but amateur baseball in most of the city’s parks and empty lots would pose an immediate and weekly annoyance to rigorous observers of the Sabbath. He also had misgivings about what lay behind the support for Sunday baseball, because “the whole question has grown up in the last few weeks, and I am led to believe that there is some sinister purpose behind it,” perhaps a “wide open” Sunday. Preston did not feel that he could approve the ordinance.30
His veto message to the council cited the solicitor’s opinion about the legality of the ordinance, but also expressed apprehension that Sunday baseball might “open the doors for wide changes in our Sunday laws. Baltimore now has an orderly and quiet Sunday. In my judgment we should not do anything to bring about a change in these conditions until there has been a distinct expression of the people on the subject, either by a referendum or an election of City officials in which the issue could be determined.”31
Preston’s veto earned him a torrent of congratulatory letters from constituents and may have contributed to the ease of his reelection in 1915. In spite of the Anti-Saloon League’s attacks, the mayor faced no opposition in the Democratic primary and easily defeated his opponent, a member of the city council’s Republican minority. His defense of the Sabbath’s sanctity may have blunted attempts to portray him as an agent of the “liquor interests.”
The mayor managed to remain on the sidelines in another campaign for moral improvement until after his reelection. This movement targeted Baltimore’s houses of prostitution. In 1911, a Johns Hopkins physician, Donald Hooker, charged that at least 296 brothels were operating in the city. Dr. Hooker’s estimate was one finding of a study conducted by his Committee on the Social Evil. The City-Wide Congress had appointed the committee, and Hooker was its chairman. He complained that his committee lacked the resources needed for an adequate examination of the problem, and its report recommended that the mayor appoint a city commission to investigate prostitution in Baltimore. The response came not from Mayor Preston but from Maryland’s Republican governor, Phillips Lee Goldsborough. Prostitution, after all, fell within the purview of the police department, and Baltimore’s department operated under commissioners appointed by the governor. Goldsborough created the Maryland Commission on Vice in 1912 to investigate Baltimore’s prostitution problem and recommend remedies.32
The police had treated prostitution as a necessary evil in need of regulation rather than a moral abomination demanding abolition. By local custom, each house of ill fame in Baltimore was subject to one fine annually. A receipt for that payment served as a license to operate without undue police interference until the time for the next year’s fine, an annual event known in the city’s courts and police stations as “Ladies’ Day.”33 For years, the practice had provoked little outrage even among members of the city’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, which concentrated on the evils of gambling and saloons and confined action against houses of prostitution to cases in which neighbors complained.34
Two of Baltimore’s reform associations, however, had redefined the issue of prostitution so as to support the argument for abolition rather than regulation. Hooker was a founder of the Maryland Society for Social Hygiene in 1908. The society emphasized prostitution’s threat to public health. Mere regulation of prostitution, according to Hooker, would not reduce the spread of venereal diseases. Syphilis and gonorrhea were difficult to detect and could not be controlled by periodic tests of women who had multiple customers in the course of an evening. Abolition was the only cure for the problem.35 The Baltimore Women’s Civic League, founded in 1911, focused on prostitution as a business and came to the same conclusion. Urbanization brought thousands of women into the city’s workplaces, liberated from the protective insularity of family homes and exposed to what a later generation would call sexual harassment. The Women’s Civic League was concerned not only with the vulnerability of working women but with the transformation of prostitution in the big-city economy. Like the monopolistic trusts that held sway over other industries, “consolidated capital” might organize the market in vice and draw the growing supply of candidates for prostitution into vast new commercial enterprises catering to male lust.36 Regulation would only sanction the industrialization of vice. Abolition was the only remedy.
In 1916, Governor Goldsborough’s vice commission would issue its report on prostitution—a five-volume investigation that covered almost every detail of the business from the rents paid by brothels to the sexual sensations of their occupants, their earnings, amusements, religious denominations, personal cleanliness, family backgrounds, and venereal diseases. But the commission recommended action before completion of its report. In March 1915, almost a year before it issued its five volumes, it wrote to the police department to urge “a continued enforcement of police regulations” to shut down Baltimore’s bordellos and “assignation houses.”37
The commission may have rushed its recommendation to avoid being overtaken by events. In 1912, the Society for the Suppression of Vice had criticized the city’s judges—the Baltimore Supreme Bench—for their failure to enforce statutes prohibiting prostitution. In a speech before the society’s annual meeting, board member Charles J. Bonaparte charged that any judge interfering with enforcement of these laws should be impeached. As a former US attorney general, his words carried weight. The judges responded that they could enforce the law only when the police initiated prosecutions against the merchants of flesh. The judges thus succeeded in shifting the society’s attention to the board of police commissioners, which responded with a crackdown on houses of prostitution. According to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the last of the city’s brothels was closed on September 12, 1915.38
The state vice commission detected the change in the municipal climate while still collecting evidence for its report. In 1914, the commission had assigned a woman as an undercover investigator to pose as someone interested in opening a “boarding house” that rented rooms to couples for short stays. She was to explain her plans to police officers, “but she told them that she would be extremely circumspect and that in acknowledgment of their . . . discretion, she would expect to pay them a certain amount of money.” None of the policemen took up her offer, and most warned her against opening her business in the neighborhoods that they patrolled. Several mentioned that their superiors and the board of police commissioners had recently become much less tolerant of such arrangements. According to one, there “was a time when things could be fixed up but there was nothing doing now.”39
Mayor Preston exploited the vice commission report to attack the state’s control of his city’s police force. Relying on an informant, the mayor charged a police lieutenant with drinking on duty and other unspecified offenses “unbecoming an officer.” At trial before the board of police commissioners, the case against the lieutenant collapsed when the informant disowned his testimony on the grounds that he had provided it while drunk. Preston, before a hostile audience of police officers, “was subjected to probably the most unpleasant experience any mayor of Baltimore has known for years,” according to the Sun. Rather than give ground, he simply shifted his attack from the police lieutenant to the police commissioners, citing the vice commission’s report as evidence that the commissioners did not know what went on in the city or their department. According to the mayor, Daniel Loden, a Mahon loyalist and former district magistrate, had brought the problem of prostitution to the board’s attention long before creation of the vice commission: “Judge Loden came in here to this particular Board—I think I am right—Judge Loden was not appointed by the Governor, but was elected by the people of the city of Baltimore . . . He told you these things were widespread in this community. Did you look it up? Did you take one step to correct it?”40
Preston was explicit about his intentions. He was determined, he said, to end state control of his city’s police department: “The government of the police force . . . is fundamentally wrong. It ought to be in the hands of the people of Baltimore, not the Governor of Maryland . . . and I am going to be on the job to see it is corrected, and that the police of Baltimore is run by the people of Baltimore.”41 In fact, the adjustment would not be made for almost 60 years after Preston left his job as mayor.