Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890-1950: Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and 'Immorality' 1107102669, 9781107102668

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GLOBAL ANTI-VICE ACTIVISM, 1890–1950

Vice was one of the primary shared interests of the global community at the turn of the twentieth century. Anti-vice activists worked to combat noxious substances such as alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes, and “immoral” sexual activities such as prostitution. Nearly all of these activists approached the issue of vice by expressing worries about the body, its physical health, and functionality. By situating anti-vice politics in their broader historical contexts, Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890–1950 sheds fresh light on the initiatives of various actors, organizations, and institutions that have previously been treated primarily within national and regional boundaries. Looking at anti-vice policy from both social and cultural historical perspectives, it illuminates the centrality of regulating vice in imperial and national modernization projects. The contributors argue that vice and vice regulation constitute an ideal topic for global history, because they bridge the gap between discourse and practice, and state and civil society. Jessica R. Pliley is an associate professor of women’s and gender history at Texas State University. Robert Kramm is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture at Hanyang University. Harald Fischer-Tiné is a professor of modern global history at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH-Zürich).

Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890–1950 Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and “Immorality” JESSICA R. PLILEY ROBERT KRAMM HARALD FISCHER-TINÉ

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107102668 © Jessica R. Pliley, Robert Kramm and Harald Fischer-Tiné 2016 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2016 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data Names: Pliley, Jessica R., 1977– editor. | Kramm, Robert, editor. | Fischer-Tiné, Harald, editor. Title: Global anti-vice activism, 1890–1950 : fighting drinks, drugs, and “immorality” / edited by Jessica R. Pliley, Robert Kramm, Harald Fischer-Tiné. Description: New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Identifiers: LCCN 2016008437 | ISBN 9781107102668 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Alcoholism – Prevention – Government policy. | Drug abuse – Prevention – Government policy. | Promiscuity – Prevention – Government policy. Classification: LCC RC565.G563 2016 | DDC 362.292–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008437 ISBN 978-110-710266-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of figures

page vii

List of tables

viii

Notes on contributors

ix

Acknowledgments

xv

1

Introduction: a plea for a “vicious turn” in global history

1

Jessica R. Pliley, Robert Kramm, and Harald Fischer-Tiné

2

PART I  HEALTH AND THE BODY

31

Modernity, vice, and the problem of nakedness

33

Philippa Levine

3

“Godless Edens”: surveillance, eroticized anarchy, and “depraved communities” in Britain and the wider world, 1890–1930

53

Antony Taylor

4

Physical culture as “natural healing”: Eugen Sandow’s campaign against the vices of civilization c. 1890–1920

74

Carey A. Watt

5

PART II  DRINKS AND DRUGS

101

The specter of degeneration: alcohol and race in West Africa in the early twentieth century

103

Charles Ambler

v

Contents

vi

6 A question of social medicine or racial hygiene? The Bulgarian temperance discourse and eugenics in the interwar period, 1920–1940

124

Nikolay Kamenov

7 Threats to empire: illicit distillation, venereal diseases, and colonial disorder in British West Africa, 1930–1948

152

Emmanuel Akyeampong

8 Medical and criminological constructions of drug addiction in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia

179

Pavel Vasilyev

9 Cigarette smoking in modern Buenos Aires: the sudden change in a century-old continuity

203

Diego Armus PART III

PROSTITUTION AND SEX TRAFFICKING

10 The FBI’s White Slave Division: the creation of a national regulatory regime to police prostitutes in the United States, 1910–1918

219

221

Jessica R. Pliley

11 Anti-vice lives: peopling the archives of prostitution in interwar India

246

Stephen Legg

12 China’s prostitution regulation system in an international context, 1900–1937

270

Elizabeth J. Remick

13 “Hey, GI, want pretty flower girl?”: venereal disease, sanitation, and geopolitics in US-occupied Japan and Korea, 1945–1948

290

Robert Kramm

14 Global anti-vice activism: a postmortem

313

David T. Courtwright

Index

325

Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 4.1

4.2

6.1

6.2

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) page 42 A typical card produced by Fortier 43 Henri Matisse, Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra) (1907) 45 Richard Ungewitter, Die Nacktheit in entwicklungsgeschichtlicher, gesundheitlicher, moralischer und künstlicher Sicht (1907) 46 “Dr. Bruce Purdie’s Nervigorine” was the kind of “unnatural” tonic and patent medicine that Sandow denounced with increasing frequency and intensity from about 1904 onward. Nonetheless, advertisements for such products constituted an important source of revenue for publishers. 86 This photograph shows Sandow c. 1893, in his mid-twenties, during his rise to fame in the late 1880s and 1890s. He was photographed “naturally” in the nude (with a strategically placed fig leaf added later) in a statuesque pose and classical Roman motif, with muscles relaxed. The links to nudism and the life reform movement are clear. 88 This cartoon is supplemented by a short dialogue beneath, reading “Boy, why do you have crutches? Well, because my father frequented the pubs!” 138 In this figure the editor of Borba provided photographs of postage stamps found in his own correspondence with colleagues from Italy and Switzerland. The caption on top informs the reader that this visual was also sent to ministers in Bulgaria with the purpose to show them how alcoholism is fought abroad, while the other caption notes that such postage stamps were used to “conduct broad anti-alcohol propaganda”. 141

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Tables

5.1 Gallons of spirits imported page 106 7.1 Relative importance of VDs in European and African troops in 1944 and 1945 170 10.1 Expenditures for white slave investigations, 1910–1916 231 11.1 Age and background data for Bombay and the United Provinces 261

viii

Notes on contributors

Emmanuel Akyeampong is Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and received his PhD in African History from the University of Virginia in 1993. He has been awarded the Zora Neale Hurston Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities at Northwestern University, named a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and was nominated to be a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Harvard, he was a board member of the Du Bois Institute and former chair of the Committee on African Studies. He has published many articles in journals such as the Journal of African Development and the Journal of African History and Social History. He is author of Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times (1996) and Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, c.1850 to Recent Times (2001), edited Themes in West Africa’s History (2006), and co-edited The History of Ashanti Kings and the Whole Country Itself and Other Writings (2003) and Dictionary of African Biography, 6 Vols (2012). Charles Ambler is Professor of History and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Texas at El Paso. He earned his PhD in African History from Yale University. He is the author of Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism (1988) and co-editor of Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa (1992) and Drugs in Africa (2014). He is the author of a series of articles and chapters on the history of alcohol and drug use and control in modern Africa and other topics in modern African history. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Nairobi, the University of Zambia, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and St. Anthony’s

ix

x

Notes on contributors

College, University of Oxford. In 2010 he served as President of the African Studies Association. Diego Armus is Professor of History at the Swarthmore College and received his PhD in history at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Columbia University, and New  York University and at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin as well as the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. As an invited visiting professor, he has taught graduate seminars in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Italy. In 2012 he received the R.A.I.C.E.S Award from the Sciences’ Ministry of Argentina. He has published extensively on the history of disease and health in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Among others publications, he is the author of The Ailing City:  Health, Tuberculosis and Culture in Buenos Aires, 1870–1950 (2011; Spanish version 2007), and editor of Disease in the History of Modern Latin America: From Malaria to AIDS (2003), Cuidad, Controlar, Curar. Ensaios Históricos sobre Saúde e Doença na América Latina y Caribe (2004), and Avatares de la Medicalización en América Latina (2005). David T. Courtwright is Presidential Professor at the University of North Florida (UNF). In 1979 he received his PhD in history from Rice University after completing a dissertation on “Opiate Addiction in America, 1800–1940.” From 1979 to 1988 he was Assistant and then Associate Professor of History at the University of Hartford; from 1983 to 1984 he was also a Mellon Visiting Faculty Fellow at Yale University. In 1988 he became a full professor at UNF. He has published books and articles on the history of drug use, drug commerce, and drug policy. His drug-related books include Addicts Who Survived:  An Oral History of Narcotic Use in America before 1965, revised ­edition (2012), No Right Turn:  Conservative Politics in a Liberal America (2010), Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (2001), and Dark Paradise:  A  History of Opiate Addiction in America, expanded ­edition (2001). The recipient of an NEH Public Scholar Award for 2016–17, he is writing a global history of pleasure, vice, addiction, and capitalism. Harald Fischer-Tiné is Professor of Modern Global History at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH-Zürich). He holds a PhD in South Asian history from the University of Heidelberg and has published extensively on global history, South Asian colonial history and the history of the British Empire. From 2010 to 2015, he directed a research group on the global history of the anti-alcohol movement. Currently, he is doing

Notes on contributors

xi

research on the history of the YMCA in South Asia (1890–1964). His most recent monographs are  Shyamji Krishnavarma:  Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-Imperialism (2014); “Pidgin-Knowledge”:  Wissen und Kolonialismus (2013, in German); and Low and Licentious Europeans:  Race, Class and White Subalternity in Colonial India (2009). His (co-)edited volumes include: A History of Alcohol and Drugs in South Asia: Intoxicating Affairs (2014, with Jana Tschurenev); Empires and Boundaries:  Rethinking Race, Class and Gender in Colonial Settings (2009, with Susanne Gehrmann); The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region (2008, with Ashwini Tambe); and Colonialism as Civilizing Mission. Cultural Ideology in British India (2004, with Michael Mann). His articles and book reviews have appeared in many journals including the American Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. Nikolay Kamenov earned a PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Techno­ logy (ETH-Zürich) in 2015 on his work on the global entanglements of the temperance movement in Bulgaria. He is presently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, working on a project on the global history of the cooperative movement, with a regional focus on India and Ghana. His first major article has appeared in the edited volume Vergessene Vielfalt. Territorialisierung und Internationalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa von 1850 bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhundert (2013), edited by Steffi Marung and Katja Naumann. Robert Kramm is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture at Hanyang University and is the appointed Junior Fellow at the Center for Excellence’s “Cultural Foundations of Social Integration” research initiative at the University of Konstanz. He earned his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland and received his MA, also in history, at the University of Erfurt. He has conducted research at various Japanese universities (Yokohama National University, Gifu University, and Waseda University). From 2010 to 2012 he was a lecturer at the Department of Chinese and Korean Studies at the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. He has published peer-reviewed articles, reviews, and conference reports in Geschichte & Gesellschaft, ASIEN, and H-Soz-u-Kult. He is the author of a chapter in the edited volume Biopolitik und Sittlichkeitsreform: Kampagnen gegen Alkohol, Drogen und sexuelle Devianz in globalhistorischer Perspektive (2014).

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Notes on contributors

Stephen Legg is a Professor of historical geography at University of Nottingham and received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the urban and imperial geographies of the interwar world, with an empirical focus on India. He has published on colonial urbanism (residential segregation, policing, and urban improvement), the regulation of prostitution (red light districts, national policy formation, and international conventions), and the cultural geographies of anti-colonial nationalism. He draws upon a range of theoretical material from postcolonial and governmentality studies to theories of memory, scale, and the subaltern. He is the author of Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2007); Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities and Interwar India (2014); and the editor of Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos (2011). Philippa Levine is Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities and Co-Director of the British Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin where she teaches in the history department. She has written on the British Empire, gender, sexuality, and eugenics. Her Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction is forthcoming. Jessica R. Pliley is an Associate Professor of women’s and gender history at Texas State University and holds a PhD from the Ohio State University. She served as a visiting assistant professor and the inaugural Human Trafficking and Modern-Day Slavery Fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Her book, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI, was published in 2014. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Elizabeth J.  Remick is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Tufts University and received her PhD from Cornell University’s Government Department. Her latest book is Regulating Prostitution in China:  Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937 (2014). On the topic of regulated prostitution in China, she has previously published articles in Modern China in 2003 and 2007. Her earlier work on taxation, public finance, and the local state in China includes the book Building Local States: China in the Republican and Post-Mao Eras (2004). Antony Taylor is a Professor of modern British history at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. He has written widely in the field of popular politics in Britain in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His interests are

Notes on contributors

xiii

in the field of radical narratives of opposition to privilege and to hereditary institutions. He is the author of “Down with the Crown”: British AntiMonarchism and Debates about Royalty since 1790 (1999) and “Lords of Misrule”:  Hostility to Aristocracy in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Britain (2004). His most recent book is “London’s Burning”: Pulp Fiction, the Politics of Terrorism and the Destruction of the Capital in British Popular Culture, 1840–2005 (2012). Pavel Vasilyev is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He holds a PhD in Russian History from the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and an MA degree in Central European History and Jewish Studies from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His research interests include history of alcohol and drugs, history of medicine and health care, social and cultural history of late Imperial and Soviet Russia, and the history of emotions. His publications include book chapters in Food and War in Twentieth-Century Europe (2011) and Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–1922 (2016), as well as articles on addiction research in Jewish Studies at the CEU, Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order, and the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Moscow. Carey A. Watt is Professor of South Asian and World History at St. Thomas University. He did his BA and MA at Concordia University and received his PhD at the University of Cambridge. His research and teaching explore citizenship, physical culture, Boy Scouts, popular music, philanthropy, colonialism, post-colonialism, and nationalism in South Asia and globally. He is author of Serving the Nation: Cultures of Service, Association and Citizenship in Colonial India (2005) and co-edited Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development (2011). He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as French Cultural Studies and Modern Asian Studies.

Acknowledgments

In the case of this anthology, writing a global history of vice has truly been a global affair. As of this writing, the editors are spread between North America, Europe, and East Asia. Bringing together the chapters featured has highlighted the challenges of building global networks even in our era that is privileged with near-instant communication. The project has also reminded us of the value of face-to-face meetings for generating valuable discourse. The chapters in this volume originate from a conference on Fighting Drinks, Drugs and Venereal Disease: Global Anti-Vice Activism, c. 1870–1940 held on the Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland, in April 2012. Jana Tschurenev and Harald Fischer-Tiné organized the conference with the vital support of Judith Große and the entire team of the chair of Modern Global History at ETH Zurich and kindly funded by the Centro Stefano Franscini as well as a number of other sponsors. The gathering in Ascona was the concluding event of the larger research project “Zur Rettung der Menschheit: Die globale Antialkoholbewegung (ca. 1870–1940)” at the ETH Zurich, initiated by Harald Fischer-Tiné, coordinated by Jana Tschurenev, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. We would like to thank all members of the research group, Francesco Spöring, Sönke Bauck, Nikolay Kamenov, and in particular Jana Tschurenev, for the continuous collaboration and inspiring discussions since the group came into existence in 2010. Travel support for the editors was also provided by Texas State University at San Marcos and the Bavarian American Academy. In 2014, Judith Große, Francesco Spöring, and Jana Tschurenev published an edited volume in German titled Biopolitik und Sittlichkeitsreform: Kampagnen gegen Drogen, Alkohol und Prostitution (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2014) with a different set of chapters based on papers that had been delivered at the conference on the Monte Verità. The two volumes and the chapters they assemble speak to one another in the attempt to cover the xv

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Acknowledgments

vast field of anti-vice activism all around the world from the late nineteenth and to the mid-twentieth century. Gratitude is also due to Judith Große, Maren Möhring, Jürgen Martschukat, John McKiernan-González, and Philippa Levine for their help in improving the introduction of this volume and for their inspiring comments and suggestions. By the same token, David Courtwright, who was kind enough to write the afterword, was an invaluable, critical, and supportive reader and commentator on the introduction as well as all other chapters in the volume. Finally, we are deeply indebted to the two blind reviewers provided by Cambridge University Press whose comments have not only encouraged us but also helped us bind our contributions much better together. At Cambridge University Press, Deborah Gershenowitz has been a tireless cheerleader of this project and has guided it through the editing and production process with grace and enthusiasm. Needless to say, that the remaining flaws and inconsistencies are solely our own responsibility.

1

Introduction A plea for a “vicious turn” in global history Jessica R. Pliley, Robert Kramm, and Harald Fischer-Tiné

Reflecting on her years of anti-vice activism on behalf of the World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU), American missionary and physician Kate Bushnell (1855–1946) commented: Time was when so-called Christian civilization seemed able to send its vices abroad and keep its virtues at home … That day has passed forever. With the invention of the steam as a locomotive power of great velocity, with the introduction of the cable, and later, the wireless telegraphy; with the mastery of these natural forces and their introduction in every part of the world, we see the old world being drawn nearer and nearer to us by ten thousand invisible cords of commercial interests, until shortly, probably within the life time of you and me, the once worn out and almost stranded wreck will be found quickened with new life and moored along side us.1

Bushnell dedicated thirty years of her life laying bare those invisible cords that spanned the globe. As much as ideas, technology, people, and material goods circumnavigated the globe, so too did troubling habits such as alcohol abuse, drug addiction, and sex trafficking and with these, the anti-vice movements sought to combat the degenerative impact of excessive consumption. Born at the apogee of the steam age and dying at the birth of the atomic age, Bushnell was well positioned to comment on the developments she observed, critiqued, and tried to change. Roaming the world as a “peripatetic puritan” Bushnell had faith that God would provide for her needs, that the British Empire could reform its sinful practices, and that men could be convinced to stop exploiting women and treat them as equals.2 Raised in Illinois, Bushnell attended Northwestern University as one of the first women admitted. She studied medicine, becoming a practicing physician by 1879. After graduation, the Women’s Mission Board of the Methodist Episcopal Church dispatched Bushnell to Jiujiang, China, where she served as a medical missionary until 1882. Bushnell returned to the 1

2

Introduction

United States, where she practiced medicine in Denver, Colorado, for four years before moving to Chicago to provide medical aid and other social services to Chicago’s most dejected, despised, and detested p ­ opulation – the city’s prostitutes. Her work brought her to the attention of her old mentor Frances Willard, who sent Bushnell into the distant and isolated lumber camps of northern Wisconsin to investigate allegations of forced prostitution for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).3 Bushnell uncovered a miasma of vice as she conducted her investigation in the lumber camps of the American upper Midwest in the summer of 1888. After interviewing more than 575 prostitutes, touring brothels, and compiling accounts from the area’s evangelical activists, Bushnell documented a thick matrix of local corruption that functioned to keep brothels stocked with sex workers. She learned that most communities informally regulated prostitution through local police forces and doctors, who examined the women and certified that they were free of venereal diseases. More troubling to Bushnell was her discovery that most of the brothels entrapped sex workers through complicated debt bondage practices, and some sex workers had been induced into prostitution through fraud. Her ­investigation revealed the entangled nature of vices – like alcohol and prostitution – as well as respectable and ignominious practices – like physicians concerned with public health who had established “contagious disease acts … p ­ atterned after the English acts.”4 The English Parliament introduced the Contagious Disease Acts in 1864 to combat the spread of venereal diseases among the British armed forces. The laws allowed for the detainment of any woman suspected of practicing prostitution, followed by a forced pelvic exam, and incarceration into a lock hospital (a prison-hospital for the venereally diseased) if found to be infected. The laws prompted vigorous protest by feminists in England, who contended that they constituted the state sanctioning of vice and disproportionally targeted poor women. Their campaign succeeded in repealing the laws in England in 1886, though some form of Contagious Disease Acts could be found in colonial settings.5 The British women’s campaign received enthusiastic support from American social purity activists and Bushnell’s revelation that local city governments had implemented local versions of the contagious disease acts in the United States served as a call to action to the purity community. Overall, Bushnell highlighted the structural – legal and economic – support for coercive prostitution, while also centering the experiences and humanity of sex workers. Her report generated reform of Wisconsin’s laws governing prostitution, heightened the profile of the WCTU’s social purity work, and launched Bushnell’s career as an anti-vice investigator and activist.6

Introduction

3

The year 1891 found Bushnell halfway around the world, traveling throughout India with Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew as round-the-world missionaries for the WWCTU. During their three months in India, Bushnell and Andrew traveled 4,000 miles, interviewed 395 sex workers, studied 637 cases of military camp prostitutes, and visited ten military garrisons.7 Like the Wisconsin investigation, Bushnell privileged the voices of sex workers themselves (though in this case their “voices” were mediated through a translator and Bushnell’s own voice). After gaining entrance into a brothel, Bushnell and Andrew would lead a prayer service that concluded with a hymn. After the singing ended, Bushnell wrote that typically: Then they begin to clamour for a chance to tell their individual stories. One is a girl who was left an orphan at the age of six years. At the tender age of eleven she says she was taken by an Englishman and kept three years as his mistress. When he deserted her, there was no door open to receive her but the chakla [military-run brothel]. One pretty girl said she had been deceived by a bad woman, under promise of employment.8

Their investigation revealed that chaklas reserved the women contained in them for British customers, that the lock hospitals kept women incarcerated and subjected them to “surgical rape,” and that the entire system stimulated sex trafficking to ensure a continually fresh crop of young women to work in the chaklas.9 Bushnell resurrected the slavery rhetoric that had characterized her Wisconsin investigation, describing the Indian women as “poor Army slave-women” and recalling, “We told them, ‘We are your sisters;’ they replied, ‘We are your slaves’.”10 Bushnell’s inclusion of such statements complicated the ideal of universal sisterhood celebrated by the WWCTU.11 For Bushnell, the blame for such slavery landed squarely on British imperial governance.12 Bushnell and Andrew illustrated the continuities of prostitution policy throughout the British Empire, noting that in the Cape Colony in South Africa, “it was always the military doctors, often fresh from India, who were most pressing in their demands for the regulation of prostitutes.” Similarly, when they traveled to Queensland and New Zealand after leaving India they noted that colonial officials enforced similar outlawed policies.13 As investigators of the WWCTU, Bushnell and Andrew next ventured to China and Japan in 1894 to work on behalf of temperance and to investigate the links between opium and forced prostitution. There they discovered that opium dens frequently offered prostitution and they compiled “an abundance of evidence that opium fed the social vice [prostitution], and

4

Introduction

that the two went hand in hand.”14 Their reports from China repeated the same arguments protesting the state-sanctioning of vice through the regulation of prostitution, the role of the British Empire in introducing regulation, the entanglements between alcohol, opium, and prostitution, and the ideals of universal sisterhood being complicated by allusions to slavery.15 For Bushnell the ideals of universal sisterhood required the absolute rejection of the consumption not just of her own sexuality, but the sexuality of all other women. “We cannot, without sin against humanity, ask the scoffer’s question, ‘Am I my sister’s keeper?’ – not even concerning – the poorest and meanest foreign woman, for the reason that she is our sister.”16 In Bushnell’s formulation the problem of vice manifested as a problem of consumption and as long as men (and the state) treated women’s bodies as objects of consumption – like opium and alcohol – then women’s equality would be forestalled.17 Bushnell’s single, though admittedly long, life captures a number of animating tensions of the anti-vice movement. She spent thirty years trying to shed light on the vulnerabilities of sex workers and drug users living and existing in liminal zones, while she herself inhabited a number of liminal, compromised, and complicated spaces: an American in service of reforming the British Empire; a medical women arguing against social hygiene policies; a single woman articulating the importance of monogamous marriage for community development, national stability, and “universal progress.” As the US anti-vice movement tracked toward a social hygienic (positive eugenicist) perspective during World War I, Bushnell became alienated from the movement. She found the social hygienic perspective disturbingly statist and hopelessly repressive in its treatment of women.18 The life of an American medical missionary illustrates that anti-vice campaigning had become global by the late nineteenth century. However, this world-spanning activism was nonetheless deeply embedded in at least three very specific cultural and ideological contexts. For one, Bushnell’s life-story seems to demonstrate that the movement to suppress “social diseases” of various kinds was particularly influential in “Greater Britain.”19 Both organizations that hired her  – the Women’s Mission Board of the Methodist Episcopal Church and the WWCTU – had their headquarters in the United States and the itinerary of Bushnell’s voyage “around-the-world” actually only extended to a tour of the British Empire.20 As Clare Midgley, Antoinette Burton, and others have shown, the critique of the c­ olonial state and its tolerance – or even encouragement – of vice often i­ndicated not so much a sign of fundamental opposition to imperialism than an attempt of enhancing the legitimacy and credibility of the imperial world

Introduction

5

order thereby securing its longevity.21 In this context it is tempting to see Bushnell’s engagements overseas as part of a very peculiar variety of cultural expansion that gained momentum in the United States during the Progressive Era, what Ian Tyrrell has referred to as “America’s moral empire.”22 Second, Bushnell’s affiliation to missionary organizations and the omnipresence of the Christian rhetoric of sin and salvation indicates that the tenets of Christianity, particularly in its Protestant variety, infused anti-vice crusades. Last but not least, Bushnell’s example would lead one to conclude that the agenda of first-wave feminism formed one foundation of the worldwide struggle against the consumption of liquor, drugs, and women’s bodies.23 The liberation of her poor or colonized “sisters” through a fight against regulated prostitution  – or the “state regulation of vice,” as activists often called it  – was clearly the most visibly feminist aspect of Bushnell’s work.24 However, the fight against opium consumption and alcohol abuse had a direct bearing on the situation of women. Whether in the working-class neighborhoods of Western cities, in African villages or Asian port towns: anti-vice activists blamed alcohol and drugs for the suffering of women and children through economic hardships and domestic violence.25 What thus emerges from our first biographical vignette is a picture of Euro-American anti-vice campaigning in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a middle ground and melting pot for evangelical missionary zeal, “white man’s burden”-imperialism, and early forms of the organized women’s rights movement. Such a conceptualization of anti-vice activism points to a transnational, indeed global, phenomenon, but one whose operational center and ideological roots materialized in the West. It might be helpful, therefore, to complicate this slightly Euro-centric picture. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1874–1948) is one of the few political leaders from what used to be called the “Third World” who has become an iconic figure in the West. Admittedly, he is not typically thought of as an ardent crusader against the unholy trinity of drugs, drink, and debauchery, but rather celebrated as a spokesman and symbol of anti-colonial nationalism. Gandhi spent three decades of his life challenging precisely the kind of imperial world order that was being moralized by Bushnell. Yet, at the same time, Mohandas Gandhi started to cultivate a quasi-religious obsession with physical health and moral perfection that seems astonishingly close to the concerns of Christian purity crusaders. It made him engage in active campaigning against the very same evils targeted by Bushnell until his death.26 Born in the small coastal town of Porbandar in the western Indian region of Gujarat, young Gandhi had been exposed to the cultural influences of

6

Introduction

the regional variety of Vaishnava-Hinduism and Jainism; both religious strands converged on the principles of strict abstinence, vegetarianism, and their aspirations toward very high moral standards often articulated in terms of sexual discipline.27 The years Gandhi spent as a student of law in London significantly reinforced these principles.28 Unlike many of his Indian fellow students, apparently the pubs, music-halls, and brothels of late Victorian London never tempted Gandhi and he preferred to spend his time instead with English members of the vegetarian and temperance movements.29 His rigid anti-vice stance was confirmed during the two decades of his residence in South Africa (1893–1914). Among the local black working classes as well as among the Indian “coolies” whom he represented as a lawyer in those years, he witnessed with his own eyes the ways in which the “terrible scourge of drink … ruined people morally, physically and economically” and in many cases also “destroyed the sanctity and happiness of their homes.”30 Gandhi understood alcoholism as an emanation of the evil influence of Western civilization that imperial expansion helped to spread to places like South Asia, which he imagined as intact and innocent because in his mind alcohol had barely any roots in pre-modern Asian (or, for that matter, African) society. Western go-betweens, who shared Gandhi’s critique of “industrial civilization,” mediated his first major initiative to collectively resist such evil influences.31 While in the theosophist circles of Johannesburg, dominated by Jewish expats from Europe, Gandhi met the architect Hermann Kallenbach who had been raised and educated in East Prussia.32 As a practicing gymnast and bodybuilder who had received physical instruction at the hands of his compatriot and world-famous strongman Eugen Sandow, Kallenbach shared Gandhi’s obsession with disciplining the body and controlling dangerous physical appetites of all kinds.33 Together they founded the experimental rural commune at Tolstoy Farm in 1910, where Gandhi would further develop the method of Satyagraha (“passive resistance”) that he had invented a few years earlier in Durban and would later deploy to great effect back in India.34 The rigid prohibition of alcohol, strict vegetarianism, and the thorough policing of sexual chastity prevailing in the small political ashram near Johannesburg are thus not only remindful of similar experiments by adherents of the Lebensreform movement that developed more or less simultaneously in Europe and the Americas, but also show that vice-control and physical self-optimization formed central elements in the training of would-be political elites.35 It should be mentioned that a strong gender dimension characterized this optimization project, as Gandhi held the view that “procreation and

Introduction

7

consequent care of children”  – tasks he deemed to be the part of the “natural” duties of women – “were inconsistent with public service” and the political elites thus trained ultimately tended to be all male.36 Like Bushnell, Gandhi believed in the “domino theory of vice.” He assumed that alcohol consumption almost inevitably led to sexual debauchery, gambling, and other forms of immoral and harmful behavior. Again sharing Bushnell’s view, Gandhi linked the rapid global spread of what he regarded as specifically Western forms of vice to “the invention of the steam as a locomotive power of great velocity.” In his oft-quoted anti-modern manifesto Hind Swaraj (or Indian Home Rule), ironically written on board a steamship en route from London to South Africa in 1909, Gandhi made it a point that he regarded railways as a sinister Western invention that would only serve to “propagate evil” whereas “good travele[d]‌at snail’s pace.”37 Gandhi’s anti-vice attitude converged with his staunch anti-Westernism, which in turn drew on the arguments of “cultural pessimist” intellectuals and religiously minded conservatives in Europe and North America, who equated “Western civilization” with a new kind of “hedonistic m ­ odernism.”38 This modernism, they feared, would erode societies and families with its “values of instant gratification, pleasure and egoistic individualism.”39 Given these ideological affinities, it is not surprising that the fight against alcohol as a potent symbol of the alien and corrupt character of British colonial rule became a central feature of the Indian National Congress in the 1920 and 1930s. Gandhian strategies to implement the anti-vice agenda in nationalist politics included temperance campaigns among the “drinking classes” (i.e. industrial workers, low castes, and “untouchables”), the boycott and picketing of foreign liquor stores, and the promulgation of laws of prohibition, as soon as the Congress was in power on the provincial level in 1937.40 There is by now a copious literature on the class conflict underlying the politics of drinking in late colonial India. The temperance campaigns of aspiring nationalist elites often clashed with the subaltern classes’ claims of autonomy over their bodies and leisure practices.41 Following the logic of the entangled character of vices, Gandhi extended his crusade against mood-altering substances to opium, which many associated with Asian rather than Western societies. As he wrote in Key to Health: The criticism leveled against alcohol applies equally to opium, although the two are very different in their action. Under the effect of alcohol a person becomes a rowdy, whereas opium makes the addict dull and lazy. He becomes even drowsy and incapable of doing anything useful. The evil effect of alcohol strikes the eyes everyday [sic], but those of opium are not so glaring. Any one … wishing to see its devastating effect should go to Assam or Orissa. Thousands have fallen victim of

8

Introduction

this intoxicant, in those provinces. They give one the impression on living on the verge of death.42

Opium’s spread to what Gandhi called the “immoral trade,” organized first by the East India Company and later by the Government of British India, perfectly lent itself to a forceful critique of the depraved character of “Western civilization” in its British imperial avatar. Quite predictably, therefore, the Indian National Congress under Gandhi’s leadership used its media as well as international political platforms such as the League of Nations to put considerable pressure on the British to prohibit the opium trade.43 However, the protracted anti-vice crusade did not target solely the colonial administration. The “Mahatma” also campaigned in the villages of the regions implicated in opium production and trade, attempting to convince peasants that they should stop cultivating poppy and persuade the opium smokers to quit their habit. Considering the striking discursive affinities between the evangelical and anti-imperial opposition to the consumption of intoxicants, it appears only logical that a Christian comrade in arms supported the Indian nationalist leader’s anti-opium campaign. C.F. Andrews, Christian clergyman and long-time friend and supporter of the Indian nationalist cause, accompanied Gandhi on his tour in Assam, published many articles and pamphlets against opium trade and consumption, and even served on a Congress Committee of Inquiry into the effects of opium use by the population of India’s north-eastern province.44 As one might have guessed, the puritan leader of the Indian independence movement displayed similar missionary zeal when it came to the castigation of illicit sex and prostitution.45 Indian historian Ajay Skaria has shown that the figure of the veshya (prostitute) was an important metaphoric trope in Gandhi’s discursive repertoire. However, the “Mahatma’s” preoccupation with prostitution was not restricted to the level of figurative speech. He was also concerned by the social reality of the existence of hundreds of thousands of “fallen sisters” in India, a fact that he perceived as a “matter of deep shame” and a “blot of the nation.”46 Much like in the case of opium and particularly alcohol, Gandhi outsourced the blame for this “tremendous and growing evil” to the West in general and British colonial rule in particular. Gandhi described the imperial metropoles Paris and London as well-known global centers of debauchery, “seething with the vice,” while simultaneously expressing his conviction that prostitution in pre-colonial India had been confined to a minuscule elite. Consequently, immorality in the past had not been “so rampant as now,” when the popularity of brothels was supposedly responsible for the

Introduction

9

“fast undoing the youth of the middle classes,”47 whom Gandhi believed to be “afflicted by syphilis and other unmentionable diseases.”48 In a remarkable statement made in an article published in his mouthpiece Young India in the summer of 1925, Gandhi summed up the pivotal importance of an encompassing war on all facets of vice for India’s political struggle for self-rule and concluded with a stunning lament: If I had the power of persuasion, I would certainly stop women of ill-fame from acting as actresses, I would prevent people from drinking and smoking, I would certainly prevent all the degrading advertisements that disfigure even reputable journals and I would most decidedly stop the obscene literature and portraits that soil the pages of some of our magazines. But alas, I have not the persuasive power I would gladly possess.49

Given the lack of the necessary persuasive (let alone legislative) power, the only solution for Gandhi consisted in protracted and concerted anti-vice campaigns that would gradually bring about the emergence of an “intelligent, sane, healthy, and pure public opinion.”50 The growth of such a “pure” public opinion alone, he felt, would be able to keep the manifold perils emanating from vicious habits and threatening the nation-in-the-making at bay.51 The example of Gandhi’s nationalistic puritanism is instructive, primarily because it adds new layers of complexity to our understanding of global anti-vice activism. Clearly, the fight against the “social diseases” and “bad habits” was neither a purely Western phenomenon nor the prerogative of Christian reformers, early feminists, and paternalist imperialists. Non-Western elites added their own critiques and seamlessly integrated the agitation for the abolition of prostitution and the prohibition of alcohol and drugs as part and parcel of their emancipatory political struggle. That being said, it would be misleading to posit the existence of an alternative temperance ideology that would only be deeply embedded in Asian religious traditions and allegedly completely isolated from these Western groups and the anti-vice discourses they deployed. To be sure, Gandhi often invoked the teachings of sacred scriptures like the Bhagvad Gita or the precepts of Hindu sages like Tulsidas and Chaitanya in his pamphlets against alcohol, opium, and “the unpardonable sin of illegitimate sexual enjoyment,”52 thereby establishing links to local cultural traditions. Yet, his contact to the vegetarian-cum-temperance circles in London, his association with German Jewish life reformers like Kallenbach in Johannesburg, and his collaboration with British missionary brothers in spirit later in India illustrates that the “glocalized” or “pidginized” variety of anti-vice activism that crystallized in South Africa and India was “made over” by the exchanges and dialogues characteristic of the age of imperial globalization.53

10

Introduction

Despite religious, racial, and gendered differences, both Bushnell and Gandhi participated in civil society and shared a common ground in their strong moral rather than social hygienic or scientific impetus against vice. Both also rejected the interests and interventions of the state in their life-long battle against vice. In both cases, the moral crusade could be even outright anti-state, as some reformers held state authorities responsible for the encouragement of vice. Yet, many other reformers turned toward the state for solutions; this dimension of global anti-vice activism steadily grew in importance as the twentieth century progressed. To bring the crucial paradigm of science as well as the ever-increasing importance of the modern state in the global engagement against alcohol, drugs, p ­ rostitution, and venereal disease into the picture, we include a third and final biographical vignette. Swiss entomologist, psychiatrist, and eugenicist Auguste Forel (1848–1931) realized at the height of his career in 1887 the necessity to secularize and scientize the campaigns for temperance that thus far had been dominated by the religious agenda and rhetoric of Christian moral reformists:54 A great field of social hygiene became apparent to me, which was heretofore annexed alone by various sorts of religious faiths (Glaubensarten). The alcoholic is not the sinner, who must be rescued with conversion to God, he is the victim of blindness and ignorance of his fellow men and ancestors. Alcoholism, the social question (soziale Frage), psychiatry, penal law and science are inseparably entwined by intimate threads.55

Born in Morges, in the Swiss Canton of Vaud in 1848, Forel studied medicine at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, until university administrators appointed him professor of psychiatry in 1879 and he subsequently served as director of the lunatic asylum Burghölzli near Zurich for two decades.56 Stimulated by the propaganda of the influential temperance organization Blue Cross (Blaues Kreuz), he developed an abstinent lifestyle and founded the Swiss lodge of the International Organization of Good Templars (IOGT) in 1892. Colleagues and the public considered him one of the most learned scholars of his time. Professionally, he was a monistic physician, psychiatrist, and sexologist, while politically he played the role of social reformer by embracing anti-alcoholism, pacifism, socialism, and feminism. At the same time, however, his belief in social-Darwinian theories turned him into a staunch advocate of social hygiene and eugenics programs. He became notorious for his positive stance toward the castration of “chronic alcoholics” and a leading champion of the sterilization of “degenerates.” In Switzerland, Forel worked hand in hand with state authorities, for whom he contributed to the draft of a new penal code and also compiled

Introduction

11

psychiatric assessments, at times recommending forced castration or sterilization of “incorrigible alcoholics” and “lunatics.”57 Forel saw himself as an objective and progressive scientist able to explain the social life of ants and the human brain with equal authority, while simultaneously conducting a transnational campaign against alcohol abuse and “degeneration.” A restless traveler for the cause of temperance, his public lectures abroad gave a significant boost to local temperance activities. In Bulgaria, for instance, Forel founded the Sofia branch of the IOGT in 1910, which in fact failed. Yet, Bulgarian activists successfully re-established the branch in 1921 as an immediate reaction to a lecture delivered by the Swiss polymath.58 Forel sought to create a healthy and efficient society, whereas contemporary Swiss society possessed “way too many stupid, sick, degenerate and evil, [and] in contrast way too few healthy, intelligent, industrious, good, socially useful people.”59 According to Forel, the single most important vice responsible for the poor shape of the “social organism” was alcohol. Forel and his colleagues considered the proliferating industrial production and expanding market for alcohol in the capitalistic economy around 1900 as one decisive cause for the increasing danger of alcohol. However, Forel, too, ascribed to the “domino theory” and remarked that alcohol was a “poison” like morphine, opium, hashish, and cocaine.60 In addition, he constantly reiterated that alcohol consumption led to secondary vices like indulgence in casual sex, which then led to venereal disease infection. The rapid spread of sexually transmitted diseases (as well as alcohol consumption itself), in turn, would have a fatal impact on individuals’ mental health as well as on their genetic make-up, and could thus be passed on to future generations. Hence, people’s vicious propensities might perhaps not be cured in the present, but, as proponents of eugenics argued, could be “corrected” for future generations through the encouragement of selective reproduction or even the enforcement of castration and sterilization.61 Forel emerged as a leading voice within the formation of a global scientific discourse on alcohol.62 He perceived alcohol and alcoholism closely connected to heredity and he suggested that the law and the penal system could play pivotal roles to improve humanity. In his later studies he turned increasingly toward the issue of sex as in his seminal work Die Sexuelle Frage (The Sexual Question, 1904). In this book, he deepened his argument of positive eugenics and underscored the necessity to overcome religious, moralizing approaches against alcohol, drugs, “illicit” and “diseased” sex, which he often articulated in strongly racist terminology.63 Forel’s and others’ scientific engagements with the “social diseases,” however, were not only popularized by numerous, transnationally circulating books, journals,

12

Introduction

and pamphlets; the community of scientists arguing over the appropriate ways to combat vices met face to face frequently at international conferences, which served to amplify the global magnitude of their discussions.64

Toward a “vicious turn”? Vices’ archeology of knowledge Anti-vice activism, as this volume demonstrates, brought together an extremely diverse set of issues, cast of characters, and assortment of debates, all centered on the habits of the body and various forms of consumption. The diverse forms of vices and their regulation constitute a global phenomenon of the modern world. They were simultaneously the product of and stimulant of globally entangled networks of trade and communication, the consolidation and expansion of states and empires, as well as the rise of a global community with the increasing engagement of civil society actors and organizations. As David Courtwright puts it in this volume’s afterword, echoing both Kate Bushnell’s and Mohandas Gandhi’s observations, vices had become steam-propelled. Moreover, vices and their regulation themselves were propelling steam for economic, political, social, and cultural developments in the modern era – the world indeed experienced a “vicious turn” from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The close entwinement of vice and modernity becomes evident in many path-breaking and thought-provoking studies. Alcohol and debates concerning alcoholism  – a “disease of the will” as writers labeled the abuse of certain alcoholic liquids and habitual drunkenness around 1900 – is a prime phenomenon to tackle the various levels of consumption and regulation, shedding light on the complexities of modern societies and the coordinates of the public sphere. In many Western countries such as Britain, France, Canada, and the United States, authorities had a difficult time managing alcohol and its consumption because it involved the question of individual freedom and accepted forms of sociability; yet concerns about alcohol consumption also intertwined with concerns about the individual’s and the whole populaces’ health and security.65 But, concern about one vice often converged with concern about other vices. Anti-vice reformers targeted alcohol, narcotics/substances, “obscene” texts and visuals, and forms of “illicit” sex simultaneously.66 These included prostitution as well as the “flesh trade” (sex trafficking). Certainly, alcohol, drugs, non-reproductive sex and its consumption and regulation were historically charged, oscillating between being widespread accepted practices, considered as necessary institutions of societal control, and accentuated as evil vices that would doom societies’ health, security, and morals.67

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The arena of vice regulation that ultimately aimed at governing societies’ morals, manners, and everyday life was exceedingly heterogeneous. According to Western historiography, it derived from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moral regulation movements  – usually of e­ vangelical provenience  – against alcohol, gambling, and prostitution, but also ­propagated by women’s rights proponents, as the career of Kate Bushnell illustrates.68 Initially, anti-vice activism engaged locally and regionally in groups like the Societies for Reformation of Manners, the Vice Society, the Band of Hope, the Blaue Kreuz, and the Anti-Saloon League. At the turn of the century some organizations, most prominently the IOGT, WWCTU, and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), among others, increasingly networked globally by establishing chapters or branches all over the world.69 Simultaneous with the campaigns of this diverse set of civil society activists pursuing a wider agenda of social and political reform, social hygienists like Auguste Forel became increasingly interested in vice regulation. He and his ilk approached the pitfalls of vices as a matter of public health and eugenics, and often focused on the negative influences vices like excessive drinking and venereally diseased sex would have on reproduction and the future of the nation or even humanity at large.70 Broadly speaking, the scientific discourse about alcohol, narcotics/substances, and “illicit” sex – which swayed moral reform groups, who themselves influenced social hygienists, especially in the United States  – gradually replaced sin with vice.71 Politically and socially, puritans, scientists, anti-colonial nationalists, and feminists, covering the whole political spectrum from far right to far left, embraced vice regulation, and thus simultaneously involved agents of the state, non-governmental, and anti-state activists in their anti-vice campaigns.72 Moreover, it would be misleading to declare vice regulators – even, from today’s point of view, the most conservative moralists – as backward oriented; quite on the contrary, anti-vice activists engaged in exceedingly modern and “progressive” ideas and tactics, a fact they demonstrated not least with their organizational skills and methods of communication, for instance by applying state-of-the-art media like magic lantern slides for mass education.73 Although various concepts and tactics of vice regulation clashed between and among different non-governmental groups and state institutions (in particular, in Europe tensions arose between science-praising social hygienists and religious-based moral reformers), anti-vice activists shared the idea that any regulatory attempt would inevitably aim at the body. Anti-vice activists declared nudism, gymnastics, and specific

14

Introduction

diets, abstinence from or the tight control of alcohol and narcotics/­ substances, and continence from “illicit” sex, among others, as important for anti-vice intervention and self-regulatory practices that would – in Michel Foucault’s words – “foster life” not only by increasing individual health and spiritual relief, but also to correct and improve societies’ stability, efficiency, and progress.74 By promoting new ways of managing life, anti-vice activists often envisioned, through the regulation of vice, a national community, which stimulated the imagining and building of a people’s body in various countries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century  – a vision that became particularly notorious in the Anglophone concept of the “social organism” or the German notion of the “Volkskörper.”75 The human body thus became multiplied by incorporating its singularity into a broader body politics in which empires and states administered people, and individuals managed themselves, while concerns of vice emerged as crucial for modern concepts of security, public health, production and reproduction, gender roles and images, class relations, and racial boundaries.76 Vice and its regulation, however, has never been a mere Western concern. As our Gandhi vignette illustrates, the issues of alcohol, narcotics/ substances, prostitution, and sex trafficking were a global modern current, similar yet different, simultaneously embedded in a global grammar and pre-existing local traditions of vice regulation. But also outside the British Empire, in most Asian and Latin American countries vice regulation allowed state authorities to administer people and populations and invited various non-governmental groups to fight for temperance and a better society. This becomes particularly evident in the contestations over the issue of commercial sex and venereal disease. In China, for instance, a prostitution regulation system enabled state authorities to foster the modern state-building project through tax collection, but commentators found commercial sex in metropolises such as Shanghai a key reference to experience “modern life.”77 Similarly, in Argentina prostitution and its regulation helped local and national authorities to integrate matters of class, gender, family, and public health into the nation-building process at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century by exploiting the image of the diseased sex worker and the common fear of sex trafficking.78 In Japan, licensed prostitution functioned as an important institution to promote public health, but also to strengthen state power in general by integrating civil society anti-prostitution engagement into the promotion of national and imperial body politics.79 Vice in colonial settings offers yet further possibilities to unfold important entanglements beyond national and singular regional boundaries.

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15

The trade and consumption of opium, cannabis, and alcohol in imperial settings illustrate the economic, political, and epistemic interdependencies between imperial metropoles and colonial peripheries.80 The performativity of consuming substances and the social activities and meanings it involved ­concerning tastes, gestures, manners, and etiquettes shed light on the workings of colonial societies.81 Equally important, the historical scrutiny of vices and anti-vice campaigns addresses empires’ “politics of difference,” the adjustment of imperial power, and the ordering of colonial societies along categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality.82 Colonial states put much effort and resources in the maintenance of colonial divides, at times in complicity with moral reform organizations by proselytizing, educating, and mapping colonial societies. On various occasions, however, moral reformers like Bushnell could also undermine imperial regimes, be an annoyance for colonial administrators, and even initiate change in policy by uncovering deficits of the colonial states, for example by pointing out the high prevalence of commercial sex and “evil” drugs in certain colonies or by judging colonial administrators’ incompetence in smashing sex trafficking or drug smuggling.83 In addition, similar to Gandhi and the anti-colonial movement in South Africa and British India, notions of anti-vice were appropriated by other anti-colonial activists to promote a modern, self-confident, anti-colonial nationalist subjectivity.84 The global community, to use Akira Iriye’s evocative phrase, was awash in civilizing discourses in the late nineteenth century as transnational actors such as Bushnell, Gandhi, and Forel engaged in global anti-vice activism.85 Vice – whether that be the international drug trade, the trafficking of prostitutes, or alcohol consumption  – constituted one of the primary shared interests of the global community that demanded transnational responses. Most literature on the global community has failed to consider vice activism.86 Yet works exploring the agendas of specific global civil society organizations – like the WWCTU – or looking at the activities of a cohort of international civil society activists – like the Anglo-European upper-class women who populated the International Council of Women or the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom – have noted the prominence of anti-vice activism.87 Alcohol, narcotics, obscene literature, and sex trafficking all appear as central concerns on the agenda of the League of Nation’s Social Section (as well as for delegates to the International Labour Office). The role of anti-vice regulation and debate has begun to take center stage as historians of the League have begun to re-assess its impact, granting it greater measure of influence for providing a site for the cooperation between different nation states, and between international civil society groups and

16

Introduction

nation states, even as it did fail in its intended aim to halt global warfare.88 Proponents of the analytic potential of the concept of global civil society praise the way that it can harness and reveal transnational associational life that produces “patterns that operate over, across, through, beyond, above, under, and in-between polities and societies” – in other words, it can illuminate the transnational networks that span the globe.89 Traditionally, histories of global civil society have centered on the North Atlantic (New York, London, Geneva) and the trans-Atlantic actors with the wealth, educations, and language skills that gained them entry into the global community, privileged individuals like Auguste Forel.90 Lately there has been a move to go beyond such Euro-centric, “The West and the rest” approaches in order to trace the proliferating globally minded institutions operating within the public sphere around the world.91 Global civil society rallied around vice precisely because the vices under consideration clearly crossed borders at will, steam-powered as they were.92 This anthology argues for a global and transnational approach to the study of vice and its regulation.93 By situating anti-vice politics in broader contexts, the book promises to shed fresh light on the initiatives developed by various actors, organizations, and institutions that have thus far been mostly treated solely in national and regional boundaries. For analytical purposes, the volume ignores, for the most part, economic issues of vice and fully concentrates on its social and cultural dimensions, which offers some substantial methodological contributions. To look at vice and its regulation, to emphasize multiple engagements and debates, to scrutinize interventions with their limitations and failures, enables us to highlight anti-vice activists’ agency in particular, but also to cut through a number of dichotomies that are often perceived as fixed “givens” in the mainstream of historical research. Thus, for instance, it is instructive to consider that prudish Evangelists were not the only ones campaigning for temperance and moderation; numerous revolutionary or reform-seeking feminists, socialists, life-reformers, anti-colonial satyagrahis, and anarchists also engaged in the strict ban or at least severe limitation of alcohol and drug production and consumption. Many colonial administrators and anti-colonial activists shared the desire for security and health of people’s lives in colonized societies, although arguably following different aims and means. Anti-statist moral reformers and state-sponsored social hygienists, racial hygienists and modern sexologists, bourgeois capitalists and proletarian revolutionaries, chauvinistic patriarchs and reformist feminists, as well as agents of the state and civil society actors equally addressed concerns about “diseased” and/or “illicit” sex and debates on reproduction. Their engagement and

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17

interventions all contributed to the construction of certain gender roles and the maintenance of class and racial boundaries. Although all these distinct individuals and groups negotiated different and often conflicting agendas, their concepts and practices encompassing anti-vice activism often overlapped and could, to varying degrees, even reinforce each other. Nearly all of them approached the issue of vice by expressing worries about the body, its physical health, and functionality. However, they also targeted the “hearts and minds,” and developed strategies to control, defend, reform, rescue, and secure the individual and with it the social and political body locally and globally. Anti-vice activism pervaded almost every aspect of life imaginable – from birth to death – by entering the public domain of politics, economy, society, religion, and culture. It is particularly noteworthy that they also reached what Ann Stoler has called the “tense and tender ties,” the most intimate realm of tastes, feelings, affections, and aversions that might be hidden from the historian’s gaze but nevertheless shaped and gave texture to people’s everyday life.94 This is not to say that anti-vice interventions worked solely top-down; those people targeted by reform and regulation acted and reacted in multiple ways. A scholarly engagement with the history of vice and the arena of anti-vice intervention and regulatory attempts thus approaches a wide spectrum of practices of subject formation, as well as strategies of cooperation, complicity, resistance, and the room to maneuver that historical actors at the receiving end of anti-vice activities possessed. By way of conclusion, Global Anti-Vice Activism argues that vice and vice regulations constitute an ideal topic for global history especially if written from a social and cultural angle, precisely because it bridges the gaps between discourse and practice and between state and civil society, because it entangles imperial metropoles and colonial peripheries, and because it embraces North, South, East, and West. The volume’s first part assembles chapters on anti-vice activism dealing with issues of health and the body. The overall theme is how people responded to the pressures and fears they felt from “civilization” at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Philippa Levine, Carey Watt, and Antony Taylor address in their respective chapters various, seemingly distinct, but actually highly intersected strands of vices, their regulation, and the tactics individuals and groups of people applied and campaigned for a better society. In doing so, all three chapters explore individuals and groups of people who criticized modern, urban, and industrialized life – from avant-garde artists to “natural healers” to radical leftists – and were to various degrees personally involved or at least discursively embedded in global anti-vice activism. As all three authors show, their chapters’

18

Introduction

protagonists shared certain forms of escapism and developed self-regulatory body techniques to engage in what they understood as “natural” to the human body:  avant-garde artists and members of the life reform movement (Lebensreform) embraced nudism as salvation from “civilization”; Eugen Sandow promoted the body’s supposedly natural health and physic through moderation, specific exercises, and “natural healing” as cure for contemporary society; and some anarchists, socialists, and other “radical” reformers sought refuge in land communes to develop new forms of collaborative life, much to the distaste of state authorities and other critics. Taken together, the three chapters in the first part of this volume underscore the significance the body and its health had for anti-vice activists. Either in its individual singularity or conceptualized as part of a larger societal, cultural, and political “organism,” the body, as the chapters highlight, was of pivotal importance in the process of modern subjectivity formation. Part II focuses on the various substances that anti-vice activists of different backgrounds perceived as posing a serious threat to both individuals’ health and physical fitness, as well as their “moral character.” The bulk of the chapters grapples with the archetypal “demon” of temperance activists all over the globe:  alcohol. Both Charles Ambler’s and Emmanuel Akyeampong’s chapters deal with the ambiguities of alcohol politics in colonial West Africa, while Nikolay Kamenov explores eugenics and the temperance movement in the early twentieth-century Bulgaria. Pavel Vasilyev guides our attention to neighboring Russia in his contribution on medical and criminological constructions of drug addiction during the late Imperial and early Soviet eras. The last chapter in this section not only takes us to a different time, it also deals with a different region and looks at a different substance: the late twentieth century, South America, and tobacco. Diego Armus explores the history of smoking in modern Buenos Aires, tracing its path from a well-accepted habit perceived as innocuous to a medicalized, noxious, and criminalized addiction. The final section of the book moves beyond considering the body and hazardous consumption to a concern with the bodily practice of ­consumption  – prostitution. Those reformers who coalesced around the issue of prostitution and sex trafficking often had different and opposing views on the precise nature of the threat posed by prostitution and sex trafficking. Some, like Forel, saw the danger as one of public health as they configured prostitutes as conveyors of venereal disease, others, like Bushnell, emphasized the ways that prostitution flourished because of women’s legal subordination, and that it functioned to ensure women’s exploitation by men, and others, like Gandhi, worried about the immorality of

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sexual license. The chapters in this section all deal with one aspect of the sex trafficking issue that dominated global anti-vice conversations in the early twentieth century  – government-regulated, brothel-based prostitution. Here, the interests of the empire and the state directly intersected with the vice marketplace. As Bushnell implied when she wrote the words, “It is a fearful thing when the State becomes the perpetrator of such sin,”95 the issue of state-regulated prostitution could make the state, itself, the object of reform. But regulatory schemes differed in their application, their goals, their underlying convictions, and their implications, even as these models were transmitted around the globe, and refined for local implementation. Jessica Pliley explores the regulation of prostitution and sex trafficking in the early twentieth-century United States by looking at a short-lived experiment conducted by the White Slave Division of the Bureau of Investigation. Stephen Legg connects the brothels of Calcutta to the anti-vice campaign politics in Geneva’s League of Nations and raises important methodological questions about researching regulated prostitution in various types of archives by considering the nature of archives that capture and reflect anti-vice histories through their own optics. Elizabeth Remick’s chapter about the establishment of regulated prostitution in China argues that although Chinese regulation may have resembled European and Japanese regulation on the surface, it differed significantly in its purpose. Finally, Robert Kramm concludes with an analysis of the regulation of prostitution and sexuality in East Asia. His work highlights the biopolitics of US regulatory schemes after World War II that reinforced the subordinate, colonial, and racialized status of occupied Japan and Korea even as it sought to protect the health and military readiness of occupying soldiers. Taken together, all of the chapters in this book demonstrate the ubiquity of vice, even as they show the diversity and controversial nature for anti-vice reformers, whose interests  – in the case of prostitution, for instance  – ranged from containing the libidinal provocations of the brothel to curbing the venereal contagion of the brothel to condemning the gendered exploitation endemic to brothels. Others saw brothels as a cornucopia of vicious consumption where alcohol, opium, and women could be consumed for mere pennies. Regardless of the particular critique of prostitution and sex ­trafficking – and indeed the other vices covered in this volume – the reforms put forward generally required the construction of administrative apparatuses to investigate, to organize knowledge, and to implement reform ­agendas. The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were full of vice, and also increasingly full of the opponents of vice. Anti-vice activists formed alliances globally, some formal and some informal. However, as is often the

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case in alliances, the members acted from different motives, operated in different social and cultural contexts, and enjoyed different degrees of success. Nevertheless, even less successful anti-vice interventions had a significant impact on the making of the modern world at the turn of the century, because addressing vice demanded the building of local and global civil society, modernizing nation states, and imperial taxonomic logics, and vice versa. The vices as well as anti-vice activism never actually vanished but continued apace throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century within similar yet changing coordinates, influencing global issues of drug and sex trafficking, as well as the representation and consumption of various liquids, narcotics, and substances, both old and new, as well as the moralization of “bad habits.” Notes 1 Co-written with her long-time companion Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew (1845–1917). Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katherine C. Bushnell, Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers (Oakland:  Messiah’s Advocate, 1907), digital edition available at www .gutenberg.org/ebooks/12818, accessed January 1, 2015, 6. 2 The term “peripatetic puritan” comes from David Courtwright’s afterword in this volume. 3 Bushnell established a halfway house for prostitutes called the Anchorage Mission with Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew. See Dana Hardwick, Oh Thou Woman That Bringest Good Tidings: The Life and Work of Katharine C. Bushnell (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002), 16–22; Katherine C. Bushnell, “A Brief Sketch of Her Life Work,” (1930), 3–6, Papers of Henry Joseph Wilson, 5HJW/F/05, India File, Folder 4, The Women’s Library, London School of Economics, London, UK. 4 Kate C. Bushnell, “Working in Northern Wisconsin,” W.C.T.U. State Work (Madison, WI) 3, no. 7 (November 1, 1888): 1–8, 4. 5 Pamela Cox, “Compulsion, Voluntarism, and Venereal Disease: Governing Sexual Health in England after the Contagious Diseases Acts,” Journal of British Studies 46, no. 1 (2007): 91–115. For what remains to be the best work on the campaign against the Contagious Disease Acts see Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For the implementation of the Contagious Disease Acts in various parts of the empire, see Ashwini Tambe, Codes of Misconduct:  Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (Minneapolis and London:  University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Richard Philipps, Sex, Politics and Empire: A Postcolonial Geography (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2006); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics:  Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New  York:  Routledge, 2003); and Elizabeth B. van Heyningen, “The Social Evil in the Cape Colony 1868–1902:  Prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts,” Journal of Southern African Studies 10, no. 2 (1984): 170–97. 6 See Bushnell, “Working in Northern Wisconsin”; Katherine C. Bushnell, “The Wisconsin Lumber Dens,” The Philanthropist 3, no. 12 (December 1888): 3; Jessica R.

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Pliley, Policing Sexuality:  The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 9–10, 23; and Hardwick, Oh Thou Woman, 25–34. 7 Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History:  British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 157. 8 Kate Bushnell and Elizabeth W. Andrew, The Queen’s Daughters in India (London: Morgan and Scott, 1899), 33. 9 Bushnell and Andrew, The Queen’s Daughters, 18–21, 34–5, 47, and for the term “surgical rape,” see 16. 10 Bushnell and Andrew, The Queen’s Daughters, 21 and 67. 11 Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire:  The Women’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 199–200. 12 Bushnell and Andrew, The Queen’s Daughters, 71. This is a provocative claim when one considers the centrality of abolition to British national identity in the late nineteenth century, as argued by Joel Quirk, The Anti-Slavery Project:  From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 13 Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire, 200. 14 Quoted in Hardwick, Oh Thou Woman, 51. 15 The WCTU’s official organ, The Union Signal, reprinted many of the reports from China and these reports formed the basis for 1907’s Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers. 16 Andrew and Bushnell, Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers, 6–7. 17 The best example of this perspective is a passage from the India study: “We do not present these facts with any thought of taking our position with those who argue that the better regulation of vice implies a better protection of the degraded women; but rather to show that in the working out of such regulations the woman is absolutely lost sight of, and only the prostitute is considered.” Bushnell and Andrew, The Queen’s Daughters, 56, emphasis in original. 18 See the numerous letters exchanged between Kate Bushnell and Alison Neilans from 1917 to 1919, Records of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, Box 122, 3AMS/D/51/01, Women’s Library, London School of Economics, London, UK. For more on the US anti-vice movement becoming dominated by male doctors and lawyers see Kristen Luker, “Sex, Social Hygiene, and the State: The Double-Edged Sword of Social Reform,” Theory and Society 27, no. 5 (1998): 601–34. 19 See Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 20 Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie Shemo, eds., Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960 (Durham, NC and London:  Duke University Press, 2010); Tyrrell, Woman’s World/ Woman’s Empire; and Joseph R. Gusfield, “Social Structure and Moral Reform: A Study of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union,” American Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (1955): 221–32. 21 See, for instance, Deana Heath, Purifying Empire:  Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Clare Midgley, “Bringing the Empire Home:  Women Activists in

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Imperial Britain, 1790s–1930s,” in At Home with the Empire, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 230–50; Katie Picles, Female Imperialism and National Identity: Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002); Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism:  Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); and Burton, Burdens of History. 22 Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 23 The literature on the early feminist movement’s critiques of prostitution, alcohol, and other vices is vast. Important works include Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New  York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Ruth M. Alexander, “‘We are Engaged as a Band of Sisters’: Class and Domesticity in the Washingtonian Temperance Movement, 1840–1850,” Journal of American History 75, no. 3 (1988): 763–85; Ruth Bordin, Women and Temperance:  The Quest for Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); and Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” The American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (1984): 620–47. 24 Josephine E. Butler, Some Thoughts on the Present Aspect of the Crusade Against the State Regulation of Vice (Liverpool: E. Brakell, 1906). In terms of Bushnell’s life as a whole, the most radically feminist work she did focused on re-writing the Bible to rid it of its misogyny. 25 For instance, Diana L. Ahmad, “Opium Smoking, Anti-Chinese Attitudes, and the American Medical Community, 1850–1890,” American Nineteenth Century History 1, no. 2 (2010): 53–68; Kathleen L. Lodwick, Crusaders against Opium: Protestant Missionaries in China, 1874–1917 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 40–8; Mariana Valverde, ‘“Racial Poison’: Drink, Male Vice, and Degeneration in First-Wave Feminism,” in Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation and Race, ed. Ian Christopher Fletcher, Laura E. Nym Mayhall, and Philippa Levine (London:  Routledge, 2000), 33–50; and Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times (Portsmouth, NH and Oxford: James Currey, 1996). 26 Gandhi even authored several books solely concerned with questions of health, diet and control of the body. Mahatma Gandhi, A Guide to Health (Madras:  S. Ganeshan, 1923); M.K. Gandhi, Key to Health (Ahmadabad: Navjivan, 1948); and M.K. Gandhi, Diet and Diet Reform (Ahmadabad: Navjivan, 1949). See also Joseph Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet and Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 27 J.T.F. Jordens, Gandhi’s Religion:  A  Homespun Shawl (Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1998), 6. 28 Judith Brown, “Gandhi – a Victorian Gentleman: An Essay in Imperial Encounter,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 21, no. 2 (1999): 72f. 29 David Arnold, Gandhi (Profiles in Power) (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 37–40; Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities:  Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle

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Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC and London:  Duke University Press, 2006), 67–76; and Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi before India (New York: A. Knopf, 2014), 36–54. 30 “Interview to the Deputation of Victuallers’ Association,” June 10, 1939, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi [henceforth CWMG] Vol. 69, 319. 31 Aditya Nigam, “Towards an Aesthetic of Slowness: Reading Hind Swaraj Today,” in Re-Reading Hind Swaraj: Modernity and Subalterns, ed. Ghanshyam Shah (London, New York and New Delhi: Routledge, 2013), 74. 32 Shimon Lev, Soulmates:  The Story of Mahatma Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach (New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2012), 1–9. 33 Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul:  Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 88–91; Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher Bearer of the Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 83f. See also the chapter by Carey A. Watt in this volume. 34 Although “passive resistance” is the most frequent translation given for satyagraha (literally: “taking a grip on truth”), it is not quite correct as Gandhi himself always emphasized that he considered his method to be a very active and conscious pursuit of truth. James D. Hunt and Surendra Bhana, “Spiritual Rope Walkers: Gandhi, Kallenbach and the Tolstoy Farm,” South African Historical Journal, 58, no. 1 (2007): 174–202. 35 Joseph Alter, “Gandhi’s Body, Gandhi’s Truth:  Nonviolence and the Biomoral Imperative of Public Health,” Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (1996):  311–14. For an insightful account of the anti-vice regime in the ashrams Gandhi was running later in India, see also Tanika Sarkar, “Gandhi and Social Relations,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, ed. Judith M. Brown and Anthony Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 187–91. See also the chapters by Philippa Levine and Antony Taylor in this volume. 36 Cited in: Anup Taneja, Gandhi, Women and the National Movement (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2005), 66. 37 Suresh Sharma and Tridip Suhrud, eds., M.K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj:  A  Critical Edition (New Delhi:  Orient Blackswan, 2010), 41. See also Nigam, “Towards an Aesthetic of Slowness,” 79f. 38 For a definition and contextualization of “anti-Westernism” see Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia:  Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 37f. It has often been observed that Gandhi’s ideology as it crystallized in South Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century was crucially influenced by the reading of authors like Leo Tolstoy, John Ruskin, Henry David Thoreau, and Edward Carpenter. Jonathan Hyslop, “Gandhi 1869–1914:  The Transnational Emergence of a Public Figure,” in Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, ed. Brown and Parel, 42. See also Pekka Sulkunen and Katariina Warpenius, “Reforming the Self and the Other: The Temperance Movement and the Duality of Modern Subjectivity,” Critical Public Health 10, no. 4 (2000): 425. 39 Sulkunen and Warpenius, “Reforming the Self and the Other,” 425. 40 Robert E. Colvard, “‘Drunkards Beware!’: Prohibition and Nationalist Politics in the 1930s,” in A History of Alcohol and Drugs in Modern South Asia: Intoxicating Affairs, ed. Harald Fischer-Tiné and Jana Tschurenev (London: Routledge, 2014), 173–200;

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and David M. Fahey and Padma Manian, “Poverty and Purification: The Politics of Gandhi’s Campaign for Prohibition,” The Historian 67, no. 3 (2005): 489–506. 41 For a classic example see David Hardiman, “From Custom to Crime: The Politics of Drinking in Colonial South Gujarat,” in Subaltern Studies IV, ed. R. Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 165–228. 42 Gandhi, Key to Health, 36. 43 See M.K. Gandhi, “Statement on Opium Policy,” March 20, 1923, in CWMG, Vol. 23, 279f. and Maria Framke, “Internationalising the Indian War on Opium: Colonial Policy, the Nationalist Movement and the League of Nations,” in Alcohol and Drugs in Modern South Asia, ed. Fischer-Tiné and Tschurenev, 155–171. 44 C.F. Andrews, The Opium Evil in India:  Britain’s Responsibility (London:  Student Christian Movement, 1926); and C.F. Andrews, “Opium in Assam,” Modern Review, XXXVII no. 5 (1925): 511–15. See also Kawal Deep Kour, “The Opium Question in Colonial Assam,” in Alcohol and Drugs in Modern South Asia, ed. Fischer-Tiné and Tschurenev, 145. 45 Ajay Skarya, “Only One Word, Properly Altered: Gandhi and the Question of the Prostitute,” Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 219–37. 46 M.K. Gandhi, “Public Speech at Rajahmundry,” May 6, 1929, in CWMG, Vol. 40, 252. 47 M.K. Gandhi, “Painfully Illuminating,” July 9, 1925, in CWMG, Vol. 27, 346. 48 Gandhi, Guide to Health, 60. 49 Ibid., 347. 50 Ibid. 51 However, it is somewhat ironic, though certainly not atypical for anti-vice crusaders, that their fight against carnal temptations at times could cast serious doubts on their moral integrity. In the case of Gandhi, recent research has provided ample evidence of the fact that his own “chastity experiments” included sleeping next to and bathing with naked women that might well have been his granddaughters. See Bhikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform:  An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, and London: Sage, 1999), 191–227. For a more recent (and popular) account see Jad Adams, Gandhi: Naked Ambition (London: Quercus, 2010). 52 Gandhi, Guide to Health, p. 59. 53 For the concept of epistemic pidginization in a colonial constellation see Harald Fischer-Tiné, Pidgin-Knowledge:  Wissen und Kolonialismus (Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2013). 54 Auguste Forel’s engagement in an “epistemic community” of social hygiene is exhaustively discussed by Francesco Spöring, “‘Du must Apostel der Wahrheit werden’: Auguste Forel und der sozialhygienische Antialkoholdiskurs, 1886–1931,” in Biopolitik und Sittlichkeitsreform:  Kampagnen gegen Alkohol, Drogen und Prostitution 1880–1950, ed. Judith Große, Francesco Spöring, and Jana Tschurenev (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2014), 111–44. For an overview of Forel’s life and career see Rolf Meier, August Forel, 1848–1931:  Arzt, Naturforscher, Sozialreformer (Zurich: Berichthaus, Universität Zürich, 1986). 55 Auguste Forel, Rückblick auf mein Leben, 2nd edn (Zürich: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1935), 144. 56 Jakob Tanner, “Auguste Forel als Ikone der Wissenschaft:  Ein Plädoyer für historische Forschung,” in Auguste Forel: Eugenik und Erinnerungskultur, ed. Anton Leist (Zurich: Vdf, 2006), 81.

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57 Urs Germann, “‘Alkoholfrage’ und Eugenik:  Auguste Forel und der eugenische Diskurs in der Schweiz,” Traverse 4, no. 1 (1997):  144–54, 151; Jakob Tanner, “‘Keimgifte’ und ‘Rassendegeneration’: Zum Drogendiskurs und den gesellschaftlichen Ordnungsvorstellungen der Eugenik,” ITINERA Allgemeine Geschichtforschende Gesellschaft der Schweiz 21 (1999): 249–58; Sarah Jansen, “Ameisenhügel, Irrenhaus und Bordell: Insektenkunde und Degenartionsdiskurs bei August Forel (1848–1931), Psychiater, Entomologe und Sexualreformer,” in Kontamination, ed. Norbert Haas, Rainer Nägele, and Hans J. Rheinberger (Eggingen: Klaus Isele, 2001), 141–84. 58 Nikolay Kamenov, “Globale Ursprünge und lokale Zielsetzungen:  die Anti-Alkoholbewegung in Bulgarien 1890–1940,” in Vergessene Vielfalt. Territorialisierung und Internationalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa von 1850 bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Katja Naumann and Stefi Mahrung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2014), 194–220. 59 Auguste Forel, “Gutes und Schlechtes:  Eine kleine Rundschau,” Der Monismus 5 (1910): 108–10. 60 Auguste Forel, Die Trinksitten, ihre hygienische und sociale Bedeutung, ihre Beziehung zur akademischen Jugend (Stuttgart: Verlag von Ferdinand Enke, 1891), 6–7, 11. 61 Germann, “‘Alkoholfrage’ und Eugenik,” 150. 62 Hasso Spode, “Auguste Forel, 1848–1931,” in Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History: An International Encyclopedia, ed. Jack S. Blocker, Jr., David M. Fahey, and Ian Tyrrell (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 245. 63 Auguste Forel, Die Sexuelle Frage:  Eine naturwissenschaftliche, psychologische, hygienische und soziologische Studie für Gebildete (München:  Ernst Reinhardt Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1905 [1904]). 64 Spöring, “‘Du Musst ein Apostel sein’,” 113–19; Hasso Spode, “Trinkkulturen in Europa: Strukturen, Transfers, Verflechtungen,” in Die kulturelle Integration Europas, ed. Johannes Wienand and Christiane Wienand (Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag, 2010), 375; Mark Lawrence Schrad, The Political Power of Bad Ideas: Networks, Institutions, and the Global Prohibition Wave (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 49. 65 Mariana Valverde, Diseases of the Will:  Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10; James Kneale, “The Place to Drink: Temperance and the Public, 1856–1914,” Social & Cultural Geography 2, no. 1 (2001): 43–59; Tony Collins and Wray Vamplew, Mud, Sweat and Beers: A Cultural History of Sports and Alcohol (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002). 66 Howard Padwa, Social Poison: The Culture and Politics of Opiate Control in Britain and France, 1821–1926 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography:  Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New  York:  Zone Books, 1996); Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Alain Corbin, Women for Hire:  Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (Columbus:  Ohio State University Press, 1999); Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Annet Mooji, Out of Otherness: Characters and Narrators in the Dutch Venereal Disease Debates 1850–1990 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998); Lutz Sauerteig, Krankheit, Sexualität, Ges ellschaft: Geschlechtskrankheiten und Gesundheitspolitik in Deutschland im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999); Roger Davidson and

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Lesley A. Hall, eds., Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Rachael Attwood, “Stopping the Traffic: The National Vigilance Association and the International Fight against the ‘White Slave’ Trade (1899–c.1909),” Women’s History Review (2014): 1–26. 67 Virginia Berridge, Demons: Our Changing Attitudes to Alcohol, Tobacco, and Drugs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Barbara M. Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Brian Donovan, White Slave Crusades:  Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887–1917 (Urbana and Chicago:  Illinois University Press, 2006). 68 Alan Hunt, Governing Morals:  A  Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 69 Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire; Irmgard Eisenbach-Stangl, “From Temperance Movements to State Action: An Historical View of the Alcohol Question in Industrialized Countries,” in From Science to Action? 100 Years Later – Alcohol Politics Revisited, ed. Richard Müller and Harald Klingemann (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2004); D.M. Fahey, “Temperance Internationalism:  Guy Hayler and the World Prohibition Federation,” The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 20 (2006): 245–75; Edmund Rogers, “Better than an Ironclad: Leonard Isitt, Temperance and Greater Britain,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 4 (2012): 579–600. 70 Valverde, “Racial Poison,” 33–50; Alexandra M. Lord, Condom Nation:  The U.S. Government’s Sex Education Campaign from World War I to the Internet (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 71 Heidi Rimke and Alan Hunt, “From Sinners to Degenerates: The Medicalization of Morality in the 19th Century,” History of Human Sciences 15, no. 1 (2002): 59–88; Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, 13; Petra De Vries, “‘The Shadow of Contagion’:  Gender, Syphilis, and the Regulation of Prostitution in the Netherlands, 1870–1914,” in Sex, Sin and Suffering, ed. Davidson and Hall, 51; Ray Lyam Wilbur, “Editorial: Social Hygiene in Relation to the Future of the Family,” Journal of Social Hygiene 31, no. 9 (1945): 561–3. 72 Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire:  Vodka & Politics in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002); Gretchen Pierce, Sober Revolutionaries: Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in the Anti-Alcohol Campaigns in Jalisco, Oaxaca, and Sonora, Mexico, 1910–40 (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2008). 73 Annemarie McAllister, “Picturing the Demon Drink: How Children were Shown Temperance Principles in the Band of Hope,” Visual Resources:  An International Journal of Documentation 28, no. 4 (2012): 309–23. 74 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1:  An Introduction (New  York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 138, emphasis in original; Philip Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen: Eine Geschichte des Körpers 1765–1914 (Frankfurt/M.:  Suhrkamp, 2001); Maren Möhring, Marmorleiber:  Körperbildung in der deutschen Nacktkultur, 1980–1930 (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna:  Böhlau Verlag, 2004); Bernd Wedemeyer-Kolwe, Der neue Mensch:  Körperkultur im Kaiserreich und der Weimarer Republik (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2004); Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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75 Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien:  Frauen, Fluten, Körper, Geschichte, Vol. 1 (Frankfurt/M.:  Verlag Roter Stern, 1977); Boaz Neumann, “The Phenomenology of the German People’s Body (Volkskörper) and the Extermination of the Jewish Body,” New German Critique 106, Vol. 36, no. 1 (2009): 149–81. 76 Ahmad, “Opium Smoking,” 65; Brian Donovan, “The Sexual Basis of Racial Formation: Anti-Vice Activism and the Creation of the Twentieth-Century ‘Color Line’,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 26, no. 4 (2003):  707–727; Svenja Goltermann, Körper der Nation:  Habitusformierung und die Politik des Turnens 1860–1890 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998). 77 Elizabeth J. Remick, Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 78 Donna J. Guy, Sex & Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family and the Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). Some other works from Latin America that deal with the same intertwined themes of nation-state building, policing of prostitution, and public health include: Eileen J. Suárez Findlay, Imposing Decency:  The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920 (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1999); Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics:  Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Christine Ehrick, The Shield of the Weak:  Feminism and the State in Uruguay, 1903–1933 (Albuquerque:  University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, Visions of the Emerald City: Modernity, Tradition, and the Formation of Porfirian Oaxaca, Mexico (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2006); and Katherine Elaine Bliss, Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State Press, 2010). 79 Susan Burns, “Constructing the National Body:  Public Health and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” in Nation Work:  Asian Elites and National Identities, ed. Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 17–49; Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds:  The State in Everyday Life (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1998); Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Elizabeth D. Lubi, Reforming Japan: The Women’s Christian Temperance Movement in the Meiji Period (Vancouver:  University of British Columbia Press, 2010); Manako Ogawa, “Estranged Sisterhood: The Wartime Trans-Pacific Dialogue of the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1931–1945,” The Japanese Journal of American Studies, no. 18 (2007):  163–85; Robert Kramm, “Reine Körper: Praktiken der Regulierung von Prostitution, Geschlechtskrankheiten und Intimität während der frühen US-Okkupation Japans, 1945–1952,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 40, no. 4 (2014): 493–522. 80 Hans Derks, History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, c. 1600–1950 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Amar Farooqui, Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay (Gurgaon:  Three Essays Collective, 2006); Timothy Brook and Bob T. Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes, China, Britain and Japan, 1839–1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire, and the Global

28

Introduction

Political Economy:  A  Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750–1950 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); James H. Mills, Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800–1928 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 81 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants (New  York:  Pantheon, 1992); Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt, eds., Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). 82 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 11–12. 83 Ann Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies of Society and History 34, no. 3 (1992):  514–55; Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics; Charles H. Ambler, “Alcohol, Racial Segregation and Popular Politics in Northern Rhodesia,” Journal of African History 31, no. 2 (1990): 295–313; Emmanuel Akyeampong, “What’s in a Drink? Class Struggle, Popular Culture and the Politics of Akpeteshie (Local Gin) in Ghana, 1930–67,” Journal of African History 37, no. 2 (1996): 215–36; Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Liquid Boundaries: Race, Class, and Alcohol in Colonial India,” in Alcohol and Drugs in Modern South Asia, ed. Fischer-Tiné and Tschurenev, 90–115. 84 Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham, NC and London:  Duke University Press, 2011). For a similar argument in the South Asian context see Chandrima Chakraborty, Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism:  Past and Present Imaginings of India (Ranikhet:  Permanent Black, 2011); and Harald Fischer-Tiné, “‘Character Building and Manly Games’: Viktorianische Konzepte von Männlichkeit und ihre Aneignung im frühen Hindu Nationalismus,” Historische Anthropologie 9, no. 3 (2001): 432–55. 85 Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 209. 86 In Akira Iriye’s brief yet informative account of the historiography of transnational and global history and its relationship with international history he omits any discussion of vice activism, or vice policing. Akira Iriye, Global and Tansnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 87 Tyrrell, Women’s Empire, Women’s World; Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women:  The Making of the International Women’s Movement (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1997), 150–2, 215–16. 88 Susan Pedersen, “Back to the League of Nations,” American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (October 2007):  1091–117; Barbara Metzger, “Towards an International Human Rights Regime during the Inter-War Years:  The League of Nations’ Combat of Traffic in Women and Children,” in Beyond Sovereignty:  Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c.  1880–1950, ed. Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann, 54–79 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Jean Michel Chaumont, Le mythe de la traite des Blanches: enquête sur la fabrication d’un fléau (Paris: la Découverte, 2009); Jessica R. Pliley, “Claims to Protection:  The Rise and Fall of Feminist Abolitionism in the League of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–1937,” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 4 (Winter 2010):  90–113; Stephen Wertheim, “The League of Nations:  A  Retreat

Introduction

29

from International Law,” Journal of Global History 7, no. 2 (July 2012):  210–32; Magaly Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of Women,” International Review of Social History 57.S20 (2012):  97–128; Paul Knepper, “International Criminals: The League of Nations, the Traffic in Women and the Press,” Media History 20, no. 4 (2014): 400–15; Stephanie Lemoncelli, The Politics of Trafficking: The First International Movement to Combat the Exploitation of Women (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); and Eileen Boris and Helen Berg, “Protecting Virtue, Erasing Labor:  Historical Responses to Trafficking,” in Human Trafficking Reconsidered: Rethinking the Problem, Envisioning Solutions, ed. Kimberly Kay Hoang and Rhacel Salazar Parrenas (New York: International Debate Educational Association, 2014): 19–29. 89 Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, “Introduction,” Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History:  From the Mid 19th Century to the Present Day (New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xvii. 90 Iriye, Global Community; Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Place:  The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2009); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2010); Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William I. Hitchcock, eds., The Human Rights Revolution:  An International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Sarah B, Snyder, “Bringing the Transnational In: Writing Human Rights into the International History of the Cold War,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 24, no. 1 (2013): 100–16. 91 See the special issue entitled “The Roots of Global Civil Society and the Interwar Moment” of the Journal of Global History 7, no. 2 (July 2012) for an example of work in this direction. 92 Recent world historical accounts, however, combined all these diverse but synchronically overlapping and entwined strands of global anti-vice activism. David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit:  Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Richard Davenport-Hines, The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003); and Tyrrell, Reforming the World. 93 James H. Mills and Patricia Barton, eds., Drugs and Empires:  Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication, c. 1500–1930 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Große et al., Biopolitik und Sittlichkeitsreform. 94 Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidation of Empire:  Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Haunted by Empire:  Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 3. 95 Bushnell and Andrew, The Queen’s Daughters, 71.

PART I

HEALTH AND THE BODY

2

Modernity, vice, and the problem of nakedness Philippa Levine

In the words of Alison Smith, 1885 was a key year in the “social purity ­crusade against the nude in art and society,” with the Church of England Purity Society and the White Cross League both actively campaigning against the use of nude female models in art classes.1 At the same time, a lively exchange of letters in The Times debated the propriety of exhibiting nude paintings in respectable art venues, a debate in which social purity ideas were pitted against aesthetic judgment.2 But it was not only in the world of art that social purity campaigning made its mark in Britain in that year. This was, after all, the same year in which the Criminal Law Amendment Act both raised the female age of sexual consent and – by a notorious amendment to that act – criminalized “gross indecency,” a vague term used primarily to prosecute same-sex activities among men. It was also the year William Coote established one of the dominant social purity societies of its era, the National Vigilance Association, dedicated to raising the female age of sexual consent, establishing tighter obscenity laws, and stamping out prostitution. Only a year later in 1886 campaigners against Britain’s Contagious Diseases Acts, whose protests had included a sturdy critique of rampant male sexuality, won their domestic repeal against laws that had rendered prostitution in certain instances not only legal but regulated by the state. Repeal was hailed as a signal victory by the social purity movement. The year 1886 also saw the first exhibition in England of what came to be called the “modern life” nude, a show that included works by, among others, Theodore Roussel (1847–1926), Philip Wilson Steer (1860–1942), Henry Tuke (1858–1929), and Walter Sickert (1860–1942). In this chapter I want to suggest that what was happening in the art world and among social purity activists, read together, reveal some interesting tensions in the morality debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 33

34

Health and the body

Despite the fact that the 1880s might be considered the high-water mark of nineteenth-century social purity, the debate over exhibiting nudes was already long-standing and vigorous in art circles. From at least the 1830s, life modeling as part of the training of artists had been a prominent topic of concern in many quarters. Not surprisingly, much of the fuss was over the use of naked female models. Although the Royal Academy had introduced female models late in the eighteenth century, they sat far less often than their male counterparts, and only advanced students had access to them and even then under close supervision. Concern over the propriety of the display of female flesh simmered in art circles, with private institutions implementing what the Academy refused to do, namely permit modeling from live women on a regular basis. It was clear that establishment institutions such as the Royal Academy approached the topic with considerable care. At the Academy no one except members of the Royal Family could enter if a female model was sitting, and no students under the age of 20 were permitted unless married. Students were required to keep a respectable distance from the model and only the Academician in charge could arrange or alter the pose.3

The issue was pressing enough that in 1860 the House of Commons voted on whether to withdraw government monies from state-funded schools of art employing the living female model. The motion was soundly defeated (147 to 32) but the fact that this seemingly esoteric issue reached into government circles is surely telling. Three years later, John Rogers Herbert (1810–90), one of the artists who had been commissioned to paint the Poet’s Hall in the new Palace of Westminster in the 1840s, told the Royal Commission appointed to report on the Royal Academy, “I would exclude altogether the nude female model from the Academy, because I conceive that art, the true aim of which is to elevate and to divinize, does not require the use of anything that might corrupt him who studies or the person who sits as the model.”4 This furor over nude art at the high end was, then, remarkably similar in sentiment to that which was articulated by social purity groups whose interests lay in the corruptions engendered by prostitution, drunkenness, and other allegedly antisocial behaviors. The vigilance movements of the late nineteenth century were interested in pornography and even more in what they understood to be working-class vice than in policing the aesthetics of the upper classes.5 Yet scandal had always adhered to the lax ­morals of the rich, and vigilance was essentially a bourgeois phenomenon, the province of a frustrated and puritanical middle class whose disapproval

Modernity, vice, and the problem of nakedness

35

extended both upwards to aristocratic excess and downwards to proletarian ignorance and viciousness. Anti-vice societies attacked all manner of p ­ ublic “indecency”  – in the theater, the art gallery, the music-hall, the streets, always pushing for broader definitions of obscenity and of indecency.6 And social purity’s h ­ eyday bloomed at much the same moment as that which Smith identifies as the pinnacle of the antinude crusade in art. The effects of both reached into the early twentieth century, often overlapping with those elements of the burgeoning eugenics movement that emphasized public health and moral improvement.7 In both the art controversy and in social purity campaigns, moreover, the focus was frequently on the female body: who could see the life models, who those models should be, what might happen if young women viewed nude paintings, how to protect ignorant and innocent girls from the clutches of those who would put them to work in a brothel – for there was a common assumption that a woman who would willingly display her unclothed body to strangers in an art class must be morally unmoored. At some level all of this fuss focused on the perceived need for the regulation of female behavior, and perhaps most especially in instances where women laid claim to some sort of economic independence whether in a studio, on stage, or in a brothel. The rationale offered was, of course, that the sexualized female presence would inflame men, a circular argument leading back to female sexuality as a problem that enmeshed both women and men. Not surprisingly given the Christianized culture of nineteenth-century Britain, the naked body – a symbol of sexuality with its revealing of the genitalia – was at the heart of this dilemma. After all, it was only when they had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge (the blame for which lies squarely with Eve, not Adam) that the first two biblical humans even understood that they were naked. Such concerns emerged not only out of a Victorian prudishness that is all too easy to parody, but out of the growing dissatisfaction in the late nineteenth century, fueled by fears of degeneration, with the effects and values of modern industrial life. At one end of the spectrum was the moralizing concern of the social purity wing (including those who decried the exhibiting of paintings of the nude) who blamed urbanization and the factories, the independence of women, the loosening of family ties, and the like, for what they saw as a sexualizing tendency that promoted illegitimacy, commercial sex, secularity, and a loss of respect for traditional values. But there was another and radical element of this critique of modern alienation that, while it also imagined a return to a mythologized moral past, did so in a strikingly different idiom. Where the vigilance movement argued that

36

Health and the body

populations made effete and pallid by over-civilization produced vicious behaviors, one of the strands rejecting the unhealthy constraints of modern life championed a back-to-nature movement that saw in nudity a form of moral, social, and political salvation. Taking off one’s clothes became, in effect, the answer to the ills of modern life and civilization. At various points as early as the seventeenth century in Britain, small radical sects had experimented with nudism as a form of liberation. The early twentieth century saw a more widespread adoption of these ideas, spurred by an increasing rejection of Western industrialism and the artifice it embodied. German Nacktkultur, one strand of the broader Lebensreform movement emerging at the end of the nineteenth century, was the catalyst for what would become a nudist movement that spread, especially in the interwar years, to a number of industrial cultures including Canada and the United States, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Spain, France, and Scandinavia.8 Its earliest prophets included Heinrich Pudor (1865–1943) in Leipzig (who is thought to have coined the term Nacktkultur around 1903) and Richard Ungewitter (1868–1958) in Stuttgart.9 Pudor’s Nackende Menschen (Naked People), published in 1893, was the first full-length manifesto for the nudist movement. In these early years women’s principal prominence in the movement was in Nackttanz where performers including Adoreé Villany (b. 1891), Mata Hari (1876–1917), Olga Desmond (1890–1964),10 and Gertrud Leistikow (1885–1948) performed nude in a self-consciously modern mode of expressive dance.11 The theorists of nudism were, by contrast, predominantly male, and the emphasis in nudism was perhaps most commonly on the restoration of a particular and often traditional form of manliness.12 The basic philosophy of early nudism was regeneration and restoration, both of the health of the individual stifled by a degenerative industrialism, and of the nation, also out of balance and overly concerned with material prosperity and consumerism. Historians of the German Lebensreform have read nudism in a number of different ways: as a racially tinged forerunner of fascism, as a romantic counterculture, as part of a larger health and beauty movement, as a democratic critique of capitalist elitism.13 As Karl Toepfer has noted, “Nudism was more than the reform of hygiene; the shared display and observation of naked bodies entailed a reform of sexual morality, family intimacy, diet, education, social class, the legal system, ecological values, and economic priorities.”14 I want, however, to take the phenomenon of nudism in a slightly different direction, framing it in a larger and transnational conversation about the valences of nakedness, and their relation to anti-vice campaigns, around the turn of the century.

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37

Nudism – sometimes rather grandly known as gymnosophy, as well as linked to naturism, which John Williams sees as a response to the crisis of modernity – self-consciously attempted for the most part to distance itself from sexuality through its focus on good health and wholesome physical exercise.15 This was so not just in Germany but, as Evert Peeters has shown, in Belgium as well as in much of Europe, Britain, and its white settler colonies.16 Richard Ungewitter called nakedness “a necessary condition for the true civilization of all of mankind,” and titled one of the chapters of his 1905 book, Die Nacktheit, “Without Nakedness No True Morality.”17 This was what he envisioned as “chaste nakedness.”18 In the English-speaking countries, as in Germany and Scandinavia, nudist publicity focused on rural walks, hiking, swimming, and bodybuilding. Though nudism’s critics were skeptical of the movement’s claims that going without clothes led to a healthier attitude to sexuality as well as improved physical health, these were the principal tenets of the movement that thus fashioned itself as, in effect, an antidote to precisely the kinds of vices that vigilance organizations identified as the most ­pernicious. Nudism’s constant struggle to free itself from the taint of pornography, the stain of disrespectability, and association with aggressive sexuality, provides an intriguing link to the anti-vice activities with which it uneasily coexisted. Though nudism thus shared some distinctive links with the anti-vice campaigns of the period, it could also run afoul of that movement, and indeed of officialdom. Nackttanz performers sometimes found themselves in court, accused of lewd performances. On-stage nudity was in some instances legal if performers remained still in a so-called tableau vivant, but movement invited prosecution and dancers were disinclined to remain still. As Erika Hughes has noted, the legal definition of bodily coverage for a dancer was the subject of considerable debate.19 Theaters were often the focus of concerted social purity campaigns as well as surveillance by police departments charged with limiting obscenity. The most famous of such cases in Britain was mounted against London’s Empire Theatre when its license came up for renewal in 1894. The feisty campaigner, Laura Ormiston Chant (1848–1923), testified before the London County Council’s Theatres and Music Hall Committee that prostitution was rife at the theater (a common complaint about theaters20) and that dancers in flesh-colored costumes and “very little apology for extra clothing” appeared as if naked.21 Her c­ omplaint was upheld, although within a year the Empire was once again offering its audiences the fare they wanted, and which had so offended Ormiston Chant.22

38

Health and the body

Nudism also had close ties to the health and beauty movement, which by the early twentieth century had become quite prominent in the West. 1885, that Holy Grail year for the social purity movement, also saw the foundation in Britain of the National Physical Recreation Society.23 The Prussian bodybuilder Eugen Sandow (1867–1925, born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller, see Chapter 4) took his muscles on the road in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, touring globally to great acclaim. On stage he wore trunks but was otherwise unclothed. In many of his photographs, however, he poses fully naked – though those made public were frequently retouched with a coy fig leaf.24 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska rather wryly comments that in these photographs “the necessary fig-leaf of respectability was provided by classical imagery,” just as the nude in art was routinely legitimized by classical surrounds and themes.25 Sandow and his many disciples emphasized bodily discipline, distancing themselves from the trope of degeneration that saw in the breakdown of social, as well as individual, discipline criminality, laziness, greed, lust, and distemper.26 Nudism and bodybuilding alike aimed to throw off, to reject, the decadence and senescence of older civilizations in order to pave the way for a bright new modernist future even while they relied on the trope of classicism for their claims of respectability. On the one hand, their visual orientation looked back to classical statuary as a kind of recuperative respectability; on the other hand, their dogma urged modern scientific exercise techniques as a way to restore and strengthen a thoroughly modern world.27 Ettie Rout (1877–1936), an outspoken reformer married to one of Sandow’s disciples, Fred Hornibrook (c. 1878–1965), constantly warned Australians and New Zealanders that Britain was becoming a stagnant wasteland of the “timid and feebleminded” whose presence in the Antipodes would contaminate the healthy vigor of the new and fit colonials.28 There is more than a whiff of eugenics in her claims, and indeed eugenicists were prominent among those who took up the joys of nudism. Caleb Saleeby (1878–1940), a well-known popularizer of eugenics, founded a nudist club in Britain in the 1920s, exhorting the nudist lifestyle in his book Sunlight and Health.29 The Health and Strength League, founded in 1906, had as its motto “sacred thy body even as thy soul,” emphasizing the links between morality and health.30 In Britain, as in Germany, the ideals of physical fitness were often yoked to those of patriotic nationalism. The rise in Britain of a new imagining of masculinity through a muscular Christianity had taken shape in the mid-nineteenth century through organized sports at elite schools, and some of that ethos passed into the early twentieth-century nudist movement.31 The so-called “New Athleticism” preached team spirit,

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39

modesty, and manliness, while the sexual reformer Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), writing in 1891, called civilization a “disease.”32 This emphasis on healthy clean living was shot through with anxieties about the damaging consequences – physical and mental as well as societal – of vice as well as of the modern industrial and commercial lifestyle. The claims of early twentieth-century nudists put them squarely both in the anti-vice camp and as enthusiasts of modernity, but a modernity that moved beyond the constraining practices and habits of urban modern conditions. Their call for a return to nature might appear a romanticized one, but it was not a yearning for earlier eras so much as a modernized rereading of nature that fueled their vision. Ungewitter, for example, based his argument for the benefits of nudism on Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionary theories, while Caleb Saleeby’s eugenicist interpretation folded nudism into a broad umbrella of modern scientific health reforms.33 Thus nudism offered simultaneously a critique of the problems brought about by modernity (repression; over-sexualization and consequent fatigue; false modesty) but also a solution based firmly on modern and frequently scientific suppositions. Science, that arch-modern approach to the world, was embraced as the means by which to reshape the world. This was a philosophy, then, of the new, not of the old; yet, without fail, analogies to the “primitive” and the “savage” were used to bolster claims of nudism’s healthful properties. The back-to-nature element of nudism made comparisons with societies and eras seen as “before clothing” virtually inevitable. In Die Nacktheit, Ungewitter tells the story of an encounter between an unnamed British governor in Canada and a local First Nations Canadian whom he calls an Indian. It was winter and the St. Lawrence River was frozen over, yet the local man wore only a light blanket and was barefoot. The governor, wearing a fur coat, asked him if he was not cold. And here I shall let Ungewitter finish the story: ‘Why not clothes on face?’ came the response in broken English from this child of the prairie. The governor looked at him in amazement and said, ‘Well, the face doesn’t freeze because from childhood on we are used to it being uncovered.’ ‘Good!’ said the Indian, ‘I all over face,’ and proudly strode off.34

It is a sweet story and I strongly suspect it is apocryphal despite Ungewitter’s claim that it was all over the newspapers. But its “truth” seems to me beside the point compared with its message that from “primitive” societies we might yet learn wisdom. In the early twentieth century and in the back-to-nature movements of which nudism was a part, the myth of the Noble Savage was curiously reborn as an antidote to the vice and artifice of modern mores. Hans Surén (1885–1972), another of the gurus of

40

Health and the body

twentieth-century nudism, articulated the borrowing that underlies this admiration of the “primitive.” In his 1925 book, Der Mensch und die Sonne (Man and Sunlight) – a title strikingly close to that of Saleeby’s book – he notes “we cannot again live the life of the natural savage – that would mean a great retrogression in our development; yet we must once again win for ourselves the health and strength of these peoples of the past.”35 The European vision of the Noble Savage – what Margaret Hodgen called an eighteenth-century “leitmotiv of literary expression”  – had long been typified by the Native American, as indeed in Ungewitter’s moral fable on the banks of the St. Lawrence River.36 Though other and less flattering descriptions of war-mongering and bloodthirsty savagery, of cannibalism and carelessness about death, competed for attention, this was a potent myth tenaciously used as a foil for the perceived ills of overrefined Europe. And in that myth undress was considered normal, even emblematic. In the early twentieth century, ideas of the enduring values of “primitive societies” and the hardy healthiness of “savages” were once again in vogue. These years saw something of a renaissance in the idea of the Noble Savage who was invariably figured – both in the original eighteenth-century frame and in this later period – as scantily or utterly unclad. This portrayal was in many ways the missionary impetus turned on its head: where the devout sons and daughters of the church anxiously tried to clothe their often reluctant charges to move them faster toward salvation, for the nudist salvation was achieved in precisely the opposite way, by freeing the body from the constraints of a misplaced prudish modesty. The primitive, after all, had it right and the simple outdoor life divested of the burden of clothes and the other fripperies of civilization would help regenerate a world grown stale, and help return the over-civilized human to a more “natural” and thus more innocent state. Thus the American critic Brooks Adams (1848–1927), writing in 1895, saw regeneration emerging from an “infusion of barbarian blood,” while Edward Carpenter counseled that “Nature must once more become [man’s] home, as it is the home of the animals and the angels.”37 This imagining of nature had very particular connotations of race, sexuality, and gender. Ungewitter, for example, read homosexuality as a product of over-civilization and over-education, and the journalist Philip Gibbs (1877–1962) deplored what he saw as the emasculation of men in the early twentieth century. In the life of “real” men, he wrote, there was “the call of the wild and the faint, far-off echoes of nature music.”38 It was thus that Hans Surén lauded the movement’s capacity to produce the “sensation of virile primitive manhood,” under attack both from over-civilization and

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41

from increasingly assertive women.39 This evocation of primitivism, though rejecting what radicals found unattractive about the modern world, nonetheless was immersed in the imperial racism of the era. This was the substance of Susan Sontag’s withering critique of Leni Riefenstahl’s late work, The Last of the Nuba, published in 1974.40 Sontag noted what she called Riefenstahl’s “primitivist ideal … untouched by ‘civilization,’ ” and approaching extinction. While there have certainly been many criticisms of Sontag’s essay, the identification she makes between an innocent but doomed primitive peoples and their nakedness abounds on every page of Riefenstahl’s book. For Sontag, Riefenstahl’s photos, though published in the 1970s, represented a fascist reading of the Noble Savage that returns us to the fascination with the primitive that in the early twentieth century was widely regarded as a solution to the problems of modernity. Nudism was, of course, not the only early twentieth-century movement to cast doubt on the benefits of modern civilization, nor indeed to reconsider the “savage” in light of that critique. What, I  wonder, would those late nineteenth-century social purity campaigners have made of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, routinely regarded as the iconic modernist painting (Figure 2.1)? Picasso (1881–1973) completed the work in 1907 and although it was not publicly exhibited until 1916, it was the talk of the art world even before its completion. Les Demoiselles is a huge and dramatic canvas, some 240 centimeters by 253 centimeters in dimension. The subject matter – sexuality – was not new for this artist, nor was the depiction of sex workers so central in this painting. But the work was nonetheless an enormous challenge at the time and on many levels. I will not rehearse here the whole range of ways in which critics, art historians, and historians of modernism more broadly understand the importance of this work, but will focus instead on the ways in which I think it dovetails with my titular problematic about the relationship between nakedness and modernity. Let me just note here, before returning to Les Demoiselles, that I do not intend to collapse the distinction between modernism and modernity, but am interested rather in exploring how, in this frame, they play off one another in productive ways, for modernism, it seems to me, offers a trenchant critique of modernity not wholly unrelated to that articulated by those who espoused nudism. Karl Toepfer has argued that German Nacktkultur “pervasively presented itself as a sign of modernity and an aspect of modernism, rather than as a reaction against both.”41 While I do see a degree of reaction to the perils of modernity, all these manifestations of nakedness nonetheless situate themselves within a paradigm of the modern.

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Figure 2.1.  Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Source: Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Art historians now think it likely that Picasso, that most modernist of painters, was influenced by his visits to the Ethnographic Museum at the Trocadéro in Paris while he was working on the painting, despite his own contradictory statements on this.42 Moreover, ethnographic postcards dating from this period showing naked women represented as African “types,” and found among his papers, have prompted one influential critic to argue that such images directly influenced the painting of Les Demoiselles as well.43 The postcards Picasso collected were the work of a successful and popular French photographer based in Senegal, François-Edmond Fortier (1862–1928).44 Fortier’s studio produced a high volume of African images, the pictures of naked women being among his best sellers (Figure  2.2). Postcards of this ilk were represented as anthropologically accurate (they were not, for the most part) and the status thus afforded them allowed them to be sent through the mail with impunity. Fortier was among many European photographers working in colonial settings who well understood the profits to be made from peddling pictures

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Figure 2.2.  A typical card produced by Fortier. Source: In author’s possession.

of naked women of color as educational and cultural artifacts.45 These postcards, with their “educational” imprimatur, moved smoothly through the system and it is in no sense remarkable that Picasso, living in Paris, would have been aware of, and a consumer of, such items. They were easy to see, to buy, and to send. I want to point to two elements at work in Les Demoiselles. The first and most obvious is that while we are palpably looking at nudes, they are a far cry from the classicized nudes of the nineteenth century against which Picasso is here protesting, in what David Lomas calls an “extreme departure from the classical canon,” and in an expression of what Elizabeth Grosz identifies as

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the urge of modern art “to problematize beauty.”46 Second, while a great deal of the rejection of Western images is contained in the deliberate distortion of the realist tradition, the two figures on the right of the picture are also and importantly figured as non-Western, wearing masks that look African and, as they would have been understood at the time, “primitive.” Picasso was no stranger to “primitivist” art, one of the major new modernist strands in the European art world and, along with André Derain (1880–1954) and other of his contemporaries was, in the early 1900s, exploring African art and incorporating motifs from it into his own work. Derain was experimenting with Fauvism (he would later turn to more conservative representational art), and the appearance of the Fauves at the Salon d’Automne in 1905 is often regarded as the start of modernism in art. The use of colonial, tropical, and exotic settings in art had a lengthy history, of course, and was often coupled with nudity as a definitive sign of the primitive. Engravings and maps in the early modern period often featured non-European peoples, and by the late nineteenth century experimental European art in particular turned toward motifs and themes from non-Western cultures. As artists moved away, on the one hand, from realism and on the other, from beauty, as necessary elements of proper art, they increasingly incorporated forms from cultures considered exotic or primitive and thus un-modern. From Gauguin’s Tahitian settings to Henri Rousseau’s jungles, the world beyond Europe (more often than not peopled by wild – read naked – peoples as well as animals) became the stock-in-trade of the new modernist art. Gauguin famously associated his own childhood with his search for primitive “states of being.”47 Needless to say, the powerful colonial domination of Europe at the time made much of this possible, though Picasso and his associates routinely expressed anti-colonial sentiments. The trope of the savage, then, figured in art, in nudism, and in anti-vice tracts where what was often represented as under threat was the orderliness of white bourgeois society. It is no accident that social purity organizations took up the cause of “white slave” trading that relied heavily on the idea of shady “foreign” elements luring innocent young women into a life of shame. Where nudism looked to a tamed savagery (associated with nakedness) to ward off the evils of civilization, vice movements read savagery as a sexualized threat to white womanhood. It was thus that social purity activists embarked on campaigns to prevent women from entering brothels in the colonies, and borrowed the older trope of white slaving from labor activists to conjure a world in which vulnerable young white women were whisked off to brothels in foreign climes.48 Modernist art, meanwhile, was attracted to savagery for many of the same reasons that anti-vice campaigns

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Figure 2.3.  Henri Matisse, Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra) (1907). Source: Courtesy of The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Cone Collection.

eschewed it and nudists cannibalized it:  for artists looking to challenge mainstream values, an unbridled (and invariably) naked savagery epitomized everything that was not of the West.49 A good deal of this new attention in art to non-European cultures nonetheless retained an interest in that long-standing mainstay of the painting world, the nude, and more often than not, as had been increasingly the case in more conventional art practice, that nude was female. There are, of course, a plethora of male nudes in the world of art but in the works of Picasso, Gauguin, Matisse (1869–1954), and many others, it is the nude female body that is routinely on show, as Kenneth Clark points out in his landmark study of the nude published in 1956.50 Clark sees 1907 as “the starting point of twentieth-century art,” and his argument focuses on two hugely famous and now celebrated canvases depicting the female nude.51 One is Picasso’s Les Demoiselles; the other is Matisse’s Blue Nude, both completed that year (Figure 2.3). Clark was alarmed by both paintings. Matisse, he claims, “sacrificed” his “lady” to “violent transitions and emphatic simplifications,” while he dubs Picasso’s canvas “the triumph of hate.”52 Clark’s reactions may surprise today’s viewers by their intensity (he was writing, after all, more than half a century ago), but they remind us of the context in which these artists were working, and of their self-conscious rejection of what they saw as a

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Figure  2.4.  Richard Ungewitter, Die Nacktheit in entwicklungsgeschichtlicher, gesundheitlicher, moralischer und künstlicher Sicht (1907).

tired, bankrupt, rule-bound world that stifled creativity. In this respect, they shared a good deal with the rather more earnest enthusiasts of nudism in extolling the apparent virtues of the primitive that they too saw as indifferent to, uninterested in, and perhaps ignorant of the strictures and conventions of modern Western life. Many commentators have pointed out that “Worship of the primitive is … endemic in the Western idea of the pastoral,” and pastoral settings were commonly used in art and in photography to render nudes respectable.53 Pudor had linked nudism and the pastoral at an early stage. Nudism allowed for a greater intimacy with nature and was thus mostly an outdoor activity, and Ungewitter’s books on nudism invariably included photographs detailing this pastoral idyll (Figure 2.4).54 Modernism’s backdrops were seldom idyllic, but they did place the nude in a primitive and apparently “natural” setting that contrasted with

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the urban density of the modern world, and that underscored the difference between primitive nature and modern civilization. In a fascinating account, a Russian art critic viewing a collection of the new avant-garde work in 1914, made a telling comparison between the nudes of Gauguin and those of Les Demoiselles. Gauguin, he noted, found an escape from his own “refined and degenerate culture” in “the exotic nature and exotic people” of Tahiti; to move from viewing his work to that of Picasso was to arrive “at the Stone Age,” and to witness “the demonic grimaces of the pent spirits of nature.”55 These paintings, differently articulated, but coupled by their association between nature and nakedness, defined the modernist avant-garde, its rejection of the stifling conventions of the West in favor of a faraway locale, not always or necessarily a paradise but palpably not of the European mainstream. In the early twentieth century, we can thus see an intriguing set of alternatives to the various discontents that surfaced in radically different camps, but which shared a rejection of at least some elements of the Western norm. Certainly nudism was a minority interest confined in large measure to a radical fringe – referred to as “Godless Edens” (see Chapter 3) – and seemingly at its most popular in Protestant industrialized nations, while the proponents and productions of the new avant-garde art were shocking and disconcerting to many. But anti-vice campaigns, too, were the province of an anxious minority; their promoters may have been successfully garnering signatures but active membership was never high. Yet these are not, any of them, trivial movements, though the nudists and the vigilance crowd have frequently been marginalized  – by journalists and politicians at the time, and latterly by historians. I want to read them, alongside the emergence of radical modernist art, as forms of cultural modernity written through the sexed and raced body (frequently represented as a reinvented noble savage), and optimistically envisioning their capacity to remold civilization. Indeed, Edward Chamberlin has asserted that it was the idea of degeneration that “determined the styles of modernism and its subject as well,” a claim well evidenced by many of the artworks and dance performances that garnered attention in these years.56 German nudism – both before and after the Nazi era – has been criticized for what Josie McLaren, writing about depictions of the nude in postwar East Germany, has called a “subtext” of “racist hierarchy.”57 Chad Ross has argued that its pre-1930s character was simultaneously modern and reactionary.58 But nudism was protean in character; there were feminist and socialist nudist strands too, just as within the anti-vice movements there were self-identified feminists, and this diversity was by no means unique to

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Germany. Nudism was a white European phenomenon with transnational reach; it evoked romantic notions of the primitive to shore up a reading of whiteness directly related to the interpretation of decency that bolstered anti-vice organizations for whom the nude human was a dangerous moral abhorrence. While Picasso, Derain, and their circles had rather less interest in upholding a healthful and sanitized vision of the world, they, too, borrowed from existing ideas of primitiveness that fundamentally equated nakedness with the pre-modern. For them, too, that linkage held out the prospect of liberation, albeit of a rather different stripe. The explicitly primitive and racialized reconstitution of the visual contours of nakedness so central to modernist art shared with nudist ideas a set of assumptions about nature and the primitive inherited from modern European colonialism within which the trope of the “naked native” has a lengthy history. Race and colonialism were deeply linked to nakedness, and the challenge for nudists was as much to make white nakedness acceptable, as it was to normalize unclothedness itself. Of the three disparate groups whose efforts I have discussed here, only the artists can realistically be said to have had a long-term effect. Then again, the nude was already an established art form and their disruptions were as much about form and surface as about content. Nudism, however, is today no more than a minority interest and still walks a legal line, in part the result of the success of anti-vice campaigners who have held steady to a definition of nudity as indecency. We live in a world in which nakedness continues to trouble many cultures even as the commodification of the sexed naked body confirms the critique of commerce that catalyzed some of these movements at the end of the nineteenth century.59 The primitive body likewise continues to be represented as unclad, as tirelessly outside the modern which, for all the work of sex radicals, health advocates, and modern artists, has yet to unburden itself in any meaningful way of its metaphorical or indeed its actual clothing. Nakedness, I contend, remains stubbornly a critical problem of and for modernity. Notes 1 Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude:  Sexuality, Morality, and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 3; Alison Smith, “The ‘British Matron’ and the Body Beautiful:  The Nude Debate of 1885,” in After the Pre-Raphaelites:  Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 217–35, 228. 2 Smith, “The ‘British Matron’ ”; see also Philippa Levine, “Naked Truths:  Bodies, Knowledge, and the Erotics of Colonial Power,” Journal of British Studies 52, no. 1 (2013): 5–25, 5–7.

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3 Smith, Victorian Nude, 28. 4 PP. HC. [3205] [3205-I], XXVII. 1, 587, Report of the Commissioners on the Present Position of the Royal Academy in Relation to the Fine Arts, with Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index, and Observations of Members of the Academy, 1863–64, 522. 5 For a discussion of the deprecation of aristocratic behavior in an earlier period, see Julia F. Saville, “Nude Male Alfresco Swimmers:  The Prehistory of a Nineteenth-Century Republican Trope,” Word & Image 25, no. 1 (2009):  56–74. On the class inflections of late nineteenth-century social purity, see Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2003), 47; Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 249–250; Edward J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (Dublin:  Gill and Macmillan; Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1977). 6 See Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast:  English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914 (London: Penguin, 1995). 7 Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, however, makes the point that physical fitness movements and eugenics were not coterminous, since the former were not interested in questions around breeding. See her “Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain,” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 4 (2006): 595–610, 599. 8 For a history of Lebensreform, see especially Bernd Wedemayer-Kolwe, “Der neue Mensch”:  Körperkultur im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2004); Kai Buchholz, Rita Latocha, Hilke Peckmann, and Klaus Wolbert, Die Lebensreform. Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900 (Darmstadt: Häusser, 2001). For Belgian Lebensreform, and the place of nudism within it, see Evert Peeters, “The Performance of Redemption: Asceticism and Liberation in Belgian Lebensreform,” in Beyond Pleasure:  Cultures of Modern Asceticism, ed. Evert Peeters, Leen van Molle, and Kaat Wils (New  York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), 21–41. 9 Karl Eric Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 30. 10 Desmond’s husband, Karl Vanselow (1877–1959), founded the visually opulent nudist journal, Die Schönheit (Beauty) in Berlin in 1903. 11 Isadora Duncan, perhaps the most famous of this generation of women dancers, did perform nude on occasion but is better known for performing barefoot. See Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy, 30. There is a considerable literature on Duncan. 12 Christopher E. Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), esp. ­chapter 6. 13 Chad Ross, Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 11, 173. 14 Karl Toepfer, “One Hundred Years of Nakedness in German Performance,” Drama Review 47, no. 4 (2003): 144–88, 145. 15 John Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 2. 16 Evert Peeters, “Authenticity and Asceticism: Discourse and Performance in Nude Culture and Health Reform in Belgium, 1920–1940,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15, no. 3 (2006): 432–61; Caroline Daley, Leisure and Pleasure: Reshaping

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and Revealing the New Zealand Body, 1900–1960 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003). See, too, David Bell and Ruth Holliday, “Naked as Nature Intended,” Body & Society 6 (2000): 127–40. 17 Richard Ungewitter, Nakedness: In An Historical, Hygienic, Moral and Artistic Light, trans. Tessa Wilson (Riverside: Ultraviolet Press, 2004), 72. 18 Ibid., 39. 19 Erika Hughes, “Art and Illegality on the Weimar Stage:  The Dances of Celly de Rheydt, Anita Berber and Valeska Gert,” Journal of European Studies 39, no. 3 (2009): 320–35, 324. 20 Claudia Johnson, “That Guilty Third Tier:  Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century American Theaters,” American Quarterly 27 (1975): 575–84. 21 Joseph Donohue, ed., “The Empire Theatre of Varieties Licensing Controversy of 1894:  Testimony of Laura Ormiston Chant before the Theatres and Music Halls Committee,” Nineteenth Century Theatre 15, no. 1 (1987):  50–60, 58. Barry J. Faulk, Music Hall & Modernity:  The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture (Athens:  Ohio University Press, 2004) includes a chapter on Chant’s work in the theater world. 22 Lucy Bland, “‘Purifying’ the Public World:  Feminist Vigilantes in Late Victorian England,” Women’s History Review 1, no. 3 (1992): 397–412, 406. 23 Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997), ­chapter 1. 24 For Sandow and male eroticism, see Budd, Sculpture Machine, 75, and Chapter 4 of this volume. 25 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “Building a British Superman,” 599. 26 There is a growing literature on Sandow. See, among others, Caroline Daley, “The Strongman of Eugenics, Eugen Sandow,” Australian Historical Studies 120 (2002): 233–48; David Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 27 Maren Möhring, Marmorleiber:  Körperbilder in der deutschen Nacktkultur (1890–1930) (Cologne:  Böhlau, 2004); Maren Möhring, “Der moderne Apoll,” Werkstatt Geschichte 29 (2001): 27–42. Thanks to Robert Kramm for directing me to this literature. 28 Ettie Rout to Quarter Master General, 4th Army, British Expeditionary Forces, November 13, 1918, Australian War Memorial, Official Papers, First World War, AWM 27 (376/174). 29 Caleb Saleeby, Sunlight and Health (New  York and London:  G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924). 30 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “Building a British Superman,” 601. 31 Paul R. Deslandes, “The Male Body, Beauty and Aesthetics in Modern British Culture,” History Compass 8, no. 10 (2010): 1191–208; Patrick F McDevitt, May the Best Man Win: Sport, Masculinity, and Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, 1880–1935 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 32 Budd, Sculpture Machine, 17; Edward Carpenter, Civilisation:  Its Cause and Cure (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891), 35. 33 Lucy Bland and Lesley A. Hall, “Eugenics in Britain: The View from the Metropole,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 213–27, 217.

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3 4 Ungewitter, Nakedness, 26. 35 Hans Surén, Man and Sunlight (Slough: Sullox Publishing Company, 1927), 150–1. 36 Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 366. 37 Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay (New York: Macmillan, 1895), viii; Carpenter, Civilization, 35. 38 Philip Gibbs, The New Man:  A  Portrait Study of the Latest Type (London:  Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1913), 155. 39 Surén, Man and Sunlight, 104. 40 Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books 22, no. 1 (February 6, 1975). 41 Karl Toepfer, “Nudity and Modernity in German Dance, 1910–30,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 1 (1992), 58–108, 66. 42 Christopher Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 51. 43 Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror (Paris: Flammarion; Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts, 1997); Green, Picasso, 49–51. 44 For a discussion of Fortier’s work, see Philippe David, “La carte postale sénégalaise au service de l’histoire,” Notes Africaines 179 (1983):  41–51; Philippe David, Inventaire général des cartes postales Fortier, 3 volumes (Paris: privately printed, 1986–8); Patricia Hickling, “The Early Photographs of Edmond Fortier: Documenting Postcards from Senegal,” African Research and Documentation 102 (2007): 37–53; Ellen McBreen, “The Pinup and the Primitive: Eros and Africa in the Sculpture of Henri Matisse (1906–1909)” (PhD diss., New York University, 2007); David Prochaska, “Fantasia of the Photothéque: French Postcard Views of Colonial Senegal,” African Arts 24, no. 4 (1991): 40–7 + 98. 45 Christraud M. Geary, “The Black Female Body, the Postcard, and the Archives,” in Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body, ed. Christraud M. Geary and Barbara Thompson (Seattle:  University of Washington Press, 2008), 143–61; Christraud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb, eds., Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998); Rebecca J. DeRoo, “Colonial Collecting: Women and Algerian cartes postales,” Parallax 4, no. 2 (1998): 145–57. 46 David Lomas, “In Another Frame:  Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon and Physical Anthropology,” in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, ed. Christopher Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 104–27, 110; Elizabeth Grosz “Nakedness,” in Encounters with Alphonso Lingis, ed. Alexander E. Hooke and Wolfgang W. Fuchs (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003), 119–32, 127. 47 Frances S. Connelly, The Sleep of Reason:  Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725–1907 (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 16. 48 Donna J. Guy, White Slavery and Mothers Alive and Dead:  The Troubled Meeting of Sex, Gender, Public Health, and Progress in Latin America (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Philippa Levine, “The White Slave Trade and the British Empire,” Crime, Gender and Sexuality in Criminal Prosecutions:  Criminal Justice History 17 (2002): 133–46; Ashwini Tambe, “Hierarchies of Subalternity: Managed Stratification in Bombay’s Brothels, 1914–1930,” in The Limits of British Colonial

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Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region, ed. Ashwini Tambe and Harald Fischer-Tiné (London: Routledge, 2009), 192–207. 49 That their appropriation and analysis marked them as Western should not go unremarked, but is not the central topic under discussion here. 50 Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 356. 51 Ibid., 358. 52 Ibid., 360, 361. 53 Carl Rollyson, “‘Fascinating Fascism’ Revisited:  An Exercise in Biographical Criticism,” Journal of Historical Biography 5 (2009): 1–22, 11; Josie McLellan, “Visual Dangers and Delights: Nude Photography in East Germany,” Past and Present 205, no. 1 (2009): 143–74, 150; Alison Smith, Exposed: The Victorian Nude (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2002), 14. 54 Toepfer, “One Hundred Years of Nakedness,” 147. 55 Nikolay Berdyaev, 1914, quoted in Connelly, The Sleep of Reason, 109. 56 J. Edward Chamberlin, “Images and Degeneration,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 263–89, 285. 57 MacLellan, “Visual Dangers and Delights,” 162; see also Uli Linke, Blood and Nation: The European Aesthetics of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 58 Ross, Naked Germany, 155. 59 In a good many places today, scanty female dress is prohibited. Most recently, in February 2014, Uganda banned clothing that reveals thighs, breasts, and buttocks. The author of that ban, Simon Lokodo, the ethics and integrity minister, is also behind the country’s recent criminalization of pornography. For Western opposition to pornography, see E. Greek and William Thompson, “Antipornography Campaigns: Saving the Family in America and England,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 5, no. 4 (1992): 601–16; Jean-Yves Le Naour, “Un mouvement antipornographique:  la ligue pour le relèvement de la moralité publique (1883–1946),” Histoire, Économie et Société 22, no. 3 (2003): 385–94.

3

“Godless Edens” Surveillance, eroticized anarchy, and “depraved communities” in Britain and the wider world, 1890–1930 Antony Taylor

Ranging from Tolstoyan communes, through quasi-religious sects, to ­artistic and bohemian alternatives to conventional society, the new radical communal settlements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attracted considerable voyeuristic and censorious attention from the state, police, anti-vice activists, and near neighbors. The freakish and unconventional nature of these colonies is reaffirmed in much of the historiography relating to their existence and by the desire of those reformers who came afterward to distance themselves from their apparent excesses. Itinerancy, rootlessness, “sexual deviance,” atheism, and “immorality” remained constant charges against the inhabitants. Multiple issues surrounded the creation of land communes, and their establishment revealed fissures within popular politics that fueled the tensions between upholders of the values of morality, modesty, temperance, and anti-vice activism, and the colonies themselves, which were perceived as detrimental to prevailing social and moral norms. This chapter analyzes a range of secular, religious, socialist, and völkisch communities to establish the communalities in their attitudes, but also in order to chart the fault line that divided inhabitants of the new experimental settlements dedicated to a profound transformation of human society from the organized anti-vice agitations of the later nineteenth century. It explores the issue of schism within the ranks of anti-vice activists and demonstrates the ways in which exponents of utopian models of alternative societies were often relegated to the margins despite their enthusiasm for the reform of human character. Moreover, it locates these errant communities in the context of a backlash that established the commonplace accusations 53

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against radicals, socialists, and left utopians that became increasingly standard in the late nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. Through an examination of popular responses to these settlements, this chapter charts the sensationalist literature that ridiculed, or emphasized, the dangers accompanying any wider acceptance of the unconventional ideas preached at experimental colonies like Whiteway (in England) and at Monte Verità (in Switzerland), which became notorious as hotbeds of vice and alternative living. Such material problematizes the relationship between anti-vice activism as a movement of protest, and the activities of the inhabitants of colonies dedicated to a cleansing of society from the ills of drink, nicotine dependency, and other vices. Hostility to radical land communes and the internationalist and transnational ideas they represented framed a number of the commonplace fears of the later nineteenth century. Across Europe a return-to-the-land movement was fueled by a similar blend of folk nostalgia, rejection of ­unrestrained urbanization, and faith in the redemptive power of human proximity to nature. Formed against the backdrop of a crisis in modernity at the end of the nineteenth century, land communes refracted contemporary fears about a range of anxieties including:  the decrepitude of urban society, the collapse of national character and family values, and the decay of vernacular communal traditions and architecture in the face of the relentless advance of the dispirited urban crowd, and formless, charmless suburban design. Christened Lebensreform (life reform) in Germany, these sentiments drew on notions of the “simple life,” advocating the revival of declining yeoman values to counteract the spread of urban poverty. Home handicrafts, artisanal design traditions, and the use of traditional materials featured strongly in the outlook of these colonies. Often bohemian in conception, most advocated a recuperation of the traditions of spade husbandry, a disavowal of the use of mechanized and steam-driven machinery in agriculture, and a return to the values of stability and continuity represented by a romanticized ideal of peasant life.1 These ideas overlapped with kindred currents of opinion that brought life reform movements into the mainstream at the fin de siècle. For Max Nordau and other prophets of declinist notions, a reliance upon industry and urbanization had bred a spiritual and physical exhaustion in urban populations that contributed to a sense of national and international malaise. Nordau’s 1895 classic study Degeneration charted the spread of concerns about decadence, degeneracy, and racial weakness amongst the intellectual circles of the late nineteenth century.2 The renewal of physical health eroded by

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urban life was important for “life reformers,” coupled with a determination to tackle and root out the neuroses and anxieties bred by city living. Anti-vice activists were central to the project for a restoration of physical vigor. For them the concern to reform urban populations drew on agendas for the modification of human character to free it from the enslaving effects of intoxicants and artificial stimulants of all kinds. As historian Daniel T.  Rogers has pointed out, this was essentially an internationalist program that amalgamated models adopted by progressives in North America, Europe, the Nordic nations, and Great Britain.3 Antidotes to the problems of the late nineteenth-century were thus infused with a strong sense of moral mission, ranging across voluntarist, state, and municipal reform solutions to urban poverty, through debates about conscription and national efficiency, town planning, physical sports and open air education, to eugenicist remedies to problems of unhealthy and physically debased human populations.4 As Eric Hobsbawm has demonstrated, most of these notions were consonant with the new styles favoring space, light, and naturalistic designs adopted by architects and designers of the metropolitan urban art nouveau style that became characteristic of the period.5 Land colonies constituted a renegade fringe of these ideas. While land reform projects were popular in this period, they proved especially enticing for those contemplating a complete break with pre-existing models of civil society through the creation of experimental communities. The use of the term “colony” itself to describe them was problematic, carrying undertones of the imperial civilizing mission. Many of the “new lifers” thought of themselves as pioneers, taking enlightenment to the heathen and creating model societies that would serve as an inspiration to others in a new social imperium. Others thought their ideas capable of realization only in remote and far flung parts of European empires.6 Such reformers advocated a more extreme utopian vision of human perfectibility than that preached by anti-vice organizations that brought many of their key elements into conflict with established norms, and moral purity campaigners. Aspects of alternative land reform colonies that were widely reported on and proved unpalatable to late Victorian sensibilities included: nudism, vegetarianism, irreligion, free love, same-sex unions, dress reform, occultism, feminism, pacifism, paganism, and the practice of alternative medicine, among other myriad forms of militant anti-statism. These notions were also tendencies that manifested themselves in allied labor and socialist organizations in the United States, Britain, and white settler colonies like Australia and New Zealand, where they drew much comment from contemporaries.7

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Cranks, marginals, and marginals in memory The aberrant communal institutions that became a marked feature of the years before and after the turn of the nineteenth century have attracted uneven scholarly attention.8 Outside treatments of religious settlements that emphasize the spiritual and reclusive elements in community building, studies of secular and non-monastic withdrawal from conventional society remain rare.9 While some colonies have found their individual chroniclers, few accounts have sought to place them in context or to establish a broader narrative about their role and significance. Despite this neglect, land communes generated popular debates about communal and unconventional living, and tested prevailing assumptions about the organization of society, community, and its relationship to the state. Surveying their impact in North America, Robert S.  Fogarty has described them as “enclaves of difference” that provided a forcing ground for new ways of social and cooperative living at a time when conventional Victorian pieties were under question.10 The strange and faddish nature of these colonies, noted by many contemporaries, has added to their increasing relegation to the historiographical margins. Most contemporary accounts highlight the eccentricities, morbidly withdrawn character, or monomaniacal tendencies of these communities over their positive contribution to radical and progressive cultures. In the majority of cases the colonists gained a reputation as “cranks,” a derogatory label also applied to other anti-vice activists like Eugen Sandow.11 An exercise in “pure communism with the usual admixture of crankdom” was the verdict of Irish radical Jack White on the anarchist community at Whiteway in Gloucestershire, England.12 This vision of their outsider status was an aspect of community living many of the colonists embraced. Reclaiming the word crank, it was frequently adopted as a badge of honor by colony members to differentiate their lifestyles from the mainstream. One member of the New Australia colony established by Australian and British migrants in Paraguay in 1893 commented: “You think we’re a lot of cranks … Well, of course we are, or we shouldn’t be here. We came to Paraguay to get away from convention, and be as cranky as we please.”13 Even advocates of such schemes were willing to lampoon the nature of the programs they supported, and to mock the outlandish enthusiasms of the rank and file members they attracted. Allen Clarke, a Lancashire radical who solicited support for an ideal colony in Blackpool, ran stories in his newspaper satirizing exactly the same cult enthusiasts whose involvement he solicited. In his dialect story The Simple Life, the protagonist, Tum

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Bibbs, is described as “abeaut the biggest faddist … In his time he’s been on an’ off wi’ Socialism, Spiritualism, Mormonism, th’ Salvation Army, Vegetarianism, Walkin’ Tours, th’ Bare-yeaded Society, the No-Breakfast Lot, an’ the Lord knows what.”14 Frequently such colonists were portrayed as risible amateurs, misunderstanding the farming process, unable to control their livestock, and with “fowls [that] would not lay,” and bees that “refused to swarm.”15 Moreover, the relegation of these communes to the margins was compounded by the desire on the part of progressive reformers and advocates of labor who succeeded them to distance themselves from their excesses. The shift across Europe from parties that advocated “new fellowship” and “new life movements” to those that were grounded in debates about economic issues and sought to represent the interests of organized labor in government led to a rejection of the utopian and heterodox religious practices that had characterized the previous ethicist and socialist groupings of the 1890s and 1900s. For a subsequent generation these colonies were a symptom of arrested development on the left.16 George Orwell’s disdain for the eccentric penumbra of beliefs that surrounded the Independent Labour Party is echoed by Bonar Thompson’s reference from 1934 to the “simple-lifers, fresh-air cranks, banana-biters, nut-eaters, milk-drinkers, male suffragettes, free-lovers, dress reformers (who wore the ugliest kind of clothing), anti-God fanatics – all sorts of intellectual, moral and political fungi” who inhabited the movement before and after World War I.17 In subsequent historiography, those identified too closely with the new social, sexual, and communal ideas of the turn-of-the-century fell from grace, and were written out of later histories of labor traditions.18 In Europe the migration of faddist ideas around diet, dress, and physical health from life reform agitations into the platform of the radical right, made the legacy of utopian and unorthodox ideas even more difficult to disentangle for German liberals and Social Democrats who found this strand of politics resistant to assimilation into an avowedly left tradition.19

Ideal communities and anti-vice activism The late-nineteenth century commune movement occupied an ambiguous position in relation to the growing anti-vice movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The analogous spaces occupied by reformers working toward socialism, for personal salvation, and for the moral reform of society have often been noted by historians working in this area.20 Usually regarding themselves as engaged in anti-vice activity, campaigning

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against the moral pollution and spiritual impoverishment of the outside world, the inhabitants of late nineteenth-century communes were often ambivalent toward orchestrated purity campaigns. Most of the anarchists/ socialists and life reformers attracted into the commune movement had roots in a strong radical tradition of self-improvement, moral restraint, and self-denial from stimulants and alcohol derived from the new social movements of the period. There was a spectrum of such ideas across the British and Continental ethicist socialist parties. Tolstoy, in particular, was a “strident” opponent of smoking, drawing on Max Nordau’s view of the practice as a symptom of urban neurosis and anxiety.21 Other socialists condemned the “worship of Wills” (a tobacco company).22 Abstinence from alcohol, vegetarianism, and opposition to vivisection characterized the outlook of the Broederschap (Brotherhood) colony at Blaricum outside Amsterdam in 1899.23 Such entrenched attitudes were not uncommon amongst anarchists and extreme reformers. The anarchist orator, Guy Aldred, was a young convert to anti-smoking, discovering the issue at school: As a result of some of the boys smoking, and inviting me to do so, I entered into discussions of the rights and wrongs of this habit, its folly or usefulness. Finally I joined the Anti-Nicotine League. My first adventures in propaganda were keen activity on behalf of this body and also as recruiting agent for the Band of Hope and the Total Abstinence Movement.24

Most colonists saw the discarding of clothes, dietary reform, and abstinence from artificial stimulants as part of a broader program to reform human society itself: nudism would normalize nakedness, reducing unrestrained carnal urges; a diet without meat would quell the martial spirit, rendering the population more attuned to international peace proposals and less inclined to favor bloody public executions; and temperance and avoidance of smoking would diminish urban wretchedness and prevent the inherited transmission of congenital ill-health to subsequent blighted generations.25 In Britain, such attitudes were part of a vein of moral puritanism with roots deep in the Cromwellian Commonwealth tradition that resurfaced regularly in radical reform and anti-poverty campaigns throughout the fin de siècle period. In the early twentieth century, Ramsay MacDonald appealed for an infusion of Puritan virtues into the newly emergent labor movement as part of the revelation that “its paths are through stony places because it has the wisdom to see that the life of effort is the life of progress.”26 In the United States, the long history of community-building in Maine and Massachusetts was seen as a return to the Puritan roots and certainties of the founding fathers, lost in the superficialities of Gilded

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Age America. The same parallels were apparent in Tennessee, where the colonists at the Ruskin colony were described as “a curious mingling of 1776 and 1976, of backwoods and millennium,” displaying “the same stuff as the pilgrims had when they landed on the Atlantic coast.”27 For many such reformers, overseas settlements like William Lane’s New Australia in Paraguay, or William Ranstead’s socialist colony in New Zealand, were new or socialist Canaans.28 In Europe such attitudes frequently arose from the Catholic innerworldly ascetic tradition. St. Francis of Assisi was often invoked as a model for some secluded anarchist communities.29 Moreover, the trappings of apostate Catholicism were apparent in some settlements. The Monte Verità community at Ascona in Switzerland was intended as a self-proclaimed monastery for the new hybrid religions at the end of the nineteenth century.30 Tolstoyan groups in particular practiced extreme forms of self-denial, including abstinence from food and a refusal to sleep indoors or to wear shoes or sufficient clothing in lifestyles that were reminiscent of mendicant friars and secluded monastic orders.31 These parallels were apparent to some observers. A British radical, referring to a Dutch anarchist colony on the Zuyder Zee, observed: “They are like monks, who leave the world to save their souls. They should not go away from their fellows, but stay in the world to reform it.”32 For supporters of these alternative colonies, images of pilgrimage and devotion continued the strong association with religious revelation for the enthusiasts of life reform experiments. At Whiteway in Gloucestershire, the comparison was made explicit at Eastertime 1899: “It is quite a feat to get to this colony, and betokens a considerable determination on the part of the pedestrian visitor. Like the kingdom of god, it can be attained only by hard-climbing.”33 As Martin Green has pointed out of Monte Verità, rope sandals, the ancient emblem of the pilgrim, were de rigeur at alternative land communes, and most communities were magnets for visiting radicals or the bohemian avant-garde.34

Hostility to land communes The images of dysfunction surrounding the communes of the later nineteenth century were reinforced by their remote physical locations and distance from urban centers. They inhabited spaces that were marginal, liminal, and on the peripheries of neighboring state systems. Mountains, moors, and wasteland were often sought out as the natural terrain of remote communities. Mountains, in particular, had a long connection with the outcast,

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the penitent, and the exile; but were at the same time threatened frontiers for exploration and mapping.35 The Llano del Rio colony in California was founded in the desert, a traditional haunt of mystics and ascetics.36 Such characteristics were frequently intentional, occasionally they were a necessity, to distance commune dwellers from enemies and critics. During a period when national boundaries and borders were solidifying in the build up to 1914, creating a proliferation of customs posts, border guards, passport identification documents, and external censorship regimes, the existence of land communes posed an apparent threat to the stability of national boundaries. In later years, the German anarchist, Augustin Souchy, recalled “the good old times … we enjoyed liberties now lost. Before 1914, everyone could travel across all of Europe without any documents of identity.”37 Often depicted as undermining the state, or compromising border security, land communes were painted as a serious danger. The Monte Verità Community at Ascona in the Ticino region between Italy and Switzerland provided one such source of moral panic. Located in a porous border area in the Alps, critics depicted it as a center for smuggling activities (particularly saccharine into Munich), as an arsenal for the stockpiling of anarchist bombs, and as a haven for draft-resisters.38 A freebooting, condottieri quality hung around most of these land communes. Martin Green, in his study of alternative culture at Monte Verità, described the generation who built the settlement as “simple life vagabonds,” with links to the German Wandervogel tradition.39 A  marked piratical element was discernible to some visitors. Victor Serge, visiting the anarchist commune at Stockel in Belgium, noted an orator, haranguing the colonists: “a big black devil, with a pirate’s profile.”40 In Britain, The New Order, the journal of the Tolstoyan movement in the 1890s, featured songs and poetry about the freedoms of a privateering lifestyle, and the comradeship of the high seas.41 The unconventional lifestyles of the colonists frequently laid them open to charges of itinerancy and vagrancy. In Britain, the anarchist inhabitants of the Whiteway settlement ceremonially burnt the title deeds to the land they acquired, thereby relegating themselves to the status of squatters.42 Restraining or taming such urges toward antisocial behavior was a concern for some members of land communes. “Some few there were,” wrote an observer of the ailing Kaweah colony in California, “of the indolent and good for nothing class … but it was never supposed that these could constitute a model society without considerable disciplinary training.”43 The outlandish qualities of the inhabitants of land communes made them prey to the attentions of outsiders and opponents. Most colonists were visibly distinct in dress, outlook, and, even, language. This created a gulf with

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neighbors, nearby communities, and local and state officials. The majority of colonies encouraged the adoption of rational dress. A movement that had gathered pace in the 1870s and 1880s and was aligned with female emancipation campaigns in the United States, and organizations like the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union, rational dress adherents encouraged the adoption of loose, non-constrictive underclothes for women, fewer petticoats, and the rejection of corsetry and bodices that compressed women’s bodies into tortured and unnatural shapes.44 As Sheila Rowbotham has pointed out, land communes became havens for such freedoms.45 Ideal clothes for women were regarded as simple in design, unencumbered by trains and excessive decoration, and carried no badges and signs of rank. Men’s clothes were similarly inventive, ranging from tweed jackets, via smocks, knickerbockers and sometimes including capes and, in the anarchist colony at Whiteway, incorporating “a kind of Greek costume” introduced by two young undergraduates.46 No shaving and long hair made the male colonists extremely hirsute in appearance. Salome Hocking in her fictionalized account of her time spent at Whiteway painted a pen portrait of a fellow colonist in which he appears as the incarnation of the noble savage: “Sydney Goodwin, clothed only in knickerbockers and a vest, his long hair blowing about his shoulders as he worked, was bending over a bed in which he was sowing some seeds. With his dark, grave unemotional face, he made me think of Fenimore Cooper’s noble red man or of Longfellow’s Hiawatha.”47 For some colonists, pure nakedness, for instance propagated and lived as Nacktkultur in Germany or embraced by avant-garde artists throughout Europe, was the most rational solution to the complexities of Western urban civilization.48 Drawing on the classical aesthetic tradition, in the German Social Democratic movement nude bathing and sports were often used to reinforce communal solidarities and to celebrate the bodies of workers honed by physical and industrial toil.49 Nudism in the 1890s sought a withdrawal from the mainstream and a retreat into a reclusive and private realm of naked humanity. There was thus a significant overlap with the aims and directions of land communes. Communal solidarities at Llano del Rio and the Fairhope settlement in Alabama were frequently represented by images of nude or semi-nude bathing circles and at Whiteway “one intrepid fellow had been addicted to mowing barley in a state of pure nature.”50 Elsewhere the links between nudism and physical hygiene regimes that advocated sun-baths, earth cures, and hydrotherapy reinforced the connections between the everyday life of the colonists and public displays of nakedness. Self-medication and nonconventional healing methods were common at the colonies.51 This emphasis on the formation of alternative diagnostic and

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nature therapies outside the medical mainstream was in a long tradition in British and European radicalism that drew on the alleged properties of mesmerism as a technique to anesthetize and sedate patients. Such ideas proved entirely consistent with the aims to break down civic, national, and ultimately medical orthodoxy that characterized the settlements’ attitudes toward mainstream society.52 At Monte Verità such treatments encouraged the transformation of the colony into a pioneering sanatorium that sought to redraw the boundaries between science and health culture.53 The strongest criticisms of land communes came from those who regarded them as places of unfettered sexual excess. Allegations of free love, immorality, and sexual impropriety were a frequent resort of opponents of the settlements. Accusations against them included hatred of the family, sexual promiscuity, encouragement of underage sex, birth control, the transmission of venereal diseases, nudism, and the practice of sex rituals that went alongside moon worship, paganism, and occultism. Some of these allegations of sexual libertinage were a recapitulation of long-standing accusations of immorality leveled at American religious communes in particular.54 Most of the settlements featured common law relationships, known as “free unions” or “vegetarian marriages” in Germany.55 For some colonists the practices of anarchism, freethinking and free love were necessary preconditions for the future success of communal living.56 Lacking vows or a formal record of mutual obligations, but stressing equality within relationships, free unions were reported by Nellie Shaw at Whiteway as beneficial partnerships that compared “quite favorably with legal marriage.”57 Even where not completely tolerated, as in the Ruskin colony in Tennessee, ideal communities provided sympathetic environments in which freedom from societal constraints enabled unconventional relationships to flourish.58 Lurid accounts of these practices informed popular fiction, and were widely used by proponents of red scare campaigns against socialists. Critics saw the practice of free love as undermining familial bonds within such communities and corrupting of the young, as detrimental to the establishment of judicial or civil institutions, and, ultimately, as breeding tensions and pressures that contributed to their decay.59 American campaigners against such alternative moralities never doubted that spiritual desolation and moral impoverishment were inevitably the lot of women practicing free love in the 1900s.60 In Europe such views persisted into the 1950s. In Daphne Du Maurier’s short story Monte Verità, the community was represented as a fortified settlement that abducted young girls from neighboring towns for the practice of arcane and gothic rituals.61 In reality, “free unions” often transferred more power to the women in relationships, and resulted

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in loving and fruitful unions without a coercive element.62 For critics this had the unintended effect of elevating the role of women in these communities over that of (or at least equal to) the men, creating a topsy-turvy world of reversed and destabilized gender roles. For many women, however, the ideal communities provided space for experimentation, for the sharing of similar sentiments, and for the opportunity to create a new grammar of sexuality. In them, many women were free for the first time to define an autonomous space for themselves in new and hitherto unexplored ways.63 Women remained significant and enthusiastic exponents of all the land communes. More than mere scribes, they were often memory keepers, fierce partisan defenders of their values and traditions, and historians of their demise.64

Religion, mysticism, and land communes Most of the communities also incubated the new hybrid-religious ideas that proliferated at the end of the nineteenth century and further accentuated their distance from the mainstream. The idea that a more just social system would, in Philip Lockley’s words, “realise the divine purpose for humanity” was a well-established notion within the culture of popular radicalism and was a marked aspect of the outlook of French anarchists in particular.65 These individualized sects are often seen as the outcome of a post-Darwinian crisis in religious faith, and the consequence of an expansion and democratization of worship. A decline in church attendance, doctrinal struggles, and the strident opposition by European liberals toward state churches had by the end of the nineteenth century led to a backlash against the hierarchy and secular power of established faiths.66 What emerged from this context were new individualized religiosities, with non-exclusive memberships, and open congregations that placed an emphasis on ecstatic experience and a direct unmediated communication with higher powers and intelligences. Most stressed the plurality of religious beliefs, and sought to unify and reconcile the common elements from all world religions. They often embraced esoteric practices and advocated alternative anti-rationalistic ideas, frequently involving occultism and contact with the spirit-world, much to the distress of more secular radicals.67 An intense spirituality was apparent at most communities, growing out of an exploration of new non-European faiths allied to an indigenous tradition of philosophical and theological transcendentalism. Some of this transcendent vision was inspired by the work of Richard Wagner, and the emphasis he placed on a “total artwork” that brought together performance, music, literature, and dance. Wagner

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was regularly performed at Monte Verità and his music remained a favorite of British radicals into the interwar period.68 The diffusion of Hindu and Buddhist ideas in particular was very marked in all the communities. Theosophy, which merged elements of both religions (as well as aspects of Islam) with the intention of reviving the decadent West with Eastern lore, was a frequent resort of community members. The cooperator and Tolstoyan Percy Redfern wrote of the appeal of theosophy: “Many socialists in those days were attracted by the ‘divine wisdom.’ It taught universal brotherhood, it was unconventional and its claims for present day occult powers intrigued the materialists.”69 Chinese Taoism, in addition, colored the outlook of the Monte Verità community at Ascona: one of its founders, Gustav Graser, had translated the Tao into German.70 The sentiments such faiths generated were visionary in nature and reliant on the concept of the adept, carefully instructed into the realm of arcane knowledge. In some colonies homegrown gurus emerged that encouraged immersion by the settlers in sect-like religious behavior. Francis Sedlack, the Czech philosopher who was resident at the Whiteway colony in Gloucestershire and sought to explore the idea of the Fourth Dimension in his writings, was a potential sage. In accounts by other colonists he was described as “daily meditating and practicing other Yogi methods, such as following the flow of the blood from the heart all through the body till its return.”71 Edward Carpenter at Millthorpe was a similar figure, who had close links with Hindu revivalist movements in Ceylon.72 These flourishing alternative belief systems reaffirmed the connection between the broader empire, imported ideas, unfamiliar religions, and the proliferation of extra-European models of religious observance that increased suspicion and outside hostility. The centrality of vegetarianism in land colonies flourished as a consequence of the infusion of Hindu beliefs and ideas, while temperance and restraint in matters of sexual morality were a marked element of the theosophical tradition.73 For some outsiders overt displays of non-European religious adherence, and the ritualistic adornments that went with them, suggested that the land colonies harbored colonial separatists and fugitive nationalist leaders. Often the new esoteric faiths refracted back at émigré nationalists a heady mix of Eastern ideas and a sense of the wisdom of subject peoples that were taken up and used by colonial leaders.74 Gandhi gained much of his early knowledge of sacred Hindu texts from the theosophist circles he encountered in London in the 1890s. He visited the anarchist settlement at Whiteway in 1909, and set up two imitative community experiments at the Phoenix settlement and Tolstoy Farm in imperial South Africa that became prototypes for his ashram movement.75

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Moral opposition to land communes These “godless Edens” in Britain and the United States, in particular, were settlements around which many of the fears of anti-vice organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cohered.76 Frequently, the colonists offered highly idiosyncratic answers to the questions raised by life reform agitations. Usually they stood outside the constraints of social control exhibited in more paternalistic company settlements like that at the Pullman town on the outskirts of Chicago.77 Espousing nontraditional approaches to the family and dress reform ideas; they constituted a conspicuous element in remote rural areas where traditional hierarchies of power and social control held sway. While preaching the virtues of community existence, such radical enclaves often encountered opposition from neighbors and those established communities that lived in close proximity to them. Language itself ruptured the relationship between the colonists and their neighbors. Most practiced or encouraged the new ancillary languages that grew up to promote international and global solidarities from the 1890s. Esperanto, learnt by garden village pioneers like Ebenezer Howard to propagate his antiurban vision abroad, was frequently spoken in land communes, driving a wedge between their inhabitants and neighboring communities.78 The large volume of sightseers and tourists that visited these sites further strained their relations with adjoining farms and settlements.79 Colonists at the Ruskin colony in Tennessee were condemned for their lax attitude toward church attendance, and for violating the Sabbath with work, organized games, and fishing. Here there were attempts to invoke antique blasphemy laws against them.80 At the Whiteway colony in Gloucestershire, the local vicar incited a public decency campaign against the settlers over their overt displays of nudity. The colonists’ refusal to register births or deaths, pay tithes, and even to observe Christian burial ritual placed the colonists outside the norms of rural community life.81 Despite their enthusiasm for a return to the land many colonists radiated a disdain for the customs and conventions of rustic life that further complicated these relationships. Other groups found themselves in conflict with local landowners and their gamekeepers or agents. Rustling of cattle and sheep and the theft of vegetables and crops were not uncommon features of the tense relationships between settlers and neighbors.82 In some cases colonists were actively driven from the land by local landowners where there was a failure to renew leases and property rights lapsed. Elsewhere, such as at the anarchist community at Blaricum in the Netherlands, the military

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was called in to defend the colonists from the depredations of the local population. More subtle pressure was applied at the Llano colony outside Los Angeles, when local notables conspired to cut off water supplies to the settlement, forcing it to move on.83 Seen as harboring dangers that undermined the state, compromised borders, and threatened neighboring communities, land communes were usually depicted as carriers of deviant, asocial, and dangerous views and positions. A refusal to pay taxes or to observe planning regulations brought them into conflict with both local and national authorities. Indifference to planning legislation was a recurrent feature of makeshift and ad hoc communities in both pre and post-1914 Britain.84 At the Brotherhood Church colony of Stapleton, near Pontefract, colonists declined on principle to fill in census forms for the 1911 census.85 Frequently they encountered opposition on health grounds. This entrenched the association in the public mind between dirt and deviance in such enclaves. At Purleigh in Essex, an outbreak of smallpox at the Tolstoyan anarchist colony there led the local board of sanitation to close down the living accommodation, in a move that resulted in the dispersal of the colonists and hastened the fragmentation of the community.86 Attracting political militants, draft-dodgers, refugees, and exponents of anti-imperial ideas (Francis Sedlack at the Whiteway colony held all these positions) alternative communities were seen as challenging the state, and creating channels of communication for political and cultural dissidents whose clandestine organizations transcended national boundaries.87 Public meetings and demonstrations at these dissident enclaves were often seen as conductors for dangerous radical creeds that radiated outwards into nearby towns. However remote, they inspired a hostile culture of surveillance and a close supervision that emphasized the negative and immoral aspects of their communal endeavors. In order to counteract the corrupting influence of such settlements, police informers and spies infiltrated communities like Whiteway, reporting back to the authorities on the “promiscuous sexuality” they witnessed.88

Conclusion Many ideal communities saw government agencies and national institutions as characteristic of the constraints they sought to avoid. This tense relationship to modernity caused some to vigorously debate “such points as whether it was lawful to support the state by putting a postage stamp on a letter.”89 Some actively avoided using postal services altogether, others utilized the mail to disseminate handbooks of alternative living and contraceptive advice. The stockpiling of leaflets and printed matter of the

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kind noticed by Victor Serge at Stockel in Belgium, often brought them into conflict with national postal services. The colonies at Llano del Rio in California and the Ruskin colony in Tennessee housed printing presses for the express purpose of publishing such material.90 Internal differences usually doomed the settlements from the outset. In many cases insufficient dedication to community commitments like temperance or to an anti-capitalist spirituality would lead ideal colonies to fracture or to schism.91 Nevertheless, in the United States in particular, the postal service was also an active agent of suppression, invoking the Comstock laws against colonies that sent “obscene” or scurrilous material through the post. In the case of the anarchist Home colony at Tacoma in the Pacific Northwest, this led to the closing down of the colony against the background of the moral panic that surrounded the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz.92 The end of the nineteenth century witnessed a period of prolific community building by radicals, progressives, anarchists, and social reformers. Expressive of the communitarian impulses unleashed by the reform movements of the period, these settlements were dedicated to a total transformation of society and nothing less than the reform of human character itself. Traditionally, the history of these settlements has been disaggregated from the broader history of radicalism and anti-vice activism in Britain, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. This chapter has re-examined the role of such communities in the context of late nineteenth-century popular politics and reevaluated their significance in relation to the changing moral and political concerns of reformers and anti-reformers at the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing together a number of examples of such settlements, from Whiteway in Gloucestershire in the UK, via the Monte Verità community at Ascona in Switzerland, to the Llano del Rio colony outside Los Angeles in California, this chapter demonstrates the contemporary late-Victorian hostility to radical land communes, and considers the vision of sexual impropriety that adhered to them. It has also established the transnational impact of these communities, most of which were organized explicitly around agendas for the renovation of existing societal conventions, both at home and abroad, during a time of rapidly changing values at the fin de siècle. Notes 1 See Alun Howkins, “From Hodge to Lob:  Reconstructing the English Farm Labourer, 1870–1914,” in Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J.F.C. Harrison, ed. Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), 218–35, and for the practice and popular reception of Ruskin’s land reform ideas, H.H. Warner, ed.,

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Preface to Songs of the Spindle and Legends of the Loom (London: N.J. Powell and Co., 1889), 7–8. 2 Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1969 [1895]), 36–8 and Wolfgang Martynkewicz, Das Zeitalter der Erschöpfung: Die Überforderung des Menschen Durch die Moderne (Berlin: Aufbau, 2014). For discussion of Nordau’s ideas in the British radical press see the Labour Leader, September 7, 1895, 3. 3 Daniel T. Rogers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), ­chapter 4. 4 See in particular amongst the extensive literature on this subject, Charlotte Alston, Tolstoy and his Disciples: The History of a Radical International Movement (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), ­chapters  2–3; Brian Ladd, Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), c­ hapter 2; Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1986), 82–90 and 158–64; Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration:  Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), ­chapters  2–3; and John Alexander Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany:  Hiking, Nudism and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford:  University of California Press, 2007), 11–13. There are contemporary examples of all these concerns in The Dawn: A Monthly Journal of Progress, September 1, 1901, 97–8; October 1, 1901, 109; and November 1, 1901, 121–2. 5 Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times:  Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (London: Little Brown, 2014), ­chapter 10. 6 August Engelhardt, an extreme German dietary reformer, for example, established a colony in German New Guinea to propagate his plan for an ideal society whose diet consisted solely of coconuts; see August Engelhardt, A Carefree Future: The New Gospel (New York: Benedict Lust Publications, 1913), ­chapter 1. 7 See Thomas Lineham, Modernism and British Socialism (London: Palgrave, 2012), ­chapter  4; Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 39–42. 8 The literature on Germany and France is the fullest. See Gilbert Merlio, “Die Reformbewegungen zwischen Progressismus und Konservatismus,” in Lebensreform: Die Soziale Dynamik der Politischen Ohnmacht, ed. Marc Cluet and Catherine Repussard (Strasbourg: Francke A. Verlag, 2013), 63–75. 9 See for a survey of the extant literature, Howard P. Segal, Utopias: A Brief History from Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), ­chapter 3, and Dennis Hardy, Utopian England: Community Experiments, 1900–1945 (London: Routledge, 2000), 176–80. 10 Robert S. Fogarty, All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860–1914 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), 1. 11 See Chapter 4 in this volume. 12 J.R. White, Misfit: An Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), 147. “He seems to attract cranks,” was one view of Julius Wayland’s Ruskin colony in Tennessee: see W. Fitzhugh Brundage, A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia, 1894–1901 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 41. 13 Stewart Grahame, Where Socialism Failed:  An Actual Experiment (London:  John Murray, 1912), 218.

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14 Allen Clarke, “The Simple Life,” Teddy Ashton’s Northern Weekly, October 8, 1904, 4. 15 W.C. Hart, Confessions of an Anarchist (London: E.G. Richards, 1906), 77, and the Labour Leader, October 12, 1906, 323. 16 Robin Archer, Why is there No Labour Party in the United States? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 207; Stefan Berger, The British Labour Party and the German Social Democrats 1900–1931 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), c­ hapters 3–4; and Ross McKibbin, Parties and People:  England, 1914–1951 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2010), 140–1. 17 Bonar Thompson, Hyde Park Orator (London: G.P. Putnam, 1934), 163. For Orwell on such ideas, see Robert Colls, George Orwell:  English Rebel (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 64. 18 Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (London: Verso, 2008), 171. 19 Martin Green, Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins: Ascona, 1900–1920 (Brandeis: University Press of New England, 1986), 236–8, and Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany, 4–9. 20 Victor Bailey, “‘In Darkest England and the Way Out’: The Salvation Army, Social Reform and the Labour Movement, 1885–1910,” International Review of Social History 29 (1984): 133–71; Maureen A, Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivism 1890–1920s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 59–67. 21 Diana Maltz, “Living by Design: C.R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft and Two English Tolstoyan Communities, 1897–1907,” Victorian Literature and Culture 39, no 2 (September 2011): 409–26, 414; and Nordau, Degeneration, 41. 22 See the career of the Bristol socialist, Hugh Holmes Gore, in Stephen Yeo, “ ‘A New Life’: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896,” History Workshop Journal 4, no. 1 (1977): 5–56, 45–6. 23 The New Order, November 1, 1899, 171. At the Norton colony outside Sheffield, “all were non-smokers, teetotallers and vegetarians.” See the Sheffield Telegraph, September 30, 1957, 3. 24 Guy Aldred, Dogmas Discarded: An Autobiography of Thought, 1886–1908, 2 vols (Glasgow: The Strickland Press, 1940 [1908]), Vol. 1, 13. 25 For nudism, see Philip Carr-Gomm, A Brief History of Nakedness (London: Reaktion, 2012), 151–9, and Maren Möhring, “The German Nudist Movement and the Normalisation of the Body,” in Normalising Diversity, ed. Peter Becker (San Domenico: EUI Working Paper HEC No. 20003/5), 45–63; for temperance campaigns see Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians:  The Temperance Question in England, 1815–1872 (Keele:  Keele University Press, 1994 [1971]), 34–5 and ­chapter 17; and for vegetarianism, James Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 23 and 96–8. 26 J. Ramsay MacDonald, “A Plea for Puritanism,” The Socialist Review 8 (1912): 423. Also see for puritanism in the early Labour Party, the Labour Leader, June 29, 1906, 93 and Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (London: Verso, 1998), 276–322. 27 Herbert N.  Casson, “Life in Ruskin,” The New Time, November 1, 1898, 220 and The New York Herald, June 27, 1897, 1. For the New England Puritan tradition in

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community-building, see Lewis G. Wilson, “Milford and Hopedale,” New England Magazine 27 (1902): 498–502. 28 Grahame, Where Socialism Failed, 19, and The Clarion, January 6, 1900, 3, and February 3, 1900, 2. 29 Peter Latouche, Anarchy! An Authentic Exposition of the Methods of Anarchists and the Aims of Anarchism (London: Everett and Co. 1908), 135. 30 Mara Folini, Monte Verità: Ascona’s Mountain of Truth (Berne: Society for the Study of Swiss Art, 2000), 8. 31 The Social Democrat 5 (1901): 179. 32 Ibid., 4 (1900): 325. 33 The New Order, June 1, 1899, 86; and for the image of anarchist communes as “a city set on a hill,” The New Order, August 1, 1899, 106. 34 Green, Mountain of Truth, 123, and for visits by radical intellectuals to the Clousden Hill colony near Newcastle, Nigel Todd, Roses and Revolutionaries: The Story of the Clousden Hill Free Communist and Co-operative Colony, 1894–1902 (London: People’s Publications, 1986), 28–9, and to the Ruskin Colony in Tennessee, The Coming Nation, June 12, 1897, 4. 35 Reuben Ellis, Vertical Margins: Mountaineering and the Landscapes of Neoimperialism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 8–16. D.H. Lawrence, on a walking tour of the Swiss Alps in 1912, recalled meeting groups of Italian anarchist artisans exiled and on the move from temporary habitation to temporary habitation:  see D.H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy (London: Heinemann, 1970 [1956]), 137–9. 36 The Gateway to Freedom: Co-operation in Action at the Llano del Rio Colony (Llano, CA: The Llano del Rio Co-operative Company, n.d.), 3–6. 37 Augustin Souchy, Beware! Anarchist! A  Life for Freedom:  The Autobiography of Augustin Souchy (Chicago:  Charles H.  Kerr, 1992 [1977]), 10. See for the impact of customs and border posts, Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalisation of Borders (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2008), ­chapter 1, and Deana Heath, Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ­chapter 4. 38 Green, Mountain of Truth, 165. 39 For the Wandervogel tradition, see Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany, 123–33. 40 Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1945]), 13. 41 The New Order, September 1, 1899, 132. 42 Ibid., 130–1, and the Labour Annual 6 (1900): 115. 43 Land Nationalisation News, March 1, 1892, 43. 44 The Coming Nation, August 24, 1894, 4, and The Co-operative News, October 22, 1898, 1194. 45 Sheila Rowbotham, Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 2011), 39–42. 46 Nellie Shaw, Whiteway: A Colony in the Cotswolds (London: C.W. Daniel, 1935), 111. 47 Salome Hocking, Belinda the Backward: A Romance of Modern Idealism (London: A.C. Fifield, 1905), 68. 48 For further discussion of nakedness see Chapter 2 in this volume. 49 Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany, 15 and 25.

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50 The Gateway to Freedom, 19; The Fairhope Courier, October 15, 1901, 1; and White, Misfit, 146. 51 Nellie Shaw, A Czech Philosopher on the Cotswolds being an Account of the Life and Work of Francis Sedlack (London: C.W. Daniel, 1940), 96. 52 J.F.C. Harrison, “Early Victorian Radicals and the Medical Fringe,” in Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy, 1750–1850, ed. W.F. Bynum and R. Porter (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 198–215. For the use of mesmerism to abate the pain of invasive medical procedures, see the obituary of the former Owenite, E.T. Craig in Land and Labour, January 1, 1895, 6. 53 Green, Mountain of Truth, 121–3 and Folini, Monte Verità, 8–10. 54 William Alfred Hinds, American Communities (Chicago: William H. Kerr, 1902), 226–39. Some American radicals suggested learning from the successful economic practices of groups like the Mormons in Utah, see The Coming Nation, August 11, 1896, 2. 55 For “vegetarian marriages” see Green, Mountain of Truth, 124. 56 Freedom, October 1, 1917, 51. 57 Shaw, Whiteway, 131. One visitor to the anarchist colony at Whiteway, however, detected a generational rebellion by children against parents in free love unions: see W. Byford-Jones, Both Sides of the Severn (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers, 1932), 6. This visitor also recorded an instance of polygamy at the colony (p. 4). 58 Brundage, A Socialist Utopia in the New South, 64–7, Freedom, August 1, 1899, 61, and The Co-operative News, November 19, 1898, 1281. 59 Grahame, Where Socialism Failed, 52–6. 60 David Goldstein and Martha Moore Avery, Socialism:  The Nation of Fatherless Children (Boston: Thomas J. Flynn and Co., 1911), 152–227. 61 Daphne du Maurier, “Monte Verità,” in The Apple Tree:  A  Short Novel and Some Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1952), 9–81. 62 Rowbotham, Dreamers of a New Day, 58–64. 63 Ibid., ­chapter 3. 64 For example, the feminist Ida Hoffman was a founder of the Monte Verità community at Ascona, Nellie Shaw defended the reputation of Whiteway, and the writer Mary Gilmore hoped for a later vindication of the New Australia colony in Paraguay. See Follini, Monte Verità, 5–8, Nellie Shaw, Whiteway, 8–9, and Mary Gilmore, Old Days, Old Ways: A Book of Recollections (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1934), 82–3. 65 Philip Lockley, Visionary Religion and Radicalism in Early Industrial England: From Southcott to Socialism (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013), 241. For French anarchism, see Richard D. Storr, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), ­chapter 10. 66 Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: Theosophy and the Emergence of the Western Guru (London: Secker and Warburg, 1992), 7, and Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 31–50. 67 See “Theosophical Humbug” in Freedom, January 1, 1926, 1, and for debates about spiritualism in American radical circles, Christine Ferguson, Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writings, 1848–1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), c­ hapter 1. The best study of plebeian spiritualism in Britain remains, Logie Barrow, Independent

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Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850–1910 (London: Routledge, 1986), ­chapters 1–3. 68 Green, Mountain of Truth, 123, and for the popularity of Wagner in radical circles, see the Labour Leader, May 22, 1913, 10. 69 Percy Redfern, Journey to Understanding (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1941), 41. For discussion of Buddhism see The New Order, December 1, 1898, 121–3, and of the Koran, Teddy Ashton’s Northern Weekly, December 10, 1904, 4.  For Theosophy, see Mark Bevir, “Theosophy as a Political Movement,” in Gurus and Their Followers:  New Religious Reform Movements in Colonial India, ed. Antony Copley (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 159–205. 70 Green, Mountain of Truth, 65. 71 Shaw, A Czech Philosopher on the Cotswolds, 66. 72 Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter, 149–61. Rowbotham alludes to Carpenter’s “guru-like persona,” 239. 73 Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians, 108; Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, 88–9; and Teddy Ashton’s Northern Weekly, May 14, 1904, 5. 74 See the theosophist connections of many campaigners for Indian self-government described in the entry on “David Pole,” in Dictionary of Labour Biography, 13 vols, ed. Keith Gildart and David Howell (London: Palgrave, 2010), 13: 304–5. 75 For Gandhi, his time spent in theosophical circles in London, and his community experiments, see Kathryn Tidrick, Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 2–41, 69–71, and 95–7; and Alston, Tolstoy and his Disciples, 207–9. For his visit to Whiteway, see James D. Hunt, An American Looks at Gandhi: Essays in Satyagraha, Civil Rights and Peace (New Delhi: Promilla and Co., 2005), 43. 76 The term “godless Eden” was used to describe William Lane’s “New Australia” community in Paraguay in Grahame, Where Socialism Failed, 146. 77 See Jane Eva Baxter and Andrew H. Bullen, “‘The World’s Most Perfect Town’: Negotiating Class, Labour and Heritage in the Pullman Community, Chicago,” in Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes, ed. Laurajane Smith, Paul Shackel, and Gary Campbell (London: Routledge, 2011), 249–65. 78 For the popularity of Esperanto see Freedom, May 1, 1907, 23, and May 1, 1917, 27; the Labour Leader, January 17, 1908, 46; and The Esperantist, November 1, 1903, 1–2. For Ebenezer Howard’s mastery of Esperanto see Joseph Rykwert, The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 164. 79 See, for example, Shaw, Whiteway, 61. 80 Brundage, A Socialist Utopia in the New South, 128. 81 See Reynolds’s Newspaper, August 26, 1900, 1 and September 9, 1900, 1; Shaw, Whiteway, 105; The New Order, June 1, 1899, 6, and Valerie Groves, Laurie Lee: The Well-Loved Stranger (London: Viking, 1999), 25–6. 82 See for such affrays at the Whiteway colony in Gloucestershire, Shaw, Whiteway, 118, Latouche, Anarchy!, 136, and White, Misfit, 146. 83 The Norton colony outside Sheffield closed when the local landowner objected to political meetings at the site; see the Sheffield Telegraph, September 30, 1957, 3. For attacks on the Blaricum colony, see Lucien Descaves, “La Clarière de Vaux,” Le Journal, June 7, 1903. Cutting in the Jules Prudhommeaux Papers, 108, International Institute for the Study of Social History, Amsterdam, and for the dissolution of

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the Llano community, Aldous Huxley, Adonis and the Alphabet and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956), 100, and The Llano Colonist, July 4, 1925, 8–9 and July 18, 1925, 7. 84 See Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward, Arcadia for All:  The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (London: Mansell, 1984), 4. 85 A.G. Higgins, A History of the Brotherhood Church (Stapleton:  Brotherhood Church, 1982), 24. Anti-census activism was a feature of the direct action politics of the period, notably amongst the suffragettes: see Jill Liddington, Vanishing for the Vote: Suffrage, Citizenship and the Battle for the Census (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). 86 Higgins, A History of the Brotherhood Church, 22, and Redfern, Journey to Understanding, 94. 87 For the popular fears that often surrounded anarchist refugees resident in such colonies, see Constance Bantman, The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), c­ hapter 2, and Pietro Di Paola, The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880–1917) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), ­chapter 5. 88 Home Office papers (HO/144/6633), “Disturbances and Aliens Committee,” May 22, 1926, National Archives, Public Records Office, Kew, United Kingdom. 89 White, Misfit, 146. For a recent study of the significance of postal services for the creation of the modern state, see Patrick Joyce, The State of Freedom:  A  Social History of the State since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ­chapters 2–3. 90 Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 12–13, The Gateway to Freedom, 20, The Coming Nation, July 16, 1896, 4, and Jason D. Martinek, Socialism and Print Culture in America, 1897–1920 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 88–9. 91 Some of the earliest schisms at the New Australia colony in Paraguay were in relation to the consumption of alcohol, see Grahame, Where Socialism Failed, 96–97 and the Labour Annual 2 (1897): 104. For a fuller treatment of the New Australia colony, see Antony Taylor, “‘We Dream our Dream Still’: Ruralism, Empire and the Debate about New Australia in Britain,” Labour History Review 77 (2012): 163–87. In the United States the Workingmen’s Co-operative colony in Kansas, the Equality colony in Washington State and the Ruskin colony in Tennessee, all ­ruptured after arguments about insufficient dedication to the principles of socialism: see Gary R. Entz, Llewellyn Castle: A Worker’s Cooperative on the Great Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), ­chapters 3–5, G.E. Pelton, “Equality’s Struggle for an Existence,” Industrial Freedom, May 22, 1899, 1–2, and Ernest S. Wooster, Communities of the Past and the Present (New Llano, LA: Llano Colonist, 1924), 44–5. 92 See Sidney Fine, “Anarchism and the Assassination of McKinley,” The American Historical Review 60 (1955): 777–99.

4

Physical culture as “natural healing” Eugen Sandow’s campaign against the vices of civilization c. 1890–1920 Carey A. Watt

Between May 1904 and September 1905, the renowned Anglo-German physical culturist and strongman Eugen Sandow undertook a “world tour” of Africa and Asia, with performances in cities such as Johannesburg, Calcutta, and Hong Kong. At each new stop his handlers arranged interviews with local newspapers, and reporters would usually meet Sandow in the hotel bar. He would be found conspicuously enjoying a scotch or a cigar or, indeed, both. On one such occasion in June 1904, Sandow told the writer from The Transvaal Leader, “I am no teetotal crank (and in proof thereof he ordered sodas and whiskies). I do not believe in dieting.”1 A year later, in China near the end of his tour, Sandow was still using the same routine and trotting out roughly the same lines. In a story published in The Hongkong Telegraph, for example, the reporter who had interviewed Sandow relayed his message to readers as follows:  “The grand principle about Sandow’s teaching is that within certain limits you can please yourself what you do. Eat, drink and be merry, if you please … [There is] no necessity to shun the limpid ale, or the fascinating cigarette … Just be natural, and keep the dumb-bells polished.”2

Life reform and the dangers of being labeled a “crank” It seems that Sandow used these interviews as opportunities to send the ­public a strong and clear message indicating that he was not a “crank,” I have been gathering material on Sandow for many years, especially regarding his 1904–5 Afro-Asian “world tour” and his visit to – and fascinating legacy in – India, but I would like to thank the Office of Research Services (ORS) at St. Thomas University for three General Research Grants (2007, 2009, and 2011), which have helped me greatly. The first trip was to India, while the other two were to the United Kingdom.

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“faddist,” or teetotaller. He was not an eccentric promoting self-denial, asceticism, and abstinence from all of life’s carnal pleasures, including meat, alcohol, and possibly even sex. As Antony Taylor’s chapter in this volume has highlighted, many health and social reformers at the turn of the twentieth century were seen as annoying and possibly disruptive deviants, especially if they lived in alternative communities or “colonies” away from urban centers of modern “civilization.”3 Taylor quotes George Orwell’s disapproval of vegetarians, sandal-wearers, nudists, and other “quacks,” but the American writer and world traveler Mark Twain (1835–1910) also made some caustic comments about health reformers. Twain described this kind of “crank” as the man “who eats what he doesn’t want, drinks what he doesn’t like, and does what he’d druther [sic] not, all while smugly announcing himself to be energetic, joyful and certain of long life, and exhorting his errant neighbour to reform.”4 Sandow did not want to be seen as an eccentric on the margins of society, even though he did promote health reform, racial improvement and eugenics through the “Sandow System” of physical culture. In fact, Sandow was generally aligned with the life reform movement that was centered in Western Europe (including Britain) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though it also had offshoots in the United States and around the world, including Tolstoy’s Russian and international ­“colonies,” and Gandhi’s experimental settlements and ashrams in southern Africa and India.5 Life reformers were critical of the deleterious physical, mental, and spiritual effects of a “diseased” modern urban and industrial society, though the “movement” was a loosely organized network rather than a disciplined and coherent group. Its adherents embraced a wide range of ideas and practices that were sometimes in conflict, but they tended to support utopian socialism, pacifism, a “new asceticism” (including abstention from meat eating and alcohol), and alternative or esoteric religious initiatives such as Theosophy, which were sometimes influenced by Eastern religions. In terms of promoting healthier minds and bodies, they advocated “natural therapies” and the healing power of nature (including the restorative effects of fresh air and sunlight), vegetarianism and other dietary or therapeutic initiatives, as well as clothing or dress reform (such as wearing looser garments, sandals, or even going naked, and campaigns against corsets for women).6 Sandow knew the risks of being labeled a “crank” and he deliberately eschewed the extremes of the life reform movement. His awareness of the “crank” problem was manifested in Strength and How to Obtain It (1897) in a chapter entitled “The Magic Cold Bath.” He maintained that taking

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a cold bath after exercising was excellent for people in good health, but added: “I am sometimes accused of being a bit of a faddist about the use of the cold bath … But the exhilarating and health-giving effects really justify the use of the adjective.”7 Likewise, vegetarian, physical culturist, and Sandow contemporary Eustace Miles warned life reformers to avoid excessive eccentricity in appearance or behavior in order to avoid being labeled a “crank”:  “The reformer who is almost exactly like other people, except that he is rather healthier, has a great deal more influence among the best people than the reformer who makes a point of being as unlike them as possible.”8 In a column offering advice to middle-aged men in the last issue of Sandow’s Magazine, in July 1907, Sandow made it clear that his natural system of physical culture did not demand “obedience to a code of prison regulations” and added that men were “not asked to live like an anchorite.”9 Sandow was certainly keen to maximize his influence, both for the benefit of a healthier humanity and for his own pocketbook. Born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller in Königsberg, East Prussia, in 1867, Sandow became serious about physical culture and health while in London during the 1890s, after a successful run as a strongman in music halls, and by 1905 he was at the peak of his fame and notoriety as “the world’s strongest and most beautiful man.” In 1899 he happily observed that many men and women who initially denounced him as a charlatan were copying his system of physical culture,10 and in late 1904 he could rightly claim that he was the “high priest” of a burgeoning worldwide physical culture movement combining gymnastics, calisthenics, and light weight-lifting along with breathing exercises and dietary advice. The Sandow System of physical culture emphasized the holistic, systematic, and scientific development of the body to achieve health and strength, but also grace, beauty, and suppleness – whether for men, women, or children. Moreover, his workout was to be done individually, and would ideally use one or more of his exercise products.11 At times, Sandow pitched the benefits of his exercise and health system in nationalist terms (for strengthening England or Britain), at others for the strengthening of the British Empire, and sometimes for the improvement of all humanity regardless of race or creed. However, he was a fitness entrepreneur, too, and he was serious about it.12 He wanted to have the biggest possible market for his exercise and health products, which included books, magazines, food, balms, dumb bells, and various other pieces of exercise equipment. In fact, Sandow built a global commercial empire in the early twentieth century, aided by new means of transportation, communication, and the rise of photography in the era of “high globalization” and the “great acceleration.”13 By 1911 advertisements

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placed in British newspapers such as the Daily Mirror showed his products being delivered to all parts and peoples of the world.14 He knew that being labeled a “crank” would only diminish his appeal and hurt his business interests as well as his aspirations to rise in the British social hierarchy.

“No teetotal crank”: Sandow and the temperance movement While the extremes of life reformers were one hazard to avoid, Sandow also wanted to keep his distance from the temperance movement. The big vice for temperance activists was, of course, drinking alcoholic beverages, which had become more plentiful and arguably more dangerous with the arrival of more efficient distillation processes and global distribution networks in the nineteenth century. While Sandow’s star rose globally in the late 1800s the temperance movement also went transnational, as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU, formed in 1874) created the World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1884 (WWCTU), with numerous chapters outside of Europe and North America – including in formal or informal colonies such as India or Chinese port cities – by 1895. European settlers who were not formally members of the WCTU or other temperance organizations also became sensitive to temperance issues, out of concerns that consumption of imported alcohol would harm local “native” culture.15 As noted above, Sandow underlined that he was no “teetotal crank” when speaking with The Transvaal Leader in South Africa in the summer of 1904. He was not in favor of total abstinence from alcoholic drinks despite his goal of improving health through physical culture, and his links to life reform. However, Sandow’s Magazine, which ran from 1898 to 1907 and featured Sandow as editor, occasionally published articles touting the benefits of vegetarianism or criticizing the consumption of alcohol and other addictive substances such as tea and coffee.16 The strongman’s watchword was “moderation” rather than abstinence, especially during the height of his career in the late 1890s and 1900s.17 He made a point of drinking whisky with reporters and let it be known that he drank wine and lager beer (“limpid ale”). He also smoked up to six small cigars per day,18 his image was used in advertisements for cigars and safety matches,19 and his residential Sandow School of Physical Culture on Tottenham Court Road in London featured a “smoke room.”20 In terms of eating, he enjoyed meat, including big steaks on occasion, and proclaimed that he had “no special diet.”21 Nonetheless, on this subject he continued to

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counsel his followers to avoid excess, and he personally kept away from big lunches and dinners, preferring more frequent small meals.22 Furthermore, he was keen to report that while touring the United States in the early 1890s he tried American cocktails (Manhattans, Martinis, and Oyster cocktails) and found them “exceedingly nice,” though for a “moderate drinker” like himself the New  York cocktail crowd seemed to like its drinks a little too much. Even gambling was within bounds, and he sampled gambling dens at train stations in the American West: “Gambling has never had any attraction for me personally, but ‘In Rome one does as Rome does’; and so in America.”23 Moreover, after being cheated out of $300 at the first stop Sandow turned the tables at the next one and taught the tricksters a lesson. In other words, a little vice was alright and a morally upstanding and healthy individual like Sandow could furnish a positive example that could dissuade some people from going too far and sliding into debauchery or – as in the case of gambling – he might even deter immorality and vice (and perhaps even criminal activity). In 1904 Sandow acknowledged that the man “who means to make his body as nearly perfect as possible must perforce cultivate habits of self-control and of temperance,” but he then went on to play with the semantics of temperance. He affirmed that “real temperance” did not mean rigidly abstaining from all the “pleasant vices” that were “conducive to happiness.” It only meant that one must not overstep “the boundary line that leads to misery.”24 This was indeed a moderate position that saved Sandow from being categorized as an over-zealous and austere “crank,” and it must have encouraged a great many sighs of relief among his followers and would-be followers. Men – and European men in Britain, the continent, the Americas or overseas in colonial postings or settlements were Sandow’s biggest constituency – did not need to give up smoking, drinking, or meat to obtain greater health, strength, and sexual appeal through the Sandow System. This also served Sandow’s commercial interests rather well.

Naturalness as virtue The real targets of Sandow’s campaign against vice were patent medicines (tonics) and pharmaceutical medicines or “drugs,” and, even more fundamentally, the modern industrial and urban civilization that created a real or perceived need for them. The strongman’s condemnation of a “diseased” modern European civilization underlined his links to life reformers who denounced the effects of industrialization and urbanization on citizens’

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minds, bodies, and spirits. For example, in 1889 Edward Carpenter, who was a contributor to Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture, published his influential essay Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure.25 The book’s first page posited that civilization was a “kind of disease” affecting Britain and many other nations. One key aspect of Carpenter’s critique was that modern humankind in the late nineteenth century had begun to forsake “hardy nature-life” and, indeed, any connection to “Nature” itself: He who had been the free child of Nature denies his sonship; he disowns the very breasts that suckled him. He deliberately turns his back upon the light of the sun, and hides himself away in boxes with breathing holes (which he calls houses), living ever more and more in darkness and asphyxia, and only coming forth perhaps once a day to blink at the bright god, or to run back again at the first breath of the free wind for fear of catching cold! He muffles himself in the cast-off furs of the beasts, every century swathing himself in more and more layers, more and more fearfully and wonderfully fashioned, till he ceases to be recognisable as the Man that was once the crown of the animals, and presents a more ludicrous spectacle than the monkey that sits on his own barrel organ. He ceases to a great extent to use his muscles, his feet become partially degenerate, his teeth wholly, his digestion so enervated that he has to cook his food and make pulps of all his victuals, and his whole system so obviously on the decline that at last in the end of time a Kay Robinson arises and prophesies as aforesaid, that he will before long become wholly toothless, bald and toeless.26

As noted above, the interviewer from The Hongkong Telegraph in July 1905 summarized Sandow’s teaching with the phrase “just be natural, and keep the dumb-bells polished,” and being “natural” was a major part of the Sandow System of physical culture. As early as 1894, in his first book entitled Sandow on Physical Training: A Study in the Perfect Type of Human Form, Sandow valorized nature and naturalness as inherently good and virtuous. The book recounted how in 1893, during one of Sandow’s tours of the United States, New  York City’s World magazine arranged for Dr. Dudley Sargent, a medical expert and Director of Gymnastics at Harvard University, to examine “the world’s strongest man.” Sargent was tremendously impressed and surprised by Sandow’s strength, form, and grace, and declared him to be “a fine example of what nature intended man to be,” and the book contained many other references to the virtues of being natural and Sandow’s own naturalness.27 The nature theme remained constant during the 1890s, and 1897’s Strength and How to Obtain It contained testimonials from men and women like John Peters, who thanked Sandow for making him one of “nature’s men.”28 In fact, within the first few pages of Strength, Sandow said that the man who neglected his body was

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guilty of the worst sin and “he sins against Nature.”29 The tendency to view “bodily neglect” or failure to develop one’s body as a sin was later echoed by the American physical culturist Bernarr Macfadden, who, incidentally, was inspired to take up physical culture after seeing Sandow at the Chicago World’s Fair (Columbian Exposition) in 1893. Macfadden emblazoned the motto “weakness is a crime” on the masthead of his Physical Culture magazine in the 1900s.30 By 1905, Sandow’s references to nature became more systematic and he started to use new catchphrases such as natural healing, natural treatment, and curative physical culture to describe and market the Sandow System and its related exercise and health products. This coincided with his return to London in mid-September 1905, following his eighteen-month Afro-Asian world tour. There was considerable interest in the press about Sandow’s ostensible success in curing a wealthy Indian merchant – and later Sandow patron – named Dhanjiboy Bomanji of elephantiasis. Sandow told London’s Daily Mirror that Bomanji, “who had visited England in search of relief, and had been operated upon without result, paid me £10,000 to cure him. It meant a stay of six months in Bombay, but the cure was perfect.”31 Two weeks later, in early October 1905, Sandow stated that the press had given “rather undue prominence to the rather exceptional case of one of my Indian patients, whose ailments were thought to be incurable.” He then went on to reveal his plans to establish a new curative institute in London and express his enthusiasm for “the great subject of Natural Healing, because by actual experience I now more than ever appreciate its great possibilities.”32 Three months hence, in January 1906, an article on Sandow’s Natural Treatment in London’s Daily Mirror featured a photograph of a pensive, well-dressed, and professional-looking Sandow captioned “Mr. Eugen Sandow, the great apostle of Natural Healing.”33 Sandow did not explicitly define what he meant by his use of the word natural, but it is clear that he valued fresh air, sunlight, and, above all, the natural movement of the body to produce health and strength. Another piece in the Daily Mirror in January 1906 – apparently part article and part advertisement  – stated that the Sandow Treatment used “Natural stimulants” and curative natural body movements.34 From 1905 onward there were more frequent references to “curative physical culture,”35 and by the time that Sandow’s last two books were published in 1919, use of this latter phrase had become commonplace. What is more, his various Institutes of Physical Culture, established in the late 1890s and 1900s, morphed into the Sandow Curative Institute on St. James’s Street in London.36

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“A craving for drugs”: patent medicines and pharmaceutical drugs as vices Of course, Sandow was not the only physical culturist or life reformer in the early twentieth century to promote natural healing and criticize the use of tonics and drugs produced by industrial methods. In his 1907 book on physical culture, Eustace Miles declared: “There never has been such a craze as there is to-day for what are ‘Natural Systems’ of healing. The bias now is against drugs and operations; it is against stimulants and narcotics; it is for cheap and simple remedies and preventatives.”37 Miles also mentioned the dishonesty and misrepresentation in many advertisements for natural healing, and he could have commented on the irony of using modern technological advances to pursue natural therapies. Sandow, for example, purveyed mass-produced exercisers and dumb bells using various mechanical pulleys and springs while other products, such as Dr. Sanden’s Electric Belt, claimed to cure “weak men” by restoring the electrical sparks of nature’s vitality. In Germany, the land of Sandow’s birth, at the turn of the twentieth century the life reform movement was very strong and there were many influential reformers, health entrepreneurs, and natural therapists, such as Louis Kuhne, Wilhelm Siegert, and Franz Schönenberger. Siegert and Schönenberger edited the journal Der Naturarzt (Nature’s Physician) from 1907, while Kuhne published health advice books such as the hugely successful The New Healing Science and established an International Establishment for the Healing Art Without Drugs and Surgery in Leipzig.38 In the United States, physical culturist and health reformer Bernarr Macfadden embraced naturalness and nudity and established a “depraved” Physical Culture City in New Jersey. He attacked patent medicines and battled the American Medical Association for several decades. His objective was nothing less than “the physical emancipation of the human race” and he claimed that he could prevent or heal illness and disease through “rational, natural, unfailing methods.”39 However, Macfadden was also connected to a long line of American food and health reformers such as Sylvester Graham (1794–1851) and J.H. Kellogg (1852–1943) – of Graham crackers and corn flakes fame, respectively – thus taking health reform back to the early nineteenth century. Graham was a vegetarian and temperance activist from the 1830s, and he helped popularize the phrase “nature’s way,” which later inspired Macfadden to preach that “the natural way is the only way.”40 Moreover, as Joseph Alter has pointed out, natural therapy and nature cures in Europe date back to

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the early 1800s, and possibly much earlier.41 Alter has also documented the fascinating connections between naturopathy in Europe and the blending of nature cure theories and practices with Ayurveda and yoga in India during the late colonial era, including the considerable influence that Kuhne and other reformers had on Gandhi.42 To Sandow, nature and naturalness were set in opposition to modern civilization and the “latter-day ailments” it created.43 In a January 1906 article Sandow echoed the arguments of Edward Carpenter when he wrote that “We have deserted Mother Nature, and she is grimly punishing her deserters.” He then went on to state that “The so-called comforts of modern life are the very causes of these discomforts. ‘Comforts’ are opiates. Over-eating, over-drinking, lack of exercise and fresh air lessen the virility of the human, weakening the circulation of the blood and of the various other vital functions.”44 He criticized modern British civilization by stating that if a prehistoric Briton returned to Britain in 1906 the “ancient troglodyte” would be startled to find “sickness and misery everywhere in the midst of opulence and luxury.” Everywhere he would find weak people with inexpressive and haggard faces, all wrapped up in excessive clothing. He would learn of indigestion, insomnia, nervous weakness, and “all the rest of these strange ailments, the names of which assail the eye everywhere.” Then there would be “the thousands of drug shops, with their funny red-and-green lamps illumining the windows. And the doctors! Why, every other man must surely belong to the profession of medicine! And the fearful and wonderful announcements everywhere announcing the sure and infallible remedies for all sorts of curious illnesses.”45 Drugs – whether pharmaceutical medications prescribed by doctors or patent medicines and tonics advertised in cheap newspapers and sold by quacks and charlatans – were artificial stimulants that often failed to heal, or actually aggravated ailments and illnesses. Sandow’s natural healing, using the “skillfully and scientifically regulated and directed Natural body movement” of physical culture, on the other hand, was “the greatest of all Natural stimulants … No matter if medicines and drugs have failed in your case, as they have in thousands of others. There is an easy Natural remedy for you in my Treatment.”46 Sandow’s indictment of modern British – and, by extension, European – civilization was quite harsh, and it was not mere marketing hyperbole. His promotion of natural body movement to facilitate natural healing came from his sense that urban and industrial societies had become dangerously sedentary, which led to physical decline and increased illness. In Body Building, Or Man in the Making (1905) he stated that the first of his four groups of exercises focused on the abdomen to combat conditions

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such as obesity, constipation, liver and kidney complaints, indigestion “and such-like weaknesses, resulting very generally from a sedentary life or occupation.”47 Significantly, his last major book was entitled Life Is Movement (1919) and it featured even stronger warnings and denunciations of the sedentary tendencies of modern civilization. He explained how civilization’s “antagonism” to “muscular movement” had “wrought unspeakable harm,” and that “faulty educational methods” that neglected the body “helped to carry on the evil work that civilization began.”48 Elsewhere in the book he outlined how the advance of civilization and education led to man’s body becoming weaker, losing primitive muscular strength. “Since man became a clothes-wearing animal his body has been, like Topsy’s origin, ‘wropt in mystery.’ Civilisation and education with their ever-increasing lack of all-round physical movement, have at last sapped and undermined his physique to such a degree that to-day his clothes are often only a cloak to cover a multitude of physical sins.”49 The sedentariness of civilization was therefore perceived as a modern sin and vice that led to bodily neglect, weaker bodies, and, ultimately, national or racial decline. Furthermore, in keeping with the adage mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body), the deleterious physical effects of civilization also had mental repercussions. One of the new afflictions was neurasthenia or “nerve weakness,” which some contemporaries linked to the stresses of modern urban life and “the struggle for survival.”50 This Darwinian language was congruent with early twentieth-century concerns about racial decline, especially in the wake of Britain’s unexpected difficulties in the 1899–1902 Anglo-Boer War in southern Africa, including the terrible physical health of many would-be recruits or volunteers.51 Sandow and many other physical culturists and reformers were active in debates about eugenics and national efficiency,52 and the strongman was invited to address a Scottish commission on physical deterioration in 1903.53 He wrote at length about these issues in Body Building, Or Man in the Making, but was careful to point out that he was not an extreme eugenicist who favored “killing the unfit.”54 Instead, he proposed to turn “the unfit” into “the fit” by means of human sciences such as physical culture.55 By the time he published Life Is Movement in 1919 he spoke of a “Higher Eugenics that will lead us inevitably to a healthier, more vigorous and more beautiful humanity, help us to breed better men and women without the necessity of statutory measures that insult human intelligence and infringe the liberty of the individual.”56 Michael Hau has observed that the complaint of neurasthenia was a staple of life reform literature,57 and Sandow made numerous references and

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commentaries on various forms of nervous “weakness” or “exhaustion” in his publications and interviews, though he specifically addressed the affliction named “neurasthenia” too. By the time he published Life Is Movement and The Power of Evidence in 1919 he had prepared a full-page table entitled “The Disease with 150 Symptoms,” and an advertisement from 1925 went further, calling it “The 20th-Century Disease With 150 Painful Symptoms.”58 In Life Is Movement there was an entire chapter devoted to “Neurasthenia – A New Conception,” in which Sandow said that “it is a morbid condition rather than disease, although it is a condition most favorable to other diseases.”59 He also said it attacked “brain workers,” people of “artistic temperament,” those in “the higher professions” as well as “sedentary workers” and individuals in “the more responsible commercial positions.”60 Sandow’s neurasthenia table listed about one hundred of the most distinctive symptoms in three columns, including “fear in many forms,” “pain over eyebrows,” “nervous irritability,” “loss of self-confidence,” “lack of vigour,” a euphemism for impotence, and “craving for drugs or stimulant[s]‌.”61 The reference to a “craving for drugs” is noteworthy because Sandow promised to cure sufferers through natural healing without medicines or drugs, by means of the scientific and rational movements of his system of physical culture. For him, drugs were another modern vice, whether in the form of prescribed medicines or quack remedies. It is significant that Sandow chose to campaign so vehemently against these new vices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rather than alcoholic drinks, smoking, or other common vices. Why were drugs so bad? At the most basic level, drugs and medicines were not natural. Moreover, Sandow believed that they failed to address what he called the root causes of neurasthenia and other modern ailments, and they allowed the afflicted to carry on with their unhealthy sedentary lives. This in turn exacerbated ongoing racial decline – not just for Britons, but for all of humanity. Sandow’s campaign against drugs began in earnest at about the same time that he began to reframe physical culture as “natural healing.” During his 1904–5 Afro-Asian tour he told newspaper reporters, “activity of the natural kind – that is, not forced by drugs – is the essence of the Sandow system,” adding that “drugs may be efficacious in some instances as a temporary stimulant,” but “as medical men themselves admit” they could not cure permanently.62 Shortly after his return to London, Sandow’s Magazine published an article arguing that Britons found it too easy and tempting “to run to a nearby-by drugstore when violations of nature’s law exact their penalty of suffering,” but that taking “nostrums” did not address underlying problems. Medicines only provided temporary

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relief, and: “The drug slaves forge their own fetters of slavery to drugs. Thus, temporary derangements of body and mind become chronic and the sufferer is a slave to TWO hard masters  – disease and drugs.” He also provided statistics for the previous twelve months, showing that £331,439 was spent on stamp duties for patent medicines  – on more than 40 million stamps, or as, Sandow pointed out, “one to every man, woman and child in Great Britain.”63 Between 1905 and 1907 Sandow also produced a number of stories and advertisements titled “Striking Letter Confessions – From Victims of the Medicine Habit.”64 They contained excerpts from letters purportedly sent to Sandow from men such as “A.M.  of Stoke Newington [greater London],” who wrote:  “My body is like a walking drug store; I am heartsick of them (patent medicines),” while another anonymous correspondent recounted, “I was a great drug-taker until I read your articles, but have now given them up, and have found your drugless treatment efficacious.”65 Sales of patent medicines were strong throughout the late nineteenth century and peaked about 1900, and they had a global market. Advertisements for tonics appeared in newspapers around the world, including southern Africa, India, and China. While many were directed at European men overseas a great deal was aimed at local populations, including those in Indian-run publications such as Surendranath Banerjea’s The Bengalee in Calcutta. They were an important source of revenue for most publications, and even in Sandow’s Magazine one would regularly find notices for products such as Coleman’s Nerve Pills (for brain-fatigue, exhaustion, and nerve breakdown, with “a great combination of ingredients to assist nature to generate energy and nerve force”), Clarke’s Blood Mixture (“the world-famed blood purifier”), and Nervigorine (for anemia, debility, and dyspepsia) (see Figure 4.1).66 In 1908 alone tonic peddlers in Britain spent £2 million on advertising.67 By 1905 the South African Review and India’s The Tribune (Lahore) wrote about “Quackery Rampant” and described “quack medicines” as “rascalitis” or “tomfoolitis,” relaying the concerns of the British medical community.68 The British Medical Association (BMA) published an exposé of the patent medicine industry entitled Secret Remedies: What They Cost and What They Contain in 1908, and the BMA’s attack was followed by the creation of a parliamentary select committee on patent medicines in 1912.69 In the United States, the journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote a series of articles in Collier’s Weekly in 1905 and 1906 to expose “The Great American Fraud” of the patent medicine business. He showed that Americans were spending $75 million annually on these so-called medicines, while highlighting how the makers of these products failed to disclose the ingredients they

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Figure 4.1.  “Dr. Bruce Purdie’s Nervigorine” was the kind of “unnatural” tonic and patent medicine that Sandow denounced with increasing frequency and intensity from about 1904 onward. Nonetheless, advertisements for such products constituted an important source of revenue for publishers. Source: Eugen Sandow, Body Building, or Man in the Making (1905).

used, which were often full of alcohol or more harmful substances. This helped to lead to the first Federal Food & Drug Act in 1906, and it impelled the American Medical Association to launch a long-term campaign against quacks and quack medicines.70 The early incarnation of Coca-Cola, which was invented in 1886 as a patent medicine and temperance drink to alleviate nerve disorders, got caught up in the fray and was taken to court by the US government.71

“Curing illness without medicine”: taking on doctors and the pharmaceutical industry At roughly the same time, the pharmaceutical industry – producing medicines for prescription by the professional medical community – was growing on a global scale too. One of example of this is Burroughs Wellcome &

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Co., the pioneering drug company founded by Americans Silas Burroughs and Henry Wellcome in London in 1880.72 Burroughs Wellcome was famous for making compressed medicine tablets, with Wellcome coining the term “tabloid” in 1884 to describe them. Tabloids provided allopathic medicine “in a convenient and palatable form” and helped to ensure the international success of Burroughs Wellcome.73 The company had a global presence by 1883 and even had a stand at the Calcutta Exhibition that year. “Travelling Victorians” quickly took a liking to compressed medicines, and Burroughs Wellcome actually gave a “tabloid chest” to H.M. Stanley, the explorer of Africa who had famously rescued David Livingstone in 1871.74 Such chests travelled throughout the British Empire with Kings Edward VII and George V, as well as to the north and south poles. The company continued to grow in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1898 it had its first overseas branches, with factories and depots throughout the world by 1914 – in New York, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Milan, Shanghai, and Bombay.75 Thus the firm’s global expansion occurred during the same years that Sandow established his worldwide exercise and health market – and fame – in the 1890s and 1900s. Interestingly, Wellcome was keen on creating publicity for the company, but he refused to advertise in regular newspapers or magazines. He was afraid that Burroughs Wellcome might be viewed as “patent medicine vendors,” which would see the firm “lose ground with the medical profession.” Instead, he focused on advertising in medical journals, including advertisements as long as twenty-seven pages in The Lancet.76 Sandow frequently claimed that “the medical profession” endorsed the Sandow Treatment, and it is clear that he wanted to keep good relations with doctors, who had grown considerably in number since about 1870.77 As David Waller has argued, doctors’ endorsements of Sandow’s exercises and therapies helped remove the suspicion of charlatanism or that he engaged in “mere music-hall frippery.”78 Moreover, while Sandow posed nude in many photographs and was almost naked while performing feats of strength or “muscle dances” in his evening shows, during the day he was fully clothed in order in an effort to downplay his show business origins to enhance his respectability (see Figure  4.2). He dressed like a professional gentleman, could pass as “a Harley Street medical consultant,” and was careful to circulate images of himself fully clothed.79 This was quite different from the approach of the American physical culturist and reformer Bernarr Macfadden, who provoked and aggressively battled the American Medical Association (AMA) from the editorial pages of his Physical Culture magazine. Some AMA officials and their supporters ridiculed Macfadden as

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Figure 4.2.  This photograph shows Sandow c. 1893, in his mid-twenties, during his rise to fame in the late 1880s and 1890s. He was photographed “naturally” in the nude (with a strategically placed fig leaf added later) in a statuesque pose and classical Roman motif, with muscles relaxed. The links to nudism and the life reform movement are clear. Source: Eugen Sandow, “Life Is Movement; the Physical Reconstruction and Regeneration of the People (A Diseaseless World),” The Family Encyclopaedia Of Health, page  490. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

“King of the Bare Torso Brigade” and “a blatant quack,” and for turning out “shoddy sex magazines” containing photographs of nude men and women.80 Despite Sandow’s attempts to remain on good terms with doctors, his condemnation of drugs as a dangerous modern vice was sufficiently ambiguous to include both patent medicines and pharmaceutical drugs of the

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type manufactured by Burroughs Wellcome  – the very type of medicine prescribed by doctors.81 Repeated use of phrases such as “Victims of the Medicine Habit” in Sandow’s interviews, advertisements, and articles did not show much respect for the medical profession. Indeed, on at least one occasion he felt compelled to clarify his position and state that medicine prescribed by doctors might be acceptable in the right circumstances: “In certain acute forms of illness medicine is undoubtedly a palliative, and often gives temporary ease and relief. But medicine should under no circumstances be taken except when prescribed by a qualified medical man.”82 If this was meant as a compliment to doctors it was a rather awkward one, for medicines were only “a palliative” and could only offer “temporary relief.” Moreover, by 1910 Sandow was advertising his Curative Physical Culture as an “exact science,” boasting about his “natural treatment of physical disorders without drugs” and “curing illness without medicine.”83 Sandow’s quest for status and respectability took a step forward when he was awarded a royal warrant as Professor of Scientific Physical Culture to King George V in February 1911, but underlying tensions with professional doctors came to a head only a few months later. The strongman had three licensed doctors in his employment at his Institute of Physical Culture in London and two of them became the subject of an investigation by the General Medical Council (GMC) and were eventually struck off the list of medical practitioners. This was an attack on Sandow because, as David Waller has put it, Sandow had committed two big sins in the eyes of the British medical establishment: attempting to heal the sick without proper credentials, and aggressively advertising his medical services with “grandiose claims.”84 It is true that Sandow portrayed himself as a doctor or physician of sorts, offering “medicineless cures.” For example, in reflecting on his 1904–5 world tour he referred to his “medical mission,” his “patients,” and his “travelling hospital.”85 In Bombay alone he claimed to have held 4,000 consultations with Indian “natives … from the coolie to the prince,” and in Hong Kong a local newspaper reported on how “new converts” to the “Sandow Craze” were throwing their medicines away to the dogs.86 Sandow was a threat because he was a rival to a growing and increasingly regulated medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry. After all, he had a global following and a market that extended beyond the British Empire, and in late 1904 he claimed to have one million followers worldwide.87 The quacks of the patent medicine industry were being brought to heel, and now physical culturists and life reformers like Sandow were being targeted – even if they refused to see themselves as quacks or cranks. For example, a June 1904 article in the South African Review stated, “the medical profession in

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England views with jealous apprehension the ever growing invasion of its lawful territory by trespasses in the shape of quacks.”88 The battle between the AMA and Bernarr Macfadden in the United States was also indicative of this process: the professional medical community squeezing out health rivals operating in the nebulous zone between quackery and orthodox medicine. William Hunt has argued that American doctors were also upset by “the assaults on their pocketbooks by Macfadden and all other advocates of unorthodox medical practice,” though they could not admit that publicly.89 Likewise, Michael Hau has pointed out that in Germany between 1890 and 1930 “regular physicians” battled for market share against “irregular practitioners,” and doctors were concerned about threats to their professional autonomy and authority.90 Apart from his problems with the professional medical community, Sandow’s business failures, the emergence of new rivals, and his German heritage caused difficulties during the war years, but he was not yet ready to give up. 1919’s Life Is Movement was dedicated ironically to “the medical profession throughout the world” and the book revealed Sandow’s deep resentment at the treatment he had received from the GMC.91 He declared that “the man who challenges tradition is suspected of a personal object in attacking heavily entrenched interests, and has, consequently, received more buffets than rewards,” adding that new inventions or discoveries required a long fight “against popular opinion or professional jealousy, usually with tardy and belated honour to the inventor or discoverer.”92 He also set out a stronger denunciation of the use of drugs and medicines – and, by implication, the entire medical and pharmaceutical community. Drugs can only cause de-struction without con-struction … Will any medical man tell me … if he knows of drugs or medicines that can give an added fraction of vitality to a sick person? Is there anything that will make weak cell strong but movement? … Medicine is simply a blackmailer in the body of a sick man levying toll on such little vitality as is left … Besides, the basis of many medicines, and especially patent medicines (which are taken indiscriminately and without medical prescription), are poisonous drugs of a most deleterious character in themselves, and would suffice to cause death if given or taken in larger quantities. Medicine is not merely innocuous, it may even be injurious, and I hope it will soon be as obsolete as the old-fashioned practice of cupping. Doctors themselves – at least the more advanced thinkers among them – know and admit that, with very few exceptions, medicine, like the x in algebra, largely symbolizes an unknown quantity, and that its administration is mainly for its psychical rather than for its physiological value.93

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Despite such jeremiads, by the time of his death in 1925 the “high priest” of physical culture and self-declared apostle of natural healing had lost his battle against drugs and sedentariness as the vices of modern civilization. Professional medical communities and the pharmaceutical industry grew richer and more powerful around the world and established themselves as experts who could define health and medicine to government regulatory agencies. Amateur health reformers like Sandow, meanwhile, were marginalized and most people on the planet became even more sedentary.

Conclusion and epilogue Sandow has often been portrayed  – and dismissed  – as a “professor of muscle” and the precursor to overdeveloped bodybuilders such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jay Cutler, but such characterizations miss the earnestness of his concerns about health. He was careful, for instance, to warn his followers not to build muscle as an end in itself, and he consistently stressed the importance of supple, symmetrical, and graceful bodies. He put more emphasis on deep breathing and blood circulation than he did on building big biceps, and he embraced a holistic approach to health. Contemporaries were often amazed at his detailed knowledge of anatomy and health issues more generally. Spectators at his shows expected Sandow’s muscle poses and feats of strength, but many expressed surprise at the seriousness of his lectures on physical culture. In the end, Sandow was a rather liminal figure. He distanced himself from the most extreme edge of life reform and temperance activists while euphemistically rephrasing and domesticating their concerns, and he did his utmost to rise above the vulgar peddlers of patent medicines and tonics, as well as various other cranks and quacks. Nonetheless, he failed in his efforts to gain respectability and be taken seriously as an expert on matters related to health, fitness, and the body, despite his recognition as a professor of scientific physical culture by George V. This failure resulted in part from his fulminations against pharmaceutical medicines as modern vices, but it was surely also related to his commodification of health and the body through his physical culture system, its books, magazines, and equipment, and, later, his various health foods. He may have been prescient in his critiques of the sedentariness of modern civilization and the professional medical community’s over-reliance on using drugs to cure illness, but he could not quite escape his show business background and his association with a crass and sensational form of commercial capitalism that ultimately

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reduced physical culture and “natural healing” to a commodity that was advertised in low-brow newspapers.94 Over the last decade or so the importance of physical activity (or “physical culture”) has received renewed attention from doctors and government health ministries, though now we put it under the rubric of “wellness” or “new-age medicine.” In early 2012, for example, my eyes seized on the following news headline:  “Toronto Doctor’s ‘Magic Pill’ Goes Viral.” The story was about a Canadian doctor named Dr. Mike Evans, who uploaded a health and wellness video to YouTube that received tremendous attention. In it Dr. Evans says that thirty minutes of exercise per day is a “magic pill” to cure aches and pains: “I’ve got a pill that’s going to help with your arthritis, help with your depression, help with your anxiety, help with your obesity, help prevent cancer,” he said.95 Clearly, Sandow’s emphasis on physical culture as “natural healing” has renewed traction in the twenty-first century, and his 1919 reference to “tardy and belated honour” for “discoverers” like himself seems to have come true – at least in part. Notes 1 “Sandow’s Sermons  – On Human Development  – The Secrets of Perfection,” The Transvaal Leader (Johannesburg, southern Africa), June 4, 1904. The parenthetical comment was made by the newspaper writer and appeared in the original newspaper text. 2 “Sandow’s System – Rising Mountains of Muscle – Hints to Hongkong [sic] Ladies,” The Hongkong Telegraph, July 18, 1905. The interview was conducted at the King Edward Hotel. 3 See Chapter 3 in this volume. 4 Quoted in William R. Hunt, Body Love: The Amazing Career of Bernarr Macfadden (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1989), 20. 5 On Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization, establishment of alternative “settlements” (or ashrams) and their associations with Tolstoy, Theosophists, esoteric Christians and other critics of modern society (with connections to life reformers) see Jonathan Hyslop, “Gandhi 1869–1915: The Transnational Emergence of a Public Figure,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, ed. Judith M. Brown and Anthony Parel (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 30–50, at 42–3 and 46–7, and Martin Burgess Green, The Origins of Nonviolence: Tolstoy and Gandhi in Their Historical Settings (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986). These connections are also evident in Gandhi’s autobiography where he discusses the influence of Theosophists, vegetarians, his Christian and Jewish friends in South Africa, as well as Tolstoy, Adolf Just, and Louis Kuhne. See Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, translated from Gujerati by Mahadev Desai (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1983). On Tolstoyan communities outside of Russia – especially in Britain – see Chapter 3, in this volume.

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On life reform communities in the United States see the comments about American physical culturist Bernarr Macfadden (below), which are based largely on Hunt’s Body Love and Robert Ernst’s Weakness is a Crime: The Life of Bernarr Macfadden (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991). 6 On life reform in Britain see Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 27–36. On life reform in Germany see Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany:  A  Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). On nudism’s links to “nature” and life reform see Chapter  2 in this volume as well as Hau’s Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany. While I have been limited to consulting the literature on life reform in English, it is important to acknowledge the rich literature in German on life reform (Lebensreform), such as Marc Cluet and Catherine Repussard, eds, Lebensreform: die soziale Dynamik der politischen Ohnmacht (Tübingen: Francke, 2013)  and Eva Barlösius, Naturgemäße Lebensführung:  Zur Geschichte der Lebensreform um die Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt and New  York:  Campus, 1997). I  am also indebted to a fascinating April 2012 lecture by Professor Helmut Zander, which got me thinking more deeply about Sandow’s connections to life reformers. It was entitled “Religiosity after Religion:  Vices, the ‘Lebensreform’ and the Acculturation of Religion in the 20th Century,” and was presented at the Fighting Drink, Drugs and Venereal Diseases:  Global Anti-Vice Activism c. 1870–1940 conference, which was organized by Harald Fischer-Tiné at EFT Zurich and held at the Centro Stefano Franscini, Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland, April 1–4, 2012. 7 Eugen Sandow, Strength and How to Obtain It, 2nd edn (London: Gale & Polden Ltd. 1899 [1897]), 18, emphasis added. This version of the book is a reprint by Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Reprints (Tennessee, USA, 2009; www.kessinger.net), though I have also consulted the original text. 8 Quoted in Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 33. Miles warned that conspicuous reformers who wore their hair long and without a hat, who did not wear a collar, tie, or waistcoat, who wore sandals and no socks, and who only ate fruit, nuts, and salad would bring ridicule and disrepute to themselves (and, by extension, the life reform movement). 9 “Anchorite” is a historical term for a religious recluse or ascetic. Eugen Sandow, “Foes of the Middle Aged,” Sandow’s Magazine, July 25, 1907, 110–11. 10 Sandow, Strength and How to Obtain It, “Note to the Second Edition,” viii and ­chapters 1 and 2, pages 3 and 9, respectively. 11 The claim about being the “high priest” was made to The Bengalee while in Calcutta, and was published on October 30, 1904. For a fuller definition of physical culture see Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 36–7, and Carey Watt, “‘No Showy Muscles’:  The Boy Scouts and the Global Dimensions of Physical Culture and Bodily Health in Britain and Colonial India,” in Scouting Frontiers:  Youth in the Scout Movement’s First Century, ed. Nelson. R. Block and Tammy M. Proctor (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 121–42, at 123ff. 12 See Caroline Daley, Leisure & Pleasure: Reshaping the New Zealand Body 1900–1960 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003) on Sandow’s commercial acumen – especially during his 1901–3 tour of Australia and New Zealand.

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13 On the “great acceleration” and “high globalization” see C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 451–67, Hyslop, “Gandhi 1869–1915:  The Transnational Emergence of a Public Figure,” and John Tosh, The Pursuit of History:  Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, 5th edn (Harlow and London: Pearson, 2010), 81. On “high globalization” Tosh cites Martin Daunton, “Britain and Globalization since 1850, I:  Creating a Global Order, 1850–1914,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, XVI, 2006. Bayly touches on the growth of photography and film c. 1900, but for more information see Chapter 2 in this volume, as well as Douglas Brown’s “Foreword” to David L.  Chapman, Universal Hunks: A Pictorial History of Muscular Men Around the World, 1895–1975 (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013), 9–23. Brown discusses Sandow’s contributions to the rise of what he calls “physique photography.” 14 This advertisement consisted of two full pages with text and ten photographs. The Daily Mirror Supplement, January 10, 1911, 2–3. Douglas Brown’s “Foreword” to Chapman’s Universal Hunks briefly touches on aspects of Sandow’s global commercial empire (see 14). 15 See the overview of temperance s.v. “Temperance” by Ellen Carol DuBois and Rumi Yasutake in The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History:  From the Mid-19th Century to the Present Day, ed. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1006–8. See also Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses (Toronto: Anchor, 2005), 232–46. 16 This seems especially true of the last few years that the magazine was published. For example, a December 1904 article in Sandow’s Magazine, without any author attribution, was entitled “Deterioration and Temperance” (404–5) and discussed a National Temperance League conference. While it did not directly endorse or praise the conference or the League it did give a positive report. The May 30, 1907 number, one of the last issues of the magazine, published “Letters on Health – A Page of Epistolary Advice from the Columns of the Daily Papers,” 680, featuring a piece titled “Tobacco and Alcohol Forbidden” by P.S. Seward. It stated that proper health was to be obtained by Nature’s methods, including cold baths, long evening walks, breathing fresh air, and systematic exercise, whereas “it is well to remember that alcohol and tobacco are the two great enemies of health.” Sandow’s editorial comment stated that he noted with pleasure that newspaper editors were taking greater interest in health matters. Other articles in the June 6, 1907 issue were “Narcotic Habits” (no author attribution, 711), which warned readers about the dangers of habitual use of coffee, tea, and chocolate, and “Why Eat Meat?” (712), by Dr. John H.  Girdner and reproduced from Cosmopolitan Magazine. The following week (June 13, 1907) the magazine carried titles such as “Is Coffee Harmful?” (738) and “Scotching the Alcoholic Fiend – How Drink Is Dying Out” (760). The last issue (July 25, 1907, 113) contained “The Dietetic Value of Fruits” (reprinted from Good Health) by Dr.  J.H. Kellogg, 1852–1943, the vegetarian, nutritionist, and health advocate famous for his Battle Creek health sanitarium and flaked breakfast cereals, and co-inventor of corn flakes (later Kellogg’s Corn Flakes) with his brother W.K. Kellogg. 17 In Life Is Movement (1919), Sandow’s last major book, he seemed to come out more strongly in favor of temperance. In two successive subsections, titled “Real

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Temperance Reform” and “The House of the Public,” Sandow applauded the effect of World War I in bringing about weaker alcoholic beverages, the restriction of public house (pub) hours, and the “no treating order,” which “weaned many a sot from the public house altogether.” He then proposed “a new and better type of public house” with the bar hidden from view and proper tables and chairs so drinkers would not rush or “nip” their drinks while standing. He also suggested that pubs serve tea, coffee, cocoa, cake, and healthy foods so children could accompany parents. See Eugen Sandow, Life Is Movement Or The Physical Reconstruction and Regeneration of the People (A Diseaseless World), with a foreword by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Hertford:  Simson & Co., 1919), 373–5. The version of the book quoted here is a reprint by Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Reprints (Tennessee, USA, 2009; www.kessinger.net), but I have also consulted the original text. 18 David Waller, The Perfect Man:  The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow, Victorian Strongman (London: Victorian Secrets, 2011), 135–6. 19 There were “Sandow Cigars” in 1894 and “Sandow Brand Safety Matches” in India (no date). Other strongmen and wrestlers advertised matches and cigarettes. See Chapman, Universal Hunks, 32, 198 and passim. 20 The information about the smoke room is contained in an advertisement for Sandow’s Schools of Physical Culture (with a “measurement form for postal instruction”) among the back matter of Sandow’s Strength and How to Obtain It (2nd edn, 1899) though similar advertisements could be found in other contemporary publications. 21 See Sandow’s comment on eating a big steak after playing billiards with a friend while in Paris, from the section “Incidents in My Professional Career” in Strength and How to Obtain It, 106. 22 See Sandow, Strength and How to Obtain It, 86 and 95, and Waller, Perfect Man, 135–6. 23 Sandow, Strength and How to Obtain It, 125, 137–8. 24 Ibid., 6. 25 See Waller, Perfect Man, 137 regarding Carpenter as a contributor to Sandow’s Magazine, endorsing open-air gymnasia. See Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 27–8 regarding Carpenter’s place in the life reform movement. 26 Edward Carpenter, Civilisation:  Its Cause and Cure and Other Essays, newly enlarged and complete edition (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1921 [1889]), 47–8. I  have consulted the Project Gutenberg edition (released November 2, 2013; accessed August 12, 2014; www.gutenberg.org/files/44094/44094-h/44094h.htm#FNanchor_13_13). The Mr. Kay Robinson referred to by Carpenter had written an article entitled “The Man of the Future” in The Nineteenth Century (a monthly review) of May 1883 in which he prophesied, extrapolating Darwin’s theory of evolution, that the man of the future would be a toothless, hairless, slow-limbed animal without separated toes, and incapable of extended locomotion. 27 The book states that it was the Sunday edition of The World. Eugen Sandow and G. Mercer Adam, Sandow on Physical Training: A Study in the Perfect Type of Human Form (London: Gale & Polden Ltd., 1894), 123. This version of the book is a reprint by Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Reprints (Tennessee, USA, 2009; www.kessinger .net), though I have also consulted the original text.

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2 8 Sandow, Strength and How to Obtain It, 56–7. 29 Ibid., 4. 30 Robert Ernst, Weakness is a Crime: The Life of Bernarr Macfadden (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 21. The first edition of Macfadden’s Physical Culture was published in 1898 and the first editorial was titled “Weakness Is A Crime.” From February 1900 onward it carried the motto “Weakness is a crime; Don’t be a criminal” on its front-page masthead. 31 “Apostle of Strength: Mr. Eugen Sandow’s Wonderful Reception on His Return to England,” Daily Mirror, September 19, 1905, 5. 32 “Mr. Sandow Explains  – Matters of Special Interest to the Ailing  – Drugs and Drug-taking,” Daily Mirror, October 3, 1905, 10. 33 “Striking Letter Confessions – From Victims of the Medicine Habit,” Daily Mirror, January 19, 1906, 10. 34 These articles in the Daily Mirror and other contemporary tabloid newspapers such as the Daily Mail are not identified as advertisements but they read and appear like advertisements or, as we would say today, infomercials. See “A Prehistoric Peep,” Daily Mirror, January 12, 1906, 10. 35 For example, in an October 1905 interview with the Daily Mirror Sandow referred to his “treatise on Curative Physical Culture.” See “Mr. Sandow Explains – Matters of Special Interest to the Ailing – Drugs and Drug-taking,” Daily Mirror, October 3, 1905, 10. 36 See Eugen Sandow, The Power of Evidence: Being a Series of Classified Reports (from many hundreds of a similar nature) of Patients Treated Through the Post and at the Institute, during a period of twelve months by The Sandow Method of Curing Illness Without Medicine By Natural Means (London:  Sandow Curative Institute, Ltd., 1919), and Sandow, Life is Movement. 37 Eustace Miles, The Eustace Miles System of Physical Culture. With Hints as to Diet (London: Health and Strength Limited, 1907), 1. 38 Hau, Cult of Health, 16–23. 39 See Ernst, Weakness is Crime, 24 and 44–7. 40 See Hunt, Body Love, ­chapter 3, “Nuts and Berries,” 13–21, with comments about “nature’s way” on p. 17. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was the co-inventor of corn flakes along with his brother W.K. (Will Keith) Kellogg, though the two had a bitter falling out and W.K. developed Kellogg’s Corn Flakes with his own company in 1906. As noted above, Sandow reprinted at least one of J.H. Kellogg’s articles in Sandow’s Magazine: “The Dietetic Value of Fruits,” July 25, 1907, 113. 41 Joseph S. Alter, Yoga in Modern India:  The Body Between Science and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 109–10. 42 Joseph S. Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 12–14. 43 “Mr. Sandow Explains  – Matters of Special Interest to the Ailing  – Drugs and Drug-taking,” Daily Mirror, October 3, 1905, 10. 44 “A Prehistoric Peep,” Daily Mirror, January 12, 1906, 10. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Sandow, Body Building, Or Man in the Making, 19. 48 Sandow, Life Is Movement, 380.

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49 Ibid., 144. Topsy almost certainly refers to the Asian elephant smuggled into the United States, who was abused by her handlers for years but was executed by electrocution in New York in 1903 after she killed one of her trainers. 50 On neurasthenia see Hau, Cult of Health, 15–17, and Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 35. Zweiniger-Bargielowska says that neurasthenia was the male counterpart to female hysteria. See also Wolfgang Martynkewicz, Das Zeitalter der Erschöpfung: Die Überforderung des Menschen durch die Moderne (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2013). I am grateful to Harald Fischer-Tiné for this reference. 51 See the classic work by G.R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1971). 52 Some writers have even speculated that the strongman chose his name Eugen out of an affinity for Francis Galton’ eugenics. See Waller, Perfect Man, 24–5, on this issue. 53 There was a Royal Commission on Physical Training in 1902 and an Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in 1903. See Olive Checkland, Industry and Ethos: Scotland, 1832–1914, 2nd edn (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 185. 54 See Sandow, chapter IV, “The Royal Commission,” in Body Building, Or Man in the Making, 9–12 and comments in other parts of the book too. 55 Sandow made his comments in a section of Sandow’s Magazine titled “What the Editor Says,” and they were in response to an article published in the same issue of the magazine entitled “Weeding Out the Unfit,” by E. Noble. See Sandow’s Magazine, January 1907, 12–13 and 16–17. 56 Sandow, Life Is Movement, 88. 57 Hau, Cult of Health, 16. 58 The advertisement was for Sandow’s “Wonderful Cures of Illness Without Medicine,” Daily Mirror, January 20, 1925, 6. 59 Sandow, Life is Movement, 407. The chapter covered pages 405 to 435. 60 Sandow, Life is Movement, 410–11. 61 See ibid., 406. 62 See “Eugen Sandow in India,” Sandow’s Magazine, January 12, 1905, 36. This was reproduced from the Indian Daily News (Calcutta). 63 “Physical Culture  – Some Indian Experiences,” Sandow’s Magazine, November 2, 1905, 469–70. 64 See, for example, “Striking Letter Confessions  – From Victims of the Medicine Habit,” Daily Mirror, January 19, 1906, 10, and “Striking Letter Confessions – From Victims of the Medicine Habit,” Sandow’s Magazine, July 25, 1907, 125. 65 “Striking Letter Confessions  – From Victims of the Medicine Habit,” Sandow’s Magazine, July 25, 1907, 125. 66 See Hunt, Body Love, 96, on the importance of advertising revenue from patent medicines. The list of advertisements appearing in Sandow’s Magazine is only partial, and it is based on a review of the magazine from 1904 to 1907. 67 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England:  Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 172. 68 See “Quackery Rampant,” South African Review, June 10, 1904, 11, and the “Contemporary Opinion” section of The Tribune, June 15, 1905, 1, which reproduced an excerpt from the British Medical Journal.

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69 Additionally, H.G. Wells highlighted the problems of patent medicines in his 1909 novel Tono-Bungay; Sydney Hillier published Popular Drugs: Their Use and Abuse in 1910; and the British Medical Journal published a special issue on “Quackery and the Medical Profession” in 1911. See Richards, “The Patent Medicine System,” c­ hapter 4 in Commodity Culture, especially 170–83. 70 See Hunt, Body Love, 92–3, and, specifically on Adams, see Elizabeth Fee, “Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871–1958):  Journalist and Muckraker,” American Journal of Public Health 100, no. 8 (August 2010):  1390–1 (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ articles/PMC2901284/, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, accessed August 24, 2014). 71 On Coca-Cola as a patent medicine, quack remedy and as temperance drink in the 1890s and early 1900s, see Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses, 232–46. 72 The significance of the growth of the pharmaceutical industry during the peak years of Sandow’s career first occurred to me while I was doing research at the Wellcome Library (Euston Road, London) in August 2011. While waiting for arrival of the documents I  had ordered in the reading room, I  visited a wonderful exhibit on Henry Wellcome entitled “The Medicine Man.” 73 “Tabloid” quickly entered the language of pharmacy and medicine, and the Burroughs Wellcome tabloid was registered as a trademark in the 1880s. The word tabloid was eventually applied to anything in compressed form – including newspapers (“tabloid newspapers”). Helen Turner refers to tabloid as “arguably the most famous trade name in all business history.” See Helen Turner, Henry Wellcome: The Man, His Collection and his Legacy (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980), 8–10, and Robert James and Rhodes James, Henry Wellcome (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1994), 112. 74 The phrase “travelling Victorians” is from Turner, Henry Wellcome, 10. 75 In 1893 both Mr. Burroughs and Mr. Wellcome were at the Chicago World’s Fair, where Sandow was also building a name and reputation. This detail was mentioned in Wellcome Collection’s “The Medicine Man” exhibit. On the global expansion of Burroughs Wellcome I have found the following sources useful: Penny Bailey, “The Birth and Growth of Burroughs Wellcome & Co.,” Wellcome Trust – About Us – Our History (November 4, 2008) (www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/History/WTX051562 .htm); the Wellcome Collection’s “The Medicine Man” exhibit, and Turner, Henry Wellcome, 10. 76 James and James, Henry Wellcome, 102. 77 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 22. 78 Waller, Perfect Man, 226–8. 79 Waller, Perfect Man, 151–2. As Philippa Levine has shown in her chapter in this book, the kind of respectable clothes that Sandow wore during the day could be considered “the fripperies of civilization.” 80 Hunt, Body Love, 92 and 95–110. 81 Such ambiguity was justified, however, by the fact that there were areas of overlap between quack doctors and legitimate or orthodox medicine. Thomas Richards has shown how quack practitioners occupied “a peripheral area of medical practice” and even members of the government Select Committee of 1912 were confused by “the dual status of quacks  – as outsiders and insiders.” See Richards, Commodity Culture, 184.

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82 See “Striking Letter Confessions  – From Victims of the Medicine Habit,” Daily Mirror, January 19, 1906, 10. 83 “Health Without Medicine: Official Confirmation that the Sandow Treatment Cures 99 Out of Every 100 Cases,” Observer, February 6, 1910, 4. 84 Waller, Perfect Man, 226–8. 85 “My Last Tour,” Sandow’s Magazine, September 28, 1905, 337–8. 86 See “Mr. Eugen Sandow: A Personal Interview,” The Madras Mail, May 27, 1905, 7, and “Athleticism in Hongkong  – The Latest Craze,” Hongkong Telegraph, July 21, 1905, 4. 87 “Sandow in Calcutta: Interviewed by our Representative – A High Priest of Physical Culture,” The Bengalee, October 30, 1904, 3. 88 “Quackery Rampant,” South African Review, June 10, 1904, 11. Also, as Thomas Richards has pointed out, both the quacks and the doctors of the BMA were part of a capitalist medical system in the early twentieth century. See Richards, Commodity Culture, 187. 89 Hunt, Body Love, 92. 90 Hau, Cult of Health, 102–3. 91 The dedication was preceded by: “This book describes the only natural, radical and permanent method of curing, preventing and eliminating disease.” Sandow, Life Is Movement, title page. 92 Sandow, Life Is Movement, 81–2. 93 Ibid., 320–3. The next section is entitled “Doom of the Medicine-Man,” from 323. 94 As Thomas Richards points out in The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, though exercise and physical culture systems were not the same as tonics and patent medicines, they were nonetheless part of a “health culture” that sold cures as commodities. See Richards, Commodity Culture, 194. 95 The actual title of Dr.  Evans’ YouTube lecture was “23½ Hours.” See “Toronto Doctor’s ‘Magic Pill’ goes Viral,” CBC News online, January 11, 2012, which has the video embedded in the text (www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2012/01/11/ toronto-viral-video-doctor-health.html).

PART II

DRINKS AND DRUGS

5

The specter of degeneration Alcohol and race in West Africa in the early twentieth century Charles Ambler

[The campaign against] The liquor traffic among the native races of Western Africa is being used as a formidable weapon of attack upon the moral, social and economic forces and problems of our national life and existence. It is essentially a race question involving important issues and large interests.1

In October 1908 an African journalist published a commentary in the Lagos Standard that explored at length “the great controversy which is raging around the question of the liquor traffic among the native races.” In it he charged that the Protestant church leaders who were the “apostles of temperance” were deliberately exaggerating and misrepresenting the facts about the import and consumption of European-produced gin in Southern Nigeria in order to promote a sinister, racial agenda. Asserting that the anti-liquor trade controversy was “essentially a race question,” the author further argued that the claims made by the opponents of the liquor trade about the destructive impact of gin on the health of African people and communities were nothing less than an attack on the “Man of Africa”  – a tactic in a larger effort to reduce West Africans to a position of racial inferiority. Invoking the memory of the great campaign against the slave trade, the writer charged that temperance advocates were “raiders of our consciences,” who “having removed the fetters from [the African’s] loins,” intend “to place them on his liberties and his conscience, to enslave his mind.”2

Race and the liquor traffic controversy The argument for a close link between race ideas and the often impassioned effort to restrict the importation of cheap spirits, known as trade gin, into West Africa  – and by extension other territories occupied by 103

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native peoples – was certainly persuasive. From the emergence of the liquor trade as an international humanitarian issue in the 1880s, the struggle to impose restrictions on the export of cheap gin and other spirits to Africa and elsewhere had turned on definitions of categories of human difference. The main pressure group promoting the issue in fact announced this by its title: The Native Races and Liquor Traffic United Committee. The claims made by anti-liquor advocates of the capacity of alcohol to dissolve inhibition, to cause the collective “demoralization” or “degeneration” of human groups and to promote collective addiction both reflected assumptions of fundamental biological difference and involved mapping and ordering the boundaries of difference. The first phase of the movement to eradicate the liquor trade among “native peoples” had focused on identifying and protecting those societies that had not yet felt the impact of imported liquor. Beginning with the 1890 Brussels Convention, successive international agreements banned the production of spirits in tropical Africa, forbade its importation into the large zones where trade had not yet been extended, and imposed progressively higher duties in areas where the spirits trade already existed.3 With a large “prohibited zone” of the African continent thus protected from the supposed ravages of the gin trade, the focus of the anti-liquor campaign shifted after 1890 to societies, chiefly in West Africa, where the commerce in alcohol was already well established and to claims that African peoples in those areas faced degeneration and depopulation because of the alcohol trade. This shift and the subsequent almost exclusive focus on Africa by liquor traffic opponents underscores the highly racialized conception of the drink vice and its potential impact on native populations.4 The anti-liquor traffic movement and other of the numerous anti-vice campaigns of this era drew very substantial popular support, especially among active Christians, in Britain and in outposts of the British Empire globally. In the limited scholarship on these movements, they generally emerge as exclusively European (typically British or American) and their ideas and actions are characterized as products or even tools of empire.5 This chapter moves away from this typically metropolitan focus to explore how the anti-liquor traffic campaign played out in one specific moment, and how this campaign, and opposition to it, was by no means confined to Europeans. As pressure from missionary and temperance organizations built on the British Liberal government, the Colonial Office agreed in early 1909 to form a small committee to conduct an inquiry into the effects of liquor in Southern Nigeria – to look in detail at the alcohol trade and alcohol consumption in one area in response to these assertions that the trade represented a serious threat to native societies or

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according to the more usual formulation, “native races.”6 This chapter looks at that inquiry, and the debates surrounding it, as a “race question.” In the introduction to their recent edited collection on Drugs and Empires James Mills and Patricia Barton stress the importance of the imperial experience in shaping modern understandings of drugs in the global economy, but at the same time they argue the importance of disengaging those understandings from superficial interpretations of the shape and meanings of imperial encounters.7 They emphasize in particular the importance of moving beyond “older historiographies in which European empires were the conscious and willing agents of addiction in non-western societies too simple and too naïve to resist the wiles of those from the west” and which in retrospect appear as “echoes of Orientalist fantasies and the civilizing mission.”8 A  remarkable aspect of the 1909 Liquor Trade inquiry in fact involves the degree to which people and peoples intruded upon imperial policy-making or at least representations of policy-making. In the voluminous testimony, reports, and press coverage and commentaries generated by the committee inquiry, and putatively describing the effects of alcohol in Southern Nigeria, the concepts of race (and for that matter the concepts of drugs and their effects) emerge both explicitly and implicitly in diverse and often contradictory formulations that defy easy oppositions between colonizer and colonized.9 The colonial state certainly possessed the power and influence to shape, to a very considerable extent, the information that would emerge in the inquiry – around the questions that were seen as central to state interests. Thus, the history of the 1909 Liquor Trade inquiry is in part a drama of the politics of investigation, for which the British colonial administration wrote much of the final script. Mills and Barton argue that in the global history of drugs and empire, “ ‘Orientalist’ fantasies authored by the white colonizers became authoritative knowledge about Asia, Africa, the Americas and so on,” and that “this knowledge was then imposed … on those regions” as the foundation for policy and practice and the basis for silencing indigenous drug theory.10 This was after all the period of the zenith of European imperial power and confidence. An accumulation of scholarly studies, focusing on the development of theories of race, has documented the emerging prominence of scientific racism and has linked those ideas to the construction of a global color line defined by the aggressive assertion of “whiteness” as well as global imperial expansion.11 These ideas have been linked in turn to concrete racial policies, particularly in colonies of white settlement. But much less is known about how such ideas translated into popular conceptual categories. In this regard,

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Table 5.1.  Gallons of spirits imported13

1900 1905 1910

Gold Coast

Southern Nigeria

1,043,734 1,044,427 1,581,624

2,349,824 2,775,430 4,764,258

Source: Public Records Office, National Archives of the UK: CO 554/96 97702.

debates about the effects of alcohol on native peoples are instructive. Perhaps surprisingly, the picture that emerges out of the 1909 liquor trade debate is one in which racial boundaries and hierarchies are contested and in which the very centrality of biological difference is contingent. Moreover, the documentation of the debate not only reflects the application of a complex set of ideas about difference but reveals people (almost all male) from Europe and Africa engaged in reshaping those ideas – connected in that process to larger transnational networks of communication and action associated with overlapping missionary, humanitarian, and commercial enterprises.

The Liquor Trade Committee With pressure intensifying from the humanitarian, temperance, and missionary lobbies and with influential representatives of these interests, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, drawing attention to the very substantial quantities of cheap gin being imported into Nigeria and other West African colonies, the Colonial Office determined that an official investigation of the trade in Southern Nigeria would serve to temper the often dramatic claims of African suffering as the result of a commerce that was a concern even to colonial bureaucrats.12 The rapid expansion of gin imports into British West Africa even troubled a number of colonial officials who typically down-played its impact (see Table 5.1). Pressing for the complete prohibition of imported gin, advocates called on the government to build on the recent decision to gradually ban the opium trade and forbid a commerce that was, it was claimed, even “more harmful.”14 Combined with increasing imports, the rise in gin duties meant vastly increased revenue, which only accentuated the financial dependence of the Nigerian colonial state on this single, embarrassing, source – gin.15 At the same time, the expansion of railway construction into the interior threatened to facilitate the easy, if illegal, transport of that same commodity

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into the prohibited zone where the importation of spirits was banned by international agreement. However dubious its claims to objectivity, the Liquor Trade Committee represented the first serious effort in the thirty-year history of the African liquor traffic controversy to gather information on the impact of the trade. Having produced a mountain of propaganda and petitions, the anti-liquor trade lobby was optimistic that an investigation would lead to a change in policy. Once it became known that an inquiry would be initiated, the prohibitionist forces in Nigeria, led by Anglican bishops and fervent temperance advocates, Revs. Herbert Tugwell, a Briton based in Lagos, and James Johnson, an African, began to organize to ensure that the committee would hear strong and convincing evidence against the trade, documenting the ravages caused by excessive alcohol consumption, from individuals across the colony. But as quickly became obvious, emotional narratives of the depredations of gin would be no match for the capacity of an informal alliance of official and commercial interests to marshal evidence and expertise behind the argument that the liquor trade posed little threat. The aim of this approach was so blatant that numerous witnesses, in particular those such as chiefs who were directly connected to the colonial regime, apparently either changed their testimony or declined to appear. In the end, the temperance advocates did not even succeed in convincing representatives of other missionary groups to support their cause – and in fact many non-Anglican missionaries showed great reluctance to appear before the committee at all.16 The central strategy of those opposing prohibition was to raise the ­possibility – inevitability as they would have had it – of the imposition of a direct tax if alcohol revenues were to dry up.17 The veteran African politician, merchant, and frequent administration critic, Herbert Macaulay, took the lead and prepared a seven-page special supplement to the Nigerian Chronicle on the “Liquor Traffic.” Macaulay repeatedly raised the possibility of a direct tax – anathema in West African politics – while systematically presenting arguments refuting the standard claims that gin had reduced commerce, raised the crime rate, lowered birth rates, destroyed families, and generally led to the degeneration of the African population.18 The supplement circulated widely in advance of the committee hearing and was apparently read out in translation to potential witnesses, notably African “traditional” rulers, who did not read English.19 As it unfolded from March to June 1909, in public sessions held across Southern Nigeria and as it spilled out into the local, regional, and metropolitan press, the Liquor Trade Committee served a variety of purposes. Most

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important, it certainly provided a forum for both supporters and opponents of the alcohol trade to air their points of view on that and many other topics, reinforcing abstract ideas of free expression associated with British Empire ideals. The one thing, however, that it most assuredly was not, was the very thing that it explicitly purported to be: a serious effort to gather objective information to inform the development of policy. From the definition of the terms of the investigation and the composition of the committee, it was clear that the final report would in fact affirm existing policy and effectively reject prohibition. The committee was chaired by Sir Mackenzie Chalmers, an attorney and former Indian civil servant with no West African connection. The other three members included a member of the Southern Nigeria administration and two British merchants, both based in Nigeria and one of whom had long opposed the liquor trade.20 The committee convened in Southern Nigeria over the course of several weeks, beginning in late April, holding sessions in Lagos and in several other major towns. A total of 171 witnesses gave evidence, representing “as far as possible all classes of experience.” The witnesses were about equally divided between Europeans and Africans, of whom thirty-three were identified as chiefs and who were always labeled in the printed evidence as “natives,” while whites remained undesignated.21 Only two women gave evidence.22 Although numerous prohibition advocates spoke before the committee, the great majority of witnesses were closely linked either to the administration or to trading interests. Nevertheless, the record of the testimonies includes a diverse set of views and the surrounding debate drew in participants in West Africa and Britain. One Lagos newspaper actually printed verbatim sections of the testimony.23 Although the British had had a presence in Nigeria, in ports along the Atlantic coast, for many decades, their authority had only extended into the interior relatively recently. By taking the Liquor Committee investigation on the road, to a series of Southern Nigerian towns, and by including diverse voices and perspectives the proceedings served to advertise the new colonial order. The committee thus engaged both the entrenched colonial culture of places like Lagos as well as societies whose traditional rulers had only relatively recently been incorporated within the colonial political structure. In such circumstances, the committee hearings represented, from the point of view of the colonial administration, an opportunity to project the power of the state and to articulate its values. Like other colonial commissions, this one was very much a ritual performance of imperial power.24 But it was also, as has often been the case in colonial encounters with vice, a theater in which competing ideas about Britishness and “civilized” British values played out.

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The ceremony of committee hearings exposed the key structures of authority and distinguished between the political, commercial, and religious realms of the colonial system. The committee sessions, open to the public and widely reported, also provided a stage from which to articulate key, if sometimes conflicting, principles of British imperialism and British imperial identity. Over and over again, in discussions the committee members and witnesses articulated the ideals of British cultural superiority, non-racialism, and respect for “native institutions,” in the process underscoring colonial power. The administrators and professionals (notably physicians) who represented the colonial government were afforded great respect by the committee, and their statements (however lacking in factual basis) were generally accepted without question. Traditional rulers, linchpins of indirect rule and personifications of cultural relativism, were likewise treated with considerable deference in the proceedings. The questioning of prohibition advocates was strikingly different. In those instances, the committee members relentlessly pressed for specific, verifiable facts, in the process casting doubt on the reliability of these witnesses and the accuracy of their claims. Bishop James “Holy” Johnson was a particular target of the committee’s strategy – presumably because of his prominence in the prohibitionist movement and his well-known and controversial African nationalist views.25 Born in Sierra Leone, he had served in Nigeria for many years where he had developed racialist views similar to those of Edward Blyden and other black Atlantic intellectuals of the era. According to Johnson: The Liquor Traffic is felt everywhere along the whole Coast and in the interior to be a source of ruin to the people. It is eating out their strength, physical and moral, and threatens their extinction. Its paralyzing and destructive influence is becoming very widespread. The great efforts that are being made by the great powers of Europe to open up interior Africa to European commerce, mean, while this traffic exists and runs wild as it does, death, certain death, to the Negro race, and to Africa.

Invoking the transatlantic slave trade, Johnson continued: “It is a greater evil and a more dreadful enemy than the trans-Atlantic slave trade on the West Coast, which England spent life and treasure to suppress.”26 His passionate opposition to the alcohol trade allied him with his Anglican and temperance colleagues, but his frequent comparison of the liquor trade to the slave trade and his argument that the liquor trade was a form of economic imperialism placed him at odds with the missionary establishment – not to mention the colonial administration. In the course of lengthy testimony, and in response to aggressive questioning regarding his broad claims about the devastation caused by alcohol,

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Bishop Johnson made the charge that in the Niger Delta region “men, women, and children” all drink gin. This statement provoked in turn a demand for specifics  – the standard tactic of the committee members in response to sweeping statements from temperance advocates whose claims were steeped in decades of sensationalist rhetoric in which arguments by repetition were reified. The bishop supported his statement with a description of a visit he had made in 1906 to a government school where, according to his account, sixty out of the seventy-five children present claimed to drink gin that they were given at home.27 This story in turn attracted further hostile questions, with the suggestion made that Johnson had used leading questions. Committee member A.A. Cowan then asked, “Do you not rather think that natives often say what they think you want them to say?” To which Johnson replied, “No, they may do that to foreigners, but not to myself,” asserting a common race nationhood. Knowing that Johnson came originally from Sierra Leone and did not speak Nigerian languages, Cowan, a Nigeria-based British merchant, then asked, “Would you say that I was more a foreigner to Southern Nigeria than you are?” Johnson, replied, “Yes, I should regard you so.”28 Although the committee generally ignored Johnson’s assertions and sufficient evidence was presented to show that child drinking was not a serious issue, the committee nevertheless found it necessary to send an investigator to the school in question and include a detailed account in the final report that challenged the specifics of Johnson’s account and went so far as to suggest that he had purposefully exaggerated the incident after the fact.29 This strategy was designed both to challenge the evidence itself and more important to discredit the witness – at least in part in racial terms. From the Nigerian point of view, the notion of an independent investigative enterprise was surely perplexing. But as this particular investigation unfolded, the process through which the demonstration of power shaped conclusions  – while permitting a certain degree of diversity of views – would have been altogether familiar. From the campaigns that the prohibition advocates and the government waged in advance of the committee hearings and in the evidence of reluctant witnesses and changing testimony we can conclude that “the facts” that the committee was charged with collecting were highly contingent and very much subject to the power of the state – whose position would ultimately overwhelm the efforts of the prohibitionists to advance their own versions of the truth. Yet, it would be entirely too cynical to dismiss the liquor trade inquiry as a whitewash, as advocates of prohibition later would. Just as John Richards has shown in his persuasive, revisionist account of the much more ambitious 1895 Royal

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Commission on Opium in India, the participants in these investigations retained a faith in free expression and objectivity, even as the nature of the process preordained the conclusions.30 The Committee terms of reference made clear that the Colonial Office did not wish to receive a policy recommendation but a report “upon the facts connected with the importation of trade spirits into Southern Nigeria, and with their sale and consumption.”31 The charge allowed considerable leeway in investigating matters related to the specified topics, provided these did not move beyond “matters of fact.” Five of the seven items listed in the committee directions covered the nature of the spirits themselves, their source and scope of distribution, methods of sale, and “relation of the spirit trade to the commerce of the Colony.” The final two topics lay at the heart of the prohibitionist cause: the “drinking habits of the people” and especially “Results – moral, social, and physical – of the trade on natives.”32 If the ground rules for the committee were set out by the Colonial Office, it was the liquor traffic opponents who basically determined the key issues that would be investigated. It was their oft-repeated claims, set out by Bishop Tugwell in a letter to the committee and in his subsequent testimony, that shaped the questioning of witnesses – an approach that appeared designed, in the guise of gathering facts, to refute those claims.33 The key charge, reflecting the emergence of eugenics in this period, was that “this traffic demoralizes the people.” Citing anecdotal evidence and calling for “thorough investigation … by medical men,” Tugwell charged that imported liquor was undermining the collective health of Southern Nigerians, reducing fecundity, increasing infant mortality, and raising the death rate, with the result that “the process of demoralization is at work … working rapidly and disastrously.”34

Alcohol, fecundity, and degeneration Predictably, the final committee report took the opposite view, stressing that a “large preponderance of evidence” indicated that “no deterioration of the race whatsoever has taken place which can be attributed to the abuse of alcohol.”35 To make the case for this determination the committee sought out evidence from witnesses that drinking was increasing and pervasive, and systematically questioned physicians regarding the physical health of population. Although a few witnesses asserted that public drinking had in fact dramatically increased in recent years, for the most part even temperance advocates admitted that public drinking and drunkenness were rare in Nigeria. One doctor went so far as to claim that in the many years’ experience in Nigeria, he had “never seen a native drunk.”36

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In the absence of any strong evidence that public drinking was extensive or increasing, much of the very considerable testimony devoted to drinking practices focused on the consumption of alcohol at various ceremonies and celebrations, including weddings and especially funerals. Traditional rulers had some serious concerns about the rising costs of these events for individuals like themselves who were expected to foot the bill, but for most of those who opposed restrictions on alcohol, such events were harmless traditional occasions at which boisterousness was as much the product of excitement as alcohol. From the prohibitionist point of view, however, these were occasions for drunkenness and debauchery and contributed to the impoverishment of families. Some of the prohibition supporters argued that these events not only became the occasion for women drinking, but also promoted sexual license and assault. One African pastor recounted the story that he had heard of a wake where a girl got drunk and then was “very badly abused” by a group of young men.37 These kinds of stories, however difficult to verify and subject to challenge, nevertheless provided a brief glimpse into the world of the supposed substantial private drinking that the prohibitionists argued was undermining family life and leading to social and racial degeneration. Dr. Thomas Adam, a temperance advocate, admitted that “going about you do not see much drunkenness, but when you come to know them more and go into their houses and their compounds, I am convinced that there is quite a lot of it.”38 These claims took the investigation into the realm of gender, to emerging constructs of the nature of “the family” and the roles of wives and husbands in circumstances in which British and Christian family models were in tension with polygyny. To get at the incidence of hidden drinking, medical experts were pressed to provide information on “alcoholic diseases” that should have been present if drinking was truly extensive. The physicians, both African and European, with their privileged, intimate knowledge of the bodies of Southern Nigerians, generally denied having seen indications of diseases such as cirrhosis – or any other physical evidence of alcohol abuse. Against such scientific evidence, Bishop Johnson’s certain claim that the “Yoruba race” had been “deteriorated in a great measure by drink,” carried little weight.39 Repeatedly, witnesses were asked to compare the scale of drinking in Southern Nigeria with that in Britain. And time and again, they provided versions of Mary Kingsley’s famous statement that “in the whole of West Africa, in one week, there is not one-quarter the amount of drunkenness you can see any Saturday night you choose in a couple of hours in the Vauxhall Road [in London].”40 The suggestion in these comparisons that excessive alcohol consumption was an unfortunate byproduct

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of urbanization and the breakdown of traditional society was reinforced in the positive response to committee testimony that implicated “foreign natives” and educated town-dwelling Africans in the occasional examples of excessive drinking in Nigeria. Claims of population decline were key to the degeneration argument, with temperance rhetoric incorporating charges that the spreading consumption of gin, even among women, had undermined general health and thus fertility. Poor health, and in particular poor maternal health, not only reduced child-bearing but increased infant mortality as did the putative practice of giving children gin on a regular basis. Alcohol also supposedly undermined male “vitality,” leading to numerous instances of impotence – although it is not clear what the sources would have been for such intimate knowledge. The medical testimony systematically contradicted these arguments. Encouraged by the committee members, doctors denied that gin played a significant role in the health of Southern Nigerians, pointing instead to the prevalence of endemic disease in the country. They repeatedly rejected the claim that women drank to any substantial degree or that this could be the source of high infant mortality  – which they ascribed to malaria and, interestingly, what they regarded as excessive breast feeding. Voyeuristic attention was devoted to the question of male impotence. Doctors, with encouragement from their questioners, dismissed the idea that long-term impotence could be linked to alcohol abuse. Instead, they argued that impotence was the product of excessive sexual activity, or, according to Dr.  John Currie, of “riding the willing horse to death.”41 Interrupting this testimony, the Committee Chairman asked, “too early and excessive sexual intercourse?”42 The consistency and prominence of this argument suggests that among whites in Southern Nigeria, who were generally somewhat careful to avoid casual assertions of racial difference, African sexuality represented an important racial marker. At the same time the efforts of both the white prohibition advocates and their white opponents to lay claim on African sexuality represents a critical point of race creation – African witnesses rarely if ever were willing in their testimony to venture into Nigerian bedrooms. The general reluctance to characterize individuals and communities in racial terms played itself out in the alcohol debate around the question of addiction, or “slavery to drink.”43 The temperance argument required either that whole peoples, or races, were collectively susceptible to alcohol slavery or that the substance itself be inherently addictive and destructive. Thus, the prohibition forces went to considerable lengths to argue the

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“poisonous” and addictive properties of cheap trade gin, especially emphasizing that Europeans never drank it. In contrast, local alcohols were represented as essentially healthful, “traditional,” or even “national” drinks. Although most temperance rhetoric stopped short of direct assertions of racial vulnerability, the anti-liquor traffic campaign arguments clearly suggested that Africans were defenseless against the gin scourge – claims that enraged many members of the African elite. African professionals divided, however, over these racial issues. Although he saw little evidence of alcohol-related health problems, the Lagos physician, Dr. Oguntula Sapara, nevertheless suggested that “the craving” for alcohol was more common among Africans and that “the native … is more affected by spirits.”44 Bishop Johnson, acknowledged that alcohol was dangerous for all people, but in his zeal to stop the ruin that he associated with the liquor trade, he characterized African peoples, or the African race, as especially exposed: “We are a people that are low already,” Johnson said. “In some parts of the country we are cannibals and, so why bring this thing to us that will make us wilder than we were before.”45 The only solution thus was complete prohibition: “If you want us to be a better people than we are,” he intoned, “the whole thing will have to be tabooed.”46 Johnson’s implication was that Africans were collectively unable to drink in moderation – at least in the case of gin. To many observers, however, the fact that drinking was linked to periodic celebrations and that in recent months residents of Abeokuta and Ibadan in Yorubaland had imposed a boycott on gin imports provided evidence that “the people” were more than capable of curbing their cravings. Most locally based physicians and colonial officials in fact rejected the idea of collective “slavery to alcohol” and located the source of addiction in the individual.47 The committee report approvingly extracted from the testimony of the African temperance advocate and Anglican minister, Archdeacon Crowther, his conclusion that “certain individuals were slaves to drink,” but that the people living in the Niger Delta district where he worked were notable for their “sobriety and self-control.”48 The superintendent of police in Lagos, an African, saw little sign of general excessive alcohol abuse, noting instead the presence in the port of twenty or thirty “habitual drunkards” who drank regardless of any efforts to control them.49 Rejecting charges that Africans were being trapped irreparably by alcohol abuse, the Lagos health officer confidently asserted that addiction is “a matter of individual susceptibility.”50 Similarly, one Lagos chief noted in passing, “We are not all the same temperament,” making the case for understanding the effects of alcohol in individual terms.51 When one of the committee

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members pressed a district commissioner to categorize inebriation according to the kind of drink consumed, the official responded: “Is not the great element the character of the man?”52 Most African opinion appears to have rejected outright the medicalization of alcohol abuse. Drunkenness was described in most cases as an occasional phenomenon, relatively benign, and at worst essentially a nuisance.53 Certainly, African witnesses saw little power in any argument that alcohol dissolved rationality. Claims that alcohol could govern behavior or that Africans were somehow weak in their susceptibility to drink smacked of racism. In the words of one resident of Yoruba city of Ibadan, “The man himself is responsible, nobody else is.”54

The geography of drink and difference In his evidence before the Liquor Trade Committee, the veteran Anglican missionary and temperance advocate, Archdeacon Melville Jones, very explicitly tied control of alcohol to racial theory. In an atmosphere in which Europeans in Nigeria were increasingly infected with racism, Melville Jones went beyond the assumption, advanced by Bishop James Johnson and other African racial nationalists, that inherent racial characteristics distinguished human groups and governed behavior. He made the claim that Southern Nigerians were a “child race, and ought to be treated as a child race.”55 Since it was now a crime to provide English children with spirits, he argued, it followed that Africans should be treated in a like manner. In his argument Melville Jones invoked the threat of a “deterioration of the race” in which excessive alcohol consumption would disable future generations of Nigerians. One African pastor of the Anglican church argued along the same lines that “natives who are not habitual drinkers of this rum … look robust and healthy and strong and developed; but many people here on account of this gin drinking are weak; they are not like their forefathers.”56 Yet somewhat remarkably for this period of expansive imperial power, the confident scientific racism reflected in Archdeacon Jones’s views was very much the exception in the liquor trade debates. If committee members often gave the temperance advocates a rough time, the tone of the proceedings themselves was generally respectful of Africans. Indeed “native views” were in some ways privileged as affording unique insight into local society. For someone unfamiliar with Nigerian colonial society, it would certainly have been difficult from the printed testimony to pick out the statements of African professionals and officials had they not been identified as “natives” or been asked for the record to reveal their ethnic or racial identities.

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The discourse on alcohol, linking West Africa, Europe, and especially Britain, encompasses a complicated mass of assertions of human categorization, which we should think of not as artifacts of well-formulated positions, but as efforts, explicit and implicit, of intellectuals and others to interpret and define difference. Jonathan Glassman, in his provocative recent study of “racial thought and violence in colonial Zanzibar,” offers a sweeping challenge to entrenched primordial arguments regarding the history of racial and ethnic conflict and the related tendency to assume “that all racial thought originates in Western doctrine.”57 Like the Zanzibari intellectuals and political activists that Glassman describes, contributors to debates about liquor in West Africa were at the same time engaged in developing a vocabulary in “languages of belonging.”58 When confronted with the alcohol issue, with a substance that by its very nature influenced human behavior, Africans in Southern Nigeria expressed their opinions in language that embedded diverse and overlapping ideas about difference and belonging. Some understood themselves in “national” terms, notably the notion of a Yoruba nation, but possibly too in a nascent sense of Nigeria, or British West Africa. For others it was the concept of a British Empire community. That kind of perspective did not of course preclude at the same time a sense of an affinity for Africa, or for the black, or “Negro” or even West African “race.” Colonial officials and missionaries most consistently used the term “native” to designate the African population of Southern Nigeria. The Liquor Trade Committee Report, for example, relied largely on that term, varying it occasionally with the “native community of Southern Nigeria.”59 The charge from the Colonial Office mentioned the “drinking habits of the people,” but also the impact of the trade on “the natives.”60 Routine reference to “foreign natives” both in the report and in the testimony to describe Africans who came originally from other areas of West Africa suggests that the term “native” had been racialized. This development may well explain why the term was less often used by Africans and appeared relatively infrequently, except in quotations, in the Nigerian press. Yet an article in the Lagos Standard in February 1908 defended a broader, racial, definition, linked to the historical advocacy for a “Native Church” in West Africa, and took issue with the new use of the term “Aborigines” by the Anglican Church as a tactic to marginalize African clergy in Nigeria who had been born elsewhere in West Africa.61 There was certainly enormous sensitivity on the part of educated elite Nigerians to racial separation and hierarchy. They had been nurtured in an ethos of a British Empire non-racialism (however often disregarded in practice) and they had resisted with outrage

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the gradual encroachment of racial segregation in Lagos and other West African towns.62 Prohibition represented yet another potential piece of discriminatory legislation, since it would exclusively target African consumers. Opponents of prohibition, Nigerian and British, repeatedly cited their opposition to such discrimination in their arguments to preserve the trade. The final report of the liquor trade inquiry stressed as a key conclusion that the liquor trade had resulted in “no deterioration of the race.”63 The reference to the race in the singular in contrast to the more typical usage of plural forms, such as “native races” or “West African races” (or even the very particular “Yoruba race” or “Ibo race”) is striking in its evocation of the race nationalism advocated by the most vocal of all the prohibition advocates, Bishop James Johnson. Whether or not its use reflected the close linkage between the concept of “deterioration” and the racial foundations of eugenics theory, it certainly pointed to the question of the broader implications of the investigation.64 In the report and repeatedly in the testimony, comparisons were made to drinking practices and alcohol abuse of other “Negro” peoples, chiefly in Jamaica and in South Africa. Among contributors to these debates, such comparisons reinforced, whether negatively or positively, a larger black Atlantic society. But at the same time these comparisons complicated assertions of more particular “national” affiliations – West African, Nigerian, Yoruba, and Igbo – and of membership in a non-racial Christian, British imperial community whose roots lay in the great humanitarian endeavor of anti-slavery  – and through which many Africans could narrate a sense of global connection.65 The boundaries of racial identity were demarcated most boldly in the comparison of debates in Nigeria to the situation in South Africa, where the state was attempting to impose alcohol prohibition on the African ­population. The prohibition movement, in Britain and in West Africa, celebrated the South African action and made its supposed success an argument for the imposition of similar regulation in West Africa.66 One member of the Liquor Trade Committee, Thomas Welsh, repeatedly in questions, raised the issue of the success of the South African experiment with prohibition, making a race argument for the logic of the extension of similar regulations to Nigeria. In especially aggressive language Welsh pressed this point with Kitoyi Ajasa, a prominent Lagos attorney, member of the Legislative Council, and later, as Sir Kitoyi Ajasa, perhaps Nigeria’s most illustrious citizen. Ajasa definitively rejected the idea that discriminatory legislation on liquor would be appropriate or acceptable and remained silent as Welsh described anti-alcohol legislation in South Africa. Welsh then asked, “if liquor is hurtful to the natives of South Africa it cannot be

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very beneficial to the natives of Southern Nigeria, can it?” Ajasa responded, in measured argument, that these were two separate and specific historical circumstances, requiring different responses. He remained unmoved when Welsh asked rhetorically, “There is no essential difference between the native of South Africa and the native of West Africa is there?”67 Although he did not speak, Ajasa must surely have reflected on the apparent contradiction between the cultural promise of the great evangelical and humanitarian movements and the assumptions of collective racial inferiority that increasingly defined the international campaign against the liquor traffic. Plainly, most Nigerian opinion rejected such racial arguments, and that very campaign provided people living in Southern Nigeria an opportunity to refute them. Likewise, in their contributions to the alcohol debate and in their arguments asserting the basic sobriety of Nigerian peoples and communities, a very wide range of people, from very diverse backgrounds, interrogated and contested the claim that Nigerians should be located globally in a constellation of seemingly “primitive” “native races,” including peoples in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand – all of whom presumably shared a vulnerability to alcohol and thus required protection.68 Much to the dismay of the prohibition advocates, the Liquor Traffic Committee report largely dismissed the claims of the opponents of the liquor trade and found no basis for claims that imports of cheap gin were causing serious injury to African communities in Southern Nigeria. According to the final report, there was “a large preponderance of evidence that no deterioration of the race whatsoever has taken place which can be attributed to the abuse of alcohol.”69 Noting that the charge to the committee had been only to gather facts and not to make recommendations, the members concluded that drink contributed only minimally to disease and mortality and that there was “hardly any alcoholic disease among the native population.” No connection was found between drink and crime and no evidence produced that cheap imported gins were particularly unhealthy. Although they avoided explicit recommendations, the committee members certainly suggested that sharply higher duties or prohibition was likely to be counterproductive – raising the specter of smuggling from nearby territories (with attendant loss of revenue) and illicit local production. The report several times asserted the general sobriety of Southern Nigerians, while acknowledging that there were individual cases of alcohol abuse  – notably among Africans who had received “a certain amount of European education.”70 This last trend, connecting problems of alcohol and drug use, to urbanization and the breakdown of “traditional” society, would become a central theme in international discourse on the impact of alcohol and other

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drugs in societies in the global south across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.71 Prohibition forces were outraged by the committee report – however predictable the outcome. They hit back with renewed pressure and a further series of alarmist pamphlets, reviving the same themes and claims that they had published in the “Poison for Africa” series of pamphlets, in innumerable letters and petitions, and in their presentations to the Liquor Trade Committee.72 The activists made little headway as other more burning issues, including notably the efforts to end the opium traffic in Asia, captured the popular humanitarian and diplomatic imaginations.73 Then, in 1914, the outbreak of World War I achieved what decades of agitation had failed to accomplish:  an end to the gin trade as a war measure. In the aftermath of the war, the temperance and humanitarian forces managed to codify what supporters believed would be a ban on the trade in cheap gin in the 1919 Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye.74 This success, however, effectively marked the end of the liquor trade question as an international issue. The treaty reiterated the existing ban on distillation in tropical Africa and codified zones where liquor imports were forbidden. Cheap gin imports were effectively banned, but importers managed to get around this prohibition. The discussions surrounding the treaty negotiations were followed closely by many West Africans. Most gave qualified support to the treaty reflecting a belief that cheap and easily available imported alcohol exacerbated social problems. In a 1919 letter to the district commission of Cape Coast in the Gold Coast a group of local traditional leaders opposed the “evils which are attributed to the unrestricted sale of rum.”75 They characterized rum as a source of crime and delinquency among youths and argued that it had injured trade and “retarded the penetration of art and science into the Colony.”76 If a number of influential Africans expressed qualified support for a ban on cheap imported liquor, they also expressed their discomfort at being allied with the missionaries who were the main advocates against the liquor traffic – and the implicit racial assumptions of the regulation. As an editorial in the Lagos Standard noted, “it was an insult to the natives to be so vilified as a race of sods, when the educated natives know very well that, comparatively, the white people are more addicted to alcohol and drinking and are more demoralised and debased by it.”77 By the mid-1920s imports were rising again in colonial West Africa and illegal stills were providing cheaper alternatives to European brands. Controversy flared once again about the liquor trade, but the controversy was almost entirely confined to West Africa, notwithstanding a few mentions in the British press.78

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Once again the discussions implicated race. Yet while colonial governments in east, central, and southern Africa were putting in place highly restrictive alcohol regulations that were explicitly designed to respect and reinforce racial boundaries and racial hierarchy, in the Gold Coast and Nigeria these debates about liquor were increasingly about economic opportunity, national identity and the legitimacy of the colonial states – rather than race. Nevertheless, the regulations imposed through the Treaty of St. Germain remained on the books. Legal distillation and relatively free markets in domestic and imported spirits would not be established until the eve of independence – reflecting the persistence of deeply held, racialized, views of the vulnerability of Africans, and other “native peoples” to distilled spirits.79 Notes 1 “The Liquor Traffic,” Lagos Standard, October 14, 1908. The article was inspired by a letter from Alex Cowan that appeared in the African Mail and excerpts of which appeared in this article. Cowan would later be appointed one of the members of the 1909 Southern Nigeria Liquor Trade Committee that is the focus of this chapter. 2 “The Liquor Traffic,” Lagos Standard, October 14, 1908. 3 The most thorough examination of the liquor traffic question is found in Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York: Africana, 1975). See also Charles Ambler, “The Drug Empire: The Control of Drugs in Africa, a Global Perspective,” in Drugs in Africa:  Histories and Ethnographies of Use, Trade, and Control, ed. Gernot Klantschnig, Neil Carrier and Charles Ambler (New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 25–47. 4 This had been reflected in a tendency to describe the ravages of alcohol on the urban poor in Britain itself in quasi-racial terms, most famously, in Salvation Army leader, William Booth’s, In Darkest England and the Way Out (New  York:  Garrett Press, 1970 [1890]), 9, a book whose title explicitly evoked the then recent work by celebrated explorer Henry Stanley, In Darkest Africa, 2 vols (New York: Scribner, 1890). 5 For a more complex approach, however, see Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire:  The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 6 See T.N. Tamuno, The Evolution of the Nigerian State:  The Southern Phase, 1898–1914 (London: Longman, 1972), 287–303 for details of the politics leading to the investigation. 7 James H. Mills and Patricia Barton, “Introduction,” in Drugs and Empires: Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication, C.  1500–C. 1930 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–16. 8 Ibid., 11. 9 Southern Nigeria, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Liquor Trade in Southern Nigeria (London, HMSO, 1909), Part I, Report [Cd.  4906] and Part II, Minutes of Evidence and Appendices [Cd. 4907]. Hereafter, Report or Evidence.

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1 0 Mills and Barton, “Introduction,” 13. 11 See Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 12 For a comprehensive history of the trade see Dmitri van den Bersselaar, The King of Drinks: Schnapps Gin from Modernity to Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 13 United Kingdom, National Archives, Public Records Office (PRO): Colonial Office (CO) 554/96 97702. 14 Tamuno, The Evolution of the Nigerian State, 290. 15 See Simon Heap, “The Quality of Liquor in Nigeria during the Colonial Era,” Itinerario XX (1997): 29–44. Also, van den Bersselaar, King of Drinks. 16 Tamuno, The Evolution of the Nigerian State, 296–7; Report; Letter to the Committee from Bishop Herbert Tugwell, April 25, 1909, Appendix C, Evidence, 445. 17 Lagos Standard, May 12, 1909. 18 Herbert Macaulay, “Liquor Traffic,” March 19, 1909, supplement to the Nigerian Chronicle, April 2, 1909. 19 Bishop Johnson, Evidence, 251. 20 Tamuno, The Evolution of the Nigerian State, 300. 21 Report, 3. 22 Evidence. Of the women one was African, the other European. The report breaks down witnesses according to position, occupation, and race, but not sex. 23 Nigerian Chronicle, testimony published in issues in May and June 1909. 24 Adam Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 2–8. 25 E.A. Ayandele, Holy Johnson: Pioneer of African Nationalism, 1836–1917 (London: Frank Cass, 1970). 26 Bishop James Johnson, Evidence, 250. 27 Ibid., 248–9. 28 Ibid., 249. 29 Report, 17. 30 John F. Richards, “Opium and the British Indian Empire: The Royal Commission of 1895,” Modern Asian Studies 26 (2002): 375–420. 31 Colonial Office to Sir Mackenzie Chalmers, April 6, 1909 annexure to Report, 19. 32 Ibid. 33 Letter to the Committee from Bishop Herbert Tugwell, April 25, 1909, Appendix C, Evidence, 442–8. 34 Ibid., 443. 35 Report, 13. 36 Dr. Arthur Smythe, Evidence, 377. 37 Rev. Emmanuel Showande, Evidence, 208. 38 Dr. Thomas Adam, Evidence, 74. 39 Bishop Johnson, Evidence, 251. 40 Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa:  Congo Francais, Corisco and Cameroons (London: Frank Cass, 1965 [1897]), 663. 41 Dr. John Currie, Evidence, 195. 42 Sir Mackenzie Chalmers, Evidence, 195. 43 Report, 11.

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Dr. Oguntula Sapara, Evidence, 143. Bishop Johnson, Evidence, 253. Evidence, 247. The Committee report in the end found no evidence of collective dependence. Report, 18. 48 Report, 11. 49 Adolphus Pratt, Evidence, 15. 50 Evidence, 86. An England-trained African physician saw “a few families prone” to alcohol abuse. Evidence, 257. One official described a case where a family had sought the help of a local healer in order to cure drunkenness. Evidence, 121. 51 Chief Oshogbo, Evidence, 125. 52 Evidence, 217 and 218. 53 Adolphus Pratt, African police official, Evidence, 15. 54 Akinale, Evidence, 191. 55 Evidence, 207. Bishop Tugwell took a position closer to Johnson: “Experience proves that the native is constitutionally incapable of being a moderate drinker, and unless under control will drink to excess.” Letter to The Times (London) read into Evidence, 101. Somewhat surprisingly, this shift in attitude was particularly pronounced among Protestant missionaries. See E.A. Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914: A Political and Social Analysis (New York: Humanities Press, 1967). 56 Rev. Josiah J. Ransome-Kuti, Evidence, 171; also Dr. Oguntola Sapara, Evidence, 143. 57 Jonathan Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), quote on 18. 58 Ibid., 15. 59 Report. 60 Colonial Office to Sir Mackenzie Chalmers, April 6, 1909 annexure to Report, 19. 61 Lagos Standard, February 19, 1908. 62 The Nigerian press from the 1890s and 1900s closely watched each indication of new race segregation measures and deplored each of them. 63 Report, 13. 64 See Philippa Levine, “Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics,” in The Oxford Handbook of The History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 43–61. 65 Jon E. Wilson, “Agency, Narrative, and Resistance,” in The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), 245–68. 66 For the history of alcohol regulation in Southern Africa, see Charles Ambler and Jonathan Crush, “Alcohol in Southern African Labor History,” in Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa, ed. Jonathan Crush and Charles Ambler (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 1–55; and the various essays in that volume. 67 Thomas Welsh and Kitoyi Ajasa, Evidence, 78. 68 Thomas Welsh, Evidence, 21. 69 Report, 13. 70 Ibid., 18. 71 See Ambler, “The Drug Empire.” 72 Native Races and Liquor Traffic United Committee, Reply to the Southern Nigeria Report [Pamphlet] (1910). Liquor trade supporter E.D. Morel in turn responded in 4 4 45 46 47

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his own pamphlet, The Attack Upon the Commission of Inquiry into the Spirit Trade in Southern Nigeria [Pamphlet] (Liverpool, 1910). See also, A.E. Blackburn, “Native Races and the Liquor Traffic,” The East and the West 15 (1917): 375–86; and Charles F. Harford, A New Africa: A Question of Urgency [Pamphlet] (London, 1918). 73 Kathleen Lodwick, Crusaders against Opium:  Protestant Missionaries in China, 1874–1917 (Lexington:  University of Kentucky Press, 1996); William McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History (London: Routledge, 2000) and William Walker, “ ‘A Grave Danger to the Peace of the East’: Opium and Imperial Rivalry in China, 1895–1920,” in Drugs and Empires, ed. Mills and Barton, 185–203. 74 PRO: FO/608 Peace Conference, A.J. Harding, Minute on the Liquor Traffic issue, March 18, 1919, 799/2/1 5833. An English translation of the Convention is included in George Louis Beer, African Questions at the Paris Peace Conference, ed. Lois H. Gray (New York, 1923), 500–506, quote 500. Beer was a member of the American delegation and its chief authority on colonial questions; the book is essentially a compilation of the papers he prepared in advance of the negotiations. The editorial “Introduction” (xvi–xxxi) provides an outline of the discussions surrounding the various conventions on colonial questions. 75 PRO CO 96/608 97796, Omanhene of Assin Attandasu and other chiefs to District Commissioner, Cape Coast Castle, June 24, 1919. 76 Ibid. 77 Lagos Standard, April 2, 1919. 78 Notably in colonial Ghana, where a commission was charged with investigating the issue. Commission of Inquiry regarding the Consumption of Spirits in the Gold Coast (Accra, 1929). Note, Bishop of London, letter to The Times (London), March 23, 1929. 79 I explore the gradual demise of the Treaty of St. Germain in a 2015 paper, “International Drug Control, Empire, and Decolonization,” Alcohol and Drug History Society Conference, Borders, Boundaries, and Contexts, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, June 18–21, 2015.

6

A question of social medicine or racial hygiene? The Bulgarian temperance discourse and eugenics in the interwar period, 1920–1940 Nikolay Kamenov

Na sobranie po perevyboram mestkoma na stancii N chlen sojuza Mikula javilsja vdrebezgi p’janyj. Rabochaja massa krichala: «Nedopustimo!», no predstavitel’ uchka vystupil s zashhitoj Mikuly, ob”jasniv, chto p’janstvo – social’naja bolezn’ i chto mozhno vybirat’ i vypivak v sostav mestkoma … Rabkor 2619 (Mikhail Bulgakov, O pol’ze alkogolizma, 1925) At the assembly for the re-election of the local committee of the N  – Railway station, Mikula, a union member, came pissed as a newt. The working masses shouted: “Impermissible!,” but the representative of the founding committee came to the defense of Mikula, explaining that drunkenness is a social disease and that it was therefore acceptable to elect drunkards … Rabkor 2619 (Mikhail Bulgakov, On the Advantages of Alcoholism, 1925)1

Setting the objectives of the new Bulgarian temperance journal Borba s Alkoolizma (Fight Against Alcoholism), the editor Haralampi Neichev commented in 1922, “alcohol, this unmatched destroyer of human society, of the individual and the family, completely unbothered, widely supported by ignorance, misery, tradition, by the state officials and capital, grows ever deeper roots in our unfortunate and weary country … Our goals are clear: radiating streams of light to uncover the nature of our insidious enemy in the spirit of truth and science.”2 Indeed, the journal later became an “Organ of the Union for Fight against Alcoholism, IOGT [Independent/ International Order of the Good Templars] in Bulgaria” and, although not Earlier versions of this chapter have been presented at international conferences in Gießen, Germany, and Monte Verità, Switzerland. I would like to thank all the colleagues, without whose comments and unflagging support this chapter could not have been written. Particular gratitude, however, goes to Harald Fischer-Tiné, Jana Tschurenev, and Francesco Spöring, with the help of whom many insights into temperance have come into being. Any deficiencies of the text remain, of course, mine.

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completely undisputed, it did emerge as something of a flagship of the Bulgarian interwar temperance movement, boasting a stable circulation of up to 3,000 copies a month until 1941.3 The journal did not exclusively limit its concerns to the question of alcoholism, but also published original and translated articles on other issues relevant to the global social hygiene movement at the time. Venereal diseases, tuberculosis, and drug abuse were also discussed on the pages of Borba, with much focus on the underlying social context causing these “scourges of modernity.” The socialist-leaning perspective of the journal was further underscored by the occasional ­critique – as already noted in the quotation above – of what was seen as alarming consummation of capital and state. Many authors believed that capitalism was directly responsible for the drink problem by providing a thriving market in cheap alcohol; yet capitalism was indirectly responsible, perhaps to greater social detriment, by creating an impoverished working class bound to drink. Writers viewed the state, dependent on excise taxes, as having an ambivalent role in creating an alcohol problem at best and as being deeply implicated at worst. Even more surprisingly, clinicians and psychiatrists also supported the “social hygienic/medical” understanding of temperance. Writing in 1937 on the subject of therapeutic measures for “chronic alcoholics” the psychiatrist Dr.  Uzunov noted that “without doubt the conditions of the external environment  – the general social conditions – are conducive in our reality to the rise of alcoholism. The hard work for mere survival, the misery, the excessive irrational work, the bad example of family and company, the organized supply by state and capital … all incite alcoholism.”4 The eugenics movement in the young Balkan state was another, albeit looser, association implicitly addressing demands to the state to stem alcoholism in the interwar period. Arguing in line with German Rassenhygieniker and contrary to the temperance activists, Bulgarian eugenicists shifted the emphasis from the “original” social causes to what was perceived to be the consequences of alcohol abuse. Thus, Stefan Konsulov, one of the leading figures in this movement, commented on what he saw as a betrayal of ­posterity – “[t]‌he alcoholism of the parents is a crime against the children. In this regard, education would startle many who have already succumbed to the vice, [and] would protect others, who in their ignorance would likely yield to this temptation. If all these people had enough culture and anti-alcohol instruction, education would have sufficed in the fight against this social evil.”5 Lamenting that the Bulgarian society was far from such a high educational standard and reckoning that the majority of the population would not be able to summon enough strength to resist the alcohol

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evil, Konsulov concluded that society and state should take on responsibility in such cases. “From a social perspective, all measures for the gradual elimination of alcoholism, even the most draconian ones, are completely justified.”6 Written in the wake of the German National Socialist Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses – translated as Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in English – Konsulov’s comments came as nothing short of an appeal for forced sterilization. At first glance these two temperance articulations  – a social hygienist’s one and a eugenicist’s  – seem like they could not be more distinct. Particularly from the perspective of negative eugenics,7 social hygiene appears to be counterproductive, indeed designed to help or alleviate the conditions of people exhibiting “undesirable traits.” Historical hindsight tends to equate eugenics with the National Socialist crimes, falsely limiting it to the radical right of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, leftist social hygiene programs and eugenics in Bulgaria – as elsewhere – were deeply interwoven.8 Many social democrats drawn to positivist thinking identified eugenics as a most appropriate measure for dealing with mounting social problems. This intersection is prominent in the literature devoted to anti-alcohol campaigning in the interwar period. Although admittedly the temperance periodicals in Bulgaria did not promote sterilization, they were still inculcated with articles on heredity and, thus, at least implicitly suggested eugenic measures to fight against alcoholism. This chapter deals precisely with the juncture of social hygiene and eugenics in the case of temperance campaigns in Bulgaria, disentangling different scientific and political influences, but also pointing to important distinctions between the proponents of different camps that crystalized in the years preceding World War II. For this purpose, the article outlines intellectual developments of the global social hygiene movement before scrutinizing its specific effects, forms, and articulations within the Bulgarian context. The concentration on the Bulgarian case sheds light on some infrequently studied phenomena such as the counter-eugenic thought that developed in the late 1930s. By analyzing these diverse currents, I hope to draw attention to the complexities and plural nature of the ideas of heredity, degeneration, and eugenics – in its positive and negative coating  – and their entanglement with social hygiene and temperance in particular. Before we proceed, however, a word on the modern history of Bulgaria might be necessary to set the stage. An offshoot of the declining nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and partially a result of a social revival and homegrown national independence movement, the modern state of Bulgaria celebrated its independence at the end of the 1877–8

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Russo-Turkish War.9 The next forty years, however, witnessed a series of military conflicts between the Bulgarian state and its neighbors in continual attempts to settle territorial issues. It was only after World War I and the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine that such entangled Balkan irredentist dreams seemed at last gone for good. The disappointment from what was generally believed to be a “national catastrophe,” translated into a more introverted project of development and generally accelerated projects of “catching up.” Most important for our study was the sustained, and from 1920 onwards hastened, drive for professionalization and “modernization” in the medical sphere and health provision.10 The interwar period, however, was also marked by political tensions – the 1923 September communist uprising put down by the government and the subsequent communist bombing of the St. Nedelya church are perhaps most illustrative of this point – as well as what might be called authoritarian experiments in the 1930s.11

Temperance and the tapestry of social hygiene The social hygiene movement took shape toward the end of the nineteenth century and reached its peak in the interwar period, leading in various contexts to new legislation aiming to improve the fitness of the populations of various nation states.12 The main concerns of the movement were ailments and diseases perceived as having a social background and/or consequences that strained and threatened the social organism.13 In many Western countries, medical doctors and reformers focused most prominently on venereal diseases, tuberculosis, alcoholism, and mental illness. The particular legislative and educational measures varied from country to country.14 They were partially informed by earlier public health campaigns as well as reform crusades, but in general exceeded in effect any previous form of bio-political intervention. In the United States, for instance, “[i]‌n the course of relatively brief period of time, a little over a decade, (1907–1920) the social hygienists were able to bring about far reaching legislative and bureaucratic changes with respect to sexuality that dwarfed the changes accomplished by their predecessors in the purity crusade.”15 The movement was also instrumental in introducing new forms of sex education that moved “away from purity and solidified the place of social hygiene as a reform discourse” in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States.16 Similarly, advocating prevention of alcoholism brought hygiene and temperance classes to schools in Britain.17 Scientific temperance instruction in the United States also tried– albeit not always successfully – to label its cause as “scientific” and a matter of social hygiene.18 The social welfare policies in Germany

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in the 1920s have been characterized by Paul Weindling as dominated by social hygiene and “socialization of health” in general.19 Around the same time, social hygiene as an academic discipline entered medical universities. Alfred Grotjahn, conventionally credited with the invention of the fateful term sozialhygiene, held the newly formed chair with the same name at the University of Berlin in 1920. In the Soviet Union too, the novel discipline of Social Hygiene enjoyed a flourishing period in the early 1920s eventually losing momentum toward the end of the decade by which time identifying illness with deficient social conditions came to be seen as a critique of the Soviet regime, as Pavel Vasilyev documents in Chapter 8.20 Most of the social hygiene schemes, particularly its manifold eugenic articulations, aimed at the improvement of the national fitness and health as well as “racial betterment” of future generations. Nonetheless, the social hygiene programs were not simply implemented more or less simultaneously by various nation states, but also rather had a transnational  – if not a supranational  – dimension. On the one hand they were advocated by institutions such as the League of Nations Health Organization, the International Labour Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Pasteur Institute, to name just a few.21 The Rockefeller Foundation was incidentally also instrumental in the framing of the Bulgarian interwar Public Health legislation – some of the health measures “proved to be a translation of the health welfare provisions in New  York State  – the state where the first Bulgarian scholars on a Rockefeller grant had been trained in public health.”22 On the other hand, transnational epistemic communities were also instrumental in the dissemination of an arguably “universal” scientific “truth” of academic medicine and social hygiene in particular.23 Not surprisingly, medical doctors, members of such an epistemic community, were the ones who introduced the notions of public health, preventive medicine, and social hygiene in Bulgaria. Public health and sanitary laws, promulgated around the brink of the twentieth century, had a lasting effect on the healthcare in the newly formed nation. The debates looming around the time revolved around the ideas of Dr. Peter Orahovac and Dr. Marin Rusev. Orahovac, who had studied medicine in Moscow, was in favor of a system providing wider access and focusing on sanitation, similar to the Russian zemstvo medicine.24 Rusev and his adherents, most of whom had studied in universities in Western Europe, were in favor of a system emphasizing the role of private praxis.25 Notwithstanding such debates, it seems that the state’s ability to intervene in matters of public health was severely limited by financial and personnel shortcomings before World War I.26 Even the comprehensive 1929 Law of Public Health remained to a large

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degree “wishful thinking.”27 More important for our study, however, was the healthcare program developed by Haralmpi Neichev for the Workers’ Social Democratic Party in 1919, only a couple of years before he devoted his energies almost exclusively to the fight against alcoholism.28 Neichev was a graduate of the Military Medical Academy in Saint Petersburg and worked for the prominent Russian literary journal Severny Vestnik, associated with Narodniks and socialist ideas at the time.29 In the program titled “Sanitary-social policy,” Neichev spoke in favor of various reforms in the Ministry of Health, suggested a mandatory sanitary work and puericultural education for young women and singled out tuberculosis, malaria, mental sickness, alcoholism, prostitution, and venereal diseases as the main concerns of social medicine. Indeed, according to Neichev the political and medical aspirations were identical: Socialism is the strongest, the most secure, the healthiest hygiene, the best assainissement [асенизация], the mightiest remedy. Socialism and hygiene is one and the same thing. They both want the reforming of life and putting it on a new basis, that would guarantee the development and survival of the individual and the mass, that would heal the whole life and put forward measures, that would not aim at curing ailments but at their prevention, that would fight the very roots of evils and misfortune at its stem.30

The multi-faceted political entanglements of the social hygiene movement in Europe and Bulgaria cannot be discussed here at length. Suffice it to note, that there was often an apparent overlapping of cadres, with many social hygiene activists having affiliations with the left part of the political spectrum, while many social democratic projects entailed medical programs emphasizing prevention and hygiene. We will return to these entanglements later in the chapter in the discussion of eugenics. Local political agendas aside, it is fascinating to see how deeply the Bulgarian temperance discourse was embedded in international academic discourses on social hygiene as, for example, endorsed by the Swiss polymath Auguste Forel (1848–1931).31 Forel, an entomologist, psychiatrist, social democrat, and perhaps the most important figure in the scientific temperance movement in continental Europe, wrote a letter for the inaugural issue of the Borba journal: “With pleasure I acknowledge the new anti-alcohol journal, edited by you … Today, hygiene must go forward, breaking out of its earlier individual frame and becoming truly social.”32 Subsequently, although Borba was formally devoted to the fight against alcoholism, the materials published in the journal often discussed other “social” diseases, arguably related to alcohol or social hygiene in general.

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One constant concern for the temperance activists was the seemingly causal relationship between alcoholism and venereal diseases. This, again, was perfectly in line with the position of Forel, who repeatedly claimed that the majority of patients suffering from a venereal disease were infected under an inebriated condition.33 Borba was often able to achieve a balancing act between a discourse portraying women as a vehicle of such infections and one framing women as innocent victims of drunken husbands suffering from what in today’s terms would be denoted as sexually transmitted diseases. An article by Iv. P. Andreev, for example, opened with the remark that alcohol “presents an evil gift to the woman and family  – sexual diseases,” but also discussed the possibility of establishing controlled red light districts and claiming that “alcoholism and venereality [венеризмътъ] are brothers by birth.”34 The article ended with an upbeat claim that in the combination of “feminism [феминизма] and anti-alcoholism the liberated woman would be conceived and born.”35 Another article in the same issue of the journal, this time written by one Miss Z. Stankova from Vidin, under the title “Let us draw the woman to our cause” put more emphasis on the intrinsic liability of fathers and husbands. The young woman, daughter of an alcoholic, is completely desperate. Her foremost education comes in the form of beating and vulgar swearing, courtesy of her drunken father! … She becomes engaged with a person she does not know, whose past she is unaware of, becoming often a victim not only of an alcoholic husband, but also of various venereal diseases.36

Although such depictions could be paralleled with the campaigns led by British feminists against sexual vice and masculine domination around the turn of the century, the Bulgarian interwar temperance discourse fell decidedly short of a demand for political equality.37 Indeed, even the author of the aforementioned article conditioned political rights on the maternal status – “Only when her [the woman’s] appearance ceases to be her raison d’être, only when she satisfies her maternal duty, she can freely enter the sphere of public and social work.”38 Even when the “local option” – public votes in villages on pub licenses modeled after the earlier practice in the United States – took off in the 1920s and, according to some estimates by the ministry of health, hundreds of pubs were closed after local referenda, women’s political participation remained a point of tension.39 Addressing the parliament in 1929 on the occasion of the new Public Health Bill, Neichev commented on women’s right to vote in pub-closing referenda: No race, no family can exist without the woman. They will say: she does not drink; she does not need to vote. Yes, but when the husband comes back drunk, she is

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the one who gets beaten, she is the one who has to go without food. That is the time when he wants intercourse, because you know what alcohol is – it brings up all the vilest [низменни, from the Russian низменен] of instincts. And that is why children are weak! … Our wish to endow voting rights for women for the local option is absolutely minimal. The Women’s Union, has probably addressed you with their demands, perhaps exaggerated, according to you. After the war in many places women have complete political rights. In Sweden there was a woman minister. Here, however, the issue is closing pubs [кръчмите] and there is absolutely no danger for anyone. This is a question of defending the nation.40

Although women were only granted the vote for parliamentary elections in 1938, and only those who were married or widowed,41 article 195 of the Law for Public Health extended the right to vote for the local option to “all men and women over 21.” The depiction of sexual vice in the temperance literature was another issue that could hardly overcome the bridge between its moral and religious discursive predecessors and modern “scientific” argumentation. Neichev, for example, claimed that “onanism is a form of deception of the Creator, it is a shameful insult [позорно оскърбление] to Mother Nature, it is a shameless exploitation of the highest endowment of human kind.”42 Another author, a teacher under the name of Bor. Iliev, however, portrayed masturbation as a social, and even an infectious, disease and consequently a concern of social hygiene. If we take Francis Bacon’s thought “Scientia est sapientia” to be correct, we would definitely conclude that it also refers to the sexual question, i.e. that knowledge about this issue is also needed. For me it is a fact, the sphere of sexuality is an enigma for the pupils, their lack of knowledge with concern to the sexual life and its development, leading to all sorts of perversions and succumbing to the dreadful vice of onanism. It could be safely claimed that the latter is based above all on ignorance and lack of knowledge … Due to such ignorance many pupils get addicted to onanism … There was a case in which one pupil infected a whole class with this vice.43

That the scientia sexualis, a pupil’s familiarity with which the author is pleading for, was “subordinated in the main to the imperatives of a morality whose divisions it reiterated under the guise of the medical norm,”44 had been well established for different contexts in recent years. In the Bulgarian case the discourse over hygiene in schools picked up pace around the turn of the century and a journal devoted to the subject started in 1905.45 The fitness of the progeny and, by extension, the fitness of the newly independent nation state, was to be improved by the means of a new professional figure bridging medical and educational work  – the teacher-doctor. The competences of this new hybrid figure extended beyond the therapeutic

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realm and well into the pedagogical, teaching children of the fundamental “sanitary demands of the body, clothing, and dwelling,” about infectious and hereditary diseases as well as the ones brought about by poor living conditions.46 What stands out in the quoted passage above, however, is the addictive characteristic of onanism, which it shared with alcoholism. Not only was onanism a “disease of the will,” thus reserving a place in the popular scientific temperance literature, but it further exhibited a contagious character, calling for sanitary and social hygiene measures.47

Eugenics, “racial poisons,” and temperance: a global discourse In a seminal work on eugenics in Latin America published in 1991, Nancy Stepan has prefigured some of the post-colonial theory and global history debates of the 1990s and 2000s, noting that there is a need to appreciate “the contribution a region such as Latin America can make to our knowledge of how ideas become part of the complex fabric of social and political life.”48 One of the foremost problems in the historiography of eugenics and racial hygiene has thus been its constant association with Nazi Germany. Stepan has criticized this on two accounts. “First, it conceals crucial continuities in eugenics between the fascist and pre-fascist periods. Second, it tempts historians to avoid discussing the involvement of many other nations in the eugenics experiment.”49 To this critique I would add a third, in my opinion, crucial point – the equation of fascism and race hygiene tends to obfuscate the role of eugenics as a vehicle of and for the agendas of other political movements and parties. Surging research on the issue has in recent years to a large degree addressed these deficiencies.50 Eugenics could be found also present throughout the political spectrum. According to one author the “variety of political leanings suggests that, for some eugenicists, political identification was opportunistic, a platform for advancing their technocratic dreams of controlled progress and medical care.”51 For others, such eugenics and political party affiliations meant professional and economic advancement.52 What could be added here is the reverse perspective, namely the advancement of political projects through the eugenic fad. It appealed even to Spanish anarchists and early Soviet communists, albeit admittedly only for a limited period.53 Indeed, its main characteristic in Europe well into the 1930s – to borrow from a colleague writing on the Polish eugenics movement  – was its progressivism.54 Turning our attention away from what at first glance seems to be theoretically incompatible, studies have shed light on the deeply rooted affinities between social democratic projects and eugenics in Germany before 1933.55 A genealogical

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analysis of the aspiration of creating a better society has even led to the suggestion that eugenic ideas have their origin in socialist thought.56 This connection is by no means restricted to the history of the German social democratic project. Leading figures in the Fabian Society, such as Beatrice and Sydney Webb, expressed ideas on heredity and degeneration, which with hindsight have a distinct eugenic aftertaste.57 In particular, the fear of degeneration caused by alcoholism played an important role in socialist thought. In this sense, I would suggest that the scientific approach toward alcoholism and its articulation in the form of popular temperance campaigns in the beginning of the twentieth century have been instrumental in bridging the respective agendas of socialism, social hygiene, and eugenics. According to Paul Weindling temperance and anti-alcoholism organizations in particular “were the breeding ground for later, more comprehensive programs of ‘racial’ and ‘social’ hygiene.”58 Thus, the problem of alcoholism and degeneration marked Grotjahn’s first endeavors in combining social science and medicine around the turn of the century. Alcoholism was related according to him to “a range of degenerative conditions such as obesity and heart disease, as well as prostitution and criminality.”59 Alfred Ploetz, remembered today for coining the term Rassenhygiene, did an internship at the lunatic asylum Burghölzli near Zürich.60 Significantly, his training took place at a time when the aforementioned Auguste Forel was the director of the clinic and performed sterilizations and castrations of people with mental illnesses and alcoholics.61 Although Ploetz “had harbored certain proeugenic sentiments” even before starting his medical education, he “moved a step closer to articulating the need for race hygiene as a result of it. His experiences in the psychiatric hospital acquainted him with the so-called mental defectives and focused his attention to one cause of the problem: alcoholism.”62 Largely because of scientific and social hygiene discussions with Forel on the subject of alcohol and heredity, Ploetz became an abstainer. Later he also “found that the campaign against alcoholism was an effective channel for popularizing racial hygiene and winning over medical experts to the cause.”63 Thus, the international congress against alcoholism that Ploetz helped organize in Bremen in 1903 provided him with long-lasting and valuable contacts and a platform for promoting racial hygiene. Ernst Rüdin, another infamous eugenicist widely recognized for his later role in framing the National Socialist racial hygiene policy, was the one to draw the strongest parallel of heredity, degeneration, and alcoholism at the Bremen congress. According to him, alcohol had a detrimental – if not exterminating – character for the “racial evolution.” Rüdin came to the conclusion that abortion and marriage laws should be imposed to meet

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this problem, the starkest expression of which was the idea that alcoholics should be subjected to a “small operation” if they necessarily want to get married.64 The notion that alcohol was an inhibitor of “racial evolution” or the even more pronounced idea of alcohol-as-racial-poison needs some elucidation. Many commentators have portrayed eugenics as a “pseudo-science.” Although with hindsight such a definition appears very convincing, it tends to confuse the historical reality of eugenics as a widely accepted science and the fact that in many cases it proved exceedingly persuasive from an epistemic perspective. At this particular juncture, the theories dealing with alcoholism played a specific role – at a first glance they appear to a baffling degree neo-Lamarckian at a time when the research of August Weissmann and Gregor Mendel had supposedly proven that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. Nonetheless, the discussions and scientific uncertainties of the time should not be lightly dismissed. Medical doctors were bewildered by a number of infectious, physiological, and genetic phenomena that could not easily be reconciled with the idea of the non-hereditary nature of acquired characteristics. Two points are especially significant for our study. Congenital infections caused by various microbiological agents, leading to an irregular development of the fetus present one such phenomenon. Although “venereal diseases” seemed to be an “acquired characteristic” – a disease obtained in an individual’s lifetime – they still could be transmitted through the placenta to the fetus. Further, teratogenic effects – caused among other things by alcohol consumption during pregnancy – also could not easily be reconciled with theories of hereditary characteristics. Not accidentally both alcoholism and venereal diseases were defined as “racial poisons” – in tune with the belief that although they might be acquired they could still lead “to permanent, hereditary degenerations that in the long run could affect entire populations or nations.”65 Such understandings admittedly echoed older, nineteenth-century ideas of degeneration, but were also squarely set in the scientific discussions taking place in the beginning of the twentieth century.66 Indeed, the point of departure for Forel’s understanding of the hereditary problem of alcoholism was based on Weissmann’s germ theory. Thus, Forel explained at the Fourth International Congress against Alcoholism at The Hague in 1892, that there were three mechanisms through which alcohol exerted a degenerative influence. First, it could poison the fetus in the utero (something which today would be denoted as a teratogenic effect); second, it could poison the germ plasm – blastotoxie – if one of the parents was inebriated during the coitus of conception; finally, the germ plasm could be poisoned by chronic alcoholism – blastophtorie.67

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Echoes of the racial degeneration discourse in the Balkans68 In Bulgaria, hereditary concerns first appeared in the so-called statutes of the Exarchate – the marriage regulation of the newly formed Bulgarian Church. Church statutes, voted in parliament in the 1880s, listed requirements for the conclusion of a lawful marriage, including a prerequisite for marriage that neither party was suffering from “insanity or epilepsy.”69 In the interwar period the rationale for premarital certificates gradually shifted from the exclusive church right over marriage to a public health issue administered by the state.70 By the end of the 1920s a small group of professionals with a German academic background, among others the already mentioned Stefan Konsulov, became devoted exclusively to “racial hygiene.” The group took an institutional form in 1928 under the name Bulgarian Society for Racial Hygiene, but soon came to an end. A  second attempt to establish a formal umbrella organization took place in 1934, during the putschist, right-wing government of Kimon Georgiev, this time under the new name Bulgarian Society for Eugenics. The relaunch was marked by the publishing of the journal Nation and Progeny [Народ и потомство], but the organization also failed within the span of a year.71 “In order to gain their agenda an institutional harbor they joined the Bulgarian Society for Hygiene and Preventive Medicine in 1936, an association which likewise dealt with eugenic issues, but not as its primary aim and then only on a rather moderate level.”72 All in all, the social impact of Bulgarian eugenicists has been evaluated as modest, their intellectual aspirations remaining “dreams to a large extent.”73 Another scholar has noted that “ultimately”  – that is to say until 1945  – “the potential of eugenics in Bulgaria to inspire radical, transformative action in the name of the ‘national organism’ remained to a great extent latent; the effects that it produced were more rhetorical and less regulatory.”74 In this, a parallel might be drawn to the eugenic projects in the Scandinavian context, where eugenic organizations “were weak. It was an area for expertise rather than democratic politics.”75 In contrast to sterilization laws in the various Scandinavian welfare states, however, such initiatives in Bulgaria failed. The only legal articulation of negative eugenics came in the form of marital health regulations in the above-mentioned statutes or the Public Health Law of 1929. New research, however, has drawn attention to the positive eugenics regulation. Maternal and child healthcare services starting from the early 1920s were informed by social hygiene notions and culminated in the pro-natalist law for Mnogodetni – literally translating as ‘with/of many children’ – families.76 Such developments were not dissimilar to state engagements with positive eugenics elsewhere, as for

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example in France and the Sheppard-Towner Act in the United States.77 Further, a eugenics discourse disseminating ideas of hereditary, degeneration, and even the infamous cost–benefit analysis – juxtaposing the state’s expenses for ‘feeble minded’ vis-à-vis the financial difficulties of healthy families – was very prominent in temperance literature until at least 1933, thus reaching wide sections of the population. Articles on alcohol and degeneration were published regularly in the journal Borba. Indeed, it could be claimed that the temperance literature in the period was inculcated with the question of heredity and the degenerative character of alcohol. The results of parents’ drinking on the progeny were summed up by Neichev as follows, “epilepsy, idiocy, impaired growth, degenerates, weakness, proneness to disease and lability, neurasthenia and hysteria of the children, etc. Infant mortality is substantially higher.”78 Usually, such articles drew from an amalgamation of translated articles of scientific studies, but the journal also featured some original contributions by some prominent European scholars – Auguste Forel being a case in point here. The Borba journal, however, was not the only temperance periodical publishing extensively on the issues of degeneration and racial poison. Journals associated with the Bulgarian Temperance Federation (BTF) were particularly active. Two figures need to be mentioned with this regard here. Dr. Dimo Burilkov, who had studied at Odessa and Lausanne, headed different social hygiene initiatives in the 1920s and 1930s, was chief editor of Sober Fight (Trezva borba) and a chairman of the BTF between 1933 and 1941.79 Burilkov published in various forms on the question of “social hygiene.” In his book on the Social Fight against the Venereal Diseases – published in 1937 and subtitled with the remark “against social diseases social measures are needed” – Burilkov ventured into the question of prostitution. “From the perspective of preventing venereal diseases, a prostitute is every woman or every man, that yield to indiscriminate sexual relations with many individuals, independently of the reason  – be it sexual deviance, disease or for money.”80 In what could be denoted as the manifesto of the BTF – a booklet under the title Fight for Sobriety  – Burilkov made an attempt to systematically list what he saw as medical, social, and political entanglements of alcohol consumption, claiming that “the misdeeds of morphinism and cocainism are relatively inconsequential” in comparison to the widespread ones brought by alcoholism.81 The text freely acknowledged that the alcohol question was related “to important fiscal interests of the state,” but reminded its readers that scientific research has “conclusively determined the following: 1) the alcohol is poison for the organism …; 4) the

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alcohol, through the parents affects the progeny, which is underdeveloped, weak, has high mortality [!]‌and a high number of neurological and mental diseases [нервни и душевни разтройства].”82 Dr. Nikola Stanchev was another activist who worked side-by-side with Burilkov in the federation and on the publishing/writing front. Having studied medicine in Vienna in the early 1920s, Stanchev seems to have been particularly well versed in the language of degeneration, publishing in various periodicals on the looming “degeneration and death” of the Bulgarian people. “Many would smile disparagingly to this call and would say ‘Futile …’ The demographic data in Bulgaria, however, brings us to contemplation, gives rise to sad thoughts and causes our soul to rebel.”83 In particular, he wrote many times on the “exogenous fetal damage” – Blastophtorie.84 In an article under the title “If you get drunk, expect an idiot!” the question of intoxication during conception  – as captured in Forel’s notion of blastotoxie – was addressed on the pages of Borba. The article opened with the recognition that many scientists were inclined to acknowledge only the role of chronic alcoholism and not the occasional inebriety in the degeneration of the progeny. Nonetheless, there were indications that a single slip might be disastrous. Referring to a study conducted by Italian scientist Pier Luigi Fiorani-Gallotta at Padua University, the text went into describing a healthy family – an intelligent tradesman and his intelligent, normal wife, who already had created a healthy son and three daughters, all of them normal. Friends of the father managed to sway him to drink excessively once. He comes back home inebriated and has a sexual intercourse [полово общуване] with his wife. The fruit of this is a daughter, now around 10  years old, microcephalic, a complete idiot, unable to speak: she expresses all her impressions and sensations (warmth, hunger, sleep) in incomprehensible, incoherent sounds. The mimics of her face are also completely idiotic.85

Such articles were sometimes flanked by visual materials circulating transnationally among temperance and eugenic activists. Such materials included photographs of miscarried fetuses, depicting fetal malformations attributed to alcohol consumption. One particular visual, published a number of times in different temperance periodicals of the time, including the children’s magazine Little Sober Chap (Trezvache), depicted a group of children, one of them supported by crutches. Under the title “Alcoholic polio” [Alkoolen detski paralich], the suggestive picture was accompanied with the transcription of the conversation (Figure 6.1). “Boy, why do you have crutches? Well, because my father frequented the pubs!”

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Figure  6.1.  This cartoon is supplemented by a short dialogue beneath, reading “Boy, why do you have crutches? Well, because my father frequented the pubs!” Source:  Borba I:  5 (1922), 72; another version to be found in Trezvache (then still Spirtomrazec) IV: 3 (1927), 3. Courtesy of SS. Cyril and Methodius National Library.

Race and racial hygiene in the 1930s Temperance campaigns in Bulgaria seem to have had a broad public support, as evidenced by the large circulations of periodicals, but also the popularity of public lectures and demonstrations during the interwar period. Temperance activists were more successful in spreading their gospel in comparison to the eugenicists that proposed more drastic actions. Further, anti-alcohol activists were not simply influential in swaying public opinion, but also in terms of legal initiatives and regulations. Thus, the Ministry of Health created an Inspectorate of Alcoholism in 1929, while various demands of the campaigners were met in the Public Health Law of the same

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year. Addressing the parliament on the issue of the bill, Neichev started his speech with a reference to alcohol as “racial poison”: The issue, which I will address today, has not been touched upon by our laws so far, but times are such, that it is essential to inquire into the factors that are destroying our race. Our current bill is significant not because it foresees a fight against the repercussions of the evils that are eating into the public’s health, but because it aims at preventing the populace [народа] from these evils.86

Such statements notwithstanding, it is imperative to note the more complex attitude of the anti-alcoholism campaigners with regard to eugenics and race. In one crucial regard the temperance journals took a more moderate position. Although, as we already noted, the temperance periodicals were inundated with the debate on hereditary issues and alcoholism, the notion of sterilization was hardly ever discussed, let alone endorsed.87 In contrast to this, the eugenic society, and Konsulov in particular, saw a forced depriving of fertility as a viable option.88 Additionally, it should be noted that although alcohol was a factor “destroying our race,” the notion of race in the Bulgarian temperance literature oscillated between an all-encompassing human race, endangered by alcohol, to a more conventional vehicle of nationalism and – if not racism – racialism. Scientific temperance managed to frame the notion of race within a discourse of human race facing the detriments of an external threat – alcohol and, as a consequence, degeneration.89 Authors have recently pointed to this more historically elusive side of race – the notion of race allowed for various interpretations, offered “a common ground for conflict,” and could even be employed by Universalists.90 A  similar articulation of race took place even in the context of German racial hygiene – some left-leaning eugenicists “preferred ‘Rassehygiene’; the omitted ‘n’ indicated that they were speaking of only one race, the human species.”91 The Bulgarian temperance literature knew, however, more racialist readings of the notion of race. Although articles often challenged and reversed conventions, depicting idyllic “African” settings devoid of alcohol and a “modern” setting, plagued by alcohol, venereal diseases, and war, there were also slippages of color. Neichev, who traveled in the late 1930s to a conference in Finland, claimed that without any doubt, Finland was one of the leaders among the most peaceful and civilized [културни] nations of the world. “Like Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Finland glitters with its civilization, as much external – technical and material – as internal – spiritual and of the soul, that is of course more precious and rare.”92 More disturbing were earlier statements by Neichev, where instead of civilization

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the key word was “race.” After visiting Sweden Neichev wrote the following panegyrics: And the people?  – Children! Genuine children! Their rusty, flaxen blond hairs, ash-blue and dove-like eyes, breathing with such sincerity, with such trust, such childrenness [детскост, sic], as if the whole country is populated by immature people, ready to believe in any fable you tell them. In comparison to these virgin [девствени] people we are dodgers and slyboots, self-seeking and egoistic. Swedes are a smart, developed, [and] deep race … There is no apish fashion, no rouged mugs [червисаните мутри], nor shameful dances or the provocative wooing typical of the distorted nations, in the list of which we are also enrolled!93

One can only imagine the bafflement that these statements caused the readers of Borba. This discursive strategy of self-depreciation, however, was not completely unfamiliar to the temperance literature – the reports and news from around the world often swung between positive role models and intimidating stories of ruin and degradation. What is noteworthy in the quotation is the framing of the Swedish role model around the notion of race. Still, Swedes were a “developed” race, leaving space for progress beyond biology, while fashion and the application of rouge could seemingly still be conditioned by social upbringing and education. The usage of race was further complicated after the National Socialist Party rose to power in Germany. Indeed, it seems that the German racial hygiene legal initiatives had a sobering – to play with the word – effect on the temperance activists in Bulgaria. In the period until 1933 it was not unusual for the Borba journal to have a first-page article on “inheritance and alcohol,”94 or to display Swiss post stamps – “Le schnaps ruine la famille et la race!”  – as an example of progressive state involvement (Figure  6.2). At least in Borba, ­however, articles on degeneration, racial poison, and hereditary encumbrance were virtually non-existent in the span between 1933 and 1939. Such issues resurfaced in 1940, addressed only occasionally and in the form of translated articles from the German press, while no suggestions to follow this model were made. Neichev’s own articles instead focused on the detrimental effects of alcohol on the body – liver failures and brain damage, the damage on cell structure, and the effects on the ability to work. This particular caesura is even more apparent in the works of Asen Zlatarov. Zlatarov, who had studied chemistry in Geneva between 1904 and 1907 and held a doctoral title in physics and chemistry from the University of Grenoble, was an internationally renowned scientist and a major public figure in Bulgaria right until his untimely death in December 1936. Among other interests, Zlatarov also devoted time to scientific work on the

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Figure 6.2.  In this figure the editor of Borba provided photographs of postage stamps found in his own correspondence with colleagues from Italy and Switzerland. The caption on top informs the reader that this visual was also sent to ministers in Bulgaria with the purpose to show them how alcoholism is fought abroad, while the other caption notes that such postage stamps were used to “conduct broad anti-alcohol propaganda.” Source:  How they fight against alcoholism in foreign lands,  Borba  VIII:  2 (1929), 25. Courtesy of SS. Cyril and Methodius National Library.

chemistry of alcohol and to public temperance activities. His first work on the subject was written during his specialization in Munich and published in Sofia in 1910, in the Journal for Contemporary Hygiene [Съвременна хигиена] under the title “Fight against Alcohol” [Борба с алкохола]. The author claimed, “irrespective of the form of intake of alcohol, it remains a poison, which destroys the nervous system and causes feeblemindedness [слабоумие], idiocy, lunacy and crime.”95 Further, Zlatarov listed the effects of drunkenness [пиянството] and remarkably his point number six was titled “the decay of race.”

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If the dangers of alcohol were limited to the individual, who was consuming it, its destructive action would still have been not so wide-reaching. But alcohol affects also the progeny, because the children of alcoholics are weak, feeble, hypochondriacs [ипохондрици], incapable, susceptible to tuberculosis and scrofula, and usually become themselves alcoholics.96

Zlatarov became a stern supporter of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, writing an exceedingly positive account of his visit to the Land of the Soviets [Страната на съветите]. With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, Zlatarov publicly equated racism and Hitlerism, claiming that race theories of the “Gobineau type” were reactionary and antagonistic to the working class. In an interview published in November 1933, he cited a speech made by Adolf Hitler, in which the latter claimed that “there are no classes. Class is caste [каста, most probably referring to Hitler’s notion of Stand/Stände] and caste is race.”97 In response to this assertion, Zlatarov referred to “honest, unforged science,” personified by Franz Weidenreich and Franz Boas, who had proven the fallacious character of racist theories. Zlatarov’s critique of Nazi racism reverberated in the whole of society and the temperance press of the late 1930s in particular. Thus, in a broad article in January 1936, titled “Alcoholism and Progeny” for the temperance journal Sober Thought (Trezva misul), Nikolay Iovchev reviewed some scientific publications dealing with alcoholism, heredity and degeneration. Again, here the author came to the conclusion that the fetus “degenerates” when the germ plasm of either of the parents is poisoned or when the mother is drinking during pregnancy. Nonetheless, he concluded, “all evidence points to the fact that the alcoholic heredity is a temporary heredity.”98 And further, “dipsomania could only occur under particular conditions; if we remove these conditions – also if we teach a person, prone to drunkenness, in the spirit of temperance – in a short span of time, it will be possible to expunge all negative effects of alcohol over humanity.”99 According to the author, the function of the temperance movement consisted in promoting “rational changes” within the existing social framework. An even firmer position came in the form of a highly polemic article written by Iovchev a month later addressing the question of eugenics. A cause for agitation was a lecture given by Stefan Konsulov in February of 1936 in the salon of the Slavic Society.100 During his talk, Konsulov had claimed that the degeneration of the ancient Greek and Roman societies had taken place by means of low reproduction rates on behalf of the high classes, combined with the high fertility on the lowest rungs of society. In his article Iovchev vehemently rejected such speculation, claiming that “the Greek and Roman cultures degraded because these people raised caste division into a cult – some degenerated due to penury and privation, others due to opulence

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and debauchery.”101 Iovchev referred also to Koropotkin and claimed that humans have evolved beyond “natural selection,” nowadays it was “mutual help – for strong and weak alike – that assured prosperity of the whole in the fight for survival.” Iovchev ended with the grim remark that Konsulov followed blindly the “German experience” and as a consequence, if he was able to exercise any executive power – as a director of public health for ­example – he would “improve” the country through “sterilization and neutering.”102 The journal Sober Thought notably published articles in the cosmopolitan idiom Esperanto, suggesting a readership with left, internationalist, and pacifist inclinations. One article dealt with racism and contemporary social life – “Rasismo kaj la nuntempa sociala vivo de la popoloj.”103 It claimed that no races exist but a human race – “pure and impure races do not exist, but only human beings and people who aspire to a brighter life under the warm, fraternal rays of the dawn of the new day.”104 All this evidence suggests that the identification of eugenics and Nazism, and Nazi Germany in particular, was already in the making before World War II and before the horrors of the Holocaust were committed. This discursive equation, however, solidified in the years immediately after the end of the war. In practical terms the denazification process in Eastern Europe meant that “most of the supporters of eugenics were either purged from their official positions, regardless of their actual actions on behalf of fascist governments and ideas, or had to make a volte-face in their public statements in order to continue to work in a professional capacity.”105 In the case of Konsulov this meant a forced labor term in prison, before he could return to his professional work. Importantly, the political implications of negative eugenics evidently did not escape Konsulov as he wrote a letter to Trofim Lysenko before the arrival of the Red Army in Bulgaria, expressing interest in Lysenko’s work and claiming that he himself has changed his biological views.106 The disassociation of the temperance literature in Bulgaria with negative eugenics did not necessarily mean a complete divorce from hereditary thought. In the light of new studies emphasizing the continuity of eugenic thought, the last point could not be stressed enough. Thus, even if progressive political and economic thought rejected forced sterilization, it still could not completely disregard “progressive” science, but could only try to accommodate it within its own positivist framework.

Conclusion The chapter has sketched some of the intellectual, ideological, and institutional intersections between the social hygiene and temperance movements with a particular focus on the issues of heredity and eugenics. For this

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purpose, the Bulgarian interwar temperance discourse has been presented against the backdrop of broad global developments. The continual scientification of the alcohol problem gradually transformed it from a religious and moral concern into an important pillar of the social hygiene movement. Alcoholism became enmeshed with other social “scourges” such as venereal diseases, sexual deviancy, and tuberculosis, and started sharing a particular language bridging morality and science, often framing such problems as vice. Social hygiene itself was deeply interwoven with eugenic thought, its undercurrents of hereditary thought and fears of degeneration being a case in point. Many prominent social hygiene activists  – or social democrats for that matter – were also involved in promoting racial hygiene and negative eugenics. The temperance discourse in Bulgaria did not deviate much from this general European trend. Although the popular scientific temperance movement was relatively belated – coming into full swing only in the 1920s – it was similarly a part of a social hygiene project and shared a language of racial poison and vice with health projects in Europe and beyond. Nonetheless, concerns with the hereditary problems brought by alcoholism did not automatically translate into an appeal for negative eugenics. On the contrary, the example of Nazi race legislation led to the equation of racism, Nazism, and eugenics and the formation of a counter-discourse prefiguring the postwar rejection of racial hygiene. That this counter-discourse did not always question in detail the core of the hereditary thought exhibits one fascinating facet of the temperance project that often managed to balance between different, sometimes competing, political and organizational goals. Notes 1 My translation from Russian. From here on, all quotes from Bulgarian are likewise my translations. Some phrases and expressions that appeared of particular importance to me are given in their original in square brackets. 2 Haralampi Neichev, “On with the Fight against Alcoholism!” Borba s Alkoolizma I, no. 1 (1922): 2. 3 For the IOGT in Bulgaria see Nikolay Kamenov, “Globale Ursprünge und lokale Zielsetzungen. die Anti-Alkoholbewegung in Bulgarien 1890–1940,” in Vergessene Vielfalt. Territorialität und Internationalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Steffi Marung and Katja Naumann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 208–12. 4 Georgi Uzunov, “Healing Chronic Alcoholics,” in Scientific Anniversary Volume [Юбилеен Научен Сборник]. 1922–1937, ed. Student Temperance Union [Студентско Въздържателно Дружество] (Sofia: Student Temperance Union, 1937), 135. 5 Stefan Konsulov, “Heredity and Alcoholism,” in Scientific Anniversary Volume [Юбилеен Научен Сборник]. 1922–1937, ed. Student Temperance Union

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[Студентско Въздържателно Дружество] (Sofia:  Student Temperance Union, 1937), 153. 6 Konsulov, “Heredity,” 153. 7 Eugenic practices and policies have been early on conceptually divided into positive eugenics – support of the reproduction of those seen favorable and fit – and negative eugenics – the various ways of obstructing those seen as unfit. 8 Jakob Tanner, “Eugenics before 1945,” Journal of Modern European History 10, no. 4 (2012):  458–79, 470; Christian Promitzer “Degeneration, Darwinism and the Development of Eugenics in Bulgaria (1890–1929),” East Central Europe 38, no. 1 (2011): 44–63, 53. 9 Rumen Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans:  Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival (Budapest and New  York:  Central European University Press, 2004). 10 Rumen Daskalov, Българското общество, 1878–1939. Том Втори. [The Bulgarian society. Vol. 2] (Sofia: Gutenberg, 2005), 42–101. 11 R.J. Crampton, Bulgaria (Oxford and New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2007), 245–57. 12 Two major trends have been singled out as formative for these processes in the literature. For the “biologization” of social thought and the rise of social Darwinism see for example Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction between Biological and Social Theory (Brighton and Atlantic Highlands: Harvester Press, 1980). For similarly early study of the “medicalization” of power following Foucault see David Armstrong, Political Anatomy of the Body: Medical Knowledge in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For a recent and excellent account on bio-politics and moral reforms between 1880 and 1950 see Jana Tschurenev, Francesco Spöring, and Judith Grosse, “Einleitung. Sittlichkeitsreform, Biopolitik und Globalisierung,” in Biopolitik und Sittlichkeitsreform. Kampagnen gegen Alkohol, Drogen und Prostitution 1880–1950, ed. Judith Große, Francesco Spöring, and Jana Tschurenev (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2014), 7–46. See also Marius Turda, ed., Crafting Humans: From Genesis to Eugenics and Beyond (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013) on the “crafting humans” and “better” nations. 13 For the idea of sickness as a social phenomenon see for example Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 21–3; Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter, “What Was Social Medicine? An Historiographical Essay,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (1988): 90–109, 94–5; Howard Waitzkin, “The Social Origins of Illness: A Neglected History,” International Journal of Health Services 11, no. 1 (1981): 77–103. Even at its peak, bacteriology never completely dispelled environmentalist causes. 14 For a longue durée perspective, taking as case studies different national projects in a discussion of the relation between public medicine and the modern state, see Dorothy Porter, ed., The History of Public Health and the Modern State (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994). 15 Kristin Luker, “Sex, Social Hygiene, and the State:  The Double-Edged Sword of Social Reform,” Theory and Society 27, no. 5 (1998): 601–34, 614. 16 Danielle Egan and Gail Hawkes, “Childhood Sexuality, Normalization and the Social Hygiene Movement in the Anglophone West, 1900–1935,” Social History

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of Medicine 23, no. 1 (2010): 56–78, 58; see also Danielle Egan and Gail Hawkes, Theorizing Childhood Sexuality in Modernity (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 51–73; Michael Imber, “The First World War, Sex Education, and the American Social Hygiene Association’s Campaign against Venereal Disease,” Journal of Educational Administration and History 16, no. 1 (1984), 47–56; on the issue of mental hygiene and education in the United States see Sol Cohen, “The Mental Hygiene Movement, the Development of Personality and the School: The Medicalization of American Education,” History of Education Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1983): 123–49. 17 Virginia Berridge, “3. Prevention and Social Hygiene 1900–1914,” British Journal of Addiction 85, no. 8 (1990): 1005–116, 1005. 18 Jonathan Zimmerman, “‘The Queen of the Lobby’:  Mary Hunt, Scientific Temperance, and the Dilemma of Democratic Education in America, 1879–1906,” History of Education Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1992): 1–30, 28–9. 19 Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 342–68. 20 Susan Solomon, “Social Hygiene in Soviet Medical Education, 1922–30,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 45, no. 4 (1990):  607–43; See also David Hoffman, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Bristol: University Presses Marketing, 2011), kindle positions 2155–637 for a different interpretation. 21 William Schneider, Rockefeller Philanthropy and Modern Biomedicine: International Initiatives from World War I  to the Cold War (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2002); Paul Weindling, ed., International Health Organizations and Movements, 1918–1939 (Cambridge and New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1995); Paul Weindling, “Public Health and Political Stabilisation: The Rockefeller Foundation in Central and Eastern Europe between the Two World Wars,” Minerva 31, no. 3 (1993): 253–67; Milton Roemer, “Internationalism in Medicine and Public Health,” in The History of Public Health and the Modern State, ed. Dorothy Porter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 403–23. 22 Svetla Baloutzova, Demography and Nation: Social Legislation and Population Policy in Bulgaria, 1918–1944 (New York: Central European University Press, 2011), 62. 23 Paul Weindling, “Introduction:  Constructing International Health between the Wars,” in International Health Organizations and Movements, 1–16, 4. 24 Zemstvo medicine was a particular form of public health aiming at rural populations. Zemstvo came into being in the latter half of the nineteenth century and was marked by its social character and mistrust in the private praxis. For the premature “death” of the zemstvo and its continuities after 1919 see John Hutchison, “‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ An Inquiry into the Death of Zemstvo Medicine,” in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Susan Solomon and John Hutchison (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1990), 3–26, and Hoffman, Cultivating, kindle positions 2155–637. 25 Daskalov, Българското, 50. 26 Crampton, Bulgaria, 305. 27 Baloutzova, Demography, 64–8. 28 Kamenov, “Globale Ursprünge,” in Vergessene Vielfalt, ed. Marung and Naumann, 194–220.

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29 CSA 713K, Историческа Справка. Narodniks were the members of the nineteenth-century Russian, socialist movement that hoped to reform and liberalize society through propaganda among and politicization of the peasantry. 30 Haralampi Neichev, Санитарно-социалната политика на Българската Работническа Социалъ-демократическа партия (Обединена) [Sanitary-Social Politics of the Bulgarian Workers’ Social-Democratic Party (unified)] (Sofia, 1919), 12. 31 Francesco Spöring, “ ‘Du musst Apostel der Wahrheit werden’. Auguste Forel und der sozialhygienische Antialkoholdiskurs, 1886–1931,” in Biopolitik, ed. Große et al., 111–44; Jacob Tanner, “Auguste Forel als Ikone der Wissenschaft. Ein Plädoyer für historische Forschung,” in Auguste Forel. Eugenik und Erinnerungskultur, ed. Anton Leist (Zürich: vdf, Hochsch.-Verl. an der ETH, 2006), 81–106. 32 August Forel, “Letter to Neichev,” Borba I, no. 1 (1922): 1 [my italic]. 33 See for example August Forel, Die sexuelle Frage. Eine naturwissenschaftliche, psychologische, hygienische und soziologische Studie für Gebildete. 6.  und 7.  Auflage (München: Ernst Reinhardt, 1908), 286. 34 Iv. P. Andreev, “The Woman and Alcohol,” Borba V, no. 2 (1926): 24. 35 Ibid., 26. 36 Z. Stankova, “Let us Draw the Woman,” Borba V, no. 2 (1926): 19–20. 37 Mariana Valverde, “‘Racial Poison’:  Drink, Male Vice, and Degeneration in First-Wave Feminism,” in Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire:  Citizenship, Nation, and Race, ed. Ian Christopher Fletcher, Laura E. Nym Mayhall, and Philippa Levine (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 33–50, 34. 38 Stankova, “Let us,” 20. This, however, should not discredit Miss Stankova as in any way reactionary. As elsewhere, it was both feminists and anti-feminists who saw the reproduction “duty” as an inextricable part of national/imperial/racial politics. For an excellent discussion of the “Mother of the Race” see Mariana Valverde, “‘When the Mother of the Race is Free’: Race, Reproduction, and Sexuality in First-Wave Feminism,” in Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History, ed. Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 3–16. 39 CSA 372K, a.  2292. See also Evguenia Ivanova, “Le Mouvement d’Astenance Alcoolique a Stara Zagora Pendant les Annees 20–40 du XXe Siecle,” Bulletin des Musees de la Blgarie du Sud-Est XVI (1993): 367. 40 Anonymous, “Speech in the Parliament,” Borba VIII, no. 8 (1929): 119. 41 Crampton, Bulgaria, 251. 42 Haralampi Neichev, “Onanism,” Borba XVIII, no. 4 (1939): 62. 43 Bor. Iliev, “Sexual Education,” Borba IV, nos 9–10 (1925): 138–40. 44 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality:  An Introduction (New  York:  Vintage Books, 1990), 53. 45 Gergana Mircheva, “ ‘Училищна хигиена’ в България от началото на ХХ век:  културни образи, институционални роли и практики. [School Hygiene in Bulgaria at the Beginning of the 20th Century:  Cultural Images, Institutional Roles and Practices],” Sociological Problems [Социологически проблеми] 3–4 (2007): 238–65. 46 Ibid. 47 An early but still useful account, sketching the history of onanism and the medical concerns related to it, is Robert H. MacDonald, “The Frightful Consequences

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of Onanism:  Notes on the History of a Delusion,” Journal of the History of Ideas 28, no. 3 (1967):  423–31. See also Ludmilla Jordanova, “The Popularization of Medicine: Tissot on Onanism,” Textual Practice 1, no. 1 (1987): 68–79, and Isabel Hull, Sexuality, The State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), ­chapter 7. 48 Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics:  Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 3. 49 Ibid., 4–5. 50 A myriad of books have shed light on the eugenic ideas and practices in North America. An important development, in this respect, has been the exposition of continuities in the period after World War II – “American eugenicists, like many German eugenicists prior to National Socialism, did not identify with the Nazi version of eugenics and therefore saw no reason to alter their own eugenic goals even after 1945 (though they were careful to monitor their language, avoiding explicit racial comments that could associate them with the Nazis).” Following a paper by Frank Dikötter that pointed to the absence of scholarly interest in the eugenics outside Europe – “ignoring entire subcontinents such as India” – there have been important contributions concerning the British Raj. A  recent, excellent study of santati-śāstra and eugenics discourses in popular Hindi literature in the beginning of the twentieth century has further complicated any simplistic history of “diffusionism” in favor of a more open approach pointing to entanglements and multiple origins. Yuehtsen Juliette Chung has analyzed and compared notions of eugenics in the context of Sino-Japanese relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Another transnational study focused on the transfer of ideas between Germany and the United States. Alongside this, there have been other attempts to rescue the history of racial hygiene and eugenics from the nation state. Recent studies of various European regions have also shown that eugenics’ science and practices were not restricted to Nazi Germany, but were also present in various forms – importantly for this study – in Central and Eastern Europe.   For the American eugenics movement see Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2001), 6; Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics:  Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Alexandra Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); on media and representation of eugenics see Martin Pernick, The Black Stork:  Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1999). For Canada see Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race: The Eugenic Crusade in Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990). For the Indian case see, Frank Dikötter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (1998): 467–78, 472; Sarah Hodges, “Indian Eugenics in an Age of Reform,” in Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies, ed. Sarah Hodges (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006), 115–38; Sarah Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce:  Birth Control in South India, 1920–1940 (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008); Luzia Savary, “Vernacular Eugenics? Santati-Śāstra in Popular Hindi Advisory Literature (1900–1940),” South Asia:  Journal of

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South Asian Studies 37, no. 3 (2014):  381–97. For examples of transnational exchanges see, Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle for National Survival:  Eugenics in Sino-Japanese contexts, 1896–1945 (New  York:  Routledge, 2002); Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Mark Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science. Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1990); Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Stefan Kühl, Die Internationale der Rassisten. Aufstieg und Niedergang der internationalen Bewegung für Eugenik und Rassenhygiene im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1997). For the recent literature on Central and Eastern Europe see Marius Turda and Paul Weindling, eds., Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940 (New York: Central European University Press, 2007); Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta, and Marius Turda, eds., Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945:  Conference on “Hygiene  – Health Politics  – Eugenics:  Engineering Society in Twentieth Century Southeastern Europe” (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2011). 51 Maria Bucur, “Eugenics in Eastern Europe, 1870–1945,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Bashford and Levine, 398–412, 403. 52 Ibid. 53 Richard Cleminson, Anarchism, Science, and Sex:  Eugenics in Eastern Spain, 1900–1937 (Oxford and New York: P. Lang, 2000); Nikolai Krementsov, “Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Bashford and Levine, 413–29; Mark Adams, “Eugenics as Social Medicine in Revolutionary Russia: Prophets, Patrons, and the Dialectics of Discipline-Building,” in Health and Society, ed. Solomon and Hutchison, 200–23. 54 Magdalena Gawin, “Progressivism and Eugenic Thinking in Poland, 1905–1939,” in Blood and Homeland, ed. Turda and Weindling, 167; see also on progressivism and eugenics in Kemalist Turkey Ayça Alemdaroğlu, “Politics of the Body and Eugenic Discourse in Early Republican Turkey,” Body & Society 11, no. 3 (2005): 68–74. 55 Michael Schwartz, Sozialistische Eugenik.: Eugenische Sozialtechnologien in Debatten und Politik der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1890–1933 (Bonn: Dietz Verlag, 1995). 56 Michael Schwartz, “‘Euthanasie’  – Debatten in Deutschland (1895–1945),” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 46, no. 4 (1994): 617–65. 57 Sören Niemann-Findeisen, Weeding the Garden: Die Eugenik-Rezeption der frühen Fabian Society (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2004). For the question of alcohol see in particular 93–4. 58 Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 185. 59 Ibid. 60 Sheila Faith Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany,” Osiris 2, no. 3 (1987): 193–236, 200. 61 Bernhard Kuechenhoff, “The Psychiatrist Auguste Forel and His Attitude to Eugenics,” History of Psychiatry 19, no. 2 (2008): 215–23. 62 Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany,” 200. On the intersection of psychiatry and the temperance movement see Martin Lengwiler, “Im Zeichen der Degeneration. Psychiatrie und internationale Abstinenzbewegung im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert,” in Biopolitik, ed. Große et al., 85–110. A small omission in this

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otherwise excellent study is the work of Sergei Korsakoff on alcoholic paralysis and psychosis – the latter known also as alcohol amnestic disorder. 63 Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 185. 64 Ibid., 185–6. 65 Stepan, Hour of Eugenics, 85. For “racial poisons” see also Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, 171–88; Valverde, “ ‘Racial Poison,’ ” 33–50. 66 See for example W.F. Bynum, “Alcoholism and Degeneration in 19th Century European Medicine and Psychiatry,” British Journal of Addiction 79, no. 1 (1984): 59–70. 67 Stephen Snelders, Frans Meijman, and Toine Pieters, “Heredity and Alcoholism in the Medical Sphere:  The Netherlands, 1850–1900,” Medical History 51, no. 2 (2007): 219–36, 227. 68 For a classical study on the idea of degeneration, its bio-medical career and eventual political employment see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration:. A  European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), particularly 176–221. 69 Gergana Mircheva, “Marital Health and Eugenics in Bulgaria, 1878–1940,” in Health, Hygiene and Eugenics, ed. Promitzer et  al., 233–270, 241; for earlier statutes with similar eugenic tendencies see Christian Promitzer “Taking Care of the National Body:  Eugenic Visions in Interwar Bulgaria, 1905–1940,” in Blood and Homeland, ed. Turda and Weindling, 223–4. 70 Baloutzova, Demography, 49; Mircheva, “Marital Health,” 233–69. 71 Promitzer, “Degeneration,” 56–7. 72 Ibid., 57. 73 Ibid., 59. 74 Mircheva, “Marital Health,” 269. 75 Nils Roll-Hansen, “Conclusion:  Scandinavin Eugenics in the International Context,” in Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, ed. Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, 259–72 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press), 259. 76 Baloutzova, Demography. 77 William Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002), 116–45. 78 Haralampi Neichev, “Alcohol and Degeneration,” Borba IV, no. 2 (1925): 18. 79 Baloutzova, Demography, 177; CSA 619K, Историческа спвака. 80 Dimo Burilkov, Social Fight against the Venereal Diseases (Unknown: Issue of the Union of the Sanitary and Veterinary Personnel in Bulgaria, 1937), 15 [emphasis in original]. 81 Dimo Burilkov, Fight for Sobriety (Sofia:  Bulgarian Temperance Federation, [undated]), 5. 82 Burilkov, Fight, 11–12; for his thoughts on heredity see Dimo Burilkov, “Heredity,” Trezvo obshtestvo (Трезво общество; Sober Society) II, no. 7 (1928): 185–8. 83 CSA 1043K, op 2, au 404, 28 [from a newspaper Полет, April 20, 1936]. 84 CSA 1043K, op 2, au 405, 26–8 cf. CSA 1043K, op 2, au 321, 1–14 [handwritten]; CSA 1043K, op 2, au 412, 64. 85 Anonymous, title “If You Get Drunk, Expect an Idiot!” Borba IX, no. 5 (1930): 76.

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86 Anonymous, “Speech in the Parliament,” Borba VIII, no. 8 (1929): 84. 87 There are two notable exceptions out of some dozen periodicals for the whole of the interwar period. In 1934, the already mentioned Nikola Stanchev published an article titled “Sterilization of the Unfit and Hereditary Diseased Individuals,” in Trezva borba (Трезва борба; Sober Fight) II, no. 16 (1934): 2. The article based its argumentation on a pamphlet “published in California” and finished on an optimistic note, claiming that even in “this field” much success awaits his fellow temperance reformers. This notwithstanding, the topic was not pursued further in this newspaper, suggesting that Stanchev’s suggestions met with criticism. Another article in the newspaper of the Neutral Youth Temperance Union, written by one Dr. Eftim Petrov, discussed in favorable terms the issue of eugenics and sterilization in particular. Nonetheless, this article also made a provision that “it is absolutely unthinkable to have any eugenic measures before improving the social conditions of the broad social layers”  – Trezva mladezh (Трезва младеж; Sober Youth) IX, no. 6 (1936): 2. 88 See Promitzer, “Taking Care of the National Body,” in Blood and Homeland, ed. Turda and Weindling, 223–4. 89 Kamenov, “Globale Ursprünge,” in Vergessene Vielfalt, ed. Marung and Naumann, 194–220. 90 Christian Geulen, “The Common Grounds of Conflict: Racial Visions of World Order 1880–1940,” in Competing Visions of World Order:  Global Moments and Movements, 1880s-1930s, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 69–96. 91 Loren Graham, “Science and Values:  The Eugenics Movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s,” The American Historical Review 82, no. 5 (1977): 1133–64, 1139. 92 Haralampi Neichev, “Finland – an Exemplary State,” Borba XIX, no. 3 (1939): 36. 93 Haralampi Neichev, “In Stockholm,” Borba IX, no. 7 (1930): 130. 94 L. Caussade, “Inheritance and Alcohol,” Borba X, no. 2, (1931):17–20. 95 Asen Zlatarov, “Fight against Alcohol,” Journal of Contemporary Hygiene [Съвременна Хигиена] IV, nos 5–7 (1910), [republished] in Asen Zlatarov, Izbrani Suchineniya v. 2 (Sofia: Nauka i Izkustvo, 1966), 325. 96 Zlatarov, “Fight,” in Suchineniya v. 2, 330. 97 Asen Zlatarov, “Against Racism,” Probuda I, no. 5 (1933), [republished] in Asen Zlatarov, Izbrani Suchineniya v. 1 (Sofia: Nauka i Izkustvo, 1966), 358. 98 Nikolay Iovchev, “Alcoholism and Progeny,” Trezva Misul I, nos 2–3 (1936): 6. 99 Iovchev, “Alcoholism,” 6. 100 Nikolay Iovchev, “Eugenics and Sociology,” Trezva Misul I, no. 4 (1936): 9. 101 Iovchev, “Eugenics,” 10. 102 Ibid. 103 D-ro Felix, “Rasismo kaj la nuntempa sociala vivo de la popoloj,” Trezva Misul III, nos 6–7 (1938): 8–9. 104 Ibid., 9. 105 Bucur, “Eugenics,” in The Oxford Handbook, ed. Bashford and Levine, 407–8. 106 CSA 1618K, Историческа Справка.

7

Threats to empire Illicit distillation, venereal diseases, and colonial disorder in British West Africa, 1930–1948 Emmanuel Akyeampong

Between 1930 and 1948 colonial governments in British West Africa found themselves fighting an unusual battle against ordinary Africans on two fronts:  illicit distillation from 1930, which undermined colonial revenue, assailed colonial hegemony in the flagrant disrespect for law, and compromised British subscription to international conventions that forbade liquor distillation in the African colonies; and prostitution, particularly during World War II, when venereal diseases emerged as a real threat to military preparedness among British military forces. Though I have written on liquor traffic, illicit distillation, and prostitution in colonial West Africa, I underestimated the American influence on the international context that framed these issues between the 1880s and the 1920s and the energy of American moral reform organizations that drove temperance and the social purity movement. The American factor enters African historiography from decolonization, and America and the former Soviet Union typically are presented as anti-colonial forces. Elided within this historiographical tradition are America’s imperial history and the formative influence of American moral reformers in shaping the very nature of colonial rule in the British Empire.1 The internationalized struggle against vice in the British Empire lent a depth to colonial responses and a sharpness to the colonial crackdown on illicit distillers and prostitutes in West Africa in the 1930s and 1940s that radicalized ordinary men and women and unveiled their potential for nationalism and mass politics. An earlier draft of this chapter was first presented at the International Conference on “Fighting Drink, Drugs and Venereal Disease,” Ascona, April 1–4, 2012. Papers presented at this conference and discussions underscored the need to connect the West African narrative more firmly to the broader international  – and American  – perspectives. I  am grateful to Jessica Pliley and Harald Fischer-Tiné for their comments on this published version.

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In the Gold Coast, for example, these ordinary men and women would be heavily represented in Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP). The collapse of prohibition in America in 1933 in the face of widespread criminality and corruption took the wind out of the sails of the international moral reform movement and helped undermine the discourse of the “civilizing mission” and the “white man’s burden” as rationales for colonialism. In the aftermath of economic depression in the 1930s and World War II, colonial emphasis shifted to development in partnership with African nationalists. Nkrumah in the early years of Ghana’s independence commented on how the mosquito was an unsung hero, for its presence in West Africa limited white settlement and removed a bottleneck from the process of decolonization in West Africa. This chapter points to the ignored constituency of ordinary men and women who struggled to earn a living through distillation and the sex trade, how these pursuits positioned them as antagonists to colonial rule, and their resilience made them threats to empire. The chapter is divided into five parts:  an introduction; the role of American evangelicals in the Anglo-Saxon moral reform movement between the 1880s and the 1920s and 1930s; temperance, liquor legislation, and the rise of illicit distillation in West Africa; the internal disorder caused by illicit distillers and prostitutes in West Africa during World War II; and a conclusion. It draws on archival sources from Britain and West Africa, oral interviews from Ghana, and published secondary literature.

American evangelicals and the Anglo-Saxon moral reform movement, 1880s–1920s The late nineteenth century and World War I witnessed two major developments in American history that set the stage for the American moral reform movement with implications for the narrative outlined in this chapter for West Africa. The first was the Spanish-American War of 1898, which left the United States in possession of the overseas territories of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and other islands, and transformed the country into a major military and political presence in the Caribbean, South America, and Southeast Asia. By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States, the ardent critic of empire, had become one. The second development related to the transformation of the United States from being the great debtor-nation in the late nineteenth century, always hungry for foreign capital, to the world’s greatest creditor in 1918. Financing the Allied war effort had redeemed America’s debt to its European trading partners and given her a credit of US$1.7 billion in loans to the Allies.2 Appreciative of the growing

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might of the United States, American evangelicals sought to present a different vision of empire for the United States through moral reform. They perceived their empire as a Christian moral empire that was above “nation.” Their activities succeeded in giving the impression that American influence did not fit classical European imperialism.3 The proliferation of American evangelical organizations that sought to reform the world is simply mind-boggling:  the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU), the Anti-Saloon League, the American Purity Alliance, Rev. Dr. Wilbur Crafts’s International Reform Bureau, the United Society of Christian Endeavor, the Student Volunteers, Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the World League Against Alcoholism (WLAA), and others. Organizations such as the International Order of Good Templars (1852) and the WCTU, which had established an International Women’s Temperance Union in 1876, certainly pre-dated the turn of the twentieth century, when the formation of several reform movements coincided with US acquisition of overseas ­territories.4 These reform movements cut their teeth in campaigns against military canteens and the registered examination of prostitutes in the United States’ newly acquired colonies such as the Philippines. American evangelicals, such as the Methodist Frances Willard, who visited France in the 1860s and 1870s, were shocked to see the government regulation of prostitution.5 They were determined that such practices would not be part of the United States’ empire. Moral reformers waged a campaign to abolish military canteens in the Philippines, which was extended to include a social purity crusade once word leaked that the US Army in the Philippines had taken up the medical inspection of prostitutes, following the precedent of the previous Spanish regime.6 For the American moral reformers these were foreign practices. Overlooked was the United States’ own history of the inspection and regulation of prostitution in some areas during the Civil War, and St. Louis’s experimentation with the medical inspection of prostitutes beginning in 1870.7 Concerns about venereal diseases and soldiers arose for Britain and the United States during the Crimean War and the American Civil War. Rising venereal disease rates during the American Civil War encouraged the licensing of female prostitutes in some cities close to military encampments. What is striking about the St. Louis experiment is that it commenced during peacetime and it was aimed at a civilian population.8 In the introduction to an important volume on venereal disease and European society since 1870, Roger Davidson and Lesley Hall note how the regulation and

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inspection of prostitutes unduly affected “marginal” groups in metropoles, while for the colonies venereal disease “was an important site for the intersection of medicine, sexuality and imperialism.”9 Philippa Levine shows that in St. Louis African American and immigrant women were heavily affected by regulation, though they constituted a small minority of the population, and venereal disease became a metaphor for savagery or primitiveness in the colonial context.10 With the push by American moral reformers, the canteen for the US Navy was abolished in 1899, and for the Army in 1901. American troops were then stationed in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Samoa, Hawaii, and the Protectorate of Cuba. In 1903 colonial authorities enacted a two-mile prohibition zone around all military camps. The focus of moral reformers then shifted to the anti-prostitution campaign to prevent the US military from licensing prostitutes. These were complex developments, for while American moral reformers saw themselves and the United States’ empire as exceptional or unique, Laura Briggs argues “that U.S. colonialism emerged neither by accident … nor in isolation from other colonialisms, as many diplomatic historians have suggested, but rather inserted itself into an already established set of colonialist practices, specifically prostitution registration.”11 She reflects on how the registration of prostitutes organized “disorderly” women and enrolled them as imperial citizens.12 British authorities in India, just as American authorities in the Philippines or Puerto Rico, assumed that the military rank-and-file lacked the higher instincts to abstain from sex and thus the dangers of “mercenary love.” The central issue then became how to protect European or American soldiers in foreign lands while providing for their sexual needs.13 Briggs flags Cynthia Enloe’s important insight that prostitution “is always one of the key questions for an army about garrisoning troops outside of ‘domestic’ borders, and one of the first and always extensive negotiations with the receiving society.”14 Prostitution and its regulation in the colonies spoke to larger issues of sanctioned domesticity at home and abroad, as military prostitution serviced empire, while its regulation and inspection kept soldiers safe for their return home and future marriages. The interconnections between empires are also illustrated in how American moral reformers traveled within the British Empire and drew on lessons learned there for application in American possessions. But what American reformers viewed as the need to keep British licensed prostitution in India out of the U.S. Army had a deeper and more complicated history. Mass petitioning under the encouragement of moral reformers, suffragists, and organizations such as the WCTU convinced Theodore Roosevelt to

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order a ban on the formal inspection of prostitutes in 1902. The attention of reformers now shifted to opium in 1903.15 But the regulation of prostitution would continue as a policy of the U.S. military overseas. “Wherever it went to combat ‘foreign’ threats, the U.S.  military instituted prostitution regulation. Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Santo Domingo, the Panama Canal Zone, and the Philippines all had some policy of reglementation from the moment of U.S. occupation, and this continued throughout the pre-World War I period.”16 In Puerto Rico the registration of prostitutes was formalized again in 1905, special hospitals existed for women found ill on inspection, and the regulation would continue until 1917.17 It is with the grant of US citizenship to Puerto Rican residents in 1917 and the conscription of thousands of young Puerto Rican men into compulsory military service that US authorities turned systematically to the suppression of prostitution in Puerto Rico.18 There is clearly analytical value in not seeing US imperialism as unique, isolated, nor an accident. Now an imperial power, American reformers converted to the idea of the “civilizing mission” as the “white man’s burden” and extended their activities to the British Empire and non-Western peoples in partnership with British organizations. This relationship of reformers on both sides of the Atlantic was bilateral and pre-dated the late nineteenth century. British reformers campaigning against the Contagious Diseases Act in Britain from the 1860s that legalized the medical inspection of prostitutes in or near docks and garrison towns reached out to the American anti-slavery party of William Lloyd Garrison in 1876 for support.19 When the Contagious Diseases Acts were repealed in Britain in 1886, British reformers extended their campaign to India and the existence of military brothels in the cantonment system. In the face of colonial denial of the existence of such a system, British reformers turned to American researchers, Dr. Katherine Bushnell and Elizabeth Andrew, to investigate the phenomenon in India. Their report confirmed the existence of the brothels in military cantonments, and the publication of their report forced governmental action in 1893. The Repeal Act of 1895 abolished the system in India, though its enforcement remained problematic, and the British Army reinstated the practice in 1897.20 Philippa Levine shows how cantonment legislation that allowed Indian prostitutes to be identified and expelled from the cantonment encouraged women to volunteer for medical examination for fear of losing their livelihood.21 Likewise in temperance there was cross-Atlantic collaboration. The WWCTU had a formal alliance with the British Women’s Temperance Association (BWTA) in 1886.22 The American naturalist, W.T. Hornaday, visited the Congo, saw the havoc of the European liquor trade, and wrote

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an exposé, Free Rum on the Congo (1887). He condemned the European powers for their failure at the Congress of Berlin in 1884 to ban liquor from the Congo in their concern that the trade in the region be absolutely free. Temperance pressure on the British government convinced Lord Salisbury, secretary of state for the foreign office, of the need to pursue the issue at the Brussels Conference in 1889–90, where the seventeen nation signatories for the first time restricted the importation of alcohol into Africa under the General Act of the Brussels Conference.23 Temperance pressure compelled a reluctant American government to sign the General Act belatedly in 1892. Mary Leavitt, the WCTU’s round-the-world-missionary, traveled from West Africa east to the Congo basin in 1889 and discussed her findings at temperance gatherings. From the late 1890s American temperance reformers worked closely alongside their British counterparts, and the American Native Races Deputation formed by Rev. Dr. Wilbur Crafts was modeled after the British Native Races and Liquor Traffic United Committee.24 Crafts credited the WCTU influence on British policy for raising the tax on alcohol imported into Africa from 70 francs to 100 francs at the 1906 Brussels Convention.25 These successes buoyed the hopes of American temperance activists. The WCTU in 1911 announced the goal of world prohibition, followed by the Anti-Saloon League in 1913.26 With its chapters around the world and its campaign against legalized vice, the WCTU was the American organization at the forefront of the international social purity movement in the twentieth century.27 World War I  and its accompanying patriotism generated a wave of restrictive legislations on alcohol in Europe in aid of the war effort. A strong prohibition movement emerged internationally, grounded in moral arguments, and the perception that distillation and brewing diverted grain, molasses, and labor from the war effort. Ian Tyrrell has observed that: International conditions between 1917 and 1919 were as propitious as they would ever be for a world-wide prohibition drive. Wartime enthusiasm had had an effect on liquor and anti-liquor forces in many parts of Europe. Even the French had banned absinth during World War I, “the sole case of prohibition of a drink in France.” Lloyd George, in a much publicized statement, had declared drink a greater enemy of the British nation than the Kaiser’s hordes, while his foe, Germany, had also restricted brewing. Some countries went further. Iceland had enacted prohibition as early as 1912, and Finland would do so in 1921. Norway had established a partial prohibition by outlawing alcohol over 12 per cent in 1917; a pro-prohibition vote was taken by plebiscite in 1919 and permanent legislation was enacted in 1921.28

It is in this environment that the temperance movement in the United States pushed through the Volstead Act of 1919, which passed national

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prohibition. Daniel Okrent, however, points to how the ground for prohibition in the United States had been laid years before 1919. By 1901 WCTU had succeeded in establishing compulsory temperance education for every state in the United States, and twenty-two million American children out of the total population of eighty million people received temperance education thrice weekly. A generation of Americans came to age around 1919 bred on temperance.29 With prohibition, America embarked on its boldest social experiment, and evangelicals viewed it as their responsibility to export this “gift” to the world. As the Methodist Bishop James Cannon declared: “God has brought America into the kingdom for such a time as this.” The WCTU’s Union Signal proclaimed “world prohibition” as essential to “world democracy.”30 American prohibition became the test case for the viability of this experiment elsewhere. It is against this larger background that Walter Long, secretary of state for the colonies in the British government, sought to strike a blow against “this German [and] Dutch trade” in liquor in West Africa. Writing to the governors of the British West African colonies on January 7, 1919, he opined that the time had come to extend “the system at present in force in the prohibited areas to the whole territory under your administration.”31 By this he was referring to the Brussels Convention of 1890 that had declared as prohibition zones in Africa areas hitherto not exposed to liquor traffic. The Brussels Act of 1890 established an arbitrary prohibition zone between latitudes 20 degrees north and 22 degrees south, within which the signatory European powers pledged to prohibit the importation and distillation of spirituous liquors in those areas not already exposed to these.32 American prohibitionists showed up at the Convention of St. Germain-en-Laye, which sought to put these measures into effect. Indeed, Ernest H. Cherrington of the Anti-Saloon League claimed that the League was responsible for the provisions against the supply of alcohol to African colonial peoples at St. Germain in 1919.33 The response of British colonial governors eager to protect liquor revenues as a valued source resulted in a compromise in the 1919 Convention. The European powers decided to ban “trade spirits,” defined as spirits exported with Africans as the targeted market and not ordinarily consumed by Europeans – in short, inferior spirits. Under this label, rum from New England, and German and Dutch gin were excluded from British Africa. In other work, I  have examined in detail the process by which Dutch liquor interests lobbied for the reentry of Dutch gin or geneva into the Gold Coast in 1923, after its exclusion negatively affected colonial revenues. Prohibition in America prevented commercial distilleries that produced

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rum in New England for the West African market from seeking a similar concession. As early as 1763, there were 159 such distilleries in New England.34 The readmission of Dutch geneva increased imports of gin ten-fold in the Gold Coast from 83,855 gallons in 1921 to 859,160 gallons in 1925. Out of a total spirits imports of 1,313,258 gallons in 1927, gin contributed 1,181,913 gallons or 90 percent of total imports.35 This spike in gin imports set the context for the temperance assault on liquor traffic in the Gold Coast from the late 1920s, and the subsequent decision to gradually prohibit gin. One cannot divorce the politics of illicit distillation in the 1930s and 1940s and the fight against prostitution in West Africa during World War II from the international setting outlined in this section. Developments in America in the 1920s informed debates about the viability of prohibition in West Africa and the repeal of prohibition in 1933 signaled the defeat of this social experiment globally. The forces that undermined American prohibition  – economic depression, the determination of individuals to drink and make money of alcohol, and popular culture as a nexus for drink and a site of resistance – were also present globally. But a spike in venereal diseases with the onset of World War II revived anxieties about the war and the military preparedness of British troops. This came after a decade of decline in the incidence of syphilis in Britain by almost 40 percent between 1931 and 1939.36 Concerns military authorities expressed about liquor consumption and the improper use of prophylactic packs among American and Dominion troops returned. Four hundred thousand cases of venereal disease were treated among British and Dominion troops during World War I.37 Viewed as working-class “vices” and embedded in a working-class popular culture that tolerated illegality, prostitution, and illicit distillation became joint targets of the colonial crackdown in West Africa during World War II. There is a sense, also, in which military authorities perceived the rank-and-file of armies, largely recruited from the working classes, as particularly prone to commercial sex and to drink.38

Temperance, liquor legislation and the rise of illicit distillation in West Africa Early colonial rule in British West Africa was heavily dependent on duties on imported liquor. Simon Heap has highlighted how liquor was the most important import in terms of volume and value in the British colonies of Lagos, Oil Rivers Protectorate, Niger Coast Protectorate, and Southern Nigeria, all of which were eventually incorporated in 1914 into

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the Southern Provinces of Nigeria. In 1906 Southern Nigeria became the first West African colony to earn a million pounds in revenue. Liquor duties constituted half the colony’s total revenue.39 In the four years before World War I, liquor duties comprised about 38  percent of total revenue in the Gold Coast.40 For temperance advocates in Britain and West Africa, liquor had a degenerating effect on Africans, and they saw an explicit connection between drink, immorality, and crime.41 The textile industry in places like Manchester strongly criticized the liquor traffic to the British West African colonies, dominated as it was by German and Dutch schnapps and gin, seeing these as being in direct competition with British textiles.42 In the Colony of Lagos between 1892 and 1903, the duty on liquor imports amounted to as much as between 53 percent and 68 percent of total revenue.43 In response to missionary and temperance agitation in Nigeria and the Gold Coast, the two British colonies in West Africa with the highest liquor imports, duties on liquor were successively raised from the 1890s but with little effect on demand. The beneficial result was to increase government revenue. Meanwhile, as Charles Ambler details in Chapter 5, a debate raged in Southern Nigeria in the early twentieth century over whether there was a liquor problem. The Lagos governor argued that cases of drunkenness were rare and that temperance allegations of a liquor problem in Southern Nigeria were unfounded. “As far as the government was concerned, this was a case of morality blending with sound economics, and the Colonial Office was able to view with some satisfaction ‘the beauty of a system by which the consumers of spirits were made to contribute more than anyone else to the cost of governing the country.’ ”44 But advocates of prohibition succeeded in pushing for a commission of inquiry into the liquor question in Southern Nigeria in 1909. Chaired by Sir Mackenzie Chalmers, a former British civil servant in India, the commission concluded that there was no evidence that liquor consumption had caused the population of Southern Nigeria any physical harm, and that the commission was satisfied with the quality of spirits imported into the region.45 In the Gold Coast, the significant increase in gin and geneva imports by 1928 riled temperance and missionary interests. The legislative council meeting in the Gold Coast on March 1, 1928 provided an occasion for chiefs and the educated elite to jointly launch a formal attack against colonial dependence on liquor revenues.46 Unwillingly, the colonial government was pushed into setting up a committee in 1928 to review liquor licensing, and a commission in 1929–30 to consider the entire question of gin and geneva imports and the consumption of spirits in the Gold Coast. Chaired by the secretary for native affairs, H.S. Newlands, the colonial government’s

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dilemma was made explicit in the second term of reference for the 1929–30 commission: “in the event of action being advisable which would be likely to result in an appreciable loss of revenue, what means should be adopted to make good that loss.”47 After lengthy deliberations, in which 125 witnesses were heard, the commission recommended the gradual prohibition of geneva imports over a ten-year period by means of progressive reduction on a quota basis. The commission opined that the liquor question in the Gold Coast was confined to the consumption of gin, and that there was a genuine demand for its exclusion, but that the Gold Coast had no national drink problem. Liquor laws were enacted in 1930 to implement the commission’s recommendations. The Gin and Geneva (Restriction of Importation) Ordinance was intended to gradually prohibit gin and geneva more than ten years, complete prohibition to be achieved after December 1939.48 The Liquor Traffic Amendment Ordinance prohibited the importation of cheap brandy, rum, and whisky to preempt their replacing gin.49 The import duty on potable spirits was raised 21.8 percent from 27.6d. in 1928 to 33s.6d. in June 1930. The Liquor Licenses (Spirits) Amendment Ordinance imposed further restrictions on the sale of spirits.50 But this time it was not business as usual:  an increase in the tariff on liquor does not offset demand. Economic depression had intervened from 1929, and the ordinary men and women for whom German and Dutch schnapps and gin had become central in their social life had limited financial resources. They turned to illicitly distilled gin. For the colonial government the first signal of the change in tide was the sharp drop in liquor imports and applications for spirit licenses. Gin imports declined 91.4 percent from 569,746 gallons in 1929 to 49,356 gallons in 1931 although the permitted quota was 512,280. The total revenue collected from spirit licenses dropped 82.4  percent from £68,078 in 1928–9 to £12,118 in 1933–4.51 Officials debated whether this decline in gin imports was due only to the temporary decrease in purchasing power because of the fall in the value of cocoa exports in the depression or was a reflection of a new, permanent downward trend in gin imports. The colonial government quickly discovered that Gold Coasters had turned to illicit distillation. Cases of illicit distillation jumped from six in 1930–1 with eleven persons convicted when the colonial government began to keep records of offenses to 558 reported cases with 603 persons convicted between April 1, 1933 and March 31, 1934.52 Moreover, this epidemic in illicit distillation had spread to Nigeria, though liquor politics differed there in the 1920s. Governor Donald Cameron of Nigeria, equally overtaken by events, believed that illicit distillation had “commenced as recently as May last [1931] and it is alleged

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that the knowledge was acquired from natives who had returned from the United States of America.”53 The sudden eruption of illicit distillation was perhaps what convinced the governor that its origins had to be foreign. In the Gold Coast case, it is clear that knowledge of distillation pre-dated the 1930s, and informants noted that the Basel missionaries distilled liquor from fermented cocoa beans. Of rural background in southern Germany and Switzerland, Basel missionaries were often familiar with processes of distillation, making brews like most from fermented apples back home.54 Ewe laborers who worked on the Basel Mission’s cocoa farms in Akropong picked up knowledge of distillation.55 Secure in their homelands of the Volta River District  – extending east of the Volta River estuary littered with lagoons, ponds, creeks and isolated islands – the Ewe of southeastern Ghana from the 1930s took up distillation with gusto. In January 1934, a highly successful raid was made by the police in force between the villages of Kpong and Amedica, where 50 Bush Stills, 40 gallons of distilled spirits and 500 gallons of palm wine were seized and destroyed. Fines to the aggregate of £375 were imposed in respect of this raid but nothing was paid. The raid revealed the fact that the Volta River Islands afford suitable shelter for the distillers which accounts for the numerous cases of possessing trade spirits reported in the Akuse and Ada Districts.56

A. Olorunfemi also noted the existence of illicit distillation in Nigeria around 1910.57 By 1931, the governor of Nigeria reported that the “secret of distilling spirits by means of a rude still made of earthen pots (or petrol tins) and copper or tubing is being sold broadcast for £10 in each case.”58

Besieged within and without: illicit distillers, prostitutes, and internal disorder in British West Africa during World War II The age of akpeteshie (illicit gin) It is important to note how popular culture in the 1930s and 1940s brought together migrants and indigenes in the burgeoning towns, and created a shared social nexus in which distillers and retailers of illicit gin mixed with prostitutes, musicians, and actors. Drinking bars, dance halls, cinema, and comic opera (“concert”) were vital pillars of popular culture. The common social background of patrons and their struggle to subsist and thrive economically in colonial towns lent camaraderie to their resistance to colonial law and decriminalized their behavior. For elderly informants interviewed in the early 1990s, illicit distillation and its persecution was about colonial liquor revenues and the desire of the colonial government to

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preserve a valuable source of income. As K.K. Kabah, an executive member of the Western Region Distillers Cooperative put it: The white men wanted to cheat us. If they could ban our local drink, we would end up buying their imported drinks. We knew they were cheating us, but we could not say anything. So we hid in isolated places and distilled our gin and drank our thing.59

Even A.A. Amartey, who worked in the Broadcasting Corporation until 1959 and was thus familiar with the colonial government’s position on illicit distillation, affirmed that it was all about revenue.60 It is against this context that colonial officials expressed doubt about their ability to rein in illicit distillation, considering that even some chiefs, partners in colonial rule, refused to see illicit distillation as a moral or legal crime. In his report for 1933, the commissioner for the Eastern Province in despair confessed: I must with regret express the opinion that illicit distillation will never be entirely stamped out, as it has become the practice to distill in individual houses sufficient spirit for family needs, apart from the class of distillers for commercial profit. The process is easy, the profit is clear, and the trade is regarded as a very venial breach of the law by the chiefs and people generally. It is quite obvious, however, that definite action must be taken by the government, who cannot remain passive under the reproach which is conveyed in the native name of the liquor “the whiteman’s shame.”61

That illicit distillation was taking on organized form was especially worrisome to the colonial government, not to mention the complicity of even those not directly involved in the industry. At this point, prohibition in the United States had collapsed, with foreign newspapers and Hollywood documenting vividly the gangster culture with its accompanying violence that emerged to combat the authorities. Illicit distillation and smuggling tested the limits of the forces of law and order, and for Okrent a key aspect of prohibition’s failure in the United States was how it “encouraged criminality and institutionalized hypocrisy” and “fostered a culture of bribery, blackmail, and official corruption.”62 British colonial authorities worried that such criminality had taken root in West Africa due to the restrictive liquor legislation they had passed in a time of economic depression. Motor lorries have on occasions been found to be conveying as much as 100 gallons illicitly distilled spirits at a time. The distribution and sale of such quantities of unusually potent liquor in any community could well be unknown even by those of the local inhabitants who neither participate in the trade nor themselves consume the illicitly distilled spirits; but, despite this, the fact remains that it is very rarely

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indeed that any assistance or information is volunteered to the police in this matter by Africans who could, by reason of their social status or their education, be expected to disapprove of the trade in cheap potent illicit spirits.63

Even the snobbish educated elites, who looked down on illicit distillers and retailers involved in a “dirty” industry associated with hiding in the bush and a pungent odor, still would not inform on them, as they took sides in the battle between “European” and “African” liquor. Informants from the 1990s revealed that illicit gin was smuggled into town at night, sometimes by armed gangs and delivered to retailers.64 The forces of law and order seemed compromised as well. In Ibagwa Mill in Calabar, Nigeria, the commissioner of police reported a constable on duty found “raving and manic drunk” from what was believed to be illicit gin.65 Faced with the specter of a breakdown in law and order, corruption of the police force, public complicity, and a flourishing counter-culture, colonial officials could not help but see the parallels with the resistance to prohibition in the United States in the 1930s. Enforced by the Eighteenth Amendment to the American Constitution from 1920 to 1933, prohibition in the United States faltered in the face of the insistence of many to the right to drink or profit from drink, and the inability of the government to enforce prohibition especially with the onset of economic depression.66 An era associated with home stills, gangsters, bootleggers, speakeasies (underground bars that provided food, live music and shows with liquor as a quiet aside), police corruption, gang violence, and violent clashes between gangs and the forces of law and order, the colonial government feared the worst in the Gold Coast and Nigeria. Indeed, the American example of prohibition seemed to have created a negative precedent, as the international sentiments in favor of prohibition cited above during World War I dissipated in the 1920s and 1930s. As resistance to prohibition in the United States was fully reported in international media, the American prohibitionist, Mary Harris Armor, could not help but complain that: “Never was a crime committed in America but it was heralded from one end of the Dominion to the other [here a reference to the British Empire], as being the result of prohibition.”67 In an age where prohibitionists in the United States sought to export prohibition to Europe and the British dominions and colonies, the unraveling of prohibition in their own country came to serve as their strongest indictment. American movies exported this image. One of the clearest trends across a number of countries was the image of an America racked by sexual immorality, divorce, crime, and gangster violence conveyed in

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American movies, which were outlets in no way directly controlled by liquor interests. Moral reformers outside the United States across a broad range of positions on the prohibition issue did not like what they saw in these movies, and American prohibitionists reported back at home the negative impact this had on support for prohibition outside the country.68

In the Gold Coast, as governors beginning with Shenton Thomas in 1933 sought to repeal the restrictive liquor legislation that had unleashed illicit distillation, they made explicit reference to the American failure with prohibition. Stating his case to the secretary of state for the colonies in 1933, Thomas opined: “Unintentionally we have imposed a policy of prohibition, with the results which I understand have been noted elsewhere.” He went on to express the inability of the police to suppress illicit distillation:  “It will be understood that, although they do their best, the police are no more able to suppress the traffic here than they have been in the United States of America.” His conclusion was that the colonial government made a mistake with the restrictive liquor legislation of 1930–1, “even though with the best intentions, [and] it is our duty to put it right.”69 Liquor imports dropped through the 1930s, a trend worsened by the onset of World War II and the need to utilize shipping space for the war effort. Unable to sufficiently reduce the duty on imported gin to make it competitive with illicitly distilled local gin due to international conventions, and responding to the concerns of colonial governments over revenue and law and order, the Colonial Office in 1943 approved the private distillation of gin by West Africans under new legislation to be passed by the governments in Nigeria and the Gold Coast.70 Citing regulatory problems and anticipating bitter opposition from “missionary bodies,” the Nigerian colonial government backed out of this scheme, and the Gold Coast decided not to pursue this course alone.71 Nationalist politicians would champion the cause of legalizing locally distilled gin in the 1950s.

A diseased fighting force: VDs and British troops As the colonial government struggled to get out of the conundrum of illicit distillation in the 1930s and 1940s, it was faced with a new challenge in venereal diseases with the onset of World War II. Venereal diseases had long been associated with sailors and soldiers in colonial Africa, and venereal diseases clinics existed in several seaports under international conventions such as the Brussels Agreement of 1924, where sailors could be treated free of charge.72 Venereal diseases tended to spike among troops during war because of troop mobility and wartime conditions, as evidenced in World

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War I.73 The American medical doctor, M.J. Exner, put it succinctly in a 1917 publication: “It is a matter of history that prostitution follows the army.”74 The resulting concern, as venereal diseases rates soared among British troops and particularly among Dominion soldiers (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), allowed the reintroduction of elements of the Contagious Diseases Acts.75 The British government even passed a new Defense of the Realm Regulation 40D in March 1918 making it an offense for women with a communicable venereal disease to solicit and have sex with a member of the British armed forces.76 During World War II, venereal diseases assumed epidemic proportions among British and African troops stationed in British West Africa, necessitating a discussion of this development at the eighth meeting of the West African War Council in 1943.77 From the colonial perspective, illicit distillation and venereal diseases appeared to have combined to threaten colonial revenue and military preparedness – in short, the British war effort. Nigeria went as far as to pass in 1943 a “Bill for an Ordinance Relating to Venereal Disease,” making it a criminal offense for anyone to conceal a venereal disease condition and not report to the medical officer of health for the area or a qualified medical practitioner for treatment. Ostensibly battling “red light” districts and brothels in Lagos and the Southern Provinces, the Bill gave the governor of Nigeria the power to commit an entire group in a locality for treatment. Where the Governor, on a report by the Director of Medical Services, has reason to believe that venereal disease is prevalent among the residents in any premises or locality he may issue an order requiring the examination by a medical officer of the health of any person or of persons of any specified class or description residing therein.78

Colonial responses to venereal diseases and prostitution are not as detailed in the archives as the two decades struggle against illicit distillation and its undercutting of colonial revenues. The peak of venereal diseases during the war in the 1940s also coincided with the invention of penicillin as an effective treatment for gonorrhea. British official responses to the threat of venereal diseases to the military preparedness of troops drew on the tradition and legacy of the Contagious Diseases Acts that had been introduced into Britain and the Empire from the 1860s. This tradition viewed the British soldier, a loyal patriot who had offered his life in defense of country, as the victim of loose, diseased women. The soldier had to be protected; the culprit was the diseased woman. Measures included preventing known prostitutes from residing in

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or frequenting places where troops were stationed. At the same time sexual virility was associated with the military tradition: “a sexless soldier is a paradox,” opined an American physician in 1918.79 The British military authorities responded by issuing soldiers with prophylaxis in World War I: calomel ointment for syphilis and potassium permanganate solution or tablets for gonorrhea. Lavage or washing rooms in barracks facilitated the postcoital washing or flushing of genitals with prophylactic preparations. In the tropical colonies, racial difference and the supposedly dangerous environment of the tropics complicated this legacy. Philippa Levine notes how over the period from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1920s, British perceptions of the “sexual fecundity of the tropics, the fear of contagion, the associations between race and sex changed very little.”80 Her observation can be extended to the period of World War II. As Levine notes, “Colonial officials routinely argued that prostitution was normalized in nonwhite societies and held no stigma. This, they argued, was proof that subject peoples were less evolved.”81 Commenting on the language of war in the combat of venereal diseases, Levine opines that the “greater vulnerability of British troops abroad to disease more than to combat made military metaphors potent.”82 World War II saw the peak of prostitution and venereal diseases during the colonial period. In Sekondi-Takoradi, a port town in the Gold Coast, this was the time of “pilot boys,” who guided foreign soldiers and sailors to prostitutes for a small commission.83 Globally, the number of people suffering from syphilis peaked during World War II, and then fell dramatically. In terms of drug therapy, the effectiveness of drugs in the treatment of yaws and syphilis from the 1920s encouraged attendance at government hospitals and venereal clinics, and this partly explains the decline in syphilis in colonial medical statistics. Gonorrhea, on the other hand, seemed to increase over the colonial period, reaching epidemic proportions during World War II in West Africa. In 1943, when Nigeria passed its bill criminalizing the nonreporting and nontreatment of venereal diseases, all over West Africa military personnel showed gonorrhea rates in excess of 60 percent per each British West African colony. The governors of the British West African colonies at an executive meeting in May 1942 had considered the necessity of altering the law “so as to empower Medical Officers of Health to enforce the attendance for examination and treatment, if necessary, of persons suspected to be, or known to be, suffering from venereal diseases.”84 The decision was to await the legislation to be passed by Nigeria on venereal diseases and follow Nigeria’s lead. Following Nigeria’s example in 1943, the criminal code was amended in the Gold Coast in 1943 to prosecute those found harboring venereal diseases.

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The West African War Council considered “the Takoradi/Sekondi area [as] the worst area of the coast from the point of view of venereal disease,” as seen from medical statistics of the incidence of venereal diseases among the members of the Royal Air Force (RAF). The War Council resolved that a “special drive” in this Gold Coast town was necessary. This took place on June 26, 1943 and netted nineteen persons who were charged under the relevant sections of the Criminal Code (Amendment) Ordinance of 1943. The acting senior health officer of the Western Province, E. Daly, reported that: Further “drives” of a like nature are contemplated in the near future. Meanwhile a special watch is being maintained to locate Brothels and Wing Commander Graham R.A.F. tells me that Takoradi has been placed “out of bounds” and that additional service police have been employed to enforce order. These measures should help reduce to some extent the incidence of venereal disease in Takoradi, which is the “Red Lamp” section as far as the R.A.F. is concerned.85

These measures seemed to have helped and a grateful Air-Vice Marshall J.  Cole-Hamilton, the air officer commanding the RAF in West Africa, wrote to the Governor of the Gold Coast on September 15, 1943 to express his appreciation. It is now possible to compare the incidence for the three months of June, July and August with that for the preceding three months. Figures, which are expressed as rates per thousand per year, are as follows: June, July and August, 48 March, April and May, 77. An improvement during the last three months is apparent and I trust that this will be bettered in the future. I  should like to thank you for the assistance you have given.86

A major article by R.R. Wilcox in 1956 compares military and civilian statistics on the incidence of venereal diseases in British West Africa between 1944 and 1945.87 He provides medical statistics for European and African troops in the last two years of the war in the four British West African colonies, when the War Council was most concerned with the issue. In addition to the broad representation of venereal diseases in Table 7.1, one notes an increase in syphilis cases for both European and African troops from 1944 to 1945, though still under 10 percent incidence, and alarmingly high rates of gonorrhea and urethritis in both European and African troops. On average for 1944 and 1945, more than 70 percent of the troops in each British West African colony – both African and European – suffered from gonorrhea and urethritis. In this period, there were approximately 50,000 African troops in the four West African colonies being trained by about 6,000 Europeans.88

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The British official tendency to label as “prostitutes” and social deviants broad categories of women who offered sexual services to soldiers and sailors in West Africa for gifts and remuneration ignored deep cultural norms that regulated sexual relations, and social dynamics within working-class communities such as Sekondi-Takoradi, where “respectable” and “non-respectable” women – from the perspective of colonial ­authorities – cohabitated and shared a common popular culture. Peter Sarpong notes from songs sang during puberty rites in colonial Asante that domesticity and reward were linked, and men were expected to reward women after sexual intercourse.89 For British military authorities – who may not have understood the cultural nuances at play  – this underscored the thin line between prostitutes and nonprostitutes and reinforced long-standing colonial assumptions that portrayed women in the tropics as contaminated.90 Posters prepared by the General Council of Health Education in Britain as part of the propaganda campaign against venereal diseases, which the colonial office sent to the Gold Coast for possible use, confirm that the colonial focus was on European troops and expatriates in the Gold Coast. With images of European wives waiting back at home, the posters stressed the importance of European soldiers returning home clean from venereal diseases.91 In African colonial towns, prostitutes were usually migrants who used their social anonymity to earn a living. For some women this was an initial step to town life, and they viewed prostitution as temporary. Studies in prostitution in colonial Africa have noted the general absence of male pimps; hence women controlled their sexuality and earnings.92 Prostitution often provided merely the initial capital that enabled migrant women set up in other trades, and marriage remained a desirable goal. Indeed, in southern Ghana where female labor and accumulation were supposed to be pursued within marriage, prostitutes in colonial towns as single, assertive women making money on their own became radical role models for other women.93 The absence of social barriers between “prostitutes” and “respectable women” in working-class leisure activities in towns such as Sekondi-Takoradi facilitated the exchange of beliefs and mannerisms. Social life in Takoradi in the 1930s and 1940s revolved around spots like Columbia Hotel, famous for its dances. The “Liberian Bar,” owned by a Liberian in Takoradi, was another active spot in the 1930s and 1940s. As prostitutes and nonprostitutes patronized these places, mannerisms were exchanged. The ability to chew gum and make it snap was introduced into Sekondi-Takoradi by Kru women from Liberia, but it expanded to become the badge of female nonchalance.94

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Table 7.1  Relative importance of VDs in European and African troops in 1944 and 1945 Gambia 1944 1945

S. Leone 1944 1945

Gold Coast 1944 1945

Nigeria 1944 1945 All Forces 1944 1945

A. Europeans Syphilis

23.0  6.3

18.0 21.1

 8.4  6.4

 4.1  2.7

 6.3  8.3

Gono and Urethritis

61.5 74.9

70.0 62.4

72.8 71.4

59.2 94.2

64.4 78.3

Lymphogranuloma

   –  –

  3.6  2.7

 7.0  4.7

 8.8  1.0

 9.3  2.7

Chancroid

15.5 18.8

  8.4  13.8

11.8 17.5

  27.9  2.1

20.0 10.7

Total

  100   100

100   100

  100   100

   100    100

  100   100

B. Africans Syphilis

 8.5  8.1

 1.3  3.0

 2.3  1.9

 2.1  5.8

 1.7  4.1

Gono and Urethritis

65.0 73.4

94.0 82.7

76.6 81.5

92.0 79.6

88.2 80.8

Lymphogranuloma

     – 8.0

  3.5     8.1

11.3  8.8

 3.5  8.3

 5.6  8.2

26.5 10.5   100  100

  1.2   6.2 100 100

 9.8  7.8   100   100

 2.4  6.3    100  100

 4.5  6.9   100   100

Venereum 170

Venereum Chancroid Total

Source: West African Annual Statistical Reports, 1944–5, as cited in Wilcox, “Venereal Diseases in British West Africa,” West African Medical Journal 5 (1956): 103–11, 107.

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The association of prostitution with images of autonomy, acquisitiveness, even glamor, was evident in the recollection of Anita Mensah, whose family was involved in illicit distillation in the Sekondi-Takoradi area in the 1930s and 1940s. By then, Kru people were the dominant group in Takoradi. The other growing area was Nkontompo in Sekondi. There many women resided. The men who worked at Takoradi lived in compounds, for example the present New Takoradi, and when they wanted women came down from the compound at New Takoradi to Nkontompo in Sekondi. So the nickname “Nkontompo Headquarters” emerged. Many single women lived there. In this period some of the young men who visited Nkontompo would fall in love, and ask the women to quit the business of prostitution and come to join them at New Takoradi as wives. I saw this happening myself.95

It is unclear how a neighborhood in Sekondi acquired the name Nkontompo, but nkontompo in Twi, the Akan language, means “deceit” or “falsehood,” and the sexual conduct of freelance single women may have bequeathed the title of “Nkontompo” to their residential area. In this Ahanta town of Sekondi, prostitutes were migrants and not indigenes, and interviewees recalled the dominance of Fante women from Cape Coast. For the colonial authorities, illicit distillers, those who sold and consumed illicit gin, and prostitutes were criminals, whose activities undermined colonial revenues, sabotaged British troops, and encouraged disrespect for colonial law. Leveraging tools that years of anti-vice legislation in Britain and the Empire had bequeathed, it deployed the considerable forces of the state against ordinary men and women struggling for a living. Many distillers of illicit gin were also cocoa farmers, the crop that propelled the Gold Coast to fame when it emerged as the world’s leading producer in 1911. Cocoa took six years to mature and bear pods, and in the interim cash-strapped cocoa farmers depended on illicit distillation from the oil palm, which grew in the same forest environment as cocoa. Ensconced in isolated farming hamlets, distillation could be safely carried out. Colonial antagonism to these economic pursuits sensitized ordinary West Africans politically. The connections between farmers involved in the cocoa hold-ups of the 1930s, who refused to sell their cocoa to expatriate companies for the low prices offered in the depression; farmers as illicit distillers in the 1930s and 1940s; and the support of this constituency for the commoners’ party, Nkrumah’s CPP, merits investigation. On February 28, 1948, the Gold Coast exploded in riots, as a boycott of European imported goods intersected with a protest march of ex-servicemen seeking relief from the economic hardships of the postwar period and programs to rehabilitate ex-servicemen. Accounts of the demonstration indicate that it quickly became more than

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an ex-servicemen’s march, and the police firing on the protestors sparked off riots. The commoners who patronized popular culture were at the center of these riots. The colonial government decided that the Gold Coast was ready for decolonization and put in place a process to transfer political power. Commoners gained a champion in the CPP, formed in 1949, which adopted the legalization of illicit distillation as a cause, and incorporated into its ranks market women and notable prostitutes such as Ataa Baasi of Kumasi.96 The party became a prominent patron of popular culture, using musicians and actors in its campaigns. Though absent from the Gold Coast between 1935 and 1947, Nkrumah as an organizer was astute enough on his return to detect a major shift in Gold Coast politics; that urban workers and rural farmers had emerged as a politically conscious class, and that in the move to popular elections, they would hold the upper hand, not the numerically few chiefs and the educated elite. Nkrumah was the political leader who read accurately the signs evident in the struggle of the illicit distillers and the prostitutes against colonial rule. That was the most fundamental political development in the 1930s and the 1940s: the era of mass politics had emerged.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to connect the local struggles in colonial British West Africa over illicit distillation and prostitution (and venereal diseases) in the 1930s and 1940s to the metropolitan temperance and social purity crusade, and the mission of American evangelicals to reform the world. The three levels connect to provide an understanding of the anti-vice crusade, which is missed when any of these levels is examined in isolation. The strength of the American moral reform movement made prohibition in the United States a global test case. Their interests pursued through Anglo-Saxon networks on both sides of the Atlantic informed international liquor conventions on Africa despite the fact that the United States did not hold colonies in Africa. When prohibition failed in the United States, the lid was closed on prohibition around the world. The history of the Contagious Diseases Acts and its offshoots in Britain, the British Empire, and the American colonies forged a set of official responses to prostitution and the military over decades that were extended to West Africa during World War II. Levine notes in regards to prostitution and its regulation during the colonial period that: Historians of empire have mostly chosen to ignore how far the tensions over the abandonment of CD [Contagious Diseases] legislation pushed the imperial

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government to the brink, and on several occasions. That the topic precipitating such a crisis was concerned with lowly prostitute women and diseases impossible to name in polite circles is important.97

These “lowly prostitute women” in West Africa were baffled by the colonial state’s intense interest in their activities during World War II, unaware of the larger history of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the social purity considerations that framed this encounter. The outcome was a political radicalization of women involved in the sex trade, distillers and consumers of illicit gin, and patrons of a popular culture that increasingly drew together rural and urban networks. An inadvertent threat to empire, their response to colonial prosecution underscored for an astute political organizer like Nkrumah their potential for political mobilization in the nationalist cause. Sekondi-Takoradi became a stronghold of Nkrumah’s CPP and a center of radical politics.98 Those interviewed on nationalist politics in the 1950s, especially the campaigns leading up to the elections of 1951 and 1954 in the Gold Coast, recalled how some CPP politicians exploited the liquor question. I was in Ashanti when the struggle for independence was on, and I heard the CPP politicians on the platform saying the British government is deceiving us. In those days if they see you with a tot of akpeteshie, you were in trouble. Akpeteshie was banned in the country by the British government, and you would be prosecuted whether you were drinking it or distilling it or even holding it … So they [the CPP politicians] said “the British government is bringing their alcoholic beverages from overseas to us and is asking us to buy [these], but we make our own [drink] here and they say no. If I go to Parliament, I will see to it that it is legalized.” And they won.99

The last statement speaks to the importance of legalizing distillation as a nationalist issue and the electoral significance of this constituency. Incorporated into the national “narrative,” this hitherto neglected constituency propelled Nkrumah’s party to political power in the era of mass politics.100 Notes 1 The “new imperialism” studies have brought colonizer and colonized into the same analytical frame in instructive ways, exploring how influences move in both directions and also across colonies or empires. A  good representative of this genre is Philippa Levine and Susan R. Grayzel, eds., Gender, Labour, War and Empire: Essays on Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). See also, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

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2 Christopher Warren Danello, “Masters of Money:  The Growth of Transatlantic Financial Institutions, 1873–1913” (BA History thesis, Harvard University, 2012). 3 Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 4 Ibid., and Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire:  The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 5 While the regulation of prostitution and the medical inspection of prostitutes had become so identified with France that it had come to be known as the “French system” within Europe, constituencies within France itself had come to question the wisdom of this policy and its co-existence with civil and political liberties by the 1870s under the Third Republic. Andrew Aisenberg, “Syphilis and Prostitution: A Regulatory Couplet in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870, ed. Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall (London: Routledge, 2001), 15–28. 6 José Flores Ramos, “Virgins, Whores, and Martyrs:  Prostitution in the Colony, 1898–1919,” in Puerto Rican Women’s History: New Perspectives, ed. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez and Linda C. Delgado (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 84, notes that the first official brothel in San Juan was authorized by the king of Spain in 1526. Ramos points out, however, that by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, municipal authorities in San Juan, like other Western cities, had come to see prostitution as dangerous to health. Ramón Castejón-Bolea, “Doctors, Social Medicine and VD in Late-Nineteenth-Century and Early-Twentieth-Century Spain,” in Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870, ed. Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall (London: Routledge, 2001), 61–75, traces the Spanish government’s shifts in position on the regulation of prostitution from one of state acceptance from the sixteenth century to the prohibition of regulated prostitution in the seventeenth century to a new system of “tolerated houses” from the mid-nineteenth century. In the last phase, Spain followed the rest of Europe in the regulation and medical inspection of prostitutes. 7 See John C. Burnham, “Medical Inspection of Prostitutes in America in the Nineteenth Century,” in History of Women in the United States Volume 9: Prostitution, ed. Nancy F. Cott (Munich: K.G. Saur Verlag GmbH and Company, 1993), 216–31; and Philippa Levine, “Race and the Regulation of Prostitution: Comparing Public Health in the U.S. and Greater Britain,” in Gender, Labour, War and Empire: Essays on Modern Britain, ed. Philippa Levine and Susan R. Grayzel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 51–71. 8 Philippa Levine observes how contagious diseases acts were more extensive in their application in the colonies than in the metropoles, and colonial legislation on regulating prostitution often preceded that in the metropole. Philippa Levine, “Public Health, Venereal Disease and Colonial Medicine in the Later Nineteenth Century,” in Sex, Sin and Suffering:  Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870, ed. Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall (London:  Routledge, 2001), 160–72; and Philippa Levine, “Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire:  The Case of British India,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4 (1994): 579–602. 9 Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall, “Introduction,” in Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870, ed. Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall (London: Routledge, 2001), 11.

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1 0 Levine, “Race and the Regulation of Prostitution,” 61–2. 11 Laura Briggs, “Familiar Territory:  Prostitution, Empires, and the Question of U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, 1849–1916,” in Families of a New World: Gender, Politics, and State Development in a Global Context, ed. Lynne Haney and Lisa Pollard (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 41. 12 Ibid. 13 See, for example, Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793–1905 (London:  Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980). 14 Briggs, “Familiar Territory,” 43. 15 Tyrrell, Reforming the World, ­chapter 6. 16 Briggs, “Familiar Territory,” 50. 17 Ibid., 61. 18 Ramos, “Virgins, Whores, and Martyrs,” 86. 19 David J. Pivar, “The Military, Prostitution, and Colonial Peoples:  India and the Philippines, 1885–1917,” The Journal of Sex Research 17 (1981): 258. 20 Ibid., 259–60. See also, Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class. See also the introduction to this book. 21 Levine, “Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire,” 589–90. 22 Tyrrell, Reforming the World, 171–2. 23 Tyrrell, Woman’s World, 152–3. 24 Tyrrell, Reforming the World, 131–2. 25 Tyrrell, Woman’s World, 161. 26 Tyrrell, Reforming the World, 212. 27 Briggs, “Familiar Territory,” 52–4. 28 Ian Tyrrell, “Prohibition, American Cultural Expansionism, and the New Hegemony in the 1920s: An Interpretation,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 27 (November 1994): 419–20. 29 Daniel Okrent, Last Call:  The Rise and Fall of American Prohibition (New  York: Scribner, 2010), 21. 30 Tyrrell, Reforming the World, 209–10. 31 National Archives of Britain (NAB), London, CO 554/41/19073. 32 Lynn Pan, Alcohol in Colonial Africa (Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1975), 34–5. 33 Tyrrell, Reforming the World, 212. 34 Okrent, Last Call, 7. 35 Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change:  A  Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c.1800 to Recent Times (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1996), 84–5. 36 Lesley A.  Hall, “Venereal Diseases and Society in Britain, from the Contagious Diseases Acts to the National Health Service,” in Sex, Sin and Suffering, ed. Davidson and Hall, 130. 37 Ibid., 125. 38 See, for example, M.J. Exner, “Prostitution in its Relations to the Army on the Mexican Border,” Social Hygiene 3 (1917): 205–20. Nikolay Kamenov, in this volume, points to how alcoholism and venereal diseases – together with mental illness and other diseases such as tuberculosis – merged in the “social hygiene” movement from the early twentieth century. An increasingly scientific approach to vices transformed alcoholism, for example, from being solely a religious and moral concern.

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39 Simon Heap, “Living on the Proceeds of a Grog Shop: Liquor Revenue in Nigeria,” in Alcohol in Africa: Mixing Business, Pleasure and Politics, ed. Deborah F. Bryceson (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002), 139–59. 40 Akyeampong, Drink, Power, and Cultural Change, 81. 41 See Charles Ambler in this volume. Ambler explores the attempts by temperance advocates in the 1909 Liquor Traffic Commission to place Southern Nigerians with other “native” peoples in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as racial minors who needed to be protected from the degenerative impact of European liquor, and some African resistance to this categorization. 42 A. Olorunfemi, “The Liquor Traffic Dilemma in British West Africa: The Southern Nigerian Example, 1895–1918,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 17 (1984): 229–41. Dutch gin, often referred to as geneva, was manufactured in a pot-still as distinct from British gin distilled in a patent still. 43 Ibid., 237. 44 Ibid., 239. 45 Southern Nigeria, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Liquor Trade in Southern Nigeria (London, 1909). See Ambler in this volume. 46 Gold Coast, Legislative Council Debates, March 1, 1928. Akyeampong, Drink, Power, and Cultural Change, ­chapter 4, examines the complexity of temperance discourse and politics. Gold Coast educated elite and chiefs had been content when liquor revenues were applied to internal development under Governor Frederick Guggisberg (1919–27). It was partly his successor’s refusal to respect the link between liquor revenue and internal development that attracted the strident criticism of Gold Coast representatives in the legislative council from 1928. 47 “Report of the Commission of Inquiry Regarding the Consumption of Spirits in the Gold Coast” (1930). Hereafter referred to as the “1930 Commission Report.” 48 Gold Coast, Government Gazette, October 25, 1930 and November 1, 1930. The government decided to avoid the confusion in distinguishing pot-still Geneva from patent-still gin by abolishing both over the ten-year period. In this way, Dutch distillers could not accuse the British of discriminating in favor of British gin distillers. 49 Gold Coast, Government Gazette, November 3, 1930. 50 Gold Coast, Government Gazette, November 18, 1930 and November 22, 1930. 51 Governor Shenton Thomas, Memorandum on Liquor Policy (Accra:  Government Printer, 1934). Copy in NAB, CO 96/715/21702. 52 Ibid. 53 Governor of Nigeria to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, December 22, 1931. NAB, CO 554/89/4495. 54 Susan Diduk, “European Alcohol, History, and the State in Cameroon,” African Studies Review 36 (1993): 9. 55 Interview with Anita Mensah, Takoradi, August 16, 1994. 56 Gold Coast, Report on the Police Department, 1933–4, 5. 57 Olorunfemi, “Liquor Traffic,” 241. 58 NAB, CO 554/89/4495. 59 Interview with the Western Region Distillers Cooperative Management Committee, Takoradi, August 16, 1994. 60 Interview with A.A. Amartey (aka Nii Amarkai II), Accra, August 31, 1994.

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61 NAB, CO 96/715/21702. Eastern Province Commissioner’s Report, December 28, 1933. 62 Okrent, Last Call, 373. 63 Gold Coast, Report on the Police Department, 1934–5, 7. 64 Interview with Jeremiah Oman Ano, Sekondi, August 15, 1994. 65 Resident of the Calabar Province, “Memorandum on the Illicit Distilling of Spirits in the Calabar Province.” NAB, CO 554/89/4495. 66 For a history of temperance and prohibition in America, see also W.J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Ian Tyrrell, Sobering Up:  From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America (Westport:  Greenwood, 1979); and David E. Kyvig, Repealing National Prohibition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 67 Tyrrell, “Prohibition, American Cultural Expansionism, and the New Hegemony in the 1920s,” 344. 68 Ibid., 345–6. 69 Governor Shenton Thomas to SOS Cunliffe Lister, January 7, 1933. NAB, CO 96/708/1660. 70 The lowest duty that could be levied on a gallon of imported gin under the St. Germain Convention was 24s in 1936, which still made imported gin over-priced compared to local gin. NAB, CO 554/104/33522 (1936). On the Colonial Office’s approval to distill gin in Nigeria and the Gold Coast, see “Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Colonies,” dated April 28, 1943. NAB, CO 554/127/33522/B. 71 NAB, CO 554/127/33522/B. T. Hoskyns-Abrahall, Nigerian Secretariat (Lagos), to Resident Minister (Accra), August 9, 1943. 72 Deborah Pellow, “Sex, Disease, and Culture Change in Ghana,” in Histories of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Philip W. Setel, Milton Lewis, and Maryinez Lyons (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 23. 73 Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics:  Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), ­chapter 6. 74 Exner, “Prostitution in Its Relations to the Army,” 205. 75 Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics, 146. 76 Ibid., 163. 77 British colonies in West Africa had escaped the Contagious Diseases Acts in the late nineteenth century because of the small European populations in colonies like the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone. Levine, “Public Health, Venereal Disease and Colonial Medicine,” 162. The Cape Colony differed in this respect, and it witnessed the institutionalization of prostitution from 1868. See Elizabeth B. Van Heyningen, “The Social Evil in the Cape Colony 1868–1902: Prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts,” Journal of Southern African Studies 10 (1984): 170–97. It was during World War II that large numbers of European and American troops were stationed in West Africa. 78 “A Bill for an Ordinance Relating to Venereal Disease.” Copy in PRAAD, Accra, CSO 11/10/136 (1943). 79 Cited in Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, 153. 80 Ibid., 323. 81 Ibid., 8. 82 Ibid., 324.

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83 K.A. Busia, Report on a Social Survey of Sekondi-Takoradi (London: Crown Agents, 1950), 108. 84 PRAAD, Accra, CSO 11/10/136. Venereal Diseases  – Legislation in Respect of (1943). 85 PRAAD, Accra, CSO 11/11/140. 86 Ibid. 87 R.R. Wilcox, “Prevalence of Venereal Diseases in British West Africa,” West African Medical Journal 5 (1956): 103–11. 88 Ibid., 108. 89 Peter Sarpong, Girls’ Nubility Rites in Ashanti (Tema:  Ghana Publications Corporation, 1977), 24–5. 90 Levine, “Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire,” 591. 91 PRAAD, Accra, CSO 11/10/137. Venereal Diseases – Pamphlets and Posters for Propaganda Campaign against. 92 Emmanuel Akyeampong, “Sexuality and Prostitution among the Akan of the Gold Coast, c.1650–1950,” Past and Present 156 (August 1997):  144–73; Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990); Benedict B.B. Naanen, “ ‘Itinerant Gold Mines’: Prostitution in the Cross River Basin,” African Studies Review 24 (1991): 57–79; and Janet M. Bujra, “Production, Property, Prostitution: ‘Sexual Politics’ in Atu,” Cahiers d’études africaines 65 (1977): 13–39. 93 Worried chiefs and elders in the Gold Coast and Asante would also deploy the trope of venereal disease in the 1930s against acquisitive single women, round them up and insist under fine that they choose mates and marry. Penelope Roberts, “The State and the Regulation of Marriage:  Sefwi Wiawso (Ghana), 1930–1940,” in Women, State and Ideology: Studies from Africa and Asia, ed. Haleh Afshah (London:  Macmillan, 1987), 48–69; and Jean Allman, “Rounding up Spinsters: Gender Chaos and Unmarried Women in Colonial Asante,” Journal of African History 37 (1996): 195–214. 94 Interview with Laurence Cudjoe, J.K. Annan, Arhu, and Joseph Kofi Ackon, Sekondi, May 27, 1992. 95 Interview with Anita Mensah, Takoradi, August 16, 1994. 96 Ataa Baasi had founded the Baasifuo Community, an association of prostitutes in Kumasi that sought and received recognition from the king of Asante (Asantehene). PRAAD, Kumasi, Item 2339 (1943). See also, Ashanti Pioneer, April 27, 1955. 97 Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, 328. 98 See, for example, Richard Jeffries, Class, Power and Ideology in Ghana:  The Railwaymen of Sekondi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 99 Interview with Rev. Col. Kofi Asare, Accra, June 30, 1992. On the CPP and the politics of local gin, see Emmanuel Akyeampong, “What’s in a Drink? Class Struggle, Popular Culture and the Politics of Akpeteshie (Local Gin) in Ghana, 1930–1967,” Journal of African History 37 (1996): 215–36. 100 On the location of “narrative” at the center of history, empire and nationalism, see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

8

Medical and criminological constructions of drug addiction in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia Pavel Vasilyev In describing the medical history of her patient, a certain S.D., in the late 1920s, Russian addiction researcher Raisa Golant specifically mentioned that it was precisely after a lengthy stay in Austrian captivity that he understood that “without drugs life … makes no sense.”1 In the Russian context, the emergence of drug addiction as a social problem can be traced back to the period from the beginning of World War I to the end of 1920s, when medical, medical-legal and criminological texts for the first time constructed drug abuse as a delinquency and a specific social problem requiring immediate state intervention. Physicians and criminologists focused on the origins of drug use, created images of drug users, and proposed possible solutions to the problem. These mutually constitutive constructions of drug addiction as a social problem influenced practical narcotic policy and legitimized increasing government regulation. These discourses and policies reveal a surprising continuity between late Imperial and early Soviet addiction research. Russian policy-makers drew on debates of drug use as a social ­problem from abroad, in particular Germany. These entanglements demonstrate some features that are specific for Eastern European constructions of the “drug addict.” Even brief analysis of Russian and German medical and criminological texts shows that there are many unexpected similarities between them. In both countries, scientists perceived drug addiction in a politicized way – as a disease closely associated with modernity and capitalism.2 They strongly supported government intervention and concurrently constructed larger projects of the improvement of healthcare and social change. In the German context, however, the association between drug addiction and Jews was made more explicit than in the Russian case, showing that drug use became closely associated with deviance in a particularly racialized way in Germany. 179

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Physicians were among the most important voices in framing drug addiction as a threat to social stability during this period and their medical texts related to drug addiction showcase their emerging discourse about drugs, drug abuse, and the drug addict. Of course, the medical community was not the only professional group that engaged in the construction of drug addiction as a social problem. However, the impact of other groups – criminologists, sociologists, legal scholars  – was much smaller, due to the relatively underdeveloped state of criminology and sociology in early twentieth-century Russia and a certain syncretism of human sciences of the period.3 Moreover, the problem of drug addiction attracted the attention of physicians because in the early twentieth century drugs were actively used in many spheres of public health and had a strong medical connotation. Indeed, as David Courtwright notes, the distinction between “good” and “bad” drugs is a medical construction.4 Understanding the transformation of Russian attitudes toward psychoactive substances is complicated by the fact that the most basic terms used to describe “drugs” and “addiction” were subject to constant negotiation and redefinition in the period under discussion. There has always been a major debate about various conflicting definitions of “drugs” and “addiction,” since the decisions to prohibit or legalize one or another psychoactive substance (be it alcohol, marijuana, or tobacco) are often arbitrary, historically conditioned, and not related to the actual degree of psycho-physical harm and addictiveness. For the purposes of this chapter, I focus on such drugs as cocaine, opiates, and hashish, since Russian society first experienced the “abuse” of these drugs as a serious social problem only after World War I.  The consumption of alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee has much longer histories in Russia. I recognize, however, the limitations and implications of this approach for the analysis of medical texts. While drug addiction is generally viewed as a contemporary global problem, there is still a need for research on the history of drugs in many areas of the world. In the Russian context, there is a clear lack of attention toward historical roots of drug addiction, various cultural forms of consuming drugs, and diverse regimes of drug prohibition. Moreover, even those historians who have looked at the social developments and legal changes related to drug consumption and addiction retain a rather essentialist understanding of drug addiction as a “social evil,” an unequivocal social problem to be “solved” through government intervention. Additionally, the histories of medical and criminological research and the development of narcotic policy are artificially separated in the historical literature on Russia and the Soviet Union. This situation differs from the Western European and

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American context, where several major books have traced the history of drug addiction with particular attention toward the reciprocal relations between medical science and narcotic policy.5 Quite surprisingly, no major study has sought to explain the changes in the attitudes of Russian professional communities to drugs and addiction from the late Imperial to the early Soviet period. The topic remains largely unexplored, even though several authors have briefly discussed the developments of the period. With its tendencies to mythologize and conceal, Soviet Marxist historiography largely ignored the history of drug addiction in twentieth-century Russia.6 New authors interested in drug addiction have emerged since the late 1980s, but the historical picture that they have tried to reconstruct remains largely fragmentary. Many scholars have published articles and book chapters that at least touch upon the social history of drug addiction in Russia,7 but there is no major contribution from the perspective of the history of medicine.8 Perhaps even more importantly, most studies have essentially confined themselves to the narrow period between 1917 and the early 1920s, neglecting both the emergence of social problems during World War I and the decline of cocaine and opiate addiction in the late 1920s.

Scientific perceptions of drug addiction in late Imperial Russia Addiction researchers in turn-of-the-century Russia hesitated to label drug addiction a social problem, and could not even decide what substances should be classified as harmful drugs. Medical science was not free of internal contradictions:  the very terms that described drug addiction were in flux, and the lists of “drugs,” with its negative connotation, would vary from one work to another to include or exclude cocaine, opium, morphine, heroine, and ether, as well as alcohol (often split into beer, wine, and spirits), tobacco, tea, and coffee.9 There was no unanimity in regard to which terms should be used to describe these “drugs” (iady, narkotiki, durmany) and conditions that arise from the use of these substances (narkomaniia, narkotizm, or more specific morfinizm, kokainizm).10 Alcoholic beverages, tea, and coffee were almost inevitably combined with hashish and opium under the label of “poisons that influence consciousness,” a phrase that is somewhat close to our contemporary understanding of drugs or psychoactive substances.11 At the same time, many physicians still continued to regard morphine, heroin, and cocaine as medications – medications that may be drastic and needed some control, of course, but could be still useful for medical treatment.12 For

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many authors, the problem of hashish or opium abuse was thus essentially the same as the excessive consumption of tea or coffee in that use of these substances provided no medical benefit and might cause physical harm. Complicating physicians’ distinctions between harmful drugs and beneficial medicine was the fact that many authors solely based their research on their personal experiences of drug consumption.13 Discussions of drug use in fin-de-siècle Russian texts presented drug addiction within the well-known narrative of criticism that touched more upon moral than medical issues. For example, in pre-revolutionary Russian legal literature the problems of crime and suicide were often explained as a result of social and spiritual crisis, difficult economic conditions, or degenerative heredity.14 To borrow a title from Nikolai K.  Reimer’s 1899 book, recreational drugs by their origin were considered to be “poisons of civilization” (Iady tsivilizatsii, itself a direct reference to Charles Richet’s Les Poisons de l’Intelligence, the many meanings of which often depended on the specific translation).15 The origins of drug addiction were accordingly strongly associated with decadence and degeneration (both physical and mental) that was closely linked to civilization, modernity, technological progress, free-market capitalism, urbanization, and secularization.16 The groups of users that were primary targets of the medical texts about this modern and perhaps even fashionable disease corresponded neatly to the degeneration discourse. These groups were closely linked to the notions of modernity, wealth, and education, and included artists, intellectuals, members of the middle-class professions (especially doctors), and rich entrepreneurs.17 In Iady tsivilizatsii, Reimer gives an evocative example of a philosophy student who studied theological mysticism and used the drug as a tool to “liberate the spirit from the hold of oppressive matter.”18 Especially characteristic is Reimer’s presentation of drugs in the colonial context as “allies to the missionaries of European culture” and “levers of civilization” – however dangerous and poisonous they might be.19 In Russian texts, Europeans taking morphine instead of pure Chinese opium, for instance, were often presented as more refined – yet also lazy and feeble – individuals.20 The vision of alcoholics would be quite different, as alcohol was strongly associated with poverty, ignorance, and the lower classes.21 As drug use was not perceived to be a major social problem in late Imperial Russia, physicians did not formulate possible solutions for drug addiction, even if they did suggest that drug consumption reflected a certain type of moral malaise. In fact, since the problem would be most often diagnosed on an individual level, the solutions offered by fin-de-siècle

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physicians had a rather narrow focus on proper medical treatment for individual patients. Once again, the situation with alcohol was different. As alcohol addiction already presented a serious social problem at the end of the nineteenth century and was perceived as such, physicians would often include in their texts various professional (medical), social, and cultural proposals that were supposed to eliminate alcoholism.22 The lack of proposed solutions for drug addiction thus does not mean that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical science was not interested in the broader social developments, public health, and the relationship between individual patients’ health and national/social health. Quite the contrary: general trends within the medical community were grouped mostly around radical reform ideas.23 The impulse for the healthification of the society noted by historian John F. Hutchinson was often accompanied by the demands for increasing government regulation and scientifically justified planning and control.24 Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works reflect this impulse, as do later medical publications on this subject. However, drug abuse had not yet been classified as a threat to public health. In general, following the popular fin-de-siècle conception of “therapeutic pessimism,” the widely held disbelief in the efficiency of treatment of psychiatric patients,25 the majority of Russian texts pertaining to the prewar period say surprisingly little even about practical treatment of drug addiction as an individual condition, let alone a social problem.26 Drug addiction in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia was not considered to be a widespread social problem that required government intervention and control. However, World War I and the changes that it brought would soon alter such perceptions.

Radical changes after World War I From 1914 to 1922, Russia experienced radical changes; including, but not limited to, World War I, crash of the empire, revolutions, and the Russian Civil War. This period was also characterized by audacious socialist experiments and radical utopian projects, as well as increasing government regulation. Among other things, drug addiction also emerged as a specific social problem precisely in the 1910s, for which World War I is widely perceived as an important catalyst worldwide.27 Scholars at the time noticed the trend toward the “democratization” of drug addiction, i.e. “contamination” of previously “clean” social groups, such as workers.28 Perhaps even more importantly, after World War I  Russian society confronted a dramatic increase in the number of drug addicts. Early Soviet physicians and criminologists

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witnessed this increase, and they also possessed some relevant scientific knowledge about addiction. It is hardly surprising, then, that they would emerge as the claims makers who departed from their professional understanding to construct drug addiction as a social problem and create moral panics through alarming declarations.29 For example, the resolution of the First Scientific Conference on Drug Addiction held in Moscow in December 1923 stated that cocaine abuse was spreading over Soviet Russia like an epidemic.30 This picture has both similarities and differences with developments in other European countries, particularly Germany. In the German context, comprehensive works dealing with drug addiction were published as early as the 1870s, in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. The most important publications, however, did not appear until the 1920s when addiction research by doctors like Fritz Fränkel and Ernst Joël was closely linked to the socialist reforms that offered comprehensive programs of public health control and disease prevention.31 Very similar explanations of the origins of drug addiction were present in major German medical texts of the 1920s and early 1930s. Physicians in the Weimar Republic also noted the catastrophic influence of World War I, political violence and revolutions as factors contributing to an increase in drug addiction within Germany.32 Weimar addiction researchers also noticed the trend toward the “democratization” of drug addiction, but they specifically focused on the members of middle-class professions and medical specialists – and in this regard the physicians invoked numerous stereotypes about Jews, labeling them both drug addicts and drug dealers par excellence.33 Importantly, in the German context, many of the later explicit anti-Semitic works of the early 1930s draw heavily on the connection between Jews and drug addiction.34 To address the perceived threat of drug addiction, German policymakers suggested establishing specialized drug clinics (usually called Fürsorgestellen) that were envisaged as institutions of comprehensive control and prophylaxis35 that would have the right to “sever all the connections that make drug supply possible.”36 There was also a general consensus on the desirability of introduction of anti-capitalist measures to control the distribution of drugs.37 Soviet doctors often studied at German universities and learned their understandings of addiction from German medical texts. The transfer of scientific (and other) ideas about addiction across the borders can be traced, as was the case with the quick Russian translation and publication of Ernst Joël’s informative handbook (first published in Leipzig in 1928, Russian translation appeared in 1930).38 The German medical discourse was

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by large the only one that influenced the Soviet authors of the period. The bibliographical list at the end of a major Soviet work on drug addiction by Raisa Golant contained sixteen entries in German and only one in French and one in English, for example.39 The tradition of medical collaboration between Russia and Germany dates back centuries and the contacts intensified greatly in the atmosphere of political isolation for both countries in the 1920s in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles.40 Additionally, while Fritz Fränkel and Ernst Joël were undoubtedly European doctors, it is difficult to perceive them as bourgeois adversaries, when both of them upheld increasingly radical political ideologies and Fränkel even delivered a speech at the founding congress of the German Communist Party.41 Thus, connections to German research on addiction allowed Soviet doctors to engage with global trends of prophylaxis and public health control, but this engagement was mediated through a kind of political filter that in many ways predetermined politically charged definitions of addiction. Early Soviet medical constructions of drug abuse both reflected national traditions and Marxist ideological preferences and at the same time actively borrowed from internationally acknowledged Western scientific theories, often in paradoxical ways.

Constructing the social problem: drug addiction in medical and legal texts of the early Soviet period Within medical debates a special emphasis was placed on identifying the causes of a medical problem because according to accepted medical reasoning the etiology of disease could often give physicians clues to solutions and treatment. Accordingly, the origins of drug addiction as described in scientific texts greatly influenced the understanding of drug addicts and narcotic policy among the professional community – and also beyond, as physicians and criminologists tried to achieve symbolic domination. In particular, researchers detected three basic explanations of potential causes of drug addiction: socio-political, such as war or revolution; economic, like capitalism or foreign trade; and personal/psychological, including various causes on the macro- and micro-scale alike that range from “moral loneliness” to the search for romantic use of drugs za kompaniiu – “for the sake of companionship.” As discussed above, historians have often recognized World War I as a major factor in the spread of drug addiction (especially morphine addiction) in Russia – as in Germany or elsewhere. This explanation was already present in the works of early Soviet physicians and criminologists, who, in a way, repeated earlier arguments that had pronounced an increase of the

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number of drug addicts after the Civil War in the United States or after the Franco-Prussian War in Germany due to the horrors of modern war and exposure to drugs in battlefield medicine.42 There were, however, some new elements in the Soviet texts, as World War I was not officially named “great” or “patriotic” by the authorities, but rather “imperialist.” As with many other things in early Soviet Russia, physicians argued that it was the old regime’s imperialism and not war per se that actually made so many young men and women fall victim to morphine after serious injuries or shell-shock. Soviet ideologues found this explanation particularly useful in the sense that it provided a politically correct framework to comprehend the great number of “declassed traumatics from various classes of the society” among morphine addicts, including workers and peasants.43 Combined with the assumed extraordinarily strong and persistent character of wartime trauma, this contention also helped to explain why there were so many morphine addicts still present on the streets and in the wards of Soviet cities even in the late 1920s. In any case, such concerns about the spread of drug addiction to all social classes marked an important shift from late Imperial to early Soviet discussions on drug consumption, abuse, and addiction. World War I  and its aftermath obviously brought about many socioeconomic problems, such as hunger, poverty, or captivity. The link between war and morphine addiction, however, remained problematic. Usually, the physicians and suppliers of drugs, who, for instance, prescribed and provided morphine to shell-shocked soldiers, were hardly ever accused of facilitating drug addiction. Paradoxically enough, they were found in the very same medical community that constructed the paradigm of drug addiction in the early Soviet period. Russian physicians were quick to label their pre-revolutionary colleagues as bourgeois and irresponsible, as the latter allegedly were prescribing morphine frivolously for minor pains or shell-shock conditions.44 In the Russian context, however, World War I was hardly the major disruption of the late 1910s. The revolutions of 1917 and the prolonged civil war, as physician Raisa Golant noted in 1929, brought additional “physical sufferings and moral anxiety that were accompanied by social perturbations almost everywhere in the world.”45 Changes of regimes, continuous social and political crisis, instability and weakness of central power, and legal vacuum were too profoundly expressed to be overlooked by the physicians and criminologists searching for the causes of drug addiction – both in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.46 For early Soviet researchers, however, the crucial task, and probably the main challenge, was to present these “social perturbations,” especially the October Revolution that was perceived

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as a starting point of the whole new order of the 1920s, in a positive light. The solution they found partially consisted in labeling the perceived deviations of various sorts, including drug addiction, as “remnants of the past.”47 While physician Gedalii D. Aronovich admitted that the revolution was a “large-scale social experiment” that caused “chronic psychic traumas” for many people, he also described the causes of drug addiction “epidemic” in Petrograd after 1917 in picturesque form: “In the transitional period, when old foundations collapse, and new forms of universal existence are born, the obsolete Old gets mixed up with the viable New and creates a whole range of transitory socio-pathological phenomena.”48 Another strategy was to label drug addicts alien and sick in terms of their class and social origin. In an 1920 article, Aronovich presented a whole series of cocaine addict types that failed to find their place in the new ­socialist world: from “tall pale 22-year old Albert K from the … well-to-do family” to the 24-year old anti-communist officer to the “hot-tempered” MA student “from [a]‌psychopathic family.”49 He also offered evocative examples of how the death of parents, “troubled family environment,” or “meager diet” all made young people resort to cocaine sniffing during World War I.50 To a certain degree, these addicts were not really presented as personally responsible for their disease. It is rather pathological modernity and their degenerative bourgeois surroundings that made them unsuitable for the “real” life in revolutionary Petrograd and forced to seek escape in cocaine snuffing. As much as drug addiction was explained as a dangerous holdover of the conservative and imperialist old regime, physicians also sought to develop an argument about the economic origins of drug abuse. They were particularly interested in the role of free-market capitalism in perpetuating drug use. For many addiction researchers in early Soviet Russia, social deviations were indeed “remnants” – but specifically “remnants of capitalism.” This became especially clear in the 1920s, when the New Economic Policy (NEP) succeeded war communism, and introduced some capitalist elements into the Soviet economy. Soviet scientists proved themselves to be good Marxists and emphasized that a capitalist (or semi-capitalist) basis will always create social and cultural pathologies in the superstructure. Physician Aleksandr Sholomovich, for instance, specifically noted in 1926 that “capitalism is the main cause of drug addiction, because it uses culture as the instrument of greater intoxication.”51 This position was also supported by such high-placed officials as People’s Commissar of Public Health Nikolai Semashko. In his Izvestiia article “On Cocaine Addiction and the Struggle Against It” he explicitly stated, “the main cause of this disease is

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the regime of [capitalist] exploitation (one are too well off for their own good [s zhiru besiatsia], others are desperate and intimidated).”52 According to this logic, the NEP actually increased the number of deviants, including drug addicts, because of the partial “return of the capitalist basis.”53 Capitalism also had its more specific faces. For many researchers, the permissibility of free trade was one of the factors that created a favorable atmosphere for drug distribution and drug-related misuse. Specific targets could have differed and included private pharmacies, foreign trade and potential smuggling, or irresponsible state-employed doctors/pharmacists; but there was a general feeling that the causes of drug addiction were closely linked to the lack of strict government control over the import, distribution, and sale of recreational drugs.54 Such control, and increased state intervention in the economy, was thus desirable. Most of the medical texts discussed above dealt with the major socio-economic and political factors contributing to drug addiction, but there were also frequent mentions of seemingly less politically salient causes of drug abuse. In fact, these factors might only seem to be of secondary importance. For example, the regime of alcohol prohibition that was introduced in Russia after the beginning of World War I was generally considered one of the reasons why drugs, such as cocaine, morphine, or opium, suddenly became more accessible than alcohol and even partially replaced the much-preferred vodka.55 For some researchers, such a situation would seem unnatural and not justified in the long run after the general stabilization. Some physicians pointed to other often-neglected physiological and psychological causes. Diseases, chronic fatigue, overstrain, and constant malnutrition comprised permanent factors that influenced the everyday choices that ordinary Russians made.56 But perhaps the broadest variety of potential causes of drug addiction detected by early Soviet addiction researchers can be attributed to the psychological realm. Indeed, the population of Russia that was described by the physicians as suffering from constant neuroses may have felt the need to resort to artificial psychic stimulators. Gedalii Aronovich discussed how “mental conflict, deep disillusionment in universal ideals … anxiety about the fate of the country … [or] about the family, worries about the future and the fate of the relatives … moral loneliness” all led many, especially young people, to take drugs.57 Military physician Vladimir A.  Gorovoi-Shaltan noted that other psychological reasons included “curiosity, urge towards new sensations … [and] suppression of nervous strain.”58 Regarding morphine, researchers often noted that the introduction took place within families; for example, a

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husband who compensated his wife for “material troubles” or “sexual deficiency” by offering her morphine.59 Of course, it would be unreasonable to discard such banal, but still valuable, factors as imitation, the appeal of drugs as a romantic attribute of the criminal world, and peer pressure. Like their colleagues almost hundred years later, researchers of the 1920s also expressed their concerns about the familiarization with drugs among children, teenagers, and youth za kompaniiu – “for the sake of companionship.”60 In one context the very systematized and ordered Soviet reality of the late 1920s emerged as yet another cause of drug addiction. In her 1929 article on morphine addiction, physician Raisa Golant admitted, “Love, revolution, and drugs cause animation and give a sharper feeling of life.”61 As the chaotic romance of revolution gave way to the quiet and measured functioning of well-adjusted political mechanism, many people could have felt the desire to “escape the reality, make life brighter and more interesting.”62 And perhaps it was the case when drugs succeeded and replaced the energy and effervescence of the revolution. The causes of drug addiction that were detected by early Soviet addiction researchers should be considered in relationship to the description of groups of users and drug-related practices that often accompanied discussions of the causes of drug addiction in these texts. Of special interest for my argument are the presentations of the social and ethnic background of drug addicts. The process of the “democratization” of drug addiction already mentioned led to the fact that the drug users in the 1920s were to be found not only in demimonde and bohemian circles (as in the late Imperial period), but also in the circles of proletarian, mostly unemployed young people.63 To explain this development, medical and criminological texts usually emphasized external factors  – war, the capitalist economy, or connections of workers with prostitutes.64 Accordingly, while new images of lower-class drug users appeared in the scientific discourse of the 1920s, their involvement with narcotics was always explained by politically palatable reasons. The democratization of drug addiction made it impossible to ignore “homeless boys” (besprizorniki) as a substantial group of addicts, but doctors specifically dismissed any structural causes of their homelessness, and rather presented them as overwhelmingly criminal.65 Aleksandr Sholomovich, for example, explicitly declared, “cocaine and crime are blood brothers.”66 Numerous physical and mental deficiencies (usually presented as genetically inherited) were also considered to be yet another “legacy of the old regime.”67 Often authors stressed the purported homosexuality or “sexual cynicism” of these children to further mark them as deviant.68

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Overall, for researchers stereotypical drug addicts continued to be prostitutes, officers, businessmen, medical specialists, students, artists, and intellectuals.69 Legal scholar Mikhail N. Gernet specifically noted, “the level of education of criminals who were cocaine addicts … was higher than average.”70 There was also a substantial anti-Semitic element in discussion of the causes of drug addiction. In early Soviet Russia, many Jews worked as pharmacists, and as such, medical and legal texts also invoked them as drug dealers. Often the pharmaceutical industry – especially NEP-era private pharmacies  – would be imagined as headed by profit-driven Jewish capitalists, who do not care about the health of the people.71 In fact, it is striking that despite all the radical changes that occurred after the war, addiction researchers retained the fin-de-siècle language and continued to describe for the most part the same social groups as drug addicts as before the war. To a certain degree, this strategy of ignoring the reality that drug addiction touched all classes reflected the ideological and political views of the authors. As devoted socialists/communists, they had difficulties acknowledging and adequately describing cocaine or morphine abuse among young workers or homeless children.72 They missed, therefore, the opportunity to present drug addiction as a condition that actually affects all layers of the population and is not stereotypically reserved for preordained degenerate groups. Instead physicians suggested that drug addiction was increasingly a bourgeois disease. The translation of social terms into political language meant that in many texts of the 1920s the addict was perceived not as a sick individual, but as a representation of political, social, economic, and medical dangers to the Soviet state and society. Such presentations predetermined the specialists’ focus on the ways of eradicating drug addiction. We should not, however, assume that there were no alternatives to the ultimate construction of the social problem as it happened in the 1920s. It is important to mention that some post-World War I medical and legal texts that addressed drug addiction did not emphasize social aspects of the problem and did not propose any solutions – an attitude which might be qualified as neutral.73 However, the majority of Soviet addiction researchers chose to call for repressive government interference and strict regulation of the drug market as possible solutions to the threat of drug addiction. The refusal to solve the problem of drug addiction without the exterior assistance of the state and the perception that the struggle against drug addiction was government business should be given special consideration. Of course, this corresponds to the increasing intervention of the modern state into the sphere of public health in the early twentieth century. The

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tradition of regulating the consumption of alcohol, culminating in the prohibition regime with the start of the Great War, was also a factor that led Russian physicians and criminologists to advocate government intervention in the struggle against drug addiction.74 In the Russian context drug addiction can also be perceived as linked to early Soviet utopian projects of the New Man and novyi byt. Novyi byt, meaning “new forms of everyday life,” was meant to transform the daily routine through bringing in new socialist values to quotidian activities.75 The impulse for the “healthification” of the society that was present in pre-revolutionary Russia was now united with the program of transforming human bodies in the aftermath of the revolution, which also determined the focus of scientific investigations.76 This impulse was developed into such diverse projects as Nikolai I. Podvoiskii and Konstantin A. Mekhonoshin’s “militarism,” Aleksei K. Gastev’s “scientific organization of labor” (NOT), Dr.  Gorinevskii’s “socialist eugenics,” and People’s Commissar of Public Health Semashko’s sanitization programs.77 By focusing on the various aspects of everyday life, such as military drill and physical exercise, work practices, eugenic marriage counseling, hygiene education and medical prophylactic campaigns, they all attempted to create a cleaner, stronger, healthier, and more productive human for the socialist future. Addiction researchers used a variety of arguments in favor of government intervention. Of course, some of these arguments would appeal to generalized moral categories and describe drug addiction as a “social ­disaster,” “anomaly of contemporary life,” or “dangerous illness.”78 Some would even go on to rhetorical exclamations:  “There should be no child addicts in the Soviet state!” (Detei-narkomanov v Sovetskom gosudarstve ne dolzhno byt’!).79 The most prominent trend was to argue that addiction posed a ­challenge to the socialist system that would be costly in both political and economic terms if left unanswered.80 Physician Lazar Minor actually calculated that the struggle against addiction would save the state between 60,000 and 70,000 rubles annually by reducing absenteeism.81 Other researchers stressed the criminogenic potential of drug addiction and reminded that “child cocaine addicts represent a danger for the state in the future, because it is the group from which the juvenile lawbreakers are recruited.”82 Some authors appealed to the rational character of the new state and provided scientific and eugenic argumentation (with references to “the health of the nation” and “degeneration”) for government intervention.83 In conditions of poor financing, red tape, and inadequate training of medical personnel a great deal of the solutions proposed by the physicians largely focused on offering medical propaganda, sanitary education, and

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prophylaxis.84 Many Soviet doctors declared the necessity to propagandize a healthy lifestyle  – especially through popular books, newspapers, and films.85 David S. Futer specifically complained that “there are no special films, slides, fiction books on sanitary education and particularly about the dangers of the drugs made for the children and teenagers.”86 Other authors would support the creation of special laboratories and libraries that could offer free-of-charge consultations.87 The importance of these preventive campaigns was specifically stressed for identified at-risk groups like children, youth, criminals, and besprizorniki (homeless children and teenagers).88 Another major suggestion that was proposed in almost every work on the subject was the establishment of special drug clinics (dispansery) for addicts.89 Most Russian works, however, give few details about how these clinics would be organized and give only occasional references to American and Western European experiences with these establishments. While Nikolai Semashko’s article is certainly ideologically charged, it offered the most detailed description of how these clinics could function. Semashko planned to establish clinics in large cities where they would complete “medical, educational and inspectorial” tasks. He referred to the positive experience of such clinics in the struggle against tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases.90 In his view, the clinics had the right to intervene in the personal lives and professional careers of the patients in order to control their work performance, leisure activities, and their circle of acquaintances. In a different article David S. Futer, while describing the practical tasks facing similar clinics for minors, explained the role of the clinics as simply to “catch and heal children addicts.”91 Lawyer Aleksandr A. Prigradov-Kudrin was in favor of the compulsory treatment of all drug addicts without exception (alongside those with alcohol addiction, syphilis, tuberculosis, etc.), but realized the “impracticability” of such a method.92 Similar proposals appeared in a 1925 Pravo i zhizn’ article by Pavel I. Liublinskii, who familiarized himself with the American experience of fighting drug addiction.93 Physicians proposed many other solutions apart from medical ones. Of course, many early Soviet physicians contended that a merely repressive policy toward drug addiction would be inefficient and should be limited in scope.94 It is perfectly understandable why they would assert such an argument: to recognize the efficiency of physical or penal persecution of drug dealers and drug addicts would mean to yield symbolic domination to law enforcement agencies. However, legal scholars also recognized the necessity of medical and prophylactic measures and the limitations of repressive actions. In legal scholar Mikhail N. Gernet’s militarized language, “criminal

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legislation, as an avant-garde, will be unable to impede the advance of drug addiction, and the expectations of salvation in repression will fail yet another time.”95 Accordingly, many criminological and medical texts of the 1920s contain not only legal or public health propositions, but also political, economic, social, and cultural reform recommendations. Many physicians and criminologists saw the answer to the problem of drug addiction in the general improvement of economic and social security situation in the country. Such hopes were already present in Aronovich’s 1920 article, which was imbued with the horror at the atrocities and hardships of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, economic crisis, lack of food, increase in disease incidence, etc.96 He did not propose a specific course of action against the spread of drug addiction, but asked the public (obshchestvennost’) and especially “those who are called to guard social health” to pay close attention to the contemporary type of [cocaine] sniffer (zaniukhannyi).97 Gernet correctly noted in 1923 that “for drug addiction, criminal law is less dangerous than healthy housing policy, reasonable entertainment, and a dynamic social life.”98 Especially as the NEP succeeded war communism, the economic demands of the addiction researchers became more elaborate. Aleksandr Sholomovich explicitly stated that “the abolition of the private capital” would be an important precondition of success in the struggle against drug addiction.99 In fact, Sholomovich’s claims can be understood in a macroeconomic dimension as the demand to put an end to the NEP. It reflects nicely Semashko’s grievances about the introduction of the capitalist elements into the Soviet economy.100 Indeed, many researchers concentrated not on the new social developments, but rather on the elimination of the “remnants [perezhitki] of capitalism.” This rationale was behind the claims that the struggle against drug addiction would benefit from the measures taken against prostitution (as requested by Dr.  Andreevskii as early as 1918)  or child homelessness.101 Anti-capitalist (protectionist and anti-free-market) ideas were also behind the demands to strictly control the production, import, distribution, and sale of the drugs.102 By the end of the 1920s, lawyers started to demand stricter measures against drug dealers. For example, in a 1929 Ezhenedel’nik sovetskoi iustitsii article, Mariia Rozen proposed to actively use such measures of “social protection” to expel the accused from big cities. On a rather weak statistical basis, she made a questionable argument that “in terms of social status, the accused are mostly unemployed, [capitalist] employers, and vagrants – it is specifically the element that we do not value much, and, on the contrary, would like to discharge from our cities.”103 In fact, the

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data cited in the article demonstrated that the share of unemployed and vagrants among the accused exceeded 50 percent only in 1927, and usually fluctuated between 45 and 48 percent.104 Some suggested legal measures were more directly connected to the drug addiction proper:  the closure of the known dens [pritony] of addicts, and destruction of the opium poppy crops.105 It is also important to discuss the implications that scientific research had for practical drug policy. Monographs, articles, and conference presentations by Russian physicians and criminologists were not isolated in narrow professional realms. In fact, they actively participated in elaboration and implementation of state policy toward drug addiction. Indeed, many of the solutions that we discussed above were actually implemented by the government and local public health authorities by the end of the 1920s. Homeless children and prostitutes were no longer seen on the streets of cities. Large sums of money were assigned to medical propaganda, sanitary education, and the publication of popular medical literature. Special drug clinics were actually opened in Moscow and Leningrad in the second half of the 1920s. Stricter controls were enforced over the production, import, circulation, and sale of drugs.106 Finally, the “capitalist” NEP was replaced by the Stalinist planned economy by the end of the 1920s. Moreover, expert scientific knowledge was used to justify marginalization and repression of the drug market in the following years.107 Even though the authorities succeeded in “driving drug addicts into the corner,” they did not eradicate the very desire to take drugs (a mission impossible from the very start, according to contemporary sociologists).108 The problem still persisted (though in more clandestine ways) in Stalinist Russia.109 As a result, however, there is a strong tradition of a negative attitude toward drug addicts and drug dealers in Russian society, and the government’s authority to control the drug market is unquestioned, though narcotic policies are often costly, bureaucratic, and inefficient.110

Conclusion This chapter has unearthed a substantial diversity of opinions regarding causes of drug addiction that existed among late Imperial and early Soviet physicians and criminologists. However, it is also remarkable that drug addiction was often constructed as a disease especially connected to bourgeois modernity, capitalism, and alien to the socialist system. In a way, when contrasted with drug addiction, alcoholism emerged in early Soviet Russia as a more organic or proletarian – and thus more tolerable – disease.

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Early Soviet medical and legal texts contain comprehensive lists of measures that they considered necessary to eliminate drug addiction. Most importantly, these proposals called for direct and extensive government interference. Moreover, some of the solutions offered had little to do with medicine or law proper, and rather pertained to social, economic, or political reforms. Importantly, a great deal of professional argumentation used for the eventual criminalization of the drug market had already been pronounced in the pre-revolutionary period. The language of the addiction research of the 1920s and early 1930s was to a large degree shaped by previously introduced concepts, ideas, and frameworks. As Daniel Beer has shown in the Russian context, there is evidence of previously ­unnoticed continuity between late Imperial and postwar scientific developments  – even on discursive and linguistic levels.111 Yet, the political context had shifted so radically as to produce the same discourses with new, potent political saliencies. In many medical and legal texts of the early Soviet period there are certain elements of “moral panic,” politicization, dramatization, exaggeration of the problem while appealing to the state to intervene. This might have contributed to the formation of a strong tradition of negative attitude toward drug addicts and drug dealers in the Russian society. Moreover, medical and criminological research played a major role in marginalizing and repressing drug addicts through its influence on practical narcotic policy. Thus, programs of addiction researchers that were initially formulated with humanistic aims could be used in a way that they were not intended for. Even though in the context of the early Soviet period ethnical connotations of drug addiction are perhaps expressed less explicitly, the politicization of drug addiction, stigmatization and marginalization of drug addicts, and the aggressive denial of the problem starting from the 1930s were clearly all specific for Soviet Russia. Notes 1 Raisa IA. Golant, “Problemy morfinizma:  (Klinicheskie i dispansernye nabliudeniia, eksperimental’nye issledovaniia),” in Trudy gosudarstvennogo instituta meditsinskikh znanii (GIMZ), ed. N.K. Rozenberg, issue V (Leningrad: GIMZ, 1929), 23. 2 On association with modernity, see Philippa Levine’s chapter in this volume. 3 Iakov I. Gilinskii, ed., Deviantnost’ i sotsial’nyi kontrol’ v Rossii (XIX-XX vv.): Tendentsii i sotsiologischeskoe osmyslenie (St. Petersburg:  Aleteiia, 2000), 13 and Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia:  The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 2, 8. 4 David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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5 Caroline J. Acker, Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Nancy D. Campbell, Discovering Addiction:  The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); and Louise Foxcroft, The Making of Addiction: The “Use and Abuse” of Opium in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 6 For a critique of Soviet Marxist historiography, see Mikhail V. Khodiakov, ed., “Goriacheshnyi i triumfal’nyi gorod”: Petrograd: ot voennogo kommunizma k NEPu: Dokumenty i materialy (St. Petersburg: SPbGU, 2000), 11–12; Nataliia B. Lebina, “O pol’ze igry v biser:  (Mikroistoriia kak metod izucheniia norm i anomalii sovetskoi povsednevnosti 20–30-kh godov),” in Normy i tsennosti povsednevnoi zhizni: Stanovlenie sotsialisticheskogo obraza zhizni v Rossii, 1920–30e gody, ed. Timo Vihavainen (St. Petersburg:  Neva, 2000), 7; and Vadim I. Musaev, Prestupnost’ v Petrograde v 1917–1921 gg. i bor’ba s nei (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2001), 5. 7 Viktor A. Popov, “Bor’ba s narkomaniei i toksikomaniei detei i podrostkov v 20-30-e gody,” Sovetskoe zdravookhranenie 5 (1989): 67–70; Mikhail V. Shkarovskii, “Leningradskaia prostitutsiia i bor’ba s nei v 1920-e gody,” in Nevskii arkhiv: istoriko-kraevedcheskii sb., issue 1 (Moscow, 1993), 387–411; Lebina, “Tenevye storony zhizni sovetskogo goroda 20–30-kh godov,” Voprosy istorii 4 (1994):  30–42; Lebina, “Narkoman iz narkomata i klub morfinistov revoliutsionnogo Baltflota,” Vechernii Peterburg, April 12, 1996; Lebina, “Belaia feia, ili Kak ‘navodili marafet’ v Sovetskoi Rossii,” Rodina 9 (1996):  64–6; Mikhail V. Shkarovskii, “Sem’ imen ‘koshki’:  Rastsvet narkomanii v 1917–1920-e gody,” in Nevskii arkhiv, issue 3 (St. Petersburg, 1997), 467–77; Nataliia B.  Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda: Normy i anomalii: 1920–1930 gody (St. Petersburg: Neva: Letnii Sad, 1999), 28–33, 46; Musaev, Prestupnost’ v Petrograde v 1917–1921 gg. i bor’ba s nei; and Lebina and Aleksandr N. Chistikov, Obyvatel’ i reformy:  Kartiny povsednevnoi zhizni gorozhan v gody nepa i khrushchevskogo desiatiletiia (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003). See also Lebina and Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge: (40-e gg. XIX v.–40-e gg. XX v.) (Moscow: Progress-Akademiia, 1994). 8 Naturally, there are numerous books on the history of relevant medical and research institutions written by medical historians (e.g. V.A. Tochilov and others, “Kafedra psikhiatrii i narkologii,” in Sankt-Peterburgskoi gosudarstvennoi meditsinskoi akademii im. I. I. Mechnikova 90 let (St. Petersburg: SPbGMA, 1997), 99–106; Aleksandr V.  Shabrov and Valerii P.  Romaniuk, Bol’nitsa Petra Velikogo  – klinicheskaia baza Sankt-Peterburgskoi gosudarstvennoi meditsinskoi akademii imeni I. I. Mechnikova, Vol. 1 (1903–1945) (St. Petersburg:  SPbGMA, 2001); Sankt-Peterburgskaia gosudarstvennaia meditsinskaia akademiia imeni I. I. Mechnikova, Vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: SPbGMA, 2006); and especially Marina A. Akimenko and Avgust M. Shereshevskii, Istoriia instituta im. V. M. Bekhtereva na dokumental’nykh materialakh, 3 vols (St. Petersburg: SPbNIPNI, 1999–2001); Akimenko, Razvitie psikhonevrologii v Institute im. V. M. Bekhtereva v XX veke (St. Petersburg: SPbNIPNI, 2005); and Akimenko, Institut imeni V.  M. Bekhtereva:  ot istokov do sovremennosti (1907–2007) (St. Petersburg: Litografiia, 2007). However, these works are often characterized by factual and other errors, have little critical treatment of primary sources, and in the end do not produce any serious theoretical generalizations other than the grand

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narrative of the respective institution’s successful development throughout the turbulent twentieth century. 9 For a perspective that combines cocaine with tea, coffee, and beer, but excludes heroin, see Aleksandr S. Sholomovich, “Narkotizm kak sotsial’no-patologicheskoe iavlenie i mery bor’by s nim sredi rabochikh,” in Voprosy narkologii:  Sb. no.  1 [Problems of Narcology: Collection no. 1], ed. Aleksandr S. Sholomovich (Moscow: Moszdravotdel, 1926). 10 Cf. internal definitional inconsistencies in the major Soviet edited collections Voprosy narkologii: Voprosy narkologii: Sb. no. 1; Sholomovich, ed., Voprosy narkologii: Sb. no. 2 (Moscow: Moszdravotdel, 1928). 11 S.N. Danillo, O vliianii nekotorykh iadov (spirt, opii, gashish) na soznanie u cheloveka (St. Petersburg:  K.L. Rikker, 1894); Nikolai K. Reimer, Iady tsivilizatsii (St. Petersburg:  A.N. Tsepov, 1899); and Sharl’ Rishe, Iady, deistvuiushchie na soznanie: (Alkogol’, khloroform, gashish, opium i kofe) (Kremenchug: M.I. Apatov, 1900). 12 For a revealing investigation of this seeming contradiction, see Alfred R. Lindesmith and John H. Gagnon, “Anomie and Drug Addiction,” in Anomie and Deviant Behaviour: A Discussion and Critique (London: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 162–3. 13 Danillo, O vliianii nekotorykh iadov (spirt, opii, gashish) na soznanie u cheloveka, 18–21; “Otchet o doktorskom dispute N.  N. Lange,” in Rossiiskaia psikhologiia: Antologiia, ed. Antonina N. Zhban (Moscow: Al’ma Mater, 2009), 487–8, 494, 506, 511. For a Western European example that could have served as a prototype consider Sigmund Freud, “Ueber Coca,” Centralblatt für die gesammte Therapie 2 (1884): 289–314 or Rishe, Iady, deistvuiushchie na soznanie: (Alkogol’, khloroform, gashish, opium i kofe). 14 Mikhail N. Gernet, Sotsial’nye factory prestupnosti (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1905); Mikhail N. Gernet, Prestuplenie i bor’ba s nim v sviazi s evoliutsiei obshchestva (Moscow: Mir, 1914); Khristofor M. Charykhov, Uchenie o faktorakh pre stupnosti: Sotsiologicheskaia shkola v nauke ugolovnogo prava (Moscow: Upravlenie Moskovsko-Kurskoi, Nizhegorodskoi i Muromskoi zheleznykh dorog, 1910); and Evgenii Efimov, Priroda prestupleniia (Moscow: IU. Vener, 1914). Cf. also Susan K. Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Sharon A. Kowalsky, Deviant Women:  Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880–1930 (DeKalb:  Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). 15 Reimer, Iady tsivilizatsii. 16 On Russia, see William B. Lincoln, In War’s Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War (New York: The Dial Press, 1983). Cf. also detailed investigation of the European degeneration discourse: Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 17 Reimer, Iady tsivilizatsii, 17–20. 18 Ibid., 18ff. 19 Ibid., 21. 20 Ibid., 16. 21 Ibid., 8. 22 For an example, consider Danillo, O vliianii nekotorykh iadov (spirt, opii, gashish) na soznanie u cheloveka, 38–9. See also Nikolay Kamenov’s chapter in this volume.

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23 Nancy Mandelker Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 24 Beer, Renovating Russia, 1–8. 25 “Therapeutic Pessimism,” The Journal of the American Medical Association XXXV, no. 8 (1900): 503; R.T. Salekin, “Psychopathy and Therapeutic Pessimism. Clinical Lore or Clinical Reality?” Clinical Psychology Review 22, no. 1 (2002): 79–112. 26 Cf. Danillo, O vliianii nekotorykh iadov (spirt, opii, gashish) na soznanie u cheloveka; Reimer, Iady tsivilizatsii. 27 Vladimir T. Lisovskii and Elina A. Kolesnikova, Narkotizm kak sotsial’naia problema (St. Petersburg: SPbGU, 2001), 24. 28 Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’, 29; Shkarovskii, Sem’ imen koshki, 467. 29 On claims making and moral panics related to drugs, see:  Peter Meylakhs, “Narkotiki: Ideologiia, narkopolitika i moral’,” http://cisr.ru/files/publ/Meylakhs/ Meylakhs_Drugs_Ideology.pdf (accessed February 25, 2016) and Peter Meylakhs, “Opasnosti moral’noi paniki po povodu narkotikov,” Credo New no. 1 (2003) http:// credonew.ru/content/view/324/28/ (accessed May 6, 2016). 30 Shkarovskii, Sem’ imen “koshki”, 474. 31 Josef Gossmann, “Über chronischen Morphiummissbrauch,” Deutsche Medicinische Wochenschrift 34–36 (1879); Ernst Joël and Fritz Fränkel, Der Cocainismus:  Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Psychopathologie der Rauschgifte (Berlin:  Julius Springer, 1924); Ernst Joël and Fritz Fränkel, “Zur Verhütung und Behandlung der Giftsuchten,” Klinische Wochenschrift 4 (1925): 1713–8; Ernst Joël and Fritz Fränkel, “Der Haschisch-Rausch,” Klinische Wochenschrift 5 (1926):  1707–9; Ernst Joël, Die Behandlung der Giftsuchten. Alkoholismus, Morphinismus, Kokainismus usw (Leipzig: Georg Thieme, 1928). 32 Joël and Fränkel, Der Cocainismus, 1, 13–4; Fritz Fränkel and Dora Benjamin, “Die Bedeutung der Rauschgifte für die Juden und die Bekämpfung der Suchten durch die Fürsorge,” Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege und Sozialpolitik 3 (1932): 23. 33 Joël and Fränkel, Der Cocainismus, 14, 19, 87, 89, 90, 91, 94, 96, 97. 34 Rafael Becker, “Ein Beitrag zur Frage der Verbreitung des Geisteskrankheiten bei den Juden in Polen,” OSE-Rundschau 5 (1930):  1–4; Rafael Becker, “Die Geisteskrankungen bei den Juden in Polen,” Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch-gerichtliche Medizin 96 (1932):  47–66; Fränkel and Benjamin, “Die Bedeutung der Rauschgifte für die Juden und die Bekämpfung der Suchten durch die Fürsorge.” In a similar vein, in the early twentieth-century United States the drugs were strongly linked to African Americans and Mexicans (Klaus Hödl, “The Black Body and the Jewish Body:  A  Comparison of Medical Images,” Patterns of Prejudice 36 (2002):  17–34; David F. Musto, “Opium, Cocaine and Marijuana in American History,” Scientific American 265, no. 1 (1991): 30–47). 35 Joël and Fränkel, Der Cocainismus, 79; Joël and Fränkel, “Zur Verhütung.” 36 Fränkel and Benjamin, “Die Bedeutung der Rauschgifte für die Juden und die Bekämpfung der Suchten durch die Fürsorge,” 23. 37 Joël and Fränkel, Der Cocainismus, 81; Joël and Fränkel, “Zur Verhütung,” 1713. 38 Ersnt Joël, Lechenie narkomanii. Alkogolizm. Morfinizm. Kokainizm (Khar’kov: Nauchnaia mysl’, 1930). 39 Golant, “Problemy morfinizma,” 32. 40 Susan G. Solomon, ed., Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia Between the Wars (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).

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41 Margarete Exler, Von der Jugendbewegung zu ärtzlicher Drogenhilfe: Das Leben Ernst Joëls (1893–1929) im Umkreis von Benjamin, Landauer und Buber (Berlin:  Trafo, 2005), 60–97; Lothar Büttner and Bernhard Meyer, Gesundheitspolitik der Arbeiterbewegung: Vom Bund der Kommunisten bis zum Thällmanischen Zentralkomitee der KPD (Berlin: VEG Verlag Volk und Gesundheit, 1984), 133. 42 Gernet, Prestupnost’ i samoubiistva vo vremia voiny i posle nee [Crime and Suicide During the War and After It] (Moscow:  TSSU SSR, 1927), 152. For a late nineteenth-century German example, see Gossmann, “Über chronischen Morphiummissbrauch.” For later Soviet argumentations, see Evgenii B. Bliumenau, Okhmeliaiushchie durmany:  Tabak, kokain, morfii, opii, efir i gashish, ikh vred i posledstviia (Leningrad: Seiatel’, 1925), 8; Golant, “Problemy morfinizma,” 17; and V.A. Bakhtiiarov, “K voprosu o narkomanii,” in Trudy nauchno-issledovatel’skikh institutov Sverdlovskogo oblzdravotdela:  Sb. no.  7 (Sverdlovsk:  Sverdlovskoe gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1936), 199. 43 Golant, “Problemy morfinizma,” 25. By the term “traumatics,” Golant means persons suffering from traumatic neurosis, as conceived by German neurologist Hermann Oppenheim. For a detailed exploration of the history of traumatic neurosis, the debates surrounding the notion, and its social implications, see Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 44 Golant, “Problemy morfinizma,” 24. On the improper prescriptions of opiates and cocaine during the Great War, see also Stanislav E. Panin, “Potreblenie narkotikov v Sovetskoi Rossii (1917–1920-e gody),” Voprosy istorii 8 (2003): 129. 45 Golant, “Problemy morfinizma,” 17. 46 Bliumenau, Okhmeliaiushchie durmany, 47–8; David S. Futer, “O detiakh-narkomanakh,” Moskovskii meditsinskii zhurnal 10 (1925): 59; Aleksandr M. Rapoport, “Kokainizm i prestupnost’,” Moskovskii meditsinskii zhurnal 1 (1926): 46; F.D. Zabugin, “Otsenka lichnosti detei-narkomanov po metodam Rossolimo, Bine i Kelle,” in Voprosy narkologii: Sb. no. 2., ed. Sholomovich (Moscow: Moszdravotdel, 1928), 59; Bakhtiiarov, “K voprosu o narkomanii,” 199. On “legal vacuum”, see Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’, 15 and Musaev, Prestupnost’ v Petrograde v 1917–1921 gg. i bor’ba s nei, 5, 169. 47 For examples, see Gedalii D. Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia i vpechatleniia sredi kokainomanov,” Nauchnaia meditsina 6 (1920): 676 and S. Visloukh, “Prostitutsiia i narkomaniia:  Po dannym ankety sredi prostitutok v Moskve, organizovannoi Nauchno-Issledovatel’skoi Komissiei,” Rabochii Sud 7–8 (1925): 317. 48 Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia i vpechatleniia sredi kokainomanov,” 685, 686, longer quote on 676. 49 Ibid., 681–3. 50 Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia i vpechatleniia sredi kokainomanov,” 680–2. 51 Sholomovich, Narkotizm, 47. 52 Nikolai A. Semashko, “O kokainizme i bor’be s nim,” Izvestiia TSIK SSSR, January 4, 1925. “Exploitation” equals “capitalism”, as in another paragraph in Semashko’s article. 53 Ibid. 54 Cf. Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt-Petersburga (hereinafter referred to as TSGASPb) [Central State Archive of St. Petersburg], fond 2815, opis’ 1, delo 526, l. 40 rev.; Semashko, “O kokainizme i bor’be s nim”; Bliumenau, Okhmeliaiushchie

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durmany, 61–2; Voprosy narkologii: Sb. no. 1, 88, 90; Vladimir A. Gorovoi-Shaltan, “Morfinizm, ego rasprostranenie i profilaktika,” in Voprosy narkologii: Sb. no. 2, 51–2. 55 Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia i vpechatleniia sredi kokainomanov,” 685–6. Cf. also Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’, 30. 56 Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia i vpechatleniia sredi kokainomanov,” 684. Cf. discussion of cocaine use and the feeling of hunger in Lisovskii and Kolesnikova, Narkotizm kak sotsial’naia problema, 24. 57 Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia i vpechatleniia sredi kokainomanov,” 684–6. 58 Gorovoi-Shaltan, “Morfinizm, ego rasprostranenie i profilaktika,” 47–8. 59 Golant, “Problemy morfinizma,” 24–5. Cf. also Gorovoi-Shaltan, “Morfinizm, ego rasprostranenie i profilaktika,” 47–8. 60 Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia i vpechatleniia sredi kokainomanov,” 680–1; GorovoiShaltan, “Morfinizm, ego rasprostranenie i profilaktika,” 48–9. Cf. also Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’, 32; Lebina and Chistikov, Obyvatel’ i reformy, 116. 61 Golant, “Problemy morfinizma,” 24. 62 Ibid., 21. 63 Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’, 32; Shkarovskii, Sem’ imen “koshki,” 467–77; Panin, “Potreblenie narkotikov v Sovetskoi Rossii (1917–1920-e gody),” 129. 64 Panin, “Potreblenie narkotikov v Sovetskoi Rossii (1917–1920-e gody),” 132. 65 Klavdiia Arkina, “Kokainizm kak factor prestupnosti’,” Vestnik prosveshcheniia 2 (1923): 69–74; Gernet, “Narkotizm, prestupnost’ i ugolovnyi zakon,” Pravo i zhizn’ 3–4 (1923): 43–4; Futer, “O detiakh-narkomanakh,” 60; Pavel I. Liublinskii, “Narkomaniia i prestupnost’,” Pravo i zhizn’ 6 (1925): 64–71; Arkina, “Nesovershennoletnie brodiazhki,” Pravo i zhizn’ 6–7 (1926): 101; Raisa M. Ziman, “O kokainizme u detei,” in Voprosy narkologii:  Sb. no.  1, 30; M.T. Belousova, “Kokainizm na materiale Instituta Sudebno-Psikhiatricheskoi Ekspertizy im. Prof. Serbskogo,” in Prestupnik i prestupnost’:  Sb. no.  1 (Moscow: Moszdravotdel, 1926), 97–104; Rapoport, “Kokainizm i prestupnost’,” 46–55; Gernet, Prestupnost’, 153–5; Zabugin, “Otsenka lichnosti detei-narkomanov po metodam Rossolimo, Bine i Kelle,” 59, 64. 66 Sholomovich, Kokain i ego zhertvy: (Nauch.-popul. ocherk) (Moscow: Zhizn’ i znanie, 1926), 30. 67 Ziman, “O kokainizme u detei,” 29; Zabugin, “Otsenka lichnosti detei-narkomanov po metodam Rossolimo, Bine i Kelle,” 64. 68 G. Dubrovich, “Klinicheskaia kartina kokainizma v detskom vozraste,” in Voprosy narkologii: Sb. no. 2, 71. 69 TSGASPb, fond 142, opis’ 1, delo 9, ll. 323, 324; Gorovoi-Shaltan, “Morfinizm, ego rasprostranenie i profilaktika,” 47; Golant, “Problemy morfinizma,” 25. 70 Gernet, Prestupnost’, 156. 71 Mary Schaeffer Conroy, In Health and in Sickness: Pharmacy, Pharmacists and the Pharmaceutical Industry in Late Imperial, Early Soviet Russia (Boulder: Columbia University Press, 1994), 105. TSGASPb, fond 4301, opis’ 1, delo 2538, ll. 254–5. 72 Interestingly, only Gernet (who was criticized by many Soviet legal scholars for his liberal and positivist views) noted that among drug addicts there were “people of all classes, various professions, both sexes, children, youth, adults, and old people” (Gernet, Narkotizm, 39). 73 T.M. Bogomolova, “Lechenie narkomanov podkozhnym vvedeniem kisloroda,” Moskovskii meditsinskii zhurnal 10 (1925): 40–4; A.M. Tereshkovich, “Narkomaniia i prestupnost’,” Sovremennaia psikhonevrologiia IV (1927): 147–9.

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74 Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire:  Vodka & Politics in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002); W. Arthur McKee, “Sobering up the Soul of the People:  The Politics of Popular Temperance in Late Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 58, no. 2 (Summer 1999):  212–33; Laura A. Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle: Drink and Worker Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900–1929 (DeKalb:  Northern Illinois University Press, 2000); Kate Transchel, Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895–1932 (Pittsburgh:  University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). See also Mark Lawrence Schrad, Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 75 Olga Matich, “Remaking the Bed: Utopia in Daily Life,” in Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, ed. John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 59ff. 76 Akimenko and Shereshevskii, Vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: SPbNIPNI, 2000), 108. 77 For details, see Shtefan Plaggenborg, Revoliutsiia i kul’tura: Kul’turnye orientiry v period mezhdu Oktiabr’skoi revoliutsiei i epokhoi stalinizma (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2000), 75–124. 78 Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia i vpechatleniia sredi kokainomanov,” 677, 686; D. Semiz, “Nuzhna li bor’ba s prostitutsiei?” Bud’ na strazhe 2–3 (1924):  79; Bliumenau, Okhmeliaiushchie durmany, 62. 79 Futer, “O detiakh-narkomanakh,” 60. 80 Semashko, “O kokainizme i bor’be s nim”; Sholomovich, Narkotizm, 45; Sholomovich, Teoriia i praktika bor’by s narkotizmom:  Tezisy po narkologii dlia medikov (Moscow, n.d.), 1; TSGASPb, fond 4301, opis’ 1, delo 3414, l. 4. 81 TSGASPb, fond 4301, opis’ 1, delo 3414, l. 4. 82 Ziman, “O kokainizme u detei,” 30. Cf. also Futer, “O detiakh-narkomanakh,” 60. 83 Voprosy narkologii: Sb. no. 1, 88; Bliumenau, Okhmeliaiushchie durmany, 56–7. 84 TSGASPb, fond 3215, opis’ 1, delo 83, ll. 3–4 rev. 85 Arkina, Kokainizm, 74; Semashko, “O kokainizme i bor’be s nim”; Ziman, “O kokainizme u detei,” 30. 86 Futer, “O detiakh-narkomanakh,” 62–3. Cf. also other problems of popular medical propaganda: TSGASPb, fond 3215, opis’ 1, delo 307, l. 129. 87 Sholomovich, Narkotizm, 49–50. 88 Arkina, Kokainizm, 74; Futer, “O detiakh-narkomanakh,” 61; Rapoport, “Kokainizm i prestupnost’,” 48, 55; Mikhail P. Kutanin, “Voprosy teorii i praktiki morfinizma,” in Trudy pervogo vsesoiuznogo s’’ezda nevropatologov i psikhiatrov, ed. V.A. Beliaev (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe meditsinskoe izdatel’stvo, 1929), 41. 89 Gernet, Narkotizm, 46; Liublinskii, “Narkomaniia i prestupnost’,” 65–71; Bliumenau, Okhmeliaiushchie durmany, 61; Ziman, “O kokainizme u detei,” 31; Sholomovich, Narkotizm, 48; Gorovoi-Shaltan, “Morfinizm, ego rasprostranenie i profilaktika,” 52–3; Dubrovich, “Klinicheskaia kartina kokainizma v detskom vozraste,” 74; Sholomovich, Teoriia i praktika, 3–4; Bakhtiiarov, “K voprosu o narkomanii,” 199. 90 Semashko, “O kokainizme i bor’be s nim.” Cf. also argumentation for the establishment of dispensaries on the local and district [raion] level: TSGASPb, fond 3215, opis’ 1, delo 306, ll. 1–2, 12, 29g; delo 307, l. 130. The raion principle of organization corresponded nicely to Leningrad physician Nikolai Tutolmin’s idea of organizing struggle against addictions from the grassroots (cf. TSGASPb, fond 4301, opis’ 1, delo 3414, ll. 2 – 2 rev.).

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91 Futer, “O detiakh-narkomanakh,” 62. 92 Aleksandr Prigradov-Kudrin, “O prinuditel’nom lechenii,” Ezhenedel’nik sovetskoi iustitsii 4–5 (1923): 83. 93 Liublinskii, “Narkomaniia i prestupnost’,” 71. 94 Bliumenau, Okhmeliaiushchie durmany, 78; Sholomovich, Narkotizm, 48; GorovoiShaltan, “Morfinizm, ego rasprostranenie i profilaktika,” 52. 95 Gernet, Narkotizm, 39. 96 Aronovich, “Nabliudeniia i vpechatleniia sredi kokainomanov,” 684–6. 97 Ibid., 678. 98 Gernet, Narkotizm, 46. 99 Sholomovich, Teoriia i praktika, 2. 100 Semashko, “O kokainizme i bor’be s nim.” 101 TSGASPb, fond 142, opis’ 1, delo 9, ll. 323–4; Futer, “O detiakh-narkomanakh,” 62; Ziman, “O kokainizme u detei,” 30; Dubrovich, “Klinicheskaia kartina kokainizma v detskom vozraste,” 75. 102 TSGASPb, fond 2815, opis’ 1, delo 526, l. 40 rev.; Gernet, Narkotizm, 46; Semashko, “O kokainizme i bor’be s nim”; Bliumenau, Okhmeliaiushchie durmany, 61–2; Voprosy narkologii:  Sb. no.  1, 88, 90; Gorovoi-Shaltan, “Morfinizm, ego rasprostranenie i profilaktika,” 51–2. 103 Mariia Rozen, “Kak borot’sia s shinkarstvom i prodazhei narkotikov,” Ezhenedel’nik sovetskoi iustitsii 32 (1929): 751. 104 Ibid. 105 Voprosy narkologii: Sb. no. 1, 88, 90. 106 Shkarovskii, Sem’ imen “koshki,” 475; Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’, 32–3. For the measures taken against smuggling, see also Lebina and Chistikov, Obyvatel’ i reformy, 117. 107 Cf. also Lebina’s remarks on “politicizing” drug addiction: Lebina, Tenevye, 41. 108 Gilinskii, Deviantnost’ i sotsial’nyi kontrol’ v Rossii, 54, 122. 109 TSGASPb, fond 7384, opis’ 2-c, delo 60, l. 250; Arkhiv Sankt-Peterburgskoi gosudarstvennoi meditsinskoi akademii im. I. I. Mechnikova [Archive of I. I. Mechnikov St. Petersburg State Medical Academy], Nauchnaia chast’ [Scientific Section], delo 23, ll. 20, 23, 35 rev., 36, 39 rev.,-40, 46, 59, 74. 110 For the examples of bureaucratic inefficiency from the 1920s, see TSGASPb, fond 3215, opis’ 1, delo 305, ll. 155, 170, 189 rev., 209–11, 224. For a general critique of the government regulation of the drug market, see Ethan A. Nadelmann, “Drug Prohibition in the United States: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives,” Science 245 (1989): 939–47. 111 Daniel Beer, “Blueprints for Change:  the Human Sciences and the Coercive Transformation of Deviants in Russia, 1890–1930,” Osiris, 2nd Series 22 (2007): 46–7.

9

Cigarette smoking in modern Buenos Aires The sudden change in a century-old continuity Diego Armus

On September 29, 2005 and December 13, 2010, the Buenos Aires city ­government approved laws 1799 and 3718 prohibiting the practice of smoking in closed spaces accessible to the public, thereby defining an aggressive anti-smoking public health education agenda, and establishing severe penalties for those who violated these new regulations. But it was not always this way. In fact, for most of the twentieth century, cigarette smoking was a well-accepted and celebrated habit, a sort of icon of daily life in Buenos Aires, a malleable tool people used to deal with the stressful and exciting scenarios offered by modernity, and a primary symbol of pleasure and power, sexuality, and individuality. Only during the last decade have these very appealing associations begun to be replaced by those of suspicion, disease, and death. As a consequence of these changes, the figure of “the smoker” has been redefined:  rather than the self-confident and independent man or the liberated woman of the past, what is emerging is the figure of the smoker as a weak, irrational, and addicted individual who rebels against the strictures of public health. Within the broader framework of a history of cigarette smoking that transmuted the practice from a well-accepted, apparently innocuous habit to a medicalized, noxious, and criminalized addiction, this chapter attempts to explore a persistent continuity – one that, starting at the end of nineteenth century, went on for most of the century until it changed in the last decade quite drastically and at a very fast pace. City Laws 1799 and 3718 are aimed at regulating the consumption, marketing, and advertising of tobacco cigarettes. Both laws frame their purposes within a distinct effort to improve public health and the health of the city’s individual inhabitants. Their articles are exhaustive and are worth including below, as they consist of legal instruments that reveal a remarkable sophistication and attention to detail. 203

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These laws prohibit every kind of sponsorship or financing of cultural, athletic, or educational activities that are open to businesses or individuals who create, distribute, or promote tobacco products. With no exceptions, the sale of tobacco products is prohibited to minors under the age of eighteen, whether the products are for their own consumption or for marketing purposes and resale. The sale of tobacco products is prohibited in primary and secondary schools and in hospitals and other public health centers. Products that are used or consumed by children and adolescents, and whose format or packaging clearly or subtly encourage smoking are prohibited from being marketed or sold. Smoking is prohibited in all enclosed spaces open to the public, including restaurants, bars and cafés, cybercafés and other businesses that offer computer use and/or wi-fi, arcades and game halls, shopping malls, cinemas, theaters, cultural centers, party spaces, and other public venues that are open to minors under the age of eighteen, bus terminals, vehicles used for public transportation, subway stations, gyms, and other sports establishments. Fines will hereby be placed on businesses that sell tobacco to minors. The advertising and marketing of tobacco, in any one of its forms, is prohibited in public spaces. Advertisements for tobacco products, whether for sale, promotional purposes, or for free, are prohibited. Excepted from the previous rules are those businesses that sell cigarettes. But cigarettes and other tobacco products’ packaging is required to include easily legible, prominent messages created by health authorities about the harmful health consequences of tobacco smoke. These laws call for the need to launch campaigns in educational institutions about the risks created by tobacco consumption. They also register the convenience of using methods of mass communication to reach out to the broader public as well as to plan control procedures to ensure the compliance of norms in advertising, marketing, sale, and consumption of cigarettes and similar products. The contents of these laws clearly epitomize the break in the celebration and practice of the smoking habit. For decades, the habit was consistently encouraged by the tobacco industry (through advertising campaigns in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television) in order to create a mass consumption market of a nonessential good while also defining the contours of socially differentiated consumers – by status, age, or gender. Along with the tobacco industry’s discourse, there were also those narratives produced by urban literature, tango lyrics, and cinema, as well as, of course, the numerous explanations and rationalizations about desires and choices articulated by smokers themselves.

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In a way, the twentieth century witnessed the consolidation of a smoking subculture. Some examples can illustrate its resilience over time: Around 1900, for example, readers of any major Buenos Aires newspaper would have come across advertisements for four or five cigarettes brands – some more expensive than others – all of which were produced in Buenos Aires. Such advertisements encouraged smokers to be selective in their choices, a modern proposition that few consumer goods at the time could offer. The year 1921 saw the first public presentation of the tango entitled “Fumando Espero” (“While Smoking”). Its lyrics were more than suggestive: “Smoking is a pleasure, a genial and sensual one…/ Please, give me the smoke from your mouth that drives me crazy…”1 Equally suggestive, taking into account that this tango was written in the early 1920s, is the fact that the individual who was “driven crazy” is a woman. Since then, “Fumando Espero” has been a musical hit, broadcast on the radio, recorded time and again, and sung in movies. Critics name it one of the most celebrated songs in tango history. By 1949, echoing the populist climate of the first Peronist era, local cigarette advertisements stated that “everyone” is entitled to enjoy a brand capable of “providing the smoker the right Argentine flavor.” During those years, and competing with this nationalistic advertising discourse, foreign companies with factories in Buenos Aires also announced their brands in a language that underlined and celebrated how cosmopolitan Argentine cigarette smokers were. Many of the characters in Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar’s writings from the 1940s to the 1960s were smokers. The foreign and domestic cinema of the 1970s and 1980s shown in Buenos Aires movie theaters is saturated with scenes in which smoking appears as a habit charged with an almost endless list of meanings. And the 1994 Lonely Planet tourist guide described most Buenos Aires inhabitants as intense cigarette smokers even knowing that smoking is a very unhealthy habit. The guide illustrates its statement with a scene in which a jogger runs with all the appropriate clothing gear and also a lighted cigarette in his mouth.2 Few indicators can easily illustrate the relevance of the material basis of this smoking subculture. On the tobacco agriculture front, it is worth mentioning that Argentina has been a tobacco-growing country for quite some time. Six provinces, in the Northeast and Northwest, have long been tobacco producers – some of them since colonial times, others since the 1930s – giving a livelihood to thousands of people working in labor-intensive, small- or medium-sized rural family units. During the last third of the twentieth century, the Argentine state subsidized tobacco agriculture with a federal tax of 7 percent on the sale price for each pack of cigarettes. Eighty percent of this state subsidy was supposed to go to tobacco farmers and the remaining

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20 percent to agricultural diversification, helping rural family-based economies and consolidating trade-offs between provincial and national politics. This fiscal policy facilitated a mechanism that, in the end, aimed at maintaining lower prices for cigarettes. By 2004, Argentina produced 2 percent of the world’s tobacco, exporting nearly 70  percent of its production to neighboring countries.3 Looking over the century of tobacco consumption in this cosmopolitan city of the world periphery, it is apparent that Buenos Aires’ encounter with the cigarette, one of the most consummate modern commodities, was not the result of a diffusion process or an induction articulated by the economic forces of the industrialized capitalist centers through the arrival of international tobacco corporations. As in other parts of the world periphery, the cigarette was not a forerunner of the consumer revolution brought in from abroad.4 In the last third of the nineteenth century, Buenos Aires’ tobacco cigarette industry was already a quite well established local economy, organized around several small and mid-sized factories that produced more than a hundred brands of black tobacco.5 In the 1920s, foreign tobacco ­companies  – mainly from the United States and the United Kingdom  – began to penetrate the already active and dynamic Argentine cigarette market. The years between the 1930s and the late 1960s were marked by an increasing competition between imported and locally produced brands. Since the early 1970s, transnational companies such as Phillip Morris International, British American Tobacco, Liggett’s, Reemtsma, Lorillard, and R.J. Reynolds have increasingly controlled the domestic market.6 Some of these companies worked through local subsidiaries built by taking over local tobacco cigarette manufacturing plants created many decades earlier by Argentine industrialists. During the last third of the twentieth century, these local tobacco entrepreneurs did not want or could not resist the increasing internationalization of the cigarette business. Comparatively high levels of cigarette consumption have been a ­feature of life in Buenos Aires since at least the end of the nineteenth century. Cigars, pipes, and chewing tobacco were not relevant consumer goods in Buenos Aires’ commercial scene. However, smoking tobacco rolled in paper was common well before the arrival of machine-rolled cigarettes, a novelty that further expanded an already well-established habit rarely qualified as a vice. Along with this well-established habit among male smokers, there are enough signs to believe that female smokers were not uncommon in the early twentieth-century Buenos Aires – although it seems they tended to practice the habit in domestic spaces. Over the rest of the century, cigarettes per capita consumption among men and women grew at a steady

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pace. By the 2000s, smoking was undoubtedly a conspicuous daily life practice: a study conducted in seven Latin American cities between 2003 and 2005 identified Buenos Aires as one of the cities with highest smoking prevalence, another revealed a resilient high proportion of smokers among the medical professionals when anti-smoking policies were already gaining prominence, and market reports indicated that Argentina topped the list of countries that smoke the most in Latin America, consuming 1,014 cigarettes annually for every inhabitant over age fifteen.7 In sum, the presence of well-developed local cigarette markets early on, the arrival and subsequently dominant position of multinational tobacco corporations, the perdurable high rates of cigarette consumption per capita, and multifaceted, enduring, and very intense cultural reflections of smoking provided the material basis of a habit that shaped millions of lives in almost every corner of the city. As one of the most versatile consumer goods of the twentieth century, it seems that until recently almost everybody smoked everywhere: passengers on the subway and buses, shoppers at the mall, teachers in the classroom, doctors in hospitals, pregnant women at home, seniors in the neighborhood coffee house, television news anchors on camera, athletes taking a rest, lovers in bed, the youth at the workplace, college, or home. It was in these long-lasting scenarios and throughout the century that smokers’ individual self-narratives and experiences constructed a polyphony of explanations that celebrated cigarette smoking as a habit associated with ideas of stress control, relaxation, pleasure, self-governance and individual responsibility, masculinity, female independence, and youthful self-reaffirmation.8 Contemporary to the celebratory discourses of smoking and the steady expansion of its material basis, recurrent anti-smoking discourses associated smoking with cancer. Since the end of the nineteenth century, there have been sporadic concerns about the health effects of smoking. This was the case in Argentina and most other places. Nazi Germany is probably one of the few periods with a proactive and articulated anti-smoking public policy.9 In Buenos Aires anti-smoking efforts were present throughout the twentieth century but were marginal and very modest in scope. Their agenda, time and again, was educational and informative, centering on the fact that smoking was an unhealthy habit, vice, or addiction and that quitting was mainly an issue of individual will and persistence. Some examples of these civil society initiatives illustrate this history of continuity. In the 1930s, and in a quite exceptional case of basic research done in the periphery of the scientific centers, doctor and researcher Angel Roffo

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pioneered studies in his Instituto de Medicina Experimental that concluded that smoke condensed from the destructive distillation of tobacco could cause tumors when smeared on the hairless skins of rabbits.10 Along with his laboratory research, Roffo was also committed to developing a diverse set of public health initiatives – from the mass distribution of pamphlets to an active effort to use mainstream printed and aural media, from the publication of a magazine entitled Aire Puro (Pure Air) to helping to organize a civil association against tobacco smoking. Later in the century, in 1963, the Adventist Church launched, for the very first time, a five-day course on how to quit smoking. By the early 1980s, the Argentine chapter of the Rotary Club International established a special committee against tobacco smoking. And in 1986, the Public Health Foundation and the Argentine League against Cancer, under the leadership of doctors affiliated with the Ministry of Public Health, the World Health Organization, and the School of Public Health of the University of Buenos Aires, created the Chau Pucho Club (Goodbye Cigarettes Club) with a quite refurbished and aggressive campaign in print media, radio, and television, inviting smokers to join their self-help quit-smoking groups.11 All these campaigns were marginal and did not significantly affect the secular dominant trend that publicly and privately celebrated the habit of smoking. In a way, this local failure mirrored another one: that of the global scientific community, which was not able to transform the emerging consensus about the association of smoking with cancer into public health policies well until the 1980s. For quite some time  – roughly three-quarters of a century  – the economic groups with interests in cigarette tobacco consumption had no need to react against anti-tobacco initiatives that made no impact on their business. By the mid-1960s, a number of legal initiatives aimed at regulating cigarette smoking announced the configuration of a new scenario in which large tobacco companies, tobacco-producing provinces, tobacco growers, and federal agencies interested in the cigarette sales tax as a fiscal resource would – each for their own goals and reasons – join forces. Between 1966 and 2003, under civilian governments and military dictatorships, there were close to twenty legal initiatives aimed at regulating cigarette smoking, all of which were blocked by the emerging pro-tobacco front.12 In 1966, the first bill on tobacco regulation was introduced in the Argentine Congress, seeking to adopt a mandatory warning label on cigarette packs, but it did not pass. In 1970, the military government promulgated Law 18604, ending cigarette advertising on radio, television and in movie theaters, as well as establishing fines for violators. The law was in

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effect for only one year. In 1973 and 1974, two bills were introduced that would have placed a health warning label on tobacco products and within ads; however, these bills were not approved due to the intervention of the tobacco lobby; by then, the industry was more proactively responding to these new initiatives that aimed at producing public policy centered on cigarette smoking. In 1977, as in the United States and other countries, the tobacco industry launched a voluntary self-regulating code as a strategy to preempt stronger and more assertive legal restrictions on cigarette advertising. In 1976 and 1979, the Social Welfare Ministry of the military dictatorship then in charge of the national government drafted two bills aimed at regulating the content of tobacco and alcohol advertisement and requiring warning labels on cigarette packs. Both bills did not pass – largely as a result of the pro-tobacco lobby that argued the preexisting voluntary code made them unnecessary.13 During the 1980s – this time under civilian governments – efforts to pass comprehensive tobacco-control legislation as well as industry answers to those efforts became more intense. In those years, the so-called “smoking controversy” framed the public discussion about whether or not there were causal links between smoking and lung-related diseases, including cancer. Consequently, the tobacco lobby employed an arsenal of initiatives – namely, information seminars aimed at doctors, professionals, technicians, scientists, advertising agencies, and state officials  – in order to counteract the efforts of those convinced of such a causal link. With the support of some medical doctors, media outlets, elected officials representing tobacco-growing provinces, and the resilient individual and collective perceptions of cigarette smoking as a non-dangerous habit, the tobacco lobby was able to corner and silence the emerging public voices that emphasized the pathological dimensions of cigarette smoking and called for forceful tobacco control legislation. Once again, pro-tobacco’s more efficient lobbying strategies won, leaving the “smoking controversy” inconclusive. Thus, in 1986, the National Congress passed Law 23344 that essentially codified the tobacco industry’s ineffective voluntary advertising code of the late 1970s and placed the weak health label “Fumar es Perjudicial para la Salud” (“Smoking is harmful to health”) on cigarette packs. In 1992, Buenos Aires hosted the Eighth World Conference on Tobacco or Health. The occasion was a very favorable opportunity for anti-smoking advocates to push Congress to consider the comprehensive tobacco control bill originally introduced in 1990. This time, Congress approved it. However, the tobacco lobby organized a powerful public relations campaign with the support of international agencies, scientific consultants hired by

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industry lawyers based in the United States, and representatives from the tobacco-growing provinces. As a result of this lobby, and only ten days after the bill passed, the president vetoed the law, mainly stressing the argument of preserving the economies of tobacco-producing provinces. Two major elements were decisive in the making of a new anti-smoking consensus: On one hand, the findings related to the harmful consequences of second-hand smoking in the early 1990s, and on the other hand, the increasing globalization of comprehensive tobacco control initiatives through a new supranational agreement against cigarette smoking. The consensus on the harmful consequences of second-hand smoke provided a rationale for public policies aimed at enhancing state regulatory roles vis-à-vis protecting citizens’ health. This consensus is both a consequence and a facilitator of the consolidation of an emerging public secular morality. Like never before, health and fitness, risk consciousness, and behavioral change  – along with traditional ideas such as “do no harm to others”  – became the key ideas, beliefs, and justifications for many parts of the new anti-smoking advocacy groups’ agendas, additional legislation that restricted smoking in public spaces, tighter controls on advertising, and increasingly abundant more or less sophisticated epidemiological studies.14 This process was particularly relevant in the Anglo-American world, but less so in the world periphery, including Buenos Aires and Argentina. Though it had been in the making for quite some time, it was apparent by the last third of the twentieth century that most of the scientific circles, as well as more and more sectors of the population, believed that smoking was not only unhealthy but also a vicious addiction, the increased stigmatization of smoking was a promising strategy, the segregation of the smoker in all public spaces was necessary, and that eventually, smoking as a socially acceptable custom had to be eliminated. The approval in 2003 of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control was a watershed event for the globalization of anti-smoking efforts. The Framework Convention was meant to induce those countries that signed the supranational agreement to raise taxes on tobacco, protect people from second-hand smoke, ban advertising, promotion and sponsorship, require strong health warnings on tobacco packaging, provide cessation services, and encourage non-governmental organizations to tobacco control efforts nationally and internationally.15 In a relatively short period of time, a new generation of anti-smoking advocates was in the making, well-equipped and updated on contents and strategies – to a great extent, as a result of the periodical production of national and international reports by the World Health Organization, Pan American

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Health Organization and others as well as civil society shadows reports by countries aimed at reviewing the gap between the Framework Convention’s requirements and their actual implementation. The Framework Convention went into place in 2005. A  year later, the creation of the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, based in New York City, reinforced the global momentum of anti-smoking efforts by making available US$375  million for the global anti-smoking agenda. Focused on reducing tobacco use in low- and middle-income countries, it facilitated the establishment of full-time anti-tobacco specialists who advocated for the production of smoke-free environment legislation and worked on the monitoring of both air quality and tobacco industry activities. In this new scenario resulting from the actions displayed by local civil society actors with plenty of support from global anti-smoking forces, and unlike ever before, the Buenos Aires anti-smoking camp succeeded in putting tobacco control on the health policy agenda, addressing with unequal strength five key issues: 1. the extent of the control on advertising; 2. the extent of restrictions on smoking in public settings; 3. prohibition of selling cigarettes to children and youth as a way to prevent them from falling into nicotine addictive behavior; 4. tobacco tax policies; 5. policy initiatives to help individuals stop smoking.16 By the second half of the 2000s the local anti-smoking camp already became a dynamic lobby. Although with intermittent, marginal, and quite ineffective initiatives during the twentieth century, the anti-tobacco militancy began to take shape during the mid-1980s, mainly as individual efforts carried out in academia, government, and civil society. Some of the most militant professional voices included Carlos Alvarez Herrera, Jorge Pilheu, Herman Schargrodsky, and Diego Perazzo. The year 1987 saw the creation of the Argentine Anti-Smoking Union (UATA), a medical/professional group that epitomized the enhancement of the activist agenda, adding to traditional approaches focused on awareness-raising activities and individual smoking cessation plans the strategy of lobbying elected officials in order to advance anti-tobacco public policies. In fact, the UATA advised some of them in the preparation of the first comprehensive bill against smoking in the early 1990s.17 Some of these new organizations joined the Latin American Coordinating Coalition on Tobacco Control, a regional alliance initially promoted by the American Cancer Society and the Center for Disease Control that was

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mainly financed by the World Health Organization, Pan American Health Organization and Health Canada. Founded in the early 1980s, this alliance was by and large focused on awareness activities and offered very timid and erratic efforts toward shaping public policy, social mobilization, and advocacy. During the 1990s, the Coalition stagnated, ultimately losing the confidence of its financial support sources. By August 2000, the Inter-American Heart Foundation  – one of the Coalition’s new members – volunteered to serve as the group’s institutional home and develop a network aimed at revitalizing advocacy and social mobilization anti-smoking efforts. With a new regional leadership comprised of local advocates working in close contact with the Inter-American Heart Foundation, fresh funds mainly coming from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and the Pan-American Health Organization, but with the additional support of the American Cancer Society, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, American Heart Association, and American Lung Association, the Coalition facilitated the organization of advocacy workshops, press conferences, media campaigns, journalism contests, shadow reports, opinion polling, and regional tobacco conferences. As a result, a new generation of anti-smoking activists and national teams of local advocates were not only in the making but also getting plenty of support from a new network of transnational, regional, national, and local organizations with a clear agenda aimed at renovating the old and not very effective anti-smoking policies.18 Since 2003, the Inter-American Heart Foundation has undoubtedly become the most dynamic and assertive advocate for the implementation of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in Latin America. In Argentina, the foundation opened its Buenos Aires office in 2007; almost right away, this office began playing a decisive role in the creation of Alianza Libre de Humo Argentina, a smoke-free environment alliance of more than one hundred non-governmental organizations: health practitioners as well as other groups focused on human rights, the environment, labor conditions, grassroots anti-smoking activism, and communications.19 In December 2009, the launch of the Coalition for the Ratification of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control marked another milestone in what was becoming a quite successful anti-smoking agenda. With the leadership of all major tobacco control non-governmental organizations, such as the Fundación Inter Americana del Corazón Argentina, the Alianza Libre de Humo Argentina, the Asociación Argentina de Tabacología, and the Unión Antitabáquica Argentina, more than 300 organizations joined this new coalition – which

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also worked very closely with the National Ministry of Health to construct a strategic plan that included advocacy, media campaigns, and public events. By the end of the 2000s, the promotion of individual smoking cessation programs stayed in the agenda of the anti-smoking camp, although its tone and priorities were now focused on smoke-free environments, the implementation of smoke-free policies, and the monitoring of the tobacco industry and how to counteract its arguments and tactics. Lawsuits brought against the tobacco industry in Argentina have been neither common nor successful. As expected, when confronting the novelties produced in the anti-smoking camp in terms of its public policy advocacy agenda as well as the increasing presence of a new international consensus on tobacco control, the tobacco industry renewed its marketing strategies and tactics, defending with new arguments the old practice of smoking. In the early 1990s, it organized and orchestrated major lobbying and public relations campaigns to question the legitimacy of concerns about second-hand smoke. Likewise, in other countries, these campaigns used industry-friendly scientists, medical doctors, and journalists. Since the mid-1990s, it has promoted its “accommodation” program, “La Cortesía de Elegir” (“The Courtesy of Choice”), designed to avoid legislation to end second-hand smoke exposure in restaurants and bars. More broadly, the goal was to maintain the social acceptability of smoking, an issue that plenty of smokers – for whom smoking could be a habit, an addiction, a pleasure, even an accepted health hazard – defended in terms of their right to exercise an individual and legitimate choice.20 By the end of the decade, the tobacco industry began to promote youth smoking prevention programs to preempt anti-tobacco education. The goal was to put all the weight of the decision to smoke on the shoulders of young smokers themselves, shifting the focus away from the imaginative strategies the industry utilized when marketing cigarettes. If during most of the twentieth century, the state was not an actor in defining tobacco control public policies, the last decade reveals a more complex picture – one with an undoubtedly profound and quite drastic change. At least three events that took place in 2003 reveal a complexity mainly resulting from the way different state agencies and government branches were articulating different discourses and trying to enact different agendas at around the same time: In 2003, the Ministry of Health created its National Program for Tobacco Control. By then, the Ministry was already working with many provincial and municipal governments in 100 percent smoke-free environment initiatives at the local and regional levels. It also pushed for

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a new and very comprehensive law following the minimum standards defined that year by the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. It was an unsuccessful effort, among other reasons because the executive power of the national government did not include the issue among its priorities. Also in 2003, the Lower House of Congress’ Public Health Committee drafted a version of a bill that consolidated eighteen previous tobacco control legal initiatives; however, at the end, it was buried in favor of other parliamentary issues. That year, Argentina signed the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, but its ratification was blocked in the National Congress Senate by legislators of tobacco-producing provinces who  – independently of their political affiliation – used their leverage within their own political parties and the national government to freeze any further action. By 2006, there was only one national law that restricted tobacco advertisements in certain places. Many provinces had laws that theoretically protected persons from passive smoking and prohibited the sale of cigarettes to minors. In Buenos Aires, the aforementioned Law 1799 (passed in 2005) made the city part of a group that was certainly moving faster than the national government toward comprehensive tobacco control policies. However, in most cases – including Buenos Aires – these laws were generally ineffective because of a lack of enforcement and loopholes that allowed the creation of smoking spaces – sort of fish tanks – within a smoke-free closed environments. By 2012, and without ratifying the Framework Convention, National Congress finally approved a new, comprehensive law even more explicit and ambitious than the one approved in 2010 by the Buenos Aires city legislature. The results of these recent changes in public policies were remarkable. Although Argentina continues to rank among the countries with the highest smoking cigarette per capita consumption in Latin America, the decline of its prevalence was one of the sharpest worldwide: between 2006 and 2012 the Argentine rate has declined by 15.4 percent compared to 5.86  percent for developing countries and 6.4  percent for developed countries – where the most significant reduction happened earlier.21 What happened in Buenos Aires in the last decade is not exceptional. With national differences, and in some countries in a faster and more effective way than in others, the new anti-smoking consensus engineered in Washington, DC and Geneva was able to begin to achieve very significant changes in cigarette consumption. At the local level, new non-governmental organizations and health professionals – some working for state agencies – adjusted and instrumentalized the tobacco control agenda and gained increasing support from the political leadership.

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During most of the twentieth century, the regulation of cigarette consumption was not a substantive topic in Argentine and Buenos Aires public policies. All civilian governments (conservative, liberal, reformist, and developmentalist) as well as military dictatorships (both moderate and brutal) did not confront tobacco as an issue because at that time it was an issue only for very marginal voices. As with other problems, the history of cigarette smoking reinforces the assertion that social and health policies cannot always be fully explained by the parameters and periodization of political history and that changes in political regimes or governments do not necessarily translate into changes in social or health policies. Only since the 1990s, and particularly during the 2000s, when supranational organizations (such as the World Health Organization, Pan-American Health Organizations and Inter-American Heart Association, as well as the North-American Bloomberg Philanthropies and American Cancer Society) began to give financial support and training to local professional and academic groups, has the new global anti-smoking consensus made its impact on the political scene in Buenos Aires. In a matter of only few years, a new advocacy network of organizations and anti-smoking activists were able to recruit legislators from almost all political parties at the local, provincial, and national levels. Some provinces and cities – Buenos Aires among them  – advanced and began to try to enforce legal anti-smoking policies earlier and at a faster speed than others. But in a very short time the new anti-smoking momentum went national. With the backdrop of an international consensus very invested in the medicalization and criminalization of smoking, and in recurrent political conjunctures where partisan approaches to policy-making tended to dominate, a very assertive and comprehensive national anti-smoking legislation was approved. By then, the voluntarism – which was mainly focused on individual programs for quitting that dominated almost all of the twentieth century  – was, without disappearing, replaced by public policies focused on the creation of smoke-free places and the drastic control of second-hand smoking. In other words, the increasing sophistication displayed by the anti-tobacco camp on many fronts – from funding to social marketing of ideas and behavior, to lobbying local, provincial, and national governments  – facilitated a profound shift of emphasis. Still in the making and with an unknown end, this shift is entailing a clear decline of discourses and policies focused on personal smoking cessation efforts and a commanding presence of a public health approach. While strongly limiting opportunities and spaces to smoke, the current dominant climate emphasizes collective and individual rights to environments free of smoke.

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The sudden change in a century-old continuity in the history of smoking in modern Buenos Aires is apparent and very difficult to question or relativize. The role of the global tobacco control forces during the last decade seems to be equally undisputable. Its relevance, however, needs to take into account the local and national conditions where the guidelines generated by the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control were enacted. It is in the interlacing, adjustment, and negotiation of social, cultural, and political events at distance with specific contextualities where the practice of cigarette smoking in Buenos Aires reveals a history that is both local and international.

Notes 1 For the complete lyrics of “While Smoking” see Juan Angel Russo, ed., Letras de Tango (Buenos Aires: Basilico, 2000), 34. 2 Wayne Bernhardson, Buenos Aires (Lonely Planet Guides, 1996). 3 José Domenech, Historia del tabaco. Universalidad de sus industrias y comercio (Córdoba and Buenos Aires: Aniceto Lopez, 1941); Julio Fidel, Jorge Lucangeli, and Phil Shepherd, Perfil y comportamiento tecnológico de la industria del cigarrillo en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Bid-Cepal, 1976); Secretaría de Agricultura, Ganadería y Pesca, Ministerio de Economía y Obras y Servicios Públicos. Tabaco en Argentina [www.mecon.gov.ar], 2004. 4 See for example, Carol Benedict, Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550–2010 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Relli Shechter, Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East: The Egyptian Tobacco Market 1850–2000 (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006). 5 Caras y Caretas, May 21, 1910. 6 www.pmi.com/marketpages/pages/market_en_ar.aspx#. Retrieved July 2, 2014; Martín González Rozada, Gustavo Sánchez, Marta Angueira, and Fernando Bartolomé Verra, Análisis económico del consumo de tabaco en Argentina, mimeo, 2002. 7 Raúl Pitarque, Tabaquismo en Argentina: Enfermedad, discapacidad y muerte (Buenos Aires, 2005); Beatriz Marcet Champagne, Ernesto M. Sebrié, Herman Schargrodsky, Palmira Pramparo, Carlos Pablo Boissonnet, and E. Wilson, “Tobacco Smoking in Seven Latin American Cities:  The CARMELA Study,” Tobacco Control 19 (2010): 457; Horacio Zilbersztejn, Alberto Cardone, Nora Vainstein, Andrés Mulassi, José G. Calderón, Patricia Blanco, Enrique Pautasso, Aníbal Picarel, Román Cragnolino, Susana Fernández, Adrian Andina, Sebastián Saravia Toledo, Italo Torchio, and César A.  Belziti, “Tabaquismo en médicos de la República Argentina. Estudio TAMARA,” Revista Argentina de Cardiología 75, no.  2 (2007):  109–16; http:// research.scottrade.com/qnr/Public/Markets/Commentary. Retrieved July 1, 2014. 8 In this chapter it is not my goal to discuss the meanings of smoking. In any case, I do want to underline that along with the pervasive influences of advertising and the addictive consequences of inhaling nicotine it is crucial to include the wishes, desires, and agency of smokers themselves in the reproduction of the habit.

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9 Robert Proctor, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 159–70. 10 José Buschini, “Una carrera professional para la ciencia en la Argentina de la primer mitad del siglo XX: Angel Roffo y la cancerología experimental,” Revista Quipu 14, no. 2 (2012): 267–93. 11 Diego León Perazzo, “Historia de pioneros: El control del tabaquismo en Argentina,” in Tabaquismo en Argentina. Enfermedad, discapacidad y muerte, ed. Raúl Pitarque (Buenos Aires: UATA/PAHO, 2005), 26–8. 12 Ernesto Sebrié, Joaquín Barnoya, Eliseo Perez-Stable, and Stanton A. Glantz, Tobacco Industry Dominating National Tobacco Policy Making in Argentina, 1966–2005. http//repositories.cdlib.org/ctcre/tcpmi/Argentina 2005. Retrieved July 4, 2014. 13 Joaquín Barnoya and Stanton Glantz, “Tobacco Industry Success in Preventing Regulation of Secondhand Smoke in Latin America:  the Latin America Project,” Tobacco Control 11 (2002): 305–14; Sebrié et al., Tobacco Industry. 14 Solomon Katz, “Secular Morality,” in Morality and Health, ed. Allan Brandt and Paul Rozin (New  York and London:  Routledge, 1997), 297–330; Barnoya and Glantz, “Tobacco Industry Success.” 15 Jeff Collin, Kelley Lee, and Karen Bissell, “The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control:  The Politics of Global Health Governance,” Third World Quarterly 23 (2002):  265–82; Ruth Roemer, Allyn Taylor, and Jean Lariviere, “Origins of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control,” American Journal of Public Health 95 (2005): 936–8; Allan Brandt, The Cigarette Century:  The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New  York:  Basic Books, 2005), 472–91; Paul Cairney, Donald T. Studlar, and Hadii M. Mamudu, Global Tobacco Control:  Power, Policy, Governance and Transfer (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Derek Yach, “The Origins, Development, Effects and Future of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control:  A  Personal Perspective,” The Lancet 383, no. 9930 (2014): 1771–9; Hadii Mamudu and Stanton Glantz, “Civil Society and the Negotiation of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control,” Global Public Health 4 (2009):  150–68; World Health Organization, History of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (Geneva:  World Health Organization, 2009). 16 Eric Feldman and Ronald Bayer, “Liberal States, Public Health, and the Tobacco Question,” in Unfiltered:  Conflicts over Tobacco Policy and Public Health, Eric Feldman and Ronald Bayer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1–7. 17 Pitarque, Tabaquismo en Argentina. 18 Perazzo, “Historia de pioneros,” 29–31; Beatriz Marcet Champagne, Ernesto Sebrié, and Verónica Schoj, “The Role of Organized Civil Society in Tobacco Control in Latin America and the Caribbean,” Salud Pública de México 52, no. 2 (2010): 330–9. 19 www.aliarargentina.org. Retrieved July 4, 2014. 20 Sebrié et al., Tobacco Industry. 21 Marie Ng, Michael K. Freeman, Thomas D. Fleming, Margaret Robinson, Laura Dwyer-Lindgren, Blake Thomson, Alexandra Wollum, Ella Sanman, Sarah Wulf, Christopher J.L. Murray, Emmanuela Gakidou, and Alan D.  Lopez, “Smoking Prevalence and Cigarette Consumption in 187 Countries, 1980–2012,” Journal of the American Medical Association 311, no. 2 (2014): 183–92, Supplement. The prevalence refers to the proportion of individuals who smoke in a population and at a given time.

PART III

PROSTITUTION AND SEX TRAFFICKING

10

The FBI’s White Slave Division The creation of a national regulatory regime to police prostitutes in the United States, 1910–1918 Jessica R. Pliley

On December 11, 1911, Violet Munroe reported to the Bureau of Investigation that a new girl had arrived at her Washington, DC, brothel, located at Delaware and H Street. The Bureau, which would be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1935, quickly dispatched a special agent from its White Slave Division to interview the new arrival as part of an ongoing census of sex workers the division was in the process of conducting. The twenty-one-year-old told the agent that her name was Maud Martin, though she admitted that she had been previously known by the names of Jane Wright (in Philadelphia, PA), Pearl Hearte (in Detroit, MI), and Jane Clarque (in her hometown of Lapaire, NM). When questioned about her entry into sex work, Maud told Special Agent John Grgurevich that she had started practicing prostitution in Detroit eighteen months prior and had been in DC working in a different brothel for one month. She was probably attracted to DC by its relatively open sex market. Though the city had laws outlawing street solicitation, clandestine brothel-based prostitution thrived in a city that had a constant and shifting stream of visitors.1 The special agent noted Maud’s physical description (138 lbs, 5'4 ½", light brown hair, blue eyes, light complexion) and her family’s national origins (father a US citizen, though described as a “half-breed Indian”). The Bureau’s interest in Maud’s nationality reflected the White Slave Division’s goal to aid the Immigration Bureau’s mission to expel immigrant sex workers from the country.2 Of the fifty-nine sex workers interviewed by Washington DC police and special agents of the Bureau on that day of December 11, 1911, three were found to be foreign nationals and were handed over for deportation to the Immigration Bureau.3 But the intensive inquiry into her entry into prostitution and the demand that Maud should list all “sporting 221

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houses” she had worked in  – a command that Maud resisted, speaking instead in vague terms – served the White Slave Division’s primary purpose of ensuring that prostitutes in America’s brothels were not white slaves.4 To confirm that all of America’s prostitutes voluntarily engaged in sex work the Bureau’s White Slave Division launched an ambitious plan in 1911 to make a “census of women engaged in the business of prostitution.”5 After her interview and the enumeration sheet that the special agent had completed had been filed, Maud Martin, as a native-born citizen, was free to continue practicing prostitution in the nation’s capital. Yet, Special Agent Grgurevich could not help pondering the unknown (and unshared) details of Maud’s life, writing: From the examination of this girl, it developed that she is a well-educated woman, apparently a graduate of a western medical college, of very refined manners, and she undoubtedly was driven into a life of shame by some circumstances which would be interesting to know. Although she has not been in the “business” for a very long time, it appears that the chances of her reformation are hopeless. No evidence could be secured showing that her coming to Washington and entering a house of ill-fame was in violation of the White Slave Traffic Act. It also appears that while she made several efforts to return to a decent life something, unknown to the investigators, drove her back to the life she now leads.6

The Bureau’s White Slave Division called upon its mandate to enforce the White Slave Traffic Act, popularly known as the Mann Act, as justification for conducting its census of brothel-based prostitution. Passed in 1910 to address public outrage about sex trafficking, the federal law made it illegal to take a woman or girl over state lines for the purposes of prostitution, debauchery, or “any other immoral purpose.” It fell to the Bureau of Investigation to enforce this expansive anti-prostitution law. Though white slavery has captured the attention of many historians of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, most consider the topic with a narrow gaze on US culture and society, frequently ignoring the fact that anti-white slavery activists could be found on both sides of the Atlantic and these activists forged transnational ties with one another.7 Because of its focus on international sex trafficking, the anti-white slavery movement was transnational almost from its inception. Initially based in England, organizations like Josephine Butler’s Ladies National Association, soon expanded to be global in scope, renaming itself the International Abolitionist Federation in 1898. Similarly, the International Bureau for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic (a voluntary organization housed in London and founded in 1889), later became the International Bureau for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women, and also developed a strong presence

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in Europe. Both of these organizations sought to shape the prostitution policy in individual nation states as well as to influence the ways international policy against white slavery should be coordinated in international agreements like the 1904 Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, the 1910 International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, and the League of Nations’ International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children of 1921, as documented by Stephanie Limoncelli.8 Even though American social purity activists invited British activists to tour the United States and maintained close ties to London-based organizations, most American historians have not set the issue of white slavery into its wider Atlantic context. Historians of white slavery in America have demonstrated a marked preference for analyzing the ways that white slavery debates expressed a wide range of Progressive-Era anxieties:  fears of women’s entry into the labor market and political sphere; fears of interracial sex amid the rise of Jim Crow segregation; and fears of the rising tide of immigration. Few historians have contemplated the reality of sex trafficking and the migration of sex workers or considered the ways that white slavery laws were actually implemented by law enforcement and criminal justice agencies.9 Only legal historian David J. Langum has addressed the enforcement of the White Slave Traffic Act, a law he considers, like prohibition, to be an excellent example of the puritanical, anti-liberal impulses of progressives.10 This chapter addresses these gaps and examines the ways the Bureau of Investigation established its White Slave Division to enforce the Mann Act. Though American white slavery activists eagerly followed the developments of the European anti-white slavery movement and participated in the various international meetings that addressed the problem, policy-makers in the federal government did not share their global orientation nor their enthusiasm for sustaining or even maintaining transnational and international cooperation.11 US policy-makers responded to a perceived growing threat of the globalization of prostitution and sex trafficking by developing its own policies to closely monitor the mobility of sex workers. Policy-makers conceived white slavery to be a threat that was foreign in nature and thus they responded to the danger by increasing border control policies and practices while also launching a regulatory regime to catalogue existing prostitutes in the United States. From the US perspective, the global problem of sex trafficking did not so much require global solutions, but rather required state-building solutions. This chapter first considers the emergence of the white slavery crisis to uncover how the issue of white slavery developed into a problem that

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required a federal response. Then it examines the activities of the Bureau of Investigation’s White Slavery Division as it conducted the census that archived Maud Martin and attempted an orderly, rational undertaking to document a population known to be disorderly and in the words of one Progressive-Era scholar, “notoriously peripatetic.”12 And lastly, the chapter situates the activities of the White Slave Division in a broader context of prostitution control within the American Empire.

The white slavery crisis Concerns about prostitution and sex trafficking in the United States had been percolating since the 1880s as social purity reformers periodically stoked the fires about the exploitation of young women in Wisconsin’s lumber camps and the role of the US military in condoning prostitution in the American-occupied Philippines.13 But these worries did not erupt into a rolling boil until 1907 when the Chicago Tribune and other big city newspapers began to regularly publish stories of sex exploitation, forced prostitution, and urban danger under the amorphous heading of white slavery. That same year muckraker George Kibbe Tuner wrote an exposé in McClure’s Magazine that detailed the white slave traffic in Chicago.14 From 1907 until the outbreak of World War I  in 1914, American media, popular culture, and progressive activists routinely invoked the specter of white slavery as an example of the dangers of extreme capitalism and unregulated industrialization, the threat posed by immigrants taking advantage of the United States’ open borders, and the trouble young white women who migrated to the uncharted city for school or work might encounter without proper parental supervision. What, precisely, white slavery meant differed depending on the ideological position of the person speaking. For some, white slavery simply was a euphemism for prostitution, a way to challenge the “conspiracy of silence” that surrounded the issue.15 For these individuals, it was inconceivable that a woman would sell sex unless desperate circumstances drove her into prostitution. Wirt Hallam noted in 1912: As for White Slavery, the girls who are forced into this or into immorality through the physical violence or intimidation of the vice promoter, are not the only ones that need our sympathy and our help. The girls who are enticed into vice by other means are often as much helpless victims as though they were taken into nets by force … They are somebody’s daughters and, sensational as it might sound, somebody is slowly killing them for profit.16

From this perspective all prostitutes were white slaves.

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For others, white slaves were those young women (frequently referred to as “girls”) who entered a brothel due to seduction, coercion, force, or fraud. These activists sought to differentiate between the sex worker deserving of pity and reform, and those who through their unrepentant immorality could be cast outside the category of redeemable. White slavery activist Clifford G. Roe noted, “The traffic in girls simply means the procuring of girls for immoral lives. That life of open shame, of public prostitution, is so naturally abhorrent to nearly every girl that none go into it except in one of two ways; either they gravitate into it, or they are tricked or trapped into it.”17 As a prosecuting state’s attorney in Chicago, Roe was primarily concerned with the latter category. He argued that “the number of girls going voluntarily into this life [of prostitution] is far too small to meet the demand; hence the necessity for tricking into the life large numbers of girls who would not come willingly.”18 Roe and his ilk were most concerned with protecting deceived innocents and criminalizing third-party profiteering of prostitution – pimping, pandering, and procuring – and as a result he helped to lay the groundwork in Illinois for an anti-white slavery law that formed the precedent for the White Slave Traffic Act. These two definitions of white slavery, one that saw all prostitutes as white slaves and the other that saw only deceived and coerced women as white slaves, sat in tension with one another and gave the term white slavery an elasticity that made it culturally dynamic; useful to a wide variety of actors precisely because the term was so imprecise, yet seemingly loaded with meaning.19 One aspect that most activists agreed upon was the idea that white slavery was about protecting white women and girls. Activists frequently invoked comparisons to African American chattel slavery, implicitly and explicitly. One writer called white slavery, the “black traffic in white girls,” while Reverend William Burgess declared that white slavery was “far worse than negro slavery.”20 Comparing white slavery to African American chattel slavery offered activists a way to connect the reform goals of the anti-prostitution movement with the most successful social reform movement of the modern era – abolitionism. Indeed, many within the movement called the anti-prostitution movement the “New Abolitionism.”21 But it also functioned to rewrite the history of slavery in the United States by implying that African American slavery was a system of labor exploitation, not sexual exploitation. While eliding the sexual component of African American slavery, these white slavery narratives also tended to ignore the presence of women of color within the United States’ sexual marketplaces.22 Activists instead imagined white slaves to be, as one congressman proclaimed, the “blue-eyed girl” in the United States.23 The black press at the time noted the

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racialized rendering of the white slave. The Chicago Broad Ax declared, “If under the term ‘White Slave Traffic’ the same protection is given to women of other races, then the law is a blessing, if not, then it is bias.”24 While white slavery narratives excluded black women and girls as victims, these same narratives fretted over the vulnerabilities of immigrant women and girls. The heyday of white slavery, from 1885 to 1914, coincided with the peak of immigration to the United States and indeed, the year that the issue of white slavery erupted into national mass media – 1907 – is the same year that immigration climaxed with 1,285,349 immigrants documented entering the country.25 Progressive-Era writers always addressed the issue of white slavery and anxieties about the growth of prostitution through the filter of immigration, though how that filter functioned differed depending on the nativist tendencies (or lack there of) of the activist-authors. Some women’s rights activists and settlement house workers, like Jane Addams and Maude Miner, argued that women and girls who migrated alone to the United States remained especially vulnerable to exploitation that might lead them into the brothel.26 Between painfully low wages offered by factory employers, terrible and monotonous work schedules, and being cast adrift of community support, it was of little surprise that immigrant women could easily be counted among the country’s brothel-based prostitutes. Addams, Miner, and others advocated a wide variety of reforms to protect immigrant women from sexual exploitation – raising the minimum wage, introducing an eight-hour day, providing social services to ensure that migrants built support systems. As the extensive Illinois Vice Report asserted, “Women do not seek lives of prostitution.” Rather economic expediency and social alienation led to a young woman’s downfall, the report argued.27 The need to protect vulnerable immigrant girls from exploitation served two goals: first, it undermined the basic immorality and inhumanity of systems of prostitution; and second, it ensured that immigrant women would be seamlessly incorporated into American culture and values, which was deemed essential since these same women would presumably give birth to American citizens. While feminist activists cast white slavery as an issue that addressed the vulnerabilities of immigrant women, others, most notably in the Immigration Bureau, took the stance that white slavery was a foreign system of sex trafficking in which greedy pimps, in defiance of American immigration law, imported foreign prostitutes to the United States. The Page Act of 1875, an anti-Chinese law, had made it illegal to import women to the United States for the purposes of prostitution, debauchery, or “any other immoral purpose.” Since then, the 1903, 1907, and 1910 immigration

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law reforms fortified the anti-vice fence at the border making it illegal for anyone connected to vice to enter the country (prostitutes, pimps, procurers, madams) and establishing these acts as deportable offenses after entry into the country.28 As the Immigration Bureau advocated for these reforms and then sought to enforce them, it conducted several studies into the prevalence of white slavery in the United States (the agency’s definition of white slavery simply equated “white slavery” with “foreign-born prostitution”). From these studies, the Immigration Bureau concluded: The most alarming feature of this traffic from the bureau’s point of view consists … in the vastly increasing numbers of alien prostitutes flooding the country, finding in the existing immigration laws, with their present means of enforcement, only slight impediment to their passage back and forth, and in the great and callous indifference displayed to the existence of these leprous sores upon the body politic in the various cities which throw the cloak of protection over the districts wherein are gathered the brothels, dives, and houses of assignation.29

Under the white slavery rubric, the Immigration Bureau painted all white slaves as a contagion, infecting the nation with immorality and venereal disease. The Immigration Bureau’s impulse to investigate white slavery was replicated in cities and states throughout the country, all of which combined to construct the “reality” of white slavery. Forty-three cities launched in-depth investigations into the prevalence of vice, prostitution, and white slavery in their urban environments. Typically a committee of leading citizens partnered with police representatives and local social hygiene activists to conduct these investigations. As city-produced documents, these vice reports were shaped by local political pressures. Some called for the significant reform of police forces whom were blamed for colluding with pimps and profiting from prostitution. Other reports, however, commended the police for a job well done.30 Each city published its investigation for public consumption, and then these vice reports found their way into libraries, and saw their findings repeated by the purity press, all of which contributed to the growing cacophony surrounding white slavery. These investigations functioned as the civic voice within white slavery narratives. They kept newspapers’ attention fixed on the issue while also bestowing a mantle of authority to discussions of white slavery that the cinema and dime novels about white slavery lacked. The federal government also embraced the Progressive-Era mania for thorough investigation. Though the Immigration Bureau’s investigations, conducted from 1908 to 1909, were never made public, they nevertheless shaped public perceptions because their findings and

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recommendations ultimately were folded in and restated in the volume of the congressionally mandated Immigration Commission investigation devoted to white slavery. This volume was released to widespread publicity in December 1909, earlier than the rest of the forty-one volumes of the enormous study. With the publication of this study, the white slavery phenomenon had become a full-blown crisis with national and transnational dimensions. As each investigation amplified the other, outraged citizens demanded legislative action. In response, the US Congress passed the 1910 White Slave Traffic Act to address this unfolding crisis.31

The White Slave Division The task of enforcing the White Slave Traffic Act fell to the young Bureau of Investigation, a detective force within the Department of Justice. President Theodore Roosevelt had established the Bureau in 1908.32 Roosevelt and Attorney General Charles J.  Bonaparte appointed Stanley W.  Finch to be the Bureau’s head and gave him leadership of a small cadre of special agents, who were largely drawn from the Selective Service and the Immigration Bureau. The young detective force initially spent its time investigating violations of antitrust laws, peonage laws, national banking laws, and cases where individuals impersonated government officials; but it also lent an investigative hand to the Immigration Bureau when called upon. Indeed, several of the Bureau’s sixty-one agents were in the midst of a multi-month white slavery investigation into the violation of US immigration laws when President William H. Taft signed the White Slave Traffic Act into existence on June 25, 1910.33 The passage of the White Slave Traffic Act dramatically altered the activities, responsibilities, organization, and reach of the Bureau of Investigation. The law made it illegal to transport a woman or girl over state lines (and territorial borders, and within Washington, DC, Native American reservations and colonial territories) for the purposes of prostitution, debauchery, and “any other immoral purpose.” Clearly this was an expansive law, but it was also shrouded in vagaries. Though most jurists had a common definition for prostitution, the legal conception of debauchery was in flux, and the phrase “any other immoral purpose” flummoxed many, including several congressmen who opposed the law. Given the confusion over the scope of the law and questions about its constitutionality, when first tasked with its enforcement, the Bureau framed it as primarily an anti-prostitution law intended to combat the trafficking of sex workers from one locale to another by a third party.

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Finch believed that the Bureau would need “to take extraordinary measures” to effectively enforce the White Slave Traffic Act.34 These extraordinary measures included setting up a separate division within the Bureau of Investigation that would be solely devoted to combating sex trafficking and enforcing the White Slave Traffic Act. Finch found this mission to be so pressing that he stepped down as chief of the entire Bureau of Investigation (leaving the position to his successor A. Bruce Bielaski) and instead focused all of his energies on his new job as special commissioner for the suppression of the white slave traffic of the White Slave Division. Finch deemed the White Slave Division as necessary because “the very large number of men who were found to be engaged, professionally, you might say, in the business of procuring women and girls for houses of ill-fame, the number, amounting to thousands, in all parts of the country, it was found necessary to adopt a special system, a system that we might reasonably hope to be effective.”35 The special system developed by the White Slave Division consisted of taking a census of every brothel in every town that had a red light district and a population more than 5,000 people. Completion of this census was why Special Agent Grgurevich interviewed Maud Martin. The Bureau hoped to collect the names, descriptions, recent background, and date of entry into sex work for each prostitute it encountered. Because the Bureau was concerned primarily with third party profiteers and the White Slave Traffic Act, the census was intended to ensure that each sex worker moved from state to state voluntarily – that she had not been trafficked by a pimp or a brothel madam.36 Finch conceived of white slavery as a crime perpetuated and supported by men. He proclaimed, “the direct cause of the social evil and the white slave traffic is … ninety per cent the fault of the man” and he suggested that according to the Bureau’s work that there were conservatively 25,000 men in the United States making their living off of the sexual labor of women.37 Yet Finch did not stop at just blaming male pimps for the white slavery problem. He also indicted the sexual division of labor that kept women’s wages low, while ensuring men had enough wages to tempt women into sexual immorality. In a sense he criticized the system of “treating” – exchanging sexual favors for goods and services  – that many working-class women relied upon to survive.38 Finch’s plan had two goals: first, find and prosecute the men who profited from women’s sexual labor by going after procurers and traffickers, and, second, to reach sex workers through one-on-one contact and offer them opportunities for reform.39 The critical flaw of this plan was its ambitious scope, which was utterly amazing considering the rather small size of the federal government in 1910s.

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When the Mann Act was signed into law, the Bureau had only sixty-one special agents, all of whom were based in the vicinity of Washington, DC. Further complicating the plan was the fact that the Bureau quickly ran out of funds to enforce the White Slave Traffic Act in October 1911, several months before the end of its fiscal year. To enact his grandiose plan, Finch would need more money and manpower. The money proved easier to acquire. Finch launched an impressive publicity campaign to raise awareness of the funding shortfall among civil society groups who had an interest in moral reform, social hygiene, and anti-vice activism. Pleas to constituents appeared in publications like Vigilance, published by the American Purity Alliance and the American Vigilance Association, and The Light, published by the World Purity Association.40 Additionally, the Attorney General’s office prepared a list of “typical” cases showing the success and necessity of the Bureau’s white slave work to circulate among Congress.41 Vigilance published detailed accounts of these cases in its April 1912 issue as part of its attempt to raise awareness about the lack of funds the Bureau faced.42 Letters poured into Congress and the Department of Justice, and as a result Congress allocated $50,000 more for the specific use of fighting white slavery (this amount was increased by an additional $200,000 in 1913; see Table 10.1).43 With this money, Finch had some of the needed resources to implement his census and shut down sex trafficking in the United States. Even with the additional funding, Finch did not have enough money to permanently expand the payroll of the Bureau of Investigation. To address this challenge he launched an ingenious scheme to enlarge the reach of the Bureau, while working in the confines of a rather small federal government. The White Slave Division developed a new position of the “white slave officer” who was intended to be a private citizen, engaged in private labor, who volunteered their expertise and time to the Department of Justice. These deputized volunteers, almost all of whom were attorneys, were appointed by a special agent of the Bureau who would oversee their work conducting the Bureau’s census. They would enter a town, coordinate with local police who would join them in their survey of brothels, interview the madams to gain an accurate list of the sex workers, and then interview each woman. The entire scheme was imbued with the sense of volunteerism and an experiment of private–public partnerships that characterized Progressive-Era politics in the United States. It was also a pragmatic way for Finch to implement his goals.44 But even so, the White Slave Division still occasionally struggled to find the right type of man to serve as a local representative of the Bureau of

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Table 10.1.  Expenditures for white slave investigations, 1910–1916

July 1910–July 1911 July 1911–March 1912 July 1912–June 1913 July 1913–June 1914 July 1914–June 1915 July 1915–June 1916

Cost of WS Investigations

Percent of Total BoI Budget

$11,279.6445 $31,449.1246 $135,650.5047 $130,668.4348 $113,883.4749 $106,843.0450

12.30% 32.65% 28.74% 23.70% 20.95%

Source: United States Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Attorney General for 1913–1916. Washington, DC: Governmental Printing Office, 1914–1917.

Investigation. Surveying brothels, even for the purposes of fighting sex trafficking, had the potential of drawing volunteers attracted to the more salacious side of the job or who could be morally compromised by the work. Aware of this potential conflict of interest, the White Slave Division preferred to appoint lawyers who had “other regular employment,”51 yet were “in this work because they believe it is of benefit to the community and to humanity generally.”52 Finch preferred lawyers because he judged them to be “best qualified to judge as to the evidence necessary to sustain prosecution for violation of the various laws involved by our work.”53 As lawyers, these white slave officers were supposed to be motivated by a commitment to civic service, respectable, middle-class masculinity, and a devotion for a moral, sexually restrained life  – the exact inverse of the pimps they were trying to uncover. They were, according to one newspaper report, “young lawyers of the highest ethical and moral standing in their home communities.”54 Entering a brothel without sampling the wares constituted a resistance to the logics that inspired the flourishing of the commercial sex in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite their respectability, and because of their class biases, local white slave officers entered into the brothels with their authority (patriarchal, governmental, and class-based) backed up by the federal authority represented by their White Slavery Division badge.55 Agents and local white slave officers developed their own vocabulary to describe their work establishing the registry of prostitutes that reveals some of their own understandings of the Bureau’s mission in enforcing the Mann Act and perception of white slavery more broadly. They referred to prostitutes who lived in brothels as “inmates,” which seems to imply that they believed them to be prisoners either of a pimp or madam or of their own lack of morality. When agents revisited brothels to update the registry,

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they frequently mentioned that they “interrogated” sex workers. As white male representatives of both the federal government and the local elite, the white slave officers had an oppositional relationship with the prostitutes they oversaw. Suspicion prevailed in white slave officers’ interviews with prostitutes and these conversations easily took on the characteristics of cross-examinations. How an agent referred to brothels depended upon his temperament and to a lesser extent his region. Most preferred “house of prostitution,” though those in the South favored euphemisms like “house of ill-fame” and “sporting house.” Similarly, agents referred to the neighborhoods where such houses could be found as a “red light district,” “segregated district,” “restricted district,” and “sporting district.” As the work of Chad Heap and Kevin Mumford has shown, these phrases allude to the overlap of the geography of urban vice, racial segregation, and popular masculine sports and entertainment, all of which occurred under the watchful eyes of often-corrupt police.56 The registry of brothel-based prostitutes led to the White Slave Division closely watching and in some cases controlling the movement of prostitutes. In one case, Thelma Claire, a young sex worker reported to the office of the White Slave Division in Baltimore to get permission to go to her hometown of York, PA, to visit her stepmother.57 Instead of ceding control of their mobility to local white slave officers, most prostitutes soon adopted a language that revealed that they had taken their discussions with the local white slave officers to heart and clearly understood the limits of the law. Again and again, when asked about their interstate traveling, prostitutes claimed they journeyed under their “own free will” or “own volition.” Use of these phrases evaded an investigation into the violation of the law and in most cases ended the ability of the local white slave officer to pursue the issue further.58 Looking at the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act, historian Adam McKeown noted that bureaucracies created to police mobility often “served to create, systematize, and facilitate fraud.”59 Similarly, the efficient way that the White Slave Division permeated brothels to conduct their census guaranteed that most brothel-based prostitutes and madams understood how to circumvent investigation. Though Finch’s long-term goals for the White Slave Division were overly ambitious  – at one point he dreamed of establishing 1,000 local white slave officers  – the results of the division were impressive.60 The White Slave Division established local white slave officers in 310 cities and towns throughout twenty-six states within the United States, thereby dramatically expanding the reach of the Bureau of Investigation because though local white slave officers were supposed to focus on sex trafficking, inevitably

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they served on the frontlines of a wide variety of federal investigations.61 White slave officers entered more than 30,000 names into its registry of sex workers.62 Jill Harsin’s work has shown the difficulties the Paris police had in tracking between 1,200 to 4,700 prostitutes in that one city during the nineteenth century.63 The White Slave Division’s ability, through the use of local white slave officers, to monitor such vast numbers of prostitutes represented an impressive, if not chilling, accomplishment. Finch celebrated the work of the division, noting that in towns and cities that had a local white slave officer the practice of using debt bondage to keep prostitutes within particular brothels had been eliminated. Furthermore, he noted “the practice of confining girls in rooms and holding them absolutely against their will as slaves has been largely stopped in those cities.”64 Finch believed that the White Slave Division’s work had been successful in undermining sex trafficking and he supported continuing to expand the system. “In the states where I have introduced the system and have it working the traffic has gone down to practically nothing.”65 The problem the division encountered was that to do its work and monitor the mobility of prostitutes it relied on the continuing presence of semi-public brothels in red light districts. But as the White Slave Division conducted its survey, cities across the country were busy closing down their red light districts and amending their vice laws. Each of the forty-three cities that launched an investigation into local vice conditions subsequently outlawed public prostitution. Consequently the White Slave Division and its registry of brothel-based sex workers would prove to be a short-lived experiment, lasting only twenty months.

Implications The White Slave Division’s registry of more than 30,000 sex workers may be one of the largest coordinated attempts at regulating prostitution before World War II, and certainly the largest undertaken by the United States.66 Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century numerous nation states and empires embarked on various attempts to regulate prostitution. Dating back to Napoleonic France, which established state-regulated prostitution in 1802, usually these schemes were motivated by a need to control the rate of venereal disease in its military and male laboring populations. Though implementation within local arenas may have varied slightly, typical regulation included registering prostitutes with state-sanctioned medical or police forces, the requirement of regular medical examination (and incarceration in a lock hospital if the sex worker

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was found to be venereal), and a prohibition against selling sex outside of designated sites. This was a policy of registration, segregation, and quarantine. As European empires spanned the globe, regulation typically followed. Furthermore, regulation was strongly associated with modernity and efficient venereal disease control, prompting countries like Argentina, and as Elizabeth Remick and Robert Kramm point out in their chapters in this volume, China and Japan to adopt regulation.67 Within American social purity discourse, regulation was strongly associated with European decadence and consequently US activists perennially proclaimed to be free of the sin of regulation. Yet, on a municipal level, informal regulation was quite common. For example, the city of St. Louis famously attempted to institute regulation in 1870, until the furor over the city’s official sanctioning of vice led to the abolishment of the scheme a few years later.68 Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, moral reform activists fought attempts to introduce regulation in several of cities, including Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and New York City.69 More commonly, city police forces introduced quiet measures that regulated prostitution by segregating it into a recognizable vice district overseen by the police. As The Philanthropist fretted, “What we do fear is a form of secret regulation of vice in our cities, a form in which there is a collusion between the keepers of evil resorts, the police, the politicians and city officials.”70 Informal regulation relied mostly on the segregation of vice, though some cities, like El Paso, TX, did register, license, and medically examine its sex workers.71 The United States abandoned covert regulation within colonial settings under military control. As Eileen Suárez Findlay’s work deftly argues, the policing of “bad” women stabilized political competition in American-dominated Puerto Rico after 1898. Regulated prostitution emerged as a key feature of American-occupied Philippines, but also served as a flash point for anti-imperialists to attack the American mission in Southeast Asia, as Paul Kramer has demonstrated. When the American Empire is examined as a whole, military regulation of prostitution is consistently present in places such as Puerto Rico, the Philippines, the Panama Canal Zone, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, along the Mexican border, Hawaii, and as Robert Kramm’s chapter in this volume shows, in American-occupied Japan and Korea.72 When looking at these colonial regulatory regimes from a distance, the similarities of both goals and tactics are overwhelming – they sought to contain the venereal rate of workers and soldiers and therefore contained a biomedical logic, and to do so they venerated the taxonomic logics that characterizes other colonial missions by registering sex workers,

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describing them, and containing them.73 Yet when you look more closely, it quickly becomes clear that these projects developed in response to local conditions; in a sense bottom-up, rather than top-down. The US federal government developed no overriding policy concerning prostitution in colonial territories (although it did so during the World Wars in relation to prostitution near domestic military bases). The consistency of approaches toward prostitution shows that US colonialism was, as Laura Briggs puts it, “tremendously indebted to the style of colonial administration of European powers,” and in many settings the actual schemes of regulation built upon preexisting frameworks that had been established by previous regimes.74 So in both Puerto Rico and the Philippines, US military officials took inspiration from the ways that Spanish officials had regulated prostitution.75 The sharing of military personnel from one colonial setting to another ensured that policies would grow to resemble one another more closely, especially between the 1910s and 1930s when US forces were stationed in and occupied the Philippines, the Mexico border zone, Panama, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and Honduras. The American military, inspired by the biomedical logics of controlling venereal disease, overtly established regulation – registration, segregation, and quarantine – in colonial settings where typically non-white women were closely monitored. At the same time, American municipal police officials, inspired by the logics of containing vice, covertly established regulation in domestic settings where impure women were closely monitored  – although often with local variations. Into this topsy-turvy world of prostitution, policy stepped the Bureau of Investigation’s White Slave Division. Registering more than 30,000 women by the federal, non-military, forces was a unique experiment. Even more unique was the fact that the White Slave Division’s registry was completely free of the biomedical (and indeed, biopolitical) logics that underwrote other attempts to regulate prostitution. For Finch, the goal was not to protect men from venereal disease (a logic that always configured women as the vector of disease), but rather it was to protect women from unscrupulous men. Consequently, rather than being overtly punitive, the registry was investigative in nature, a type of consensual surveillance. It was also relatively voluntary. Maud Martin resisted divulging the details of her life even as she did concede to the second interview with Bureau Special Agent Grgurevich. The relatively high age of the women included in the registry – between the ages of eighteen and fifty, with most claiming to be thirty-two years old – indicates that madams probably hid their teenage sex workers to evade detection.76

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Finch had concluded that interconnected vice in the United States was “extremely vicious” and that traffickers could “ensnare almost any woman or girl they select for the purpose.”77 He had told Congress that he believed “it is absolutely impossible to suppress that traffic by any casual investigation of individual complaints.”78 But Finch’s plan of fighting white slavery through prevention by registering brothel-based prostitutes was short-lived as the Bureau closed the White Slave Division in 1914 because within the gendered imagination that clung to the sexual double standard, Finch (as a male government official) was unique in solely blaming men for prostitution. A more typical view of the White Slave Traffic Act was articulated by US Attorney Guy Goff who contended, the White Slave Traffic Act “is a quarantine act against the morally and physically unclean.”79 After the dissolution of the White Slave Division, Stanley W. Finch resigned from the Bureau to commit himself to social welfare work focusing on the moral dangers facing American daughters. He led the National Social Welfare League, a short-lived organization dedicated to providing work for former sex workers.80 Without Finch’s vision of reforming sex workers, the Bureau reverted to the more biomedical, paternalist position that situated women as a threat to men and sex workers as menace to society. But what of the registry? Bureau Chief A.  Bruce Bielaski reported to Congress, “We have never found any use for it.”81 Ann Laura Stoler points out the importance of paying attention to and tracing “circuits of knowledge production” and “governing practices” that inform colonial and modernization projects.82 In the case of the White Slave Division, the Bureau later disowned the knowledge produced by the white slave officers when it subsequently destroyed all the records of the division. Where the Bureau found no use for the registry of prostitutes, the law enforcement agency found considerable use for the administrative apparatus established to police “white slaves.” Even though the Bureau disbanded the White Slave Division in January 1914, it continued to expand the local white slave officer system using it to augment its force of special agents. For example, in December 1914 the Bureau appointed attorney Charles B.  Braun to act as the local white slave officer for Waco, Texas. Braun began his duties by investigating allegations of white slavery in central Texas and to do so he became familiar with most of the established sex workers between Waco and Austin. Significantly, Braun’s activities were not limited to enforcing the White Slave Traffic Act. As the likelihood of American involvement in the European war increased, Braun investigated neutrality matters, conscription violations,

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war-relief fraud, pro-German activities, and suspected cases of espionage.83 In 1918, he gave Lieutenant Darsie of Army Intelligence a tour of all of the brothels in the vicinity of Waco, TX, and the army camp, Camp MacArthur, assuring him that the census of prostitutes would suit the military’s purpose of keeping its soldiers “fit to fight.”84 Throughout the war he would confirm the identity of sex workers engaging in prostitution near the army base, ensuring their arrest and incarceration for potentially undermining the venereal health of American soldiers. Additionally, the enforcement of the White Slave Traffic Act remained one of the Bureau’s primary duties, constituting at least 20 percent of special agents’ caseloads from 1910 into the 1930s.85

Conclusion The Bureau of Investigation’s White Slave Division demonstrates the experimental quality of the United States’ prostitution policy. Each city and town developed its own approach, though informal regulation (or rather segregation) of commercial sex was the most common. In the White Slave Division’s census of brothel-based prostitution we find the largest, national attempt to regulate prostitution within the domestic United States by monitoring and documenting sex workers. The experiment was conducted at the same time that the US military regulated prostitution in colonial sites, yet the goals, processes, and punitiveness of these contrasting attempts of regulation varied considerably. Overall, American state policy toward prostitution may have mimicked policies in places elsewhere, but it developed in more diffuse ways in the United States, and prostitution policy was conceived of around issues of national security (containing venereal disease in colonial sites and combatting sex trafficking in domestic sites) rather than global interests. Stanley Finch brought to the registry project a gendered ideology that blamed men for prostitution – both directly and indirectly – and he suggested that protecting women, even hardened prostitutes, from male exploitation as one of the primary purposes of the White Slave Traffic Act. Thus, this regulatory regime was milder and eschewed the biomedical imperatives that motivated various other attempts to regulate prostitution. Stopping sex trafficking was the goal, not containing venereal disease. This gendered ideology ensured that sex workers did not automatically experience a burden of regulation unless they were foreign born, in which case they would quickly be deported by the Immigration Bureau. Even if many

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white slave officers and special agents did not agree with Finch’s gendered analysis of prostitution, the scheme within itself was not intended to punish sex workers, although it did monitor their mobility closely.86 The successful implementation of the White Slave Division transformed the Bureau of Investigation into a truly nation-wide agency, with representatives in more than three hundred cities and towns.87 Even after the White Slave Division closed its offices in early 1914, the network of local white slave officers established throughout the country continued to investigate crimes, including alleged Mann Act violations. Enforcing the White Slave Traffic Act justified the Bureau’s appeals to Congress for more funds and established its authority in the general public.88 In responding to the global crisis in sex trafficking the United States turned to policies that built up the power of the state, and in this case significantly expanded the federal criminal justice state. Notes 1 Surprisingly there has not been any academic research on the practice and policing of prostitution in Washington, DC, though the topic does make an appearance in popular histories of the city. Garrett Peck, Prohibition in Washington, DC: How Dry We Weren’t (Charleston: The History Press, 2011), 73. The White Slave Traffic Act applied to the entirety of the District and consequently my extensive perusal of Mann Act case files indicates that prostitution was regularly available in DC, though it was informally segregated by the DC police. 2 Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied:  Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Martha Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870–1865 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Deirdre M. Moloney, National Insecurities: Immigrants and U.S. Deportation Policy since 1882 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2012). 3 Special Agent Betjamin, December 12, 1911, and Special Agent Betjamin, December 13, 1911, case 3065, Roll 139, RG 65, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Investigative Case Files of the Bureau, 1908–1922, M1085, National Archives, College Park, MD [hereafter cited as BOI Microfilm Records]. 4 “447 Delaware Street,” December 11, 1911, case 3065, Roll 139, BOI Microfilm Records. 5 Special Agent J.R. Murray, December 9, 1911, case 3065, Roll 139, BOI Microfilm Records. 6 J.J. Grgurevich, Special Agent, December 14, 1911, “In Re Maud Martin,” case 3065, Roll 139, BOI Microfilm Records. 7 Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1980); Francesco Cordasco and Thomas M. Pitkin, The White Slave Trade and the Immigrants:  A  Chapter in American Social History (Detroit: Blaine Ethridge Books, 1981); Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1982); Frederick K. Grittner,

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White Slavery: Myth Ideology and American Law (New York: Garland Press, 1990); Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992); David J. Langum, Crossing over the Line:  Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1994); Brian Donovan, White Slave Crusades:  Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887–1917 (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2006); and Gretchen Soderlund, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).   The important exception to this claim of the parochial view of US historians of white slavery is Edward Bristow who wrote a compelling and prodigiously researched book about international and transnational Jewish anti-white slavery activism. Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice:  The Jewish Fight against White Slavery, 1870–1939 (New York: Schocken Books, 1982). 8 Stephanie A. Limoncelli, The Politics of Trafficking: The First International Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2010). 9 The exceptions to the claim that US historians offer more of a cultural analysis than a criminal justice policy analysis are David Langum and Marlene Beckman. See: Langum, Crossing over the Line, and Marlene D. Beckman, “The White Slave Traffic Act: Historical Impact of a Federal Crime Policy on Women,” in Criminal Justice Politics and Women: The Aftermath of Legally Mandated Change, ed. Claudine Scheber and Clarice Feinman (New York: Haworth Press, 1985), 85–101. 10 Langum, Crossing over the Line. 11 For more on the transatlantic ties between white slavery activists, see Jessica R. Pliley, Policing Sexuality:  The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), ­chapter 1. 12 Howard B. Woolston, Prostitution in the United States, Vol. 1, Prior to the Entrance of the United States into the World War (New York: The Century Company, 1921), 50. 13 Kate C. Bushnell, “The Wisconsin Lumber Dens,” The Philanthropist 3, no. 12 (December 1888); and Paul A. Kramer, “The Darkness Enters the Home:  The Politics of Prostitution during the Philippine-American War,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 366–404. 14 George Kibbe Turner, “The City of Chicago:  A  Study of the Great Immoralities,” McClure’s Magazine 28 (April 1907): 575–92. 15 John C. Burnham, “The Progressive Era Revolution in American Attitudes Toward Sex,” Journal of American History 59, no. 4 (March 1973): 885–908. 16 Wirt W.  Hallam, “The Reduction of Vice in Certain Western Cities through Law-Enforcement,” Social Diseases: Report of the Progress of the Movement for their Prevention (published by the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis), Vol. III, No. 2 (April 1912): 27–48, 31. 17 Clifford G. Roe, Horrors of the White Slave Trade: The Mighty Crusade to Protect Our Homes (Chicago: Roe and Steadwell, 1911), 97. 18 Ibid., 97. 19 The term “white slavery” has a much longer geneology within the labor movment. See David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1999), 65–93; Gunther Peck, “White Slavery and

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Whiteness: A Transnational View of the Sources of Working-Class Radicalism and Racism,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 1, no. 2 (summer 2004): 41–65. 20 Jean Turner-Zimmerman, Chicago’s Black Traffic in White Girls (Chicago: Chicago Rescue Home, 1911); William Burgess, White Slavery and Its Remedies (n.p., n.d. [probably 1911]), 2. 21 Maurice Gregory, “Visit to the United States,” The Shield: The Official Organ of the British Committee of the Federation for the Abolition of State Regulation of Vice 4, no. 41 (December 1901): 82–3. 22 For more analysis of the comparison between African-American chattel slavery and white slavery, see: Jessica R. Pliley, “Protecting the Young and the Innocent: Age, Consent, and the Enforcement of the White Slave Traffic Act,” in Child Slavery Before and After Emancipation:  An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies, ed. Anne Mae Duane (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Gunther Peck, “Feminizing White Slavery in the United States:  Marcus Braun and the Transnational Traffic in White Bodies, 1890–1910,” in Workers Across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 221–44. For more on the place of women of color in US sex markets, see:  Cynthia Blair, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’:  Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2010); Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones:  Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Lucie Cheng Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved:  Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1979): 3–29; Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women:  Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Kazuhiro Oharazeki, “Listening to the Voices of ‘Other’ Women in Japanese North America: Japanese Prostitutes and Barmaids in the American West, 1887–1920,” Journal of American Ethnic History 32, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 5–40; Grace Peña Delgado, “Border Control and Sexual Policing: White Slavery and Prostitution along the US-Mexico Borderlands, 1903–1910,” Western Historical Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2012): 157–78.   Clifford Roe did note that women of color could be trafficked, writing in 1911, “The phrase, white slave traffic, is a misnomer, for there is a traffic in yellow and black women and girls, as well as in white girls. However, the term has become so widely and extensively used that it seems futile to ever change it.” Roe, Horrors of the White Slave Trade, 97. 23 United States House, Congressional Record 45 (January 11, 1910), 812. 24 “The Laws on the ‘White Slave’ Traffic Should Protect the Women of All Races,” Broad Axe (Chicago, IL), November 9, 1912, 2. 25 Immigration Bureau, Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor for the Fiscal Year ended June 30, 1907 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907). 26 Jane Addams, A New Conscience of an Ancient Evil (New  York:  Arno Press, 1922 [1912]); Maude Miner, The Slavery of Prostitution:  A  Plea for Emancipation (New York: Macmillan, 1916); and Grace Abbott, The Immigrant and the Community (New York: Century Co., 1917).

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27 Illinois General Assembly, Report of the Illinois Senate Vice Committee (Chicago: Allied Printing, 1916), 22. The Illinois Senate Vice Committee strongly favored establishing a minimum wage for women and instituting an eight-hour workday as ways to combat prostitution (88). 28 Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen. 29 William H. Taft, “Message from the President of the United States transmitting, in further response to Senate Resolution No. 86, of December 7, 1909, Information Concerning the Repression of the Trade in White Women,” Senate, 61st Cong., 2nd Sess., Doc. No. 214, Part  2 (Washington, DC:  Government Printing Office, 1910), 13. 30 Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, 14. 31 United States Immigration Commission (1907–1910), “Importation and Harboring of Women for Immoral Purposes,” Reports of the Immigration Commission (final), (Washington, DC:  Government Printing Office, 1911). Meanwhile, on the state level by 1918, forty-five of the forty-eight states also passed anti-white slavery laws. Joseph Mayer, The Regulation of Commercialized Vice: An Analysis of the Transition From Segregation to Repression in the United States (New York: The Klebold Press, 1922), 29. 32 Sanford J. Ungar, FBI (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975), 39; Richard Gid Powers, Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI (New York: Free Press, 2004), 39, 51–2; Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 39–40. 33 Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States for the Year Ended June 30, 1910 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1910), 25–6. See case 696, Roll 118, BOI Microfilm Records. 34 Illinois General Assembly, “Testimony of Stanley Finch,” Report of the Illinois Senate Vice Committee, 353. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 354–5. 38 Elizabeth Alice Clement, Love for Sale:  Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Illinois General Assembly, “Testimony of Stanley Finch,” Report of the Illinois Senate Vice Committee, 355. 39 “50,000 Make ‘Easy Living’ in White Slave Traffic,” Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette September 15, 1912, 33; “All Girls in Peril; Men Fighting Vice,” Cedar Rapids Republican February 22, 1913, 5. 40 James Bronson Reynolds, “The Association’s Department of Legislation and Law Enforcement,” Vigilance 25, no.  5 (May 1912):  6–7; “Funds Inadequate to Fight White Slavery,” The Light 15, no. 84 (March 1912): 13–15. 41 Attorney General George W.  Wickersham to Honorable J.R. Knowland (R-CA), March 20, 1912, Box 2620, RG 60 General Records of the Department of Justice, Formerly Classified Subject Correspondence, 1919–45. Class 31 Mann Act, Box 2620, National Archives, College Park, MD [hereafter cited as DOJ Mann Act Records].

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42 “The Work of the United States Department of Justice,” Vigilance 25, no. 4 (April 1912): 13–17. 43 “List of letters urging the appropriation of additional funds for the use of the Department of Justice in suppressing the White Slave Traffic,” Attorney General George W. Wickersham to Honorable J.R. Knowland (R-CA), March 20, 1912, Box 2620, DOJ Mann Act Records; U.S. Congress, Hearings on Sundry Civil Appropriation Bill for 1913, 1490; and U.S. Congress, Hearings on Sundry Civil Appropriation Bill for 1914, 868. 44 For more on the volunteerism of the era see Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 45 Wickersham to Knowland, Mar 20, 1912, Box 2620, DOJ Mann Act Records. 46 U.S. Congress, Hearings on Sundry Civil Appropriations Bill for 1913, 1486. 47 United States Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Attorney General for 1913 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 393–4. 48 United States Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Attorney General for 1914 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914), 416. 49 United States Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Attorney General for 1915 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915), 424. 50 United States Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Attorney General for 1916 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 453. 51 Stanley W.  Finch to Clifford G.  Roe, March 21, 1912, Box 2620, DOJ Mann Act Records. 52 U.S. Congress, Hearings on Sundry Civil Appropriation Bill for 1914, 876. 53 Stanley W.  Finch to Clifford G.  Roe, March 21, 1912, Box 2620, DOJ Mann Act Records. 54 “50,000 Make ‘Easy Living’ in White Slave Traffic.” 55 For more on ideals of masculinity and citizenship during the Progressive Era see: Kevin P. Murphy, Political Manhood:  Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, & the Politics of Progressive Era Reform (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2008); Thomas Winter, Making Men, Making Class:  The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America:  A  Cultural History (New  York:  The Free Press, 1996), 101–12. The emphasis on restraint, moderation, and order is taken from George L. Mosse, “Nationalism and Respectability:  Normal and Abnormal Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Contemporary History 17, no. 2 (April 1982): 221–46, 232. 56 Chad Heap, Slumming:  Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Mumford, Interzones. 57 Special Agent John J.  Grgurevich, “General Investigation White Slave Traffic Conditions,” February 17, 1913, Case 4596, Roll 148, BOI Microfilm Records. 58 Special Agent John J. Grgurevich, “General White Slave Matters (In re Ruth Cone),” July 17, 1913, Case 4596, Roll 148, BOI Microfilm Records. 59 Adam McKeown, “Ritualization of Regulation:  The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China,” American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 377–403, quote on 379.

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60 Stanley W.  Finch to Clifford G.  Roe, March 21, 1912, Box 2620, DOJ Mann Act Records; Sundry Civil Appropriation Bill for 1914, 880; “50,000 Make ‘Easy Living’ in White Slave Traffic.” 61 Woolston, Prostitution in the United States, 38; for more on the expanded array of investigations undertaken by white slave officers see, Pliley, Policing Sexuality, 123–9. 62 White slave officers registered 39,021 names, but when sociologist Howard Woolston examined the registry in 1917/1918 he discovered several double entries and reduced the number of individual prostitutes to 31,689. Woolston, Prostitution in the United States, 38. 63 Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 361–2. 64 Illinois General Assembly, “Testimony of Stanley Finch,” Report of the Illinois Senate Vice Committee, 354. 65 “50,000 Make ‘Easy Living’ in White Slave Traffic.” 66 Of course, if one looks to military regulation of prostitution, the comfort women system in imperial Japan coordinated and regulated from 200,000 to 400,000 sex workers. Additionally, within the German KZ/Death Camps you’ll also find high numbers of regulated prostitutes. 67 Donna J. Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires:  Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 38 and 47; Laurie Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters:  Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1996), 20; Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1990), 4; Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, 30; Eileen J. Findlay, “Decency and Democracy: The Politics of Prostitution in Ponce, Puerto Rico, 1890–1900,” Feminist Studies 23, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 471–99; Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003); Elizabeth B. van Heyningen, “The Social Evil in the Cape Colony, 1868–1902: Prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts,” Journal of Southern African Studies 10, no. 2 (April 1984): 170–97; Petra de Vries, “‘White Slaves’ in a Colonial Nation: The Dutch Campaign Against the Traffic in Women in the Early Twentieth Century,” Social and Legal Studies 14, no. 1 (2005): 39–60; Philip Howell, “Race, Space and Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial Hong Kong,” Urban History 31, no. 2 (2004): 229–48. 68 John C. Burnham, “Medical Inspection of Prostitutes in America in the Nineteenth Century: The St. Louis Experiment and Its Sequel,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 45, no. 3 (May/June 1971): 203–18. 69 Ibid.; Ann R. Gabbert, “Prostitution and Moral Reform in the Borderlands: El Paso, 1890–1920,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 12, no. 4 (October 2003): 575–604. “New American Responsibilities and Dangers,” The Philanthropist 14, no. 1 (January 1899): 13–14; “State Regulation of Vice in Ohio,” The Shield 4, no. 48 (August 1901): 61; and “American Regulation,” The Philanthropist, 18, no. 4 (January 1904): 1–2. 70 “The United States,” The Shield 8, no. 82 (April 1905): 38. 71 Gabbert, “Prostitution and Moral Reform in the Borderlands.” 72 Laura Briggs, “Familiar Territory:  Prostitution, Empires, and the Question of U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, 1849–1916,” in Families of a New World: Gender

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Politics and State Development in a Global Context, ed. Lynne Haney and Lisa Pollard (New York: Routledge, 2003), 40–63, 50; Eileen J. Suárez Findlay, Imposing Decency:  The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920 (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1999); José Flores Ramos, “Virgins, Whores, and Martyrs:  Prostitution in the Colony, 1898–1919,” in Puerto Rican Women’s History:  New Perspectives, ed. Félix V.  Matmos Rogríguez and Linda C. Delgado (Armonk:  M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 83–104; Kramer, “The Darkness that Enters the Home”; Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New  York:  Penguin Press, 2009), 289–97; and Alexandra Minna Stern, “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood:  Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910–1930,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 79, no. 1 (February 1999): 41–81. 73 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 97–116; and Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics. 74 Briggs, “Familiar Territory,” 49–50. 75 Ibid.; Kramer, “The Darkness that Enters the Home.” 76 Woolston, Prostitution in the United States, 39–43. 77 Hearings before Subcommittee of House Committee on Appropriations in charge of Sundry Civil Appropriation Bill for 1913:  Part II (Washington, DC:  Government Printing Office, 1912), 1490; Stanley W. Finch, “The White Slave Traffic,” The Light 15, no. 86 (July 1912): 17–26, quote on 17. 78 Hearings before Subcommittee of House Committee on Appropriations in charge of Sundry Civil Appropriation Bill for 1914 (Washington, DC:  Government Printing Office, 1913), 877. 79 Guy D.  Goff, “New Interpretation of the White Slave Traffic Act,” The Light 17, no. 99 (September–October 1914): 29–31, quote on 30. 80 “Quits as Federal Sleuth,” Washington Post, March 26, 1914, 14. 81 John Allen Noakes, “Enforcing Domestic Tranquility: State Building and the Origin of the (Federal) Bureau of Investigation, 1908–1920” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993), 143. 82 Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties:  The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 24. 83 Jackson Family, William S., Jackson Family Papers, WH1017, Box 14, Western History Collection, The Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado. 84 Charles B. Braun, “In re. Women, Camp MacArthur, Texas, Feb 4, 1918,” “US 1918,” Box 3, RG 21, Records of Special Agent Charles B. Braun, Western District of Texas, National Archives, Southwest Region, Fort Worth, Texas. 85 “Sources of Complaints Received by the Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, Concerning Federal Law Violations,” Bureau of Investigations, Records of the Wickersham Commission on Law Enforcement, Part  2:  Research Reports and General Subject Files, Consulting Ed. Samuel Walker (Bethesda, MD:  University Publications, 1999), reel 3, 2. 86 By 1915, the Supreme Court of the United States would rule that the White Slave Traffic Act could be used to prosecute women who conspire to transport themselves (traffick themselves) for the purposes of prostitution. With the Holte ruling

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enforcement of the Mann Act could and did take on a much more punitive instrumentatlity toward sex workers. See Pamela Haag, Consent:  Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1999), 67–8; US v. Holte, 236 U.S. 140 (1915). 87 Tony G. Poveda, “Controversies and Issues,” in The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide, ed. Athan G. Theoharis (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1999), 101–42, 104. 8 8 Noakes, “Enforcing Domestic Tranquility,” 108.

11

Anti-vice lives Peopling the archives of prostitution in interwar India Stephen Legg

The archive is anything of which a set of questions is asked and the nature of the archive is largely, but not entirely, defined by the nature of questions asked of it. The problem therefore is not of sexuality and the archive per se, or of gaps in the archives. It is a question of playing one archive against another, of conversations within and outside of archives, of romancing the archives, of using parallel, alternative, official, and popular archives simultaneously. It is in such interplay that more interesting stories are revealed.1

Having spent ten years working on “anti-vice” campaigns in colonial India, looking back on this research I  am often struck by the busyness of the archives, and the diversity of the people one meets there. Beyond the staff and colleagues in particular archives, the most recurrent person one meets in the archives is oneself; constantly refiguring both the archive and the researcher by the questions one asks of the indexes, cartons, and stacks. But in the diverse archive I  have constructed regarding the regulation of prostitution in interwar India, two very different sets of people emerge: the campaigners; and the campaigned against/for.2 Neither set is stable nor homogenous. Campaigners included disciplinarians, libertarians, internationalists, Indian nationalists, and social reformers. Depending on their approach, the prostitute was campaigned against, or with, and for. The opinion of prostitutes regarding the latter distinction is rarely archived. However, at often random and unpredictable points in this decade of research, documents have emerged which suggest a glimmer of insight into the lives of women who worked with sex. These women emerge as victims and agents, entrepreneurs and commodities, as defiant but also, as will be shown below, often violently debased. But as surprising as the variety of individuals in the documents were the scalar worlds they offered insights into. The brothel was often a local, 246

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regional, national, imperial, and international space, all at once.3 As the League of Nations found out during its 1931 traveling commission of enquiry into traffic in women and children in the East, there was very little evidence of international trafficking in India.4 But the imperial government and its official and non-official populations, as well as Indian entrepreneurs and laborers, were internationally mobile, thus making diseased prostitutes in India a transnational problem.5 Prostitutes were fretted over in New Delhi and London, while the policies adopted not only to reduce their levels of disease but also to increase their standard of life were pondered by the League of Nations in Geneva. This chapter will explore the anti-vice lives of interwar India from two scales and two perspectives. The first half will look at depictions of prostitutes in anti-vice literature, examining the way in which they were imaginatively portrayed through their potent locations, but also abstracted into sterile lists and tabulations. The second half will examine how intimate traces of the lives of both campaigners and prostitutes themselves found their way to Geneva, forming an archive of distant intimacies in the vaults of the Palace of Nations. As such, this chapter follows Charu Gupta’s advice to mix and contrast archives, drawing material from the National Archives of India in New Delhi, the League of Nations archive in Geneva, and pamphlets collected by the British Library in London. The nature and scale of these repositories is not coincidental. Files and documents were often created for transition between scales:  provincial summaries for central governments; national precis for international surveillance; and even finely detailed minutiae for the most global of audiences. These reports were most often statistical summaries but they, occasionally, contained information on the various lives upon which both vice and anti-vice depended. In her study of the regulation of prostitution in late-colonial Bombay, Ashwini Tambe provided a sensitive reading of just such a life and death, that of the sex worker Akootai. I  had come across the same file in my ­investigation of Bombay’s pioneering attempts to devise a new form of prostitution regulation following the discrediting of the tolerated brothel system around the years of World War I. Perhaps the key case in the overturning of the belief in the relative safety of “red light districts” was the prosecution of Miroza Syedkhan and his two female accomplices Gangabai and Gomtibai.6 His crime was the torture and murder of Akootai, one of the workers in a brothel that he managed, who had attempted to escape in late February 1917. The court trial documents included fifteen witness statements that offer a rare degree of insight into the brothel system in Bombay before the enforcing of its Prevention of Prostitution Act (from 1923).

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Tambe provides a sensitive and insightful reading of the subaltern life of Akootai, and the sociological narratives we can unpack from the texts.7 The witness statements are harrowing, but must be read as highly mediated, translated, and multiply transcribed. Yet even through these filters, vivid traces of the corporeality of violence and the multiple registers of agency, blame, and guilt are preserved. The police surgeon detailed Akootai’s broken body as an archive of the violence against her: the three broken ribs; the bruises and eighteen weals all over her body;8 the stench of garlic and onion (skins), which she had been forced to eat; while also recording that “[t]‌he legs, buttocks and private parts were blackened by lunar caustic,9 strong lunar caustic had been injected into the vagina and caused much ­swelling.”10 The caustic had previously been forcibly applied to Akootai’s genitals to treat a venereal sore. The treatment made the symptoms worse so she refused her fourth client of the night, who left the brothel without paying, despite Gomtibai’s suggestion that he “have intercourse with Akootai by force against the order of nature.” Having escaped anal rape, a fellow brothel inmate, Phooli, recounted how Akootai tricked the cook into giving her the keys to the brothel. She escaped but was caught, brought back to the brothel, and severely beaten. Phooli’s witness statement detailed how any woman refusing to take clients was forced to drink Syedkhan’s urine, and of how she was forced to watch the beating of Akootai. The witness statements are remarkable for their detailing of the brothel’s everyday lives, but Akootai’s voice is mostly absent, though she is not entirely silent. Her cries after capture were recalled slightly differently by each witness, and make for harrowing hearing: “Do not beat me, do not beat me” recalled Phooli; “For God’s sake do not beat me” reported fellow brothel inmate Moti; “Do not beat me; I will not run away” heard the cook; while another “prostitute” in the brothel, Jijabai, heard the even more distressing “God – I will eat your night soil – For God’s sake do not beat me.” Accounts of her last day chart the liminal hours between the beating and her death. Phooli recalled that Akootai woke up but she was not able to walk so she went scrawling11 to the fire “to foment herself,”12 while Jijabi recalled Akootai folding her hands in supplication, begging Gangabai to beat her no more, while saying “I will not run away now.” She died during the night and would have been cremated, leaving no trace, had a policeman not become suspicious when the corpse was carried through the street. While Akootai was undoubtedly a victim, she certainly was not without action or voice.13 She refused clients, orchestrated an escape, and berated her cousin when he had previously visited her in the brothel. If her agency

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in life was brutally cut short, the case resulting from her murder guaranteed her an afterlife that transformed the regulation of prostitution in India and discredited the brothel system through the publicity the case generated. The witness statements quoted above were read in Delhi and elsewhere, causing widespread revulsion. In 1917, the central government ordered a review of red light districts across the country, which spurred the overturning of long-held beliefs about the social and biological safety of brothels. The resulting investigations tell us much about the lives and views of governors and anti-vice campaigners, though the women who were supposedly being saved remain obscured, often beneath metaphors and synecdoches of place.14

“Calcutta Vice: The Dragon of Calcutta Lust” Reverend Herbert Anderson had been living in Calcutta since the 1890s, campaigning for social improvement, and against vice, as the Indian Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society, a founding member of the National Missionary Council, and a member of the Calcutta Vigilance Committee.15 In 1921 he published the pamphlet Calcutta Vice, an exposé of the seemingly omnipresent geography of prostitution in the ex-capital, relating it to the fate of the city’s children, “vice areas,” the exploiters and city fathers, civil morals, medicine, drink, and policy. He framed his own expertise in terms of the shock the Government of India had received in 1917: The curtain was lifted from the brothel conditions of Bombay and revealed a sight so unpleasantly revolting that the Imperial Government approached Provincial Governments to learn if similar evils had any counterpart in other Indian cities. A girl called Akootai had been treated cruelly, slowly tortured and finally murdered. She was a slave-debtor, earning for her keepers, but getting free board, clothes and ornaments [jewellery]. Her earnings were not, however, large enough for her avaricious owners, a man and two bad women. They tortured her slowly to death.16

On December 14, 1917 the Home Department had, indeed, forwarded details of the case to provincial governments, asking if they had similar evils and what remedies they had discovered.17 Ten months later the central government surveyed the responses, and was reassured that no other city had as severe a problem as Bombay, and decided that provincial governments should be left to legislate as they felt fit.18 After Burma and Bombay, which passed legislation targeting brothel keeping, procurement, soliciting, and trafficking in 1921 and 1923, respectively, Calcutta was one of the first cities to respond, passing its Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act (SITA) in

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1923 which included similar powers but omitted powers against soliciting.19 The SITA built on substantial campaigning by local women’s organizations, though their contribution escapes most official narratives.20 Officials were more willing to collaborate, however, with “colonial civil society,” of which Anderson’s pamphleteering formed a part. The Bengal government asked him to help draft a response to the 1917 governmental circular, drawing upon his experience as a missionary and as a leading figure in Calcutta’s colonial civil society. Though he responded that there was nothing as extreme as the Bombay case, he felt that the city needed action. It had been too long since a pamphlet had addressed “commercialized vice” in Calcutta, perhaps referencing Kerr’s 1886 The Social Evil in Calcutta, or “Verax” ’s The Social Evil in South Calcutta from 1895.21 Like Kerr, Anderson classified prostitutes by their location, class, fee, and clientele:22 from the busti23 (slum) prostitute catering to unmarried industrial laborers to brothel inhabitants and to kept mistresses and dancing girls. Here the typology of habitation reproduces in a different register a more abstract series of classificatory hierarchies, which discursively aligned the normativities and abnormalities of class, gender, sex, and race.24 But there was also a haptic, multi-sensory, and complex metaphorical rhetoric of displacement, association, and connotation at play.25 It was not just the case that the rank of geographical hierarchy correlated with the rank of the “prostitute.” Rather, the haptic geography of location was used to embed these women in their place, and to imbue those places with all the miasmic and contagionist force of moral and social unhygiene.26 Their places were environments of putrescent decay and defilement, but they themselves were agents of venereal disease and contamination.27 Regarding Calcutta’s social vice, for instance, Anderson insisted: “It can be no pleasure to any honest citizen to drag out the slimy sins of immorality from their dark hiding places, and hold them up for the city to gaze at. But there are times when it must be done. And this is one of them.”28 In a later section on “vice areas,” these geographies were expanded upon. He insisted that Calcutta was not an immoral city, and that the dozen vice areas were few and far between. They, however, offended the senses and the mind. A  small site near Wellesley Street was described as a “stagnant cesspool” of what used to be the “repulsive headquarters of European immorality” in Calcutta. The largest area, on either side of Chitpore Road, was claimed to be the historic home of vice, and thus had been allowed to remain. To Anderson, it offended health, law, and morals: On the Indian principle of segregating its trades this trade was permitted to stay where it started and grew until to-day you have a moral gangrene in the heart of the

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Indian quarter occupying hundreds of houses in Jorasanko, Jorabagan, Burtolla and Shampukur, the home of eight to ten thousand fallen sisters. This area laughs at civil authority, law and administration, and is a standing contradiction to the purity of ideal that modern Indian claims as its glorious heritage.29

Within many of these metaphors and adjectives lies the classic ambivalence regarding the prostitute; woman as destroyed and destroyer; the object of pity and of fear; consumer of men and families, but consumed herself by poverty, disease, and sex.30 So in his introduction, entitled “Calcutta Vice:  The Dragon of Calcutta Lust,” Anderson employed the figure of St. George, embossed on British sovereign coins killing a vicious dragon. On his crusade he was said to have saved the town of Sylene which was being devastated by a dragon with a gross appetite for human flesh, especially that of poor girls. “Calcutta Vice” was compared to the dragon, with Anderson claiming that 15,000 women were professionally disreputable; it was vice that was consuming children, at a “computational average” of one per day.31 The dragon, however, slithers from the lance: what was vice, and at whom was the blame directed? The men who paid for sex, or the women who provided it, sold their children into prostitution, and imbibed the secrets of the oldest profession into these nubile young offerings? Likewise, the crusade lacked a moral compass; where was it heading, and to what end? Was the crusade an imperial one, against oriental sin, or was it Anderson’s abolitionist campaign against the British and their official toleration of vice? In tying up the metaphor, Anderson attempted to pin down both the dragon and the knight, by reformulating the challenge: Was there no son of Bengal willing to protect the Bengal womanhood? The problem was thus a failure of Bengali manhood, a common and, by this time, increasingly desperate ploy of colonial masculinity.32 The ambivalence continued. In the “cess pool” mentioned above, one encountered both aggressive pimps (men who coordinated the exploitation of prostitutes) but also “aggressive women” who came out into the street to attract trade, including European seafaring men and boys. The reading of women through place, and the supposed vulnerability of the military, offered by Anderson can also be seen in a 1926 pamphlet by M.S. Mani entitled “Pen Pictures of the Dancing Girl.” The aim of this pamphlet was to draw attention to the overlapping professions of dancing girls and “abject prostitution.”33 The pamphlet opened by going beyond an association of these women with abject place, to their abject nature and history: “The origin of the dancing girl is as dim as the origin of the protoplasm.”34 Though having a noble place in Indian history, these girls were

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said to have descended from the sublime to the ridiculous, from high ideals to obsession with clothes and money: Where there is prostitution, there is drunkenness. Cupidity and Bacchus are hobgoblins; they are vampires of humanity. Dancing girls consume European wines without method or measure; they revel in bacchanalian songs without rhyme or reason … The nautch-woman is a museum of diseases which is of an internal rather than an external nature. The rose has prickles and yet it is plucked.35

The pamphlet goes on to describe the growth of prostitution in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. Discussions of Madras in historical and current literature do not reflect its status as the third Presidency city; it was not as popular with Europeans, in part due to its tropical climate and less cosmopolitan culture.36 But it also had its vice areas, described here as vivid sites of visual and aural enticement: At the close of every day, after the hour half past six, near the thresh-holds of their houses, arrayd in white saris, prostitutes of complexion dark as the night of a New-Moon day, could be seen standing like statues without the least indication of motion. If the white saries worn by them would indicate to the passer by, that some one is at every door, yet their faces are not distinguishable from one another. If the passengers on the road, for fear of being over – run by carts through pressure of traffic, should abandon the middle of the road and pass close by one side of it, ie close to these godowns of prostitutes, voices crying “come here” “come here” would strike their ears. Strangers unacquainted with the above particulars and the true nature of these calls, would naturally turn round on hearing them and this leads to further conversation with those lewd creatures ending, we are told, in a great many things which, we cannot with decorum, mention here. If any ignorant man caught in the clutches of these heinous women should have sexual intercourse with them, he is sure to contract incurable venereal diseases which finally cause his death or else till the day of his death, he has to make use of the margosa-leaves to drive away the flies that torment his ulcerous body and to allay the irritation by the peculiar balmy breeze from the leaves. Hence it is said that after Eleven o’clock in the nights it is rather dangerous to pass through those streets. The total population of these prostitutes we are told, is about more than Five thousands.37

Here the widely commented-upon darker skin of the local women was alluded to so as to obliterate their difference, annihilating them into the darkness of their abodes. Through (not in spite of) this groundedness they tempted men; lacking body, yet wholly embodied; voices in the night, searching out innocent ears (it was suggested that Odakkal Street derived its name from “who do you call,” a query often put by European gentlemen and “ignorant soldiers”). The voices were wily and enticing, yet lewd and animalistic. Calcutta, in contrast, was a modern and cosmopolitan city in

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which prostitutes attracted men not through their darkness but through their light: It is not surprising to find that, living in more luxuriant circumstances than those that live in the district centres, the city harlots, with all their paraphernalia of coaches, Broughams,38 Landous,39 Victorias40 or Motor cars, should astound and enchant even those that are in good positions. Almost all their houses, particularly their drawing rooms are fitted with electric-lights and pankahs.41 About Fourteen thousands, we are told, is the total population of the prostitutes in Calcutta alone.42

These women do not just become their place, but also their possessions, which, vitally, service the purposes of vice. Their carriages and cars made them mobile threats. They could be found flaunting themselves at flower gardens, theatrical halls, marinas, roadsides, and restaurants “to lure and entice the young men loitering there, with their subtle arts of signs and beacons.”43 Common to this pamphlet and that of Anderson is an association of women with place, which goes beyond a space of correlative hierarchies to appeal to affective registers of smell, sight, and sound. Mani updated these places to the electronic age in Calcutta, just as Anderson’s piece had been forward looking in other ways. First, it appealed to “Mahatma” Gandhi’s disgust at the idea of dancing girls and sin, and his insistence that swaraj (self-rule) could only come through respecting a country’s women and through killing the “sins that kill the man in us, and make us brutes.”44 Anderson also understood that to make people care about an archive, and about a crime, it has to be peopled. The problem, however, was that of balancing length and detail. As the author of the Rangoon Vigilance Society Annual Report for 1930–1 would later put it: “It is very difficult in writing a report of work done to leave the right amount in to make it interesting, and the right amount out to keep it confidential.”45 Their solution was to place an alphabetical list of cases at the end of the report, such that a reader could assess the types of case under review. This is a challenge that faced Anderson, and which faces us now. The detailing of Akootai’s murder is incredibly rare but that does not mean that case information regarding prostitutes was uncommon. On the contrary, as the internationalist movement to stamp out trafficking, and tolerated brothel zones, picked up pace, so did the codification of prostitutes and their treatment. The sexual subalterns are definitely not defined by their absence from the archive; an archive lacking mention of the majority of the population would be almost useless. Colonial archives do not simply exclude prostitutes from their records. Rather, they are over-written,

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interpreted, and represented.46 They are spoken for, they do not speak; our challenge is to speak of them without speaking for them. One form of silencing is numerical; we are given numbers of prostitutes in an area, how many were arrested, etc. Another form is alphabetical; the reduction of lives to alphabetized lists, encapsulating a person in a letter that can neither be read nor be returned. This leaves us with a dilemma. Should we reproduce the lists, attempt to expand upon them, or further tabulate them into digits, sums, and algorithms? Anderson detailed thirteen (or, I  should say, A-M) cases of child kidnapping from 1917 to 1921; victims of the dragon of lust. A sense of his annotations is given below. The details are hopelessly inadequate; yet offer vital clues as to the mobilities and immobilities of vice in Calcutta. A. Left with her brother-in-law to visit Hazaribagh, but was over-carried by train to Howrah. She fell into hands of some desiring person, but was rescued by a constable. B. Brought to Calcutta by a distant relative with a view to being made a prostitute. Returned to her husband. C. Two prostitutes arrested for having in their possession five minor girls. One woman fined Rs200, all children were provided for. D. A Hindu wife aged 12 with incapable husband fell into hands of procurers, was kept in a brothel two days and rescued. Insufficient evidence for trial. E. A Muslim girl of 11 decoyed from her home on pretence of going to see sister; thrashed and gagged and taken to Calcutta, where she was seduced and made into a “… woman of the town.” F. A Muslim girl aged 14 was a victim of wrongful confinement; the owner had been prosecuted. G. A Muslim wife aged 17 was abducted by two prostitutes who were sisters, brought to a Calcutta brothel and kept behind locked doors. This case became famous as a corrupt Sub-Inspector of police helped the abductors, “… keeping the girl for his own use in their brothel.” Bad treatment of girl, tried to commit suicide twice. A visitor to the house rescued her. Two women given sentences of 7 years. H. A 12 years old girl. A mistri (fixer or technician) helped by a prostitute kidnapped her from her husband, brought to Calcutta and offered her for sale for Rs200. I. Daughter of Brahmin priest, 5 years old. Prostitute owner of a house claimed she had procured her from a beggar two and a half years before.

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J. A Hindu girl of five. Accused from Benares received 2 years for kidnapping and stealing ornaments. K. A minor girl abducted with sister, brought to Calcutta, seduced and put in brothel. Accused got one year. L. A little girl of three and a half years old. Obtained by a prostitute who kept her in a brothel as her child. Fined Rs200 and given one days detention. M. A minor girl, kidnapped for purposes of sale for prostitution. The accused got six months rigorous imprisonment.47 Though fragmented, these letters offer us the briefest of correspondences regarding the movement of females into prostitution. These moments are almost impossible to read for causes or for details of the experiences of prostitutes. But it was precisely these sorts of listings that were pored over in Geneva by the new internationalist champions of anti-vice; the distant intimacies of their archives will be explored next.

Geneva’s distant intimacies Writing in 1921, Herbert Anderson was coming toward the end of his Indian career. In 1926 he and the Calcutta Vigilance Association persuaded the United Kingdom’s Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH) to send a qualified anti-vice campaigner to the city for three years as his replacement. Meliscent Shephard ended up staying in India for nearly twenty years.48 During that time she collaborated closely with the League of Nations and was one of its longest standing champions in India.49 The year 1921 also marked the formation of the Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children (TWC), which met annually from 1922 in Geneva and adopted a generally anti-regulationist approach and increasingly advocated the abolition of tolerated brothels.50 India had signed the 1921 convention on TWC, which committed it to taking measures to detect and prevent trafficking, and to sending information to Geneva annually regarding its efforts.51 The most regular of these reports sent information collected from provincial governments, who forwarded statistics regarding arrests, whether of those organizing or participating in prostitution. These statistics were printed in the Advisory Committee’s annual reports. But the League also worked persistently to gather information on the nature of prostitution in its member states, and to amass evidence on the impact of various reforms and anti-vice campaigns. It is in response to these sorts of requests that the Geneva archive became a repository of some exceptionally rich

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insights into the lives not only of prostitutes but also of anti-vice campaigners in India (and elsewhere). In 1933 the League had organized the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women of Full Age.52 It punished trafficking of women and children even if they gave their consent, to be enforced by new national laws where necessary, and organized the sharing of information about traffickers between countries. However, a redefinition of “country” to include protectorates and suzerainties meant that traffic between British and Princely India could have fallen under the League’s jurisdiction, so the Government of India refused to sign the convention.53 But the League continued to request information from India regarding the provincial effects of the abolition of licensed houses (here also taken to include tolerated brothel zones) between 1928 and 1933, which it considered Bombay’s Prevention of Prostitution Act (1923) and Madras’s Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act (1930) to have brought about.54 Beyond the ending of segregationist policies, the League also wanted to investigate the measures taken to protect those women and children evicted from brothels, so it distributed a questionnaire in 1934 enquiring about rescue homes and rehabilitation institutions, their funding, their classifications of inmates, their recording of cases, their dealing with relatives, and methods of rehabilitation.55 The variety of replies attests to the fact that the Government of India very clearly felt that rehabilitation and rescue was a job for civil society, not for the state. Perhaps the decisive feature of these organizations was their bridging of state and society, marking both the state’s intrusion into colonial social work (or a governmentalized society) but also the reshaping of the state by the demands of civil society (what has been called the governmentalization of the state).56 This interplay allowed the government to claim (to both nationalists and internationalists) that it was doing something to counter both the social and moral hygiene risks of prostitution. So, for instance, the reply from Bombay outlined the work done by the Bombay Presidency Women’s Council Home, the League of Mercy Shelter, the Salvation Army Women’s Home, the Bombay Vigilance Association Shelter, the St. Catherine’s Rescue Home, and the Hindu Women’s Rescue Home. The questionnaire responses give us a sense of the complex interconnections between the state and anti-vice civil society institutions in interwar India, but also of the absence of regular state financial support. The homes took cases from both the public and the police, just as their funding was partly from voluntary subscriptions and partly from occasional government grants. Just as Anderson used the Calcutta Vigilance Association to bridge his social, religious, and state interests, so the Bombay Vigilance

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Association represented the organizations listed above to the state (Shephard, Anderson’s successor in Calcutta, later crafted the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene into this representational mold in Delhi). The homes were limited in the state resources they could draw upon. There was no provision for repatriating foreign girls, nor were there institutions to support the “mentally defective” (only girls classified by the police surgeon could be sent to the lunatic asylum), while babies would be handed over to “Foundling Homes” or persons willing to adopt them (the opinion of their mothers is not mentioned). As such, the success of the homes often depended on the regional support that civil society networks could offer. For instance, the Salvation Army’s Eastern India branches, staffed by Christian workers, collaborated with the Bengal Presidency Council of Women regarding its Rescue Homes in which babies and mothers were kept together until the child was one year old (what happened thereafter was not mentioned). There were some provinces with more progressive funding schemes, however. The Bombay’s Children Aid Society received girls from both the police and the Bombay Vigilance Association, and was more than half-financed by the government. It kept girls until their associated adults had been processed by the courts, and until any venereal disease had been cured, before passing them on to a school or home. Perhaps because of its government funding, the Society provided a full reply to the League questionnaire, giving a rare insight into the mindset of a small-scale anti-vice organization. Its superintendent was Katharine Davis, who was running a home in Bombay when Meliscent Shephard visited in 1929. When penning her questionnaire reply in September 1934 she despaired of the chances of rehabilitation for her wards (“Supervision by day does not prevent a girl from being ruined by night”). Girls faced, it was believed, the triple obstacles of nature (sexual desire), culture (parenting), and space (the city itself) in negotiating a pathway to a vice-free life: Rehabilitation seems increasingly difficult, owing to early wakening of sexual desire in young girls, even before they attain physical maturity, and owing to the extreme ignorance, poverty, and even wickedness of parents, who frequently, for economic reasons, do not hesitate to prostitute their girl children, to sell them into impossible marriages which eventually break down. The overcrowded conditions of Bombay City must make it appalling difficult for young girls to be brought up with any real sense of decency, and to be kept safe.57

Other organizations in India were less closely aligned to the state and cooperated more heavily with local institutions, leading to anti-vice spaces that took their inspiration from local ashrams as much as European rescue homes. Miss Mable Pillage replied to the League questionnaire on behalf of

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the AMSH’s Mysore State branch and the Methodist Mission of Bangalore City.58 She claimed to have done ten years’ worth of moral hygiene work in Mysore State yet she had failed to secure financial support from the Princely State (despite appeals to government, municipal authorities, directors of industry and education, etc.) and was thus dependent on voluntary subscriptions from individuals and institutions. In Bangalore City she was in touch with all the tolerated brothels and, with Indian helpers, would tell girls there of the Shanti Sadana Ashram run by the Methodist Mission. The home at the time held thirty-five girls and twenty babies. It was considered best to keep mother and child together, and the home would take care of the babies for a monthly fee if their mothers availed themselves of the provided opportunities for training in “weaving, housecraft, mothercraft” or social work. The distinction offered here from the strict disciplinary models of other homes is stark.59 Pillidge stated that: “The life of the ashram is made as homely as possible, so that those who would find it impossible to take their place again in society, may lead a useful life. This is not ideal, but sometimes necessary.” Rehabilitation was said to be made difficult by the prevalent idea that a once-wronged girl was “fair sport,” so the ashram was made into a replication, and possibly engine, of home life (although the girl’s association with outcaste, or dalit/untouchable, work may have reinforced their social exclusion from orthodox communities): Girls are in families of four and five, one or two babies also in each home. They do their own shopping, arrange diet, cook, give necessary attention medically to family in sickness, and are responsible for the order of the home. Outdoor life has been much increased; games walks, etc. Life is made as normal as possible. Girls do social work in outcaste village near [sic]. Life is as full and interesting as possible, giving them every opportunity for improvement, so that they may be ready, if an opportunity arises, for placing again in Society.60

To place “fallen” women back into society was one of the chief aims of global anti-vice campaigners. By the early 1930s the League of Nations was moving beyond its previous definition of abolitionism (targeting the international means of trafficking) to a more aggressive target of abolishing the source of demand for prostitutes, which it identified as the brothel. In an attempt to assess how easy it was to find alternative ways of living after brothel closure, it issued a questionnaire to member states in 1935.61 It was suggested that each state interview fifty “prostitutes” (whether still active or “rescued”) and provide a range of biographical details. The Government of India passed on the request to its provinces, each of which sent a different reply depending on their interpretation of the questionnaire and their laws regarding prostitution.

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Delhi’s chief commissioner insisted the province had no tolerated brothels (assuming toleration meant licensed, not “allowed” brothels) so provided no answers. Coorg avowed there were no prostitutes in that (small) province, while Assam said they did not have the relevant information, and the North-West Frontier Province said that collection of such information was impossible. The Punjab claimed they did not have enough time for such matters, but got Meliscent Shephard to pass on three illustrative case studies, while Bihar and Orissa submitted one sample case. The Burmese government argued that it would not be worth collecting the information, as it seemed certain of the condition of prostitutes in Rangoon. All were said to be uneducated, apart from the Anglo-Indians, while pimps were said to have introduced most “girls” into the trade through deception. Three provinces, however, provided full answers with various levels of detail. The United Provinces (UP) provided thirty-eight case studies. Eighteen cases were tabulated with minimal information, while a further twenty cases had brief life stories of women involved in prostitution. Bombay provided fifty detailed studies, which were printed by the government, with answers to all the League questions and an opening paragraph in the first person. For instance, the second case, a twenty-eight-year-old Muslim named Husseini, opened with: “I am a native of Lahore. I was married to a Mohammedan at Lahore but after his death I came to Bombay about 12 years ago and started my life as a prostitute of my own accord.”62 The Bengal government also provided fifty “life histories,” providing much of the relevant information in short-paragraph descriptions in the third person. The diversity of responses reflects the lack of coordinated policy regarding prostitution in India, reflecting the devolution of these issues under the dyarchy reforms of 1919.63 The following analysis will read across the three provinces that gave detailed responses (UP, Bombay, and Bengal). The Bengal survey was carried out in Calcutta, and these life histories have been analyzed, from the originals in the Bengal Archives, by historian Indrani Chatterjee.64 She highlights the significance of the histories, given the imperial emphasis on white prostitutes and the nationalist emphasis on countering orientalist stereotypes. The survey’s focus on the women themselves was relatively new, as was the League’s interest in the rehabilitation of prostitutes. Chatterjee’s use of the Bengal archives brings special benefits; she is able to detect how the replies had been edited and translated, and how the Government of Bengal had cut down on the “sob stuff.”65 But using the replies from the League archives in Geneva also allows comparison across provinces, and the comparison of answers to the specific questions that

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were asked (a questionnaire was not preserved in the Bengal archives). The questions were: a) Name, age, and civil status b) Type of school attended c) Age on leaving school d) Character of employment first entered e) At what age did women leave home, what was the character of her background f) Age on first conviction and of subsequent convictions g) Any social service given [referring to any care received] h) Assessment of the mental conditions viz. certifiable, borderline, normal, superior. Many of Chatterjee’s reservations about the Bengal replies apply to the collection as a whole:  the nature of translation and the means of interview remain unclear; while the police may have gone to the “upper crust” which they were informally acquainted with. But the larger collection also has much to tell us, as Chatterjee shows, about the role of marriage in women who became prostitutes, the frequency of abduction and/or elopement, the position of mothers, pimps, and the police, and the experiences of children. While a comparative approach to the statistical mass of cases will be adopted here, this risks further silencing the life-traces that the questionnaires preserve. As such, stand-out excerpts from the life histories suggest links to wider conclusions about agency, resistance, and the archive itself. While Chatterjee’s summary analysis of the Bengal returns will be used for comparison below, there are certain calculations possible for the Bombay and UP returns that the Calcutta survey did not allow. While the Bengal replies included some greater detailing in life stories, there was no consistent data on age or religion. The provision of this data for UP and Bombay allows statistical comparison (see Table  11.1). For instance, the Bombay women had a higher average age than the UP returns. Older women pulled up this average, many of whom had been working for some time in Bombay city and seemed to have established themselves in stable positions within the city’s sexual economy. The categories feature many of the common confusions and overlappings of India’s complex religious and ethnic taxonomies. Anglo-Indians were usually Christian but were separately listed next to other religious categories, including Christianity, for Bombay. Likewise, three individuals were listed as Mahar, Murli, and Marathi, which are regional and caste identities that could have been subsumed under their religion. The United

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Table 11.1.  Age and background data for Bombay and the United Provinces Province Average age Lowest age Highest age Anglo-Indian (%age) Christian (%age) Muslim (%age) Hindu (%age) Other (%age)

Bombay 29.4 19 50 1 (2.4%) 6 (12.2%) 6 (12.2%) 36 (73.5%) 3 (6.1%)

United Provinces 24.6 18 35 0 0 14 (63.6%) 2 (9.1%) 6 (27.3%)

Source: League of Nations Archive, R4696/19097.

Provinces covered many cities, but a recurring location was the Hindu holy city of Benares, which makes the high proportion of Muslim women surprising. However, the “other” replies included ten caste descriptors that form sub-categories of Hinduism (Rajput, Kahar, Kunbi, Brahman, Kurmi, and Ahir), as well as five regional “Bengali” descriptors with Hindu caste qualifiers (Brahmin, Kayasth, Kahar, Koeri, and Dusadh) taking the Hindu figure to seventeen (43.6%) with various other regional and occupational entries (Bihari and Dhobi) also possibly being Hindu. The Bengal replies suggested that marriage did not protect women from prostitution, Chatterjee’s first conclusion, and that analysis holds strong here. Just as thirty-three (66%) of the Bengal women had been married, so had twenty-three (46.9%) from the Bombay returns and fourteen (35.9%) from the United Provinces. An outstanding feature across the statistics was the number of “child brides” (seventeen [34%] in Calcutta). In 1929 the “Sarda” (Child Marriage Restraint) Act had fixed the minimum age of marriage for girls at fourteen and boys at sixteen years.66 By this criteria or by people who did not specify an age of marriage but mentioned being married as a “child,” Bombay returned twenty-one respondents (42.9%) and the United Provinces six (15.4%) who had married under age or as a “child.” Of these, seventeen (34.7% of total respondents) of the Bombay respondents were widows, and five (12.8%) in the United Provinces. But widowhood (and the unlikelihood of remarriage) was not the only route for married girls/women into prostitution. Two married women were abducted and brought to Bombay for prostitution. A twenty-five-year-old Hindu woman named Chandabai was a child bride who had been abducted at age seventeen and brought to Bombay for domestic service, after which she was “induced” into brothel prostitution.

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A  second seventeen-year-old woman named Sitabai had been married aged ten and spent six years with her husband, before being “kidnapped” and deposited in a Kamathipura (the former tolerated “red light” district) brothel, from where she was rescued and taken to a children’s home. However, many more were enticed away than kidnapped (ten from Bombay). The twenty-year-old Benti, for instance, was from “Jammoo State” and had been married to a fifty-year-old man when she was only eight. She complained of being ill-treated so a friend took her to Bombay where she was “made to live a life of shame,” though she was rescued to a children’s home. Various others told of being brought to Bombay and forced into prostitution, whether having been induced to leave by a professional procurer, or by exploiters who passed the girls on to pimps and brothels in Bombay. Many of these cases overlapped with “seduction”; women who started affairs and agreed to leave their husbands, only to find themselves deserted and forced to resort to prostitution by families that had disowned them, or girls seduced and sold directly into prostitution. Others were deserted by their husbands, such as the fourteen-year-old girl Kashibai, who was married in Bombay aged nine but whose husband soon married again. While she was kept as a mistress for four years, after the husband died she resorted to prostitution. While these narratives seem to describe an endless tale of exploitation and hopelessness, the women here detailed were anything but immobile, silent, and wholly subaltern.67 As the “seductions” and “enticements” above suggest, the women were very often accomplices in their movement from unhappy marriages with older men.68 Some women had also clearly established themselves as independent earners. Tarabai, for instance, was a twenty-five-year-old from Sholapur in southwest India. She claimed that she was too young to remember when her husband had died, but at eighteen a prostitute neighbor introduced her into the trade and, seven years later, she was earning independently. Another, Shantibai, had been brought to Bombay and made to work for a pimp but, after his arrest, had continued to work independently. In many other cases, it was explicitly clear that the women had chosen this career themselves (though whether this was the insistence of the interviewer, the translator, or the interviewee is less clear). Ivy Hayes was a thirty-one-year-old Anglo-Indian prostitute whose parents had died when she was fifteen and who, having come to Bombay with her aunt a year later, had chosen to be a prostitute. Another twenty-nine-year-old woman, Jadibai, had been married at age thirteen but had returned to her parents after four months because her husband mistreated her and had a mistress. When her parents died five years later she

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turned to prostitution. Similar experiences were reported from the United Provinces. A thirty-year-old Bengali woman had been married aged fourteen but her husband deserted her. She became a mistress for some time but left him to become a prostitute in Benares. A twenty-two-year-old woman, listed only as a Muslim, had been married to someone much younger than her, who she left to enter prostitution. Another thirty-six-year-old woman had been kidnapped by a woman servant who then deserted her. She found some work and eventually found a male partner, “and on getting disgusted with him embraced prostitution.” Another woman, listed as a twenty-year-old Brahmin from Calcutta, was disowned by her parents after forming “illegal connections” with a teacher while studying at school: “She mixed in the company of men freely and ultimately became a prostitute.”69 These tales match the tenor of some of the more detailed life histories from Bengal, which were forwarded to Geneva as individually typed life stories. They provide incredibly rare insights into the lives of women classed as prostitutes, though the short descriptions are carefully selected and highly mediated. Despite this, the replies refuse to endorse any conflation of the subject position of the “prostitute” with a lack of agency of a situation of victimhood. For instance, one Amitabala Dutta was married aged thirteen but did not get on well with her husband and had “illicit intercourse” with her cousin. They ran away together to his house in Calcutta: “She then grew tired of this man and went into a brothel. Here she managed to save a considerable sum of money and from her earnings paid the expenses of her sister’s education. She does not appear to wish to change her present mode of living.” Another woman, Ashalata Dassi, aged twenty-three, spoke of being tortured by her husband when she moved to his house a year after having been married to him aged seven. She was taken home by her mother and, after various spells of training and education, claimed that: “I started prostitution at the age of 12 years as the lives of prostitutes attracted me. I am quite happy with my present life.” Similarly, the sixteen-year-old Biman-bala Dassi, whose mother was a retired prostitute, refused the marriage her mother arranged for her, “as I did not like to curtail my freedom by marriage … I spend my earning myself in my food and luxury. I am quite happy with my present life.” The question of prostitution and childhood was also a vexed one, as displayed earlier in the different approaches to the children of prostitutes in rescue homes. Chatterjee showed that, contra popular beliefs, only six (12 percent) of the Bengal woman had been the children of prostitutes, five of whom said their mothers had attempted to stop them entering the trade. The further files found in Geneva complicate this picture in various ways.

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The United Provinces returns came in two halves; one table of 18 cases, then shorter stories relating to twenty more women, the latter of which seem to have been from Benares and none of whom were born into prostitution. Fourteen of the first batch, however, were listed as having been “brought up as a prostitute” and very little extra information was listed, other than that one had been to primary school. In the Bombay returns, seven (14.3  percent) were the daughters of prostitutes. Two were from Mangalore and did not mention religion or caste in their biographies. One, a twenty-eight-year-old called Sitabai, had followed her mother’s turn to prostitution after her father died when she was seventeen. A second, Appi, had left her mother to practice prostitution in her home while she came to Bombay to earn more money. The five others from Bombay, however, fitted in to the much-discussed phenomenon of “temple brides,” “dancing girls,” or devadasis.70 All of them spoke of being “devoted to God”; the three that mentioned an age of devotion put it at either four to five, ten, or ten to twelve years old. The former was sent to a brothel when she reached puberty, another started earning money from prostitution when she was fourteen, while a third started when she was twenty-one. She described her mother as a murli (dancing girl), while another two referred to themselves as of the naikin (dancing) class.71 The questionnaire responses contained at their heart, therefore, the nub of orientalist fantasies about Indian prostitution (the devadasi or dancing girl), which brings us back both to the fictions and scandals with which this chapter opened.

Fictional facts and anti-vice lives The dancing girl and the devadasi had previously functioned as the standard, caste- and tradition- based colonial explanation for Indian prostitution. Yet by the 1930s any suggestion of blaming Indian tradition for its social problems had been outlawed following the controversy over Katharine Mayo’s condemnation of India for the treatment of its women.72 As such the British had been sure to expunge any mention of devadasis from the League’s report to the Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children in the East nor would they figure substantially in the League’s 1937 meeting in Bandoeng, Java, to discuss trafficking.73 Yet the ambiguous place of these figures in the questionnaire replies reminds us of the ever-present intersection of fact and fiction in the libidinal economies of interwar prostitution. This intersection was evident in texts that based themselves both in science and erotica. In terms of the former, Santosh Kumar Mukherji had supplemented his previous historical works on prostitution

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in India (1934) with a broader piece on Indian Sex Life and Prostitution in 1945.74 Blending historical analysis with early twentieth-century sexual sciences, he moved from analysis of ancient “Hindu sexologists” through to surveys of 100 women living in brothels in 1940s Calcutta. Causes of prostitution were said to be inclination (6), starvation (62), seduction and abandonment (19), social abandonment (5) and ill treatment by their family (8).75 But these causes were situated within their broader urban context, especially the distorted male to female ratios resulting from migrant labor. League of Nations reports were referred to in charting the decline of European prostitutes as suppressionist legislation had spread through the provinces.76 Yet between the scientific ratios and League-approved statistics emerged much older imaginaries. Describing Upper Chitpore Road in Calcutta, as detailed by Anderson twenty-four years earlier, Mukherjee portrayed the prostitutes of the city after the 1923 SITA. No longer women of light, they stood in their best attire just inside their abodes, the poor light disguising the faces of the older women: “From the street the sound of the tinkling bells on the feet of some of dancing girl, the sound of the music and revelry may be heard and lure the victims into the clutches of these women.”77 Echoing, consciously or not, the traits of Anderson and especially of Mani, Mukherjee’s sexology blends into a broader discourse of prostitution of which vice and anti-vice, fact and fiction, literature and brothel form part. This chapter has sought to overview the people of anti-vice:  from the tortured body of Akootai; to the campaigner Anderson; to the place-bound fictive women of prostitution literature; and to the massed lives and numerals of survey studies. The dispersed archives from which these materials were drawn remind us of the transnational nature of the risk, governance, and surveillance of prostitutes, even if their lives remain resolutely local. The diversity of sites and perspectives, from the social sciences to the arts and humanities, force us to face and reconstitute, today, the multiscalar frames of historical anti-vice lives. Notes 1 Charu Gupta, “Writing Sex and Sexuality:  Archives of Colonial North India,” Journal of Women’s History 23, no. 4 (2011): 15. 2 For a thorough investigation of the archives and colonial sexuality see Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 3 Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire:  Scale, Governmentalities and Interwar India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

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4 Stephen Legg, “Of Scales, Networks and Assemblages:  The League of Nations Apparatus and the Scalar Sovereignty of the Government of India,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 34, no. 2 (2009): 234–53. 5 For a clear reading of the increasingly transnational, and sexual, politics of the late-colonial state see Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India:  The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 6 For details of the gradual, pre-war turn against the idea of the tolerated brothel area see Stephen Legg, “Stimulation, Segregation and Scandal:  Geographies of Prostitution Regulation in British India, between Registration (1888) and Suppression (1923),” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 6 (2012): 1459–505. 7 Ashwini Tambe, Codes of Misconduct:  Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2009), ­chapter 4. 8 “Weal” here indicating a wound, from a cane or, in this case, a yard measure. 9 “Lunar caustic” referred to silver nitrate, a disinfectant. 10 National Archives of India (henceforth NA)/Home(Police)/1917/December/ 128-130A. 11 “Scrawling” is a now obsolete term, which could refer to crawling, used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to refer to wretches or snakes, Oxford English Dictionary 1911, online 2012. 12 To rouse, or heat, herself. Oxford English Dictionary 1897, online 2012. 13 For similar augments regarding the now totemic subaltern subject of sati see Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998). 14 For an explication of this approach see James Duncan and Trevor Barnes, Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 15 National Missionary Council, Proceedings of the First Meeting of the National Missionary Council, Calcutta February 4 and 5, 1914 National Missionary Council, Calcutta. For later reflections on his work and on the city see Herbert Anderson, “Miss Shephard’s Campaign in Calcutta,” The Shield VI, no.  2 (1930); Herbert Anderson, “Changes in the Outlook on Prostitution in India,” Health and Empire VIII (1933). 16 Herbert Anderson, Calcutta Vice (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1921), 3. 17 National Archives of India, New Delhi (henceforth NA)/Home(Police)/1917/128-130. 18 NA/Home(Police)/1917/173-189A. 19 Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire, 140. 20 Although see Barbara Southard, The Women’s Movement and Colonial Politics in Bengal: The Quest for Political Rights, Education and Social Reform Legislation, 1921–1936 (New Delhi:  Manohar, 1995), and Aparna Basu and Bharati Ray, Women’s Struggle: A History of the All India Women’s Conference 1927–1990 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1990). 21 R. Kerr, The Social Evil in Calcutta, 3rd edn (Calcutta: TS Smith, 1886); Verax, The Social Evil in South Calcutta (Calcutta: Central Calcutta Press, 1895). 22 Kerr wrote of three categories: the seduced and abandoned; the social seductress; and the common prostitute. See Legg, “Stimulation, Segregation and Scandal,” 1495–6. Anderson later passed all his papers on to the campaigner Meliscent Shephard, who wrote in 1929 of four categories of prostitute, again marked by their

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location: ground floor cheap brothels; second floor dancers and foreign prostitutes; open shop front elite prostitutes; and street, “hereditary” prostitutes. See Stephen Legg, “An Intimate and Imperial Feminism: Meliscent Shephard and the Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial India,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no. 1 (2010): 68–94, 75. 23 Busti usually referred to a makeshift settlement, slum, or “shanty town.” 24 See Philippa Levine, “Orientalist Sociology and the Creation of Colonial Sexualities,” Feminist Review 65 (2000): 5–21. 25 For a brilliant exposition of the potential of multi-sensory geographies for historical study see Neil Pemberton, “‘Bloodhounds as Detectives’:  Dogs, Slum Stench and Late-Victorian Murder Investigation,” Cultural and Social History 10, no. 1 (2013): 69–91. 26 On these terms, their geographies and power relations see David Armstrong, “Public Health Spaces and the Fabrication of Identity,” Sociology 27, no. 3 (1993): 393–410. For applications to planning in imperial Asia see Robert Peckham and David M Pomfret, eds., Imperial Contagions:  Medicine and Cultures of Planning in Asia, 1880–1949 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013). 27 For comparisons between the stigmatisation of prostitutes and that of low caste or opposing religious groups see Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). 28 Anderson, Calcutta Vice, 1. 29 Ibid., 12. 30 See Lynn Nead, “The Magdalen in Modern Times:  The Mythology of the Fallen Woman in Pre-Raphaelite Painting,” Oxford Art Journal 7, no. 1 (1984): 26–37. 31 Anderson, Calcutta Vice, 3. 32 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 33 See D. Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 253, and A. Morcom, Illicit Worlds on Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion (London: Hurst C & Company, 2013). 34 MS Mani, The Pen Pictures of the Dancing Girl (Salem: Srinivasa Printing Works, 1926), 1. 35 Ibid., 20, 21. 36 David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (London: John Murray, 2005), 58. 37 Mani, The Pen Pictures of the Dancing Girl, 49–50. 38 A one-horse closed carriage. 39 A four wheeled carriage. 40 An elegant, expensive carriage. 41 An (electric) fan. 42 Mani, The Pen Pictures of the Dancing Girl, 52. 43 Ibid., 53. 44 Anderson, Calcutta Vice, 1.  Also see Ashwini Tambe, “Gandhi’s ‘Fallen’ Sisters: Difference and the National Body Politic,” Social Scientist 37, no. 1/2 (2009): 21–38.

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45 League of Nations Archive, Geneva (henceforth LoN)/R4676/2000 Rangoon Vigilance Society (1931) Annual Report for Year Ending February 1931 (British Burma Press, Rangoon). 46 See Tambe, Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay, 79–81. 47 Anderson, Calcutta Vice, 8–10. 48 See Legg, “An Intimate and Imperial Feminism.” 49 For the challenges the League faced see Stephen Legg, “An International Anomaly? Sovereignty, the League of Nations, and India’s Princely Geographies,” Journal of Historical Geography 43 (2014): 96–110. 50 See Jessica Pliley, “Claims to Protection: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Abolitionism in the League of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–1936,” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 4 (2010): 90–110. 51 Barbara Metzger, “Towards an International Human Rights Regime during the Interwar Years: The League of Nations’ Combat of Traffic in Women and Children,” in Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c.1880–1950, ed. Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Daniel Gorman, “Empire, Internationalism, and the Campaign Against the Traffic in Women and Children in the 1920s,” Twentieth Century British History 19, no. 2 (2008): 186–216; Stephen Legg, “‘The Life of Individuals as Well as of Nations’:  International Law and the League of Nations’ Anti-Trafficking Governmentalities,” Leiden Journal of International Law 25, no. 3 (2012): 646–64. For specific material on the League’s campaign in India see Legg, “Of Scales, Networks and Assemblages.” 52 Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children. Records of the Diplomatic Conference concerning the Suppression of Traffic in Women of Full Age, Geneva, League of Nations Geneva, 1933. 53 See Legg, “An International Anomaly?” 54 Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children. Abolition of Licensed Houses, League of Nations Geneva, 1934. 55 All of the following information comes from the replies to the questionnaires, from LoN/R4688/11160. 56 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population:  lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 248, 109. Also see Michael Hardt, “The Withering of Civil Society,” Social Text, 45, vol. 14, no. 4 (1995): 27–44. See www.jstor.org/stable/466673 (accessed May 6, 2016). 57 LoN/R4688/11160. 58 Also see Mabel Pillidge, “The Work of the AMSH in an Indian State,” The Shield 5th series III, no. 3 (1934), 100–106. 59 For the Delhi rescue home’s disciplinary constitution see Stephen Legg, “Governing Prostitution in Colonial Delhi:  From Cantonment Regulations to International Hygiene (1864–1939),” Social History 34, no. 4 (2009): 447–67, 465. 60 LoN/R4688/11160. 61 The incredibly detailed reports have been little studied, though for brief comments on the Australian replies see R. Frances, Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007), 224.

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6 2 LoN/R4696/19097. All the following quotations and data come from this file. 63 See Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire, ­chapter 2. 64 Indrani Chatterjee, “Refracted Reality:  The 1935 Calcutta Police Survey of Prostitutes,” Manushi 57 (1990): 26–36. 65 Ibid., 29. 66 See Sinha, Specters of Mother India. 67 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular,” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 4 (2005): 475–86. 68 On the necessity of viewing the subaltern as sensual, and even erotic, subjects see Ratna Kapur, Erotic Justice:  Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism (London: Glasshouse Press, 2005). 69 LoN/R4696/19097. 70 See Kay K. Jordan, From Sacred Servant to Profane Prostitute:  A  History of the Changing Legal Status of the Devadasis in India, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2003). 71 Kunal M. Parker, “‘A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes’ Anglo-Indian Legal Conceptions of Temple Dancing Girls, 1800–1914,” Modern Asian Studies 32, no. 03 (1998): 559–633, 567. 72 See Sinha, Specters of Mother India. 73 Legg, “Of Scales, Networks and Assemblages,” 246–7. 74 Santosh Kumar Mukherji, Prostitution in India (Calcutta: Das Gupta & Co, 1934); Santosh K. Mukherjee, Indian Sex Life and Prostitution (Calcutta: Anil Kumar Das Gupta, 1945). 75 Mukherjee, Indian Sex Life and Prostitution, 97. 76 Ibid., 107. 77 Ibid., 113.

12

China’s prostitution regulation system in an international context, 1900–1937 Elizabeth J. Remick

Modern prostitution regulation came relatively late to China, in world perspective. While the European powers, beginning with France, established regulatory regimes primarily starting at the beginning of the nineteenth century, such a regime did not begin to appear in Chinese cities until after 1905. This is rather surprising considering that most of China’s Asian neighbors, both colonized and independent, had fully realized systems for regulating prostitution by the 1860s or 1870s. Indeed, in the sections of the few Chinese cities partially controlled by Euro-American colonial regimes, such as in Shanghai and Tianjin, those regimes regulated prostitution in the same fashion as their home countries and other places in their respective empires. But the vast majority of Chinese cities, administered by Chinese governments, did not follow their lead for close to fifty years. By the time regulated prostitution was abolished at the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, nearly all provincial capitals and first-tier cities, as well as many smaller cities, had adopted a regulatory approach for at least some length of time. In fact one might say that it was the “default” position on prostitution, as opposed to criminalization or a laissez-faire approach. However, while the Chinese style of prostitution regulation resembled its European and Japanese forebears in many ways, it also developed its own unique goals, structures, and implications. Thus during the peak regulatory period, between 1905 and 1937, China’s prostitution regulation regime consisted of taxation and registration of brothels, periodic mandatory venereal disease inspections of prostitutes, and regulation of the location of and activities inside brothels, just as in Japan, Europe, and the European empires. However, unlike those regimes, the primary goals of the Chinese regulatory system were neither the racialized separation of colonizers from colonized, nor the control of venereal disease; instead, the goal was the adoption of modern policing and state-building methods, of which prostitution 270

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regulation was a key part. Furthermore, in order to defend themselves from early twentieth-century international critiques claiming that prostitution regulation was a form of slavery, Chinese regulators built into the system an official police-run refuge, called a jiliangsuo, for women who wished to leave prostitution. Finally, the Chinese regulatory model had different meanings and implications for the rights of women than its European forebears because women and girls legally could be bought, sold, pawned, or indentured by their fathers or husbands in China, as in Japan. This left the state in the unenviable position of enforcing legal contracts that bound women into prostitution and made state support of the male-dominated gender system highly visible. This chapter traces the diffusion of prostitution regulation from Europe and Japan to China and examines how the historical and political context in China, most notably state-building concerns, created this complex of distinctive institutions.

The diffusion of regulated prostitution to China Prostitution regulation came to China from Paris via Tokyo. The Parisian model of regulation began, as is well known, in the first decade of the nineteenth century primarily as a means to control the spread of venereal disease, which was thought to threaten the health of the nation.1 It was no longer seen as primarily a moral question but as an inevitable public health problem, the solution to which was strict regulation. In rather broad strokes, the highlights of the Parisian regulatory model were: 1) police tolerance of technically illegal licensed brothels; 2) restriction of those brothels to certain locations; 3) licensing of individual prostitutes to work either in brothels or as independent agents; 4) regular gynecological exams; and 5) a shadow system of special courts, prisons, clinics, police regulations, and morals police parallel to the “regular” institutions of the state.2 The Parisian approach subsequently became the model for many other states in continental Europe, whether via the regulation of military prostitution in the Napoleonic empire or through institutional emulation.3 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Parisian pillars of registration, health inspection, incarceration of ill prostitutes, and regulation of prostitutes’ behavior was well established in Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Spain, the Netherlands, and many cities in the German states including Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Mainz, as well as in Russia.4 In Great Britain, concerns about the public health threat posed by prostitutes revolved mainly around fears that venereal disease would weaken the imperial army and navy, thus threatening the survival of the empire.5 As a result, prostitution regulation under the

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Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864 and 1866 in England and Ireland focused exclusively on prostitutes in military towns. British prostitution regulation differed from the continental model in that it relied on ordinary police to enforce the regulations rather than on a separate morals police, but it was similar in that it required prostitutes to register, undergo venereal disease inspections, and submit to incarceration in a venereal disease prison (“lock”) hospital if they were found to have venereal disease.6 European governments also extended the policy of regulated prostitution throughout their overseas empires during the nineteenth century, including in some of China’s closest neighbors. French colonial regimes in Southeast and East Asia inevitably and immediately established regulated prostitution in order to protect the health of troops, merchants, and bureaucrats who would, it was assumed, have sex with local women.7 And although the Contagious Diseases Acts in Great Britain proper had been repealed in 1886, informal prostitution regulation continued in East Asian British colonies well into the twentieth century. Thus French Indochina, Hong Kong, and Singapore all had regulatory systems mimicking those in their respective metropoles. One might expect that these close neighbors, some directly abutting China, must have been a transmission belt for regulatory practices into China. In fact, they were not; the Chinese studiously ignored these models for decades. Colonial regulatory regimes were established in 1857 in Hong Kong, in Indochina in 1862, and in 1870 in Singapore. At first this regulation only targeted prostitutes serving a Euro-American clientele, since it seems that local customers did not share a concern about venereal disease.8 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, registration and health inspections were extended to prostitutes serving Chinese and other Asians, and to non-Chinese prostitutes as well. Also, fears about inter-racial sex and racial mixing sat at the heart of these regulatory regimes.9 Colonial authorities in China proper shared many of these concerns, and as a result regulated prostitution in the foreign concessions in Shanghai and Tianjin beginning with the mid-nineteenth-century treaties that opened China to foreign trade.10 As in Hong Kong, in Shanghai the only prostitutes who were licensed and given health inspections, and were therefore subject to incarceration if they were found to be infected, were Chinese women with a Euro-American clientele. European prostitutes were not subject to licensing or inspection in the early days, even though of course they would have been in their home countries. The French Concession regulated prostitution in this way from the 1860s until the end of World War II, and the British-American International Settlement did so from 1877 until a ban

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was instituted in 1920. After 1925, though, the International Settlement returned to a policy of unofficially tolerating licensed courtesan houses until the Japanese occupation.11 Rather than taking these regulatory systems as a model, however, it appears that Chinese local governments resisted them precisely because they were imposed by foreigners.12 In fact, the foreign concessions just mentioned had had regulated prostitution for about forty years before any Chinese-governed city adopted regulation. When regulation was finally adopted, it came in through Japan by means of the diffusion of a Tokyo-based policing model during the late-Qing New Policies reforms. Prostitution regulation had been embraced by Japanese officials during the early years of the Meiji period (1868–1912), when a new regime was undertaking thoroughgoing reforms in nearly all of its state institutions. Prior to this time, during the Tokugawa period, prostitution in Japan had usually been licensed and confined to “pleasure quarters” and subject to some social stigma, but not subject to health inspection.13 The state did not treat prostitution as a moral or public health problem even though venereal disease was common among prostitutes as early as the fifteenth century. But after 1868, the British and Russian Navies began to pressure the Japanese to ensure that their sailors had access to healthy prostitutes in treaty ports. In addition, some Japanese doctors accepted the idea that prostitution created a public health problem. The combined result was that after 1868, many municipal governments began to establish regulatory systems and lock hospitals. They did so with the direct assistance of the British Navy in treaty ports, but also without it elsewhere around the country.14 As Japanese officials cast about for models of how to establish a regulatory regime, they settled on the Parisian model. In 1872, the future chief of the nascent Tokyo police went to Paris to learn more about the policing system, and he became intrigued with how the police regulated prostitution. He reportedly even personally witnessed prostitutes receiving venereal disease inspections in Paris. After his return, the chief put in place an expansive model of policing in Tokyo based on that of Paris, including prostitution regulation.15 With regard to prostitution, there were two notable departures from the Parisian model. The first was the lack of a separate Morals Brigade. Rather, similar to regulation in Great Britain, the implementation of the regulatory system was carried out by each local police precinct. The second was that prostitutes were not permitted to register as individuals working on their own; rather, they were required to work in brothels, which had the effect of institutionalizing the control of madams and pimps in the system

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of regulation.16 Other than that, the Tokyo police emulated Paris’ system of registration, taxation, health inspection, lock hospitals, and police intervention in everyday brothel activities.

Application of the regulatory model in China When Chinese reformers at the turn of the twentieth century looked for a new policing model in their efforts to rescue China’s imperial political system, they chose that of Tokyo. Contained within that was, of course, the system of prostitution regulation. In a sense, then, we could say that police reform acted as a Trojan horse for the regulation of prostitution. Both foreign colonialism and internal rebellion devastated the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) during the nineteenth century. In the early 1900s, Qing reformers attempted to emulate Japan’s Meiji Restoration in maintaining a monarchy by undertaking thoroughgoing state reform dubbed the “New Policies” (1901–1911), and they put particular emphasis on police reform because it was hoped that a new policing system would help maintain political stability through the reform process. The officials given the task of undertaking police reform both in Beijing and Tianjin, and later in the country as a whole, were nearly all enthusiasts of the Tokyo policing model. Police reform began in earnest in Beijing after large parts of the city were razed by European and American troops following the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Once the imperialist troops withdrew in 1901, Qing reformers set about establishing an entirely new, “modern” municipal police force to replace the old Manchu gendarmerie.17 The leader of the police force in the Japanese legation, Kawashima Naniwa, worked closely with the Manchu prince who took charge of the project to replicate Tokyo’s police force model in Beijing as well as to found the Beijing Police Academy.18 Part and parcel of this adoption was the introduction of prostitution regulation. Soon, Kawashima Naniwa also convinced governor-general of Zhili Province, Yuan Shikai, a major figure in the New Policy reforms and future president of the Republic of China, to adopt the Tokyo policing model.19 Yuan initially applied the model in the provincial capital of Baoding, then in the Chinese-controlled parts of Tianjin municipality, and ultimately at the county level throughout the entire province.20 Proponents of the New Policies quickly moved to spread this model of police reform throughout the country. Provincial capitals were told in 1901 to establish modern police forces, although precisely what that meant was not explained until the following year, when Yuan Shikai’s

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Zhili policing system was promoted as a model for emulation.21 Between 1905 and 1906 a national Ministry of Police was established to further this goal, and then was replaced with a Ministry of Civil Affairs. This ministry’s portfolio included not only policing but also, on the Tokyo model, some early attempts at providing social services and public health protections. By 1907 all provincial capitals had formed modern police forces on the Zhili and Beijing models.22 Since both Tianjin and Beijing police had established prostitution regulation systems by this time, in 1906 and 1907, respectively,23 those systems were an integral part of the national model of policing. Indeed, this was when regulation became the standard for dealing with prostitution across the country.24 By the fall of the Qing dynasty and subsequent founding of the Republic of China in 1911, all provincial capitals and most other important cities had adopted the Japanese model of policing that included prostitution regulation along with a host of other responsibilities that local governments had previously eschewed.25 Localities’ acceptance of the Japanese model was undoubtedly aided in some places by the fact that local leaders had studied in Japan at military academies and were therefore inclined to emulate Japanese practices.26 Chinese state reformers at that time also faced tremendous pressure from Euro-American governments and powerful international nongovernmental actors to improve the treatment of Chinese women. Missionaries, women’s rights groups, and anti-trafficking organizations bemoaned the Chinese practices of footbinding, child marriage, keeping of indentured “slave girls,” and indentured prostitution.27 The Qing government was not able to do much about most of those practices immediately, but it did respond to criticisms about indentured prostitution by signing onto the 1904 International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic and the 1910 International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic.28 This pressure for social reform created further impetus for regulating prostitution in order to prevent the abuse, maltreatment, and sale of women and girls. Under the Qing government, there was never a central law mandating the regulation of prostitution. Still, through police reform, the Tokyo model became the “best practice” among Chinese localities for dealing with prostitution in the last years of the Qing. Throughout the Republic (1911–1949), regulation continued to be the default approach, in spite of periodic local bans under particular provincial leaders. It was not until the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949 that regulation ended and prostitution was criminalized.

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The Chinese style of prostitution regulation At the time that the Qing reformers brought prostitution regulation to China, officials had a fairly laissez-faire attitude toward prostitution. That is to say, until 1905 or so, local governments did not usually concern themselves with trying to criminalize female prostitution or to limit it in any way except by informally confining brothels to particular areas away from city centers. Historically, prostitution in China had been associated with pariah legal-status groups, similar to outcaste groups in other societies. That is, women in pariah ethnic groups were assumed to be prostitutes, and women working in brothels had to register as members of the yuehu (“music household”) pariah classification to which entertainers belonged. This idea that pariah groups and prostitution were connected still existed in people’s minds in the early twentieth century although the legal status system had been abolished in 1723.29 In Confucian terms, brothels were thought to encourage immorality because they promoted excess of all sorts – sexual, financial, and culinary – but not because they were sinful, which was not a Confucian concept. Prostitutes were considered immoral because a woman was supposed to be chaste. Men, however, were not expected to be sexually continent, and very little stigma attached to men who frequented brothels. In fact, at the turn of the twentieth century in many Chinese cities, brothels were the site of a huge proportion of male social and business gatherings. Friends and business associates from all social classes who could afford it frequently gathered there for banquets and other group activities such as gambling and smoking opium.30 Of course all of this changed with the introduction of prostitution regulation. While there was some regional diversity in the particular modes of regulation, it is fair to say that, writ large, the Chinese approach was regulation with a light hand.31 As already noted, it consisted of registration, minimal taxation, prescription and proscription of particular activities inside the brothels, sporadic health inspection, and a police-run prostitute rescue institution.32 The foundation of the regulatory system was registration. Brothels and the women working in them had to register with the local police precinct. Male prostitution was illegal and had been comprehensively suppressed by the end of the nineteenth century.33 Regulations usually did not offer a definition of “female prostitute” (jinü), as they assumed everyone knew what the term meant. Further, regulations applied only to brothel prostitutes. Other kinds of commercial sex – streetwalking, casual sex work, or sex work in unregistered brothels  – were banned. Unlicensed prostitutes

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could be jailed for a few days and fined a minor sum. When women registered as prostitutes, a (usually male) member of their family was supposed to indicate the family’s agreement unless the women swore they had no family. They frequently had to state their “reason” for engaging in prostitution, such as poverty, and they also had to declare that they were practicing prostitution willingly. This was meant to prevent trafficking, similar to the goals of the prostitution census in the United States as discussed in Jessica Pliley’s chapter. As part of the licensing process, the police also stipulated precisely where in their cities prostitution could take place by creating defined prostitution districts; prostitution occurring elsewhere was, by definition, clandestine. Licensing allowed local governments to derive income – sometimes substantial and sometimes not – from prostitution. Brothels, and often individual prostitutes as well, were taxed in the form of a licensing fee and also occasional supplemental levies. Regulations frequently stipulated that the revenues thus generated were earmarked for institutions connected to the regulation of prostitution, such as the municipal police or its divisions, e.g. prostitute rescue homes. However, some other localities taxed prostitution much more heavily by delving deeper into the account books of brothels. The most notable example of this is Guangzhou, where the municipal government levied an extraordinarily lucrative per-trick brothel banquet tax and multiple earmarked surtaxes in the early 1920s on top of the licensing fees.34 Regulations also usually contained long lists of forbidden and required behavior inside the brothels. Of particular importance was a ban on child prostitution, which was very widespread indeed. Most regulations required that prostitutes be at least sixteen sui (fifteen years) old. Regulations banned physical abuse of prostitutes, stipulated hours of operation, banned weapons and drugs, and prohibited certain classes of clients (underaged boys, students, and officials) from using the brothels. Many regulations prohibited prostitutes from leaving brothels except on “out calls” to approved hotels or restaurants. Some went so far as to stipulate what colors, clothes, or hairstyles prostitutes must or must not wear, and some even required prostitutes to wear numbered badges. In many cities, regulations required prostitutes to receive health inspections, usually focusing on detection of syphilis and gonorrhea, but sometimes on other communicable diseases as well. The inspections were intended be monthly or even weekly, and women who refused to comply could lose their licenses. Women found to have diseases were supposed to have their licenses suspended until they were found to be symptom-free,

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but they were not incarcerated. A few cities, such as Hangzhou, appear to have tested for syphilis via serological test by the 1930s, but most relied only on visual gynecological inspections.35 This public health component, however, was frequently omitted in regulations, and indeed very often not carried out even when it was included. Finally, alongside statutes instituting municipal prostitution regulation, most Chinese cities published regulations establishing a police-run home, called a jiliangsuo, for women and girls who wished to escape from ­brothels.36 As a general rule, the women had to be able to demonstrate that they had been sold into prostitution against their will and/or had been physically abused in order to gain admission. If they were able to do so, then their contracts would be voided and debts cancelled. Many of these institutions also accepted other kinds of marginalized women and girls, including runaway abused indentured servant girls, abandoned or abused wives, and mentally ill women. Some also functioned more or less as a municipal women’s jail or sometimes were attached to jails. One purpose of the homes seems to have been to head off criticisms of regulation claiming that it supported the sexual slavery of women pawned or indentured into prostitution. The jiliangsuo usually functioned as industrial schools wherein the inmates learned literacy and math, trade skills such as weaving, and domestic skills such as sewing, embroidery, and household management. By this means, they could be reformed into virtuous wives. And indeed the most common means of exit for former prostitutes was marriage, facilitated by the police, to a man who could afford to re-pay the home for the woman’s room and board during her incarceration there.

Domestic transmission of prostitution regulation By 1907, the basic elements of prostitution regulation began to take shape around the country. Perhaps predictably, cities best known for having large prostitution populations were among the first to adopt regulation, including Guangzhou, Nanjing, Tianjin, and Suzhou. More surprisingly, though, some culturally conservative interior cities that were known more for frowning on prostitution, such as Chengdu, also joined in early on.37 In other places the model took years to catch on, however, because local officials viewed regulation as promoting prostitution. It is difficult to tell how enthusiastically or thoroughly all these cities embraced regulation, but one aspect of the regulatory model that we can detect and quantify is the taxation of prostitution. Based on that measure, we can safely say that by 1914, all provincial capitals had started licensing

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and taxing prostitution.38 Whether they also carried out health inspections, regulated behavior inside the brothels, and established jiliangsuo is less certain and would require substantial research to ascertain. We might well also ask whether prostitution regulation was extended to lower-level cities and towns, or whether it was confined to provincial capitals and other large cities. Indications are that after the 1911 Revolution, many lower-level cities did adopt parts of the regulatory model. For example, one 1922 missionary survey found that about half of cities and towns in the provinces studied taxed prostitution.39 In my own fieldwork I found that, in the 1920s and 1930s, thirty-seven out of ninety-four county seats in Guangdong province taxed prostitution.40 More broadly, my research leads me to believe that county governments in many parts of the country licensed, zoned, and taxed prostitution, but probably did not regulate the brothels internally or establish their own rescue homes.

New meanings and consequences of regulation in China The regulatory regime that was established in China was structurally very similar to the ones in Japan and Europe from which it descended. But the regime also had some distinctive features that developed out of its particular time and place, and it also had some different implications from the European systems because of the social and legal context in China.

Structural divergences from the European and Japanese models The basic regulatory structure in China was quite similar to that of Japan and some of the European models, with two exceptions. First, rather than having a large morals bureaucracy as in Paris, the Chinese system, like that of Japan and the United Kingdom, relied on police precincts and the ordinary court system to do its work. However, the Chinese system was even more minimal in that it did not have a system of lock hospitals devoted to the treatment of venereal disease. That is to say, if prostitutes were tested at all, and if they were found to be ill, then they were likely to lose their licenses; but cities did not incarcerate them in venereal disease hospitals. Indeed, sometimes cities did not have separate venereal disease clinics to conduct inspections and treatment. Rather, if prostitutes were examined and treated at all, it was either in the brothels or inside existing municipal hospitals. In short, the Chinese local governments most often did not commit the same high level of resources to the regulatory system that we see in some other countries. In addition, the absence of lock hospitals also

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may indicate that in China venereal disease was less stigmatized, and perhaps even simply considered to be less of a medical and social problem, than in other parts of the world. This is an interesting contrast with the bio-medical focus of prostitution regulation in postwar Japan and Korea, as Robert Kramm discusses in his chapter of this book, and more in line with the short-lived American approach to regulation described in Jessica Pliley’s chapter. The second important structural difference was China’s inclusion of the jiliangsuo, or prostitute rescue home, as an integral part of the system of regulation. To my knowledge, these sorts of police-run institutions for former prostitutes were not formal parts of the regulatory apparatus in Europe, Japan, or the United States. Of course prostitute rescue organizations did flourish in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in those places, but such homes were usually religious in nature, taking the form, for example, of convents or missionary-run rescue organizations. Examples of such religious organizations in Europe include Catholic convents for former prostitutes; halfway houses for reformed prostitutes such as the Maison du Bon Pasteur in nineteenth-century Paris; Christian reform institutions such as Magdalenes; evangelical Protestant homes for unwed mothers such as the Florence Crittenton Homes and those operated by the Salvation Army; and other refuges for poor and destitute women.41 Similarly, in Japan, Tokyo’s Jiaikan, established at the end of the nineteenth century, was a missionary-run industrial school funded by missionary Charles Crittenton of Florence Crittenton Home fame.42 In these countries, the state criminal justice systems also had homes for delinquent girls who may or may not have engaged in prostitution or other sexual misconduct, but they were not conceptualized as part of the system of prostitution regulation.43 In China, however, the homes were secular institutions run by the police as part of the regulatory structure; that is to say, they were state institutions conceived of as part of the regulatory system, rather than social organizations working against the state and its regulatory system. As a result, rather than working for Christian conversion or spiritual salvation, the goal of the jiliangsuo was to teach prostitutes discipline and economic and wifely skills so that they could marry and, in a rather magical way of thinking, therefore never return to prostitution. Of course, a significant number of prostitutes were already married, and some were sold, pawned, or pimped by their husbands or marital families.44 But, in any case, marriage was seen as the antidote to a life of prostitution, and the police therefore took responsibility for marrying the former prostitutes off to single men of sufficient means who promised not to return them to the brothels. They did this by posting

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photos of the women outside the jiliangsuo for prospective husbands to choose from, and in some cases by having public, open calls for marriage to women in the institution.45 This twentieth-century innovation carried on an imperial-era practice of the “official matchmaker,” a local government official who married off women whose husbands had been convicted of crimes for which punishment was mandatory divorce.46 Although the jiliangsuo were secular, they were largely based on an evangelical Protestant Anglo-American missionary institution,47 the Door of Hope Mission (DHM) in colonial Shanghai.48 In fact, the DHM’s Chinese name was Jiliangsuo (literally, “place of relief for the virtuous”), and that name subsequently became the generic Chinese word for prostitute rescue organizations. However, missionaries neither helped found nor worked in the police-run homes around China. The model diffused throughout the country because Tianjin and Beijing municipal police copied the DHM’s Chinese-language regulations in their own jiliangsuo regulations of 1906–7, which served as a model for other cities. Further, in 1907 and 1908, DHM leaders and the US Consulate in Shanghai lobbied Chinese officials in surrounding Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces to establish jiliangsuo in the cities where they regulated prostitution. Once Viceroy Duan Fang, one of the important Manchu proponents of the New Policy reforms, took up the cause and the institutions were established in this rich and important area’s big cities, the model spread throughout the country.49 Some of the jiliangsuo founded around this time (for example, in Chengdu, Hangzhou, and Beijing) started out as joint (secular) gentry/official ventures, but the gentry component was soon lost as the police claimed them as part of the regulatory system. The model continued to spread even after the demise of the Qing dynasty and the founding of the Republic of China.

Implications for women’s autonomy In addition to these structural ways in which the Chinese regulatory system differed from some of its forebears, we should also note how China’s social and legal context changed the implications of prostitution regulation in the sense that it much more severely limited the independence and agency of the women working as prostitutes. Euro-American critics of regulation in Europe attacked it on the grounds that it impinged upon women’s civil rights by leaving them to the depredations of the independent morals bureaucracy in France, by leaving even “virtuous” women open to inscription on the prostitution rolls simply upon police suspicion, and so on. But these arguments are all predicated on the idea that women had civil rights,

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which in China they (and men, for that matter) really did not have at the turn of the twentieth century. Women were, essentially, not even legal persons: not only could they not own property, they were more or less treated as the property of their fathers, husbands, or sons, who were assumed to have the right to transfer women’s ownership as they liked.50 As a result, male relatives could, and did, sell, pawn, or indenture women under their control into prostitution for years at a time, and the contracts they signed to do so were enforced by the state. This is quite different from the French and British regulatory systems where women drifted onto and off of the inscription rolls more easily of their own accord, particularly those like the filles en carte who were individually licensed rather than working in brothels. In contrast, most prostitutes in China could not easily break their contracts with brothels, and prostitution was only legal in brothels. The bottom line here is that, just as in Japan where women’s legal status was similar, in China the system of prostitution regulation put local governments into the business of locking women and girls into legally sanctioned prostitution, with little regard for the women’s wishes.51 The only possible exit from a valid contract was escape to a jiliangsuo, which was not as easy as it might seem, both because it was hard for prostitutes to prove they had been abused or forced into prostitution, and because space in the homes was so limited.

Motivations for choosing a regulatory strategy The last divergence from the European and Japanese models of regulation that I would like to consider here is the motivations and underlying purposes of the prostitution regulation system in China. In the European cases, whether in Europe or in the European empires, it seems clear that the public health imperative was quite strong, the idea being that either the national body or the empire was weakened by the spread of venereal disease through prostitution. Certainly there were secondary goals at work as well having to do with social control and increased state control over unruly women and sexuality more generally, and there was also some mention of making prostitution more humane by protecting prostitutes through regulation. Japanese regulation began as a response to pressure from Euro-American armed forces concerned with the health of their troops, but then took on a life of its own with indigenous supporters. To Meiji reformers prostitution was not only a public health issue, but also an important symbol of Japan’s transformation into a modern state with imperial ambitions of its own. In fact, the central government became highly involved in the regulatory system and derived a significant amount of revenue from it.52 Shot through

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these practices was the importance of venereal disease control; and this focus continued, as Robert Kramm shows in his chapter, into the post-war period as well. None of these impetuses seems to have driven China’s adoption of prostitution regulation. It was not intended to protect soldiers or the empire, since it was not about military prostitutes either in China or abroad. There was no sense in which the regulatory system reinforced a racial hierarchy, because most Chinese-governed cities did not have a racial hierarchy at all, least of all one reflected in regulations about prostitution. No foreign governments pressured or forced China to regulate brothels. Local officials in most cities purposely chose not to use the regulatory system to generate much tax revenue, even though they had at their disposal examples of how to do so both at home and abroad. This leads one to conclude that revenue generation was not some kind of hidden agenda in the system’s adoption. Regulations included lip-service to the goal of preventing venereal disease through conducting health inspections, but most cities held the ineffective inspections very irregularly and unenthusiastically. In addition, the social reform goal of protecting the women and girls working in brothels was undercut by the state’s enforcement of contracts that kept women there against their will. It seems to me that in the initial stages, at least, the motivating factor was one of trying to build effective state institutions at a local level. The late-Qing reformers wanted to construct a modern state in China, and their research on “best practices” in the developed world led them to believe that a modern police system ought to regulate prostitution. Therefore, they adopted the practice even though around the world it was under attack from groups – feminists, Christians, and many others – who strongly criticized it for being exploitative, sexist, and immoral, and who actually succeeded in ending prostitution regulation in much of the world during the early twentieth century. In a sense, China adopted a system that was already past its prime, thus incurring criticism for being “backwards,” when officials were in fact doing their best to be modern.53 Indeed, all the criticisms of prostitution regulation leveled at it elsewhere in the world, plus some new Chinese ones, appeared in China once the new system was in place, but officials continued to employ it even so. Confucians argued that prostitution was immoral and wasteful and was something that neither upright men nor women should engage in. Missionaries and Chinese Christians argued it was sinful. Feminists claimed that it violated women’s rights, and Marxists that it was a form of feudal/capitalist oppression. They all argued that regulation of prostitution was in essence governmental approval of it. In spite of all these attacks, local officials continued

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to defend regulation for many reasons. Although the regulatory system was not initially motivated by a search for revenue, once in place the system certainly created fiscal incentives for local governments to continue regulation. In a minority of Chinese cities, such as Guangzhou, regulation came over time to produce revenue that municipal governments used to engage in local state-building projects such as road-building, public schools, universities, and militias. Indeed the Guangzhou mayor openly announced in 1922 that the city could not possibly close the brothels since prostitution tax revenues made up nearly a third of municipal revenues at that time.54 In most cities, though, prostitution tax revenues were not nearly so large; nevertheless, they still had come to be of great importance to the police, whose budgets relied on those revenues earmarked for them. Regulation also created sources of kickbacks and other corrupt income for individual officials.55 Moreover, bureaucrats and police were naturally loath to give up control of anything once they had it. Finally, some local officials continued to believe that regulation was the most modern way to reduce the harm caused by prostitution, in spite of the naysayers’ arguments. Thus while the national government did technically ban prostitution from 1928 to 1934, it was only able to obtain compliance with the ban in the capital city, Nanjing, and a few other cities in the provinces immediately adjacent to it.56 Nearly every other locality in China not under Communist rule during that period persisted in regulating prostitution, sometimes with brief periods of prohibition, until the Japanese occupation (1937–1945). It is difficult to obtain information about prostitution during the occupation, although it is certain that Japanese established so-called “comfort stations” of prostitutes in service to Japanese troops in many cities as they did elsewhere in their empire. In some unoccupied cities, regulation of prostitution continued under Guomindang rule through this period. And indeed after the Guomindang’s return to power in 1945, regulation once again became the predominant approach to dealing with prostitution in the areas the regime controlled. One peculiar effect of the Guomindang’s persistence in relying on this strategy for dealing with prostitution for so long was that by the 1930s the brothel-based regulatory system ceased to reflect the realities of commercial sex work, which increasingly moved to many new kinds of unreachable venues such as tea houses, dance halls, and tour guide companies.57 In addition, as the “modern girl” ideal of femininity became more prevalent in urban China during the 1930s, respectable young women regularly took up kinds of behavior that under the regulatory regime could get them arrested for suspicion of engaging in unlicensed prostitution: going out on the streets alone, going on unchaperoned dates with men, spending

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the night at a hotel, working as waitresses in restaurants and teahouses.58 Local governments and police sometimes tried unsuccessfully to stop the tide of evolving gender roles through political/social campaigns such as one against women singers and restaurant hostesses, and another in the mid1930s against “strange dress” (qizhuang yifu), targeting women’s clothing such as sleeveless tops or any clothing deemed to be gender-bending in some way.59 The regulatory system thus ended up evolving into a kind of social conservatism straining to hold back the tide of changing sexual and gendered behavior. It is because of these and similar developments that, in the end, regulated prostitution also became to the Chinese Communist Party a symbol of the inherent “feudalism” of the Guomindang regime, one of many institutions and practices that guaranteed China’s “backwardness” and exploitation in the international sphere. This was why abolishing legalized prostitution was one of the first major political efforts undertaken by the new Party/State after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Ironically, the regulatory system came, over the course of forty-five years of adaptation to the local Chinese context, to be identified strongly with the forces of social and political conservatism, irrationality, and unchanging tradition, when in fact it was a relatively new phenomenon initially embraced by modernizing state-builders attempting to bring China into conformity with what had seemed to be the international best practices of the time. Notes 1 Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), xvi; Alain Corbin, Women for Hire:  Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1990). On venereal disease as a threat to the troops and to the nation, see Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics:  Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New  York:  Routledge, 2003); Susan P. Conner, “Politics, Prostitution, and the Pox in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1799,” Journal of Social History 22, no. 4 (1989); and Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1986). 2 Corbin, Women for Hire, 24; Harsin, Policing Prostitution. 3 Gibson, Prostitution and the State, 24. 4 Laurie Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2–3; Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 367–8. 5 Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics.

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6 Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 71–2. 7 Christelle Taraud, La prostitution coloniale:  Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc (1830–1962) (Paris: Payot, 2003); Trong Phung Vu and Shaun K. Malarney, Luc Xi: Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi (Honolulu:  University of Hawai’i Press, 2011); Annick Guénel, “Prostitution, maladies vénériennes et médecine coloniale au Vietnam de la conquête française à la guerre d’indépendance,” in Vietnamese Society in Transition:  The Daily Politics of Reform and Change, ed. John Kleinen (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2001). 8 Marie-Corine Rodriguez, “ ‘L’administration de la prostitution’:  Réglementation et contrôle social au Vietnam pendant la période coloniale,” in Vietnamese Society in Transition, ed. John Kleinen (Amsterdam:  Het Spinhuis, 2001); Philip Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San:  Prostitution in Singapore, 1870–1940 (Singapore and New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1993); Norman Miners, Hong Kong Under Imperial Rule, 1912–1941 (Hong Kong and New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1987); Guénel, “Prostitution, maladies vénériennes.” 9 Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 10 While I  will not treat it in depth here, prostitution was taxed and regulated in the French Concession and Japanese Concession in Tianjin, although apparently not in the British, American, German, or Russian Concessions. See Tianjin shi difang zhi bianxiu weiyuan hui, ed. Tianjin tongzhi fuzhi:  zujie, vol. fu zhi:  zujie (Tianjin: Tianjin shehui kexue yuan chuban she, 1996), 404–5. I have not found evidence of this in other treaty ports, interestingly. 11 Christian Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai, trans. Noel Castelino (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001), 276–9, 316; Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures:  Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 205–6. 12 On the Shanghai municipal government resisting prostitution regulation because it was foreign in origin, see Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, 286–8. 13 On prostitution in pre-Meiji Japan, see Amy B. Stanley, “Pinning Down the Floating World: Prostitution in Provincial Japan, 1600–1868” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2007); Elizabeth Dorn Lublin, Reforming Japan: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in the Meiji Period (Honolulu:  University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), 103; Cecilia Segawa Seigle, Yoshiwara:  The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 23–39. 14 On the early regulation of prostitution in Meiji Japan, see Seigle, Yoshiwara, 220; Susan Burns, “Bodies and Borders: Syphilis, Prostitution and the Nation in Japan, 1860–1890,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal English Supplement 15 (1998): 16; Lublin, Reforming Japan, 103; Sheldon Garon, “The World’s Oldest Debate? Prostitution and the State in Imperial Japan, 1900–1945,” American Historical Review 98, no. 3 (June 1993). 15 D. Eleanor Westney, Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer of Western Organizational Patterns to Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 46. 16 Garon, “World’s Oldest Debate.”

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17 On the Qing gendarmerie in Beijing, see Alison J. Dray-Novey, “The Twilight of the Beijing Gendarmerie 1900–1924,” Modern China 33, no. 3 (2007). 18 David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing:  City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 67–8; Douglas R. Reynolds, China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1993), 165–6. 19 Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, 68. 20 Stephen R. MacKinnon, Power and Politics in Late Imperial China: Yuan Shi-kai in Beijing and Tianjin, 1901–1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 152, 154, 155. 21 Han Yanlong and Su Yigong, eds., Zhongguo jindai jingcha shi, Vol. 1 (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chuban she, 2000), 124, 129; Reynolds, China, 168. 22 Han Yanlong and Su Yigong, Zhongguo jindai, 131–3. 23 Jing shi xun jing zong ting, Jing shi jing cha fa ling hui zuan (Beijing: Jing shi xun jing zong ting, 1910); Tianjin shi gongan ju, ed., Tianjin tong zhi – Gongan zhi – jiu jingcha juan (lanben) (Tianjin: Tianjin shi gongan ju, 1998), 36. 24 Shao Yong, Zhongguo jindai jinü shi (Shanghai:  Shanghai renmin chuban she, 2005), 113. 25 Han Yanlong and Su Yigong, Zhongguo jindai, 156–8. 26 Examples of Chinese local officials who studied in Japan include Zhou Shanpei in Chengdu and Tang Jiyao in Yunnan province. See Kristin E. Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center:  Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2000); Donald S. Sutton, Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic: The Yunnan Army, 1905–25 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980). 27 On the treatment of women and girls in late imperial and Republican China, see, for example, Sue Ellen Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise:  Prostitution in China, 1860–1936 (New  York:  Harrington Park Press, 1985) and Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, eds., Women and Chinese Patriarchy:  Submission, Servitude, and Escape (Hong Kong and London; Atlantic Highlands: Hong Kong University Press and Zed Books, 1994). 28 League of Nations, Commission of Enquiry into Traffic in Women and Children in the East. Report to the Council, Series of League of Nations publications: iv. Social. 1932. iv. 8 (Geneva: League of Nations, 1933), 493, 520–7. 29 On the formation and history of debased status groups in China, see Anders Hansson, Chinese Outcasts: Discrimination and Emancipation in Late Imperial China (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1996) and Matthew Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), ­chapter 6. 30 On the importance of brothels in male homosocial behavior in Republican China, see Virgil K.Y. Ho, Understanding Canton:  Rethinking Popular Culture in the Republican Period (Oxford and New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2005), and Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures. 31 Elizabeth. J. Remick, “Police-Run Brothels in Republican Kunming,” Modern China 33, no. 4 (2007). 32 This summary of the national model comes from my own observations as well as the work of other scholars. See Shan Guangnai, Zhongguo changji: guoqu he xianzai (Beijing: Falü chubanshe, 1995), especially 192ff.; Zhang Chao, Minguo changji

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shengshuai (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chuban she, 2009); and the classic work on the history of prostitution in China, Wang Shunu, Zhongguo changji shi (reprint of 1932 edition) (Beijing: Tuanjie chuban she, 2004). 33 On male prostitution and its suppression in nineteenth-century China, see Shan Guangnai, Zhongguo changji, 96–7. 34 See Elizabeth J. Remick, “Prostitution Taxes and Local State Building in Republican China,” Modern China 29, no. 1 (2003); Elizabeth J. Remick, Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 35 Remick, Regulating Prostitution, 89. 36 Ibid., ­chapter 5. 37 Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu, 128–33. 38 Remick, “Prostitution Taxes,” 45–6. 39 Milton T. Stauffer, Tsinforn C. Wong, and M. Gardner Tewksbury, The Christian Occupation of China: A General Survey of the Numerical Strength and Geographical Distributon [sic] of the Christian Forces in China, Made by the Special Committee on Survey and Occupation, China Continuation Committee, 1918–1921 (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1979; repr. of the 1922 edn published by the China Continuation Committee, Shanghai), 396. 40 On prostitution taxes in Guangdong province, see Su Shijie, ed., Guangdong caizhengting ge xiang shuijuan zhengshou zhangcheng (Guangzhou:  Guangdong caizhengting, 1936), 68–9; Guangdong caizheng tepaiyuan gongshu and Guangdongsheng zhengfu caizhengting, eds., Guangdongsheng caizheng jishi (Guangzhou: Guangdongsheng zhengfu caizhengting, 1934), 951ff.; and Remick, “Prostitution Taxes.” 41 Harsin, Policing Prostitution, 61, 67fn; Sherrill Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums Since 1500: From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1992); Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). 42 Lublin, Reforming Japan, 109–25. 43 On homes for delinquent girls in the United States, for example, see Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters:  Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 44 Remick, “Police-Run Brothels,” 439. 45 On open searches for men to marry jiliangsuo inmates in Hangzhou, see Remick, Regulating Prostitution, ­chapter 5. 46 On the official matchmaker in late imperial Chinese local government, see Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society, 282. 47 This is not to say that there was no Chinese precedent for rescue homes. China has a long history of philanthropic homes for the needy, including some Confucian institutions for abused women and chaste widows who did not wish to remarry. One such famous institution was the Guangren Tang in Tianjin. See Vivienne B. Shue, “The Quality of Mercy:  Confucian Charity and the Mixed Metaphors of Modernity in Tianjin,” Modern China 32, no. 4 (2006):  411–52; Ruth Rogaski, “Beyond Benevolence: A Confucian Women’s Shelter in Treaty-Port China,” Journal of Women’s History 8, no. 4 (1997): 54–90.

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48 On the Door of Hope Mission in Shanghai, see Sue Ellen Gronewold, “Encountering Hope: The Door of Hope Mission in Shanghai and Taipei 1900–1976” (PhD Thesis, Columbia University, 1996). 49 Huang Hongshan, “Qingmo jiliangsuo de chuxian yu tuixing,” Xuexi yu tansuo 3 (2009): 225. 50 Jaschok and Miers, Women and Chinese Patriarchy. 51 Garon, “World’s Oldest Debate.” 52 Yuki Fujime, “The Licensed Prostitution System and the Prostitution Abolition Movement in Modern Japan,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5, no. 1 (1997): 135–170. 53 Donna Guy makes a similar point with regard to Argentina’s late adoption of prostitution regulation. See Donna J. Guy, “White Slavery, Public Health, and the Socialist Position on Legalized Prostitution in Argentina, 1913–1936,” Latin American Research Review 23, no. 3 (1988): 60–80. 54 Remick, Regulating Prostitution, 135. 55 Remick, “Prostitution Taxes”; Remick, “Police-Run Brothels.” 56 Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, 263–4, 288. 57 On the rise of casual sex work in Shanghai, see Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, 39–40. 58 On the “Modern Girl” in China, see Madeleine Yue Dong, “Who is Afraid of the Chinese Modern Girl?” in The Modern Girl Around the World:  Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, ed. Alys Eve Weinbaum and The Modern Girl Around the World Project (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008). 59 On the Republican-era campaigns against strange dress and on regulations banning waitresses, hostesses, and singers, see Angelina S. Chin, Bound to Emancipate: Working Women and Urban Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century China and Hong Kong (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012) and Hsu Hui-chi, Gudu xinmao: qianduhou dao kangzhanqian de Beiping chengshi xiaofei (Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 2008).

13

“Hey, GI, want pretty flower girl?” Venereal disease, sanitation, and geopolitics in US-occupied Japan and Korea, 1945–1948 Robert Kramm

In his memoirs, World War II and Korean War veteran Alton Chamberlin described his passage from the naval base in Sasebo, Japan, to the port of Pusan in Korea in May 1952 during the Korean War. In detail he remembered how he and his pals from the 97th Infantry Division were struck by the smell of Korea, which “stunk like stale shit” and “reeked of urine, feces, sweat and all other foul odors combined.” While he wondered “how people could stand it,” his companion Bill Brownly instantly remarked that “the Koreans must be very primitive and uncivilized,” which led another, George Goodboy, to conclude that Korea would be “a fucking place to have a fight for.” After they had landed in Pusan and took a stroll at Pusan’s harbor, Chamberlin continued in his memoirs: A young, barefoot, dirty faced little boy approached us. “Hey, GI, want pretty flower girl?,” he asked. “Only ten dollars. Come on. I take you to her. You have good fuck … “You like cherry girl?” the boy persisted. “I let you fuck my little sister. She number one cherry girl. I know. I fuck her myself.” Bill waved him away with his hand. “Go on, get [lost]. We don’t want any whores.” “Wait,” I said. “Let’s talk to him. I wouldn’t mind to get laid.” “Are you out of your mind?,” asked George in amazement. “We don’t want to get v.d. [venereal disease] from a dirty prostitute or a knife in the back from a communist guerrilla.” Bill agreed with him. “I’ve never been promiscuous in my life. I’m not about to lower myself now by having sex with a Korean whore.”1

In his initial, very polemic and discriminatory impression of Korea, Chamberlin followed common patterns of US military representation of the “land of the morning sun”: fetidness, dirt, filth, and a general lack of sanitation were related to Korea’s primitivism, health hazards, and oriental promiscuity. I would like to thank Sebastian Conrad, Takashi Fujitani, You Jae Lee, and Jie-Hyun Lim for their comments, critique, and suggestions that were of tremendous help to write this ­chapter – all persisting shortcomings are of course my responsibility. 290

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Commercial sex was portrayed as cheap and available, but also risky – mainly due to the absence of any moral standards and omnipresence of venereal diseases. Although this narrated incident occurred slightly beyond the temporal scope of this chapter, and was even written in retrospect after the actual event, Chamberlin’s writings were embedded into a manifest discourse that formed America’s representation of Korea since the mid-1940s. Chamberlin’s border-crossing experience and depiction, which addressed major aspects of the (sexual) encounter between the US occupiers and Japanese and Korean occupied, opens up perspectives on the formation of a new hegemonic order erected by the United States in East Asia after World War II.2 As both military occupations were established, almost simultaneously, in the late summer of 1945, hygiene and sanitation emerged as highly significant and of utmost concern for the occupiers who implemented numerous regulatory measures to administer the health and security of their personnel. As Chamberlin’s passage indicates, anxieties about the dangers of contracting communicable diseases, among which venereal disease received special attention, did circulate widely and thus linked hygiene and sanitation closely to prostitution, sexuality, and morality.3 Also during World War II, the US military focused on the dangers of venereal diseases as a serious problem of health and discipline. In anti-VD campaigns and wartime propaganda on both the home front as well as in overseas theaters of war, servicemen were warned of the dangers of u ­ ncontrolled sexual intercourse. Prostitutes and women labeled as ­promiscuous – often derogatorily called “women of low repute,” “loose women,” or just “pick-ups” – were singled out and constantly represented as vectors of venereal disease solely responsible for its spread.4 Simultaneously, regulation of female sexuality – and especially in its non-reproductive form of prostitution  – formed an integral part of military organization that aimed at providing appropriate or “safe” heteronormative recreation of young, male soldiers, which served to construct and sustain a “militarized masculinity.”5 The sexual encounter between servicemen and prostitutes, barmaids, and “pick-ups”  – far from ever being thoroughly prohibited – was thus constantly monitored and regulated in order to secure and protect the health, discipline, and morale of the army and maintain public order in the “host” society.6 Against this backdrop, this chapter explores how the regulation of venereal disease and servicemen’s sexuality functioned as important themes for the identification and representation of self and other in the encounter of occupiers and occupied in Japan and Korea in the mid and late 1940s. The closely linked issues of prostitution, hygiene, and sanitation could be mobilized to mediate cultural, social, and political differences. The regulatory

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practices thereby constituted an arena, in which various agents of the occupation regime, in cooperation with or in rejection of Japanese and Korean administrators, sought to control its military personnel and the civilian Japanese and Korean populace along three different, but intersecting foci of police, health, and morality. Comparing, linking, and contrasting the occupation regime’s regulatory practices in occupied Japan and Korea, such reconnaissance offers perspectives on an entangled history in the making of a regional hierarchy in East Asia in which sexuality and hygiene had been and continued to be key categories to define one’s position in the postwar period during the early years of the Cold War.

Occupations and prostitution: Japan and Korea in the early Cold War The history of the occupations of Japan and Korea has been subject to various, often conflicting interpretations, but are rarely thought together as an entangled history. The occupation of Korea (1945–8) under Lt. General John R. Hodge and the United States Army Forces in Korea (USAFIK) receives rather little attention and is commonly subsumed under the liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule.7 The over seven-year-long occupation of Japan (1945–52), however, led by the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP) General Douglas MacArthur and its General Headquarters, has been much more widely explored and often portrayed alternatively as a benevolent and successful democratization and modernization project, or as a failure of the United States’ democratic mission in Japan and Asia that merely empowered and supported a conservative regime characterized by anti-communism and an elitist, authoritarian rule.8 More critical approaches have tried to overcome such one-dimensional perspectives by highlighting a “reversed course” in the late 1940s, which turned earlier ambitious occupation policies of democratization and demilitarization into a second phase of US Cold War containment that incorporated Japan into a postwar sphere of US hegemony.9 The occupation of Korea experienced no such reversed course, but was from the outset part of US-dominated Cold War planning that resulted in the division of Korea.10 The ruling US Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) substituted the Japanese colonial administration and established, in contrast to the occupation of Japan with a still functioning civil government and bureaucracy, its own military-governmental body of rule that relied heavily on the former colonial administrative structure, its economy, police system, and elites.11 Colonialism’s continuity also echoed from the Western Allies’ rhetoric of the Cairo Declaration from 1943 that

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stipulated Korea’s freedom and independence “in due course.”12 Even after its liberation from Japanese colonial rule, Korea was placed in what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called “an imaginary waiting room of history” – a running trope of colonial discourse  – that relegated Korea to a status of “not yet” modernized enough to govern itself in the immediate postwar era.13 In spite of these differences, Japan and the southern part of Korea became a laboratory for US-style democracy and nation-building as well as anti-communist containment (and in Korea even a rollback) policy.14 This policy of containment in East Asia, as Bruce Cumings has repeatedly argued, was following a world-economy logic, placing Japan and Korea in “Dean Acheson’s metaphor of a ‘great crescent’ stretching from Japan through Southeast Asia and around India.”15 Within this framework, Japan and Korea would, despite the end of the Japanese empire, still be tightly linked together along “a world-system conception of multiple, overlapping, tripartite hierarchies: Japan … would underpin regional core systems, and help reintegrate peripheral areas as exclusive-held empires disintegrated.”16 This regional model that became effective in the late 1940s, but resembled old imperial formations such as the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” as envisioned during the peak of Japan’s empire,17 was designed to create an anti-communist network in East Asia, tightened Japan’s dependency toward the United States, but also helped Japan’s reconstruction, which according to American planners needed a hinterland for material resources and export markets.18 However, I  want to propose that such a regional hierarchization between the United States, Japan, and Korea did not emerge with the political economy of the Cold War during the late 1940s and early 1950s alone, but was already exercised from the very beginning of the occupation of the two East Asian countries. Following Bruce Cuming’s adoption of Immanuel Wallerstein’s metaphor of a world-system model of center and periphery, I contend that the imagery of Japan and Korea from the occupiers’ “core” perspective constructed a quite similar hierarchized entanglement in the regulation of venereal disease, sexuality, and prostitution. My argument thus relies on Edward Said’s observation that “imperialism and the culture associated with it affirm both the primacy of geography and an ideology about the control of territory.”19 The narratives prevalent in the occupation military documents that addressed the threat of venereal disease, the decline of (sexual) morality, and the need for military discipline usually in close connection to hygiene and sanitation in Japan and Korea, portrayed both countries as eroticized yet hazardous places, and took representative control of the occupied

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territory.20 Ironically, American representations of Korea in the immediate postwar period were quite similar to those of Japanese administrators, ethnographers, and journalists during the colonial period, who constructed Korea’s difference to the Japanese metropole along signifiers of cleanliness, hygiene and health hazard, and depicted Korea as dirty, filthy, and backward in contrast to Japan’s supposedly more modern health standards.21 The question remains open as to whether the US occupiers directly (or indirectly) referred to former Japanese rhetoric, but these lingering continuities nevertheless show how powerful representations of hygiene and sanitation can be for what Frederic Cooper and Ann Stoler have called the “dialectics of inclusion and exclusion” between metropole and colony.22 However, the regional evaluation of Korea and Japan, which could from time to time result in a hierarchization between both East Asian countries, has a shared history grounded in an observing, colonizing “gaze” from the metropole – in this case, the United States.23 These imageries translated into the concepts and practices of venereal disease control and regulation of sexual encounter, and vice versa. As many, mostly feminist and investigative-journalist studies have shown, from the very outset of the occupation prostitution formed the most intimate form of the highly racialized and sexualized relationships between the occupiers and occupied.24 Immediately after Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, Japanese authorities, in close cooperation with Japanese entrepreneurs of the entertainment industry, initiated a broad prostitution scheme to “comfort” the occupiers. Fear of violent revenge and the possible rape of Japanese women prompted the construction of a so-called “female floodwall” (onna no bōhatei) as a protective zone.25 It included recreational facilities (ian shisetsu), mainly brothels, but also bars, cabarets, dance halls, and restaurants to separate the occupation forces from the Japanese population. In Korea, Japanese colonial administrators were similarly eager to protect Japanese citizens and conceptualized prostitution as a dividing but comforting boundary between the occupiers and the Japanese citizens repatriating to Japan from the Korean peninsula.26 Immediate post-defeat prostitution in Japan and Korea was a male dominated enterprise, which was designed similar to Japan’s prewar licensed prostitution system that was also introduced in colonial Korea and, as Elizabeth Remick’s chapter in this volume demonstrates, exported to China.27 Prewar prostitution constituted a heteronormative institution under state control to regulate social hygiene, preserve public peace (chian) and morality (fūzoku), protect female middleand upper-class reproductive sexualities, while simultaneously channeling

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male sexual desire through the deliberate use of the bodies of women from the lowest social strata.28 The system peaked in the infamous wartime mobilization of military comfort women (jūgun ianfu) during World War II that enslaved mostly young women from Japan’s colonies into sexual service for the Japanese Imperial Army.29 Brothels and other recreational facilities established by Japanese authorities after the war were not objected to by the occupation regime, and American servicemen frequently and massively visited and patronized these sites. Although attempts were made to abolish the licensed prostitution system in Japan, which was considered by the occupiers to be “in contravention of the ideals of democracy and inconsistent with the development of individual freedom,”30 prostitution never vanished.31 On the contrary, prostitution even flourished outside fixed establishments as street prostitution and women labeled as “streetwalkers,” “pan pan girls,” “geisha girls,” or “kisaeng girls” dwelled in former red light districts, parks, railway underpasses, and near military camps.32 The occupation authorities tried to manage these new and “clandestine” forms of prostitution; at stake were the health, stability and reputation of the occupation troops and the legitimacy of their democratic “mission” in Japan and Korea.33 Various branches of the occupation regime were involved in the regulation of venereal d ­ isease: military commanders, chaplains, and physicians made efforts to educate the troops and by teaching military morale and discipline in lectures and seminars. In order to prevent the spread of venereal diseases military police units patrolled red light districts, raided brothels, and enforced hospitalization of prostitutes in VD clinics. Military medical departments and SCAP’s Public Health and Welfare section (PHW) set up prophylactic stations, developed new medical surveillance systems, and introduced rehabilitation facilities to extend a net of venereal disease control to calculate and reduce the possibility of relapsed contractions.

Moralizing the soldier’s body: education, VD prevention and hygienic regulations In a “unique manner,” Brigadier General W.A. Beiderlinden wrote in a report to the Character Guidance Council of SCAP’s General Headquarters, were US servicemen instructed in venereal disease control and hygiene at the Eighth Army Replacement Training Center in Atsugi, Japan. The center built a Venereal Disease Museum that consisted of four rooms, through which servicemen toured, where they might attend lectures and view charts and posters that outlined the type and number of venereal diseases, their

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contraction and treatment. In one room, fifteen wax figures of about three feet tall displayed the various stages of venereal diseases. In another room the center set up “a typically Oriental room” with “a voluptuous figure of a Japanese women in a semi-reclining position.” Against the backdrop of this stage and along various drawings, the museum’s guiding instructor explained to servicemen the characteristics of the prostitution business and highlighted the vast number and frequency of the prostitute’s customers (the prostitute herself was personified with the name Kimiko). The accompanying lecture stressed the high chance of contracting a venereal disease infection from Kimiko, who was quoted: “Last night I had ten friends. One of them had VD, but of course I didn’t know it.” Kimiko, the lecture continued, infected the next nine friends, in return. The show ended with a comic strip of “Pvt. John Doe,” who was “getting shot with a very large needle,” and the depiction of Kimiko getting arrested together with nine other girls by the Military Police and sent to a venereal disease hospital for health inspection and treatment.34 The Venereal Disease Museum taught the moral that venereal disease could be acquired only through sexual contact and that servicemen should practice abstinence because they “don’t need a woman twice a week or twice a month or twice a year to keep healthy.”35 Still, if they did want to risk exposing themselves, the servicemen should learn the proper precautions, “because: 9 of 10 Japanese women you can pick up have VD.”36 Women – and especially in their role as prostitutes and “pick-ups” – were made singularly responsible for the spread of venereal diseases. This perception echoed a more general image of Japan constructed in this museum, which was signified by the “Oriental room” and its inhabitant – the “voluptuous” Kimiko – both of which portrayed Japan along orientalist fantasies as a sexualized and promiscuous country, where sexual opportunities were cheap, and available everywhere.37 According to this logic, Japan bore some risk for the occupier’s health due to a supposed promiscuous carelessness and ignorance resulting from the lack of public health education and an obsolete health system. The dangerous results, however, could supposedly be controlled through moral and medical precautions provided by the occupation army. In Korea, US servicemen were educated in a less picturesque manner. In a detailed compilation of venereal disease lecture manuals provided by the USAFIK, instructors were informed that venereal disease control was not a medical or moral-religious matter alone, but one of military discipline, character, and readiness. In military jargon, venereal diseases’ most basic cause – “promiscuity in sexual relations” – was to be “attacked.” In the

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attempt to foster a healthy, responsible, self-disciplined, and heteronormative masculine character, servicemen were to be lectured on the basics of sexuality, hygiene, morality, and citizenship. Sex itself, as the outline put it, was not sinful as long as it was practiced by married couples to create an emotional bond, strengthen domesticity and family values through love, trust, and honor, and sought reproduction. Extra-marital sex, however, was considered selfish, unfair, and dishonest, and its “momentary pleasure will usually end in disgust and disillusion.” Sex would not be necessary to keep healthy and to affirm soldierly masculinity, which was achieved through an “inner struggle” to master one’s sexual urge, while “athletics, sports and religious activities” were stressed to help overcome pent-up sexual desire. The aim of every man should be to live a healthy, honest, and “clean life” as a “valuable asset to the nation,” a life that would require sacrifices, but shall result in a future of trust, good reputation, health, stability, and strength, both for the individual and the community, because:  “The new world demands character.” Thus character building would be achieved through effort and hard and continuous labor, a necessity for discipline and leadership.38 An attached lecture titled “Treatment of Venereal Disease and its Limitations” repeated the dangers of venereal disease through uncontrolled sexual intercourse and located its predominant source again in the orientalized body of the female prostitute, because the “incidence of venereal disease among prostitutes in Korea is … almost 100%.” Moreover, a “survey among Kaesong [kisaeng] girls and waitresses revealed about 60% of them to be infected with one or more venereal diseases” and therefore would make an infection most likely if any fraternization occurred. Although the Army would offer protection against venereal disease to a certain extent by providing prophylaxis, the lecture emphasized the need for the servicemen’s self-regulatory practices: at best, servicemen should be continent, or apply all provided preventive measures seriously. To make continence easier, the lecture designed for troops stationed in Korea highlighted abstinence from alcohol, which was supposed “to weaken the individual’s resistance, dull his senses, blur his judgment.” Again, it was stressed that military masculinity of the citizen-soldier would not rely on sexual and alcoholic excess, but derived his honor from discipline and character, which was achieved through hard work, responsibility, and self-discipline.39 The language applied also created a sense of militarized masculinity in these lectures. Another lecture’s title, “The Eternal Fight,” already set the program, which was developed along four subchapters headlined “The Front,” “Reconnaissance,” “Casualties,” and “Weapons of Defense,” respectively. The

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education against venereal disease thereby heavily relied on military tactical terminology that constructed the image of a “tough fight” against a disease at a “front,” which “is everywhere, in front of us, behind us, and especially within us.” The lecture created an omnipresent threat of venereal disease as a perfidious and sneaky enemy: “The strategy of our enemy, the forces of evil, in this battle for personal purity is usually camouflaged. Therefore we need advance patrols to seek him out and prepare for a later attack.” Self-control, discipline, commitment to the nuclear family, religious faith, and patriotism were declared the “weapons of defense” and unmistakably summed up that the United States “possess the best weapons of any nation on the face of the globe” to “annihilate and destroy the forces of evil.”40 US occupying forces presented women of both occupied countries as the source of venereal disease, who would bear especially high risk of venereal infection due to low sanitary standards and lack of education. Moreover, Japan and Korea were both portrayed along the lines of established orientalist clichés as highly sexualized countries providing unlimited and ubiquitous sexual opportunities that are simultaneously adventurous and hazardous: both were teasing and thereby endangering the troops’ health, morality, and discipline, but they also posed a danger to American families, homes, and communities. To control the sexual relations, the occupation regime preached continence to its servicemen as the safest method to stay “clean,” but conceded that in case of “sexual exposure” one should make use of all medical prophylactic tools provided thoroughly. Especially in Korea, it was repeatedly emphasized to be abstinent from alcohol and to focus on athletics and religious practices in order to build a manly, self-disciplined, and responsible character. This approach resonated with a broader attempt to develop and celebrate a desired trustworthy and stable male body embedded in Cold War ideology to foster American values of Judeo-Christian morality, middle-class domesticity, and democracy. Stability, responsibility, and good health were repeatedly stressed as “common sense” of the soldier, which had the normalizing effect to establish a heteronormative subjectivity of the male soldier, who should be responsible to his wife (present or future) and family as well as to the reputation of the Army, the United States, and the “free world.” Although such ideals were hardly ever achieved, their propagation was nevertheless effectual. As the anecdote by Alton Chamberlin cited above shows, his companions were rejecting the offer of commercial sex by following the US Army’s governing logic that Korean prostitutes would be venereally infected and allegedly pose as much of a danger to them as a communist guerilla might. The male soldiers’ heterosexual engagements were thus limited by the presumption that sex had

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to be clean and safe and soldiers were educated in self-regulatory practices to live up to proposed American ideals.

Prophylaxis and surveillance: pro stations and VD contact tracing In order to facilitate clean and secure sexual contacts between the occupiers and the occupied, the medical departments and Public Health and Welfare Section (PHW) of the occupation regime developed and maintained various regulatory practices. Alongside the moralizing lectures, the PHW fostered medical regulation of venereal disease and sexuality in Japan and Korea, yet with some differences in both countries. However, these regulations followed the same consistent heteronormative logic according to which sexual encounters between servicemen and women of the occupied societies could hardly be fully avoided, but should rather be closely administered to sanitize the bodies and sexualities of both occupied and occupier. As taught in hygiene lectures on venereal disease, servicemen were compelled to apply “mechanical prophylaxis” (condoms) during and “chemical prophylaxis” (such as ointments containing mercury chloride) after every “sexual exposure,” which could be found in distributed, portable pro kits. Prophylaxis was also available in prophylactic stations erected in both Japan and Korea almost immediately upon arrival of the occupation forces in military units, brothels, and red light districts.41 Prophylactic stations – in military jargon called pro stations – were an intimate place off limits to nonoccupation personnel and equipped with sinks, toilets, various drugs, and sanitary products. Their walls were covered with hygienic instructions, images of venereal disease and sex education and anti-VD-propaganda posters. They were thus a space in the military health regime where discursive regulations met with the everyday hygienic physical practices – the concrete sanitation and protection of the male soldier body and his genitals. Through the architectonic arrangement of sanitary artifacts, health care instructions, and the visibility of venereal disease and the dangers ascribed to them, prophylactic stations constituted a panoptic institution in the occupiers’ health regime, in which the soldierly body was disciplined by the surveillance of the personally absent yet symbolic omnipresent gaze of the military health regime.42 While pictures of VD-infections and the anti-VD posters displayed in the pro stations warned of the hazards of uncontrolled sexual intercourse – a supposedly inevitable consequence due to the constant availability of prostitutes or “pick-ups”  – and created a dangerous aura of venereal disease, the self-proclaimed modern and scientific prophylaxis propagated in the stations simultaneously promised security and

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protection. The normalizing effect on the soldierly body of the prophylactic station’s regulatory technique was twofold: first, it categorized the soldier’s body in “healthy” or “sick” terms, and, second, it aimed to control and sanitize sex for servicemen. The introduction of a new medical report system for venereal diseases called VD contact tracing constituted another medical regulatory practice. Its use in the occupied civilian societies functioned contrary to the pro stations, not hidden in private but in public to create a thorough transparency of the occupied people and a public reading of the putatively diseased bodies of the occupied. For its implementation in Japan, SCAP and members of the PHW demanded the cooperation of Japanese health administrators, sometimes even appreciated their expertise, and appropriated existing institutions, equipment, methods in venereal disease control and public health communication channels.43 In Korea, by contrast, VD contact tracing was not in civilian use, apparently because occupation forces considered the Korean health system not stable and trustworthy. However, even in Japan the PHW was nevertheless convinced that there was a general lack in the local health system, which was apparently only efficient to control licensed prostitution and believed to be ineffective in treating “clandestine” street prostitution.44 As early as October 1945 Lt. Col. James H. Gordon, head of the preventive medicine department of the PHW, noted in a memorandum that “the present organization and functioning of the program of venereal disease control is wholly inadequate to prevent the spread of venereal disease in the civilian population and the occupation forces,” and the “most pressing needs are for modern drugs and competent personnel of all types.”45 In general, the Japanese health system was repeatedly portrayed as backward and inadequate and US medical officers reported of “tragic work” done by Japanese physicians in diagnosis and treatment. They complained about the poor standards of all medical and sanitary institutions and contrasted Japan’s health system with its supposedly more scientific, rational, and modern US counterpart.46 The main reason stressed for this deficiency was the supposed ignorance of Japanese physicians toward new methods in medical treatment and surveillance to collect data on the development and spread of communicable diseases. The vast acquisition, storage, and evaluation of data documented by the PHW in memos, reports, and statistics, were regarded as proof for the modernity of the US military health system, which was especially highlighted by the perspective of US military health officers, who were apparently much more interested than their Japanese colleagues in the health of the entire population than in the welfare of the individual patient.47

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Since October 1946, the PHW ordered Japanese health authorities to notify all venereal infections to the PHW’s Venereal Disease Control Division “by name, age, sex, and full address.”48 The PHW compiled special reports, which were to be handed in monthly by all health offices of all Japanese prefectures.49 The required data included population numbers of each prefecture, number of clinics and physicians, and the numbers of venereal infections broken down by sex. For the PHW the source and development of infection were of most importance and it had to be documented, first, if the “patients” had been infected by a commercial or “clandestine” prostitute, a friend, or a wife/husband. Second, it had to be noted why, when, and where the infection had been diagnosed, and if, third, the “patient” had been treated and henceforth registered and observed.50 American occupying forces introduced contact tracing to Japan. The collection and storage of data about VD-infected patients and their contacts and the surveillance of the disease’s etiology, pathogenesis, and contagious path formed a major attempt to “measure” the occupied Japanese society and to make it more transparent for the occupation regime. In both Japan and Korea the contact tracing system was also applied within the occupation army as SCAP introduced the “Venereal Disease Contact Report Sheet” in January 1947, which mandated reporting of all cases of venereal disease among occupying personnel.51 The form sheet compelled US military physicians to list the date and time of each infection, along with the nationality and color and/or race of the “patient” and the “contact person.” It is notable that military doctors did not identify the “patient” (the male soldier) stationed in Japan by name, but rather reported him anonymously by unit and station number, whereas in Korea the soldiers were listed with full name, rank, unit and station number.52 To identify the presumably female “contact person,” however, the form sheet left significantly more space, in which every personal detail such as name, nickname, address, occupation, work place, body height, weight, as well as eye and hair color should be documented – sometimes even photographs were attached. The section on the “procurement history” prompted doctors to give full particulars on the origins of the sexual encounter: if the contact was a friend, a “pick-up,” or a prostitute; if the initial contact was made through one’s own effort or mediated through a pimp; if it was arranged in a brothel, in the unit, on the street, at a train station, or in a dance hall; and if the sexual intercourse occurred in the barracks, a home, a hotel, a brothel, a bus, an alley, or a rice paddy. Finally, the doctor asked the “patient” if he was sober or drunk, and if he applied any prophylaxis. Interestingly the questionnaire did not ask for any detail on the biological sex of the “patient”

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and the “contact person” because the distinction between the male “patient” and the female “contact” was already presupposed. This assumption was laid bare by a supplementary instructional note on the form sheet, in which the physician should inform “the patient … that the purpose of obtaining this information is to treat the girl and prevent her from infecting others.”53 Again, such utterances reproduced the anticipation that exclusively women – mostly in their role as prostitutes – formed the source for venereal disease. Furthermore, it affirmed a normalization of sex, according to which fornication between male soldiers and women of the occupied societies was accepted, who were even expected to be available as prostitutes, “pick-ups,” or girlfriends. The reporting system of contact tracing thus organized knowledge for the bureaucratic rule of the occupation regime about the occupational personnel, and, especially in Japan, also about the occupied society. The massive accumulation of data on venereal disease among the Japanese population had thereby the subtle function of surveillance and domestication. Although the focus of the reporting system was to secure the health of the occupation troops, it monitored the occupied society closely and assembled data on its population. The system of data collection furthermore integrated Japan, its people and institutions into the geopolitical sphere of US hegemony and thus closer to the US “zone of interior” by re-modeling and guiding a more “modernized” (read, Americanized) Japanese health system. In Korea, this regulatory practice was only applied within the military in order to gain local knowledge about entertainment districts and other areas with “houses of prostitution.” Apparently, US Cold War planners did not consider Korea safe enough to become an integral part of the American hegemonic sphere in East Asia yet. Simultaneously, the reporting system in both Japan and Korea constituted an important governmental practice to legitimate the occupier’s rule. As a tool to regulate public health it aimed at securing the physical prowess of the occupation troops, while physical fitness was also a symbol of the “free world” and was perceived as a guarantor for the success of democracy and anti-communism.54 The reporting system was not only a mechanism to maintain the occupier’s reputation, but also substantiated their claim for superiority through the supposedly clear-cut boundaries between occupiers and occupied, who were differentiated along gendered and racial categories.55 The data collection sheet, which compelled the registry of the “patient’s” race or color, reified racial differences within the occupation regime and was thus an expression of the color line maintained by the US military which remained segregated until July of 1948. Gendered

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distinctions resulted, on the one hand, from the ambition to secure and confirm a desired masculinity of the occupiers. On the other hand, this differentiation functioned to feminize the occupied society: occupied Japan and Korea were – again – portrayed as dangerous places through the lack of hygiene and uncontrolled sexuality. The sexual opportunities, however, were yet fantasized to be possible anytime and available everywhere, and hence required rigorous administration.56

Recovery and research: Venereal Disease Rehabilitation Center and VD lab Another significant institution of the military-medical complex for the recovery of the bodies and minds of venereally diseased servicemen during the occupation period were so-called Venereal Disease Rehabilitation Centers. Such centers developed special training programs to treat servicemen’s bodies medically, train them physically, and strengthen them morally to minimize the risk of venereal disease relapse. In Japan, a rehabilitation center was established in the Eighth Army’s Replacement Center in Atsugi, which primarily focused on moral education with a comparatively less rigorous military training program.57 In Korea, by contrast, the USAFIK planned to set up a vast web of rehabilitation centers all over the country from mid-1947 onwards. By November 4, 1947, however, the USAFIK only managed to open the Venereal Disease Rehabilitation Center in Chinhae (Jinhae-gu) close to Busan, located on a former Japanese Navy base. This center became responsible for treating all US military VD patients stationed in Korea. The center’s program was designed for about two hundred “trainees” with at least thirty to ninety days of forty hours intensive training each week with at least four hours of military training daily. High emphasis was put on athletic activity, but lectures on morality and prophylaxis, and religious service supplemented the daily agenda.58 High-ranking commanders of the USAFIK regularly inspected the center, and they generally praised its administration. Upon his visit, Robert W.  Allen noted in a report from January 20, 1948, for example, that the rehabilitation center was very satisfactory in regard to sanitary, housing, recreation, and medical installations, and remarked that “the strict training schedule … is quite strenuous [but] has not exhibit[ed] any adverse effects upon the trainees’ convalescence.” Questioned “trainees” themselves, Allen continued, would favor the military training obtained in the center, “but objected to the necessity of contracting venereal disease in order to do so.” This ironic comment by Allen was further directed toward the general

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argument that every serviceman should receive a more thorough military training upon enlistment “prior to acquiring venereal disease,” which would probably help to limit the infection rate. Discipline through strict military training was thus highlighted as most efficient to build stable, healthy, masculine, soldierly characters that would not supposedly be tempted by promiscuity and fornication. The center’s program would be providing such training and led Allen to conclude by quoting Colonel Thomas A. Gunby, who “referred to the trainees as ‘General Hodge’s first line of defense in Korea.’ ”59 The rehabilitation center also served as a laboratory for surveys on venereal diseases. Lieutenant William L. Minton, surgeon of the rehabilitation center, filed a medical report on July 30, 1948, in which he outlined his investigation into how venereal disease exposure related to the social background, personality, and mental attitude of the soldiers. His general conclusions stated that infection rates were closely connected to social background and especially to the level of education. According to statistics, all USAFIK’s servicemen had completed an average of 9.36 school years with two major groups of eight and twelve years of school education, respectively. This second group, Minton argued, would not surface among the center’s VD infected “trainees.” Moreover, 50 percent of all “victims” of venereal disease infection were young (average of 18.5  years old) and were characterized as immature and adventurous with just a single infection. Another group of “trainees,” ones with multiple infections (25 percent), were believed to have had a difficult childhood and/or come from “families of modest poor circumstances.” He suggested that the majority of “trainees” should receive more education in “sex morality,” though there would be “little hope of rehabilitation” for a third group (25 percent), also with multiple infections, who would be seeking sexual satisfaction regularly because “these men are allowing an animal instinct to predominate over the mind which governs normal human moral behavior.” Hence, Minton summed up that “men with the most education have a lesser tendency to contract venereal disease” and even stated a lower intelligent quotient among the multiple infection groups, and thus drew a close connection of sexual behavior, venereal disease, education, morality, and class.60 Furthermore, Minton stressed the influence of race in venereal disease exposure. Based on the numerical proportion that of all “trainees” 75 percent were “white” and 25  percent were “colored,” but among those with multiple infection histories 63  percent were “white” and 37  percent were “colored,” “it would indicate,” Minton argued, “that the colored race has a greater tendency toward the contracture of venereal disease than the white

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race.”61 Without hinting at the relation between racial inequality and access to education, Minton simply presupposed a racial inclination for venereal disease infection.62 Minton’s conclusions were thus both structured and fortifying the color line within the US military; this type of racialized thinking was also highly visible in the racialized reports and control of venereal disease. Additionally, since venereal disease infection was supposedly connected to education and morality, “colored” troops were portrayed as less educated, less moral, less responsible, and less able to comply with the military’s hygienic regulations. As previous research has suggested, the bio-political knowledge produced by the USAFIK consistently constructed non-white troops along racial stereotypes, seeing them generally as infantile, primitive, and hypersexual.63 In various reports, the rehabilitation center was celebrated a success, and its closure on September 15, 1948, one month after the inauguration of the South Korean government under Syngman Rhee, was repeatedly regretted and mentioned as a factor contributing to the renewed rise of venereal disease rates among the US servicemen stationed in Korea. It is however questionable, if the center’s program actually reduced venereal disease rates since the numbers of venereally infected servicemen stayed constantly high throughout the occupation period. Nevertheless, the center was a significant attempt by the USAFIK to connect different military branches in one institution to control venereal disease. It brought together most of the regulatory practices, methods, and concepts developed by the military command, the medical departments, and the chaplains’ association. Simultaneously, the center’s program also highlighted the desire to produce a certain kind of soldierly body in the USAFIK, which focused on the production of physical and mentally stable soldierly bodies that could embody the good reputation of the United States and its military, while also strongly investing in the maintenance of combat-fit soldiers.

Conclusion During the occupation of Japan and Korea, sexual encounters between occupying servicemen and occupied women of color were perceived by the occupation regime as disturbing and destabilizing, resulting in various efforts by the occupation regime to regulate servicemen’s hygiene, morality, discipline, and sexuality. The regulating interventions were justified with the alleged need to counter the spread of venereal disease and decline in sexual morality. In doing so, the occupiers’ regulatory practices often referred to and translated into the representations of both occupied

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societies. Especially in the medical discourse both Japan and Korea were consistently rendered as an Orientalized other – promiscuous, feminized, but also diseased. By drawing on established colonial discourses on health, sexuality, and modernity, however, anti-VD campaigns even unknowingly reinforced narratives from the period of Japanese colonial rule in Korea and transferred them in the context of the early Cold War. Members of the occupation regime thus configured Japan as modern enough for hygienic reform, but saw Korea as simply less able and adept at embracing the medico-regulatory apparatus that marked a country as “modern.” The regulation of venereal disease and sexuality during the US occupation of Japan and Korea was characterized by the ambivalence of villainizing prostitutes and other women labeled as “loose women” or “pick-ups” as sources of venereal disease, and maintaining the availability of hetero-sex to sustain a “militarized masculinity.” Occupying forces chose to fight high rates of venereal disease infections not by suppressing prostitution, fraternization, and sexual encounters through laws or repressive policing. Rather, servicemen were educated in self-restraint or self-policing to build morally stable and responsible soldierly characters. For those who did not possess the “character” to control themselves, however, the military offered particular sanitizing patterns for the servicemen’s sexual recreation. This ambivalence uncovers, to quote Seungsook Moon, a “consistent system of regulated prostitution,”64 following the heteronormative logic that male soldiers are supposedly inclined to hetero-sex. This sex was constantly evaluated as a potential “danger” due to the likelihood of contracting venereal diseases and “loopholes” for servicemen were facilitated by teaching effective prophylaxis without the renunciation of sex, providing private and intimate prophylactic stations, enforcing a broad system of medical surveillance, and guaranteeing a medical recovery. Although this ambivalent yet consistent regulation of sex and venereal disease was similarly applied in occupied Japan and Korea, the regulation of prostitution, sexuality, and venereal disease show some differences. As the remarks by Alton Chamberlin quoted at the beginning of the chapter indicate, the danger of venereal disease found in “a dirty prostitute” captured the idea that a lack of sexual morality, discipline, and hygiene was emblematic of Korea’s supposed primitivism and backwardness and posed as much of a danger to American servicemen as a “knife in the back from a communist guerilla.” In the US occupier’s representation, Korea was repeatedly portrayed as a much more hostile and hazardous environment than Japan, with numerous types of communicable diseases, a total lack of sanitary systems, and no functioning modern public health

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regime. Korea was moreover perceived as an endangered and militarized environment in a constant state of emergency, which also translated into the regulation of prostitution, sexuality, and venereal disease  – and arguably vice versa. VD lectures in Korea and the Venereal Disease Rehabilitation Training Center established by the USAFIK, for example, apparently aimed at the production of specifically well trained military combat soldiers who consequently required a much “tougher” training in military tactics, physique, and moral stability. This interplay of similar yet different practices to regulate prostitution, sexuality, and venereal disease in occupied Japan and Korea and their implicit imageries strikingly resembled previous colonial forms of differentiation between Japan and Korea. Hence, despite the rupture of Japan’s defeat in World War II and the subsequent loss of its empire, in the postwar period former regional formations in East Asia seemed to prevail – although in different forms – under the hegemony of the United States. As has been demonstrated, they have not least been articulated in the regulation of sanitation, sexuality, and venereal disease.

Notes 1 Alton Chamberlin (AFC 2001/001/11499), Memoirs (MS02), Veteran’s History Project Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 236–9. 2 In maps from the immediate postwar, both Japan and Korea south of the 38th parallel are summed up as “SCAP Administrative Areas – Japan and South Korea.” See for this regional definition: SCAP, “Summation of Non-Military Activities in Japan and Korea,” General Headquarters, Tokyo, No. 5, February 1946. 3 For initial summaries of the public health, venereal disease and its dangers to the occupation troops, see:  V.J. Erkenbeck, “Annual Report of Medical Department Activities,” February 6, 1945, SCAP/GHQ, Headquarters Eighth U.S. Army, Office of the Surgeon, National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, MD (NARA), RG 407, Box 2390, “Reports of Medical Dept. Activities, 1945.” And for Korea:  Unknown author, “Chapter I.  Public Health and Welfare,” 1945/1946, USAFIK, XXIV Corps, Historical Section G-2, NARA, RG 554, Box 19, “Public Health and Welfare.” 4 War Department, “Sex Hygiene and Venereal Disease,” 1940, WW2 U.S. Medical Research Centre, http://med-dept.com/vd.php (accessed December 2, 2012); John Parascandola, Sex, Sin, and Science:  A  History of Syphilis in America (Westport: Praeger, 2008), 99–101. 5 Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After:  Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 145; Marylin E. Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes:  The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II (New York and London: New York University Press, 2008), 2.

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6 Even in societies where prostitution is illegal, sex work is common, visible, and maintained by the US military, mostly existing in spatially close relation to military bases where it can dominate local economies and cultural life. See: Beth Baily and David Farber, “Prostitutes on Strike: The Women of Hotel Street during World War II,” in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, ed. Linda K. Kerner, Jane Sherron De Hart, and Cornelia Hughes Dayton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, eds., Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: New Press, 1992); and Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds., Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 7 Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2010), 104. 8 For an overview on the historiography of the occupation, see:  Carol Gluck, “Entangling Illusions  – Japanese and American Views of the Occupation,” in New Frontiers in American-East Asian Relations, ed. Warren I. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 169–235. 9 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat:  Japan in the Aftermath of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 23. Nevertheless, in most cases there is a shared belief that the occupation starting 1945 signals a new beginning for Japan, which has – for good or bad – still major political, economic, social, and cultural significance for the US–Japan relations until today. See: John W. Dower, “Preface,” in Inside GHQ:  The Allied Occupation of Japan, by Takemae Eiji (New  York:  Continuum, 2002), xix–xxiv; and on the seemingly “endless duration of the postwar” and its implications, for example: Harry D. Harootunian, “Japan’s Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History,” in Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 98–121, 107. 10 Bonnie B.C. Oh, ed., Korea under the American Military Government, 1945–1948 (Westport and London: Praeger, 2002), 2–3. 11 Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 1 (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1981), 429–30. 12 See the Cairo Communiqué, December 1, 1943, Department of State, National Diet Library, Tokyo (NDL), “740.0011 European War 1939/32623,” DW-1, Roll No. 179. 13 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:  Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8. 14 George McCune himself stated in 1946 that “Korea is providing a testing ground of American postwar policies in the Far East.” George M. McCune, “Occupation Politics in Korea,” Far Eastern Survey 15, no. 3 (1946): 33–7, 33. On Japan, see Mire Koikari, Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 18–20. 15 Bruce Cumings, “Japan in the World System,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 37. 16 Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 2 (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1990), 49. 17 Sven Saaler, “Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Overcoming the Nation, Creating a Region, Forging an Empire,” in Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders, ed. Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann (New York: Routledge, 2007), 1–18; Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts

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1 8 19 20

21 22

23 24

25 2 6 27

28

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into History (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1993), 77; Mark R. Peattie, “The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 6, ed. Peter Duus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 244; John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 263–4. For a further critical approach on the history of the idea and formation of an Asian region, see: Prasenjit Duara, “Asia Redux: Cenceptualizing a Region for Our Times,” Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 4 (2010): 963–83, 970. Cumings, “Japan in the World System,” 38–41. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 93. See, for example, the Department of the Army’s Korea Handbook from September 1950, according to which numerous communicable diseases exist in Korea that are carried by mosquitos, snails, fleas, mites, ticks, rats, and even fresh water fishes; “all water supplies should be considered unsafe … sewage disposal systems may be considered as nonexistent [and] venereal diseases are widely prevalent.” Department of the Army, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, “Korea Handbook,” September 1950, Far East Command (FEC), Medical Section, Public Health and Welfare Section, NARA, RG 554, Box 1, Subject File “1945–1953.” Todd A. Henry, “Sanitizing Empire:  Japanese Articulations of Korean Otherness and Construction of Early Colonial Seoul, 1905–1919,” Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 3 (2005): 639–75, 649. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1997), 3. Taylor Atkins, Primitive Selves:  Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–45 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 3–4. See among others: Duus Masayo, Haisha no okurimono: Tokushu ian shisetsu RAA o meguru senryōshi no sokumen (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1985); Inoue Setsuko, Senryōgun ianjo. Kokka ni yoru baishun shisetsu (Tokyo: Sinhyōron, 1995); and Yamada Meiko, Senryōgun ianfu:  Kokusaku baishun no onnatachi no higeki (Tokyo:  Kōjinsha, 1992). On Korea, see: Na Young Lee, “The Construction of Military Prostitution in South Korea during the U.S. Military Rule, 1945–1948,” Feminist Studies 33, no. 3 (2007): 453–81; Seungsook Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire: U.S. Military Prostitution in South Korea, 1945–1970,” in Over There, ed. Höhn and Moon, 39–77. Michael Molasky, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1999), 105. Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire,” 43. Youn-ok Song, “Japanese Colonial Rule and State-Managed Prostitution: Korea’s Licensed Prostitutes,” Positions:  East Asian Cultures Critique 5, no. 1 (1997): 171–219; John Lie, “The Transformation of Sexual Work in 20th-Century Korea,” Gender & Society 9, no. 3 (1995):  310–27, 313; and Atkins, Primitive Selves, 147–86. Susan Burns, “Bodies and Borders: Syphilis, Prostitution, and the Nation in Japan, 1860–1890,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal (English Supplement), no. 15 (1998): 3–30, 18–25; Yutaka Fujino, Sei no kokka kanri. Baibaishun no kingen daishi (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 2001), 168; Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control

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in Modern Japan (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2003), 28. Sheldon Garon, “The World’s Oldest Debate? Prostitution and the State in Imperial Japan, 1900–1945,” American Historical Review 98, no. 3 (1993): 710–32, 719–20. 29 A classic historical study on the comfort women is Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Jūgun ianfu (Tokyo:  Iwanami shoten, 1995). But see also Ueno Chizuko, Nashonarizumu to jendā (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1998); Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility, ed., Nashonarizumu to “ianfu” mondai (Tokyo:  Aokishoten, 1998); Chungmoo Choi, ed., “The Comfort Women: Colonialism, War, and Sex,” Positions: East Asian Cultures Critique (Special Issue) 5, no. 1 (1997); John Lie, “The State as Pimp: Prostitution and the Patriarchal State in Japan in the 1940s,” The Sociological Quarterly 38, no. 2 (1997): 251–63, 257; Margaret Stetz and Bonnie Oh, eds., Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2001); and C. Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008). 30 H.W. Allen, “Memorandum For Imperial Japanese Government:  Abolition of Licensed Prostitution,” January 21, 1946, GHQ/SCAP, SCAPIN-642, NDL, Box 5250, Sheet CIE(A)-01643. 31 The abolition of licensed prostitution was celebrated in Cold War ideological fashion as democratic achievement to liberate the Japanese and Korean woman from “feudalistic” male chauvinism and domination. Mire Koikari, “Exporting Democracy? American Women, ‘Feminist Reforms,’ and Politics of Imperialism in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952,” Frontiers 23, no. 1 (2002): 23–45, 28. In Korea the USAMGIK also promulgated a law to prohibit “Trafficking of Women and Children” in line with international conventions and the new United Nation’s charter on sex trafficking. Lee, “The Construction of Military Prostitution in South Korea,” 466. 32 For further description of the “pan pan girls,” see: Kanzaki Kiyoshi, Baishun: Ketteiban Kanzaki repooto (Tokyo: Gendaishi shuppan-kai, 1974); Michiko Takeuchi, “ ‘Pan Pan Girls’ Performing and Resisting Neocolonialism(s) in the Pacific Theater: U.S. Military Prostitution in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952,” in Over There, ed. Höhn and Moon, 78–108. 33 Koikari, Pedagogy of Democracy, 160. 34 W.A. Beiderlinden, “Memorandum for:  Members of General Headquarters Character Guidance Council,” November 24, 1948, General Headquarters, FEC, NARA, RG 331, Box 9370, File 6 “Venereal Disease Control – Character Guidance.” 35 “Description of Disease Museum,” in ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 The term “sexual opportunity” is borrowed from Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), see especially ­chapter 4. 38 W.E. Thiessen, “Venereal Disease Control,” February 26, 1949, USAFIK, NARA, RG 554, Box 146, Adjutant General, General Correspondence 1945–1949, “Prevention of Venereal Diseases 1949.” 39 Ibid., Inclosure No. 4, “Lecture: ‘Treatment of Venereal Diseases and its Limitations.’ ” 40 Ibid., Inclosure No. 3, “Instructor’s Lecture: ‘The Eternal Fight.’ ” 41 James H.  Gordon, “Conference with Major Philip Weisbach, M.C., C.O. 1st Med Squadron, 1st Cavalry Div.,” September 30, 1945, GHQ/SCAP, Public Health

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and Welfare Section, NARA, RG 331, Box 9370, Communicable Diseases, File 8, “Venereal Disease Control 1945–1946.” W. H. Biggerstaff, “Venereal Disease Control and Reports,” September 22, 1945, Headquarters XXIV Corps, NARA, RG 554, Box 20, Public Health and Welfare, 1. 42 Michel Foucault, Überwachen und Strafen: Die Geburt des Gefängnisses (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 258–9. 43 B.P.W., “Venereal Disease in Japan,” October 3, 1945, GHQ, United States Army Surgeon, Pacific, Office of the Chief Surgeon, NARA, RG 331, Box 9370, File 8, “Venereal Disease Control 1945–1946.” James H.  Gordon, “Conference with Dr.  H.  Yosano and Dr.  Fukai,” October 3, 1945, GHQ/SCAP, Public Health and Welfare Section, NARA, RG 331, Box 9370, File 8, “Venereal Disease Control 1945–1946.” 44 Crawford F. Sams, “Medic”: The Mission of an American Military Doctor in Occupied Japan and Wartorn Korea, ed. Zabelle Zakarian (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 73–5. 45 James H. Gordon, “Conference with Dr. H. Yosano and Dr. Fukai,” October 3, 1945, GHQ/SCAP, Public Health and Welfare Section, NARA, RG 331, Box 9370, File 8, “Venereal Disease Control 1945–1946.” This is also reported by Crawford Sams to the Chief of Staff: Crawford F. Sams, “Memorandum for the Chief of Staff,” October 16, 1945, SCAP/GHQ, Public Health and Welfare Section, NARA, RG 331, Box 9370, File 8, “Venereal Disease Control 1945–1946.” 46 Oscar M. Elkins, “Summary of Initial Venereal Disease Control Reports,” March 28, 1947, SCAP/GHQ, Public Health and Welfare Section, RG 331, Box 9370, File 5, “Venereal Disease Contact Tracing 1945–1950.” 47 Such emphasis can be found in:  Sams, “Medic,” 77. For a critical perspective, see: Koikari, Pedagogy of Democracy, 177. This identifies resonances of modern governmentality, which, according to Michel Foucault, is characterized by a pastoral power of the state that administers the people along an economization of the social, grounded in a statistical calculability. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 777–95, 784–90. 48 H.W. Allen, “Memorandum For Japanese Imperial Government: Control of Venereal Diseases,” October 16, 1946, SCAP/GHQ, SCAPIN-153, NDL, Box 785-22, Sheet AG(A)-03431. 49 Oscar M. Elkins, “Report Form for Prefectural Venereal Disease Control Officers,” October 28, 1946, SCAP/GHQ, Public Health and Welfare Section, RG 331, Box 9370, File 8, “Venereal Disease Control 1945–1946.” 50 Ibid. 51 Office of the Commanding General, “Circular Nr. 13,” January 28, 1947, Headquarters Eighth U.S. Army, RG 331, Box 9370, File 8, “Venereal Disease Control 1945–1946.” 52 W. H.  Biggerstaff, “Venereal Disease Control and Reports,” September 22, 1945, Headquarters XXIV Corps, NARA, RG 554, Box 20, “Public Health and Welfare.” 53 Office of the Commanding General, “Inclosure 1 to Cir. 13,” January 28, 1947, Headquarters Eighth U.S. Army, RG 331, Box 9370, File 8, “Venereal Disease Control 1945–1946.” 54 Koikari, Pedagogy of Democracy, 187. 55 Takeuchi, “ ‘Pan Pan Girls,’ ” 94; Dower, Embracing Defeat, 211–12. 56 According to Anne McClintock, this desire of “porno-tropics” is a classical element of colonial topographies. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather:  Race,

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Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 22. 57 Emil A.  Zund, “Venereal Disease Trainees, Eighth Army Replacement Center,” July 2, 1984, Eighth Army Replacement Center, Headquarters and Headquarters Detachment, NARA, RG 331, Box 9370, File “Venereal Disease Control – Character Guidance.” 58 J.W. Fraser, “Venereal Disease Rehabilitation Training Center,” October 24, 1947, USAFIK, NARA, RG 554, Box 147, AG 726.1 “Venereal Disease 1947.” 59 Robert W.  Allen, “Visit to USAFIK Venereal Disease Rehabilitation Training Center, Chinhae, Korea,” January 20, 1948, USAFIK, NARA, RG 554, Box 147, AG 726.1 “Venereal Disease Control 1947–1948.” 60 William L.  Minton, “Report of Essential Technical Medical Data,” July 30, 1948, USAFIK Rehabilitation Center, Office of the Surgeon, NARA, RG 554, Box 147, AG 726.1 “Venereal Disease 1948 (1).” 61 Ibid. 62 For a critique on the presumption of racially inclined intelligence, see: Stephen J. Gould, Der falsch vermessene Mensch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 240. 63 Michael Cullen Green, Black Yanks in the Pacific: Race in the Making of American Military Empire after World War II (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2010), 9. The discrimination African-American servicemen experienced in Korea followed rather common racist stereotypes against African Americans also highly effective throughout postwar Japan. John G. Russell, “The Other Other,” in Japan’s Minorities:  The Illusion of Homogeneity, ed. Michael Weiner, 2nd edn (New  York and London: Routledge, 2008), 103–8; John G. Russell, “Race and Reflexivity: The Black Other in Contemporary Japanese Mass Culture,” Cultural Anthopology 6, no. 1 (1991): 3–25, 6. 64 Moon, “Regulating Desire, Managing the Empire,” 41.

14

Global anti-vice activism: a postmortem David T. Courtwright

Vice is of ancient origin. So is its religious condemnation, apparent in Confucian, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim teachings. Yet it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that anti-vice activism emerged as an important transnational movement led by a coalition of religious and secular reformers. This movement reached the peak of its influence in the first third of the twentieth century, an era in which many nations, states, colonies, and municipalities experimented with prohibition, whether of alcohol, cigarettes, nonmedical narcotic use, gambling, ­obscenity, or prostitution. Then, in the mid-twentieth century, the movement began to lose prestige and momentum. Except for the nonmedical use of narcotic drugs, the suppression of which remained an international priority, anti-vice activism assumed the air of an unfashionable “Victorianism.” Remnants of the movement survived, but as a part of a public health establishment that was more secular and narrowly focused than the first great wave of transnational reform. Public health authorities won some battles, notably against tobacco in developed nations. But they also encountered fresh political and technological headwinds, with the result that commercialized vice continued to flourish throughout the world. In looking back at global anti-vice activism, three questions stand out. First, why did the reform wave build in the late nineteenth century and then crest in the early twentieth century? Second, why did anti-vice activism attract reformers of such diverse backgrounds and interests? How could the likes of Bishop James “Holy” Johnson, fitness entrepreneur Eugen Sandow, anti-imperialist Mohandas Gandhi, and nudist-eugenicist Caleb Saleeby pull at the same reform yoke? Third, why did vice prove so resilient, given that other international reforms produced more satisfactory and durable results? As to timing, the most basic explanation is that industrialization, technological innovation, and globalization had released the genie of commercialized 313

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vice, alarming middle-class moralists, hygienists, and progressives of various stripes. At the time of the French Revolution, Paris had 3,000 drinking establishments. A hundred years later, in the late 1880s, it had more than 30,000. Rivers of cheap gin flowed from modern distilleries into steamships whose speed and gross tonnage doubled between the 1850s and 1890s.1 Even complacent colonial officials took notice, Charles Ambler observes, when spirits imports to Southern Nigeria more than doubled during a single decade, 1900 to 1910. Cigarettes and other manufactured tobacco products became ubiquitous, as did narcotics and stimulants – available, thanks to pharmaceutical progress, in pure and highly addictive form. Those who preferred to smoke opium could purchase small (0.725 gram) tin tubes manufactured, sealed, automatically weighed, and packaged in factories that churned out 250,000 units a day.2 Industrialization similarly transformed and expanded the market for pornography, a luxury good for most of its history. Steam presses slashed publication costs, as did photography. By 1872, a sympathetic journalist reported, the inexpensive multiplication of “filthy representations from living models” had greatly complicated the work of the London-based Society for the Suppression of Vice. So had postal improvement that facilitated the “secret trading” of pornography through the mail.3 Journalists and reformers likewise denounced the recruitment and trafficking of prostitutes, particularly in industrial cities swollen by immigration. The heyday of white slavery in the United States, Jessica Pliley points out, was the heyday of mass migration. Media concern peaked the same year, 1907, that immigration reached flood tide. Contemporary illustrations often depicted vulnerable immigrant women waylaid by white slavers as they disembarked from steamships and trains. Vice had become, as it were, steam-propelled. But so had reform, which accounts for the emergence of transnational reform networks during the same era. Railroads, steamships, and ocean-spanning canals sped missionaries to their destinations, and sped home their reports of opium, liquor, prostitution, and other evils that ruined natives’ health and frustrated Christian conversion. Presses produced multiple editions of polemics like Protection of Native Races against Intoxicants & Opium. Telegraph offices provided the means to flood government agencies with anti-vice petitions. Popular magazines ensured that millions read of the depredations of vice entrepreneurs. Middle-class reformers became globe-trotters, crossing the oceans in search of new ideas, new converts, and new allies.4 Or tried to cross the oceans: The indefatigable English journalist W.T. Stead, who gained fame for his exposés of child prostitution, met his end in 1912 when he booked passage on the Titanic.

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By the early twentieth century, the word “international” had itself become a signpost of reform. This was the era of the International Reform Bureau, the International Opium Conference and Commission, and several international congresses against alcoholism. It was also, as historian Daniel Rodgers has noted, the era of the International Association for Labor Legislation, the International Congress on Social Insurance, and the International Congress on Public Assistance and Private Charity. What these enterprises had in common was a social politics that “tried to hold certain elements out of the market’s processes, indeed to roll back those parts of the market whose social costs had proved too high.” The Victorian and Edwardian middle classes were having second thoughts about the unbridled capitalism that their own values and industriousness had fostered. Ideologically and emotionally, the impulse to spare children from prostitution and obscenity overlapped with the impulse to spare them from labor in factories and mines. In this sense anti-vice activism was part of a larger transnational progressive effort to counter industrial capitalism’s worst products and practices, then spreading, due to accelerating globalization, from the metropolis to the remotest provinces and colonies.5 The private citizens who threw themselves into this transnational reform enterprise would not have gotten far without official cooperation. They could agitate, but they could not legislate. Conveniently, those who could legislate were intent on expanding the police power of national governments during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Where officials had once concentrated on defending and extending national and imperial boundaries, they increasingly concerned themselves with conditions inside the territory they already controlled. That meant building railways and gasworks to bolster the economy, but also hygienic reform to promote the sort of healthy citizenry that guaranteed the state’s security and prosperity.6 The 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese war, depicted as a debacle in which the numerous but drunken Russian soldiers and sailors blundered into defeat at the hands of the sober and disciplined Japanese, provided a timely reminder of the security dangers of unchecked vice. “The chief enemy of an army is the nation’s moral diseases,” wrote Associated Press war correspondent Frederick McCormick. “A great people with a great army, who could not defeat the Japanese in one single battle, must first have been the victim not of the enemy, but of themselves.”7 No one wanted to end up like the humiliated Russians. Vices sickened and corrupted the young, incapacitated soldiers and workers in times of national peril, and opened the gates to hygienically advanced enemies. World War I crystallized these fears and catalyzed a flurry of international anti-vice activity: an emergency decree against absinthe sales in France in

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1914; new drug regulations in Britain in 1916; prohibition of distilling in wartime Russia and other countries; the closure of brothels near American army bases; renewed anti-venereal disease propaganda everywhere. Practically the only vice to emerge from the war unscathed was tobacco smoking, which relaxed soldiers without intoxicating them. Officers encouraged smoking to boost morale, warning only that their men take care to light their pipes and cigarettes out of sight of the enemy. Tobacco smoking had one other advantage. Though tobacco’s enemies had long charged that it enslaved users, encouraged other vices, and undermined health, medical authorities had yet to decisively link it to a specific lethal disease.8 The same could not be said of prostitution and syphilis. By the early twentieth century, Alfred Fournier and other physicians had unraveled the etiology and complex morbidity of “the great imitator.” Syphilitic infection led to paresis, tabes dorsalis, aortitis, and other devastating illnesses. Hygienists worried about its hereditary consequences, both in terms of racial degeneracy and direct infection of the newborn. Physicians advised that, at a minimum, those diagnosed with syphilis should delay marriage, pending the evidence – never entirely certain – of successful treatment. Many medical reformers favored the registration, segregation, inspection, and, if necessary, quarantining of prostitutes, whom one syphilologist likened to “trepenoma machine-guns.” Regulating prostitutes worked better in theory than in practice, however, and many hygienists also sought the mandatory reporting and treatment of all venereal patients. Several European states, including Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, made it a crime for infected persons to knowingly transmit syphilis.9 The most uncompromising reformers sought to outlaw prostitution itself. They also targeted drinking, which, as Nikolay Kamenov and Stephen Legg point out, was linked to prostitution and venereal disease. The association was a fair one: One saloon in Storyville, New Orleans’ prostitution district, featured a bar a half a city block long. Eventually, municipal anti-vice crusades and war anxieties (“men must live straight to shoot straight”) shuttered Storyville and America’s other legal red-light districts.10 The paradoxical effect, as Pliley notes, was to render moot the federal government’s brief experiment in registering brothel-based prostitutes. Whether aimed at regulation or prohibition, all prostitution reforms required application of the state’s police power. What justified coercion was the prevalence of syphilis and other venereal diseases. Neither Western nor Eastern nations were exempt. By the mid-1920s, 10 percent of the French population and 10–15  percent of the Chinese urban population showed

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signs of syphilis. Perhaps, as Elizabeth Remick hints, the uneven and cursory fashion in which the Chinese regulated prostitution contributed to the nation’s persistently high infection rates. Even so, Chinese officials felt that they had to pursue the policy, if only to maintain the appearance of modernity. By the early twentieth century, hygienic policing was something that all serious states did.11 The emergence of global anti-vice activism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, in a word, overdetermined. Vices had become cheaper and more widely available and, in large cities, easier to indulge anonymously. The ultimate source of vices’ availability, unregulated globalizing capitalism, had attracted opposition from a transnational progressive movement. Progressives attacked commercialized vice as a prolific source of political and journalistic corruption and as an egregious example of the new industrial order’s disregard for the health, safety, and morality of the working classes at home and colonial peoples abroad. Reformers drew upon medical studies that purported to show increases in narcotic addiction, evidence that syphilitics were silting up asylums, and the perils that drinking posed to children from the moment of conception. “If you get drunk, expect an idiot!” proclaimed an article in the Bulgarian temperance journal Borba s Alkoolizma. The prospect of more addicts, more paretics, and more congenital idiots alarmed government officials. Centralizing, security-conscious states had developed eugenicist and social-hygienist policies and the anti-libertarian will to act on them. In 1938 Erich Hesse, a German expert on drug addiction, captured the new spirit when he stated the rationale for compulsory detoxification of narcotic addicts. No one had the right to destroy his own body with poisons, Hesse wrote, because “everyone has the obligation to keep himself fit to the benefit of the community. The community, which gives the individual a chance to live and to make a living, has every right … to demand this.”12 If the zeitgeist favored the early twentieth-century reformers, they nevertheless confronted both stubborn political obstacles (not least, lost revenue) and internal political divisions. One problem, emphasized throughout this book, was that anti-vice reformers acted out of different motives and sought incompatible ends. I have already mentioned the division over regulating or abolishing prostitution. The same split arose over the drink question. Was it better to have a system of fixed-profit municipal monopolies that sold liquor in strictly regulated fashion, refusing minors, paupers, and alcoholics, or was it better to attempt to outlaw nonmedical consumption? Broadly speaking, evangelical Protestants, who were more concerned with sin and

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personal purity than religiously liberal or secular reformers, favored abolition over regulation. They regarded – more precisely, they felt – prohibition to be the most satisfying form of anti-vice reform. Consider the careers of two international reformers, the Reverend Wilbur Crafts and Bishop Charles Henry Brent. History knows them as allies on the opium question. After the United States assumed control of the Philippines from Spain, it was Crafts who led the successful campaign to replace the colony’s opium monopoly with prohibition. Brent made his name as the chairman of the international opium conferences held in 1909 and 1911–12. He helped lay the foundation for the modern treaty system to limit narcotic production to estimated medical needs. But there the similarities ended. Crafts, an American Presbyterian of evangelical disposition, saw all vices as interlocking threats to salvation and social order. He demanded suppression of gambling, obscenity, cigarettes, and Sabbath-breaking as well as drink and drugs. He was an uncompromising moralist, a peripatetic puritan who took his anti-vice crusade to twenty-nine different countries before he died in 1922.13 Brent, a more celebrated figure when he died in Lausanne in 1929, was an Ontario-born Episcopalian who cut his pastoral teeth in Boston’s most vice-ridden parish. He was a tolerant Social Gospeler, a celibate liberal who loved Jesus but hated slums, narcotic addiction, and Christian disunion. Brent nonetheless parted company with Crafts on the Volstead Act, and wound up questioning the wisdom of America’s experiment with nonmedical alcohol prohibition. So, of course, did many purely secular authorities, who regarded the “noble experiment” as a failure that tainted more rational attempts to control the industry. Complicating matters further was the presence of “left deviationists” in the anti-vice movement. These were social critics who offered a more radical indictment of modernity, which, they said, had saddled the world with drug-addled neurasthenics, noxious industrial cities, and an intrinsically unhealthful way of living. But some of their more imaginative solutions, such as nudism, vegetarianism, occultism, rural communes, and free love, clashed (to put it mildly) with the mores of the Christian anti-vice reformers. Philippa Levine and Antony Taylor demonstrate that nudism was a particular bone of contention – inevitably so, given the mainstream reformers’ prudishness, horror of promiscuity, and resolve to combat obscenity. One American prohibitionist, Blanche Boise, began her career smashing saloon windows and ended it by defacing “indecent” movie posters.14 One can only imagine what she would have made of the sun worshipers at Monte Verità. Anti-vice activism attracted all manner of radical critics of industrial modernity, especially in the decades immediately before and after 1900.

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There were spiritualists like W.T. Stead, anarchists like Guy Aldred, ministers turned socialists like Job Harriman, fervent African Christians like James Johnson, and even Hindus with Theosophist tendencies like Gandhi. One of the few things they had in common was vulnerability to charges of extremism. Their enemies attacked them as “nuts,” “faddists,” “cranks,” and “teetotalers” mad to foist their prejudices on the masses. Carey Watt shows how Eugen Sandow sidestepped this public-relations problem. He flexed his muscles and flaunted the occasional drink or cigar to ward off any taint of fanaticism. The simplest way to avoid the extremist charge, though, was to downplay the radical and religious motives of reform, making the case for coercion on utilitarian grounds – what was best for the nation’s health, wealth, and security. Moralizing persisted, of course, but by the mid-twentieth century it had assumed a secondary role. Robert Kramm’s account of GIs and prostitutes in post-World War II Japan and Korea captures the shift. The Venereal Disease Museum that servicemen toured conveyed a moral message: No self-disciplined American boy should consort with Asian prostitutes. However, in the not-unlikely event that they did, they should take appropriate steps for mechanical and chemical prophylaxis and seek treatment if infected. Soldiers’ promiscuity might be didactically condemned, but the important thing was that their actual sexual behavior be thoroughly sanitized. By the time the anti-smoking wars erupted in Argentina, a half century later, the reform argument had assumed an almost wholly secular character. Twentieth-century Buenos Aires had been a smokers’ paradise, a place where the cigarette, far from being a vice, had served as an icon of modern virtue and populist reform. Advertisers stole a page from Juan and Eva Perón, proclaiming that “everyone” had the right to enjoy a sexy, flavorful smoke. But then the cancer epidemiology began piling up and, ultimately, evidence that environmental tobacco smoke caused lethal diseases in others, including children. The threat to public health, combined with the 2003 World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, prompted the Argentine government to enact comprehensive anti-smoking legislation. Apart from the unusually late date of this action (2012), what stands out in Diego Armus’s account is the absence of the sort of puritanical or faddish reform characters who might have agitated against cigarettes in 1912. They had given way to experts in the Ministry of Health and secular, supranational organizations like the World Health Organization. This is not to say that religiously inspired anti-vice activism disappeared in the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, it became more

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visible than ever in conservative Islamic societies and, if one counts communism as a secular religion, in revolutionary regimes that castigated vice as a legacy of imperialism. By the 1980s and 1990s accounts of executed drug dealers, shuttered brothels, and banned casinos were more likely to appear in Iranian or mainland Chinese newspapers than in Western dailies. Noting the punitive American drug war as a partial exception, Western anti-vice activism took on a medical colorization. Old-school “dries” learned to recast their arguments against alcohol and tobacco in the safe, politically correct language of public health. They also learned to take their allies where they could find them. Thus in 1987 South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, a venerable Protestant foe of drinking, a right-wing Republican, and a onetime champion of racial segregation, cheerfully co-sponsored an alcohol-labeling bill with Representative John Conyers, an African American and liberal Democrat from Detroit worried about the consequences of alcohol marketing.15 Whatever ideological diversity persisted in post–World War II Western anti-vice circles was concealed and constrained by the lingua franca of public health. Indeed, the word “vice” itself became taboo. Its connotations of personal moral weakness threatened to transfer blame to victims, stigmatize patients, and sabotage the project of replacing punishment with effective medical treatment. The most conspicuous exception – the mid-1980s flurry of jeremiads against AIDS as the just wages of sin – proved the rule of secularization and medicalization. Condemnatory religious rhetoric, commonplace a century before, quickly moved out of bounds. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, public discussion of AIDS had turned to education, prophylaxis, and harm reduction – a development that would, ironically, play an important role in liberalizing drug policy, most notably in Western European countries. However motivated, justified, and labeled, how do we assess the results of the twentieth-century anti-vice campaigns? One thing is certain:  Vice is still with us. The global war on tobacco has won more victories in Western nations than in developing ones, above all in China, where steady increases in cigarette consumption since the 1980s have offset declines elsewhere.16 Meanwhile new and purportedly safer forms of tobacco consumption, such as e-cigarettes, have emerged as potential means of recruiting new smokers. Though campaigns against drunken driving and public intoxication have enjoyed some success, multinational corporations still ship spirits, wine, and beer throughout the world, their volume swollen by low transport costs and free-trade agreements. Once the surest route to a pauper’s grave, whiskey has been reborn as an international status symbol and sign

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321

of upward mobility. It has been otherwise with most illicit drugs, yet their trade has flourished even as the prohibitions against them have begun to unravel. Meanwhile hotel-casino complexes on the Las Vegas model have gone international, with rival vice meccas sprouting in destination cities throughout the world. Like “café,” “casino” has become one of the world’s most recognizable words. As for trafficking in prostitutes and pornography, the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Internet created an ideal environment for both enterprises. Global criminal organizations took advantage of the newly “borderless” world to ramp up their trade in all things progressive reformers considered criminal or vicious.17 One should not regard these failures in a cynical way. We have, after all, derived many lasting benefits from international reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Think of the bans on African chattel slavery, or on expanding bullets or poison gas in warfare, or on nuclear-weapons testing. These measures remain broadly effectual, and no one can suppose the world a better place because the efforts to suppress child prostitution and narcotic addiction met with less happy results. What was it, then, that made the international struggle against vice so difficult and ultimately so futile? Part of the answer lay in the practical difficulties of implementing anti-vice measures, particularly those aimed at prohibition or near-prohibition. The West African liquor import restrictions and prohibitions described by Ambler and Emmanuel Akyeampong entailed both significant revenue losses and competition from illicit distillers who, by the 1920s, were underselling European importers. More embarrassing still, Akyeampong argues, was the high-profile failure and repeal of the Volstead Act in the United States, the very nation whose anti-vice reformers had spearheaded international prohibition efforts. If prohibition produced criminality, corruption, and contempt for law in that righteous Protestant land, how could better results be expected elsewhere? The collapse or retreat of most alcohol prohibition schemes – as when, in 1925, the Soviet Union restored the state vodka monopoly and reverted to drunken business as usual – gave anti-vice activism its second black eye.18 The first, as we have seen, came from its association with cranks and fanatics. The second came from its association with failed “dry” experiments that led to illicit markets and lost revenues, which governments could ill afford during the hard times of the 1930s.19 It is true that the prohibition of illicit drugs persisted during and well beyond the 1930s. The League of Nations and later the United Nations strengthened and expanded international drug-control agreements, even as beverage alcohol bans disappeared and the global cigarette industry

322

Prostitution and sex trafficking

expanded its ambit. The psychoactive double standard derived, in part, from hardening attitudes toward opiates and cocaine. In the nineteenth century popular and medical opinion attributed drug addiction to many things: technological innovation, therapeutic misadventure, improvident experimentation, degeneration, urbanization, immigration (especially of Chinese laborers), and industrial capitalism, which had expanded both the supply of drugs and the number of exhausted, demoralized workers tempted to avail themselves of it. The drug habit seemed at once a disease, a vice, and a concomitant of modernity  – a reasonable muddle, given the many paths to addiction and the many classes of people afflicted by it. During the early twentieth century, however, the muddle resolved itself, as nonmedical drug use and addiction became equated with anti-social behavior. Opinion shifted in North America before World War I and, as Pavel Vasilyev shows, in Europe after the war. His quotation from the Soviet writer Aleksandr Sholomovich, “cocaine and crime are blood brothers,” captures the change. Sidney Brewster, who oversaw New York City’s prisons, went further. In 1927 he wrote that 99 out of 100 persons could drink alcohol in moderation, while moderation was unheard of among drug users. Every one of them became derelicts, if not actual criminals.20 Statistically, Brewster’s claims were preposterous. But they reflected the conventional wisdom, particularly in New York City, a town so defiantly wet that the mayor of Berlin, visiting in 1929, is reputed to have asked, “When does the Prohibition law go into effect?”21 For all their faults, drinkers were part of a more-or-less normal majority. Nonmedical drug users were part of a more-or-less parasitic minority. Alcohol, like tobacco, had deeper cultural and economic roots than opiates, cocaine, or cannabis, at least in the Western nations that dominated mid-twentieth-century drug-control policy. With few exceptions, Western political leaders smoked and drank. Whether they did or not, they appreciated the tax revenues that tobacco and alcohol reliably generated.22 Yet, even in the arena of drug policy, the failure of alcohol prohibition cast a long shadow. Critics who sought to liberalize or overturn punitive drug laws routinely evoked the costly failure of stamping out nonmedical alcohol use. The tactic allowed them to challenge their public health opponents on common utilitarian ground, insofar as the costs of prohibition offset the social costs generated by drug abuse and addiction. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) perfected this approach, as when it trumpeted a 2007 study claiming that marijuana prohibition cost American taxpayers 42 billion dollars a year.23 Though the

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sum was implausibly large, the prohibition-as-folly mantra had its effects. Between 1996 and 2016 nearly two dozen US states abandoned outright bans on marijuana for prescription or legalization schemes. By then the political climate in which libertarian critics advanced legalization arguments, whether for marijuana smoking or for other vices, had also changed. During the last third of the twentieth century the dynamic, unopposed capitalism that triggered the commercialized vice crisis of the nineteenth century came roaring back into history. The progressive state retreated, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs who profited from old vices and invented new ones: Internet pornography, video poker, and junk food, to name but a few. The rise of neoliberalism and the complementary social libertarianism of influential thinkers like Milton Friedman undercut statist reform projects aimed at decommodification through government control and suppression of markets. Indeed, it would be hard to name a more articulate or consistent critic of prohibition than Friedman, who became an international symbol of anti-anti-vice activism. To risk a large generalization, but one that has the virtue of identifying a theme for this fine collection, what happens to vice (or even what is considered a vice) depends on whose political economy prevails. If the zeitgeist favored anti-vice reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it no longer does so in our own, more unfettered time. Notes 1 Gina Hames, Alcohol in World History (New  York:  Routledge, 2012), 70; Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 168. 2 Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy:  A  Study of the Asian Opium Trade, 1750–1950 (London: Routledge, 1999), 161. 3 “Society for the Suppression of Vice,” The Leisure Hour, no. 1046 (January 13, 1872), 32. 4 Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 15, 34, 56, passim. 5 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 30. 6 On shifting state priorities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History:  Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 105 (2000): 807–31. 7 Mark Lawrence Schrad, Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), ­chapter 11, quotation on 168. 8 John C. Burnham, “American Physicians and Tobacco Use: Two Surgeons General, 1929 and 1964,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 63 (1989): 1–31.

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9 Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis, trans. Judith Braddock and Brian Pike (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), ­chapters 6–9, “machine-gun” on 219. 10 Gary Krist, Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans (New York: Crown Publishers, 2014), 108, 250, quoting Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels. 11 Quétel, History of Syphilis, 199; Christian Henriot, “Medicine, VD and Prostitution in Pre-Revolutionary China,” Social History of Medicine 5 (1992): 106–7. 12 Erich Hesse, Narcotics and Drug Addiction, trans. Frank Gaynor (New  York: Philosophical Library, 1946; originally published in German in 1938), 47. Anti-narcotic nationalism was, if anything, stronger in interwar France. French officials regarded addicts as bad citizens, and had no compunctions about punishing their civic irresponsibility. Howard Padwa, Social Poisons: The Culture and Politics of Opiate Control in Britain and France, 1821–1926 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), ­chapter 4. 13 “Dr. Wilbur F. Crafts, Crusader, Dies at 73,” New York Times, (December 28, 1922). 14 Ethel S. Ellis, “Valentine Note of 37 Years Ago,” Topeka Journal, (February 14, 1940). 15 Pamela E. Pennock, Advertising Sin and Sickness: The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing, 1950–1990 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), c­ hapter 8. 16 “Cigarette Consumption,” The Tobacco Atlas, www.tobaccoatlas.org/topic/cigaretteuse-globally/, accessed February 27, 2016. 17 Misha Glenny, McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (New York: Vintage, 2009). 18 Schrad, Vodka Politics, ­chapter 15. 19 The need for revenue undercut anti-cigarette as well as anti-alcohol campaigns, as shown in Wennan Liu, “ ‘No Smoking’ for the Nation: Anti-Cigarette Campaigns in Modern China, 1910–1935” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2009) and Mary C. Neuburger, Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). Many governments finessed the health-and-morals problem by permitting taxed, legal sales to adults but banning them for minors, as shown in Elizabeth Dorn Lublin, “Controlling Youth and Tobacco in Meiji-Period Japan,” paper for the conference Under Control? Alcohol and Drug Regulation, Past and Present, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, June 21, 2013. 20 Sidney W. Brewster, “The Actual Trend of Drug Addiction and Its Relation to Crime,” Narcotic Education 1 (July 1927): 13. 21 Michael A. Lerner, Dry Manhattan:  Prohibition in New  York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 1. 22 David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), ­chapters 8–10. 23 “Pot Prohibition Costs Taxpayers More Than $40 Billion Per Year, Study Says,” http:// norml.org/news/2007/10/04/pot-prohibition-costs-taxpayers-more-than-40billion-per-year-study-says, accessed February 27, 2016. The figure included foregone revenue.

Index

abolition 9, 193, 251, 255–56, 318 abolitionism 222, 225, 258 absinthe 315 Acheson, Dean 293 Adam, Thomas 112 Adams, Brooks 40 Adams, Samuel Hopkins 85 Addams, Jane 226 Adventist Church 208 age of consent 33 Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic (1904) 223 Ajasa, Kitoyi 117 Akootai 247–49, 253, 265 alcohol 2, 4–5, 7, 10, 12–16, 18–19, 58, 77, 84, 86, 104, 106–7, 109, 112–16, 119, 124–25, 129–31, 133–34, 136, 139, 141, 144, 157–59, 180–81, 188, 320, 322 abstinence from 14, 58, 75, 77, 297–98 abuse 1, 5, 11, 111–15, 117–18, 125 addiction 183, 192 advertisement 209, 320 Auguste Forel's views on 10–11 degeneration through 11, 103–4, 111–13, 133–34, 136–37, 139–42 discourse on 11, 13, 116, 118 imported 119 laws 117, 157 local 114 Mohandas K. Gandhi's views on 6–9 prohibition 6, 9, 117, 188, 313, 318, 321–22 regulation 112, 120, 191 Southern Nigeria 105 taxation 107, 157 trade 104, 108–9 West Africa 18, 103

alcoholism 6, 10–12, 124–27, 129–30, 133–34, 136–37, 139, 144, 154, 182–83, 194, 315, 317 Auguste Forel's views on 10 degeneration through 133, 142 eugenicist views on 125 onanism, relation to 132 Aldred, Guy 58, 319 Alianza Libre de Humo Argentina 212 Allen, Robert W. 303–4 American Cancer Society 211–12, 215 American Heart Association 212, 215 American Lung Association 212 American Medical Association 81, 86–87 American moral reformers 152, 154–55 American Native Races Deputation 157 American Purity Alliance 154, 230 American Vigilance Association 230 anarchism 62 Anderson, Herbert 249–51, 253–57, 265 Andreev, Iv. P. 130 Andrew, Elizabeth Wheeler 3, 156 Andrews, C.F. 8 Anglo-Boer War 83 anti-communism 302 Anti-Nicotine League 58 Anti-Saloon League 13, 154, 157–58 anti-Semitism 184, 190 anti-smoking 58, 203, 207, 209–15, 319 anti-statism 55 anti-tobacco 208, 211, 213, 215 anti-trafficking organizations 275 archives 19, 166, 246–48, 253, 255, 259–60, 265, 265n2 Argentine Anti-Smoking Union 211 Argentine League against Cancer 208

325

326

Index

Armor, Mary Harris 164 Aronovich, Gedalii D. 187–88, 193 art nouveau 55 ashram 6, 64, 75, 257–58 Asociación Argentina de Tabacología 212 Association for Moral and Social Hygiene 255, 257–58 Ayurveda 82 Band of Hope 13, 58 Banerjea, Surendranath 85 Baptist Missionary Society 249 Beiderlinden, W.A. 295 Beijing Police Academy 274 Bengal Presidency Council of Women 257 Bielaski, A. Bruce 229, 236 Bill for an Ordinance Relating to Venereal Disease 166 biopolitics 19 Blackpool colony 56 Blaricum community 65, see also Broederschap Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use 211 Bloomberg Philanthropies 215 Blue Cross 10 Blue Nude 45 Boas, Franz 142 Boise, Blanche 318 Bomanji, Dhanjiboy 80 Bombay Presidency Women’s Council Home 256 Bombay Vigilance Association 256–57 Bombay’s Children Aid Society 257 Bonaparte, Charles J. 228 Borba s Alkoolizma 124–25, 129–30, 136–37, 138f6.1, 140, 141f6.2, 144n2, 147n32, 147n34, 147n35, 147n36, 147n38, 147n40, 147n42, 147n43, 150n78, 150n85, 151n86, 151n92, 151n93, 151n94, 317 Borges, Jorge Luis 205 Brent, Charles Henry 318 Brewster, Sidney 322 British American Tobacco 206 British Medical Association 85 British navy 2, 273 British West Africa 106, 116, 152, 158–60, 162, 166–68, 170t7.1, 172 British Women’s Temperance Association 156 Broederschap 58, see also Blaricum community Brotherhood Church colony 66

Brussels Agreement (1924) 165 Brussels Conference (1889–90) 157 Brussels Convention (1890) 104, 158 (1906) 157 Bulgarian Society for Eugenics 135 Bulgarian Society for Hygiene and Preventive Medicine 135 Bulgarian Society for Racial Hygiene 135 Bulgarian Temperance Federation 136 Bureau of Investigation 221–24, 228–32, 235, 237–38, 238n3, 244n81, 244n85, see also White Slave Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation Burgess, William 225 Burilkov, Dimo 136–37 Burroughs Wellcome & Co. 87, 89 Burroughs, Silas 87 Bushnell, Kate 1, 4–5, 12–13, 15, 18–19 anti-vice movement, relations with 4 in China 3–4 in India 3, 156 in Japan 3 Mohandas K. Gandhi, relations with 5, 7, 10 slavery rhetoric 3 Wisconsin lumber camps, investigation of 2 Butler, Josephine 222 Calcutta Vigilance Association 255–56 Calcutta Vigilance Committee 249 Cameron, Donald 161 Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids 212 Cannon, James 158 Carpenter, Edward 39–40, 64, 79, 82 Center for Disease Control 211 Chalmers, Sir Mackenzie 108, 160 Chamberlin, Alton 290–91, 298, 306 Chant, Laura Ormiston 37 Chau Pucho Club 208 Cherrington, Ernest H. 158 child marriage 261, 275 Chinese Communist Party 285 Church of England Purity Society 33 civil society 10, 16–17, 55, 211, 256 activists 12–16, 211 colonial 250 global 16, 20 initiatives 207 networks 257 organizations 5, 12, 15, 230

Index Civil War Russian 183, 186, 193 US 154, 186 civilizing mission 55, 105, 153, 156 Clarke, Allen 56 Coalition for the Ratification of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control 212 Coca-Cola 86 cocaine 11, 180–81, 188, 322 abuse 184, 190 addicts 187, 190–91 and crime 189, 322 as medication 181 sniffing 187, 193 coffee 77, 94n16, 95n17, 180–82, 197n9, 207 Cold War 292–93, 298, 302, 306, 321 Cole-Hamilton, J. 168 Colonial Office 104, 106, 111, 116, 160, 165, 169 comfort stations 284 comfort women 295 communism 56, 187, 193, 292, 320 Comstock laws 67, see also obscenity Confucianism 276, 283 Congress of Berlin (1884) 157 Contagious Disease Acts 2 Convention People’s Party 153 Coote, William 33 Cortázar, Julio 205 Cowan, A.A. 110 Crafts, Wilbur 154, 157, 318 cranks 56–57, 68n12, 74–78, 89, 91, 319, 321 crime 80, 96n30, 107, 115, 118–19, 125–26, 141, 160, 163–64, 182, 189, 229, 238, 247, 253, 281, 316, 322 Criminal Law Amendment Act 33 Crittenton, Charles 280 Crowther, Archdeacon 114 Currie, John 113 Cutler, Jay 91 Czolgosz, Leon 67 Davis, Katharine 257 Defense of the Realm Regulation (1918) 166 Department of Justice 228, 230, 231t10.1 Derain, André 43, 48 Desmond, Olga 36 dietary reform 58 domino theory of vice 7, 11 Door of Hope Mission 281

327

dress reform 55, 57, 65, 75 drug abuse 125, 179–80, 183, 185, 187–88, 322 drug addiction 180–95, 317 causes of 185–89, 194, 322 criminological constructions of 18, 179 history of 180–81 as a Jewish problem 179, 184, 190 medical constructions of 18, 179 origins of 184–85 scientific perceptions of 181 as a social problem 179–81, 183–85 Du Maurier, Daphne 62 Eighteenth Amendment 164 Esperanto 65, 143 eugenics 10–11, 13, 35, 38, 75, 83, 111, 117, 126, 129, 132–34, 136, 139, 143–44 Bulgaria 18, 124–26, 135, 142 Germany 132 Latin America 132 Nazi Germany 132, 143 negative 126, 135, 143–44 Poland 132 positive 135 socialist 191 Evans, Mike 92 Exner, M.J. 166 Fabian Society 133 Fairhope settlement 61 Fang, Duan 281 fascism 36, 132 Fauvism 43 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 221, see also Bureau of Investigation feminism 5, 10, 55, 130 Finch, Stanley W. 228–33, 235–38 Fiorani-Gallotta, Pier Luigi 137 Florence Crittenton Homes 280 Food and Drug Act (1906) 86 footbinding 275 Forel, Auguste 10–11, 13, 15–16, 18, 129–30, 133–34, 136–37 Fortier, François-Edmond 42, 44f2.2 Foucault, Michel 14 Framework Convention on Tobacco Control 210, 212, 214, 216, 319 Franco-Prussian War 184, 186 Fränkel, Fritz 184–85 free love 55, 62, 71n57, 318

328

Index

Fundación Inter Americana del Corazón Argentina 212 Futer, David S. 192 gambling 7, 13, 78, 276, 313, 318 Gandhi, Mohandas K. 5–6, 9, 12, 14–15, 64, 82, 313, 319 alcoholism, views on 6 anti-Westernism 7–8 ashrams 75 domino theory of vice 7 industrial civilization, critique of 6–7 Kate Bushnell, relations with 5, 7 prostitution, views on 8, 18, 253 temperance campaigns 7–8 women, views on 6 gangster 163–64 Garrison, William Lloyd 156 Gastev, Aleksei K. 191 Gauguin, Paul 43, 45, 47 geisha 295 General Council of Health Education 169 General Medical Council 89 Gernet, Mikhail N. 190, 192–93 Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses, see Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring Gibbs, Philip 40 gin 103–4, 106–7, 110, 113–15, 118–19, 158–65, 171, 173, 176n42, 176n48, 177n70, 178n99, 314 global community 12, 15–16 Goff, Guy 236 Golant, Raisa 179, 185–86, 189 Gold Coast 106t5.1, 119–20, 123n78, 153, 158–62, 164–65, 167–69, 170t7.1, 170–73, 176n46, 176n47, 176n48, 176n49, 176n50, 176n56, 177n63, 177n70, 177n77, 178n92, 178n93 gonorrhea 166–68, 277 Gordon, James H. 300 Gorovoi-Shaltan, Vladimir A. 188 Graham, Sylvester 81 Grotjahn, Alfred 128, 133 Gunby, Thomas A. 304 Guomindang 284–85 Gupta, Charu 247 Haeckel, Ernst 39 Hallam, Wirt 224 Harriman, Job 319 hashish 11, 180–82

Health and Strength League 38 Health Canada 212 Healthy and Artistic Dress Union 61 Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada 212 Herbert, John Rogers 34 hereditary 132, 134–36, 139–40, 143–44, 151n87, 267n22, 316 heroin 181 Herrera, Carlos Alvarez 211 Hesse, Erich 317 Hind Swaraj 7 Hindu Women’s Rescue Home 256 Hinduism 28n84, 261 Hocking, Salome 61 Hodge, John R. 292, 304 Holocaust 143 Home Colony 67 homosexuality 40, 189 Hornaday, W.T. 156 Hornibrook, Fred 38 Howard, Ebenezer 65 immigration 223, 226, 314, 322 law 226–28 Immigration Bureau 221, 226–28, 237 Immigration Commission 228 Independent Labour Party 57 Indian National Congress 7–8 Instituto de Medicina Experimental 208 Inter-American Heart Foundation 212 International Abolitionist Federation 222 International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic (1904) 275 International Association for Labor Legislation 315 International Bureau for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women 222 International Bureau for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic 222 International Congress against Alcoholism 133–34 International Congress on Public Assistance and Private Charity 315 International Congress on Social Insurance 315 International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children (1921) 223 International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women of Full Age (1933) 256

Index International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic (1910) 223, 275 International Council of Women 15 International Establishment for the Healing Art Without Drugs and Surgery 81 International Labour Office 15 International Opium Conference 315, 318 International Organization of Good Templars 10–11, 13, 124, 154 International Reform Bureau 154, 315 Iovchev, Nikolay 142–43, 151n100, 151n101, 151n98, 151n99 Iriye, Akira 15 Jainism 6 Japanese health system 300–2 jiliangsuo 271, 278–82, 288n45, 289n49 Joël, Ernst 184–85 Johnson, James 107, 109–10, 112, 114–15, 117, 313, 319 Jones, Melville 115 Kallenbach, Herman 6, 9 Kaweah colony 60 Kellogg, J.H. 81 Kingsley, Mary 112 Konsulov, Stefan 125–26, 135, 139, 142–44, 145n6 Kuhne, Louis 81–82, 92n5 La Cortesía de Elegir 213 Ladies National Committee 222 Lagos 107–8, 114, 117, 159–60 brothels 166 racial segregation 117 Lagos Standard 103, 116, 119, 120n1, 120n2, 121n17, 122n61, 123n77 land communes 18, 53–54, 56, 59–63, 65–67 Lane, William 59 Latin American Coordinating Coalition on Tobacco Control 211 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring 126 League of Mercy Shelter 256 League of Nations 8, 19, 24n43, 28n88, 128, 223, 247, 255, 258, 261t11.1, 265, 266n4, 268n45, 268n49, 268n50, 268n51, 268n52, 268n54, 287n28, 321 Leavitt, Mary 157 Lebensreform 6, 18, 36, 49n8, 54, 68n8, 93n6 Leistikow, Gertrud 36

329

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon vii, 42f2.1, 41–43, 45, 47 Liggett’s 206 Liquor Committee 108, see also Native Races and Liquor Traffic United Committee Liquor Licenses (Spirits) Amendment Ordinance 161 Liquor Trade inquiry (1909) 105, 110, 117 Liquor Traffic Amendment Ordinance 161 Liublinskii, Pavel I. 192 Llano del Rio colony 60–61, 66–67, 70n36 local option 130–31 lock hospital 2–3, 233, 273–74, 279 Lockley, Philip 63 Long, Walter 158 Lorillard 206 MacArthur, Douglas 292 Macaulay, Herbert 107 MacDonald, Ramsay 58 Macfadden, Bernarr 80–81, 87, 90, 92n4, 93n5, 96n30 madams 227, 230, 232, 235, 273 Magdalenes 280 Maison du Bon Pasteur 280 Mani, M.S. 251, 253, 265 Mann Act (1910) xii, 21n6, 223, 229–31, 236–38, 238n1, 239n11, 239n7, 241n41, 242n43, 242n45, 242n51, 242n53, 243n60, see also White Slave Traffic Act (1910) marriage 4, 62, 71n55, 133, 135, 155, 169, 191, 257, 260–63, 275, 278, 280–81, 316 masculinity 38, 207, 231, 242n55, 251, 291, 297, 303, 306 Mata Hari 36 Matisse, Henri vii, 45, 45f2.3 medical discourse 184, 306 Mekhonoshin, Konstatin A. 191 Mendel, Gregor 134 mental illness 127, 133 mesmerism 62 Methodist Mission of Bangalore City 258 Miles, Eustace 76, 81 military police 295–96 Miner, Maude 226 Ministry of Health 129, 138, 213, 319 Ministry of Police 275 Ministry of Public Health 208 Minor, Lazar 191 Minton, William L. 304–5, 312n60 modernism 7, 41, 43, 46–47

330

Index

Monte Verità xv, 54, 59–60, 62, 64, 67, 70n30, 71n53, 71n61, 71n64, 93n6, 124, 318 morals police 271–72 morphine 11, 181–82, 185–86, 188–90 Mukherji, Santosh Kumar 264 Müller, Friedrich Wilhelm 76, see Eugen Sandow Nacktkultur 26n74, 36, 41, 50n27, 61 Naniwa, Kawashima 274 National Missionary Council 249 National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws 322 National Physical Recreation Society 38 National Program for Tobacco Control 213 National Social Welfare League 236 National Socialist Party 126, 133, 140, 142, see also Nazi Germany National Vigilance Association 33 nationalism 5, 38, 117, 139, 152 Native Races and Liquor Traffic United Committee 104, 157, see also Liquor Committee natural healing 18, 68n11, 74, 80–82, 84, 91–92 Nazi Germany 132, 142–44, 148n50, 207, see also National Socialist Party Neichev, Haralampi 124, 129–31, 136, 139–40, 144, 147n30, 147n32, 147n42, 150n78, 151n92, 151n93 neurasthenia 83–84, 97n50, 136 new asceticism 75 New Australia 56, 59, 71n64, 72n76, 73n91 New Man 191 New Policies 273–74 Newlands, H.S. 160 Nkrumah, Kwame 153, 171–73 noble savage 39–41, 47, 61 Nordau, Max 54, 58 nudism 13, 18, 36–41, 43–48, 55, 58, 61–62, 65, 75, 81, 88f4.2, 318 and bodybuilding 38 Caleb Saleeby 38–39, 313 criticism against 37 among eugenicists 38 German 47 Hans Surén 40 health and beauty movement, ties to 38 Heinrich Pudor 46 philosphy of 36 Richard Ungewitter 39, 46 socialist 47 theorists of 36

obscenity 33, 35, 37, 313, 315, 318 occultism 55, 62–63, 318 Oil Rivers Protectorate 159 opiates 82, 180–81, 322 opium 3–5, 7–8, 11, 15, 19, 24n43, 111, 156, 181–82, 188, 194, 197n11, 276, 314–15, 318 dens 3 Mohandas K. Gandhi's views on 7–9 production 8 trade 8, 15, 106, 119 Orahovac, Peter 128 Orwell, George 57, 75 pacifism 10, 55, 75, 143 Page Act (1875) 226 Pan American Health Organization 211–12 pan pan girls 295 Pasteur Institute 128 patent medicines 78, 81–82, 86f4.1, 85–91, 98n69, 99n94 People’s Republic of China 270, 285 Perazzo, Diego 211 Peronist era 205 Phillip Morris International 206 Phoenix settlement 64 physical culture 74–77, 79–84, 91–92, 93n11, 99n94 Physical Culture City 81 Picasso, Pablo vii, 42f2.1, 41–43, 45, 47–48, 51n42, 51n43, 51n46 Pilheu, Jorge 211 Pillage, Mable 257 pimps 169, 225–27, 229, 231, 251, 259–60, 262, 273, 280, 301 Ploetz, Alfred 133 Podvoiskii, Nikolai I. 191 police 2, 37, 53, 114, 162, 164–65, 168, 172, 221, 227, 230, 232–35, 248, 256–57, 260, 271, 273–81, 283–85, 292, 315–16 corruption 164, 232, 254 informers 66 morals 271–72 reform in China 274–75 Tokyo 273–74 postcards 42–43 Prevention of Prostitution Act (1923) 247, 256 Prigradov-Kudrin, Aleksandr A. 192 pro kits 299 pro stations 299–300 prohibition zone 155, 158

Index prophylaxis 167, 184–85, 192, 239n16, 297, 299, 301, 303, 306, 319–20 prostitution 2–4, 8–10, 12, 14, 18–19, 34, 37, 133, 136, 152, 155, 159, 166–67, 169, 171–72, 193, 219, 221–22, 224–28, 232, 236–38, 247, 249, 251–52, 255–56, 259, 261–65, 271, 274, 277, 280, 284–85, 291, 294–96, 313–16 brothel-based 19, 221–22, 237, 261, 282, 284, 302 child 251, 255, 263–64, 277, 314, 321 China 19, 270, 274, 276, 278 colonial Africa 169 colonial West Africa 152 East Asia 19 forced 2–3, 224, 262, 278, 282 globalization of 223 indentured 275, 278, 282 India 246 Japan 273, 282, 292 Korea 292 laws 2, 33, 222, 228, 258, 316 legalized 285 licensed 294–95, 300 male 276 Mohandas K. Gandhi's views on 8 movement against 225 Philippines 224 policy 3, 223, 235, 237 public 225, 233 registration 155 regulation 2, 4–5, 13–14, 19, 154–56, 172, 224, 233–35, 237, 247, 270–84, 306–7, 317 suppression 156, 306 taxation 278–79, 284 United States 221, 235, 237 and venereal diseases 129, 166–67, 172, 282, 293, 316 West Africa 159 Public Health and Welfare Section 295, 299 Public Health Bill (1929) 130 Public Health Foundation 208 Pudor, Heinrich 36, 46 puericultural education 129 Pullman settlement 65 Purleigh 66 race 15, 40, 47–48, 76, 81, 103, 105, 109–20, 130, 139–43, 167, 226, 250, 301–2, 304, 314 hygiene 132–33, 138 legislation 144 theories 105, 142

331

Rangoon Vigilance Society 253 Ranstead, William 59 realism 43 Redfern, Percy 64 red-light districts 229, 232–33, 295, 299, 316 Reemtsma 206 Reimer, Nikolai K. 182 Repeal Act (1895) 156 Reynolds, R.J. 206 Rhee, Syngman 305 Richet, Charles 182 Rockefeller Foundation 128 Roe, Clifford G. 225 Roffo, Angel 207–8 Roosevelt, Theodore 155, 228 Rotary Club 208 Rousseau, Henri 43 Roussel, Theodore 33 Rout, Ettie 38 Royal Academy of Art 34 Royal Air Force 168 Royal Commission on Opium in India (1895) 111 Rozen, Mariia 193 Rüdin, Ernst 133 Rusev, Marin 128 Ruskin colony 59, 62, 65, 67, 68n12, 70n34, 73n91 Russo-Japanese war 315 sailors 165, 167, 169, 273, 315 Saleeby, Caleb 38–40, 50, 313 Salisbury, Lord 157 Salvation Army 57, 69n20, 120n4, 256–57, 280 Sandow Craze 89 Sandow Curative Institute 80 Sandow School of Physical Culture 77 Sandow System of physical culture 75–76, 78–80, 84, 89 Sandow Treatment 80, 87 Sandow, Eugen 6, 18, 38, 56, 74–85, 86f4.1, 88f4.2, 86–92, 313, 319 attack on 89 campaign against drugs 84 disciples 38 eugenics 83 temperance movement, relations with 77 US tour 79–80 world tour 74 Sandow’s Magazine 76–77, 79, 84–85 Sapara, Oguntula 114

332

Index

Sarda (Child Marriage Restraint) Act (1929) 261 satyagraha 6, 16 Schargrodsky, Herman 211 schnapps 140, 160–61 Schönenberger, Franz 81 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 91 Scientific Conference on Drug Addiction (1923) 184 scientific racism 105, 115 Sedlack, Francis 64, 66 Selective Service 228 Semashko, Nikolai 187, 191–93 Serge, Victor 60, 67 sex education 127, 299 sex trafficking 1, 3, 12, 14–15, 18–20, 219, 222–24, 226, 229–33, 237–38, 310n31 sex workers 2–4, 14, 41, 221, 223, 225, 228–30, 232–38, 243n66, 247 Shanti Sadana Ashram 258 Shaw, Nellie 62 Shephard, Meliscent 255, 257, 259, 266n22, 267n22 Shikai, Yuan 274 Sholomovich, Alexsandr 187, 189, 193, 322 Sickert, Walter 33 Siegert, Wilhelm 81 Smith, Alison 33, 35, 48, 52 smoking 9, 58, 78, 84, 203–16, 316 Buenos Aires 18, 203–4, 207 cancer, relation to 208–9 controversy 209 criminalization 215 marijuana 323 medicalization 215 opium 276 prohibition 204 regulation 208–11, 214–15, 319 subculture 205 smuggling 15, 60, 118, 163, 188, 202n106 social democrats 61, 129, 132–33 Bulgarian 126, 144 German 57 social hygiene 4, 10, 14, 21n18, 24n54, 125–29, 131–33, 135–36, 143–44, 175n38, 227, 230, 255, 257, 294 social purity 2, 33–35, 37–38, 41, 44, 49n5, 152, 154, 157, 172–73, 223–24, 234 Social Welfare Ministry 209 socialism 10, 57, 68n13, 68n7, 69n22, 70n28, 71n59, 71n60, 71n65, 72n76, 73n90, 73n91, 75, 129, 133, 146n20, 148n50, 149n50 Society for the Suppression of Vice 314

soldiers 19, 154–55, 165–67, 169, 186, 234, 237, 252, 283, 291, 295, 297–302, 304–7, 315–16, 319 Sontag, Susan 41 Souchy, Augustin 60 Southern Nigeria 106t5.1, 103–8, 110–13, 115–16, 118, 120n1, 120n9, 122n72, 159–60, 176n41, 176n45, 314 St. Catherine’s Rescue Home 256 St. Francis of Assisi 59 St. Germain-en-Laye Convention of 158 Treaty of 119–20 Stanchev, Nikola 137 Stanley, H.M. 87 Stead, W.T. 319 Steer, Philip Wilson 33 sterilization 10–11, 126, 133, 135, 139, 143, 151n87 Stockel colony 60, 67 Stoler, Ann 17, 236, 294 Storyville 316 Student Volunteers 154 Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act (1923) 249 (1930) 256 Surén, Hans 39–40 surveillance 37, 53, 66, 92n3, 235, 247, 265, 295, 299–302, 306 syphilis 9, 159, 167–68, 192, 277–78, 316–17 tabloid 87 Taft, William H. 228 Tambe, Ashwini 20, 51–52, 247–48, 266–67 tango 204–5 Taoism 64 tax 14, 66, 107, 125, 157, 205, 208, 210–11, 270, 276–79, 283–84, 286n10, 288n40, 322, 324n19 temperance discourse 124, 129–30, 144 temperance movement 6, 13, 18, 77, 125, 129, 142–44, 149n62, 157 Theosophy 6, 64, 71n66, 72n69, 75, 319 Thomas, Shenton 165 Thompson, Bonar 57 tobacco 18, 180–81, 203–4, 206, 208, 211–12, 215, 313, 316, 319–20, 322 advertisement 204, 209, 214 companies 58, 206, 208 industry 204, 206–7, 209, 211, 213 lobby 209 production 205, 208–9, 214 products 204, 209, 314

Index regulation 208–14, 216 smoking 208, 316 taxes 210–11 Tolstoy, Leo 58 Tolstoyan movement 6, 53, 59–60, 64, 66 Total Abstinence Movement 58 transatlantic slave trade 109 tuberculosis 125, 127, 129, 142, 144, 175n38, 192 Tugwell, Herbert 107, 111, 121n16, 121n33, 122n55 Tuke, Henry 33 Tuner, George Kibbe 224 Twain, Mark 75 Tyrrell, Ian 5, 16, 22, 25, 28n87, 29n92, 120, 157, 174, 175n15, 175n22, 175n23, 175n24, 175n25, 175n26, 175n30, 175n33, 177, 177n67 US Army 154–55, 292, 298, 307n3, 311n51, 311n53 US Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) 292 Ungewitter, Richard 36–37, 39–40, 46, 46f2.4, 50, 51n34 United Society of Christian Endeavor 154 United States Army Forces in Korea (USAFIK) 292 Vaishnava-Hinduism 6 VD contact tracing 299–301 vegetarianism 6, 55, 57–58, 64, 69n25, 75, 77, 318 venereal disease 2, 10–11, 14, 18, 62, 125, 127, 129, 134, 136, 139, 144, 152, 154–55, 159, 165–68, 170t7.1, 227, 233–35, 237, 250, 252, 257, 270–72, 279, 283, 291, 293–307, 316 and alcoholism 130, 134 British West Africa 152 campaign against 169 education 298–99 Japan 290 Korea 290 prevention 295 and prostitution 166–67, 172, 270, 272–73, 279, 282, 290–91, 316 rehabilitation centers 303, 307 among troops 165–68, 290 Venereal Disease Museum 296, 319 Villany, Adoreé 36 violence 5, 116, 163–64, 184, 224, 248, 294

333

Volkskörper 14 Volstead Act (1919) 157, 318, 321 Wagner, Richard 63 Wandervogel 60 Webb, Beatrice and Sydney 133 Weidenreich, Franz 142 Weissmann, August 134 Wellcome, Henry 87, 98n73, 98n74, 98n75, 98n76 Welsh, Thomas 117 West African War Council 166 White Cross League 33 White Slave Division 19, 221–24, 228–33, 235–38, see also Bureau of Investigation White Slave Traffic Act (1910) 222–23, 225, 228–30, 236–37, 238n1, 239n9, 240n22, 244n79, see also Mann Act (1910) white slavery 222–29, 231, 236, 239n11, 239n7, 240n22, 241n31, 314 crisis 223–24, 228 laws 223 movement against 222–23, 225 policy against 223, 230 Whiteway colony 54, 56, 59–62, 64–67, 70n46, 71n57, 71n64, 72n75, 72n79, 72n81, 72n82 Wilcox, R.R. 168, 170t7.1 Willard, Frances 2, 154 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union 2, 77, 154, 157–58 Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom 15 Women’s Mission Board of the Methodist Episcopal Church 1, 4 Workers’ Social Democratic Party 129 World Conference on Tobacco or Health 209 World Health Organization 208, 210, 212, 215, 217n15, 319 World League Against Alcoholism 154 World Purity Association 230 World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union 1, 3–4, 13, 15–16, 77, 154, 156 yoga 82 Young Men’s Christian Association 13, 154 Young Women’s Christian Association 154 Zlatarov, Asen 140–42, 151n95, 151n96, 151n97 Zuyder Zee colony 59