A Cincinnati Health Officer’s Plan To License ‘Ladies Of The Evening’ Ends In Grief
Nobody, but nobody, utters the word reglementation today. It’s even difficult to pronounce. In the early years of the Twentieth Century, reglementation was stolen from French to define an effort to regulate or license prostitution. Overall, the campaign was a failure pretty much everywhere, but especially in Cincinnati.
Why adopt a strange word that most modern spellcheckers refuse to recognize? The answer lies in the tightrope reglementers had to walk in 1900. On the one hand, they did not want to admit that they were regulating or licensing prostitution – making the practice legal, in other words – although that is exactly what they were doing. On the other hand, they did not want to imply they were attempting to eliminate prostitution, because they most certainly were not.
Cincinnati’s chief reglementer was Health Officer Clark Wargatt Davis. As the man charged by the Cincinnati Board of Health with ensuring the purity and vitality of the city, Doctor Davis spearheaded campaigns for pure milk, antiseptic telephone mouthpieces, stiff enforcement of the anti-expectoration ordinances and regular and vigorous inspections of slaughterhouses and butcher shops.
Soon after his appointment as Cincinnati Health Officer in 1900, Doctor Davis announced his plan to reduce the incidence of venereal disease in the city’s red-light district in the West End. His plan was based on reglementation, and it did not go smoothly at all.
It appears that a lot of Cincinnati doctors had been making considerable profit by offering check-ups and treatments to the “frail sisterhood” of the red-light district. Doctor Davis announced that, henceforth, only his hand-picked “district physicians” could certify the health of the city’s prostitutes because the freelance doctors outside his department were either dishonest or incompetent. That made him very popular with the local medical community, as you may imagine. Two of those freelancers, Doctor E.P. Joseph and his father, Doctor Alexander Joseph, responded to this accusation by filing a $10,000 slander suit against Doctor Davis that dragged on for several years.
Health Officer Davis originally proposed that each prostitute in the red-light district pay a fee of one dollar per weekly examination and certification. This led to what the Cincinnati Enquirer [6 March 1901] described as “a wholesale revolt among the denizens of the Tenderloin.” Davis agreed to reduce the fee to 50 cents. His 21 district physicians screened 400 to 500 prostitutes each week.
Although Doctor Davis maintained that his district physicians were superior in every way to the independent doctors who had been profiting from their examinations in the red-light district, at least one embarrassing incident suggested otherwise. When the police raided a brothel managed by a madam named Vonnie Avel in March 1901, District Physician William T. Lindsay was found in the madam’s private apartment. Davis at first excused Doctor Lindsay, claiming he was present on official business. That assertion aged rather poorly as more details emerged, and Davis eventually demanded that Lindsay resign.
Doctor Davis expected the Police Department to help enforce his program, but he discovered that Cincinnati’s officers were embedded in the system of graft that maintained the red-light district. On one occasion, a police officer was sent to arrest a woman who had skipped her examination. The officer claimed she could not be found, but it came out that she, in fact, occupied a room next-door to the officer’s mistress in the same bawdy house.
When the police did decide to track down an unlicensed “woman of the town,” the results were often embarrassing. As it turned out, identifying a sex worker was not a simple matter. Most women operated from brothels managed by a madam, but many maintained an independent practice. A police detective, acting on a tip, knocked on an apartment door on Central Avenue and informed the occupant that she was overdue for her hygienic exam. It turned out that she was the very respectable wife of a bank executive, who gave the Mayor a piece of his mind.
Enough friction developed between the Police Department and the Board of Health that Mayor Julius Fleischman was dragged into the controversy. The mayor did his best to put a happy face on matters, but the newspapers reported some heated discussions behind closed doors at City Hall.
Even when flagrant violators were brought into court, things didn’t go as Doctor Davis anticipated. There was no law against refusing to be examined by a doctor, so the recalcitrants were charged with loitering, a truly vague accusation. With rare exceptions, juries refused to convict on that flimsy allegation, infuriating the prosecuting attorney who complained that he was wasting his time on trivialities.
Health Officer Davis raised so many legal questions with his program to combat venereal disease that the City of Cincinnati ended up suing its own Health Officer to clarify the rights and responsibilities of the Health Department. In its suit, the city claimed that mandating regular medical examinations of the sex workers in the red-light district amounted to an abuse of corporate power and that there was no legislative authority to enforce such a program.
In his response to the suit, Doctor Davis testified that he was acting under the municipal law giving him authority to regulate the health of the city. Davis asserted that “certain contagious diseases” prevailed in “certain quarters” of the city and that he was authorized to take actions to inhibit the spread of such diseases. Further, by levying a reasonable fee, he was ensuring that “the expense of this work is made to be borne by those responsible for the existence of the disease.” Typical of the Reformist politicians of the era, Doctor Davis blamed the women infected by male customers rather than the men involved.
The major opposition to Health Officer Davis’ program was Cincinnati’s Municipal Reform League, a progressive organization. In addition to generally impotent attempts to banish gambling, boxing, most forms of Sunday entertainment and alcohol, the League endeavored to close the red-light district entirely. In essence, the Municipal Reform League believed that venereal disease was the just desserts for men who indulged their lusts in the palaces of sin. The League saw Doctor Davis’ disease-prevention efforts as only encouraging the social evil.
The argument raged for years, even after Doctor Davis departed city employment for the far more tranquil position of Medical Director for the Union Central Life Insurance Company. Cincinnati’s red-light district was officially shuttered in 1917 by order of the United States Army which prohibited cities from allowing such enclaves within five miles of a military training facility. Fort Thomas in Kentucky was less than five miles from the West End and that was that.
Well, almost. Although no longer officially designated and no longer regularly inspected, Cincinnati’s Tenderloin limped through the Great Depression and was only finally closed down when it was demolished for “urban renewal” in the 1950s.
