The End of Innocence

Part II 1910--1919

They are everywhere. Girls run to catch trolleys. Your stenographer is a looker, the telephone operator has a voice that haunts your dreams. The woman who sold you a ready-made suit is a vision. You walk past girls standing in line at the movie theater to see larger-than-life heroines: the Vitagraph Girl, the Biograph Girl, the World's Most Perfectly Formed Woman. And, if you have the price of admission, a late-night trip to Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies will allow you to feast your eyes on the Follies Girls--a band of impossibly plumaged dancers culled from more than 15,000 applicants, Darwinian selection at its finest, all effort focused on finding and glorifying the American woman.

The Victorian world had been wearing blinders--now the erotic is everywhere. In a storefront window, a bold proprietor offers copies of the painting September Morn--in spite of vice crusader Anthony Comstock's attempt to suppress the delightful nymph. Fresh-faced maidens appear in ads for White Rock soda, Ivory soap and the Packard automobile. There are eye-catching women on calendars, on magazine covers, on movie posters, on sheet music--millions of images flooding millions of homes. It is a world filled with appealing possibilities.

Upon arriving in New York, a young Peruvian artist named Alberto Vargas spends days walking the streets, "taking in the sights and sounds and all the electricity in the air." According to a biographer, "What excited him most were the American women. They were not shy and demure like the Latin women back home in Arequipa. They were not stolid and fleshy like the women in Geneva. They were not coy and coquettish like the women he had seen in Paris. No, to his eyes, American women seemed unique. He liked their jaunty stride, their openness, their air of independence and their look of healthy, uncomplicated sensuality. 'From every building came torrents of girls,' he would later recall. 'I had never seen anything like it. Hundreds of girls with an air of self-assuredness and determination that said, Here I am, how do you like me?' "

Against his father's wishes, Vargas decides to stay in America and to take up painting.

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An aspiring young writer named F. Scott Fitzgerald notes that the precious daughters of America have a new attitude: They can be seen, he writes, "eating three-o'clock after-dance suppers in impossible cafés, talking of every side of life with an air half of earnestness, half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement." Mostly they talk about sex. The conspiracy of silence is shattered. The editors of Current Opinion declare in August 1913 that it is "sex o'clock" in America:

"A wave of sex hysteria and sex discussion seems to have invaded this country. Our former reticence on matters of sex is giving way to a frankness that would startle even Paris."

Another writer, describing coming of age in this era, will remember fondly that "young women all over the country were reading Freud and attempting to lose their inhibitions." Young men dream of working in New York, of taking one of these new creatures as a mistress.

Emancipated women are the topic of the day. As women shed their shackles, will they become more like men? Equality means more than access to power; it means access to pleasure. Will women demand the right to sow their own wild oats?

There are women in the streets by the thousands, suffragettes marching for the right to vote. There are women on soapboxes, women walking shoulder-to-shoulder with labor leaders, women in picket lines, women publishing literary magazines and anarchist manifestos.

Until this decade it had been a man's world. Now, the New Woman has arrived. The dance begins.

The Devil's Dancehall

In the heart of the city is a dancehall. Young men and women swirl through the tango, the hesitation waltz and "animal dances" such as the turkey trot, the grizzly bear, the monkey glide and the bunny hug. The dancehalls make visible the erotic, while the band plays Everybody's Doin' It Now.

When Irving Berlin pens a syncopated dance tune called Alexander's Ragtime Band, more than 1 million copies of the sheet music are sold within the year. The rhythms that filled the brothels of New Orleans have become a part of mainstream America.

"These dances," opines one journalist, "are a reversion to the grossest practices of savage man. They are based on the primitive motive of orgies enjoyed by the aboriginal inhabitants of every uncivilized land."

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Consider this description by a former dance master converted to Christianity. In From the Ballroom to Hell, Tom Faulkner writes:

It is her first experience in the arms of a strange man, with his limbs and body pressed to hers, and in her natural modesty, she shrinks from so familiar a touch. It brings a bright flush of indignation to her cheek as she thinks, What an unladylike and indecent position to assume with a man who, but a few hours before, was an utter stranger.... Thus accepting the situation she yields her body to those sex excitements caused by movements so artfully executed by the well-trained dancer in these arts. She soon learns the secret, the charm, the cause and craze, experiencing sex awakening for the first time. Becoming abnormally developed in her lower nature, she is now started on the very high seas of the mad whirl of physical desire.

She will soon meet her ruin, after the last waltz:

Let us look at the fair young girl once more--close in the embrace of the Apollo of the evening. With head resting on his shoulder, face upturned to his, her bare arms around his neck--with partly nude swelling breasts heaving tumultuously against his, face-to-face they glide, their limbs interwoven, with his strong right arm around her yielding form he presses her to him until every curve in the contour of her body thrills with amorous contact.

After the dance:

The girl, whose blood is hot from the exertion and whose every carnal sense is aroused and aflame by the repetition of such scenes as we have witnessed, is led to the ever-waiting automobile, where she sinks exhausted on the cushioned seat. Now is his golden opportunity. He must not miss it and he does not, and that beautiful girl who entered the dancing school as pure and innocent as an angel three months ago returns to her home that night robbed of that most precious jewel of womanhood--virtue!

The dance craze, which began at the end of the previous decade, has its own celebrities. Vernon and Irene Castle--known for their elegant sensuality--change the way America moves, the way it dresses. Gone forever are the bustle and the corset. Theirs is a world of silk.

Something this fun, this frenzied, would inevitably attract the attention of puritan politicians and reformers.

In 1916 the Illinois Senate Vice Committee holds hearings on the dangers of dancehalls. After questioning the female partner of a dance team, and having his offer of protection turned down, Chairman O'Hara tries to get at the root of evil:

"Now, as a matter of fact, don't you wrap yourself up with this young woman almost as though you were one and glide together?"

"At times we do, but only at certain parts of our dancing. We have done certain things, but I do not consider that they are bad, because I object to anything that is licentious. I don't approve of it. I am a dancing teacher myself, and I don't see any good in indecent dancing."

Then the committee calls a witness, a teacher of art named Maude Josaphare:

"Describe the dances you saw."

"The third dance was what I should call the tango. It was danced with a man. I have seen one there in the slums in New York. In the modern tango the man picks the girl up and throws her around, bends over to the floor that way, rests his arms on her arms and his head on her shoulder and vice versa."

"Is it art or suggestive?"

"I don't think there is any art in that. I think it is very suggestive, the kind of suggestiveness that may confuse in the mind of a young girl."

The Politics of Prudery

The Illinois Senate Vice Committee was not an isolated example of political lunacy. Investigators spent hours delving into the meaning of song lyrics (a ditty called All Night Long presented an unusual threat) or the nature of costumes worn in a harem dance because these were of great concern to the sons and daughters of our Puritan forefathers. The New Woman challenged the old order, the great design of puritan America.

Fifteen years earlier a minister had summed up the optimistic mood of the U.S.: "Laws are becoming more just, rulers humane; music is becoming sweeter and books wiser; homes are happier and the individual heart becoming at once more just and more gentle. For today, art, industry, invention, literature, learning and government--all these are captives marching in Christ's triumphant procession up the hill of fame."

Now the vision was coming apart. The old order rallied its forces. An obsession with vice created a coalition of women's groups and male reformers. Both believed that a woman's place was in the home, that purity was a virtue, (continued on page 104)Sexual Revolution(continued from page 74) that male sexual impulse was evil. The Women's Christian Temperance Union feared the animal nature of man--the devil in the flesh.

These groups sought to extend so-called maternal authority into the public sphere, to extend their rights by curtailing those of others.

There was a sexual undertone to all of their work. At the turn of the century Kentucky-born Carry Nation would storm saloons and, after smashing windows, mirrors and whiskey bottles with a hatchet, would rip sporting images from the walls.

"There was scarcely any phase of human life," wrote one biographer of Nation, "from kissing to eating, into which she did not poke her disapproving nose. Did she observe a maiden expose a few inches of her ankle or glimpse the gleaming bosom of a lady of fashion? She forthwith shrieked a lecture on modesty and quoted Scripture to uphold her prediction that the offender was destined to stew in the infernal fires. Did she find a young man embracing his sweetheart, even though he had progressed no further than imprinting a chaste salute upon the fair one's willing lips? Nation has to her credit many a blighted romance, for to her mind lovemaking before marriage was a sin of sins, reeking with horrid possibility. Menacing the lovers with quivering forefinger and glittering eyes, she cried an oration on seduction and the gratification of lusts that sent them scurrying away, hiding their blushes as best they could, for she was nothing if not frank."

Carry Nation represented the extreme; other women's groups were better organized and more powerful. The WCTU had an impressive agenda. It began in 1874 and almost immediately branched out with a Committee for Work With Fallen Women, which later became the Department for the Suppression of the Social Evil and then the Department of Social Purity. The group had launched a White Cross--White Shield campaign promoting the single standard (chastity before marriage and fidelity within). The WCTU wanted a single code of morals "to maintain the law of purity as equally binding on men and women."

One of the temperance movement's greatest triumphs was in incorporating into primary school penmanship lessons the slogan, "Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine."

These women wanted greater protection in the home (e.g., freedom from abusive or drunken husbands). But they also wanted greater control over the environment outside the home. They worked to create red-light abatement laws that could be used to force brothels out of business. In San Francisco, when the enlightened city opened a venereal disease clinic for prostitutes (an act that quickly resulted in a 66 percent drop in infection rates), social purity groups threatened a boycott against the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915. The groups argued that the wages of sin had to have a price (in this case, disease). The clinic was closed.

Dr. Kate Bushnell, a leader of the WCTU, was clear on the breadth of the crusade: "The word temperance had been narrowed down till it only meant total abstinence. In America, the women of the WCTU had accepted it in its higher meaning, the combating of depraved appetite in every form, and for the abolition, all the world over, of all laws that protect depraved appetite."

These women could turn to their own champions--the men of the Progressive Party. Male reformers had taken over the problem of fallen women.

Whether the problem was quack medicine or impure food, Progressive reformers tackled social issues with a clear plan. Recognizing the value of publicity--especially the power of headlines to galvanize political action--they launched a series of vice investigations. John D. Rockefeller funded the crusade, which allowed George Kneeland to publish Commercialized Prostitution in New York City in 1913. The Vice Commission of Chicago preceded it in 1911 with The Social Evil in Chicago. Within a few years, more than 32 municipalities and states had conducted investigations of vice. In towns as diverse as Lexington, Kentucky, Bay City, Michigan and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, stouthearted sons of middle-class America put themselves at risk, going night after night to brothels, concert saloons, candy stores, dancehalls--the bars and haunts of the working class. Vice investigators diligently recorded every fondled buttock, every exposed breast, every offer of pleasure, every laugh from a girl in some young man's lap, every embrace, every departure of a couple for some secluded spot.

Prostitution was the apparent target. The Vice Commission of Chicago claimed as a motto "constant and persistent repression of prostitution the immediate method; absolute annihilation the ultimate ideal." But the true target, of course, was lust itself: "So long as there is lust in the hearts of men," announced the commission, "it will seek out some method of expression. Until the hearts of men are changed we can hope for no absolute annihilation of the social evil."

In 1914 writer Walter Lippmann took the Vice Commission of Chicago to task. He saw a parallel between political repression and Sigmund Freud's theory of psychological repression. Like Freud, he believed that sex surfaced in every human activity, and that attempts to contain it were doomed. "Lust has a thousand avenues," he writes in his Preface to Politics. "The brothel, the flat, the assignation house, the tenement saloons, dancehalls, steamers, ice-cream parlors, Turkish baths, massage parlors, streetwalking--the thing has woven itself into the texture of city life. Like the hydra it grows new heads everywhere. It draws into its service the pleasures of the city. Entangled with the love of gaiety, organized as commerce, it is literally impossible to follow the myriad expressions it assumes."

Lippmann claimed the moral crusaders had become "panicky and reverted to an ancient superstition. They forbade the existence of evil by law."

The commission published page after page of recommendations, new sexual taboos: No immoral or vulgar dances should be permitted in saloons, no intoxicating liquor should be allowed at any public dance. Laws against private wine rooms should be enforced. Lippmann scoffs at the attempt: "Nothing dynamic holds the recommendations together--the mass of them are taboos, an attempt to kill each mosquito and ignore the marsh. The evils of prostitution are seen as a series of episodes, each of which must be clubbed, forbidden, raided and jailed."

The vice investigators provide a look at a new sexuality--beyond the world of prostitutes. In Vice in Chicago, Walter Reckless describes a distinctly noncommercial fling: "Young people, some visibly under the influence of liquor, others apparently sober, were repeatedly seen to dance or whirl about the floor with their bodies pressed tightly together, shaking, moving and rotating their lower portions in a way that undoubtedly roused their sex impulses. Some even were seen to engage in 'soul kissing' and biting one another on the lobes of the ears and upon the neck."

The vice investigators saw women--unchaperoned by family and freed from the front porch--experimenting with sexuality on their own terms. Are we to believe these fevered accounts? Years later, Polly Adler would describe the dancehalls of the late teens differently. Adler, who became one of New York's most famous madams, wrote that the dancehalls of her youth resembled "strenuous gymnasiums" more than they did "nightly mass deflorations."

In an essay on " 'Charity Girls' and City Pleasures," feminist historian Kathy Peiss presents a vice investigator's description of the barroom activity between dances at a Turnverein ball in New York City:

Most of the younger couples were hugging and kissing, there was a general mingling of men and women at the different tables, almost everyone seemed to know one another and spoke to each other across the tables and joined couples at different tables, they were all singing and carrying on, they kept running around the room and acted like a mob of lunatics let loose.

Peiss argues that the dancehalls created a new code:

The heterosocial orientation of these amusements made popularity a goal to be pursued through dancing ability, willingness to drink and eye-catching finery. Women who would not drink at balls and social entertainments were often ostracized by men, while cocktails and ingenious mixtures replaced the five-cent beer and helped to make drinking an acceptable female activity. Many women used clothing as a means of drawing attention to themselves, wearing high-heeled shoes, fancy dresses, costume jewelry, elaborate pompadours and cosmetics. As one working woman sharply explained: "If you want to get any notion took of you, you gotta have some style about you."

One investigator noted, "Those who are unattractive and those who have puritanic notions fare but ill in the matter of enjoyments."

And vice investigators shared none of those traits for popularity. In one Pittsburgh report on dancehalls, an investigator--after describing men and women intermingling joyfully--reports he could not get any of the local women to dance with him, and ended up having to partner with his co-agent, a female investigator.

Vice investigators were not buffoons: By 1915, 17 states and the District of Columbia had red-light abatement laws. By 1917, 30 states had adopted the reform. The American Social Hygiene Association--heir to the group founded by Dr. Prince Morrow to combat venereal disease--could point to 47 cities that had closed their vice districts by 1916.

The results were mixed. "There were a great many of them who left the city," one reformer in Des Moines complained. "It was not our prime idea to drive them out of the city, but our idea to drive them into decency."

Lust was a chameleon that adapted to new technologies. B.S. Steadwell, president of the World's Purity Federation, bemoaned advances in 1913:

The advent of electricity brought us the telephone, which is a necessity to any modern house of shame whether located in the city or in the country, and connects every home with these dens of infamy. It made possible the degrading picture show, and inventions which have been used largely to promote and cultivate immorality. During the past 50 years, girls and women have taken their places beside boys and men in schools, colleges, stores, offices, factories and shops, and have in constantly increasing numbers entered commercial life. This close association has brought opportunities for sexual gratification of which full advantage has been taken. The automobile has made possible the "joyride" and has built up the palatial "roadhouse," or country brothel. Luxurious transportation facilities have also ushered in immoral practices never before known.

The new woman created her own rules. These "women adrift" were part of a new style of socializing. The vice investigators identified "charity girls" who traded sex for excitement or access to entertainment: "They simply take this means of securing more amusements, excitements, luxuries and indulgences than their wages would afford them," proclaimed the 1911 Federal Report. "They are not promiscuously immoral."

The vice investigator carried an indelible notion of madonna and whore. A woman's place was in the private sphere, supporting her husband, not in public cavorting with strangers. Young girls who expressed interest in sex were deemed incorrigible, and ended up in reformatories or worse. The vice inspector viewed himself as a Christian champion in a holy war--his mission was saving souls. Indeed, one crusader wrote: "The records of the Protestant churches of the U.S. show that in 1917 there were 458,400 new members enrolled. The secretary of the N.Y. Travelers Aid Society declares in 1917 there were 600,000 girls in houses of ill fame in the U.S. and 1 million clandestines. The referee of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court states that 95 percent of the delinquents are from the dancehalls."

Lippmann saw the dangers of repression: "We have made a very considerable confusion of the life of joy and the joy of life. The first impulse is to abolish all lobster palaces, melodramas, yellow newspapers and sentimentally erotic novels. Why not abolish all the devil's works? the reformer wonders. The answer is in history. It can't be done that way. It is impossible to abolish either with a law or an ax the desires of men. It is dangerous, explosively dangerous, to thwart them for any length of time. The Puritans tried to choke the craving for pleasure in early New England. They had no theaters, no dances, no festivals. They burned witches instead."

The Flickers

No single event marks the change in America more than this: In the second decade of the century a young entrepreneur named William Fox bought the most notorious concert saloon in New York City--the Haymarket on 29th and Sixth--and turned it into a movie theater. The palace of sin became a palace of cinema. The smell of sweat, semen and beer gave way to the smell of popcorn.

Men and women could attend movies together and watch in intimate darkness as beautiful creatures lived impossible lives. Where once no reputable girl would go--for fear of being mistaken for a prostitute--millions of families now flocked.

The films weren't about sex so much as about sex roles. In 1909 reformer Jane Addams had realized for "hundreds of young people, going to the show is the only possible road to mystery and romance." What was "seen and heard there becomes their sole topic of conversation, forming the ground pattern of their social life."

As early as 1907, a pious professor attacked the new medium: "Pictures are more degrading than the dime novel because they represent real flesh-and-blood characters and import moral lessons directly through the senses. The dime novel cannot lead the boy further than his limited imagination will allow, but the motion picture forces upon his view things that are new; they (continued on page 132)Sexual Revolution(continued from page 106) give firsthand experience."

In 1915 the Supreme Court would agree. In Mutual Film Corp. vs. Ohio the court ruled that film was not protected by the First Amendment. "The exhibition of moving pictures is a business pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit, not to be regarded as part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion. They are mere representations of events, or ideas and sentiments published or known; vivid, useful and entertaining, no doubt, but capable of evil, having power for it, the greater because of their attractiveness and manner of exhibition."

Filmmakers had realized early on that the market wanted sex. One historian recounts a meeting of the board of directors of the Biograph Co. When one member questioned the heavy emphasis on sex, he was shown a list of titles playing at a local arcade, along with the daily take:

U.S. Battleship at Sea--25 cents.

Joseph Jeffersen in Rip's Sleep--45 cents.

Ballet Dancer--$1.05.

Girl Climbing Apple Tree--$3.65.

At a nickel a shot, sex beat battleships by seven to one. One Biograph board member said, "I think we had better have some more of the Girl Climbing Apple Tree kind."

Women added sensuality and spice to the movies--Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties cascaded through scene after scene, revealing more leg than one would see at a beach. The curvaceous comedians brought out the censors, who snipped offending scenes and created great publicity for Sennett's work.

By the teens, the arcades with row upon row of nickelodeons had given way to movie palaces; and anonymous girls climbing trees gave way to real screen celebrities. One of the earliest stars, an Australian swimmer named Annette Kellerman, was presented as "the world's most perfectly formed woman" in one aquatic epic after another. She pioneered the one-piece bathing suit. Her effect was such that a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, points out a swimming hole once visited by Kellerman, leaving one to fantasize on sharing water that had been cleaved by perfection.

And then came Theda.

The Vamp

In 1914 William Fox cast unknown actress Theda Bara in a film version of the play A Fool There Was. Bara portrayed a woman whose sexual instinct was unrestrained. She seduced a diplomat, lured him away from wife and family, then discarded him. Studio press agents created a ridiculous biography: Theda was the love child of a French actress and her Italian lover. She was born in the shadow of the Sphinx. Her lovers died of poison from mysterious amulets. Theda Bara was an acronym for Arab Death. Publicity stills showed her kneeling over the skeleton of a lover, suggesting that she not only drained men of their vitality but also ate their flesh.

Theda was actually Theodosia Goodman, daughter of a Cincinnati tailor. But America remembers the character created by the willing press. In one interview she called her character a "vamp" (her first film was based on a Kipling poem called The Vampire, and the shortened version stuck as a nickname). According to biographer Eve Golden, "Until 1915, a vamp was either a piece of stage business or music done over and over between acts (to 'vamp until ready'). But by the end of 1915, the word had entered the American vocabulary as a woman who uses her charms and wiles to seduce and exploit men."

Theda became the screen's first sex star. It was so implausible. One critic commented that Bara "had a maternal figure. She was, in fact, remarkably like a suburban housewife circa World War One, bitten by the glamour bug into imagining herself a supreme seductress of men, and by some weird turn of fate succeeding at it."

"She was the first popular star whose primary attraction was her sexuality," note film historians Jeremy Pascal and Clyde Jeavons. "She proved conclusively that audiences paid vast sums of money to see women projecting a highly sexual image. She showed that true sex symbols have a bisexual appeal in that they attract equally the fantasies of the opposite sex and the vanity of their own. Men adored, women emulated."

But the role proved a trap. Once a vamp, always a vamp. Bara's popularity lasted for more than 40 films, but by decade's end the public would tire of the seductress.

Still, her effect reached far beyond the screen. Fitzgerald charted the evolutionary change in women in This Side of Paradise: "The belle had become the flirt, the flirt had become the baby vamp."

The birth of the fan magazine allowed women stars to talk about traditional women's roles through a safe layer. Lillian Gish, an actress who epitomized innocence in films by D.W. Griffith, would grumble: "Virgins are the hardest roles to play. Those dear little girls--to make them interesting takes great vitality, but a fallen woman or a vamp! Seventy-five percent of your work is already done."

As Lary May points out in Screening Out the Past, Bara played Cleopatra, Madame du Barry, Salome--"women whose erotic allure destroyed men who ruled over vast kingdoms. The vamp thus embodied the most ominous warning of the vice crusaders: Sex could destroy the social order."

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Of course, to reformers, movies posed a threat as great as those of dancehalls and brothels. "They brought the lessons of the red-light district to young people." At the end of the first decade, America had taken steps to screen and censor films. The National Board of Review, created in 1908 by Anthony Comstock, labored to protect the nation's morals. More than 100 female volunteers viewed films nonstop. According to one account, "During October 1914, for example, its members reviewed 571 films and eliminated 75 scenes, ten reels and three entire movies." Comstock and company wanted to control more than behavior--they wanted to control the images and dreams that fascinated the new America.

Blue Movies

In 1915 projectionists toured the country with a film called A Free Ride. Directed by A. Wise Guy and photographed by Will B. Hard, with titles by Will She, Free Ride is the earliest known stag film. It set the low standards that still guide the underground film world. A man driving along a country road picks up two girls who are walking home. He briefly fondles their breasts, remarking, "What a beautiful dairy." A while later, he pulls off the road.

The title card declares, "In the wide open spaces, where men are men and girls will be girls, the hills are full of romance and adventure." The sex that follows is, to the modern eye, hilarious. One girl lifts her skirt and rubs her vagina. The man fondles the other girl while she wrestles his penis through a button fly. Quick cut and she is lying on a blanket, legs spread. The man's pants are around his ankles, and thus hobbled, he takes the plunge. The second girl watches, then demands her turn. He enters her doggy fashion. There is no come shot, and the girls seem to pass out from pleasure. Another quick cut shows the man supine in the grass--still clothed. The girls appear sans dresses, but still in knee-length socks. One performs tentative oral sex--the man artlessly grabs her hair and forces her head down. Then, according to the title card, he says, "Hurry up, let's get out of here."

A Free Ride starred the Jazz Girls. In the second decade, jazz didn't just refer to the music; it also meant the act of sex itself. In a 1919 stag film called Strictly Union, a stagehand comes upon an aspiring actress in a changing room. As the hour hand spins on the clock, having tried oral sex and anal sex, he promises, "I'll give you a regular jazz." At the end of the film, after the stagehand punches a time clock and retires from the field, the woman complains, "Gee, I wish I could get a man with some pep."

The traveling projectionist played his images on the walls of local smokers--clubs where small-town businessmen gathered--and at college fraternity houses. As red-light districts disappeared, these films would act as sex education and a safe rite of passage for young men. For older men, this allowed them to share sex with their buddies--a form of extramarital sex that did not involve a visit to a brothel. For college students the films provided a clear look at sex--French postcards set in motion. Years later, historians would say that the "films revealed graphically what it was difficult to see in the dark confines of the backseat." The films also reinforced the obsessive myths of male sexual fantasy: "A real man can have any woman, all women want to be dominated sexually, sex can happen any time, anywhere, and human beings are universal sexual tinder."

White Slavery Revisited

On June 25, 1910 President William Howard Taft signed into law the White-Slave-Traffic Act. Named for its sponsor in Congress, the Mann Act stated:

That any person who shall knowingly transport or cause to be transported, or aid or assist in obtaining transportation for, or in transporting, any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose, or with the intent and purpose to induce, entice or compel such woman or girl to become a prostitute, or to give herself up to debauchery, or to engage in any other immoral practice shall be punished by a fine not exceeding $5000, or by imprisonment of not more than five years, or by both such fine and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court.

In Crossing Over the Line, legal scholar David Langum presents evidence of Congress' original intent. The bill was aimed at the criminal traffic in women, the huge and mythical vice trust. But it also served as a rallying point for the social purity movement. As one supporter argued, those in favor of the bill included "every pure woman in the land, every priest and minister of the living God, and men who reverence womanhood and who set a priceless value upon female purity." On the other side of the bill, "you would find all the whoremongers and the pimps and the procurers and the keepers of bawdy houses. Upon that other side you would find all those who hate God and scoff at innocence and laugh at female virtue."

In the face of such rhetoric, who could vote against that bill?

The moral panic was in full bloom. The New York Times proclaimed, "There is a white-slave traffic." The San Francisco Examiner came up with the feverish figure: "Slavers Kidnap 60,000 Women Each Year." Reformers plastered various cities with posters that screamed: "Danger! Mothers beware! Sixty thousand innocent girls wanted to take the place of 60,000 white slaves who will die this year in the U.S.!"

Reginald Kauffman's House of Bondage was a best-selling novel. Two white-slavery plays--The Lure and The Flight--opened on Broadway. Movie theaters drew throngs of people to Traffic in Souls in 1913. The movie played simultaneously in 28 theaters in New York City, grossing $450,000.

America was suddenly afraid for its daughters. Stanley Finch, one of the first heads of the Bureau of Investigation, used the hysteria to build a personal fiefdom within the federal government. After he became Special Commissioner for the Suppression of White Slavery, he told audiences:

It is a fact that there are now scattered throughout practically every section of the U.S. a vast number of men and women whose sole occupation consists in enticing, tricking or coercing young women and girls into immoral lives. Moreover, their methods have been so far developed and perfected that they seem to be able to ensnare almost any woman or girl whom they select for the purpose. This is indeed an extraordinary statement, and one almost passing belief, but that it is absolutely true no one can honestly doubt who reviews any considerable portion of the mass of evidence which is already in the possession of the Attorney General's Bureau of Investigation.

There was only one problem: No one could find a widespread, organized traffic in white slaves.

Investigators at the time interviewed 1106 street prostitutes and found six who claimed white slavery was the cause of their entry into prostitution. The Vice Commission of Chicago looked at 2241 juvenile delinquents (i.e., sexually active females) and found 107 self-described victims of white slavery.

Clearly, relatively few women were being forced into prostitution by white slavers. Some reformers looked at economic forces, even calculating the exact dollar value of purity. A woman could support herself without falling into sin if she made $8 to $10 a week. Unfortunately, most working girls--in factories, shops and offices--earned wages of $6 per week.

Suffragists used prostitution to argue for economic equality and a minimum wage for women, but they also recognized the emotional appeal of the white-slave myth. As one suffragist put it: "Remember, ladies, it is more important to be aroused than to be accurate. Apathy is more of a crime than exaggeration in dealing with this subject."

The Bureau of Investigation created a directory of brothels. Agents interviewed prostitutes, attempting to identify those being held against their will. They would report the arrival of prostitutes from other states. But the paperwork and moral accounting lacked the passion of a crusade. The national press began to express doubts that white slavery was more than hype and hysteria. Congress weighed cutting funds for the new bureau. Fearing a lost opportunity, a coalition of religious leaders called the World's Purity Association demanded greater appropriations.

In 1913 a minor scandal erupted when a press release of suspect origin suggested that Attorney General James McReynolds had "issued instructions that no man is to be indicted and prosecuted [under the Mann Act] unless it is shown that he shared in the earnings of the woman."

The attorney general denied authorship of the memo, which seemed to target only pimps. But the damage was done. As David Langum points out, the church groups went wild:

For the next eight months, church and purity groups denounced a directive that never had been made and in the process moved the federal government more and more toward a policy of vigorous prosecution of noncommercial violations. The Chicago Church Federation Council resolved on September 29, 1913 to "call upon Christian churches and reform organizations and all men who desire the safety of our homes and upon all good women and women's organizations to support this law in its prohibition of debauchery, whether for gain or for personal indulgence, and we protest the weakening of the Mann Act for the evil gratification of influential men."

The purity movement demanded that the law be used to punish "personal escapades." The movement had its law and a national sex police, and it wanted action. But a law designed for one purpose--the elimination of white slavery--was also subverted for another.

Jack Johnson, born in Texas in 1878, was the first black boxer to win the heavyweight championship of the world. In a bout fought in Reno on July 4, 1910, he knocked out Jim Jeffries in the 15th round. He became the most hated man in America--as one writer noted, "no longer the respectful darky, hat in hand." He had defeated a white man. Not entirely coincidentally, in the aftermath of the fight, race riots swept the country.

Johnson, an educated man who read Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, was a connoisseur who collected exotic cars. He threatened the old order in a more direct way--he married a white woman and kept several white mistresses scattered throughout the country.

Lucille Cameron was one of the latter. She had come to Chicago from Minneapolis, ostensibly to work at Johnson's Café de Champion. Cameron's mother reported Johnson to the feds. They arrested him in October 1912 on charges of abduction and violating the Mann Act.

Cameron refused to testify against Johnson, and upon her release from custody, she married the fighter. (Johnson's wife had committed suicide.) The case seemed closed, until the feds located Belle Schreiber, another of Johnson's former mistresses, also white. The black fighter was convicted in 1913 and sentenced to one year in jail for transporting Schreiber for "immoral purposes."

With racial tension high (the governor of South Carolina told fellow governors "the black brute who lays his hands upon a white woman ought not to have any trial"), Johnson fled the country. (He later returned and served his sentence.)

The law had another unanticipated consequence: The Mann Act created a whole industry of blackmailers who tracked wealthy men as they traveled with women who were not their wives. A member of the gang would pose as a federal agent, flash a badge, threaten arrest--and then collect hush money.

Women threatened reluctant suitors with arrest. Angry wives called on the state to arrest errant husbands who conducted reckless affairs.

Consider the case of Drew Caminetti and Maury Diggs. In 1912, the two Californians, both married, both the sons of wealthy parents, became captivated by a pair of young single women. The foursome ricocheted around the Sacramento area in an automobile, visiting road-houses and having amorous picnics in the countryside and "champagne orgies" in their offices. As a result of their escapades, the four achieved an inevitable notoriety. In 1913, trying to avoid angry spouses and family members, the two men and their mistresses boarded a train in Sacramento. They crossed the state line into Nevada and took rooms in Reno. Four days later the men were arrested under the Mann Act.

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Did the statute's language--"debauchery" or "any other immoral purpose"--cover noncommercial sex? The court decided it did: "The prostitute may, in the popular sense, be more degraded in character than the concubine, but the latter nonetheless must be held to lead an immoral life, if any regard whatever be had to the views that are almost universally held in this country as to the relations which may rightfully, from the standpoint of morality, exist between man and woman in the matter of sexual intercourse."

Crossing state lines was not what mattered--it was crossing the line that keeps sex within marriage. The Mann Act sought to limit the movement of emancipated women, though mostly men were prosecuted. It was a direct challenge to the phenomenon of the automobile.

The Free Ride depicted in America's first stag film was now, and for decades to come, threatened by federal law.

Sex and Drugs

The moral panic surrounding the white-slave traffic extended into other areas associated with vice. Reformers noted that cocaine and morphine were connected with prostitution and the new nightlife. "Society requires late hours," explained one frequenter of nightclubs and cabarets.

H. Wayne Morgan's Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800--1980 presents this testimony to Congress from a member of the Philadelphia pharmaceutical board, on the dangers of cocaine:

The colored people seem to have a weakness for it. It is a very seductive drug and it produces extreme exhilaration. Persons under the influence of it believe they are millionaires. They have an exaggerated ego. They imagine they can lift this building if they want to, or can do anything they want to. They have no regard for right or wrong. It produces a kind of temporary insanity. They would just as leave rape a woman as anything else, and a great many of the Southern rape cases have been traced to cocaine.

Another committee heard that women were especially susceptible to the drug: "The police officers of these questionable districts tell us that the habitués are made madly wild by cocaine."

Concern was not limited to drugs. The Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914 and the Volstead Act of 1919 were largely attempts to remove all of the lubricants of vice. The Volstead Act was fueled by testimony from social workers about fallen girls whose ruination was summed up in one sentence: "I had a few drinks, then I don't remember what happened next."

Nothing shows the overlap between social purity groups, suffragists and temperance unions more than the phenomenon of dry states. Where women first got the vote--in Western states--prohibition immediately followed.

Comstock and the Women of Greenwich Village

If the dancehalls and movie theaters were creating a new kind of American woman, so were the salons and saloons of New York's Greenwich Village. Artists were struggling with personal freedom. Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer who ran the gallery 291, shocked his fellows by photographing his wife, painter Georgia O'Keeffe, in the throes of orgasm. An art show at the New York Armory had just introduced America to the work of Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.

Anthony Comstock, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, viewed art as another of Satan's traps. While the public seemed to support his attempts to ban obscene books, it began to view Comstock as unsophisticated and an embarrassment when it came to art. In 1906 he had arrested a young woman who worked for the Art Students' League for sending him a catalog containing a study of nudes. A subsequent flurry of satirical cartoons made Comstock the butt of jokes and almost cost him his position as special agent for the Post Office. When Comstock protested a play about prostitution written by George Bernard Shaw, the playwright coined the term "comstockery" to indicate such censorship. The controversy surrounding Mrs. Warren's Profession assured its success. In fact, the seal of Comstock's disapproval became a mark of distinction in society.

In 1912 the Paris Spring Salon awarded a medal of honor to artist Paul Chabas for his painting September Morn. In May 1913 a manager put a copy of the innocent nude in the west window of Braun and Co., on West 46th Street in New York. Comstock called the store and ordered the picture removed. "It is not a proper picture to be shown to boys and girls," he said. "There is nothing more sacred than the form of a woman, but it must not be denuded. I think everyone will agree with me that such pictures should not be displayed where schoolchildren passing through the streets can see them."

The manager refused to remove the picture and, indeed, kept it in the window for two weeks, until he realized that the crowd gathering daily kept customers away. The print sold millions of copies. September Morn became the flag of the new freedom.

In his annual report to the society, Comstock wrote about his campaign against paintings "which had been exhibited in the saloons of Paris."

Thanks to Dr. Freud, we have a term for such a revealing slip.

Comstock was a clown to the art world, but he was a serious threat to individuals fomenting change. He kept his own enemies list, and if someone mocked him, he or she would have reason to fear.

In Greenwich Village, anarchist Emma Goldman, born in Russia in 1869, was an articulate champion for the new woman--and a harsh critic of the old order. She had heard Freud speak at Clark University and had taken to heart his message that too much repression was destructive. Goldman discussed free love from a libertarian position: Individuals had the right to choose sexual partners on the basis of love, not law. She viewed marriage as a form of prostitution. "It is merely a situation of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in one marriage, or to many men."

Goldman argued for contraception--not as a means to weed out imbeciles and madmen, as most social Darwinists and eugenicists wanted, but simply as a way to free women from the trap of biology. Yet, when she wrote letters to her longtime lover, Ben Reitman, she had to use a code for fear of giving Comstock cause to arrest her.

Candace Falk, author of Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman, gives a sample of the code: "Skirting the laws prohibiting obscenity in the mails, they relished the defiance of their euphemisms and abbreviations. From the few times that they dared spell out their code, it can be deciphered. Her treasure box longed for his Willie, and she longed to have his face between her joy mountains--Mount Blanc and Mount Jura. She wanted to suck the head of his fountain of life which stood over her like a mighty specter. Both lovers reveled in an orally focused sex that particularly emphasized clitoral-area stimulation. She once wrote, 'I press you to my body close with my hot burning legs. I embrace your precious head.' "

Another quote: "But one condition I must make: No whiskers, no, the t-b cannot stand for that."

•

Into this radical environment came Margaret Sanger, a former nurse and mother of three. Goldman gave her the works of pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis to digest. Soon Sanger was holding forth on the beauties of sex and orgasm at Mabel Dodge's Greenwich Village salon, listening to other radicals attack the slavery of marriage.

At the request of a fellow radical organizer, Sanger started lecturing workers' groups on the facts of life. She later collected this information in a pamphlet called What Every Girl Should Know. What she preached would bring her the unwanted attention of Anthony Comstock.

To demonstrate how radical was Margaret Sanger's frank discussion of sex, consider how Good Housekeeping suggested imparting the facts of life to a teenager: "Mother and Father love each other very much. All our friends know that. Where love is there God is, and God wants little ones to be. When God wants to send a little child into a home, he fits up just beneath the mother's heart a snug nest not unlike the nests birds live in. Then out of two tiny eggs the father and mother bring together in the nest, a little child is hatched just like a little bird. It is all very wonderful. No fairy tale is half so beautiful. And best of all, the story is true, every word of it."

Sanger was aware that birth was not a fairy tale. In 1912 she attended a poor patient, Sadie Sacks, who was recovering from trying to abort her umpteenth pregnancy. Sanger listened as the woman pleaded with a doctor for information on how to prevent conception. "Oh ho," laughed the doctor. "You want your cake while you eat it, too, do you? Well, it can't be done. I'll tell you the only sure thing to do. Tell Jake to sleep on the roof."

Three months later the telephone rang. Sadie Sacks was dying. Finding herself pregnant, she had tried again to self-abort. She died within ten minutes of Sanger's arrival.

Sanger says that on that night she vowed to fight abortion by finding ways of controlling conception.

She attempted in 1912 to serialize What Every Girl Should Know in the Call, a radical newsletter published by friends in the Village. When the editors told readers that the final installment would discuss venereal disease, the line was crossed. Comstock ordered the Post Office to revoke the Call's mailing permit if it ran the article.

In exasperation Sanger wrote a three-line replacement:

"What Every Girl Should Know--Nothing.

"By Order of the Post Office."

What Every Girl Should Know may have been radical, but it was also a reflection of the prejudice of the time, in some ways no different than the vile antimasturbation handbooks of the turn of the century.

"Let us take a sane and logical view of this subject," Sanger wrote. "In my personal experience as a trained nurse while attending persons afflicted with various and often revolting diseases, no matter what their ailments, I never found anyone so repulsive as the chronic masturbator."

She then tells of a young boy she had attended during a bout of measles. She discovers that he is a masturbator, and considers it a triumph when, after she has given him a lecture, he asks his brother to tie his hands to the bedpost during the night to help him overcome his struggle.

Sanger, revealing a prejudice against male desire, warned against a specific danger:

In the boy or girl past puberty we find one of the most dangerous forms of masturbation, i.e., mental masturbation, which consists of forming mental pictures or thinking of obscene or voluptuous pictures. This form is considered especially harmful to the brain, for the habit becomes so fixed that it is almost impossible to free the thoughts from lustful pictures. Every girl should guard against the man who invariably turns a word or sentence into a lustful or, commonly termed, smutty channel, for nine times out often he is a mental masturbator.

Other self-appointed sex experts at the time called flirtation "a form of mutual onanism."

Sanger's discomfort with male sexuality was about to undergo a radical change. She vacationed in Provincetown, Massachusetts and socialized with the artists who made up the Provincetown Players. Her circle of friends included John Reed, the journalist who later covered the Russian revolution. She began to experiment with the free-love theory espoused by her friends--more on principle than desire, it would seem. She took lovers. When her husband, William, objected, she told him to take mistresses of his own. He refused, writing her: "I will let my name be associated with no other woman. I would be amiss to all the fine emotion that surges within me if I fell from grace. It cannot be, that's all. I still hold that intercourse is not to be classed with a square meal, to be partaken of at will, irrespective of the consequences. You speak, dear love, that in our life together you have given me the best and deepest love--yes, and I have felt it--that you were the only woman who cared to understand me. But you have advanced sexually--you once said that you need to be in different relations (with men) as a service for the women of your time. To all this I have no answer."

In 1913 Sanger raised money to start her own newsletter, The Woman Rebel. She promised subscribers that the paper would deliver facts about the prevention of conception.

At one Village meeting, a writer named Robert Parker suggested she call her issue "birth control." She took the words as her own.

On August 25, 1914 two agents from the federal government arrived to tell her that she had violated the Comstock Act. Four issues of Woman Rebel had been suppressed; seven separate articles had been deemed obscene. Sanger faced 45 years in prison. Planning to leave the country rather than appear in court, she printed a pamphlet called Family Limitation, outlining what she knew of birth control. The text is a straightforward description of condoms, pessaries, douches and spermicidal suppositories. Her comments about the pleasure of sex are limited to: "A mutual and satisfied sexual act is of great benefit to the average woman, the magnetism of it is health-giving." Failure to give a woman an orgasm might lead to a "disease of her generative organs, besides giving her a horror and repulsion for the sexual act."

For Sanger, birth control was a liberation from sexual slavery--the duty to procreate. She told the poor: "While it may be troublesome to get up to douche, and a nuisance to have to watch the date of the menstrual period, and to some it may seem sordid and inartistic to insert a pessary or a suppository in anticipation of the sexual act, it may be far more sordid and the condition far worse than inartistic a few years later for the mother to find herself burdened down with half a dozen accidental children, unwanted, helpless, shoddily clothed, sometimes starved or undernourished, dragging at her skirt, while she becomes a worn-out shadow of the woman she once was."

Sanger arranged to have Family Limitation privately printed, 100,000 copies, to be sold for 25 cents apiece. Rather than face trial, she took a train to Canada and, armed with a false passport, made her way to England.

Comstock would not be deterred. He ordered a decoy to pose as a woman in distress. The agent called on William Sanger and asked for a copy of the pamphlet. Arrest followed immediately, along with a suggestion that if William would tell the whereabouts of the author, he would go free.

William refused. He went to trial, was found guilty of distributing obscene literature and was sentenced to 30 days by a judge who thundered: "Persons like you who circulate such pamphlets are a menace to society. There are too many now who believe it is a crime to have children. If some of the women who are going around advocating equal suffrage would go around and advocate women having children, they would do a greater service. Your crime violates not only the laws of the state but also the laws of God."

In England, Margaret Sanger met Havelock Ellis. She was 31, he was 55. He became a mentor. He told her to focus on one cause--birth control--and directed her research in the British Museum. The two became lifelong friends, possibly lovers.

She traveled from England to Holland and Spain before finally returning to the U.S. As a result of publicity, the atmosphere had changed. She succeeded in having the charges against her dismissed.

Comstock had died from pneumonia--reportedly from a chill caught at William Sanger's trial. It was the end of an era--or so it seemed. Comstock was gone, but his laws were still on the books, and there were still many zealots willing to persecute the unwary. Police arrested Emma Goldman for delivering lectures on "a medical question." Ben Reitman was arrested for merely announcing he would distribute a pamphlet on birth control.

In 1916 Sanger opened the first U.S. birth-control clinic, in Brooklyn. Staffed by her sister and a co-worker named Fania Mindell, the clinic dispensed advice to the hundreds of women who lined up. It remained open ten days. A police decoy asked for information. The next day three plainclothesmen from the vice squad arrived and arrested all three women. Sanger went to trial and received a sentence of 30 days in the workhouse. Upon her release, she was picked up by a limousine and taken to a luncheon of influential women. She had become a national figure. The cause of birth control had a martyr and a bible. Family Limitation would be translated into 13 languages; some 10 million copies would be distributed over the next few years.

The Great War

America was undergoing a great social upheaval, but Europe was engaged in a bloodbath. Separated by an ocean, America wrapped itself in isolationism. That changed with the sinking of the Lusitania. On April 2, 1917 President Woodrow Wilson called on Congress to declare war against Germany: "We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion." This was the war that would make the world safe for democracy. On the recruiting posters that followed, Democracy was often depicted as a vulnerable, flag-draped woman in the arms of Uncle Sam. On a single day, 10 million American men registered for the draft.

The war also represented a great opportunity for women. Thousands entered the armed forces; a million more took factory jobs. Fashions changed almost immediately; soon there were as many women visiting barbershops as there had been men. (Historian Mark Sullivan pointed out that nurses found long hair couldn't be tended in the trenches, while women working in ammunition factories found that long hair attracted gunpowder dust.) Women even donated the metal strips from their corsets--enough steel, it was said, to build two battleships.

The war put steel into the suffragist movement. President Wilson became a champion of woman's suffrage, appealing to Congress to pass a resolution for a Woman's Suffrage Amendment:

The strange revelations of this war having made many things new and plain to governments as well as to peoples, are we alone to ask and take the utmost that our women can give, service and sacrifice of every kind, and still say that we do not see that they merit the title that gives them the right to stand by our side in the guidance of the affairs of their nation and ours? We have made partners of the women in this war.

•

The war provoked a puritan crisis. It achieved in a matter of months what the antivice crusade had struggled toward for more than a decade. In 1917 Secretary of War Newton Baker ordered the closing of all bawdy houses within five miles of a naval base. New Orleans' Storyville was shuttered; the Barbary Coast in San Francisco had received the same treatment earlier. Baker banned the sale of alcohol on military bases. Local purity movements forced dancehalls to close in town after town.

A member of New England's Watch and Ward Society--the blue-blooded equivalent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice--called for the formation of an Army Corps of Moral Engineers. He got his wish. As America's entry into World War One drew near, the government turned to the social hygienists. Dr. Prince Morrow's followers--devoted to raising awareness about venereal disease--had a remarkable decade. They joined forces with the American Vigilance Association to become the American Social Hygiene Association. It pushed for the suppression of prostitution and persuaded seven states to pass laws requiring blood tests before marriage. The ASHA enlisted the aid of doctors to create fear- and purity-based sex-education programs.

According to Allan Brandt, author of No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the U.S. Since 1880, resistance from the community was strong. In Chicago, for instance, the school board rejected one course, explaining: "While there are certain things children ought to learn, it is far better they should go wholly untaught than that the instruction should be given to them outside the family circle. There are some kinds of knowledge that become poisonous when administered by the wrong hands, and sex hygiene is among them."

Another claimed that sex education itself was an insidious form of pornography: "Each venereologist has met psychopaths to whom each curve in nature or art suggests female breasts, napes or genitalia. For such not even the slightest education would be advisable. Indeed it would be harmful, because every step thereof would to them contain lubricious suggestions."

In 1917 Secretary of War Baker created a Commission on Training Camp Activities. Information about sex that had once been deemed obscene would henceforth be policy. Reformers celebrated the rise to power of the social hygiene experts. "Rejoice with us that the growing movement for social morality is showing results in this important way." One social hygienist noted: "The government is putting into the hands of social experts a million picked men to do with them in compulsory regimen, protection and education what no so-called sane government would dare force upon the same men in time of peace."

The social experts came up with an avalanche of slogans. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels proclaimed: "Men must live straight if they would shoot straight."

The CTCA wrote pamphlets such as Keeping Fit to Fight. They produced photo exhibits showing the "most devastating effects of untreated syphilis: twisted limbs, open lesions and physical deformities." A case of gonorrhea, recruits were told, was more devastating than a German bullet.

The CTCA had to deal with patriotic prostitutes, or charity girls. According to social workers, teenage girls flocked to military training camps, meeting soldiers in the woods, sometimes giving themselves to eight soldiers in a night. The traditional division between good girls and bad girls was blurred, but the CTCA found a new way to characterize sexual women: "Women who solicit soldiers for immoral purposes are usually disease spreaders and friends of the enemy."

War had a profound effect on the body politic, but the effect on individuals varied. The chaos unleashed a ragged sexual energy.

Nell Kimball, owner and operator of a brothel in New Orleans, wrote about the change:

Every man and boy wanted to have one last fling of screwing before the real war got him. Every farm boy wanted to have one big fuck in a real house before he went off and maybe was killed. I have noticed it before, the way the idea of war and dying makes a man raunchy, and Wanting to have it as much as he could. It wasn't really pleasure at times but a kind of nervous breakdown that could be treated only with a girl between him and the mattress. Some were insatiable and wrecked themselves, and some just went on like the barnyard rooster after every hen in sight. I dreamed one night the whole city was sinking into a lake of sperm.

Once the Yanks arrived in Europe a new problem appeared. Americans came into direct contact with the sexual mores of decadent--or enlightened--Europe. Fliers urged: "The U.S. government is permitting you to go on leave, not in order that you may sow wild oats, but to give you an opportunity to improve your health, and advance your education.

"If you become intoxicated, associate with prostitutes or contract a venereal disease, you are guilty of a moral crime. Wouldn't it profit you more to purchase with that money a little gift for mother, wife, sister, or sweetheart? Do not let booze, a pretty face, a shapely ankle make you forget. The American Expeditionary Force must not take European disease to America. You must go home clean."

But the threat of venereal infection was only one cause of alarm. One officer, who sent investigators to interview French prostitutes and discovered that Americans preferred a certain sex act above all others, deplored the twisted impulse known as "the French way" (a euphemism for oral sex): "When one thinks of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of young men who have returned to the U.S. with those new and degenerate ideas sapping their sources of self-respect and thereby lessening their powers of moral resistance, one is indeed justified in becoming alarmed."

•

Years later, writer Malcolm Cowley would put the war into perspective. As one of the many who volunteered as a driver for the French army, he summed up his experience: "They carried us to a foreign country, the first that most of us had seen; they taught us to make love, stammer love, in a foreign language. They taught us courage, extravagance, fatalism, these being the virtues of men at war; they taught us to regard as vices the civilian virtues of thrift, caution and sobriety; they made us fear boredom more than death."

But even more important was the impact of the war on those at home:

"The war itself was the puritan crisis and defeat," he wrote. "All standards were relaxed in the stormy sultry wartime atmosphere. It wasn't only the boys my age, those serving in the Army, who were transformed by events: Their sisters and younger brothers were affected in a different fashion. With their fathers away, perhaps, and their mothers making bandages or tea-dancing with lonely officers, it was possible for boys and girls to do what they pleased. For the first time they could go to dances unchaperoned, drive the family car and park it by the roadside while they made love and come home after midnight, a little tipsy, with nobody to reproach them in the hallway. They took advantage of these stolen liberties--indeed, one might say that the revolution in morals began as a middle-class children's revolt."

Cowley was not absolutely correct: The puritan ethic survived the war. The social experts ushered in national prohibition in 1919; the federal government--watching the machinations of the Russian Revolution--deported radicals, many of them on trumped-up vice charges. A young lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover oversaw the expulsion of Emma Goldman, calling her the most dangerous anarchist in America.

But Cowley was correct in assessing the impact of what would be known as the Lost Generation, the youth who were the first to be raised in the modern age, who had never seen puritan America, who, as Fitzgerald would say, had "grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."

"Lust has a thousand avenues. The thing has woven itself into the texture of city life."

Theda was born in the shadow of the Sphinx. Her lovers died of poison from mysterious amulets.

Time Capsule

Raw Data From 1910--1919

First Appearances

Father's Day. Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Women's Wear Daily. Neon lights. Trench coats. The Mann Act. Lipstick. Keystone Cops. Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties. Eight-hour workday. Parachutes. Girl Scouts of America. Peppermint Life Savers. Camel cigarettes. Erector set. Manufacturing assembly line. Birth-control clinic. Aspirin tablets. Windshield wipers. Kotex sanitary napkins. Dial telephones. The Piltdown man (the supposed missing link). Selective Service Act. Gas mask. Feature film. Stag film. Sex education. The Talon slide fastener (zipper). Traffic lights. Jazz records. Tarzan. Jane.

Dance Craze

Sentence imposed on a Paterson, New Jersey woman who was found guilty of dancing the turkey trot: 50 days or $25.

Number of female employees of Ladies' Home Journal fired for dancing at lunchtime: 15.

On any given night in 1911, number of young people who attend dancehalls in Chicago: 86,000.

Sign at a popular nightclub: "Do not wiggle the shoulders. Do not shake the hips. Do not twist the body. Do not flounce the elbows. Do not pump the arms. Do not hop--glide instead. Avoid low, fantastic and acrobatic dips."

Movie Madness

Number of Americans attending movies each week in 1910: 26 million.

First feature film shot in Hollywood: The Squaw Man. Charlie Chaplin's first full-length comedy: Tillie's Punctured Romance. Most popular serial, in which heroine escaped weekly from "a fate worse than death": The Perils of Pauline. First serious feature film: The Birth of a Nation.

Weekly salary that was received by Theda Bara during 1914 filming of A Fool There Was: $150. Amount film studio grossed in 1915: $3 million. Weekly salary received by Theda in 1919: $4000.

Who's Hot

Charlie Chaplin. Douglas Fairbanks. Mary Pickford. Lillian Gish. D.W. Griffith. Irving Berlin. George M. Cohan. Ty Cobb. Florenz Ziegfeld. Eddie Cantor. Will Rogers. Jim Thorpe. Bert Williams. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Jelly Roll Morton. Jack Dempsey.

Birth of a Nation

Population of the U.S. in 1910: 92 million. Population of the U.S. in 1920: 105 million.

Life expectancy by the end of the decade: Male: 53.6 years. Female: 54.6 years.

Number of children that a healthy woman living in wedlock should have, as estimated by the Vice Commission of Chicago: 10.

Number of women who visited Margaret Sanger's birth-control clinic in nine days in 1916: 464.

Quid Pro Quo

In 1912 corset makers in Kalamazoo, Michigan went on strike to protest the behavior of supervisors, who regularly suggested to female workers that they trade sexual favors for sewing thread. The strikers were arrested.

Money Matters

Gross national product in 1910: $35.3 billion. GNP in 1919: $84 billion. Average daily wage at Henry Ford's plant, as of 1914: $5. Average daily wage for auto workers not employed by Ford: $2.40. Weekly wage a man should earn before daring to date, according to a 1919 Chicago newspaper headline: $18.

Estimated amount a woman needed to earn per week to lead a virtuous life: $10. Average weekly wage of a woman in 1910: $6.

Price of a portable vibrator (with attachments), advertised in the 1918 Sears catalog as "very useful and satisfactory for home service": $5.95.

On the Road

Number of automobiles registered in the U.S. in 1912: 900,000. Number registered in 1919: 6.7 million.

The Wages of Sin

Number of infants killed by syphilis in 1916: 73,000 (including 41,700 stillbirths). Estimated number of prostitutes who died each year as the result of venereal disease: 40,000. Number of infected prostitutes imprisoned in detention homes and reformatories during World War One: 15,520.

Tailhook, Circa 1919

In the oddest sexual scandal of the decade, the Naval Training Station in Newport, Rhode Island sends a squad of enlisted men into local bars to associate with "sexual perverts." The decoys--in the name of duty--willingly accept blow jobs. The subsequent trials prove to be an embarrassment. According to Colin Spencer, author of Homosexuality in History: "The decoys were asked how much sexual pleasure they had experienced. One protested, saying he was a man and if someone touched his cock, then it got erect and he could not do anything about it."

Final Appearances

1911: Carry Nation. Anti-alcohol crusader finally buries hatchet.

1912: The Titanic. "Unsinkable" luxury liner strikes iceberg on maiden voyage. Captain orders, "Women and children first." Only 711 of 2224 passengers survive.

1914: Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria. Assassination begins World War One.

1915: Anthony Comstock. Puritan crusader catches cold.

1917: Mata Hari. Seductive beauty executed for espionage. Storyville. Red-light district in New Orleans closed by secretary of war.

Sex and Censorship

In 1913 D.H. Lawrence handed in the manuscript for sons and Lovers. A New York Times review of the Published book warned that the relations between Paul Morel and his lover Clara "are portrayed with absolute frankness." If the Times had Only known. Edward Garnett, Lawrence's editor, had already cut it by ten percent.

"He could smell her faint natural perfume" became "He could smell her faint perfume."

A scene that read: "He sat up and looked at the room in the darkness. Then he realized that there was a pair of her stockings on a chair. He got up stealthily and put them on himself. Then he sat still and knew he would have to have her. After that he sat erect on the bed, his feet doubled under him, perfectly motionless, listening," became: "He sat up and looked at the room in the darkness, his feet doubled under him, perfectly motionless, listening."

Another passage: "The first kiss on her breast made him pant with fear. The great dread, the great humility and the awful desire were nearly too much. Her breast were heavy. He held one in each hand, like big fruits in their cups, and kissed them, fearfully. He was afraid to look at her. His hands went traveling over her, soft, delicate, discriminate, fearful, full of adoration. Suddenly he saw her knees and he dropped, kissing them passionately. She quivered. And then again, with his fingers on her sides, she quivered."

This became, under the pen of editor Garnett, simply: "He was afraid to look at her. His hands went traveling over her, delicate, discriminate, fearful, full of adoration." Lawrence submitted to the edit, saying simply, "It's got to sell, I've got to live."

The original manuscript--cuts restored by Helen and Carl Baron--was finally published in 1992.

Tin Pan Alley

Tunes of the Times

In My Merry Oldsmobile * He'd Have to Get Under, Get Out and Get Under * Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine * Wait Till You Get Them up in the Air, Boys

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Let Me Call You Sweetheart * I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad) * If You Were the Only Girl in the World * A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody * Oh, You Beautiful Doll

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There's a Broken Heart for Every Light on Broadway * Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl * Poor Butterfly

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Everybody's Doin' It Now * If You Talk in Your Sleep, Don't Mention My Name * Naughty, Naughty, Naughty * Ballin' the Jack * At the Devil's Ball * Do It Again * Ain't Gonna Give Nobody None of This Jelly Roll

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Alexander's Ragtime Band * I've Got to Dance * Ragtime Cowboy Joe * Ragtime Jockey Man * 12th Street Rag * St Louis Blues * Darktown Strutters' Ball

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There's a Little Bit of Bad in Every Good Little Girl * The Vamp * What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For? * I Want a Daddy Who Will Rock Me to Sleep

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I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier * Over There * Goodbye Broadway, Hello France * If He Can Fight Like He Can Love, Goodnight Germany * Would You Rather Be a Colonel With an Eagle on Your Shoulder or a Private With a Chicken on Your Knee? * The Rose of No Man's Land * A Good Man Is Hard to Find * How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)? * Somebody Stole My Gal

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Prohibition Blues * What Are We Going to Do on a Saturday Night? (When the Town Goes Dry) * When the Moon Shines on the Moonshine * I'll See You in C-U-B-A

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You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet

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Damaged Goods

In 1913 Eugène Brieux's play Damaged Goods open on Broadway. The drama (turned into a movie in 1915) charts the downfall of a man infected with syphilis who passes the disease to his wife, his newborn child and a wet nurse. The outraged father of the bride, a lawmaker named Loches, confronts the man's physician, who responds:

Doctor: Well, there is one last argument, which, since I must, I will put to you. Are you yourself without sin, that you are so relentless to others?

Loches: I have never had any shameful disease, sir!

Doctor: I was not asking you that. I was asking you if you had never exposed yourself to catching one.[He pauses. Loches does not reply.] Ah, you see! Then it is not virtue that has saved you; it is luck. Few things exasperate me more than that term "shameful disease," which you used just now. This disease is like all other diseases: It is one of our afflictions. There is no shame in being wretched--even if one deserves to be so. Come, come, let us have a little plain speaking! I should like to know how many of these rigid moralists, who are so choked with their middle-class prudery that they dare not mention the name syphilis, or when they bring themselves to speak of it do so with expressions of every sort of disgust, and treat its victims as criminals, have never run the risk of contracting it themselves! It is those alone who have the right to talk. How many do you think there are? Four out of a thousand? Well, leave those four aside: Between all the rest and those who catch the disease, there is no difference but chance