JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2813

There were two big surprises in this 1913 work¹ on prostitution in Portland, Oregon–I mean, aside from the normal “surprises” and “unexpecteds”one expects from an early 20th c study on the sex trade. (If someone wanted to do a version of The Deuce as Portlandia Nights 1913 this report would be atomic material.) The book runs 200 pages and for the time is filled with unusual social history, snapshot observations, interviews, police involvement, data of all shapes and sizes, and that sort. The book is fairly comprehensive–all things considered–and the efforts are distributed to 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.) Overall it is a survey of the grand scheme of prostitution (the “Social Menace”) in Portland as it existed in one section of the city (Irving Street-Hall Street-23^rd St-Harbor line). It investigated 547 buildings/rooming houses and found 98 to be “moral”, 431 to be “immoral”, and a balance of 98 falling into a gray-ish “doubtful” category. 

• This post is based on a copy of this report that I have here–there is something online text at Hathi that has a slightly different title but looks to be the same that you can enjoy here: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100641247

The report surfaces some fascinating info: for example, there is a section on interviews with proprietors of the erstwhile hardly-vanilla hotels, 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…”), police, civil service, hotel folk, that sort..  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.

So, the first surprise: there is also a very daring and fascinating map in the first section of the report 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 seems to be 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). The map isn’t quite a “map” as much as it shows approximate vicinities and coagulations of these establishments in relation to one another and confined to that one particular part of Portland. I guess that leaving out the exact addresses 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.  

The second major unexpected surprise: 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 in the state of Oregon in 1913, “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. Or perhaps this was the work of a racist editor, or author, or someone;; one person, one small group, that instigated this classification. Or maybe it was someone ignorant who just go the whole thing wrong and which was subsequently missed by the editor. I don’t know. All I can say about this is that this is the first time I’ve seen African Americans introduced in a statistic post-1865 as citizens of the U.S. who were deemed to be not so. 

Notes:

1. 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.