| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 5.1

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Book Reviews

Customer Law: A Thwarted Campaign in Progressive Era Antiprostitution

MACKEY, THOMAS C. Pursuing Johns: Criminal Law Reform, Defending Character, and New York City's Committee of Fourteen, 1920–1930. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. x, 297 pp. Introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $63.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8142-0988-2; $9.95 (CD), ISBN 0-8142-9062-0.
In the early twentieth century, New York City reformers campaigned against the "Raines Law" exemption to the state's liquor law. The 1896 law (named after its sponsor, New York state senator John Raines) exempted saloons with hotels attached from the Sunday drinking ban. In response, saloons took out mortgages on adjoining buildings, called them hotels, and then paid for them by renting out rooms to prostitutes. In 1905, alarmed by the resulting rise in the number of the city's brothels, a group of citizens formed the "Committee of Fourteen for the Suppression of 'Raines Law Hotels'."	1
The "Fourteen," as the Committee came to be known, won stronger saloon licensing procedures that enabled the denial of licenses to saloons running "fake" hotels. Over time, the Committee expanded its numbers and widened its purview, eventually taking on the goal of abolishing the city's entire sex trade. Toward that end, around 1915 some Committee members began to explore the possibility of prosecuting prostitutes' customers. This was not a new idea. Feminist reformers had long argued that arresting prostitutes and not their customers would do little to curb the trade or its concomitant spread of venereal diseases to innocent parties. Nonetheless, for the Committee of Fourteen to propose the arrest of customers was sufficiently controversial that it gave rise to prolonged debates among New York's purity reformers, civic activists, and members of the criminal justice community. It is the fascinating nature of these debates that prompted Thomas C. Mackey to write Pursuing Johns.	. . .

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