Crimes of Immorality: Prostitution
In the early part of the twentieth century, the crusaders against vice took a strong stance against prostitution and white slavery. But the target of this new campaign against vice wasn’t prostitutes, but rather against those who profited from these “unsuspecting females” (Lubove 1962, 308). According to reformers, women were the victim of this commercialized vice, being manipulated by “sinister interests” with no way to escape. It was men who were to blame for the demand for prostitutes, for it was the lust of men that created the profession of prostitution in the first place (Lubove 1962, 318).
Crimes of Immorality: Prostitution
It was also popular opinion among reformers that the “procurers, pimps, madams, proprietors of saloons, hotels, [and] dance halls” were the ones to blame for supplying this demand (Lubove 1962, 310-311). This focus on criminalizing the people profiting from prostitution can be seen in the circuit court cases in Brown County as well. In multiple instances, it was the owners or managers of the buildings in which prostitution had taken place who were brought to court, not the prostitutes themselves. In fact, as seen in the graph below, six out of the 15 people brought to court for prostitution between 1910-1939 were proprietors of the buildings where prostitution was accused of taking place (“Brown County Circuit Court Criminal Cases Database ca. 1890-1939," 2019). An additional person was the manager of the Motor Inn. Only three of the people brought to court were actual prostitutes.
Crime & Punishment
It is worth noting that the punishments for operating or working at a "house of ill fame" or being a prostitute varied on who was being tried. The court records only describe the punishments doled out in four of these cases. In one case, the accused proprietor of the “house of ill fame,” the Motor Inn, was sentenced to the Brown County Jail (State of Wisconsin v. John Bangert, Clara Bangert, Betty Larsen, Charles Schuldt, Vivian O’Hara, R.L. Passmore, Art Matzke, & Gertrude Conn, 2019). The above article from the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern on April 12, 1933 expands upon this sentence and the sentences of the other people involved in this case.
According to the article, in addition to being sent to jail, the proprietor, John Bangert, was fined $200. The Inn’s bartender was fined $100, and the three prostitutes involved in the case were fined $25 each and told to leave the county. Adjusted for inflation, this would be a total of about $7,243.47 in fines today. In order to dismiss the case against John Bangert’s wife, Clara, also a proprietor of the Motor Inn, the owners were forced to close down the Inn for one year. Another of the cases represented within the circuit court cases showed that the sentence for the three proprietors of an unnamed business accused of prostitution, including a married couple, was a fine $524.01. This would be about $10,121.73 today adjusted for inflation (State of Wisconsin v. Albert Kraemer, Fred Kraemer, & Ida Kraemer, 1915). These cases suggest that it was more important to the court that the prostitutes be removed from the county than for them to be reformed and saved from their “immoral” ways. In contrast, the males and their wives who were involved in these cases, including the proprietors and bartenders, were to be fined but could remain in the county. Though they may have been involved in allegedly “immoral” acts, these proprietors were still valuable to the community. They likely had money to keep investing into the community and, although they were mixed in with some questionable business, they were not prostitutes themselves.
Victorian Notions & Venereal Diseases
In fighting this vice, reformers also challenged previous Victorian notions of “sexual necessity,” which believed men’s “health depended upon minimum indulgence in sexual intercourse” (Lubove 1962, 311). This practice justified the actions of men who engaged with prostitutes while simultaneously vilifying the female prostitute for her sins (Lubove 1962, 311). In addition to their arguments against Victorian principles, reformers also argued that stopping prostitution was not only a moral necessity but also necessary for the health of Americans. The spread of venereal diseases was a huge concern for reformers because, they claimed, they spread from the “guilty” to the “innocent.” Men, often husbands, spread diseases, leaving behind a path of sickness in their wake by “contaminating the innocent wife and child” (Lubove 1962, 319). The Teasdale Vice Committee itself looked at the damaging effects of venereal diseases and believed it to be the cause of a “great loss of time and money to all persons so afflicted” (Wisconsin Legislature 1914, 133). The committee also stressed the importance of creating stricter legislation to limit the spread of disease, even pushing a law that required the name and address of people afflicted with these diseases to be reported (Wisconsin Legislature 1914, 159-160).