Talbot, Henry Russell. Report of the Portland Vice Commission to the Mayor and City Council of the City of Portland, Oregon.. Portland, 1913. 9”x 6”, 216pp. Original stiff wrappers. Provenance: Library of Congress via the Washington DC Public Library. Condition: there are six small stamps for the libraries located on title page, end papers, and one on the front cover. Overall, a GOOD+/solid copy. $200
This is a survey of prostitution in Portland in one section of the city (Irving Street-Hall Street-23rd St-Harbor line) which investigated 547 buildings/rooming houses finding 98 to be “moral” and 431 to be “immoral”) with 98 in a gray-ish “doubtful" category. The publication includes the following sections: “A Report on the Social Evil, as affecting places of public resort and accommodation; hotels, apartment houses, rooming and lodging houses”, pp 4-81; “On the Legal and Police Aspects of the Social Evil”, pp 81-122; “A Report on the Juvenile Aspect”, pp 123-164; “Report on the Economic Aspect”, pp 165-202; “Report on a Segregated District”, pp 203-216.
The contents are fascinating. For example, there is a section on interviews with proprietors, which includes a number of very colorful quotes, including one “madame” from a bawdy house on Sixth Street, who claimed “Portland is the best town on the coast for a sporting woman to make money in.” Other madams agree! There are interviews with “sources of vice” (“grills, chauffeurs, pool rooms, messenger boys newsboys...”), efficiency of the police and civil service. A good standard example of a description of one of the bawdy houses reads: “Hotel [unnamed and with no street address identified] Taylor Street. Shabby place of 46 rooms. Run by man and woman, who occupy front rooms, one of which the woman uses as a parlor, the other as a bed room for immoral business. Three prostitutes work for management, paying one-half of their earnings from bed money. Liquor sold.”
The “study of the docket” is a listing of occupations of prostitutes, arrests, charges, fines, and wages paid the prostitute; there is a section on “testimony” in which the sex worker tells her story, and another section on the general living conditions in the bawdy houses. The last section in the publication deals with “segregation”, though the type of segregation here has nothing to do with race, and simply means that there would be a set-aside space for sex businesses in Portland.
There is also a very daring and fascinating map in the first section which identifies hundreds of the Social Evils establishments. They are classified top -to-bottom in the following way: “Moral houses”, followed by moral status not determined” and then steeping into “immortality countenanced or ignored”, to “immoral tenants desired or preferred”, and then finally to “house wholly given up to immorality”. The odd thing about the map is that it is an overlay, meaning that the details of the actual geographical part of the map are left out and there is no underlying map on which this skeleton map is laid (as published), which I guess was a preventative measure to squash the possible plans of some enterprising people to use a detailed map as a guidebook to Portland Houses of Ill Repute.
There is an endless amount of social commentary and history that lives and thrives in these pages.
One unexpected find: on page 96 there is a listing of nationalities of prostitutes arrested—in the accompanying table the leading nationality is “American” followed by “Negro” and then “German”...which seems to me that U.S. Citizenship is being denied to African Americans on the basis of race, and that, evidently, “Negroes” are not American citizens. And according to the law and the constitution in the state of Oregon, “Negroes” were not even allowed to migrate to the state, stated as such right in the Oregon constitution—a law that was not addressed and eliminated until 1924. I suspect that African Americans were illegally in the state and thus, somehow, had their rights of citizenship in the USA stripped away.
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