Sex and Other Vices at the Fair
After spending a day at the fair, San Francisco resident Harry Thiederman complained to President Charles Moore about his visit to the Joy Zone. He voiced his frustration about the presence of attractions that showcased female sexuality, telling Moore, “Cairo dances and women shows are relegated to the lowest sections of border cities and should have no place at this otherwise beautiful exposition.”1 He believed that such performances belonged only in poor towns along the U.S.-Mexican border. Middle-class men might visit these places alone but never with their wives and daughters. The exposition should uplift visitors, he reasoned, rather than expose them to the salacious side of life in the American West. But as a fair is supposed to be fun, too, many visitors to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition eagerly spent their money on alcohol, gambling, and dancing.
Thiederman’s letter encapsulated a persistent complaint about the fair. City residents, fair directors, and members of reform organizations weighed in on the moral content of the exposition from the moment the city won the fair. They debated whether alcohol, gambling, and risqué dances belonged on the grounds, with local residents again expressing a deep interest in the content of the fair. Resolution came only after public complaints reached the ears of state politicians. The sometimes troubled relationship between the PPIE Woman’s Board and the PPIE Board of Directors exacerbated this issue. The coming of the fair offered reformers a compelling reason to clean up San Francisco’s vice district in order to ensure the respectability of the fair. And many tried. Unfortunately for them, San Francisco’s long history of tolerance of alcohol, gambling, and prostitution, combined with the fair directors’ interest in profits, meant that reformers had limited success in ridding the city or the fair of vice.
Fair directors hoped the moral protective work that the PPIE Woman’s Board and its associated women’s organizations undertook would alleviate concerns about the fair’s and the city’s morality. Although contemporary histories of the fair recall the success of this union, close examination of the relationship suggests a rather different story, one that reveals another instance of the breakdown of “civic unity” in the city. These conflicts expose the male organizers’ opposition to moral reform and to assertions of female power. The Board of Directors and the Woman’s Board had rather different ideas about the place of female sexuality in society. Their debates ignored both the female Zone performers, whose voices were conspicuously absent from public discussions, and those fairgoers of all races and classes who wished to enjoy attractions on the Zone that featured alcohol, gambling, and sexually suggestive dances.
San Francisco’s reputation as a “wide-open town,” where vice ran rampant, posed a publicity problem for the PPIE in the reform-minded Progressive Era.2 Moral reform movements gained strength during this time, as middle-class men and women united to rid society of various social evils: gambling, drinking, and prostitution. These movements originated in the antebellum Northeast and regained momentum in response to the excesses of the late nineteenth century’s Gilded Age. The immigrants who flooded into the cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries heightened middle-class anxieties about morality and respectability. The increasing number of young women entering the workforce also worried reformers, who believed the women’s morality and chastity were at risk. In some cities elite male urban leaders entered into coalitions with female reformers in the hopes of maintaining middle-class social values and control over working-class immigrants and people of color.3 They used reforms to try to hold sway over the increasingly unruly and diverse urban population.
Concerns about the safety and morality of the city and the fair began to surface almost as soon as San Francisco won the right to host the fair. One concerned potential fairgoer wrote to Moore, “Glimpses of the ornate and beautiful architecture of its wonderful buildings and objects of attractions, . . . have aroused visions of the grandeur and glory of the [fair]. . . . But with that vision, there comes another of the Red-Light way and the notorious Barbary Coast, where the lowest forms of vice and sin, show themselves, in all their hideousness and deformity.”4 Such fears were driven by a preoccupation with the possible exploitation of young white women. A railway poster displayed in North Dakota highlighted one of the main accusations that the fair would become a center of prostitution and the downfall of innocent young women:
Warning! The women of San Francisco are determined to prevent the letting of a portion of the fair grounds for the purpose of establishing houses of prostitution and are doing all in their power to stay the evil. . . . Let it be remembered that the country will be scoured for girls to supply the demand of this nefarious business, and every means that is possible for man to conceive will be used to snare and mislead these girls in order to secure them. Every girl should be warned against advertisements of positions in San Francisco . . . the door that will be open for the strange girl will be the door that leads to perdition.5
Rumors had long circulated about the thousands of young women who had gone missing after the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Oft-repeated stories told of innocent farm girls who left home for the city and never returned.6 Those same stories emerged in 1915, as the apparent warning from the “women of San Francisco” demonstrated. The fair’s Board of Directors and Woman’s Board worked hard to combat this type of bad publicity.
These rumors had substance. San Francisco’s vice district, the Barbary Coast, had evolved along with the city, serving the desires of Gold Rush miners, sailors, and the thousands of local residents who frequented the area’s saloons, dance halls, and brothels.7 By the 1880s, approximately two thousand saloons and brothels flourished in the city. The center of this activity was the Barbary Coast, a neighborhood known across the nation as an “assemblage of dance halls, drinking places, lodging houses and dives, first known to deep sea sailors and later exploited in many a novel.”8 Appalled visitors often commented on the Barbary Coast’s immorality. Only three years before the fair, a Chicago police captain returned home from a visit to report that San Francisco was “the worst vice-ridden city in the country.”9
San Franciscans, however, did not always oppose the activities in the Barbary Coast.10 As a San Francisco Bulletin columnist argued in 1912, San Franciscans “like to think about it [the Barbary Coast] and to talk about it and to look at its displays and even take part . . . [often one sees] groups of handsomely dressed people . . . among the night revelers on the Barbary Coast. . . . They seem to think they are having a great lark.”11 This laissez-faire attitude, the result of the city’s diverse and cosmopolitan population, helps to explain many San Franciscans’ tolerant attitude toward an active vice district during a time when such venues were frequently under siege by Progressive reformers. After the earthquake the quick erection of a huge brothel—citizens called it “the municipal brothel” since a good portion of the profits went to city hall—and the official creation of the Municipal Clinic, where prostitutes could get free medical care, demonstrated the generally tolerant atmosphere in the city toward the “social evil.”12 San Francisco basically segregated prostitution to the vice districts—the Barbary Coast, the uptown Tenderloin, and, to some extent, Chinatown—allowing most city residents to ignore its presence.
The city’s large Chinese immigrant population, often connected in the popular mind with gambling, opium use, and prostitution, contributed a racial aspect to the city’s reputation for vice. As in other parts of the country, popular culture linked nonwhite men to hypersexuality and vice. In San Francisco, Chinese men were predominantly presented in this symbolic role, with the media often depicting them as a threat to white women. The uneven male–female ratio in the Chinese community and the real history of Chinese prostitution in California meant that whites often viewed all Chinese women as prostitutes.13 In San Francisco, as elsewhere, vice had an explicitly racial component that contributed to the construction of the city’s social hierarchy and moral order. The association of Chinese men and women with vice—as male slavers and female prostitutes, respectively—bolstered the city’s racial hierarchy and the dominance of white men and women over Asians. These links masked the reality that many more whites than Asians participated in the vice trade, as well as helped shift the blame for social disorder onto the perceived Asian menace. For white Americans who were familiar only with these negative images of the Chinese and Chinatown, this association exacerbated their fears about visiting San Francisco.
But fairs also attracted visitors by featuring morally questionable attractions. In 1893 the success of Chicago’s “Midway Plaisance,” which had featured the dance du ventre (belly dance) of “Little Egypt,” convinced later fair organizers that an amusement section was necessary for a successful fair. Likewise, that success drew fire from those who objected to such displays of female sexuality.14 PPIE publicists emphasized the fair’s educational nature while actively promoting the Joy Zone. There, they promised, visitors would find a set of attractions that “in novelty, interest and ‘thrill’ surpass[ed] any similar gathering of amusement enterprises ever seen in this country or Europe.”15 Many visitors eagerly anticipated going to the Zone, with its roller-coaster rides, talking horse, dance halls, and scale model of the Panama Canal.
The Zone, and the fair itself, offered countless spots for young men and women to socialize unchaperoned. Reformers consequently worried that young people would use the space of the fair for both licit and illicit activities. Movie theaters, amusement parks, and dance halls throughout the nation drew young men and women to their doors, reflecting a new style of socializing that worried the older generation. Young women, many of them employed and with their own spending money, formed relationships with their male peers that often turned sexual.16 Scholars have documented the evolution of working-class attitudes toward sexuality that differed from those of the middle-class.17 In turn, the explosion of these working-class amusements in cities across America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought working-class and nonwhite sexual standards into view, and they came under fire from Progressive reformers who associated them with prostitution and white slavery.18 These changes, along with the rise of film and the media culture, contributed to rapid changes in public sexuality and an accompanying set of concerns about vice.19
World’s fairs also troubled some because the events featured a wide diversity of people and chances for interaction not only between men and women but also between people of different races, ethnicities, and classes. The Zone offered opportunities for heterosexual socializing in an environment that featured people of color and blatant displays of female sexuality. This combination frightened those who feared for their own virtue and that of their families. The myth of the male black rapist, used to justify lynching and terrorism of the black community in the South, held power nationwide in the Progressive Era and added to concerns about protecting white female sexuality. The nonwhite men present on the Zone performed as examples of primitive cultures, but their very presence threatened the racial and gender order of the fair. The freedom of the Zone meant that they could interact with white women in ways that risked overturning the carefully constructed social hierarchy of the fair and, by extension, of white America.20 These concerns reflected nationwide panic about prostitution and white slavery. Apprehensive reformers believed that rings of white slavers—often stereotyped as nonwhite immigrants—plotted to kidnap and sexually enslave unsuspecting young white women. The prevalence of these alien or dark white-slave traders in the white-slave literary narratives heightened public anxieties about the peril and convinced many white Americans that their daughters were at risk.21
Real concerns about the effect of vice on men, women, and the family contributed to the growth of female moral reform organizations such as the Young Woman’s Christian Association (YWCA), the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and scores of other local groups across the country.22 They wanted to abolish the sexual double standard and protect working women from the dangers of the city, so they tried to provide healthy alternative entertainments for young city dwellers.23 San Francisco, like all Progressive Era cities, had its share of female reform organizations.24 By 1915, the YWCA had a wide array of services and programs aimed at the young, single, working women of the city, as did other groups including the Catholic-sponsored Society for Befriending Girls and the Traveler’s Aid Society, a group that focused specifically on aiding new arrivals to the city.25
These simmering conflicts about society’s moral standards converged on the PPIE, making it a focus for Progressive Era debates about the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, and class. Critics questioned whether the fair would be a safe place for white women and children. They worried it might expose them to unseemly practices of working-class and nonwhite culture. Simultaneously, organized groups of local white women hoped they could use the fair as a place from which to work on improving moral conditions in the city. Although the Board of Directors appeared not to possess much intrinsic interest in moral reforms, these pressing issues forced the men to take a stand in order to protect their profits; so they took steps to reassure potential visitors that the event would be one worth traveling across the country to visit.
Exposition directors understood the need to downplay San Francisco’s reputation for debauchery. They relied on the PPIE Woman’s Board to accomplish this goal. Integrating an active Woman’s Board into the fair bureaucracy allowed publicists to reassure visitors that these women would ensure the moral health and stable gendered order of the exposition and in the city. As President Moore noted in a letter to a concerned religious leader, the “high quality of women on the Woman’s Board” would uphold morality at the exposition.26 Fair directors hoped that the activities of these prominent women and their assurances of the safety of the fair and city would reassure nervous midwesterners and easterners that they would be safe venturing to the wicked city of San Francisco.
The Woman’s Board deliberately integrated the YWCA and similar organizations into the fair. After the San Francisco YWCA found itself unable to expand its travelers’ aid work, the board organized a California auxiliary to the New York–based Traveler’s Aid Society. This group focused particularly on assisting female travelers who needed help finding lodgings in a new city.27 Traveler’s Aid workers promised that they would help all visitors find safe, affordable lodgings and avoid the racketeers who took advantage of naive visitors to the big city. Even more important, Traveler’s Aid workers were on the lookout for traffickers in women. Reformers worried that the opening of the Panama Canal would cause such an increase in immigration that more immigrants would fall in with the wrong influences once they arrived in the city.28 The exposition offered the organization the chance to expand its outreach work and to publicize the dangers inherent in travel. After the fair, the Woman’s Board turned over all of its remaining funds to the Traveler’s Aid Society.
Phoebe Hearst’s position as honorary head of the Woman’s Board facilitated the strong relationship that emerged between the board and the National Board of the YWCA. The YWCA constructed a large, centrally located building on the fairgrounds from which the organization served both men and women. There, fairgoers could purchase cheap meals at the cafeteria, find safe and affordable lodging in the city, enjoy a cup of coffee, or sit and recuperate from the rigors of enjoying the fair. As we shall see, YWCA workers also reached out to the young female workers on the Zone. The YWCA was the visible manifestation of the fair directors’ promise to keep the fair clean and safe for women and families.29
Fig. 43. California Building. (Donald G. Larson Collection, Special Collections Research Center, California State University, Fresno.)
Fair publicity painted the relationship between the Woman’s Board and the fair in glowing terms. Propaganda promised concerned visitors that “any woman of any country may come to San Francisco during the Exposition and rest assured of protection.”30 Closer examination of the relationship between the Woman’s Board, its sister organizations, and the male exposition directors reveals a much rockier relationship. It calls into question the fair directors’ dedication to reform and suggests the obstacles that female reformers faced in such cities as San Francisco, where the entrenched establishment had little interest in reform. Philip Ethington argues that San Francisco’s elite men were not friendly to female power in the city, and the fair’s relationship with the Woman’s Board bears out this observation.31
Elite Bay Area women founded the Woman’s Board independently of the fair’s administrative structure. The negotiation over the relationship between the PPIE Board of Directors and the Woman’s Board vexed members of both entities. One male official urged women to take on solely social responsibilities, “not because its members are capable of social affairs only, but because the character of the other work to be discharged is of a nature that women could only with difficulty, embarrassment and great discomfort perform.” Yet, the same writer almost immediately noted that the women’s political influence in California meant that the Woman’s Board could be very helpful regarding California political affairs.32 His contradictory approach helps explain the tension that emerged between the Woman’s Board and the fair directors. By 1911, women had earned the vote in California, granting them real political power. Yet some male leaders remained disconcerted with that fact and did not favor involving women in the fair as anything other than hostesses.
Some male officials were frustrated because they had no control over determining who sat on the Woman’s Board. When Gavin McNab, an exposition lawyer, reported on the proposed contract between the two bodies, he vociferously criticized the composition of the Woman’s Board and its claim to represent the women of California. He argued that placing all of women’s affairs under the board’s jurisdiction granted the members too much power and denied the points of view of other interested women. Probably more significant, he objected to the policy of allowing a board not formed under the direction of the exposition Board of Directors to “control the participation of women in the state of California . . . without their consent.”33 Curtis Lindley, another of the fair’s counsels, dismissed McNab’s concerns, suggesting “there is involved something more” in the conflict and reminding him that appointing another Woman’s Board would only cause more problems for the fair.34 McNab’s reluctance to recognize the Woman’s Board implies that he felt threatened by its potential power and points to a conflict over territory between the two bodies.35 Probably displeased at having no input over choosing members of the exceptionally well-organized and well-funded Woman’s Board, some of the men on the Board of Directors might have feared that the women would use their advantages to further their own agenda.
The struggle continued over the wording of the agreement, suggesting that McNab was not the only male board member to harbor distrust of the Woman’s Board. In mid-November 1911, Woman’s Board president Helen Sanborn complained that the new proposed contract would require the Woman’s Board to fund all activities related to women at the fair, including “such activities as may be from time to time assigned to it by your board.” This stipulation, she pointed out, violated the Woman’s Board’s own bylaws, for to require one corporation to fund undertakings determined by another corporation was both legally and morally questionable. Sanborn suggested alternate phrasing to clarify that such activities required mutual agreement.36 Evidently, she and her peers were equally uneasy with their relationship with the male board. The final contract removed the offending phrase and simply stated that the Woman’s Board would “provide for sufficient funds to effectively organize and conduct all such activities as may properly fall within the Department of Women’s Affairs.” Despite this concession, the agreement still required the Woman’s Board to submit an outline of all activities to the Committee on Woman’s Affairs and described the Woman’s Board as “an auxiliary agency of this Board . . . subject to the supervisory control of the Board of Directors.”37 Although an independently funded corporation, members of the Woman’s Board had to answer to the men in charge, establishing a relationship potentially fraught with conflict.
Not surprising, conflicts arose out of this relationship. Some dealt simply with practical issues, such as repairs and improvements required in the California Building that the Woman’s Board were not authorized to order.38 Other, more serious conflicts emerged over the city’s moral issues. Pressure from nationally based moral reform organizations to clean up San Francisco mounted during 1914, forcing the Woman’s Board and fair management to respond. In September, President Sanborn asked Director Hale to prepare a statement about moral reform efforts, reminding him “our board was busy long before the formation of a Traveler’s Aid, defending the reputation of the Exposition, especially its Concessions department.”39 After Hale failed to respond, she reminded him that the real problem was not the morality of the exposition but of the city: “If this be a wide open town—drinking, dancing, and gambling everywhere—the very atmosphere inviting the unprincipled and lewd to us—we may labor earnestly in a Traveler’s Aid or in any protective field and accomplish mighty little.”40
Sanborn and others wanted fair directors to cooperate more fully with attempts to tackle vice issues in the city, but they recognized the challenge that such a job posed and did not want to be blamed for any failure to regulate conditions in the city and at the fair. As Sanborn wrote Hearst, “I think . . . Mr. Moore & Mr. Burt & all of them had better understand it. A nice time we should have trying to regulate moral conditions. We are willing to help in all ways possible, but the responsibility is not ours. Am I right?”41 Here, Sanborn seemed acutely wary of the fair directors’ hope that the Woman’s Board could serve as a shield against criticisms of moral disorder, even while they failed to support such efforts fully. Later events would validate her concerns, as angry fair visitors blamed the Women’s Board for failing to maintain a morally clean fair.
Fig. 44. Woman’s Board of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition Day, October 29, 1915. (#1959.087—ALB, 3:70, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.)
The strained relationship between these two bodies extended to include the groups affiliated with the Woman’s Board. Traveler’s Aid workers complained in late 1914 that exposition officials, rather than responding themselves, sent all queries about moral concerns at the fair to them. Cassie Hitchcock of Traveler’s Aid reminded Executive Secretary Joseph Cumming that “we will always be glad to answer any communications distinctly covered by our work, but the Traveler’s Aid Society in no way is caring for or guaranteeing the morale of the Exposition or of the City.”42 Like Sanborn, Hitchcock was frustrated that the male directors appeared to be shifting all responsibility for the city’s and the fair’s moral conditions to the Woman’s Board and its associated groups.
The Board of Directors’ relationship with the YWCA seemed to be no better. Exposition officials denied YWCA organizers the location they desired for their building on the grounds. The YWCA had chosen a centrally located site near the South Garden and adjacent to Festival Hall. Fair officials attempted to force the organization into an ungraded site located on the northern edge of the grounds that would have been even more expensive for the already financially strapped YWCA. In their protest, YWCA officials reminded the fair board, “Mrs. Hearst wishes me to say to you that in the placing of our building, you are doubtless remembering the purpose of our being on the Exposition grounds. . . . You will be interested to know that we are being flooded with inquiries from all over the country as to what provision is being made for the protection and welfare of young women at the Exposition.”43 Hearst’s name pointedly reminded the board of the influence behind the YWCA, of the alliance between the YWCA and the Woman’s Board, and of the responsibility of fair directors to work with those groups. The women of the YWCA sought to draw upon their one advantage, the threat of negative publicity for the fair, to convince officials to support their work. The final site of the YWCA building was located directly to the left of the Scott Street entrance, not far from Festival Hall but not adjacent to it.
Fair directors also resisted upholding their commitment to the Traveler’s Aid Society. Officials denied free passes to Traveler’s Aid workers in the spring of 1915. The enraged parent society threatened to withdraw all workers from the grounds immediately unless the exposition relented. Simultaneously, Orin Baker, a representative of the society’s New York office who was brought in to help implement the San Francisco program, planned to inform the New York office of the exposition’s lack of support of the group’s work. This notice would almost certainly bring on a spate of bad publicity.44 When Hale questioned Anna Pratt Simpson, who sat on both the Traveler’s Aid Board of Directors and the Woman’s Board, about what she thought the fair should do, she reminded him of the exposition’s commitment to welfare work at the fair. She admitted, “I can advance nothing but my conviction at this time” as to its effectiveness.45 Hale seemed skeptical at best, but the board relented and issued the requested six passes.
Although fair directors publicly proclaimed support for the Woman’s Board, YWCA, and Traveler’s Aid, their actual interactions with these groups were more fraught. Much evidence, however, suggests that fair officials understood the problem that San Francisco’s moral reputation posed for the fair. President Moore and other officials repeatedly attempted to convince potential visitors that the fair and the city would be safe places to bring their families. When Professor Shailer Matthews, president of the Federated Churches of Christ, visited the city in March 1913, the Board of Directors hosted an elaborate dinner in his honor at the Palace Hotel. Moore informed the directors, “The organization of which Professor Matthews is the head represents a membership of about 17,000,000 and it is very important that he be given a proper impression of San Francisco both for its influence in inducing the Federated Churches of Christ to hold its 1915 Congress here and to offset the circulation of stories in the East about the vice condition in San Francisco.”46 The previously mentioned conflicts, though, suggest that despite Moore’s desire to dispel “stories of vice” in the East, he and the rest of the board resisted committing to cooperate fully with the organizations they had delegated to handle the problem. The root of this conflict bears investigation. Two legal issues that arose during the planning years of the fair suggest why exposition directors actively resisted moral reforms.
After women earned the vote in 1911 in California, they immediately began to find sponsors to introduce legislative reform measures to improve the lives of the state’s women and children. These proposals included a bill to mandate a minimum wage for women, a state training school for girls, and a “bastardy” law that required fathers to support illegitimate children.47 Two of the issues debated during this legislative session regarded the regulation of vice in San Francisco—the Kehoe Bill, a temperance act aimed at the exposition, and the “Red-Light Abatement Act,” which was an antiprostitution bill designed to flush brothels from the city. Although state Progressive Party supporters and many female activists supported these bills, the PPIE directors opposed them both, again involving themselves in state politics to further the interests of the fair.
Local and national temperance leaders seized upon the fair to further their campaign against alcohol. They warned potential visitors that free-flowing alcohol available at the fair and in the city would corrupt impressionable young people. The Kehoe Bill deliberately targeted the exposition by banning “the serving of alcoholic liquors in any building or upon the grounds, or within 150 yards of the exterior boundaries of any such building or grounds used for the purpose of an exposition aided by funds furnished by the State.”48 Concerned citizens from across the country wrote to the exposition to voice their support for the bill and their opinion that liquor must be controlled at the fair and in the city. As one man warned Moore, “We will never attend a World’s Fair where liquor and the social evil are not barred out. Better support the bills in your legislature to accomplish this.”49
Despite pleas from temperance leaders across the nation, exposition officials firmly opposed the bill, realizing that prohibiting alcohol on or near the fairgrounds would threaten their profits and offend the sensibilities of many San Franciscans. It also could discourage those who might come to San Francisco expressly for its illicit pleasures. Few San Franciscans, moreover, supported temperance. Even though the fair forcibly relocated local saloons, it did so not out of any support for temperance but out of a desire to keep fairgoers, and their funds, on the fairgrounds. Many saloon owners and anti-temperance organizations financially backed the exposition, making it unadvisable for the exposition to oppose their interests. Fair officials had no reason to risk displeasing the many San Franciscans who supported the fair and disapproved of temperance.
Fair officials publicly opposed the bill. Frank Brittain, the exposition’s general attorney, testified against the bill during a joint meeting of the California Senate and Assembly Committee on Public Morals. Progressive newspaper columnist Franklin Hichborn reported that Brittain’s appearance was most notable because he stated that the PPIE Woman’s Board—which the fair had used to assure everyone of the city’s morality—had adopted resolutions opposing the measure. Presumably this statement was intended to sway those who believed that the exposition was caving into the demands of the city’s liquor trade. No evidence exists, however, to support Brittain’s claim. At least one Woman’s Board member denied that the board opposed the measure and insisted she had no knowledge of the supposed resolutions. Regardless, clearly fair officials attempted to fight the bill with whatever power they had.50 Fair officials eventually succeeded in swaying enough legislators to defeat the bill, twenty-three votes to fourteen.51
The debate over the Kehoe Bill revealed that fair directors were far more interested in preserving their relationship with the city’s liquor industries, saloon owners, and immigrant communities than in supporting any kind of social reform agenda. It was one thing to delegate the safety of women to the Woman’s Board and to involve such organizations as the YWCA in the fair, but they balked at making the fair dry. Saloon owners’ financial support for the fair, San Franciscans’ general enthusiasm for alcohol consumption, and the possibility that selling alcohol on the grounds would make a profit, in the minds of the fair board, trumped the vehement opposition expressed by potential tourists from other, drier parts of the nation. Financial gain was again at the root of the fair directors’ politicking.
California’s women fought harder to change the state’s antiprostitution laws. Legislators introduced antiprostitution bills in the 1911 legislative session, but it was not until 1913, when women had gained concrete political power, that public concerns about white slavery brought the bills to fruition. National and statewide publicity about the Red-Light Abatement Act, as it came be called, forced legislators to take action to control prostitution in the state. Much of the publicity focused on San Francisco and the Barbary Coast. The fair became a part of this anti-vice campaign, although the fair directors, along with many San Franciscans, had no desire to become involved in this particular piece of legislation.
The WCTU of California spearheaded the campaign for the act. Its members drew on the support of prominent Progressives in the state, of the states’ most important women’s organizations, and of concerned citizens around the nation who pressured exposition officials to support the bill.52 The State Federation of Women’s Clubs proved particularly important in coordinating efforts to pressure legislators and to draw public attention to the cause.53 Motivated in part by the successful suffrage campaign, the WCTU hoped particularly to prove that women would indeed “purify” politics. The union’s members sought to use their new political power to rid society of the sexual double standard and the flagrant sexuality of working-class and nonwhite communities. Their well-organized campaign drew support from sister organizations around the country. The Grant-Bohnett Bill was modeled on a similar red-light abatement act that had passed in Iowa in 1909. It represented a move away from the older, geographically segregated method of regulating prostitution in red-light districts. Many citizens had resigned themselves to the existence of prostitution, as long as it was contained to these areas. Middle- and upper-class men and women often believed prostitution was necessary to meet the sexual needs of lower-class immigrant men, and thus they tolerated these districts’ operations as a way to control the perceived immigrant masses.54
The new red-light abatement bills implemented a system that cracked down on all selling of sex. The Grant-Bohnett Bill targeted property owners, however, rather than individual prostitutes or madams. It declared houses of prostitution or assignation to be public nuisances and allowed any citizen to bring a suit against an owner or proprietor for maintaining a nuisance. If proven to be a nuisance, the building’s contents would be sold, with the plaintiff’s costs paid out of the proceeds and the rest turned over to the defendant. The property would be closed for one year unless the owner furnished a bond for the value of the property guaranteeing that the nuisance would not continue.55 The theory behind this approach was that property owners would become more careful about those to whom they leased their buildings, making it harder for those interested in selling sex to find places to run their operations.56 Holding owners responsible for the activities carried out in their properties and assessing a significant financial penalty if a site was found to be a nuisance would in theory appeal to the economic interests of property owners who might not be swayed by moral arguments.
Letters supporting the measure and threatening a boycott of the fair if the bill did not pass poured into the exposition headquarters. One Rhode Island minister told PPIE president Moore, “We have a church convention there at the time of the Exposition. I want many of our young people to attend, but I can urge no one to attend if these evils are to flaunt themselves and offer their enticements wherever people may go in the neighborhood of the Exposition.”57 Many letter writers threatened Moore that if the bill failed to pass, they would not support the exposition’s efforts to draw state exhibits or tourists. Others, who realized that the exposition was intended to boost California, argued that they would not form a favorable impression of a state and city with such rampant vice. “I feel certain that we may enjoy the Exposition more fully and form a better impression and one more likely to be of more value to California if these Bills become laws and the laws shall be enforced,” wrote one potential visitor.58
Despite intense pressure from women’s organizations and from Christian groups, San Francisco business interests and state politicians opposed the bill. They resisted arguments that it was necessary to abolish the sexual double standard; instead, they relied on old arguments in favor of the segregated system that assumed prostitution was an inevitable fact of life and that it was better to regulate it than to drive it underground. If the system of segregation was ended, they argued, prostitutes would simply spread out across the city, threatening the virtue of all the women of the city. If it were no longer contained to the Barbary Coast, the women of San Francisco would not be safe on the streets, the bill’s opponents warned. One member even predicted that the governor would be forced to call out the militia to protect them. San Francisco–based legislators, moreover, argued that female visitors to the fair also would not be safe on the streets of the city if the bill passed.59 The San Francisco legislative delegation therefore voted against the measure. Perhaps the most succinct statement against the bill came from President Pro Tem of the State Senate Boynton, who stated that “San Francisco is a clean city. It has its vices and hell-holes. But you know where the rotten part of the apple is and you can avoid it.”60 The bill passed despite the city’s opposition.
Exposition officials did not directly involve themselves in the public debate over the Grant-Bohnett Bill, but when San Francisco politicians voiced their opposition, they drew the ire of reformers and did little to reassure concerned potential visitors that the city and fair would be safe for middle-class women. While these bills’ debates revealed the power of these moral issues to polarize the public, both locally and nationally, they also demonstrated that the city of San Francisco remained opposed to such reforms. The fair directors’ attitudes toward these particular issues reflected those held by many city residents, who did not see temperance or the suppression of prostitution as issues of pressing importance.
The reasons behind the male fair directors’ opposition to the Grant-Bohnett Bill are less clear than those that motivated their opposition to the Kehoe Bill. Some conclusions can be drawn, however. First, the fair board deliberately excluded San Francisco’s crusading reformers who had led the graft trials. Board members were not Progressive Party members; instead, they were generally conservative businessmen who demonstrated little interest in social reforms. They had likely not voted for women’s suffrage in 1911 and probably had little desire to empower moral reformers or to share power with newly enfranchised female voters. As a group, they opposed temperance and saw no need to reform prostitution laws. To question the sexual double standard and the status of prostitution would directly attack their white male privilege.
Fair directors’ solutions to the problem of the city’s reputation proved halfhearted precisely because they opposed the tenets of moral reform. Handing off the work to the Woman’s Board, the YWCA, and the Traveler’s Aid Society was a convenient way for fair officials to temporarily stave off challenges from local women who wanted to participate in the fair and from reformers concerned about San Francisco’s morality. The directors undoubtedly realized that San Francisco’s illicit reputation was as much of a draw for some visitors as it was a problem for others. They hoped that walking the line between supporting and opposing moral reform would allow them to please all parties and make the fair as financially successful as possible. But the conflicts that emerged between these women’s groups and fair officials in 1915 revealed the weakness of that strategy.
Concerns about gender, race, class, and female sexuality at the fair converged on the Joy Zone. There white and nonwhite young working-class women performed sexually suggestive dances for curious visitors. Men and women interacted unchaperoned in the public dance halls where young working-class women served free-flowing alcohol. Appearing as objects for the tourists’ gaze, people of color often performed in minimal clothing, drawing attention to their bodies and implying the presence of the unbridled sexuality that many whites believed ran rampant in their communities. Concerns about the moral effects of amusement sections had accompanied world’s fairs since the emergence of midway attractions at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, but San Francisco’s moral reputation made people’s concerns about the Panama-Pacific International Exposition even more pointed.61 The PPIE Woman’s Board and female reformers, meanwhile, used their privileged social position to attack the exploitation of young women’s sexuality for profit in what became a direct critique of the race and gender system from which they themselves had benefited.
Fair directors took some steps to make the Zone and the fair appear “clean.” Publicists issued guides that emphasized the wholesome and educational nature of the Zone.62 Moore offered private assurances to concerned citizens and reformers that nothing immoral would occur there.63 And the members of the fair’s Committee on Concessions and Admissions made decisions about attractions that suggested that they understood the importance of maintaining moral standards.64 But the committee failed to consistently oppose shows that featured female sexuality so visitor complaints persisted throughout the fair.
National social reform journals published pieces that drew attention to San Francisco’s moral conditions. Survey, for instance, printed an article titled “Warnings to Girls from San Francisco” in April, followed by a report on the YWCA’s work on the Joy Zone in July, and “Facts on Vice in San Francisco” in September. The April piece warned young women they should not come to San Francisco and search for work during the exposition because of the city’s high unemployment rate. It emphasized the YWCA’s reform work on the Zone while drawing attention to the problem of the fair’s moral standards. The September article censured the fair and the mayor for failing to keep their pre-fair promises to clean up the city. Although these reports were read mainly by those already interested in moral reform, they both reinforced the perception that the fair and the city exploited female sexuality and motivated those who desired to reshape San Francisco.65
Reformers veiled their attacks as critiques of the city’s moral conditions, but when they focused on the presence of alcohol and saloons, they also attacked the city’s immigrant and working-class culture. In March John B. Hammond, ex-mayor of Des Moines and author of Iowa’s Red-Light Injunction and Abatement Bill, resigned in protest from his position as chairman of the PPIE’s Vice Commission. He declared that the exposition “planned an entertainment for the world on the immorality of San Francisco as a basis . . . with a white-slave market unapproached by any competitor in the world, with more saloons in proportion to population than any other city on the continent, with a total repudiation of the American Sabbath.”66 Such publicity perpetuated the idea that San Francisco remained a wide-open town where fair directors reneged on their promises to make the fair a space friendly to white, middle-class values and families.
Critics differed regarding whom they blamed for these conditions. Female reformers often portrayed the female performers on the Zone as misguided victims of male exploitation, but some male reformers blamed unbridled female sexuality as the problem. Bascom Johnson, a representative of the American Social Hygiene Association (a group that worked for moral purity), condemned the “obscene” dances that women on the Zone performed and the coarse and suggestive language of the spielers who tried to lure unsuspecting visitors into the shows. He blamed the “low” women who danced and solicited men to buy drinks and perhaps sex for the situation as much as he held the men themselves accountable. He showed no concern for the welfare of the women who danced and supposedly prostituted themselves. In his opinion they caused the exposition’s (and society’s) moral decline. Only in the Cairo Café, where a “roistering, rough class of men . . . frequent the place,” did he deem the women at all “respectable.”67 Both he and Hammond blamed the PPIE directors and Woman’s Board for failing to honor their promises to keep the fair morally clean. But they really attacked the behavior of the men and women who acted in ways that did not fit their white, middle-class expectations of appropriate conduct.
Some local residents defended the city just as loudly and publicly as reformers criticized it, demonstrating the real difference of opinion about the place of gender and sexuality on the Zone. San Francisco Chronicle feature columnist Helen Dare repeatedly wrote on this issue. In one column, she dismissed the efforts of those reformers who worked to protect young women by warning them to avoid San Francisco during the fair. “Our fervid and philanthropic protectors of innocence and conservators of virtue are so ingeniously desirous,” she wrote, “so naively ambitious to make business for themselves, to justify their being, to offer results to the contributors of funds . . . that they have not the patience to wait in the ambush of their own doorway, but have dashed out into the open shouting: ‘Wolf!’ ‘Wolf!’”68 In fact, she argued, San Francisco was “safer than any tradition-saturated city of the Old World, safer than many a convention-bound city of the East, safer than the cities of the South with the terrors of the race problem.”69 A few months later, she responded to criticisms of the Zone by commenting on “September Morn,” a show in which a woman wearing very little clothing appeared in suggestive poses. She noted that it was “a sort of adventure into the unconventional, to be sneaked upon and giggled at; not in the least to be taken seriously.”70 Dare failed to buy arguments that the display of female sexuality threatened society. Yet the title she chose for the second article, “Strained Relations between the Clubman and the Lady,” lighthearted though it might have been, both pointed to the conflict between female reformers and elite men and acknowledged the struggle in the city over the place of female sexuality in public life.71
Meanwhile, the city’s female reform groups had been attacking the Barbary Coast for years, and their campaign picked up momentum after women won the vote.72 They backed a 1913 campaign against the Barbary Coast that drew on the cooperation of local improvement organizations and churches to pass a law banning the serving of alcohol in the area’s dance halls.73 That campaign resulted in the closure of many such establishments, the loss of work for many women, and a widely publicized claim that the Barbary Coast was now “clean.” The Downtown Association and other local improvement organizations launched another campaign against the area in the spring of 1915, hoping to close all establishments that allowed both dancing and the sale of liquor. An April editorial in the San Francisco Examiner accused the mayor and the police commissioner of allowing vice to persist. Neither had any interest in closing down the Barbary Coast, the writer alleged, and did so in 1913 only to mollify an outraged public.74 Ten days later, a prominent front-page article charged that rather than serving the “near beer” currently allowed, numerous dance halls were selling real beer and whiskey in their establishments in flagrant disregard for current law.75 The North Beach Promotion Association, one group that had attacked the dance halls in 1913, soon adopted a set of resolutions condemning conditions on the Barbary Coast.76
The association’s report concluded that despite the presence of illegally run dance halls, “San Francisco is morally cleaner than any other city of its size in the United States.”77 But many in the city continued to fight against the presence of vice. After the ensuing publicity and investigation, the Board of Supervisors turned over responsibility for the dance halls to the Police Commission and granted it the license to issue all permits for such businesses.78 The San Francisco Examiner’s editor noted in response, “There are a number of good things an energetic Police Commission can do to profit San Francisco. Let us hope that they can.”79 At the same time, the Recreation League, another reform group, began a series of “penny dances” to keep young women away from the city’s dance halls.80 The issues at the fair, therefore, reflected the situation in the city at large, as San Franciscans debated just how much vice they were willing to tolerate.
Some fair visitors likewise had no problems with the alcohol, dancing, and gambling found on the Zone. One local resident defended the gambling at the ’49 Camp, telling Moore, “It is a matter of congratulations that the persons who have the 49 concessions have been able to provide a game furnishing so much harmless diversion together with so small an expenditure.”81 Local papers often failed to take attacks on the Joy Zone seriously.82 Boosters of California and San Francisco continued to argue that the fair was in fact quite moral and clean. Sunset, the popular western monthly published in San Francisco, countered negative reports of the city’s morals in a May 1915 piece. In response to the resolutions passed by the Church Federation Council and Illinois Vigilance Association condemning the exposition and urging a boycott by all American Christians, Sunset replied that San Francisco had no more of a vice district than did any other city. Young Christians “of either sex are in no more danger in San Francisco than they are in Chicago.” Moreover, the editor insisted, the Zone was “absolutely clean and inoffensive,” unlike the Midway Plaisance of Chicago.83 Even the editor of the Catholic diocese paper, the Monitor, chimed in when he launched a similar campaign in his paper to repudiate charges that San Francisco was “wild” and “wide open.”84
Yet the complaints of unhappy visitors persisted. They objected to the Zone attractions that featured “muscle dances,” which they found “vulgar and immoral,” and they complained as much about the barkers, or spielers, who stood outside the attraction and called to customers as they did about the performances themselves. The presence of these displays of working-class sexual mores offended many white middle-class visitors. Visitors also reported that spielers used extremely suggestive language. “Living Venes [sic] is very vulgar and the man on the outside makes it even more so when he tells the public that the girls on the inside have no clothes on, also tells the people that a man with crutches went in and was a new man when he came out,” wrote one unhappy customer.85 Such remarks upset visitors who found themselves unable to avoid eager barkers on their foray through the Zone. Their presence in the area’s main thoroughfare made their risqué spiel available to all fairgoers. These episodes confirmed the reformers’ fears that the rampant sexuality of these attractions might spill outside the doors of the dance halls and theaters to reach all visitors.
Other fairgoers complained about the suggestive nature of the dances that women performed inside the performance halls, criticizing them as exploitative of the young female dancers. As the local Women’s Christian Temperance Union secretary informed Moore, “These dances . . . are so vile and sensual that the effect of witnessing them must be disastrous to the moral nature of our young people.”86 Half-clothed women in gauzy material moved in ways that suggested sex and repulsed moral reformers. Audiences less concerned about middle-class notions of propriety, however, no doubt enjoyed the acts.87 The performances of spielers and dancers brought issues of voyeurism and sexuality to the fore; however, no one insinuated that sex itself actually took place in the dance theaters.
Reformers alleged that men and women engaged in far more dangerous behavior in the Zone’s cafés and dance halls. Men and women mixed freely without chaperones and amid freely flowing alcohol. These places evoked the spirit of frontier days and drew upon the city’s reputation as a wide-open town. One local minister called the 101 Ranch Café “a regular Barbary Coast Dance Hall, a market place of prostitution, transferred to the protection of the Exposition. Only this is worse . . . [for] your ‘101 Ranch Café’ provides the means of getting women drunk.”88 Critics alleged that the management paid women to flirt with customers and coerce them into spending their hard-earned money on alcohol. Women flaunted their sexuality in far more public and dangerous ways than the performers of the dance halls did. One anonymous undercover investigator at the ’49 Camp reported: “The waiter sent us two girls at our request, who danced and drank with us between dances. One who was an entertainer on small salary stated that she would not ‘do business’ with men, but that one other girl . . . and herself were the only ‘straight’ girls there. . . .” In addition, the report charged, one of the women admitted to having been “immoral” in San Francisco since she had arrived there two weeks before.89 The accuracy of this report is impossible to determine, but it demonstrates the real conflict between the lives of working-class women and the ideals of middle-class reformers. The trading of sexual favors for money or other commodities was not uncommon for young working-class women, but they did not then view themselves as prostitutes. These activities allowed them to survive an often-hostile working world and did not indicate a descent into moral turpitude, as reformers believed.90
Fig. 45. Entrance to 101 Ranch in the Zone at the PPIE. The 101 Ranch Café came under fire from protesters for alleged lewd behavior therein. (San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.)
Fair officials struggled amid this criticism to reconcile their desire for profit with accusations of immorality and corrupt behavior. Allegations of illegal gambling forced fair management to close the ’49 Camp within the first week of the fair. The accusations directed toward the camp concession concerned gambling and alcohol rather than immoral sexual behavior. But reformers saw liquor, loose sexuality, and the exploitation of women as intimately linked. Reports of prostitution at the ’49 Camp continued throughout the fair. The camp re-opened quickly—in March, with assurances that it was cleaned up—but the allegations continued, and in mid-April, the attraction was shut down again for gambling.91
Letters from frustrated visitors flooded the offices of the Woman’s Board and the YWCA. Representatives of both bodies pressured fair officials to fulfill their pre-fair promises and to rid the Zone of influences cited in the criticisms levied against San Francisco. They envisioned a fair in which female sexuality was not for sale and its workers met middle-class standards of respectability. Local religious leaders allied with the Woman’s Board to oppose what they saw as the exploitation of women for the fair’s profit. Oakland minister Albert Palmer accused the exposition of sharing the “blood money” that these immoral concessions earned “by exploiting womanhood” and in turn of “lowering the tone of dramatic performance throughout the country.” He objected to a lengthy list of attractions, including the hula dancing on the Streets of Cairo, the “apache dance, the snake dance, and the muscle dance in ‘The Model’s Dream,’ the muscle dancing on The Streets of All Nations, and the second show of ‘The Girl in Blue.’”92 Only in early August, after unrelenting pressure from these groups, did the fair board finally respond to allegations of immoral activity and close both the Streets of Cairo and the Cairo Café.93
Fair officials continued to approve new concessions that relied heavily on female sexuality, demonstrating their lack of commitment to the tenets of moral reform. The Committee on Concessions and Admissions approved applications in June for Buddha’s Paradise, an “Oriental” dancing act that included an illusion of a living model, and the Mona Lisa Smile, a mechanical device that showed the face and bust of a nude woman and featured “an infinite number of expressions.”94 These attractions also used female sexuality and innuendo to attract viewers and soon came under fire from reformers. By August, Buddha’s Paradise was one of a number of concessions about which the YWCA raised severe objections.95 When the exposition’s legal counsel recommended closing the Cairo Café and then reopening it under strict behavioral guidelines, the committee did so only to avoid legal problems and not out of any real concerns about morality.96 Clearly the committee was more interested in keeping the Zone full of profitable concessions than in avoiding the ire of moral reformers. Only the possibility of legal action and bad press convinced it to clean up the Zone.97
Fig. 46. The Diving Girls exhibit in the Zone at the PPIE. Although not targeted by protesters, it was one of many Zone attractions that featured scantily clad women both outside and inside the concession. (San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.)
The restrictions on the Cairo Café remind us that these attacks on concessions primarily affected the working-class women who worked there as waitresses, dancers, and performers. They bore the brunt of the practical effects of these restrictions as their working environments were altered and their behavior critiqued. Many of them lost their jobs when their concessions folded, a fact that reformers never addressed in debates over the Zone’s activities. They failed to consider either the economic consequences of their actions or that these young performers might enjoy their jobs. Instead they assumed that given proper guidance, the performers would realize that they could, and should, support themselves in other ways.98 While it may have been true for some women, other Zone performers likely enjoyed their jobs and preferred dancing for appreciative audiences to their only alternatives—domestic or factory work.99
Fig. 47. The September Morn featured scantily clad women, as this image reveals. (The Blue Book.)
The white middle- and upper-class female reformers had a complicated relationship with the fair’s directors and the narrative about race and gender created on the fairgrounds. They used their class and race status to claim control over the behavior of the working-class women employed on the Zone, but they did so in part because they felt that the female workers of the Zone were victims of male exploitation. The reformers saw only the dangers that the Zone posed to fairgoers and not the opportunities. They believed that unbridled female sexuality was a threat to all women and men. They advocated abolishing the sexual double standard, arguing that it contributed to the exploitation of women in society. Furthermore, they believed in the dominance of white, middle-class conventions of female sexual purity, and they knew that their claim to power rested on upholding those conventions.100 But that attack on the sexualized attractions of the Zone in fact subverted the very hierarchy from which they benefited. Paradoxically, removing the sexualized images of women from the Zone meant removing the foils against which pure white women were defined.
White male fair officials shared their female peers’ assumptions about race and class, but the men had different conceptions about the place of female sexuality in public life. Unlike the female reformers, fair officials did not believe that that the presence of overt public sexuality threatened society. As products of a white male elite society that generally accepted a sexual double standard and turned a blind eye to male infidelity but condemned displays of sexuality by white middle-class females, they had no incentive to clamp down on the sexual activities on the Zone.101 They were leaders of a city renowned for its disreputable pleasures, a reputation that brought its own income to the city. They wanted the Zone to make money and made decisions in keeping with this goal. This narrative also suggests that elite male San Franciscans had little interest in sharing power with enfranchised women. Blocking female reformers’ efforts to affect conditions at the fair may have been an attempt to stymie women’s political power in the city.102
It took the intervention of the California State PPIE Commission to resolve the struggle over moral conditions at the fair. Progressive Party governor Hiram Johnson had appointed the commission to oversee the PPIE’s spending of the $5 million that the state bond issue had raised.103 Earlier in the year, the commission had objected to some concessions. In late September it renewed its campaign on the alleged gambling at the ’49 Camp. “Lately . . . with your knowledge and consent,” it charged the Board of Directors, “gambling in a more flagrant form has been resumed. . . . These games are conducted with a view of enriching a few professional gamblers and of making some money for the Exposition at the expense of gullible visitors.” More important, it maintained, this activity occurred “at the sacrifice of the good name of the City of San Francisco and the State of California.”104
Fig. 48. Hon. Hiram Johnson, governor of California and State Exposition Commission. (#1959.087—ALB, 1:7, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.)
The exposition responded by closing the ’49 Camp’s casino, pending an investigation of the commission’s allegations. Chester Rowell, a leading Progressive Party supporter and member of the commission, publicly expressed his skepticism, telling the San Francisco Examiner, “The statement that the gambling is stopped pending investigation is made to save the faces of the Concessions Committee.”105 Frank Burt, chief of the Department of Concessions and Admissions, revealed in a statement to the press that the exposition was more concerned about profits than purity: “The lights will burn just as brightly there, and there will be dancing and other entertainments. The demonstration of gambling will be temporarily discontinued.”106 Despite Burt’s assertion, by early October, the entire camp folded, unable to sustain itself without the attraction of the casino. Fair officials were right to assume that the fair’s illicit pleasures made them a profit.107
In October, bolstered presumably by its success in closing the ’49 Camp, the state commission decided to rid the Zone of the “girl shows” once and for all and issued a formal protest to the board about them. Rowell told the Examiner, “We have been deluged with protests against these shows, and I am told the Woman’s Board has received an avalanche of letters.”108 The next day, the fair board finally ordered the permanent closure of a number of shows, including the notorious Streets of Cairo, the 101 Ranch Café, the muscle dance on the Street of All Nations, and the second show of the Girl in Blue and the Model’s Dream.109 They also warned all spielers to stop mentioning anything objectionable. Rowell explained, “It is not the desire of the commission to act as police officers of the Zone, but it seems that function has been relegated to us.” He was also careful to emphasize that the commission only acted on submitted complaints. The commissioners did not go out of their way to “police the Zone.”110 And with that, barely two months before the end of the exposition and more than seven months after its opening day, the debate about moral standards on the Zone was put to rest and not at the behest of the elite, San Franciscan male Board of Directors but on the direct order of the Progressive-dominated California State PPIE Commission. San Francisco’s bastion of male power fought its battle to the bitter end. Female reformers won a victory as well, demonstrating that with the right allies, they could defeat vice and insist that local men respect their burgeoning political power.
The conflict between male fair directors and female reformers came to a head as simmering social conflicts about temperance, gambling, and female sexuality converged on the Zone. The performers remained caught in the middle, unable to respond to the public censure about their acts or the threat these attacks posed to their livelihoods. Nor did those involved consider the wishes of audiences who might enjoy salacious and suggestive shows. The debate generally ignored the actions of individual employees and focused instead on their employers, or the concessions themselves. Other issues emerged, both on the Zone and in other locales around the fair, when fair employees behaved in ways that did not fit with the expectations of fair officials or visitors. These conflicts over race, class, and, again, gender offer us another snapshot of the ways in which contemporary social conflicts intruded into the fair makers’ ideal city and offered an alternative vision of society for visitors and employees alike.