Everybody’s Doin’ It

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C XIV, ALLEGED MUSIC, AND SUPERLATIVELY ROTTEN DANCES

AT ABOUT ELEVEN O’CLOCK on a Thursday evening in early May 1912, Jack Stockdale, a forty-one-year-old married father of five, walked into a Bowery saloon at 180 Park Row. A sharp dresser, he fit right in. In a room at the saloon’s rear he noticed eight women sitting alone, likely prostitutes, while at another table three more women were entertaining sailors. There was a band in the corner made up of a pianist, a fiddler, and a drummer who played both a bass drum and a smaller drum. The piano player, who was black, started in on Irving Berlin’s new hit song, “Everybody’s Doin’ It Now,” and two sailors immediately jumped up and started dancing. Goaded on by the prostitutes, they gyrated about in a provocative manner that Stockdale thought simply “Rotten.”¹

Having seen enough, Stockdale left and walked a few blocks into Chinatown where in a dive at 6 Mott Street he observed ten men around the tables, some of them drunk, plus, in his words, two “fruiters.” One of the latter stood and sang a modestly ribald version of the 1910 song “Whoops! My Dear,” in which Georgie, “a dainty youth,” likes to watch “the girls in tights, their figures trim and neat.” After enjoying a beverage, Stockdale continued on and entered Madami’s on Doyers Street. There he found a prostitute talking with one of the singing waiters, who shortly launched into his take on “I Will Love You If You Only Call Me Papa.” A couple soon entered the joint—likely a prostitute and her pimp—and commenced dancing the “everybody doing it” dance. She soon hooked up with a potential client in the room and started to “dance rag time” until the fiddler called out to them that that was not acceptable at Madami’s. Another man took up the dance with the lady and when the fiddler was not watching, they “walked backwards,” stood still, and did the wiggle.²

Jack Stockdale was all pretense. He was not looking for a night on the town, but was at work, getting paid seventy-five cents an hour plus all expenses to provide undercover evidence of immoral behavior to New York’s Committee of Fourteen.

images — Excerpt from a report filed by Committee of Fourteen agent Jack Stockdale on May 31, 1912. At 388 Eighth Avenue, Stockdale found couples dancing the everybody doing it/grizzly bear dance to the music from a slotted player piano; he declared the place “Rotten.” Committee of Fourteen Records. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

The Committee of Fourteen picked up where the Committee of Fifteen had left off and would prove to have a much more significant impact on life in New York City. It was formed on January 16, 1905, in part as a response to Tammany Hall moving back into the mayor’s office the year before. Founding members included leading citizens from areas in the city strongly affected by the development of Raines Law hotels, leaders of the city’s major religions, and former members of the Committee of Fifteen.

The committee’s specific mission was to bring about the abolishment of Raines Law hotels. To accomplish this, detailed evidence on their nature was required. Undercover detectives were quickly hired (or volunteered) and then spread out across the city, visited hotels, and wrote up what they saw or experienced.

J. W. Brewster and A. Whitehouse were typical agents. Together they spent an evening at the Friendly Inn, 116 Mott Street, in May 1905. There they chatted up the patrons and drank beer; Brewster played the barroom piano and Whitehouse sang some songs. At about eleven P.M., Whitehouse solicited a prostitute and went upstairs with her to one of the “hotel” rooms.

The girl laid on the bed and pulled her dress up to her waist showing her naked body to the waist. I sat on the edge of the bed and was talking to her and she kept saying hurry up, I have got to go to the other room. There is others that want to be fucked as well as you. I told her that I was not in a hurry and that I did not want to fuck in a hurry. With that she got up and said you go to hell and you won’t get your money back.

The committee eventually investigated twelve hundred places like the Friendly Inn that year and found more than seven hundred of them to be “evil resort” Raines Law hotels. Thanks to the diligence and hard work of Whitehouse and Brewster, the Friendly Inn made the list.³

With that kind of information in hand, the committee lobbied the state legislature for passage of the “Prentice Law,” which would mandate meaningful inspections before Raines Law hotel licenses could be issued. Passed early in 1906, the new statute required, among other things, that walls separating the ten or more rooms necessary for hotel status be of a certain thickness and of certain materials—sheets separating ten dirty cots would no longer suffice. As a partial result of that law, hotel license applications in New York City fell from 1,304 in 1905 to 650 in 1906.

A fifty percent reduction in applications represented a victory but was far from “abolishment.” If a Raines Law hotel conformed to the terms of the new law but was still thought by the committee to be disorderly, options were somewhat limited, for the committee had no legal or policing authority. Recognizing this, the Committee of Fourteen developed a strategy that targeted the infrastructure supporting Raines Law hotels.⁴

At this time, the hotels (which were also saloons, of course) had their libations provided by a sponsoring brewer or distributor, such as Pabst Brewing Company, Anheuser-Busch, or the more than fifty other local brewers then active in Brooklyn alone. More than just the alcohol behind the bar, many saloons depended on their sponsors for loans, mortgages, advertising, and other forms of support. Brewers provided the booze, along with a security net. If a Raines Law hotel/saloon was reckoned disorderly, then the committee would approach the sponsoring brewer, share the damning reports, and press it to rein in the offending sponsoree, lest their support of vice lead to more regulations, fees, licenses, and bureaucratic hassle. If the brewer did not respond accordingly, the committee next turned to the saloon’s surety company. This tactic was simple. The excise laws of New York stated that all places with liquor licenses had to be bonded and insured. According to the committee’s logic, bonding a Raines Law hotel made the surety company a partner in its business.⁵

Confronted with evidence of disorder, most brewers and surety companies quickly realized that their best business interests entailed cooperation with the committee. Accordingly, they could and frequently did withdraw support from a beyond-salvation saloon, which generally ensured its closing. Only as a last resort did the committee threaten to press charges for code violations (of which there were always a convenient number).

Dedicated volunteers working out of desks loaned by sister organizations managed the committee’s work at this time. To be effective in the long run—Would the 654 saloons that did not reapply as hotels remove their cots?—the committee needed a long-term plan. Toward that end, it incorporated in 1907 and then sought, and obtained, financial support for its work from some of the city’s wealthy elite; John D. Rockefeller Jr., J. P. Morgan, George Foster Peabody, and George H. Putnam, among many others, cut checks to finance the committee’s work. Office space was rented at 27 East Twenty-Second Street and Frederick H. Whitin was hired to oversee the committee’s mission.

The Prentice Law and the vigilance of the committee, along with its political acumen and clout, eventually spelled the end of Raines Law hotels. By 1910 only eighty-seven of them were left. An unqualified success, the committee had fulfilled its mandate. But rather than disband—as had the Committee of Fifteen after its success—the Committee of Fourteen pivoted and turned its attention to the social evil.

Members of a subcommittee formed in 1908, called the Research Committee, anticipated the new mission when instructed to study “the laws of New York relating to the immorality of women.” To some extent, the subcommittee was being asked to respond to the national panic over white slavery and the felt need to do something about it. To help fashion and energize a program, the subcommittee hired George J. Kneeland, a sociologist who would play a major role in Committee of Fourteen activities for years to come. Kneeland subsequently organized the subcommittee’s agenda, directed the background research, and oversaw the publication in 1910 of The Social Evil in New York City; A Study of Law Enforcement by the Research Committee of the Committee of Fourteen. That report laid the foundation for a tide of committee-initiated social activism that would change New York’s approaches to morality by 1917—and even alter prevailing sexual practice among consenting adults.⁶

Kneeland’s explosive book (which Anthony Comstock thought obscene) grabbed public attention in ways that Raines Law hotel legislation never could, and financial support for the committee’s work grew dramatically from about five thousand dollars annually to fifteen thousand dollars through much of the 1910s. An executive secretary, Walter G. Hooke, was soon brought on, as well as two stenographers; Whitin’s position was upgraded to full-time status and retitled “general secretary.” In February 1912 the official mission of the Committee of Fourteen became “the Suppression of Commercialized Vice in the City of New York.”

The committee’s approach to confronting prostitution took a different tack than the one then commonly prevailing, which was to identify prostitutes and jail or fine them. Its strategy, signaled by the word “commercialized,” followed from that developed to attack the Raines Law hotels: ferret out involvement by the agents of prostitution and challenge owners and managers of the properties where it flourished. If the committee could destroy the vine, the fruit would soon wither.

Whitin, with Kneeland’s professional assistance, led the assault. Gathering compromising evidence of prostitution in New York had begun in earnest in 1911, but it became tightly focused after the new mission charge. The primary means of collecting information was by now familiar: hire undercover detectives to go into saloons, dives, joints, dance halls, brothels, cafés, restaurants, entertainment resorts, assignation hotels, and tenement houses looking for vice and write up reports on what was observed there. With significant available resources, the work ramped up as a corps of agents went to work sniffing out immorality in New York’s underworld.

They had lots of places to hit. A grand jury impaneled in January 1910 to investigate the white slave traffic in New York City, headed by John D. Rockefeller Jr., had developed a fifty-seven-page list of more than five hundred “immoral places.” Their addresses were passed on to the committee and most of them were visited multiple times. That turned out to be only a starting point, though, as thousands of other places received the attentions of the committee over its life, which continued to 1932. Investigative reports, mostly handwritten, eventually totaled nearly one hundred thousand and are now archived in the New York Public Library, where they take up more than fifteen tightly packed feet of shelf space.⁷

Dozens of investigative detectives eventually took positions as frontline troops for the Committee of Fourteen. On occasion, agents had some training (or at least standing) as detectives, such as did Jack Stockdale, but most did not. Some of them had experience working for the state Department of Excise; others were journalists or had worked in social service organizations. In general, investigators were hired who met job profiles defined by race, ethnicity, and gender, and who could fit in among common people. Stockdale, for example, was white, a native Pennsylvanian, and Catholic, and was sent where he would be most inconspicuous. Harry Sussman, on the other hand, was a Russian Jew who spoke English, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish, all of which came in handy for his work among specific ethnic communities. James A. Seaman, a New Jersey–born medical student, provided free medical advice to some of the prostitutes he befriended (and, ironically, managed to resist solicitations by claiming to have a case of gonorrhea). David Oppenheim, who had a day job in the clothing business, was a German Jew, whose facility in German, “Jewish,” and English served him well during his several years of service to the committee. Natalie Sonnichsen (née de Bogory) was a married, twenty-five-year-old freelance journalist when she began working for the committee; born in Russia, she grew up in Switzerland and spoke a range of European languages, which presumably enabled her to pass readily as one among the many immigrant prostitutes in New York. William Pogue and Robert Lewis Waring were African Americans who could easily infiltrate and investigate the black and black-and-tan nightspots.⁸

Their work would not be without danger. Agents were involved in deceiving people who had often taken them into their confidence, people whose well-being might suffer from what the agents would report. Proprietors, managers, waiters, entertainers, and prostitutes soon learned to be cautious around those they did not know, in large part because they were suspicious of committee activities. Reports detail several occasions on which compromised agents had to talk their way out of suspicion, some involving actual physical danger. Inevitably, covers were blown and agents were transferred to a different section of the city or were simply retired.

Whitin was not undercover, but rather served as the visible, public face of the Committee of Fourteen. Also its field enforcer, he was particularly loathed by those in the businesses he monitored. As a result, he carried a police-permitted pistol with him at all times, protection he did not appear to have granted his agents.⁹

Instructions to the investigators seem not to have survived, but some details can be gathered from the nature of the reports. Investigators were always undercover, required to blend in with the sporting crowd, and were dressed accordingly; some even wore disguises. They were expected to size up the joint under investigation and make that assessment a cornerstone of their reports: How disorderly (or not) was the place? If things were disorderly, then investigators were to mix in and gain the confidence of those involved.

Female investigators, of which there were a fair number, were expected to flirt, dance, and count the solicitations they received for sex, all the while employing a range of excuses to turn them aside. Male investigators should buy drinks for the women, dance with them, charm them, and either solicit them for sex or allow themselves to be solicited. If the latter, the agent was to employ a ready excuse: “not enough money,” “need to get home,” “have another appointment down the street,” etc. But if their solicitation was accepted, things could and did get tricky. Accordingly, many reports told of situations in which an investigator ended up in a room with a prostitute, who then removed all or most of her clothing and offered herself to the investigator/client at the agreed-upon price. At that point the investigator typically claimed a problem with his “nature,” or that he had had too much to drink, or that he had “the clap” (presumably just remembered), or that he had just discovered that he did not have enough money . . . thus presumably wriggling out of a tight situation with his Committee of Fourteen credentials intact.

On many occasions, male and female investigators were paired to see if they could book an hour at one of the alleged assignation hotels. If they succeeded, they proceeded to the room, ordered drinks to be sent up (also a violation of city code), ruffled up the bedsheets, and used a blue pencil to mark “C XIV” on the undersides of drawers, backs of mirrors, and in other inconspicuous places. Soon after, Whitin and the police would charge into the establishment and claim that the hotel functioned as a disorderly place for unmarried couples to consummate sexual liaisons. If the hotel manager denied the accusations, the proof was to be found on the backsides of the furniture.¹⁰

Kneeland and Whitin stepped up their investigative work as 1912 went on. At their direction, reports became more detailed than before, with the specifics proving foundational to the publication in 1913 of Kneeland’s Commercialized Prostitution in New York City. The structure of that book reflected the places where prostitution was found: chapter one is concerned with brothels; chapter two with tenement houses, hotels, furnished rooms, and massage parlors; chapter three treats everything else—disorderly saloons, concert saloons, the streets, public dance halls, excursion boats, parks, etc. Among the findings:

images Investigators visited 142 brothels in 1912, each two or more times. Prices in these places ranged from fifty cents to ten dollars per service. Prostitutes in the one-dollar houses had as many as thirty customers each night. Orchestras were a common feature of the thirty-four five- and ten-dollar houses investigated.¹¹

images Disorder was a special problem in saloon “backrooms,” a space partitioned off from the bar area and accessible to women by a convenient “Ladies’ door.” There the sexes socialized, drank, danced together, and made arrangements for sex. Of the 765 backroom saloons visited by agents, prostitutes circulated in 308 of them. In some of these places the races also mixed freely. The backroom scene, according to Kneeland, was often enlivened by music provided by “a sallow-faced youth” who sat at a piano and “bang[ed] out popular airs in wild, discordant notes.” Agents characterized the dancing in backroom saloons as obscene and vulgar.¹²

images Large public dance halls were rife with indecent behavior. Of seventy-five dances or sponsored balls investigated, agents judged only five as “decent”; eleven were “more or less objectionable”; and fifty-nine were graded as “wholly objectionable.” A female investigator (probably Natalie Sonnichsen) reported on thirty-one dances, and at twenty-two of these she was solicited by fifty-three different men. “Tough” (or “half-time”) dancing was common in such places.¹³

images Approximately fifteen thousand professional prostitutes worked in Manhattan in 1912. “On the basis of data actually on file,” each prostitute on average serviced at least ten men per day, yielding a “conservative” total of one hundred fifty thousand tricks turned daily on an island populated by two million, three hundred thousand people.¹⁴

Kneeland’s book redacted many graphic details found in investigators’ reports. No mention is made of agent Samuel Auerbach’s August 1912 observation that the dancing he saw was an “imitation of [the] action of sexual intercourse,” or that Elsie and Daisy (both in drag and assumed by Auerbach to be gay) sang songs “obscene to the farther limit,” or that they danced a two-step and “laid on a table and imitated the sexual intercourse,” or that another dance featured “the action of committing Sodomy.” Nor does Commercialized Prostitution copy the episode reported by Jack Stockdale in which he passed a table in a Broadway saloon and a woman reached out, grabbed him by the pants, and opened his fly; whereupon another prostitute joked, “Don’t go try to steal my husband,” to which the woman replied, “I just wanted to see if he had anything in there.” Clearly disorder was much more rampant than Kneeland could chronicle for polite public consumption.¹⁵

On-the-street investigators intuited from the first that the nature of the music and dance in a place gave a strong indication of its character. “Disorderly beyond question. ‘Market for women.’ The street-walkers were coming in and out. . . . Two negroes making alleged music.” To agents, the more “alleged” the music-making and the more modern and erotically charged the dancing, the more disorderly the place. Furthermore, report details on music and dance turned out to be more obviously veracious than observations on, for example, social behavior. What went on in the music and dance might be some marker of the central issue, but it was to the committee and its investigators essentially peripheral. Committee activities would not cease just because agents witnessed no alleged music and rotten dance, but they might well if no vice were found. Accordingly, a cellar-level window into a critical period in American cultural history has been recorded and preserved.¹⁶

The liveliest music and the wildest dancing occurred in dance halls, which category included everything from backroom saloons to larger public dance halls to the dance halls incorporated into beachside entertainment resorts. Despite long-standing efforts by social activists to shut them down, dance halls remained a tenacious and vibrant feature of the urban landscape. Belle Israels had counted more than five hundred scattered throughout the five boroughs in 1909 and there is no indication that the number had diminished by 1912.¹⁷

There were several good reasons to pay special attention to the dance in the dance halls, one of which was the practical role of dancing in solicitation. The routine went something like this:

images Once a dance began, two prostitutes would start dancing together.

images Two men, who were teamed and on the lookout for companionship, would immediate approach the women and “break” them, forming two male/female dancing couples.

images Propinquity and the loud music provided the necessary privacy for solicitation, which, if acceptable to both parties, would include the terms, the scheduling, the address, and any other necessary arrangements, all conducted out of the hearing of any police or Committee of Fourteen “flatties” in the room.

“Breaking” was not always in operation, however, and indeed some establishments forbade the practice altogether, a regulation that the committee encouraged.

But breaking aside, there was the very richness of the dancing. Few, if any, decades in the history of American dance featured a wider array of wildly provocative dances than the 1910s. Although some of these had been around a while, others were new and of-the-day. In 1912 alone, investigators witnessed and identified the hoochie koochie, the grizzly bear, the turkey trot, the bunny hug, the wiggle, the shiver, the one-step, the two-step, the Bowery, spieling, hopping, dipping, “skirt & muscle dancing,” “knee-cap muscle dancing,” the “nigger,” clog dancing, buck dancing, and an “exhibition dance” in which a female dancer was twirled around as she clung to her partner’s neck, becoming airborne in the process. Agents referred categorically to these “indecent” or “disorderly” dances as tough dances, modern dances, half-time dances, or, ragtime dances.¹⁸

Most all of the dances featured bodies jammed up close to each other—“hollow to hollow,” as Stockdale liked to report. Sonnichsen judged a dance she attended to be “perfectly unrestrained; everybody did just as they pleased,” altogether giving her the impression of “one wild orgy.” What the investigators witnessed were moments in an especially dynamic time when young people from a wide range of ethnicities were hearing flashy, invigorating, and heavily syncopated ragtime rhythms and moving their bodies to the music in fresh, sexy, uninhibited ways. If a hint of wistfulness sometimes crept into the agents’ up-close, firsthand reports (many of them danced the dances too), the moral-bearers back at the offices of the Committee of Fourteen never once doubted that danced expressions of the new, of youth, and of the sexual were potent elements in an especially explosive compound.¹⁹

Committee reports are rich in particulars on dancing, but agents were no better than earlier reporters at providing useful details on music-making. Music and dance are both expressed through performance though. To a dancer, the music is interpreted in the dance; bodily movements are performances of the aural experiences of the music. In an important way, dance is music made manifest. To a musician, the way the dancers move prompts the way the music is made; playing is in some part an expression of seeing. So, concomitantly, music is dance made manifest. Reading about dancing in the reports and visualizing what it was like is a form of synesthetically hearing the music-making over in the dark corner. If the agents thought the dancing “vulgar,” “indecent,” “suggestive,” “disgraceful,” or “utterly and superlatively rotten,” they probably also thought the music “wild,” “alleged,” and “discordant”—and often called it just that.

Agents could see the musical instruments in a joint, which made reporting on them easy. They chronicled pianos, violins and fiddles, guitars, banjos, harmonicas, a zither (the player of which took exception to derogatory remarks cast his way, started a fight, and ended up being hauled off to the police station), accordions, harps, drums, and, according to one report, “a cracked piano in [the] bar & a one legged coon who plays the bones occasionally.” An “orchestra” might minimally consist of a piano and a violin/fiddle or, less frequently, a piano and a percussion instrument—drums of various sorts, bones, clappers, a trap set, “anything to make a big noise,” in Stockdale’s phrasing. Other frequently mentioned ensemble combinations were piano and guitar, piano and banjo, guitar and banjo, and piano and harp. Four-piece orchestras typically consisted of piano, drums, and two violins/fiddles. Just about whoever was around with whatever instrument was handy seems to be at the heart of the story here.

Only two piano players have names attached to them in the 1912 reports. Stockdale entered a “Café & Saloon” on West Twenty-Fourth Street in April 1912 and noticed that “Frank” the piano player was playing a ragtime hit. “Pianist Plenny Heath, colored,” is the only musician identified by full name in that year’s reports. Little is known about Heath other than he ran a music shop on West 135th Street in Harlem and moonlighted as a piano player in Percy Brown’s Café on West Forty-Fifth Street in April 1910.²⁰

Singers in the dives were commonly noted, but infrequently by their names. Six singers earned first-name status and only one of those received any special attention. “Rosie” sang in William Banks’s black-and-tan café on West Thirty-Seventh Street, wore a silver band around her hair, sang an unidentified song, and then lifted her dress over her knees, revealing red garters and black stockings. A mulatto about twenty-two years old, Rosie danced the “Hoochy Coochy movement” for four white men who appreciatively threw money on the floor for her. Details of her physical stature (5 feet 6 inches, one hundred forty pounds) were included because in the agent’s view she was likely a prostitute who needed to be profiled for the committee.²¹

Songs had titles and lyrics much more often than musicians had names. However, some of the references are so cryptic that it is difficult to peg the song. Did “Lovy Boy” refer to “Lovey: A Syncopated Love Song” (1909) or “Lovey Girl” (1912) or the highly popular “Cuddle Up a Little Closer, Lovey Mine” from 1908? Did “Band” imply Irving Berlin’s immensely popular “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” of 1911? (Probably, but who can be sure?) What was the “Circus song,” with its suggestive lines: “We have the long rubber neck Giraffe, who they feed peas to / But owing to his long thing he can take only one pea at a time”? Or the title of the song with the lyric: “If Your Father and Mother knew as much as you do—you would not be here”? And who wouldn’t want to know more about the “Pimp Song” or “O, That Night of Mystery”?

Fortunately, fourteen songs tagged by Committee of Fourteen agents can comfortably be identified, providing at least a shadowy profile of the music heard in New York dives during the 1911–1912 period.

images “Boogie Man Rag” (Terry Sherman/Mort Hyman; 1912)

images “Casey Jones: The Brave Engineer” (Eddie Newton/T. Lawrence Seibert; 1909)

images “Everybody’s Doin’ It Now” (Irving Berlin; 1911)

images “Finnegan” (A. Seymour Brown/Nat. D. Ayer; 1912)

images “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland” (Leo Friedman/Beth Slater Whitson; 1909)

images “My Name Is Morgan, But It Ain’t J.P.” (Halsey K. Mohr/William A. Mahoney; 1906)

images “Parisienne” (Lew Brown/Albert Von Tilzer; 1912)

images “Roll Me Around Like a Hoop My Dear” (Fred Fischer; 1912)

images “Row, Row, Row” (James V. Monaco/William Jerome; 1912)

images “Steamboat Bill” (Ren Shields/Frank Leighton/Bert Leighton; 1910)

images “That’s My Personality” (Lew Brown/Albert Von Tilzer; 1912)

images “There’ll Come a Time” (Charles K. Harris; 1895)

images “There’s a Ring Around the Moon” (Alfred Bryan/H. Blanke-Belcher; 1911)

images “When I Was Twenty-One and You Were Sweet Sixteen” (Egbert Van Alstyne/Harry Williams; 1911)

There are some easy observations to draw from this list. For instance, all the songs save one were published between 1906 and 1912, suggesting that then, as now, the day’s current hits were the most popular. Also, although many of the titles do not make this clear, the rhythms of ragtime accent nearly all the songs. Several of them actually mention ragtime dances. “Parisienne,” for instance, is explicitly a dance song, which the sheet music cover makes clear, and cites in the lyrics the glide, the slide, the “Grizzly Bear,” and the “Turkey trot.”

To study the sheet music to these songs does not necessarily tell how they did their work. Sheet music was clearly available in the nightspots; photographs sometimes show that, and one agent reported that he went to the piano to look at some sheet music, from which vantage point he could better peer into a disorderly backroom. But in keeping with a long-standing tradition, performances freely deviated from the notes and words on the page. Take the oldest song in the group, Charles K. Harris’s “There’ll Come a Time.” In its published form, it is a sentimental song in which a daughter whose mother has died is counseled by her father that

There’ll come a time someday, when I have passed away.

There’ll be no father to guide you from day to day.

However, entertainers in Marshall’s Hotel on West Fifty-Third Street—“well filled with both white and colored people”—sang “very low songs,” one of which included the lines “There’ll come a time when a whore won’t need no man, lordy, lordy.” “Roberts” and “May,” both white women, began dancing to the song, punctuating their steps with kicks high above each other’s heads and raising their skirts so high that “their person could be seen.” One dancer reportedly wound her legs around the neck of the proprietor (who was a black man) and went through dance motions that were “outrageous.” Charles K. Harris, who wrote his song before the age of ragtime, could hardly have imagined such.²²

“My Name Is Morgan, But It Ain’t J.P.,” a “coon song” (i.e., a minstrelized ragtime song) from 1906, featured a published chorus lyric that went

My name is Morgan, but it ain’t J.P.

There’s no bank on Wall Street that belongs to me. . . .

But on June 1, 1912, Jack Stockdale entered a backroom saloon on Seventh Avenue at 12:35 A.M. and found there a few drunken people, one of whom, “Jeanie,” staggered over to the piano and sang a song with a verse that Stockdale transcribed loosely as “My name is Moriarty, I keep a hoar house & fuck for charity.”²³

Natalie Sonnichsen reported on a 109th Street dive she visited at the end of 1912 and noted that “Ada,” who was reading a romantic potboiler novel by Victoria Cross between sets, sang songs that were “very vulgar and full of allusions which made the company laugh.” Her second song was the ragtime hit “Row, Row, Row.” The published chorus to this song is about a young man taking his beau on a Sunday afternoon boat ride.

And then he’d row, row, row,

Way up the river he would row, row, row.

A hug he’d give her, then he’d kiss her now and then,

She would tell him when. He’d fool around and fool around,

And then they’d kiss again. And then he’d row, row, row,

A little further he would row, oh, oh, oh, oh!

Then he’d drop both his oars, take a few more encores,

And then he’d row, row, row.

The printed lyrics are suggestive enough, but Ada’s parody lyrics went further and “left nothing to the imagination.” Imagination was given some substance in the committee files two weeks later when Jack Stockdale heard the same song in a Brooklyn joint, sung by a different singer, and included a loose transcription in his report.

He rowed rowed &c then he hugged & kissed her; her saying when, where &c then they left the boat, got on the grass and he loved her & hugged her, when she said &c then he was over her & he rowed & he rowed of course when she said &c.

It would appear that consenting adults who enjoyed salacious songs in Brooklyn dives did not hold copyrighted verses sacred. Nor did anyone else.²⁴

The one song that seems not to have been parodied is the one most frequently mentioned in the 1912 reports. Irving Berlin copyrighted “Everybody’s Doin’ It Now” on November 2, 1911, and it almost immediately exploded in popularity. The Indestructible Symphony Orchestra recorded it by the end of the year, and at least eight more recordings were made in 1912. It was sung and played in places high and low, public and private. People also danced to it. The fetching ragtime rhythms compelled dancing in part because the song’s narrative is about the joys of dancing ragtime. Verse 1 gets the dancers on the floor.

Honey, honey, can’t you hear?

Funny, funny music, dear.

Ain’t the funny strain,

Goin’ to your brain,

Like a bottle of wine, fine?

Hon’, hon’, hon’, hon’ take a chance,

One, one, one, one little dance.

Can’t you see them all,

Swaying up the hall?

Let’s be gettin’ in line.

Verse 2 speaks of the energy required to keep on doing what everybody’s doin’.

Baby, baby get a stool,

Maybe, maybe I’m a fool.

Honey, don’t you smile,

Let us rest a while,

I’m so weak in the chest, best.

Go, go, go, go get a chair,

No, no, no, no leave it there.

Honey, if the mob,

Still are on the job,

I’m as strong as the rest.

Meanwhile, the chorus—always where the music is most compelling—spells out exactly what everybody’s doing and how they do it.

See that ragtime couple over there,

Watch them throw their shoulders in the air,

Snap their fingers, honey, I declare

It’s a bear, it’s a bear, it’s a bear. There!

Ev’rybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it.

The “bear” is a reference to the “grizzly bear,” among the newest animal dances in 1911, where dancers stretch out their “claws” above their heads and dance aggressively and provocatively. All sorts of variations on the steps were possible. Stockdale noted that while dancing to the song, two women “rub[bed] against each other, shaking and grunting [and] making a noise.” In another report, dancers were doing “the G.B. &c. in the toughest way” while “some sang everybody is doing it &c.” On June 1, 1912, at a dance held at the Mandarin Club on Doyers Street, the “music was of the ‘Everybody’s Doing It’” style. The dancing there was “as bad as it could be,” with one of the women entertainers pressing her dance partner “against one of the posts in the room” and lingering against his body. One writer noted in August that the song had become the “national hymn” of the modern set, a notion that had been suggested a few months earlier by journalist Franklin P. Adams in his critique of the “fury and craze of these musical days,” for he thought “Everybody’s Overdoing It.”²⁵

The work of the Committee of Fourteen did not cease with the publication of Commercialized Prostitution in early 1913. If anything, it accelerated, in part because media attention increased the profile (and the budget) of the committee. In addition, the forms and expressions of prostitution and sexuality were changing rapidly in New York and needed to be tracked. And among them were new modalities that relied directly on vital roles played by music and dance.

There is only a single reference in Commercialized Prostitution to the cabaret, which Kneeland suggested is sometimes found in disorderly establishments as a “poor imitation” of the entertainments often found in upper-crust restaurants. Little did he or the committee then realize that New York was under invasion.²⁶

The entertainment weekly New York Clipper first sighted what was on the horizon when it published a column in 1910 written by its Berlin bureau editor: “‘Cabaret’ Becoming an Important Factor in the European Amusement World—Its Origin and Progress.” The writer, a Mr. P. Richards, thought that many readers of the Clipper might not be familiar with cabaret, so he provided a brief history. Cabaret’s birth, Richards wrote, was in the Montmartre district of Paris, where from the first it had a bohemian, “free and easy” air. It was essentially a rough melding of the informal music-making heard in bars and dives and the more formal program of song, dance, and comedy common in vaudeville theaters. Significantly, it was aimed at a more downscale crowd and thus occupied a niche below vaudeville houses. Salaries for cabaret work were lower than in legitimate vaudeville, but the satisfaction gathered from the work and the prospect of long-term employment made it worthwhile—“[performers] didn’t make much money, [but] they had a deuce of a time.”²⁷

“‘Oh, You Babylon!’: A Taxi-cabaretta,” which was “Cabawritten” by Julian Street with “Cabagraphs” by Wallace Morgan, appeared in the August 1912 issue of Everybody’s Magazine. A piece of clever whimsy, it was nevertheless among the first writing to recognize that the European cabaret had landed in New York.

From Little Hungary in Houston Street, to Pabst’s vast armory-like restaurant in One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth, we will find them everywhere: rag-time, turkey-trotting spots upon the city map; gay cabarets, jay cabarets; cabarets with stages and spot-lights, cabarets without; cabarets on ground floors, in cellars, and on roofs; cabarets where “folks act gen’l’mumly,” cabarets where the wild time grows. . . . Can this be death? No, Kid, this is Life! You can’t escape it! You can’t escape the cabaret! . . . The town is cabaridden! Cabarotten! And you, poor devil, you’re stark, staring cabarazy! ²⁸

Cabaraziness could not have arrived at a better time, for New York’s larger restaurants were just starting to provide entertainment along with their food and drink. By 1912, “we hear her screaming everywhere, . . . we masticate our morning egg to rag-time, lunch and dine to the strains of the pseudo-passionate waltz.” Everything was thus in place for the cabaret, and a rich and varied night out for customers.²⁹

There was also the issue of tone. Cabarets in Paris and Berlin were deeply subversive of high-minded mores. So too in New York, which made it an ideal fit with a demimonde that had lost its beds in the Raines Law hotels. Prostitutes, pimps, and clients poured into the cabarets, for as a waiter told David Oppenheim, “all the cabarets are known as regular whorehouses.” Harvey, the proprietor of the saloon at the Park View Hotel, acknowledged that “90% of [the cabarets] cater to that trade,” and that without prostitutes many saloons could not make a go of it.³⁰

The Committee of Fourteen soon recognized cabaret’s true face and made it its main focus from 1913 to 1917. Among much else, this meant that agents were hitting a wider range of entertainment places, for cabarets could be made to work just about anywhere. Large restaurants continued to mount cabarets, but soon downscale cafés and saloons were also adding a cabaret a night or two a week. Even dance halls programmed cabarets to supplement the dancing. A stage was not even necessary, for the form depended on a degree of intimacy between patrons and entertainers; indeed, singers were expected to circulate among and around the tables while performing. Personnel requirements were meager and inexpensive. In a backroom saloon, a piano player and a female singer would be sufficient to advertise “Cabaret tonight.” The manager of the Manuel da Silva Café told Oppenheim that all he had to do was hire a “couple of Creole girls” and he had a cabaret. And they did not even have to be very good. Seaman reported that a woman singing “What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For” went around to each table, patted cheeks and whispered “any old thing” to the patrons; but “SING she cannot.” Stockdale reported that one cabaret performer “made noise with her mouth in trying to sing.”³¹

Although small was just fine, big productions worked too. The continuing development of New York’s subway system and a burgeoning automobile culture opened up the development of pleasure resorts on the outskirts of the boroughs, where land was cheaper. These resorts were often called “casinos,” a term that at the time did not imply blackjack, roulette wheels, and slot machines. (In fact, as throughout much of the United States, gambling for money was illegal in New York.) Casinos hewed closer to their original, etymological meaning, as in “house” (i.e., casa), and offered a range of social activities that might include dining, drinking, music, dancing, vaudeville, movies, bowling, roller skating, and cabaret.

Many of the casinos were adjacent to amusement parks (such as those at Bronx Park, Van Cortlandt Park, and Clason Point) or around beaches, many of which also had amusement parks (Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Rockaway Beach, Canarsie, and parts of Staten Island). They had names like Arbor Casino, Harlem Casino, Manhattan Casino, Dietrich’s Fairyland Casino, Gilligan’s Palace Casino, and Reisenweber’s Casino. These places were generally large, with dance floors that might accommodate a thousand couples. Given the scale, casinos could afford to hire cabaret ensembles of seven or more singers (many of them highly accomplished performers), a comedian, and a small orchestra. So when the summer heat smothered Gotham, legions jammed the subways and trollies and headed to the end of the line at Coney Island or Bronx Park. There cabaret, dancing, drink, food, sport, and a good time beckoned. Among the crowd were prostitutes who knew they would easily find clients. And a squad of detectives charged with the mission of keeping an eye on them was directly on their heels.

Cabarets shifted the attention of patrons (and the reportage of committee agents) away from the drinking and toward music and dance. Accordingly, reports from the cabaret years are rich in information on both.

Agents in 1913 mainly tagged dance steps that had been around a while, like the “Everybody’s Doin’ It”/grizzly bear, the “nigger,” and the Texas Tommy (“Tommy” was slang for “prostitute”). A new style did surface that year, though. Agent Charles S. Briggs inquired about the name of a dance in which a couple “proceeded to go through all the movements of sexual intercourse”; the response from a tablemate was, “That’s what they call the dry or Kentucky fuck.” In 1914, more new dances emerged: the lame duck, the kitchen sink, and ball the jack. The exotic and erotic tango also was first chronicled by agents that year. All these were energetic dances that featured suggestive moves; “sinuous as serpents,” one wrote. The dancing of two couples especially repulsed Briggs, for the moves included picking female partners up and flipping them upside down—“when their clothes fell around their shoulders their private parts were clearly exposed to view.” He was confounded that such dancing was wildly applauded by spectators. Another agent from that year confessed that he was so shocked by the sensuous gyrations of the dancers that he refused to write a description of it. Ever a good investigator, however, he promised to demonstrate the moves in the offices of the Committee of Fourteen, provided they “will stand for it.” (There is no evidence that his offer was taken up.)³²

The following year marked the first mention of “the Salome,” an obvious reference to the “Dance of the Seven Veils” in Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play, likely colored in popular consciousness by a scandalous production of Richard Strauss’s Salome at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907. David Oppenheim reported on a 1917 cabaret performance in which the dancer “with bare legs and body uncovered from the waist line to the hips danced a Salome dance with all the suggestive motions of sexual intercourse.”

In 1916 there appeared a reference to the “St. Louis” dance, about which nothing seems to be known; perhaps it is an allusion to W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” one of the first published blues songs (1914). That year also saw a craze for Hawaiian music and dance, specifically the hula. In cabaret, the hula was often danced by (white) women wearing only a grass skirt, since any more covering would (obviously) not be true to the traditional dance. Seaman observed one hula dancer who appeared to be “clad for her bath”; she wiggled the midsection of her body in such a way that it appeared to him as a “universal joint.” Prostitutes quickly adopted the dance; one woman promised an agent that she would do the “Gula-yula dance” naked for him if he would go with her.³³

Rich information on songs performed in cabarets shows up in the reports, including titles.³⁴ Characteristically, almost none of the songs were reported sung as published. “The Angle-Worm Wiggle,” for instance, is an animal dance, but of a different degree of anatomical suggestiveness than the grizzly bear or the fox-trot, an allusion not missed by Chicago authorities when they removed the famous singer-comedian Sophie Tucker from a 1910 stage for singing it.

When I dance that wiggling dance,

I simple have to giggle with glee.

So hold me tight, don’t let me fall,

Sway me round the hall to that angle-worm crawl.

Oh babe, tell it to me, can you do that angle-worm wiggle with me?

“With my little wiggle waggle in my hand” was the clever new lyric sung in a 1913 New York cabaret, surely far surpassing the grace embedded in Tucker’s singing.³⁵

“Chinatown, My Chinatown” received bracing new lyrics during a rowdy evening at the Washington Inn on 155th Street, when “Hearts that know no other land / Drifting to and fro” became “Where you can get a hump / For fifty cents a throw.” The agent added only that “this song was supplemented by others equally as indecent.” “Some Girls Do and Some Girls Don’t” became “Some Girls Will and Some Girls Won’t” in 1916. Bawdy parody even trumped national politics in January 1917, when two “nice young American girls” in a dive on Third Avenue joined a piano player in singing “I wouldn’t raise my skirt to any soldier” instead of the antiwar lyrics “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”³⁶

Agent Oppenheim discovered the mistress of ribald parody in Brooklyn the evening of August 18, 1915. He was in the Bard & Berl when she struck up: “Yankee doodle went up town riding on a pony stuck his fingers up his a__ and found a macaroni.” Oppenheim complimented the singer on her muse, to which the bartender rejoined, “Oh that’s nothing. . . . Wait till I get her to sing ‘Cock Eye Reilly.’” Oppenheim liked “Cock Eyed Reilly” so much (a song better known today as “One-Eyed Reilly” or “Reilly’s Daughter”) that it brought out the quiescent folklorist in him. He proceeded to transcribe her version of this old Irish bawdy ballad in full and included it in his report. (See Appendix 2.) But not until after the singer entertained him with her version of “Tip-Top Tipperary Mary,” which she renamed “Tip It Up Mary.”³⁷

In the Committee of Fourteen reports from 1906 to 1912, only two instrumentalists, six singers, no dancers, and no other professional entertainers were identified by name, and only rarely by their full name. In the committee reports from 1913 to 1917, thirty solo instrumentalists or bands, thirty-five singers, ten dancers, and twenty-seven other professional entertainers are named, generally by full name. To some degree, the dramatic increase in identifications reflects the greater number of reports. But, in the main, the Committee of Fourteen came to realize that musicians, dancers, and entertainers in the shows and cabarets were not there just to provide the ambiance behind the business of commercialized sex, they were, rather, critical agents in the business of commercialized sex and therefore worthy of being marked.

One reason—no surprise here—was simple livelihood, for “like so many girls and women on the stage” they made “extra money on the side with their prostitution.” Take the case of Connie “Peggy” O’Neill. She grew up in Pittsburgh, a loved member of a large and prosperous family—“Used to having everything [she] wanted.” Like many girls during that time, she learned to dance, enjoyed it, and discovered that she was good at it. When her family’s finances suffered in the Panic of 1907, she thought that with her looks and dancing ability she could support herself on the stage, lessening the burden on her family. She got a job in vaudeville but was soon raped by her tour manager. As a result, she “began her life as a careless girl.” She continued to dance professionally when a job was available, but she told agent James A. Seaman that it was impossible for a girl to live decently by just working on the stage. So she became a part-time prostitute.

O’Neill was bright and inquisitive—she spent one evening querying Seaman (a graduate of Amherst College) about Buddhism and requested a reading list from him. She also had a moralistic perspective on what she had become and confided in Seaman that “she felt like forgetting all about every man she had been out with and being as she used to be.” The following week she began dancing in the cabaret at the Pré Catelan restaurant and somehow managed to make ends meet through that job alone. Six months later, in July 1917, Seaman ran into O’Neill again and learned that she was no longer working regularly as a prostitute, but “just parties” occasionally.³⁸

The economics of prostitution as a supplement to a stage income were manifest in a detailed report filed in February 1917. Investigator D. W. Ashley teamed up one day with a Mr. Nugatt, who did not work for the Committee of Fourteen. That afternoon, Ashley solicited Anne Lisard at the Pré Catelan (coincidentally at about the time that O’Neill went to work there). He reported that she was “good looking and well dressed and danced in a most lascivious way.” Through her Nugatt was introduced to Mabel White, a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies. White quickly made it clear to Nugatt that her terms were “ten dollars.” She agreed eventually to five dollars and told him to have the next dance with her to set up the arrangements. Lisard wanted Ashley to agree to the same terms, but he claimed to be “in a bad way” (i.e., he had gonorrhea). She thanked him for that information and asked him to pass the time with her still. At 7:30 P.M., the couples gathered in Lisard’s boardinghouse. “Miss White undressed and got on the bed with Nugatt and she wanted to do it ‘69’ but he refused.” While Ashley and Lisard looked on, the couple consummated their arrangement. White got her five dollars; Lisard received two dollars for the use of her room and a private “hoola” dance demonstration. One woman who performed in the Ziegfeld Follies confided to a committee agent that there was not a “pure girl in the whole company.”³⁹

Another document, submitted by David Oppenheim, contained yet more lurid details on how the system worked. Oppenheim had been in the Snug Café in Harlem the morning of March 5, 1916. The after-hours party there included fifteen couples, plus ten men, eight women, a lady entertainer, a piano player, a drummer, and the dive’s manager, Frank Nolan, all of them black. Although Oppenheim was Jewish, he was dark-complected and sometimes passed as a light-skinned African American. The lady entertainer, Mamie Sharp, went over to Oppenheim and introduced herself by sitting on his lap. She then lifted one of her breasts out of her dress and invited him “to kiss my Titty.” According to the agent’s report, she was soon “bobbing up and down” on him and told him that he could “scuttle me now if you want.” The manager said, “Go ahead, Dave, take her upstairs; she’s steamed up.” Oppenheim refused the invitation, but Sharp still encouraged him to phone her any night before eight P.M. and she would take the night off to escort him to some of the “buffet flats” in the area, where a range of sexual shows could be purchased, including one “where the women will dance naked for you and also show you how two women bulldike each other.”⁴⁰

Outside of working hours, women entertainers like Mamie Sharp and Mabel White could solicit clients directly, but a more circuitous ritual was necessary in the workplace. A standing citywide regulation mandated that a woman could not enter a saloon unless accompanied by a man, a provision intended to deny prostitutes easy access to backrooms and cabarets. But an exception was made for women cabaret entertainers, who were, naturally, allowed to go to work, even if by themselves. That amounted to a loophole, however, if a woman entertainer was also willing to prostitute herself.

In general, potential clients knew that direct solicitation in a joint was not appropriate. To do so would bring attention from any observant undercover policeman or committee agent. But they also knew the workaround: get friendly with the piano player or a singing waiter, arrange to be introduced to the lady entertainer, and then enjoy a nice, friendly, quiet chat over a drink. At the Triangle, in March 1916, the singer had just finished a song when a singing waiter pointed out an elderly man who wanted to meet her. After a drink and a fifteen-minute conversation between them, the man left, the assignation set. Agent Daniel Ogden got to know piano player Steve Hayes at Bobby Moore’s place in early 1917. Ogden expressed to Hayes an interest in a cabaret singer there and was soon introduced to Carrie, who it turned out was married to Hayes but also hustled for him. Singing waiters and other male entertainers also pimped for women who were not entertainers. Buddy Reid, a black singer and pianist of some renown performing in John McClary’s Café, was identified in a report as a pimp. Oppenheim wrote that Reid did not really need to keep performing because he had plenty of women feeding him cash: “he only holds this job so that the police can have nothing on him.” Agent B. J. Cunningham stated in one of his reports that a majority of male cabaret performers live with women who turn “the proceeds of their labor” over to them.⁴¹

The focused attention given cabarets by the Committee of Fourteen affected the ways entertainers secured their livelihoods, as it did also those who ran the joints in which they worked. Proprietors and managers generally had to get committee approval before even commencing the process of procuring a cabaret license. Accordingly, Chris Traynor of the Village Inn, with a pledge of one thousand dollars in support from a brewer, approached Whitin with a proposal to mount a cabaret, but like most others was refused endorsement. Traynor claimed to undercover agent Daniel Ogden even to have spoken with Mayor John P. Mitchell, who, it turned out, felt powerless to countermand the committee’s decision. It is not clear whether Whitin and the committee intended to shut down cabarets throughout the city, but that is what Traynor and others in the business came to believe. The proprietor of Harvey’s at the Park View Hotel told detective Oppenheim that the committee wanted to do away with cabarets because “they claim all cabarets are whore houses”; it even, according to Harvey, wanted to disallow any kissing in the saloon backroom. Another manager informed Oppenheim that the committee dictated seating arrangements—men and women were required to sit across from each other at tables, not side by side. On some occasions, fed-up proprietors simply attempted to stage a cabaret outside the committee’s oversight; investigator Harry Kahan learned from a waiter that his joint planned to start up a cabaret “in a few weeks, when everything will be quiet.” That was a ploy that seems to have been infrequently successful because “the Committee of 14 have men out watching,” a belief with some obvious truth behind it since one of those doing the watching wrote the report.⁴²

Committee actions such as these led to loud venting about overreach, intolerance, and injustice. Mrs. Forester, who ran Hunter’s Hall on Wyckoff Avenue in Brooklyn, confided to Oppenheim that Whitin himself came to her establishment on September 22, 1915, and physically removed her license. She subsequently had to promise to give up the “Hotel business” (which likely meant renting assignation rooms) and to quit serving women in the backroom saloon. When she did not live up to the agreement, Whitin and her brewer literally nailed shut the door to the ladies’ entrance. Forester swore that no one could touch Whitin because of Rockefeller’s connection to the committee, although she claimed to know for a fact that Rockefeller himself was no paragon of high virtue: “he has a yacht and takes new girls on it for 3 or 4 days then ships them back but forms committees [against] the poor people.” Mr. Wagner, who ran a place in a German neighborhood, “kept on cursing Mr. Whitin and calling him the vilest name he could think of.” He got so excited that his fluency in English failed him and he reverted to cursing in German. According to Oppenheim, “I think if he had W[hitin] here he wouldn’t be a bit squeamish about committing murder.” Another proprietor more quietly thought that the Committee of Fourteen wanted to “make a church” out of his nightspot.⁴³

Still, the committee’s work went on, and with considerable success. The cabarets, like the Raines Law hotels before them, had been a boon to prostitution, since they were relatively safe public places open late in which men looking for women congregated. As the Committee of Fourteen forced the shuttering of cabarets or, at least, the closing of their doors at one A.M., prostitution came under stress. Agent Samuel Auerbach reported on a 1915 conversation with some Swedish sailors during which they despaired over how difficult it was in New York to find a prostitute; one declaimed that “if he had to remain permanently in N.Y. he would have to cut his b__s out.” Seaman swung by Times Square at eight P.M. in June 1917 and was surprised to find streetwalkers soliciting on the sidewalks, “like a return to the old way.” He reported that the girls, many who had never been on the street, felt they had been forced there by committee action.⁴⁴

There were also outside forces bearing on the business. Telephones were becoming more common, signaling the era of the call girl, which had the effect of scrambling decades-old solicitation methods. Furthermore, social mores and sexual behaviors were undergoing rapid change. Many post-Victorian young women discovered that sex had intrinsic rewards. For these so-called “charity girls,” a dalliance with a favored date became a perfectly acceptable cap to an evening out.

After the United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917, the Department of War became concerned about doughboys and their access to prostitutes (and the venereal diseases that afflicted about thirty percent of servicemen). Section 10 of the Selective Service Act of May 1917 required that all known prostitution districts within five miles of any military camp be shuttered. The effect was that many tenderloin districts were closed, not only in New York City but across the nation, most famously Storyville in New Orleans. Altogether, the business of American commercialized sex was due to undergo a major reshuffle.

Then there was the matter of the city’s racial climate and the role of the Committee of Fourteen in it. New York City, with some justifiable pride, had had no legal color line throughout much of the previous century. The first emancipation law in New York was passed in 1799, although it was limited in what it accomplished. All New York–born slaves, though, had been freed by 1827. A civil rights act, passed in 1873, guaranteed to all “full and equal enjoyment of any accommodation, advantage, facility or privilege furnished by public conveyances, innkeepers, theaters, public schools, or places of public amusement.” The language of that statute was subsequently strengthened so that by 1909 all citizens enjoyed “full and equal rights and privileges,” whatever their race. Lest there be any equivocation on the point, in 1913 new legislation established that civil rights could not be withheld from anyone on the basis of “race, creed, color, or national origin.”⁴⁵

Many patrons of New York’s nightspots appear to have been fine with no color line at all. “The place was doing a rushing business. The backroom being so full of those of both sexes and races that there was no vacant place.” An agent scouting the Douglas Club on West Twenty-Eighth Street admired the girl dancers, who joined in a “free-for-all” dance enjoyed by both white and black young people, “with no suggestion of a color line.” At the many black-and-tan nightspots throughout New York, investigator reports show that large, racially mixed crowds gathered peacefully together, flirting, loving, dancing, and listening to “Good music & latest.”⁴⁶

In the view of the Committee of Fourteen, however, the mixing of the races, especially among the lower classes, led necessarily to immorality and vice. The issue from the committee’s perspective was simple: keep white women away from black men, white men away from black women, and New York would become a more orderly place. Part of its mission thus became establishing and enforcing a de facto color line. Black-run and -patronized hotels, clubs, cafés, and saloons that attracted a measure of white patronage were subsequently targeted. Baron Wilkins’ Café, William Banks’, Percy Brown’s Café, Young’s, Diggs’, Welch’s Café, the Criterion Club, and Marshall’s Hotel, all in midtown and among the most popular entertainment places in the city, were hounded by committee investigators, as were other black and tans throughout the city. Racially biased action usually followed.

A typical middling black and tan was Welch’s Café at 317 West Thirty-Ninth Street. An early visit by agents, in March 1910, did not go well for them. Both patrons and waiters were startled by the strangers’ presence and deeply suspicious. A visit by another agent in June 1911 went better. He counted there nineteen white women, thirty-one white men, and about the same number of “colored.” The agent also witnessed “vulgar dances,” many black prostitutes soliciting white men, and an argument between a black man and a white woman. Welch eventually signed a note forced on him by the committee in which he promised “not to permit white persons and colored persons to be served at the same table, nor will I serve a white woman without a white man as her escort at any time of the day.”⁴⁷

The large and famous café in Marshall’s Hotel at 127–129 West Fifty-Third Street was several steps up in scale from Welch’s. Even the Committee of Fourteen acknowledged in 1910 that it might have been the most popular nightspot in town. Proprietor James L. Marshall had fashioned a vibrant black and tan that was at the epicenter of New York’s black bourgeois life, with clientele that made up a virtual Who’s Who of accomplished black Americans: author James Weldon Johnson, musician James Reese Europe, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, among others, along with intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois.

Despite the prestigious patronage and the fact that all licenses and permits were up-to-date, the committee sent waves of agents into Marshall’s. Predictably, reports soon chronicled “orgies and revels” that were supposedly nightly events. Most damningly, investigators spoke of how white women met their “colored lovers” there and of the easy race mixing. By September 1912, enough evidence of disorderly behavior had been gathered that Whitin confronted Marshall with it, leading to an extensive exchange of letters between them. Finally, and in capitulation, Marshall sent Whitin a promissory letter in which he agreed that his main dining rooms would henceforth be “exclusively for colored people” and that two other dining rooms would be converted to one large room for “private dancing and entertainment exclusively for my white patrons only.” Marshall added meekly that he hoped that this met with Whitin’s approval.

W. E. B. Du Bois, although only a patron of Marshall’s, wrote letters to Whitin in which he attacked the committee’s actions in the Marshall’s Hotel matter. He pointed out the gratuitous conflation of race mixing with immorality and condemned the committee’s push toward racial segregation. But to no avail. Although the arrangement forced on Marshall was technically not a violation of New York state statutes, since this was a legal case of “separate but equal,” the spirit of Jim Crow started casting its long, dark shadow over New York’s social, political, and cultural life.⁴⁸

By 1915 the committee’s racist perspective was affecting proprietors and patrons in Harlem, Brooklyn, Coney Island, and throughout Greater New York. An agent noted a sign in a Brooklyn café in July that read: “By request of the Committee of 14—No couples of different color will be served together.” And by later that summer the proprietor was refusing any admission to the backroom by white men. Another black proprietor, Mr. Rickey, told David Oppenheim that Whitin himself often dropped into his place on a Saturday night and if he observed a white man here “he would get mad.” Rickey claimed that Whitin did not mind his café being open late “as long as there are no whites mixed with the blacks.” Frank Nolan, the manager at the Snug Café, informed Oppenheim in March 1916 that the Committee of Fourteen had black investigators working constantly throughout Harlem who reported back to Whitin on “everything that goes on.” According to Nolan, Harlem joints typically received several warning letters a year from Whitin detailing happenings about which no one but the boss and a few waiters should know. Manager James Gould at the Lincoln Hotel in Coney Island was direct about the work of undercover detectives: “they are prejudiced on account of color and hound a black man.”⁴⁹

Even if Whitin did not directly confront race mixing in a black-and-tan establishment, proprietors quaked that he might, for repercussions could include shuttering the place. One result of committee action and intimidation was that reports filed in 1917 are strikingly absent references to race mixing. The issue just seemed to have disappeared. In August 1918, David Oppenheim got to chatting with one of the black entertainers in the Remsen Café, a “colored bar” in Coney Island. He asked if there were any places around that still stayed open all night, implying black and tans—“like in the olden times.” The entertainer noted that the White Cannon Inn in East Rockaway was a lively place open until the early hours, but then added, “it’s a high toned place, white people.” The color line had become a color wall, one not easily breached for decades to come.⁵⁰

Music has always been good for nightspot business. Martin Heilbutt of the Court Square Café told Oppenheim that his place in 1916 used to be slow until he brought in a piano and that business had since picked up. A fundamental problem for Heilbutt and others who kept an instrument in their backrooms, though, was that you could hope for a walk-in patron who would play the instrument or you could hire a musician. The former was free but not a dependable source of quality music-making; the latter was much more a sure thing but required payment out of proceeds. A solution to this conundrum for many proprietors turned out to be electricity. After 1911, more and more saloon owners and managers bought electric player pianos fitted with coin-slot attachments and placed them in their backrooms. And not only pianos, for they also installed slot harps, slot organs, player pianos with mandolin attachments, and at least one “German band orchestrion.”

Much more than a novelty, the purchase of a player piano was a rational business decision. By the mid-1910s, hundreds of the latest ragtime hits could be bought on inexpensive player-piano rolls. Loaded in a player piano, well-played and great-sounding music was available on demand, at any hour, without rest, and did not call for free beer. Furthermore, with the slot attachment, patrons—not the proprietors—paid for the music. And apparently that revenue could be substantial. Trommers, the proprietor of an unassuming joint on Seventh Avenue, told an agent that he paid three hundred dollars per month rent on his place and that the slot instrument in his backroom made that much alone.⁵¹

It seems that dancers had no issue with the devices and simply brought the old dance ethos with them into the new machine-made aural world. A complaint filed by the Committee of Fourteen with the City Magistrates’ Court in July 1912 concerned disorderly behaviors at Selig’s Hotel, where an agent observed dancing to an “automatic piano . . . in a manner suggestive of sexual intercourse.” One female dancer reportedly placed her hand on the crotch of a male dancer and announced, “Hey, girls, feel the hardon this kid has.” Other female dancers cautioned her, “Florence, you better not be dancing with that kid any more; he’ll get such a hardon he will F___ the whole lot of us.” All this to canned music.⁵²

Oppenheim, in August 1916, learned that the backroom saloon at the Arlington Hotel used to hire a band each Saturday night but quit that practice and installed a player organ. With slot-operated instruments more and more common in backroom saloons throughout New York, the employment picture for musicians became progressively grim.

Actions by the Committee of Fourteen did not help. Whitin believed that the backroom was a primary source of the city’s immoral behavior. One of his innovative solutions was to oppose the renewal of a liquor license until the piano was removed, while another simply forced proprietors to clear out instruments on the basis of reported disorderly behavior. Where there had once been music and dancing, there would now be only the sounds of people talking and drinking, a sure way to eliminate a measure of jollity (the step before immorality) from a backroom. And with each piano removed, another job or two was lost.

Once agents marked a place where singing waiters served as the go-betweens for men seeking prostitutes, it became a committee target. Forced to sign promissory notes, proprietors frequently were required to relieve singing waiters of their jobs. And with each promise to the committee that was kept, musician unemployment went up another tick.

The committee held strongly to the requirement that cabarets close by one A.M., severely curtailing the long-standing after-hours partying. Eddie, a singing waiter at the Boulevard Inn, complained that business was rotten because of the enforced closing hour. He claimed that the place now had only three waiters each making about fifty dollars a week, which he compared to the five or six waiters in the past who were all good for ninety to one hundred dollars per week. Edda, the singer at the Village Inn, lost her job because the place could not make enough money before one A.M. to pay her. She became yet another number among the newly unemployed.⁵³

It is not easy to project how many musicians were making livings in the New York City places that the Committee of Fourteen targeted, or to know how many of them were affected by the tightening labor markets for musicians from 1910 to 1917. But gray estimates on the situation in Manhattan alone give some general indication.

images Brothels. Committee agents visited 142 brothels during 1912. Parlor houses of any standing employed a “professor.” Figure that at least one hundred brothel musicians had steady employment in Manhattan at that time.

images Backroom saloons. Kneeland’s 1913 report surveyed and documented 765 backroom saloons (a fraction of the total in Manhattan). Many of these places provided steady employment for at least one musician and up to five or six if there was a cabaret. A workable, conservative average would be two musicians in five hundred such places.

images Dance halls. Agents visited seventy-five public dance halls in 1912, but there were surely more (as many as five hundred according to Belle Israels). Assume that about one hundred operated nightly. Each hall typically had a band of two to three musicians, sometimes more and sometimes only a single piano player. Figure that at least two musicians enjoyed steady employment in each of the one hundred dance halls.

That makes for around thirteen hundred musicians in pre-cabaret, 1912 Manhattan who had regular jobs requiring a firsthand understanding of the relationship between music-making and human sexuality.

For comparison purposes, extrapolation from U.S. census data suggests that there were about 4,088 professional male musicians in 1910 Manhattan. That number included symphony orchestra members, pit players, conductors, composers, songwriters, opera singers, vaudeville, and the stars in Naughty Marietta, but not music teachers. It also included the thirteen hundred musicians in the brothels, saloons, and dance halls. Musicians employed by the vice business then would appear to make up something on the order of thirty percent of the total male musician population of Manhattan. These were the “routine,” mainly anonymous musicians who supported an underground cultural economy based largely on liquor, dancing, and sex, and all were under attack by the Committee of Fourteen by 1913.⁵⁴

Big changes were directly ahead. The 1910 U.S. census had counted fifty-six percent more “musicians and teachers of music” in Greater New York than in 1900, while the general population increased “only” thirty-eight percent. The 1920 census showed that the general population in Greater New York grew by eighteen percent over 1910, but those who claimed employment as musicians increased by less than two percent during that time. The number of musicians in New York City had always before (and after) tracked (or exceeded) population changes. But not during the decade of the 1910s.⁵⁵

The year between the way things had been in New York for decades and the way they were going to be in the future was 1917. Ragtime was getting stale after its two-decade run. Tough dancing was being tamed (or sterilized) by the likes of the slick, well-known dancing team Vernon and Irene Castle. World War I began for Americans and the War Department banned tenderloin districts. In order to avoid pressure from the police and the Committee of Fourteen, private “nightclubs,” such as the Cocoanut Grove, began requiring nominal “membership” fees to enter. For musicians, jobs were hard to get and harder to keep.

And that was also the year that jazz came to New York City and to the world. On January 27, the Original Dixieland Jass Band opened at Reisenweber’s “400 Club” Café at West Fifty-Eighth Street and Eighth Avenue. The New York Clipper greeted it with a one-line review: “Its weird music must be heard to be appreciated.” And quickly appreciated it was. In February, the band recorded for the Victor label “Dixie Jass Band One Step” and, on the B side, “Livery Stable Blues” This became the first jazz record ever released. Wildly successful, it signaled that the Jazz Age had arrived.

Agents surely heard the ODJB but none appear to have commented on its music. Reisenweber’s was a large place, with a dining room, cabaret, and dancing on one floor, while the top floor, called the “Paradise,” held another expansive dining room and entertainment stage. An unnamed agent visited the Paradise on February 1 but said nothing about the music heard there, while James Seaman mentioned only the “Cohen Revue” in his February 5, 1917, report. But jazz was certainly in the air. An agent at the Van Cortlandt Park Inn in August heard a jazz band of black musicians perform (not the ODJB, whose members were white). And an advertising flyer for the famously licentious Greenwich Village “Christmas Costume Party” boasted that at one A.M. “the original Dixieland Jass Band will come down all the way from the Rich Mr. Reisenweber’s in a Fleet of Taxicabs.”

The explosive arrival of jazz in New York has generally been ascribed to developments in the recording industry and to the arrival in the city of “Great Migration” black musicians. A more immediate explanation would be to take note of the legions of black and white musicians long in New York. Already practiced in an energetic, syncopated dance music—ragtime—they had lost easy access to a secure, demimonde musical economy and so necessarily moved into a new and insecure public economy. There they naturally played for dancing, music-loving patrons the noisy music they had long known how to make, but now inflected by a closely related, jazzy new idiom.

Even as consequential as this moment proved to be, as exciting as this music surely was, and as lovingly as it was embraced, in the deep counterpoint could be heard—if one really tried—distant cornet caterwaulings crying out a dirge for a colorful era that had spanned decades. Dancers have never particularly fancied dirges, however. So they called for some champagne, turned to one another, and raised a toast to that past. Then, in keeping with traditions long maintained by the young, they playfully taunted the sour faces of the moralistic, drained their glasses, smiled to the musicians, kicked high, and got on with their superlatively rotten dancing to an enflaming new alleged music.