Vice Dens of the Eastern District

The article at left appeared on the front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of November ^th, 1900. Of course, there was no recent upsurge of vice in the Eastern District, just an upsurge in pious morality. The scolds were on the march and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was hopping on the bandwagon. These periodic eruptions of civic censure had become a prominent feature of life in New York after the Civil War. The apparatus du jour was the Committee of Fifteen, a group of self-appointed guardians public morality.

The Eastern District comprised Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick. Much of the article is taken up by the reporter’s first-person account of visits to various vice dens. What it amounts to is a lot of suspicions about gambling and prostitution. But what he finds just as troubling is the mixing of the races. This is a perfect example of how Southern racists had managed to export their fear and loathing of African-Americans northward.  The Eagle regularly referred to African-American neighborhoods  as “negro colonies.” In fact, African-Americans made up barely 1% of Brooklyn’s population in 1900, and the percentage had actually fallen over the previous decade.

While there was plenty of gambling and prostitution going on, the author seems peculiarly inept at finding any proof of it. The various vigilante committees and their investigators generally did a better job. But for them, too, racism, xenophobia, and classism featured large. This is well documented by Jennifer Fronc in her book New York Undercover.

The politicians and police were generally forced to take up the mantle for a time. But they had learned how to set the public against the scolds. They used what’s now called triangulation to appear as the reasonable center between the extremes of wantonness and puritanism.  In the spring of 1901, the police began strictly enforcing the widely unpopular state law against the selling of liquor on the Sabbath. This law had a number of loopholes and enforcement had typically been lax. But instead of targeting the seedy Raines Law hotels, the police took on the German dance halls of Williamsburg. These places catered to middle-class families at a time when the weekend lasted from Saturday evening until Monday morning. Saturday night was the one night the average person could have some fun and not be facing a 10- to 12-hour workday the next morning. Though  the halls were closed Sunday, where they erred was in staying open past midnight on Saturday. So the police clamped down and turned another group of upright citizens against the crusaders.

The hypocrisy is best summed up by an episode involving Michael Minden. Minden owned a variety of hotels and saloons, and there is little doubt gambling was an important part of his business. His hotel at the top end of Broadway in Williamsburg was raided. No one was found to be actively gambling, almost certainly because he’d been tipped off by a friendly precinct captain. However, a roulette wheel and some other bits of gambling gear were seized. Without any actual evidence of gambling, the case against him was dismissed. Then, a while later, Minden’s lawyer went to court and successfully sued for the return of his roulette wheel.

Mr. Dooley

It's difficult imagining anything like the phenomenon of Mr. Dooley occurring today. This philosophizing Irish saloon owner was the creation of Finley Peter Dunne, a humorist and Chicago newspaper editor. In Dunne's columns, Dooley gave his interpretation of the events of the day and the concerns of the nation. The columns, written in the vernacular of a working class Irish, originally focused on Chicago. But Dooley became nationally syndicated in 1898 and by the end of the Spanish-American War had achieved immense popularity.

When I first read these pieces, I was put off by the silly (and seemingly forced) vernacular. It sounds more like the cliche Irish of a Pat and Mike routine than anything you'd be likely to hear in a saloon. And many of the topics are esoteric, or too specific to the time and place.

The pieces I appreciate the most are usually on topics I've already read about. For instance, "The Crusade against Vice" captures succinctly the periodic anti-vice campaigns. These would erupt with great fanfare, and much apparent support. Only to peter out as the majority tired of the ever-wider range of acts which needed to be eradicated.

Here is how Dooley puts it:

"As a people, Hinnissy, we're th' greatest crusaders that iyer was-—f'r a short distance. Ou a quarther mile thrack we can crusade at a rate that wud make Hogan's frind, Godfrey th' Bullion look like a crab. But th' throuble is th' crusade don't last afther th' firat sprint. Th' crusaders drops out iv th' procission to take a dhrink or put a little money on th' ace an' be th' time th' end iv th' line iv march is reached th' boss crusader is alone in th' job an' his former followers is hurlin' bricks at him fr'm th' windows iv policy shops. Th' boss crusader always gets th' double cross. If I wanted to sind me good name down to th' ginerations with Cap. Kidd an' Jesse James I'd lead a movement fr th' suppression iv vice. I wud so."

But  I think the best of the pieces I've read is "The Negro Problem". Dunne captures beautifully the hypocrisy of the position of most Northerners: African-Americans needed to accept that they'd be excluded from most employment and social opportunities, and yet couldn't expect be excused for their failure to measure up to their neighbors.

Mr. Hennessy, the only customer who ever seems to visit Dooley's saloon, asks him what will become of the negro:

"Well," said Mr. Dooley, "he'll ayther have to go to th' north an' be a subjick race, or stay in th' south an' be an objick lesson. 'Tis a har-rd time he'll have, annyhow, I'm not sure that I'd not as lave be gently lynched in Mississippi as baten to death in New York. If I was a black man, I'd choose th' cotton belt in prifrince to th' belt on th' neck fr'm th' polisman's club. I wud so."

I assume the reason Dooley only ever had the one customer was all this spewing of his opinions. If you've spent any time in a bar, you know any bartender worth his salt keeps his opinions to himself, unless it's to voice his agreement with yours.

Many of the 700+ Dooley pieces were assembled into bound volumes and these are available online, both at the Hathi Trust and at Archive.org. There's also a paperback collection that was put out by Dover a while back, Mr. Dooley on Ivrything and Ivrybody.

Losing ground: African-Americans in the North, 1890-1920

As most Americans are aware, the history of civil rights for African-Americans has been anything but a straight continuum. In The Philadelphia Negro (1900), W.E.B. Du Bois recounts how in 1837 African-Americans in Pennsylvania were disenfranchised when the word "white" was inserted in language that qualified voters. This came after African-Americans had enjoyed the right to vote for 47 years. And during the Civil War, while slaves were being freed in the South, African-Americans were being hunted down by mobs in New York.

For African-Americans, the years 1890-1920 were a sort of dark age. In the South, this was a period of continual reverses. They were being disenfranchised through various laws requiring poll taxes, literacy tests, etc. Then in 1896 came Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision that ruled the doctrine of separate but equal as constitutional.

What surprised me was how a similar change was occurring in the North. African-Americans weren't losing the right to vote, but they were losing ground as economic and social barriers seemed to increase. I thought this animosity might have been due to friction as greater numbers of African-Americans migrated from the South. But while a continual stream of African-Americans moved North in the 19th Century, an even greater number of immigrants arrived. The proportion of African-Americans in most northern cities either fell or was stable between 1870 and 1900. Du Bois shows that for Philadelphia, their proportion peaked in 1810.

Increasingly, blacks in the North were relegated to certain jobs. For men, porters, janitors, waiters,  and common laborers. And for women, work as domestics, laundresses, and seamstresses. And neighborhoods became increasingly segregated.

The best explanation I've read for what was occurring is presented by David Blight in his Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory. Which the publisher describes as "a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War." As the nobility of the white South, if not it's cause, became increasingly accepted by those in the North, African-Americans became seen as an impediment to reconciliation. And Southern attitudes were increasingly accepted in the North.

A particularly apt example of this is recounted by Jennifer Fronc in her book, New York Undercover. She writes about the Committee of Fourteen and how it worked to force the segregation of New York saloons by depicting race mixing as immoral. This was something new, a Southern white code being enforced by paternalistic Northerners.

Blight recounts how in 1913, Woodrow Wilson's administration initiated policies of segregation within Federal departments. Two years later, the immensely successful The Birth of a Nation was released. The film's sympathetic depiction of the Ku Klux Klan became generally accepted and the Klan became resurgent, in North as well as the South. In the 1920s, membership grew to four million and the Klan showed its strength with a march down Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Philadelphia Negro does an excellent job of depicting the lives of Philadelphia's African-Americans in 1900, as well as giving a historical context. It is a sociological study done with an academic rigor unusual for the time. More personal depictions can be found among the pieces in The life stories of undistinguished Americans as told by themselves.  For instance, "A Northern Negro's Autobiography"  is the story of an African-American woman born and raised in an Upstate New York village and her experiences after moving to a Northern city and traveling in the South. She tells of the slights she herself suffered and also about her efforts to find employment for qualified African-Americans. Mr. Dooley, the comic commentator, also makes some cogent observations.

What for most Americans was a period of optimism fulfilled, was for African-Americans just the opposite.

A day at the races under the Percy-Gray Law

To understand how horse racing was conducted in New York in 1900, you first should know that the state constitution of 1895 forbade "pool selling, bookmaking, or any other kind of gambling". Sounds pretty unequivocal, doesn't it?



And yet, the photo at left illustrates a betting pavilion at a New York track. Kings Views of Brooklyn 1905 identifies it as being at Sheepshead Bay (I've seen the same photo identified as being at Gravesend.)

In fact, the period 1895-1908 was one of the golden ages for New York horse racing, and on-track betting. This amazing hypocrisy was due to the Percy-Gray Law, passed by legislature in 1895. How it could create a loophole large enough to allow flagrant gambling when the state constitution unequivocally forbade it was a mystery that required some research.

 The Percy-Gray Law described itself as "an act for the incorporation of associations for the improvement of the breed of horses and to regulate the same; and to establish a State racing commission." It was passed at the behest of racing interests gave the established jockey clubs a monopoly on racing.

Reading the first 16 sections, it's hard to see how this law allowed what's going on in the photo above. For instance, section 9 states that race track owners "shall cause to be properly posted in conspicuous positions upon the grounds whereon such races are held, printed notices or placards in large and legible type, which notices or placards shall be to the effect that all disorderly conduct, pool-selling, book-making or any other kind of gambling is prohibited."

Even a first reading of section 17 doesn't offer much illumination.

§ 17. Any person who, upon any race-course authorized by or entitled to the benefits of this act, shall make or record, directly or indirectly, any bet or wager on the result of any trial or contest of speed or power of endurance of horses taking place upon such race-course, shall forfeit the value of any money or property so wagered, received or held by him, to be recovered in a civil action by the person or persons with whom such wager is made, or by whom such money or property is deposited. This penalty is exclusive of all other penalties prescribed by law for the acts in this section specified, except in case of the exchange, delivery or transfer of a record, registry, memorandum, token, paper, or document of any kind whatever as evidence of any, such bet or wager, or the subscribing by name, initials or otherwise, of any record, registry or memorandum in the possession of another person of a bet or wager, intended to be retained by such other person or any other person as evidence of such bet or wager.

The secret lies in the fact that this was interpreted as meaning that the sole penalty for accepting a bet at a race course was forfeiture through civil action. The key bit being, "[t]his penalty is exclusive of all other penalties prescribed by law for the acts in this section specified." Thus criminal penalties were negated, provided no record of the bet was passed between parties. And as far as I can tell, there were no civil actions taken under the law, probably because there was no record of the bet having been made.

I spent a fair amount of time trying to establish just what the mechanics of betting under this bizarre regime. Ironically, one of the few descriptions I've found comes from the scolds themselves. The World's Work published an article in 1906, "Horse-Racing and the Public", which describes a visit to Gravesend.

Picking up information from that and similar articles, and various newspaper articles, I believe the way the bookies avoided passing a record of the bet is that the bettor gave the bookie his entrance ticket along with the wager. The bookie recorded the bet under the ticket stub number, then gave the bettor back the ticket, which did not itself have a record of the bet.

It all ended when the scolds took over the statehouse and passed the Hart–Agnew Law 1908. This killed the loophole and the horse racing courses died a not-so-slow death. The course at Brighton Beach moved on to auto racing for a period.