The War Against Vice

Official confirmation of California’s high-quality, wide-spread gold deposits sent an electric jolt around the world. Thousands of bedazzled treasure-seekers—most of them respectable, middle-class young men—surged into this new American possession recently acquired from Mexico. The not-so respectable recognized this unique opportunity, too: the stampede to California’s gold fields, which began in late 1848/early 1849 from Europe and America's East Coast, included throngs of thieves, gamblers, and prostitutes.

By mid-1850, California’s population was 92 per cent male. Never planning to stay any longer than the few weeks or months they expected it might take to amass a fortune, they had left wives and sweethearts back home; therefore, the societal “gentling influence” of decent women was sorely missing. In fact, women were so scarce that females of any character, decent or otherwise, amounted to less than 8 percent of the entire population.

For a time, California was a lawless environment. Congress—caught up in heated controversies over whether or not slavery would be allowed in those vast south-western lands recently ceded by Mexico—had, by the end of 1849, failed to pass legislation that would make California an official Territory, subject to the laws of the United States.  Gambling was ubiquitous; gallons of imported liquors were consumed; theft and brawling increased. Harlots brazenly established themselves in the gold camps and developing towns.

Those troubles seemed solvable when California was admitted as the 31st State of the Union on September 9, 1850, and the new state’s new legislature vowed that “Something was going to be done” about the debauchery within its borders. Attempts to suppress the flesh trade (and the unrealistic, yet hoped-for goal of eradicating it altogether) became an on-going, continual frustration for legislators, police, prosecutors, and judges during the 1850s and beyond. Acts by the state legislature classed prostitution itself, and/or keeping a house of ill-fame, as misdemeanors—offenses punishable by jail time of not more than six months, or a fine not to exceed $500—with the regulations regarding arrests spelled out in the statute.

More often than not clever defense attorneys, well-paid with the very “unlawfully earned” gold that lawmakers railed against, successfully argued for dismissal of charges on the grounds the arrest was illegal because the regulations were not adhered to. The code required that a warrant had to be issued first—no policeman was authorized to arrest any person for a misdemeanor without a warrant—and the suspect must be arrested in the daytime. Another defense tactic (though one almost never seriously considered by a magistrate) was to contend that the case was coming to trial in an inappropriate jurisdiction.

Prosecutor’s expectations of a conviction in trials of sporting girls were often doomed from the start by blunders beforehand, and bad breaks in the courtrooms. Arrests were, in fact, frequently made in a hurry without warrants, and in the nighttime. Occasionally, the complaint itself lacked sufficient information or legal merit, despite the fact that the females’ occupations, and the addresses of houses of ill-repute, were common knowledge. Witnesses for the prosecution often appeared to know nothing. Service people making daytime deliveries, had seen nothing indelicate or immodest; neighbors who had seen “suspicious” comings and goings of unknown men between 7:00 p.m. and midnight had never been inside the house in question. A bordello’s live-in cooks, bartenders and part-time workmen, if summoned, knew how their bread was buttered and testified accordingly. 

Absent were those witnesses whose truthful testimony mattered most, the men who frequented houses of ill-repute—men whose faces were obscured by the dark of night, their identities merely hearsay; men who categorically denied, if questioned, they had ever been inside a brothel.

Matters weren’t helped any when bills were introduced in the Seventh Session of the California Legislature to also make bawdy house customers guilty of a misdemeanor, subject to the same fines or jail time, if convicted, as the women they patronized. City ordinances such as Sunday Laws, which mandated the closure of houses of ill-fame on the Sabbath (and closure at or before midnight on every other day of the week) had no teeth.

Too many juries in too many trials returned to the courtroom saying they were unable to agree on questions of fact—let alone deliver a verdict—even in those instances when the evidence overwhelmingly affirmed that the reputation of the house was as a bordello, over which the defendant exercised control; that the inmates were unchaste females of bad character; that the house was, as the prosecution claimed,  “resorted to for the purposes of prostitution and lewdness.”

Too many hard-gained convictions were reversed on appeal. Eventually—though by no means retreating from the battle against it—legal system professionals got used to the fact that the oldest profession in the world was a flourishing business, not easily eradicated.