Everybody’s Doin’ It

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE: LIBERTINES, BLACKFACE, MINSTRELS, AND THE SMALL-POTATOE HUMBUG

2McDowall’s numbers were likely exaggerated, although he claimed they were conservative. For instance, a grand jury convened to produce an analysis of prostitution could count only 1,438 prostitutes in the city. For background on prostitution during this period in New York, see Marilynn Wood Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830–1870 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 39ff. Primary sources include Charges Preferred Against the New-York Female Benevolent Society, and the Auditing Committee, in 1835 and 1836, by J.R. McDowall, in the Sun and Transcript, Answered and Refuted by Himself!! In His Own Journal!!! In the Year 1833 (New York: Osborn & Buckingham, 1836), 50ff and passim; and John R. McDowall, Magdalen Facts (New York: Printed for the Author, 1832), 66–72.

9Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 58–59. Flash, October 31, 1841. True Flash, December 4, 1841. The lives of Dixon’s cohort are covered in Cohen et al., The Flash Press, passim.

Short the subtleties inherent in satire and irony, the cohort developed the marks of a genre with a long reach. In 1845, one of this group, George Wilkes, edited the first issues of the National Police Gazette, which became enormously influential over the decades as a men’s weekly specializing in the risqué, accompanied by engravings (later, photographs) of scantily clad women. It was central to American male fantasy life up to its demise in 1932, six years after the first issue of the National Enquirer.

CHAPTER TWO: ASMODEUS, JUBA, AND BLOOD ON FIRE

19Greenhorn [George Thompson], New-York Life; or, The Mysteries of Upper-Tendom Revealed, by the Author of “Asmodeus,” “Lady’s Garter,” &c. (New York: Charles S. Attwood, ca. 1849), 5. This same book was also published, anonymously, under the title Revelations of Asmodeus, or, Mysteries of Upper Ten-Dom: Being a Spirit Stirring, a Powerful and Felicitous Exposé of the Desolating Mystery, Blighting Miseries, Atrocious Vices and Paralyzing Tragedies, Perpetrated in the Fashionable Pandemoniums of the Great Empire City (New York: C.G. Graham, 1849); to confuse matters yet more, the book is retitled again at the head of chapter 1 as Asmodeus; Or the Mysteries of “Upper Ten-Dom” Revealed. Sharps and Flats; or the Perils of City Life; Being the Adventures of One Who Lived by His Wits (Boston: W. Berry, 1850). The Lame Devil has either been lost or was never published. Jenny Lind Mania (Boston: n.p., 1850). See David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 385, 458–59, and elsewhere for a revealing analysis of Thompson and those of his ilk.

CHAPTER THREE: THE WICKEDEST MAN, THE PUGILIST, AND PRETTY WAITER GIRLS

CHAPTER FOUR: THE BISHOP, COMSTOCK, AND JUVENILE DELINQUENTS

CHAPTER FIVE: DIVES, CORNETS, AND THE CANCAN OUT-PARIS-ED IN NEW YORK

29Walling, Recollections, 485, put the Black-and-Tan at 153 Bleecker Street, but contemporaneous newspapers are consistent in the 151 Bleecker address. According to the New York Times, January 27, 1880, the “Bastile,” a cigar store that ran a multiracial gambling and numbers racket den in the back, was at 153 Bleecker; other newspaper accounts show that illegal gambling was a longstanding tradition at that address. Stevenson (spelled “Stephenson” by Walling) apparently sold the Black-and-Tan in early 1886; New York Sun, September 5, 1886. The building and its previous usage are described in the New York Times, February 26, 1888. New York Herald, December 26, 1870, June 20, 1870. Campbell, Darkness and Daylight, 472–73. The extensive quoted passage, written by journalist Thomas W. Knox, located the Black-and-Tan on Baxter Street, which might mean that he was describing a dive other than the one at 151 Bleecker Street, or that he was mistaken about the address. Walling, Recollections, 485–87.

CHAPTER SIX: RAGTIME, SPIELING, AND LEAPFROGGING FOR THE REVEREND

CHAPTER SEVEN: TOUGH DANCING, WHITE SLAVERY, AND “JUST TELL THEM THAT YOU SAW ME”

CHAPTER EIGHT: C XIV, ALLEGED MUSIC, AND SUPERLATIVELY ROTTEN DANCES

10Investigators were charged primarily to report on prostitution activities and, secondarily, on violations of the laws governing alcohol consumption. Yet details and implications in their reports are always suspect, for it was in the best interest of job security to find disorderly behavior, as it was also in Whitin’s best interest. And they were surely hypersensitive to anything smacking of the disorderly. Actual criminal behavior was one thing (and plenty of that was reported), but kissing, hugging, hands under clothing, bare flesh, lifting dresses to the knees (or above), swearing, women smoking cigarettes, and such, were also enthusiastically reported. Also fashion statements, for short dresses and low bodices signaled immoral behavior to the committee; one agent even had an eye for measurements and reported that one dress was hemmed an unladylike five inches above her shoe tops. Perhaps a prostitute signaled her availability through such things, but perhaps a young woman in question was just enjoying a night on the town and a mild taste of the risqué before heading back late to her parents’ home.

EPILOGUE: REFLECTIONS

1Paducah, Kentucky, Report and Recommendations of the Paducah Vice Commission (Paducah, KY: n.p., 1916), passim. To my knowledge, the only extant copy of the report is among the Lee Joseph Levinger papers at the University of Oregon. Levinger was, in 1916, the rabbi at Temple Israel in Paducah and an original member of the vice commission.

The “Sore Spots” map contained no streets or contextual reference points, lest some sporting man use it as a guide. In addition to the places of public prostitution, the map also marked sixty-seven saloons and twelve pool rooms.

For anecdotal comparison, as a teen-aged boy in 1960s Paducah, I tittered along with my buddies as we drove past 808 Washington Street, with its white picket fence and well-manicured lawn, and honked our car horns to disturb the alleged (and mysterious) goings-on in the house. So far as male teen-aged rumormongering had it, it was the only brothel in town.

6In 1910 Chicago, there were about 275 dance halls, with at least two musicians in each; a bare minimum of 236 “disorderly” saloons and concert saloons, each of which employed on average at least one musician (likely more); and 192 brothels, with a minimum of one professor in each. That formulation yields a very conservative number of 978 professional, fully employed, well-paid musicians who have firsthand understanding of the relationship between music-making and sexuality, or about one of every 2,234 Chicagoans. Figures are taken from The Social Evil in Chicago: A Study of Existing Conditions with Recommendations by the Vice Commission of Chicago (Chicago: Gunthorp-Warren Printing Company, 1911), 71, 109, 185, passim. Since the vice commission investigations only canvassed 445 of the city’s 7,152 saloons (and found 236 disorderly), the actual number of musicians employed in disorderly saloons was undoubtedly significantly higher than the report shows. My rough guess is a ratio of one musician to each two thousand in the general population.

The 1910 census also counted 15,694 female professional musicians. It was unusual (but not impossible) to find a female musician performing in a place that obviously supported prostitution at that time. There were many women musicians in variety, vaudeville, and the theater at large, and I expect that the bulk of the female census figures were employed there.

APPENDIX 3: THE PEOPLE &C. AGAINST WALLACE W. SWEENEY