Rev. Parkhurst Goes Slumming

Rev. Parkhurst Goes Slumming:

The Birth of Modern Sexuality

by David Rosen

Why, I wouldn't stay in that house for all the money in the world. Rev. Charles Parkhurst

Slumming morality, temperance and good- government. On March 5, 1892, three sloppily attired but unmistakable gentlemen In 1894, Gardner published a popular visited the Golden Rule Pleasure Club, tell-all, The Doctor and the Devil, Or, a unique sex “resort” on West 3rd The Mid-Night Adventures of Dr. Street, near Greenwich Village’s Parkhurst, about his work uncovering Washington Square Park. Coming the sins of the city. Among the two- through a basement entrance, “Scotch dozen vice dens the three visited, none Ann," “a pretty woman, tall, black- compared to the Golden Rule. "The haired and of a graceful form,” greeted basement,” Gardner recalled, “was our men-about-town.1 She introduced fitted up into little rooms, by means of them to a world of immoral cheap partitions, which ran to the top debauchery that would scandalize the of the ceiling from the floor.” He city.* described what greeted the upstanding citizens: “Each The three visitors were men room contained a table and on a mission, out to a couple of chairs for the discover the true nature of use of customers of the vice and corruption defiling vile den.” The resort’s Gotham. The explorers of residents drew his the modern underworld, of attention. “In each room Dante’s fin de siècle sat a youth, whose face secularized hell, were the was painted, eyebrows Rev. Dr. Charles Parkhurst, blackened, and whose airs the pastor of the Madison were those of a young Square Presbyterian Church and head girl,” he observed. “Each person of the Society for Prevention of Crime talked in a high falsetto voice, and (SPC); John Langdon Erving, one of called the others by women's names.” Parkhurst’s zealous, young The Revered was appalled. parishioners, nicked-named “Sunbeam” for his innocence, a Van Parkhurst was mortified to learn that Rensselaer in his lineage and a clerk at the "female" residents were actually the “high-tech” Mexican Telegraphy young males wearing dresses, with Company; and Charles Gardner, a painted faces, blackened eyebrows and private investigator hired for his speaking in high-pitched voices to special knowledge of the city’s sound like girls. Gardner, a far more underworld. The three undertook their traveled man-of-the-world then the research through the auspices of SPC, Reverend, explained what was playing a citizens group promoting sexual out before their gaze. As he reported: "The Doctor instantly turned on his heel and fled from the house at top

* speed. ‘Why, I wouldn't stay in that Photo: Library of Congress Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality house,' he gasped, ‘for all the money legal and the adult sex industry is in the world.'”2 estimated to be a $50 billion business.

In the 1890s, Parkhurst, along with Parkhurst’s battle against vice and other upstanding citizens, felt that corruption signaled a shift in the traditional city life was under attack. nation’s belief system, the transition He insisted that the threat came from from “suasion” to “regulation.” He, an apparent increase in drinking, along with most leading 19th century gambling and prostitution festering in moralists, long believed that the power the city’s over-crowded immigrant of moral injunction -- of being able to slums and enjoyed by men of means. convince someone to be a better, God- More troubling, he argued that the fearing person -- could change a threat was facilitated by the pay-to- person’s unacceptable behavior. This play system of corruption that belief was giving way to one in which lubricated city life, permeating Christian conservatives sought to use municipal government and the police. the power of the state to enforce moral order, whether involving The Reverend’s two-week slumming unacceptable practices or expressions. escapade into the city’s underworld Parkhurst’s campaign was, became an almost legendary tale, metaphorically speaking, a finger-in- retold by many authors. 3 It was a the-dike effort to forestall the “tipping point” in the political struggle inevitable, the emergence of the between Tammany Democrats and modern, 20th-century marketplace- insurgent progressives, leading to the mediated sexual practices. This new establishment of the Lexow sexual culture would transform New Committee, a state commission York and, in time, become the new investigating police corruption, and normal. culminated in the 1894 election of William Strong as mayor. Virtue tested

Parkhurst and his fellow reformers won The Golden Rule was but one of the key battles but lost the great morality two-dozen venues of vice Parkhurst war; they succeed politically, but failed and his associates visited during their socially. They helped shape the late-night explorations into Gotham’s nation’s formal moral order for underworld. He ventured into up-scale decades: in 1910, their call for sexual bordellos and down-market boarding- abstinence helped secure passage of house brothels as well as popular the Mann Act barring interstate sex concert saloons and seedy opium dens. trafficking; in 1919, their temperance The undertaking was, as one campaign culminated in the adoption commentator later described it, a of the 18th Amendment (it was “journey into the hell of New York’s repealed in 1933); and, in 1920, they nocturnal depravity.”4 Parkhurst was a contributed to the adoption of the 19th man on more then a mission of Amendment granting women the right discovery; it was a mission of to vote. Nevertheless, the U.S. is no redemption, his own. longer the country it was during fin de siècle era; the Christian right’s culture On Sunday, February 14, 1892, wars, while repressive in terms of a Parkhurst gave a sermon at his woman’s reproductive rights, has lost Madison Square Church assailing the most its moral authority as abortion widespread proliferation of vice remains legal, homosexual marriage is throughout the city and the complicity of the city government in the sin

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality trade. He decried the moral state of the city: "...New York [is] a very hot Whatever the count, vice dens spread bed of knavery, debauchery, and throughout Manhattan’s “red-light bestiality... [where] there is not a districts.”* Many were clustered young man so noble, nor a young girl “uptown” in the Tenderloin district, so pure, as not to be in a degree from Madison Square Park on 23rd infected by the fetid contamination."5 Street and Fifth Avenue to 48th Street The sermon led to Parkhurst’s gravest between Fifth and Ninth Avenues. professional and personal humiliation. Others were located “downtown,” on the West side in today’s SoHo and The Reverend’s sermon was a Greenwich Village as well as on the sensation, reprinted and discussed East Side along the Bowery to Houston throughout the city. District Attorney Street and into the Lower East Side. De Lancey Nicholl ordered him to Concert saloons were a leading appear before a Grand Jury on the 28th attraction, offering cheap beer and a and, at the hearing, he forced the good time, welcoming all male comers. Reverend to admit that his accusations Pool halls, gambling dens, tattoo were based not on first-hand, personal parlors, basement dives and rat pits experience but on newspaper were common. Brothels, backrooms accounts. On March 1st, the Grand and private rooms, offered other Jury ruled against Parkhurst. He was pleasures. Dance halls welcomed censured and mocked out of the working-class single men and women courtroom; Joseph Pulitzer’s World as well as couples out for a good time. denounced him for “bearing false And theatres offered live witness.” Parkhurst was shamed and entertainment, some of it scandalous, vowed revenge.6 as well as the notorious 3rd tier reserved for prostitutes. Gotham had Many respectable New Yorkers become Gomorrah on the Hudson. believed they lived in a wicked city. In the 1890s, as one historian argues, The virtuous Rev. Parkhurst was one “New York reigned as the vice capital of those who found the emerging of the United States.” Estimates vary urban culture unacceptable, a threat to as to the scale of the vice trade. traditional moral order. At 50 years, James McCabe, author of the 1881 he was a handsome, athletic reformer, study, New York by Sunlight and an Amherst graduate who had studied Gaslight, claims that there were 600 in Europe and knew Latin and Greek. houses of prostitution, 900 In the sermon on February 14th, he “assignation houses” (i.e., hourly went further than most moralists who brothels) and 5,000 professional simply railed against the ills of vice. prostitutes in the city. Another source He linked what he believed was the speculates that by the ‘90s 8,000 wide-scale presence of immorality to saloons, hundreds of hotels, low-life the Tammany political machine and dives and illegal casinos operated in the Democratic Party. He denounced the city. The Mail and Express, a Mayor Hugh Grant, the District leading anti-Tammany paper, reported Attorney and the police as part of an that 600 saloons, hundred of brothels, 250 faro banks and 720 policy games * The term “red light” is apparently derived from did business in Manhattan. Parkhurst the early days of prostitution in Kansas City estimated that, in ’92, hundreds of when a railroad brakeman posted a red light brothels operated and an estimated outside a whorehouse while he was engaged 30,000 prostitutes plied their trade in inside. [Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: 7 Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore: the city. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 105.

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality

“official and administrative criminality Lincoln. On the other side were the that is filthifying our entire municipal insurgents, recently arrived Tammany life, making New York a very hotbed of Democrats, Whitman’s “multitude,” knavery, debauchery and bestiality.” mostly Irish Catholics but increasingly He urged a campaign to cleanup the Jews, Italian Catholics, African- city’s moral and political corruption. Americans and Chinese. This While incensed by immoral vices, he contestation, in one form or another, was most deeply offended by shaped the city over the next century. municipal corruption, especially by the police.8 Among those attending the Reverend’s Valentine’s Day anti-vice sermon was Parkhurst moved to Gotham from the aging but ever-clever Thomas Lenox, MA, in 1880 to become minister Collier Platt, the “boss” of the state of the Madison Square Church. Over Republicans. He knew a good story the following decade, he became when he heard it and this one was a increasingly outspoken condemning great poke in the Tammany eye. vice and corruption. In the winter of Come Monday morning, Parkhurst’s ’86, he made his first undercover sermon was a lead story the city’s expedition into the city’s slums, leading dailies, including the Herald, visiting Castle Garden, Water Street Sun, Times, Tribune and World. It and the Bowery. Writing in 1895, one rocked the city. of the Reverend’s earliest biographers, Elias Nason and J. Frank Beale, report And now Parkhurst was in disgrace. that he found “almost the entire Armed with the determination of a true vicinity of New York Harbor was a believer, he knew that to counter the pest-hole of ribaldry, debauchery, scorn inflicted on him, he needed obscenity, and shame.” 9 In October firsthand evidence of vice and ‘90, he gave a sermon railing against corruption. It was the only way to Tammany’s control over the city counter the police and the Tammany government, quoting the 12th Psalm, machine. To discover such evidence “The wicked walk on every side when he had to venture into the city’s heart the vilest men are exalted.” 10 In a of darkness, the other Gotham – and speech before the Temperance he had to do so in a formal, systematic Congress held on Staten Island the manner. Parkhurst drew inspiration following August, he called for from earlier underworld vice explorers. Protestants and Catholics to “earnestly unite to secure legal restrictions on the In 1847, the Presbyterian minster, saloon.”11 Parkhurst joined the PSC in Rev. Samuel Irenaus Prime, ventured 1890 and, a year later, was asked to into the Five Points and was greeted assume the group’s leadership by “a motley multitude of men and following the death of its founder, the women, yellow and white, black and Presbyterian minister, Howard Crosby. dingy, old and young, ... .” He found “a set of male and female Bacchanals Many who attended Parkhurst’s dancing to the tambourine and fiddle; sermons knew that he was a cat’s paw giggling and laughing in a style in a bigger political gambit playing out peculiar to the remote descendants of in Gotham. Since the late-1840s, the Ham, and making ‘night hideous’ with city had witnessed repeated jousting their lascivious orgies.” 12 In 1878, bouts between two contesting social Anthony Comstock, the founder of the forces. On one side were the old-line New York Society for the Suppression Republicans, the city’s gentry, mostly of Vice (NYSSV), went undercover to Protestants; they were the party of expose scandalous sex resorts like

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality

Elizabeth Williams’ brothel on Greene Street and another venue featuring a Like a master theatre director, “French Act.” At Williams’ brothel, Gardner gave Parkhurst and young Comstock paid $5 to watch three Erving, two very respectable vice women perform a provocative number, tourists, the time of their lives – and the “Busy Fleas,” in which they charged only $6 a night, plus searched for fleas in their respective expenses. Upon first meeting with the underclothes, then undressed and had twosome, Gardner was stupefied: “I oral sex which a piano player provided screamed almost with laughter.” musical accompaniment.13 Also in the Looking at the Reverend, he admitted, late-‘70s, the Rev. Henry Ward “ … good gracious, sir, clergyman Beecher and the Rev. Thomas De Witt stands out all over you. It sticks out Talmage, separately, went slumming ten feet. Why, you couldn't get into a as part of their efforts to uncover the Bowery lodging house the way you are city’s mysteries; their adventures dressed." Many “slummers” were captured significant press attention. rebuffed for being do-gooders from the Talmage, writing on vice in his Salvation Army or another moralist massive lamentation, The Masque Torn group. Gardner outfitted his Off (1879), admitted, “I went as a underworld explorers with the physician goes into a small-pox appropriate costumes. He dressed hospital, or a fever lazaretto [i.e., Parkhurst in black-and-white checked quarantine station for maritime pants, a dirty shirt and a necktie cut travellers], to see what practical and from a red-flannel shirt, “a double- useful information I might get.” He breasted reefer jacket” and an old ventured into “the region where slouch hat. He touched up young gambling and crime and death hold Erving with a red tie and a pair of high carnival. When I speak of houses rubber boots. He then artfully of dissipation, I do not refer to one sin, messed-up their severely cropped hair or five sins, but to all sins.” Digging so they would be acceptable as just deeper, he fretted, “As I moved part of the ordinary trade prowling the through this place I said, ‘This is the city’s underworld. Gardner positioned home of lost souls. It was a Dante's Parkhurst as an out-of-town relative, Inferno; nothing to stir the mirth, but enabling the Revered to discover many things to fill the eyes with tears evidence proving that Gotham was, of pity.’”14 indeed, the new Babylon. His total fee for services rendered was $224; about Being a modern man, Rev. Parkhurst $6,080 in 2014 dollars.16 knew that the city’s underworld of sin was a foreign territory, a region he Wicked city really knew little about; it was a world apart. He also knew that others, Parkhurst’s underground odyssey particularly men (and some women) of culminated at the Golden Rule Pleasure the respectable classes, made regular Club, but started at the East River excursions into the underworld. He waterfront near the Brooklyn Bridge. needed an experienced guide. To The three disguised explorers took the meet this need, he was advised to 3rd Avenue Elevated Railway (the “El”) enlist the services of an expert, downtown from near Madison Square Charles Gardner, a highly Park to Franklin Square, descending recommended private detective who into one of the city’s most notorious had worked the previous five years for neighborhoods, Cherry Hill. It was E. T. Gerry’s Society for the Prevention once a prosperous area where John of Cruelty to Children (SPCC).15 Hancock and George Washington,

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality while the nation’s first president, had first explored the downtown “pleasure lived. A century later, the Hill was a districts,” stopping at the East River down-on-its-heals slum with garbage Hotel at Water Street and Catharine clogging the streets and an increasing Slip. It was a venue notorious for the number of poor Eastern-European "stalls" where male customers were Jewish and Italian Catholic residents. encouraged to drink “until senses gave It was part of the notorious 4th Ward, way. Then they were at liberty to fall an old Irish enclave that had been down on the filthy floor and sleep their home to the young William Marcy intoxication off.”20 The troupe visited Tweed, Tammany’s legendary “Boss.” two cheap sleeping spaces – or “dead houses” -- at 219 and 223 Park Row. The trio’s first stop was Tom “Torn” At 219, men paid 10-cents to crash Summers’ watering hole at 33 Cherry the night; at 223, guest who bought a Street that sold, in Gardner’s words, 5-cent whiskey after midnight could “embalming fluid … as whiskey.” sleep on the floor until morning. 21 Entering the saloon, the tourists found According to Gardner, the Reverend themselves among a rowdy crowd of was a hard man to please and kept pool players and derelicts, everyone demanding more: “Show me drinking and smoking. 17 Wandering something worse.” Gardner reflected, through the neighborhood, local “He really went at his slumming work streetwalkers drew them into a dive at as if his heart was in his tour.”22 342 Water Street for more drinks and solicitations. “On each chair sat Upping the ante, Gardner took his something that originally had been a charges to the city worst slum, the woman,” Gardner recounted. “That is, Five Points, today’s Chinatown. They we supposed so, as each gaunt figure visited an opium den in the back room wore an ancient ‘Mother Hubbard’ of a restaurant on Doyers Street run [outfit].” The Reverend and his by Lee Bing. Parkhurst informed his compatriots, after chatting with the fellow travelers, "It has been said that barkeep and downing some rotgut there are 30,000 men and women in whiskey, moved on.18 New York, who are slaves to the opium habit.” Rugs and pillows were Their next stop was Jim Jensen’s dance scattered around the room with many hall at 96 Cherry Street where an old people laying around, motionless, in a black man played an accordion. A stupor. He was particularly struck by dozen couples drank, smoked and the presence of a mixed-race family -- danced. The clientele included sailors, a Chinese man, a “young, black-haired laborers, thieves, gamblers and “the and quite pre-possessing” white class of wretches that live upon the woman and their 8-year-old child -- horrible earnings of the women who who were “drowned in the fumes of frequent the resort … some of them the drug ….” Without moral were almost pretty in the bold, judgment, Gardner noted, “ … the physical prettiness of an abandoned family was enjoying an evening of female.” Parkhurst bought a drink for pleasure, just as you would take your a “200 pound” hooker named Baby wife and boy to a theatre.” who invited him home with her, but he graciously declined.19 The adventurers toured Little Italy, a growing district of poor Italian Catholic Over the next two weeks the vice immigrants. “All the buildings are explorers visited numerous concert rickety, low, dirty and hideous in their saloons, drinking dives and houses of second-hand style of architecture,” ill repute throughout the city. They Gardner observed. “They are filled

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality from cellar to roof with people. Every furnished the evening’s musical inch of a room is used by a tenant. accompaniment. Even the halls are used nightly as sleeping places.” The district was Upon paying the required fee, the marked by such now all-but-forgotten dancers promptly disrobed, leaving on passageways as the Bottle Alley and only their garters and stockings. They the Bandit’s Roost inside the Mulberry performed a provocative can-can that Bend at 59½ Mulberry Street. included the scandalous “leapfrog.” Neither Parkhurst nor his young The threesome visited a popular “tight congregant, “Sunbeam,” could be house” on Bayard Street, just off the enticed to dance. Gardner took up the Bowery. It had red shades over the challenge. Joining the naked women front door transom and “bold-faced, in the center of the room, he dutifully painted women hung out of the played his part: “I was the frog and windows and chirped merrily as the others jumped over me,” he later crickets to passers-by made the house wrote. “The Doctor sat in the corner belie its looks,” Gardner noted.23 He with an unmoved face through it all, was surprised to find on the walls watching us and slowly sipping at a “several risqué photographs” depicting glass of beer.” Hattie questioned the female residents. They wore Gardner as to the gentleman’s nothing but “union suits,” neck-to-toe identity. “I told her that he was ‘from tights, showing off their nature- the West,’ and was a ‘gay boy.’” endowed finery. According to Hattie toyed with the dignified visitor, Gardner, it was a favorite among U.S. trying to pull the Reverend’s whiskers, soldiers stationed at nearby Fort but Parkhurst rebuffed her entreats Hamilton in Brooklyn. Wandering and she left him alone for the rest of along Bleecker Street, only a couple the evening.24 blocks from Police Headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street, they were solicited by Blushing but determined, the at least 50 streetwalkers. adventurers pushed on to one of their final stops, a number of disorderly The vice explorers also visited a good houses located near the Golden Rule in number of parlor-houses, brothels and the Village. The area was popularly bordellos celebrating heterosexual known as “Frenchtown” and ran along intimacies in the Tenderloin district, Wooster and Greene Streets between just a few blocks from Parkhurst’s 3rd and 4th Streets. One was at 86 home. Around 11:30 pm on March West 3rd Street and run by Annie 11th, the wanderers visited Hattie Lewis. Another was at 42 West 4th Adams' establishment, located at 29 Street and run by Maria Andrea. and 31 West 27th Street. Knocking on Approaching Andrea’s brothel, the trio the bawdyhouse’s door, the trio was was surprised to find a policeman ushered in by an African-American standing on the steps leading into the female attendant. Adams was “a house. Nonplused, a house girl scraggy, thin, little woman, with hay- leaning out of an upper-floor window colored hair and colorless light eyes” whistled them in. Gardner, ever and, after being questioned as to the observant, noted: “Each girl was entertainment offered, she proposed dressed in the usual garb of a Mother that for $15 ($385 in 2015 dollars), Hubbard gown, so fashionable in the five female performers would put on a circles we were in.” Frenchtown “dance of nature.” An old piano bordellos were renown for hosting player, wearing a blindfold and dubbed “French circuses,” offering a sex act the “Professor,” sat in the parlor and that was then considered the worst

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality sexual perversion, oral sex. And the substantiated by two unimpeachable mistresses charged dearly for their witnesses, Erving and Gardner. He services, often double for conventional railed against not only the saloons, intercourse. Leaving the brothel, brothels and gambling houses that Gardner asked the Reverend what he defiled the city, but the corruption and thought of the show. “Think of it!,” complicity of the police and city Parkhurst fumed, “It was the most officials, often tied to the Tammany brutal, most horrible exhibition that I machine, in the illicit trades. ever saw in my life!” Erving and one of Gardner’s detectives visited 25 The Reverend’s exposé led to not only additional brothels.25 an increase in middle-class outrage over vice in the city, but a growing Moral corruption acknowledgement that those in power, especially the Tammany-controlled On March 13th, the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst police force, were part of the problem. again stood before his Madison Square In a clever move to dissipate mounting congregation offering a sermon anti-Tammany fervor, the District attacking vice and corruption. He Attorney had the Grand Jury revealed how, during the previous few investigate three police captains for weeks, he had wandered the streets of bribery and corruption. It found Sodom in disguise to collect first-hand “circumstances and testimony offered proof of widespread immorality. He have tended to show financial proclaimed: consideration in some cases for lax administration.”27 The police launched Many a long, dismal, heart-sickening night, a series of cleanup raids, including one in company with two trusted friends, have by the Mercer Street Precinct that I spent since I spoke on this matter before, resulted in the arrest of 246 going down into the disgusting depths of streetwalkers, raids of 20 brothels this Tammany-debauched town; and it is (“houses of ill fame”), closing 25 rotten with a rottenness that is unspeakable and undescribable, and a saloons (of the 170 in the precinct) rottenness that would be absolutely and the braking-up two gambling impossible except by the connivance not to houses. Both Hattie Adams and Maria say the purchased sympathy, of the men Andrea were arrested for operating whose one obligation before God, men, houses of ill repute; they were tried, their own consciences, is to shield virtue convicted, fined and sentenced to and make vice difficult. terms at the Blackwell's Island workhouse. (Parkhurst and Erving He blamed “slimy, oozy, soil of testified at both trials.) The police also Tammany Hall” for creating in New closed down other brothels on one of York the “dirtiest, crookedest, and the coldest, snowy nights of the year ugliest lot of men ever combined in forcing many women-of-the-night onto semi-military array outside of Japan bitter-cold streets.28 and Turkey.” He denounced Mayor Grant and his political colleagues as "a Power is never kind to those who stick lying, perjured, rum-soaked, and a thumb in its eye. Parkhurst’s libidinous lot" of "polluted harpies.”26 associate, good-time Charlie Gardner, was an unexpected casualty in the Parkhurst’s revelations again rocked police’s effort to cleanse the city of the city. And again, District Attorney corruption. In an act of police Nicholl called him before the Grand retaliation, he was busted for Jury. This time he was armed with attempted blackmail. 29 He was first-person proof, evidence convicted but the verdict was later set-

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality aside on appeal. Rev. Talmage dubbed the area “Satan’s Circus” and the name stuck.32 Parkhurst recognized that the prostitute busts were just another ploy The Tenderloin was home to some of in Tammany’s shell game. He knew the city’s finest restaurants -- the Fifth that Tammany and the police were Avenue Hotel, the Hoffman House and sacrificing a few hookers so that they Delmonico’s -- as well as Madison could preserve their 20 percent Square Garden and the Ladies Mile, kickback from the illicit vice trade. To the fashion district. Satan’s Circus was up the ante, the Reverend, later in also home to innumerable saloons and 1892, pulled together 40 religious and sexual resorts. Among the leading civic groups to establish the City dance halls were the Tivoli (West 35th Vigilance League (CVL), an Street near Broadway), the Bohemia organization dedicated to fighting vice. (West 29h Street), Star and Garter It was a spinoff from the SPC and (West 30th Street and Sixth Ave.) and consisted mostly of "young men of Sailor’s Hall (on 30th Street) as well as more earnest temper." Members were Heart of Maryland, the Broadway required to conduct surveys of their Gardens, Stag Café, Paddy Pig’s, Pig’s neighborhoods and identify gambling Head, White Elephant and the Chelsea. parlors, brothels, illegal saloons and Buckingham Palace, on West 27th abortionists. They sought to Street, was “the handsomest dance determine “the number of customers house in the city.” It was a two-story each location drew.”30 building, “gaudily decorated,” with an orchestra performing and a balcony Parkhurst’s campaign fused two moral running along the 2nd floor with tables concerns -- vice and corruption – into and chairs and where anything went. a single, highly-charged political issue, “The women present are the inmates one with significant consequences. His of the neighboring houses of ill-fame revelations – and a well-organized and street walkers,” reported McCabe. political campaign -- led to the creation Another popular venue was the Cairo, of a state commission, headed by located at 36 West 39th Street, Senator Clarence, to investigate police decorated in an exotic “Turkish” style corruption. His efforts also contributed and where sexual solicitation was to the election of a reform, “Fusion” common. Another unique attraction candidate, William Strong, as mayor in was the French Madam’s on West 30th 1894, and to the appointment of Street just off Sixth Avenue, famous Theodore Roosevelt in ’95 as president for its dancing girls who performed a of the police commission. The wars nude can-can dance in a private against vice and corruption was on.31 cubicle for a $1 a show – other exotic performances were charged Another city accordingly. It was also home to innumerable sexual resorts, including While Parkhurst ranted from his pulpit, the White Elephant and the Cremorne. vice flourished throughout the city, The Cremorne, located in a basement including very near his home and on West 32nd Street, was named after church. He lived at 133 East 35th a legendary London nightspot and Street; his church was at Madison and offered very cheap drinks; it was 24th Street. He was in walking dubbed, “one of the bawdiest resorts distance from what was popularly in the Tenderloin.”33 known as the Tenderloin, one of the city’s most fashionable, most exciting, The Haymarket was the Tenderloin’s pleasure districts. A decade earlier, most popular concert saloon. Dubbed

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality

Gotham’s Moulin Rouge, it was a was the finest. According to one three-story dance hall located on Sixth authority, “her customers included Avenue at 29th Street, that sported an prominent millionaires, judges, city inviting sign: “Grand Soiree Dansant!” officials; she was unique in being It catered to the city’s underworld of exempt form the payment of any pimps, gamblers, confidence men, tribute to the police. She had political opium smokers and other low-life and financial influence.” Still other characters. It operated from 1878 to high-class madams included Mrs. 1913 under different incarnations Matilda Mermann, a “French” madam, including the Newmarket, Gramercy who ran two adjourning houses and Club and the Metropole Club. William installed electric lamps on the front McMahon, a retired professional stoop to welcome wayward gentlemen. baseball player, first ran it, followed by Mrs. Sadie West ran a local brothel Edward Corey. Corey insisted that he considered by many a public nuisance maintained a respectable but was protected by high-up officials. establishment, where “everything was Miss Maud Harvey kept an overnight aboveboard.” His club had a lodging house at 234 West 51st Street, restaurant and presented regular where no questions were asked.36 variety shows; he banned female pickpockets, “degenerates” (i.e., Men of means could indulge still other feminine male homosexuals) and fantasies. On December 16, 1896, a couples dancing too close, “cheek to most scandalous event took place in cheek.” However, upstairs, it offered one of Gotham’s finest cabarets, rooms by the hour or the night.34 Sherry’s, an upscale Tenderloin nightspot. The cabaret hosted a The Haymarket was described as bachelor party for one of the city’s “animate[d] with the licentious life of leading swells, Clinton Seeley. The the avenue” and attracted sporting gala, organized by the bachelor’s men, including the legendary Diamond brother, Herbert Barnum Seeley, Jim Brady. It charged men a 25-cent offered as the evening’s live admission fee, but ladies were entertainment one of the nation’s first welcomed free of charge. Many of the sex stars, “Little Egypt.” At first, damsels were hookers and the saloon rumors circulated that Teddy was popularly known as “the Roosevelt, head of the police prostitutes' market.” Like other commission, would attend; they were resorts, female attendants encouraged quickly dispelled. However, the male customers to buy drinks and scandal marked the nadir of TR’s other favors. Big spenders were tenure on the police commission. He invited to accompany the ladies to had bigger fish to fry and was soon off private, curtained-off rooms in the to Washington, DC, to be part of the balcony and upper floors. (For men new William McKinley administration. with other sexual interests, the Artistic Club, serving male homosexual On this particular pre-Christmas prostitutes and their clients, abutted evening, Seeley, a well-to-do nephew the Haymarket’s back entrance.)35 of the legendary P.T. Barnum, hosted an intimate get-together for his For those seeking more refined sexual brother. The 20 gentlemen who encounters, the Tenderloin offered a attended were attired in their finest host of upscale bordellos welcoming formal wear, their pedigree pre- gentlemen with a certain yen and established. The evening’s money in their pockets. Georgiana entertainment highlight was to be a Hastings’ resort on West 45th Street series of erotic presentations by very

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality attractive female performance artists, was featured in an Edison “peep” featuring Little Egypt. What exactly displayed at Asbury Park, NJ.38 Two happened that night is still shrouded in years later, William Heise’s classic mystery. vitascope moving picture, The Kiss, was premiered at the Koster & Bials In keeping with the customs of the day Music Hall at Broadway and 34th among some upper-class male Street. The early movie runs 16 to 51 partygoers, female performers were seconds (depending on version) and subject to not merely the male gaze depicts a close-up of John Rice and and catcalls, but lascivious touching May Irwin passionately kissing. This and groping as well. As Seeley later early porn performance likely shocked, explained to the befuddled police, if not excited, many New Yorkers. It Little Egypt “just wiggled a bit, this was a larger-than-life erotic intimacy way and that, and it was that must have been thrilling, even uninteresting, as they had all seen this overwhelming. sort of thing before. There were cries of ‘Take it off!’ and so forth.” When Projected moving film emerged in the the police arrived, the female late-19th century and the first performers – naked but for their storefront movie theatres opened at overcoats – were ushered out a back the turn of the new century. One of door. the earliest picture shows at a Chicago penny arcade was How Girls Undress; Little Egypt was an Algerian, born it was displayed on a “mutascope” Ashea Waba, who lived in New York as system and attracted many young “Mrs. Harper.” She performed at the boys. 39 Movie theatres were a new 1893 Chicago Exposition and became social venue, home to a revolutionary one of America’s first sex stars, a technology, the moving-image system national sensation. She represented, of production and display. Moving along with other exotic performers like pictures were a new form of artistic Fatima (Fahreda Mahzar) and women expression, of visualizing a storyline, with stage names like Houri, Husaria, acting, cinematography and directing. Farida and Maryeta, the erotic fantasy Theatres were darkened spaces in of all that was foreign, seductive, un- which individuals experienced public American. Little Egypt was so popular anonymity and witnessed popular she helped launch the new movie spectacles, suggestive enactments on industry. She was featured in one of a large-then-life display screen. In the Thomas Edison’s earliest peep shows late-19th century, movie theatres were and was, as a leading scholar noted, one of the few acceptable social W. K. L. Dickson’s “first Mutoscope spaces in which white men and hit.” Not to underestimate her appeal, women, often un-chaperoned she was professionally represented by strangers, could share an intimate no less a legendary theatrical figure proximity and an exciting visual than Oscar Hammerstein 1st.37 experience; African-Americans were barred from early New York movie In addition to Little Egypt, Edison houses. produced peep shows featuring other alluring, foreign damsels, including Other then the saloon, the dance hall one named Fatima. Another was or the Church-sanctioned gathering, Carmencita, the “lovely spanish young men and women (excluding dancer” who performed “the butterfly prostitutes) had few public venues in dance.” According to the Newark which to socialize let alone flirt, touch Evening News of July 17, 1894, she or kiss. "The very darkness of the

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality room," warned the social reformer in elaborate female evening costumes, Jane Addams in 1909, "is an added ‘sat for company’ and received a attraction to many young people, for commission on all the drinks served by whom the space is filled with the the house to them and their glamour of love making."40 The large- customers.”43 These were not the only scale display of sexual intimacy transvestites he met. illustrated by The Kiss must have been shocking, a cascade of images The inquisitive student stopped by the reinforcing the complexity, confusion Slide, one of the city’s most notorious and rawness of modern urban life. A “fairy” clubs. Located at 157 Bleecker newspaper critic of the day exclaimed: Street, not far from the Golden Rule, it "Magnified to gargantuan proportions, was run by Frank Stevenson. it is absolutely disgusting. ... Such Stevenson is a legendary 19th century things call for police intervention."41 underworld figure who would later run the Black & Tan, a seedy basement For those interested in sexually bar on Bleecker Street near the provocative images and stories, New Bowery that welcome whites and York offered a multitude of choice in blacks, a rare social venue. The great addition to Nickelodeons and early Gotham gossip, Herbert Asbury, movie storefronts. Sculptures along author of the legendary Gangs of New with paintings, drawings and York, says that Stevenson resembled lithographs as well as postcards and "a corpse; his face was almost as playing cards could be titillating. white as snow and his cheeks were Books -- including literature, poetry, sunken, while his eyebrows and hair medical studies and marital aids -- were black as ink.” Four bartenders offered erotic and obscene manned the Black & Tan’s long representations. Newer technologies, counter. The club was popular among including the black-and-white African-Americans as well as white photograph and stereoscopic women rumored to be prostitutes and daguerreotype, added to erotic catering to men of color, including excitement 42 Native Americans and Chinese.44

Sexual culture The Slide was a very different scene. In 1892, the New York Herald When Parkhurst went slumming in reported: “It is a fact that the Slide Gotham’s vice districts, he joined a and the unspeakable nature of the long line of other socially respectable orgies practiced there are a matter of men (and some women) who ventured common talk among men who are into the city’s underworld. While the bent on taking in the town, making a Reverend went to document the sins night of it.” It was a club offering out- of the city, many others went to enjoy of-towners “something outré in the the pleasures it offered, the pleasures way of the fast life … “ Still another respectable society denied them. For visitor, a lawyer, left an evocative them, as well as for Parkhurst, a new reminiscence: “Here men of world awaited. degenerate type were the waiters, some of them going to the extent of One of those upstanding citizens who rouging their necks. In falsetto voices visited Gotham’s 1890s underworld they sang filthy ditties, and while not was Charles Nesbitt, a visiting medical otherwise busy drop into a chair at the student from North Carolina. Along table of any visitor who would brook with a friend, he toured Bowery their awful presence.”45 saloons where “male perverts, dressed

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality

At the Slide, young Nesbitt made the income; they received an education acquaintance of one of the club’s (many getting a high-school degree, popular trannies, “Princess Toto.” The some to college and even post- two became fast friends and the graduate study); and they fought for Princess, sensing the student’s open- and – three decades later -- won the mindedness, inviting him to a drag ball vote. They also sought new forms of at the Walhalla Hall, a Lower East Side sexual experiences, including more party space. Walking in, Nesbitt was expressive forms of dress, the right to overwhelmed. Some 500 same-sex birth control and to enjoy a wider male and female couples were in palette of sexual pleasures. attendance. Some were dancing to a waltz, including “quite a few … A series of very contradictory social masculine women in male evening forces defined the new woman. The dress dancing with other women.”46 Second Great Awakening of the pre- Civil War era inspired the movement in The Golden Rule, the Slide and two, sometimes incompatible, Walhalla Hall were but three of the expressions. One stressed individual many gay and transvestite saloons, salvation, the redemption of a person’s clubs and bawdyhouses operating in soul; the other advocated public good, the city in the 1890s. One of the most establishing “the Kingdom of God” on notorious male brothels was Paresis earth. Both strands of this renewed Hall located at 392 Bowery at 5th Christianity found strong appeal Street. A witness testifying before the among women. During the pre-Civil Mazet Committee, a New York State War era, leading women of the “social 1899 investigation into city corruption, Christian” movement included Lucretia the Paresis Hall was “a well-known Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and resort for male prostitutes ... .” Susan B. Anthony, anti-slavery Digging deeper, it reported: “These activists. They organized the 1848 men that conduct themselves there -- Seneca Falls, NY, women’s rights well, they act effeminately; most of convention that promoted suffrage, them are painted and powdered; they equal opportunities in education and are called Princess this and Lady So jobs, and legal rights for women. In and So and the Duchess of Marlboro, the postwar era, Frances Willard, a and get up and sing as women, and strong suffragist, ran the Women’s dance.” Most disturbing, Gardner Christian Temperance Union (WCTU); found that fairies “ape the female established 1874, it played a character; call each other sisters and leadership role in the passage of the take people out for immoral purposes.” Mann Act (1910) and the adoption of Other male brothels included the the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Manila Hall, the Black Rabbit and the Amendment (1919, 1920). Palm.47 In 1890, Vida Scudder helped establish During the 1890s, Gotham’s sexual the "settlement house" movement to culture was being recast by what was address the growing problem of urban known as the “new woman.” While poverty. Many upstanding women -- the earliest notion of the new woman often referred to as “club women” – emerged in the pre-Civil War era (e.g., were active in what were known as Francis Wright), it was not until the “prevention” societies.48 These groups end of the 19th century that she first emerged in England in the early became a social reality. As the U.S. 19th century and got started in the industrialized and urbanized, women U.S. in 1866 with the founding of the joined the labor market and earned an American Society for the Prevention of

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality

Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). By the vigilante-like raids on private late-19th century, a host of these amusement resorts and execute groups operated in Gotham. Elbridge arrests. These societies, in effect, Gerry established the SPCC in 1866, privatized law enforcement. where Gardner had worked; Comstock, with the backing of the Prevention societies, often with the Young Men's Christian Association active participation of female (YMCA), founded the NYSSV (or SSV) members, were troubled by the in 1873; Rev. Crosby founded the SPC emergence of the more sexualized new in 1877 (which Parkhurst took over in woman. She challenged the long-held 1890) to fight “white slavery,” Victorian model of femininity, the “Cult prostitution; and in 1884, the Rev. of Domesticity,” based on motherhood, Benjamin DeCosta established the propriety and passionlessness.50 The White Cross Society promoting purity new woman flaunted a different sense (i.e., sexual abstinence) until of self-hood, one rooted in being marriage. In 1892, Parkhurst single, a wage earner and embracing established the CVL to actively fight sensual fulfillment. She most explicitly vice; it worked with the Chamber of displayed this new self-hood in how Commerce’s Committee of Fifteen. she looked, had fun and, ultimately, According to historian Jesse Todd, “the voted. CVL combined the shaming techniques of the old moral reform societies and The “appearance industry” was the the more heavy-handed tactics of the principal agent for the constitution of coercive agencies.”49 the new woman. It took shape in the fin de siècle era and was driven by the These groups engaged in a two-front combined power of the cosmetics war against vice. First, they sought to companies, beauty parlors, garment suppress illicit activities taking place in and shoe manufacturers, department working-class and immigrant slums stores, small retailers, mail-order including the Bowery, the Lower East houses, advertising agencies and, last Side and Greenwich Village. Second, but not least, the popular media of they sought to stop the spread of women’s magazines. One of the unacceptable sexual activities among principal battlegrounds over female the more respectable classes, sexuality involved the face. For especially well-to-do “sporting men” generations, a highly made-up face who were regulars at Tenderloin was a social scandal. Outside the venues. Prevention groups differed theatre, it signaled a prostitute, a from other morality groups (like the “painted lady.” In the 1880s, makeup YMCA and WCTU) in that they began “to cross from the stage into combined politics and the legal system everyday life.” By the turn-of-the-20th with direct action to achieve their century, cosmetics, particularly goals. lipstick, came to stand for women’s new freedom in an age where In post-Civil War New York, the state “appearances were fluid and social legislation empowered prevention rank unstable.” Makeup, as Kathy societies with law enforcement Peiss points out, “assert[ed] authority. The state initially gave the worldliness against insularity and SPCC the power to issue warrants. sexual desire against chastity.” The However, in the ongoing war between traditionalist’s battle against the “false Republicans and Tammany Democrats, face” eroded as women, especially legislators passively enabled younger ones, used makeup to prevention groups to undertake “transform the spectacle of themselves

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality into self-conscious performances.” By was only the outward appearance of a WW-I, the line between a painted lady deeper malady. Their eyes gleamed and a respectable working girl was “with the madness of delirium gone.51 tremens, or faded from potent drugs, masqueraded in alcohol as liquor. In the 1890s, New York’s new woman Women lost to everything in the world, liked to have fun. A growing except a mere love for liquor.” assortment of popular entertainment Parkhurst found, “her eyes expressed welcomed them, often single and un- volumes.”53 chaperoned. Public venues included wholesome traveling shows, most The trio was proposition by numerous notably Chautauqua circuits, offering “actresses" -- “painted, brazen women lectures on a variety of issues of the of the town” – at the Windsor Concert day and scholarly subjects as well as Garden on the Bowery. Gardner classic and Broadway plays, musical recalled one: “Her hair and eyes were presentations and even movies. Less brown, but her complexion had been wholesome venues of entertainment bought at a drug store, and had been proliferated, ranging from circuses to applied to her face in liquid form by a wild-west shows to Nickelodeons and fire engine, I should judge.” After an movie theatres to Coney Island, on-stage performance, the female Brooklyn’s popular amusement district entertainers joined the male guests, with its affordable Luna Park and sitting on their laps and encouraged Steeplechase Park. Dance halls, them to spend money on drink. A however, were the most threatening heavily made-up “actress” in a low-cut and Parkhurst passed a number of dress greeted the trio and ordered them wandering along the Bowery. brandy all-around. (The female They were festive spaces, welcoming attendants received a 20 percent single, young and un-chaperoned kickback on drink orders.)54 women to flirt, even touch and rub against, men. Among the popular At the Five Points opium den, women's repertoire were "pivoting" Parkhurst struck-up a conversation and "tough dances." As Peiss with a 20-year-old white woman who observed, “Pivoting was a wild, was “tall, and well-formed” and “was spinning dance that promoted a well-dressed in a blue tea gown.” "I charged atmosphere of physical am a Western girl," she admitted, "and excitement; tough dances ranged from was betrayed by the man I was a slow shimmy, or shaking of the hips engaged to about five years ago.” She and shoulders, to boisterous animal first settled in Tenderloin, “but I imitations.”52 couldn't stand it. It was too tough for me, so I got to smoking opium. Then I Parkhurst and his companions got to be a chronic pipe-hitter.” She ventured into the bowels of city’s then moved to the Five Points where underworld and found a very different she now lived with a Chinese man. “I “new” woman. At the East River live twice as well as I did when I was Hotel, Gardner was shocked by her in the Tenderloin district,” she physical appearance “Dirty; I never admitted. “I tell you, I'd rather be saw such dirt,” he lamented. “It was living with a 'Chink,' as the Sixth caked and crusted on hands and faces. Warders call Chinamen, than be a Hair tangled and matted around woman of the town in New York City, bloated, rum-flushed faces. Clothing any day." However, the Reverend was scant, soiled, ragged and ill-smelling, stupefied by the power the drug half covering gaunt bodies.” But this exerted. According to Gardner, “But

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality what struck Dr. Parkhurst most was sexual expression. As could be the absolute silence, a silence that expected, cities adopted different wraps itself around you until you want strategies to deal with the changing to shout, scream, yell, do anything to urban sexual culture. Some attempted make a noise.”55 to regulate -- legally or informally -- commercial vice as well as drinking Moral order clubs, gambling joints and opium dens known as “red light” districts. In New In 1892, New York was a different, far York, informal zones of illicit vice were smaller city than it is today. Then it tolerated in the Five Points, the included only Manhattan and chunks of Bowery, Greenwich Village and the the Bronx and Westchester. That year Tenderloin. Similar districts operated Parkhurst and his trusty companions throughout the country: in Brooklyn, it wandered surreptitiously though was Brownsville; in Baltimore, the Manhattan searching for the vice Block; in Chicago, the Levee; in underworld, the sins of the city. And Denver at Market Street; and San they found it in the working-class Francisco’s Barbary Coast. However, slums that flourished throughout the between 1898 and 1917, New city. Today’s five-borough city was Orleans’s Storyville was the nation’s consolidated in 1898, a brilliant move most renown – and regulated! -- zones by Republicans to undermine the of legal prostitution, drinking and power of the Manhattan-anchored gambling. Historian Ruth Rosen notes, Tammany Democratic political “[in] these sporting resorts with their machine. And it partially worked, streets lined with brothels, saloons, Tammany’s power was diluted.56 and hotels, the air [was] filled with the odor of tobacco and the sounds of Historian Timothy Gilfoyle argues, “the blaring music, [and the windows bore] period of Progressive reform in New images of women making obscene York City began with Parkhurst’s gestures ... .” The 19th century harlot assault on sexual turpitude.” 57 The who called a red-light district home Reverend’s fears expressed the prefigured the 20th century’s new growing perception among respectable woman.58 citizens that New York’s -- and America’s -- moral order was under After nearly two decades of struggle attack. The threat came from the for sexual reform, Parkhurst and his growing appeal of drinking, gambling fellow advocates succeeded with and, most especially, sex among poor Congress’s passage of the 1910 Mann people, immigrants and some swells. Act barring interstate sex trafficking. This sexual expression took many However, the major case prosecuted forms, including pornography, under the Mann Act was against Jack prostitution and homosexuality as well Johnson, the first African-American as the private sex practices people world heavyweight-boxing champion. engaged in, most especially oral or In one of its most infamous cases, the “French” sex. Changes in the forms of FBI’s harassed, arrested, prosecuted, sexual expression embodied broader convicted and ultimate imprisoned economic and cultural processes Johnson, illustrating how federal laws recasting the city, most vividly can be subverted for political ends.59 reflected in the make-up of its people, commerce and entertainment. During the last half of the 19th century, Gotham’s multitude nearly tripled, Cities throughout the country were jumping to over 1.5 million in 1890 battlegrounds over vice, particularly from 516,000 in 1850. During this

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality period, two waves of immigration sex workers. The city’s poor and transformed the city’s face sexual working classes clustered in ghettos culture. The first wave came before throughout the city, whether the Five the Civil War, especially in the ‘40s Points, the Bowery, Lower East Side, and ‘’50s, and consisted predominately Greenwich Village, Hell’s Kitchen or of Germans (including Jews) and Irish Harlem. These slums deeply disturbed driven from their homeland by a Rev. Parkhurst, especially the sexual terrible potato famine. By 1890, first practices that he believed took place and second generation Irish-Americans there. He knew that the poor, the represented over half of city's immigrant, the colored, the non- population and one-third of registered Protestant and the non-Christian voters. They formed the backbone of populated these neighborhoods. the new Democratic Party, the Equally challenging, up-market Tammany machine. A new New York slummers regularly visited the low-life was being cast.60 to engage in illicit practices. These slums were fashioning new, socially In the 1880s, a second wave of shared values that would ultimately immigrants began to flood the city. It change the city’s sexual culture. Poor consisted of three distinct elements: New Yorkers’ experiences of place – of (i) people from Southern and Eastern poverty, tradition and aesthetics – Europe, notably Italians, Poles, helped shape Gotham’s emerging, 20th Bohemians and Russian Jews; (ii) century sexual culture. peoples from the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico; and (iii) a growing In 1892, Gotham was bustling; number of African-Americans from the immigrants thronged the major South fleeing repressive Jim Crow walkways and subways, they even conditions. This second wave of strolled in Central Park. These new immigration continued until the post- New Yorkers fostered changes that WW-I period and, collectively, challenged the established mores reshaped the city’s character. shared by Parkhurst and others of the respectable classes. This class These immigrants lived three lives. included the establishment press One involved their fellow immigrants, represented by the Herald, Sun, Times family and friends from the old and Tribune, the dominant media of country; they provided continuity. A the late-19th century. The gentry second life involved other immigrants, perceived that their acceptable moral minorities and poor people who called order was under attack. Slums were the city’s slums home; they provided seen as vice districts, home to community. And a third life involved drinking, dancing, smoking, gambling, an immigrant’s interchange with the prostitution and homosexuals. Most larger city, the New York they called troubling, the slums’ raucous men and place; it suggested the bigger world painted ladies were dirty – they that awaited them and, most smelled, didn’t regularly bathe, importantly, their children. flaunted sex and ate smelly, mysterious foods. Many upper-crust Many second-wave immigrants came New Yorkers accepted Sylvester with little to nothing in their pockets Graham’s linkage of food to sexual and were forced to live in the most behavior. Graham, a pre-Civil War crowded slums, often taking the most moral reformer, believed that rich menial jobs. They worked as manual foods, alcohol, coffees and teas, meats laborers, garment workers, restaurant and condiments stimulated waiters, household-service helper and masturbation.61 A half-century later,

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality

Rev. Pankhurst’s campaign sought to In Gotham, the Panic of ’93 set the sterilize the city against the growing stage for the mayoral victory of the array of vices -- especially alcohol and “Fusion” candidate, William Strong. sex – that flourished in the teaming Backed by Parkhurst and drawing ethnic slums. together old-line Republicans and disaffected Democrats, Fusion branded Mounting crisis itself “progressive” and defeated the Tammany machine in the ’94 election. Pankhurst’s morality campaign was While not much of a religious man, played out against a background of a Mayor Strong had a debt to pay to mounting social crisis. In 1892, a clean government and moral reformers series of bitter labor disputes swept who had backed him. He appointed the nation: steel workers walked out in Theodore Roosevelt president of the Homestead, PA; a general strike shut police commission. down New Orleans, LA; coal miners struck in Tennessee; railroad “TR” had run for mayor in 1886 and switchmen struck in Buffalo, NY; and suffered a drubbing. To recover, he Idaho copper miners refused to enter went to Washington, D.C., and served the pits. For New Yorkers, the political as a Civil Service commissioner in the tension culminated in July ’92 when a Benjamin Harrison administration. In local anarchist, Alexander Berkman, ’94, he had a private dinner with Emma Goldman’s closest comrade and Parkhurst – and the two hit it off. TR lover, ventured to Pittsburgh to later confided to a friend that he address through direct action the feared the Reverend would promote a grievances of the striking miners. He campaign to end “certain evils which I shot, but failed to kill, the steel fear cannot possibly be suppressed in industrialist Henry Frick.62 a city like New York in our present state of existence.” TR had low In ’92, New York was the center of expectations of Parkhurst, but found country’s finance and began to stutter him a “good fellow.” They spent the as the nation’s economy started to evening discussing police corruption unravel, foreshadowing the Panic of and never broached the subject of 1893. It started on May 5th with the prostitution. As Roosevelt’s crash of the New York Stock Exchange biographer, Richard Zacks, notes, it and quickly spread to the rest of the “might have been too delicate a topic nation. On June 27th, the Exchange for either man.”64 In ’95, TR took on crashed again. The Panic of ‘93 saw corruption and vice but with mixed the failure of 158 national banks results. During the first six months of (mostly in the South and West), 172 his tenure, he battled police force state banks, 177 private banks, 47 corruption. It was a thankless fight savings banks, 13 loan and trust but he achieved some major victories companies, 16 mortgage companies in the force’s “professionalization.” and innumerable Wall Street During the next year of his tenure, TR brokerage houses. Over 15,000 served as the city’s archbishop of businesses went into receivership. By secular morality – and, in this role, he the winter of ‘93, unemployment hit failed. 18 percent! Those still working swallowed pay cuts of about 10 Under Roosevelt’s leadership, the percent. The Panic of ‘93 dragged on police commission sought to enforce until June 1894.63 an 1857 state ordinance closing establishments that permitted alcohol drinking on the Sabbath. Over the

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality four decades since the ordinance was quickly became "the leading institution enacted, it was rarely enforced. Like of prostitution in Gotham." 67 With many laws, “blue laws” were a little- New York State’s adoption of the 1906 disguised attempt to impose the moral Prentice Law, the number of Raines order of the upper crust on the newly hotels was cut in half.68 arrived, ethnic and poor multitude. The police force was the means to Rev. Parkhurst was a moralist, an up- impose this moral rectitude. In the right, well-intentioned Christian wake of the reformist 1894 electoral minister who embraced some of the victory, a new, Republican-controlled “progressive” sensibility of his age. He police commission was appointed to railed against municipal corruption, a enforce the city’s moral standards. betrayal of the Founding Fathers, but Where politicians, priests and pundits sought to contain the excesses of the failed to instill virtue, the police force capitalist marketplace, particularly was called upon to enforce secular involving drinking, smoking, gambling, values.65 drugs and commercial sex. He supported the temperance movement As the city recovered from the Panic of and broadly supported women’s rights, ’93, a new vice culture flourished. including suffrage. Like many leading While giving lip service to suppression conservative and religious leaders of of gambling, prostitution and the day, he backed a woman’s right to pornography, TR’s principle initiative – vote because they believed that these dubbed “Roosevelt Sundays” -- was newly-empowered citizens would join targeted at stopping working-class them in their attempt to use the power men from drinking in saloons on the of the state to impose abstinence, Christian Sabbath. Under his prohibit commercial sex, end leadership, the abstinence law was homosexuality and suppress obscene bitterly enforced for a year or so, forms of expression. transforming the city into a morality war-zone. Ultimately, the campaign Like many reformers of the Progressive failed, undercut by savage state era, Parkhurst was baffled by the slum politics. The passage of Raines Law in dwellers he encountered, particularly 1896 permitted “hotels” with 10 beds the women who called the city’s to sell alcohol, eviscerating Roosevelt’s ghettos home. Gardner’s tell-all, along authority.66 with other accounts, reveals a minister adrift during a period profound social Under the Raines Law, ever- change. He sought the moral uplift of resourceful saloonkeepers — often the slum dwellers he studied, but he working hand in glove with large didn’t seem to understand their plight, brewery owners and local police their poverty, their excesses. With a officials — quickly transformed back number of notable exceptions, he rooms, walk-ups, cellars and other didn’t seem to really care about them spaces to house 10 beds. This as people. They were pawns in a effectively sidestepped the intent of bigger political game he was playing the law and opened up a new revenue with the Tammany machine. source, commercial sex. As Edwin Seligman notes in his appendix to the Looking back, Parkhurst’s expedition original Committee of Fifteen's 1902 into Gotham’s underworld – and what report on New York vice, "the effect of he voyeuristically discovered – seems the Raines Law has been to provide almost prurient, an exposé for a unexampled accommodations for traditional-values cable TV reality prostitution." Raines Law hotels show. Since the nation’s founding four

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality centuries ago, American moralists obscenity and homosexuality a sin. have had an especially difficult time The boundaries of acceptable sexual with sexuality. People who have practice, of what is “normal,” have expressed illicit desires or engaged in been transformed. Masturbation is no un-accepted practices have been longer a sin and oral sex is common. shamed, imprisoned, tortured, Pre- and non-marital sex among sterilized, electro-shocked, hung and “consenting” age-appropriate people is worse. The rage shown by Parkhurst, an accepted convention. Commercial Comstock and other late-19th century sex remains legal in only a handful of moralists succeeded in slowing down counties in Nevada, but is a multi- the inevitable, the integration of billion dollar business. Sex toys sexuality into the marketplace. Truly (“wellness”) and porn are also multi- progressive social reformers of the billion dollar industries. The Supreme early-20th century like Emma Goldman Court has made gay marriage legal and Margaret Sanger understood the and the U.S. military is accepting tyranny of the marketplace and fought transgender soldiers. Drinking is a to set limits, safeguards, against huge regulated industry and marijuana turning all human relations into is becoming increasing accepted for commodities. Over the last century- medical and recreational purposes. plus, however, the marketplace has And gambling is an all-American fundamentally and irreversibly enterprise, with innumerable states transformed sexuality. running lotteries and regulating casinos. Today, the concepts of “sin” or “vice” are suggestive of personal, prurient Sex has shifted from a moral issue, fantasy but no longer invoke the same “sin,” to a legal concern, “consent,” moral bite they once did. For many whether public or private. Today, Americans today, the concept of anything goes as long as it’s between immorality is no longer relevant. More age-appropriate, consenting people, modern, scientific notions like whether gay, straight, male or female. “deviance,” “perversion” and The once-deviant sex practices that so “pathology” have superseded the old shocked Parkhurst have become the Biblical nomenclature. In the 21st new normal. Today’s acceptable sexual century jargon of authenticity, experience expresses a wider sensuous perversion has become “deviance pallet then anytime in American without pathology.”69 history. The only true sex crime is the violation of consent, the equality of all In Parkhurst’s time, women wore participants, whether involving rape, ankle-length dresses with corsets, pedophilia, child porn, sex trafficking masturbation was decried, intercourse or lust murder. Rev. Parkhurst’s was for procreation not pleasure, birth investigation into the city’s underwork control prohibited, abortion a crime, has become today’s must-watched interracial sex a hanging offense, pre- reality TV series. Welcome to the 21st marital sex forbidden, pornography an century.

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality

Notes

1 Charles W. Gardner, The Doctor and the Devil, Or, The Mid-Night Adventures of Dr. Parkhurst (Gardner & Co., 1894), p. 54. 2 Ibid., p. 58. 3 Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last Hundred Years (New York: Random House, 1951); Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Vantage, 1992); Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: Norton, 1992) and A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of 19th Century New York (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006); Warren Sloat, A Battle for The Soul of New York: Tammany Hall, Police Corruption, Vice, and Reverend Charles Parkhurst's Crusade against Them, 1892-1895: (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002): and Richard Zacks, Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York (New York: Doubleday, 2012). 4 Morris, op. cit., p. 217. 5 Charles Parkhurst, My Forty Years in New York (New York: McMillian, 1923), pp. 9-12; New York Tribune, Feb 15, 1892; see also New York Times, Feb. 16, 1982. 6 New York Times Feb 16, 1892; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 1168. 7 Zacks, op. cit., p. 3; Gardner, op. cit., p. 38; James McCabe, New York by Sunlight and Gaslight (Philadelphia: Douglass Brothers, 1881), pp. 474-75; Richard O’Conner, Hell’s Kitchen: The Roaring Days of New York’s Wild West Side (New York: Old Town Books, 1958): 100-01. 8 Morris, op. cit., p. 216. 9 Elias Nason and J. Frank Beale, Lives and Labors of Eminent Divines (Forgotten Books, 2014; originally published, 1895), p. 19. 10 New York Times, Oct 27, 1890. 11 New York Tribune Aug 6, 1891. 12 Jesse T. Todd, Jr., “Battling Satan in the City: Charles Henry Parkhurst and Municipal Redemption in Gilded Age New York,” American Presbyterians, vol. 71, no. 4, p. 243. 13 Rachel Shteir, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 31. 14 Morris, op. cit., pp. 139-40; Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 2001), pp. 158-59; Thomas De Witt Talmage, The Masque Torn Off (London: Richard D. Dickinson, 1879), pp. 30, 33. 15 Zacks, op. cit., p. 10. 16 Gardner: 68; see MeasuringWorth at http://www.measuringworth.com. 17 Ibid, pp. 12-13. 18 Ibid, pp. 15-16; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 1168. 19 Gardner, op. cit., pp. 17-21. 20 Ibid., pp. 24-26. 21 Ibid., pp. 28-30. 22 Ibid., p. 64. 23 Ibid., p. 49. 24 Ibid, 65-66. 25 Ibid., pp. 59-61, 70. 26 Parkhurst, op. cit., 15-19; New York Tribune, Mar 13, 1892; New York Times, March 14, 1892. 27 New York Times, April 2, 1892. Following a December 1895 police raid that closed down numerous Tenderloin brothels, Mrs. Nellie Parkhurst and her husband welcome a group of desolate prostitutes into their home for tea and toast; Sloat: 184-85. 28 New York Trib, Mar 26, 1892; New York Times, Mar 26, 1892; New York Times, April 7, 1892; New York Trib, May 9, 18922. 29 Gardner, op. cit., p. : xxx. 30 Todd, op. cit., p. 49.

Sex Matters Parkhurst & Modern Sexuality

31 Gilfoyle, op. cit., p. 301; Parkhurst, op. cit., p. 22. 32 O’Connor, op. cit., p. 82. 33 McCabe, op. cit., p. 490; O’Conner, Ibid., pp. 92-94] 34 Morris: 221; Gilfoyle, City of Eros, pp. 227-28; Gilfoyle. A Pickpocket's Tale, pp. 118-20. 35 Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket’s Tale, p. 119. 36 Morris, op. cit., pp. 221, 223-24; Zacks, op. cit., p. 63. 37 Gordon Hendricks, “The History of the Kinetoscope,” in The American Film Industry, ed., T. Balio (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 50-51. 38 Ibid., pp. 50-51. 39 David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993), p. 154. 40 Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York: McMillian, 1909), p. 86. 41 Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 286-87 n 10. 42 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, ed., Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), pp. 218-19; Steven Luber, Infoculture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Boston, MA: Houston Mifflin, 1993), p. 51; Joseph Slade, “Eroticism and Technology Regression: The Stag Film,” History and Technology 22 (2006), vol. no, 1: 28; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, The Legs of the Countess (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 296; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT October Books, 1990), pp. 17-18; Elizabeth Hovey, “Pornography,” in The Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 924. 43 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. xxx. 44 Asbury, op. cit., p. xxx. 45 Chauncey, op. cit., pp. 38-39. 46 Ibid., p. 41. 47 Morris, op. cit., p. 219; http://www.outhistory.org/wiki/New_York_State_Investigation_of_New_York_City:_May_16,_ 1899 48 Bishop, op. cit., p. 18. 49 Gilfoyle: 639-40; Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 1164; Todd, op. cit., p. 249. 50 Bishop, op. cit., p. 7. 51 Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), pp. 48, 39, 54, 55, 97 and 142; Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), p. 3. 52 Kathy Peiss, “Charity Girls and City Pleasures,” Magazine of History, Vol. 18, No. 4, Sex, Courtship, and Dating (July 2004), p. 15; Bishop, op. cit., pp. 62-63. 53 Gardner, op. cit., p. 24-26. 54 Ibid, p. 47. 55 Ibid., 36-39. 56 Burrows and Wallace, op. cit., p. 1220-34. 57 Gilfoyle: 299. 58 Rosen, op. cit., p. 70. 59 David J. Langum, Crossing Over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 183. 60 Todd, op. cit., p. 246; http://physics.bu.edu/~redner/projects/population/cities/newyork.html. 61 Todd, op. cit., p. 248. 62 Thai Jones, More Powerful Than Dynamite. Radcals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York's Year of Anarchy (New York: Walker & Company, 2012). Pp. 37-39. 63 Zacks, op. cit., p. 14. 64 Zacks, op. cit., p. 86. 65 Zacks, op. cit., pp. 3-4.

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66 J. [John W.] Raines, “The Raines Liquor-Tax Law, The North American Review, vol. 162, no. 473 (Apr., 1896), pp. 481-85. 67 Edwin R. A. Seligman, ed. The Social Evil, a report originally prepared under the direction of The Committee of Fifteen (1902)(New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1912). 68 Gilfoyle, op. cit, p. 304. 69 R.F. Baumeister and J. L. Butler, “Sexual Masochism: Deviance without Pathology,” D. Richard Laws and William O’Donohue, eds., Sexual Deviance: Theory, Assessment, and Treatment (New York: Guilford Press, 1997), p. 225.