MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

During the first two decades of the twentieth century many middle-class activists in Baltimore perceived the city as a place awash in a culture of sin. In a sense they were correct. Baltimore featured a bevy of potentially sexually-charged activities in the opening years of the twentieth century. Prostitution—by no means a new phenomenon in the early 1900s—stood at the center of this urban pleasure culture. The perception of prostitution as an urgent “problem” gained political clout in the early twentieth century as progressive reform groups sought to exert their influence in city politics. Progressives’ efforts did not go uncontested. Historians have analyzed Progressive Era anti-vice reformers, but have rarely paid attention to those who challenged their efforts. This paper shifts the focus away from courtrooms and the offices of anti-vice organiztions to the city’s residential neighborhoods and the efforts of vice segregationists. In Baltimore, many opponents of the vice crusade proposed maintaining a system of vice segregation. Though rarely organized, or self-consciously identifying as a social movement, these people—whom I label vice segregationists—articulated an agenda of reform and regulation that in many ways fit comfortably within Progressive values of separation and social order. This paper examines how reformers—both anti-vice and vice segretationists—used concerns over prostitution and the urban pleasure culture to further their efforts at reordering Baltimore’s city spaces in the early twentieth century.