One more thing on that subject...

Perhaps my reason for writing this is that while scholars of American literature and sociologists haven't overlooked slumming, historians have. My contribution to the field is to discuss slumming in the context of the history of America in the Gilded Age -- how we make sense of ethnicity, the new frontier, modernity, the Other.

The Present State of Scholarship

I've decided that this section of my proposal -- "The Present State of Scholarship" -- is going to be the key part of my proposal defense. After meeting with a wonderful historian of the Lower Est Side yesterday and getting her feedback on my topic, I've realized that the topic itself is engaging enough and rich with potential meaning. But what it tells us and how it fits into the larger historiography of New York, the Lower East Side, tourism, sexuality, etc. still remains to be seen.

As with my research paper on the Committee of Fourteen a couple of years ago, I need to do that somewhat tedious part of research preparation where I explain why what I'm doing is so damned important. And so, being realistic now, let me list the texts I really need to discuss in order to "defend" my proposal:

In terms of urban tourism/leisure:

Cocks, Catherine. Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1840-1915
Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements
Erenberg, Lewis. Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture
Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements
Wasserman, Suzanne. The Good Old Days of Poverty
etc.

In terms of slumming as slumming:

Koven, Seth. Slumming
Gandal, Keith. The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum

In terms if Lower East Side history:

Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements
Wasserman, Suzanne. The Good Old Days of Poverty
Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925.
Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives
Abu-Lughod, Janet. From Urban Village to East Village
Mele, Christopher. Selling the Lower East Side
Diner, Hasia. ed. Remembering the Lower East Side
Tchen, Jack. New York Before Chinatown
Bonner, Arthur. Alas! What Brought Thee Hither
etc.

In terms of sex:
Gilfoyle, Timothy. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920.
Chauncey, George. Gay New York
etc.

There are also all of those American Lit. dissertation I found on slumming literature, which should be considered.

Quote from Seth Koven's Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London

"Many kinds of love, sexual and nonsexual alike, animated Britons' engagement with philanthropy. I investigate how the histories of sexuality and sexual desires usually associated with the private lives of individuals intersected with the public histories of benevolence to shape metropolitan philanthropy and social welfare. While I do not anachronistically impose the vocabulary of twentieth-century psychoanalysis on my nineteenth-century subjects, I do attempt to illuminate their psychological and sexual complexities. I examine the motives, representations, meanings, and consequences of their forays into the slums of Victorian and Edwardian London. At the same time, I reconstruct as best I can the responses of the poor to their uninvited visitors. The circumstances and survival strategies of the poor necessarily shaped their vision of the world and of their social betters.¹⁸ This book reveals the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories, overflowed their boundaries, affecting one another in profoundly consequential ways for our understanding of poverty and its representations, social policies, and emerging sexual and gender identities in modern Britain." (From Introduction)

I love Koven's approach, but I also wonder if I would need to be so subtle. I don't think erotics and sexuality informed slumming; I think it was the impetus for slumming. But then again, we're talking about different populations and places -- he's talking about Victorian London reformers and I seem to be talking about tourists.

Urban tourism vs. sex tourism

I have a lot of thoughts to sort out today, namely which approach I want to take (or if I need to even choose) between the idea of urban tourism, which would build upon the obvious slumming tours of the downtown area led by guides like Chuck Connors, OR the idea of sex tourism, which would build upon whatever research I gather from the Committee of Fifteen/Committee of Fourteen files and the like. Or would sex tourism simply be a chapter of the dissertation? I mean, how far can I go with it?

Let's examine that. So, of course, people don't seem to have called visiting the Lower East Side for the purposes of finding prostitutes "sex tourism" at the turn of the last century. Indeed, the term conjures more images of trips to a 20th or 21st century Thai brothel than it does gentlemanly excursions to the slums. On the other hand, my investigations of the Committee of Fourteen records a few years ago suggested that people definitely came to the city, visited prostitutes, and then returned to their banal lives in the country. It wasn't simply a local phenomenon with prostitutes servicing their neighbors. Evidence of this consisted of letters to the Committee, business cards, the testimony of "steerers" who worked on behalf of pimps and prostitutes to "steer" business toward them. In my research yesterday on the Committee of Fifteen papers (that committee was around from 1900-1902), it appears that the impetus for the formation of the committee was the distribution of prostitutes' business cards on the steps of a Lower East Side Episcopal church. In other words, it's not so far-fetched when one considers the incredible underground economy of prostitution on the Lower East Side to examine it in the same terms anyone would examine any other tourist industry.

On the other hand, sex tourism, like all tourism, is about consumption -- consuming products, consuming the Other. So taken with the language of consumption that permeates the other sources I've read, is it important to distinguish between this kind of sexual exchange and that of slummers who really just want to watch opium smokers, light joss sticks, buy well-made overcoats, and eat "authentic" Jewish, Chinese, or Italian food?

And that's really the question: is this about slumming as a mode of consuming the Other, in which case sex tourism is a chapter and slumming tours are another? Or is there so much about sex tourism (not just prostitution, but nightclubs, bathhouses, opium dens as locations for the "white slavery" trade, the fascination of people like Hapgood with "free love" on the Lower East Side) that I should just stick with that? If it's the former, then there are several books I need to consider: Cocks' Doing the Town, Erenberg' Steppin' Out, more guidebooks, etc. If it's the latter, then I really think I need to think about this in terms of narratives, as in Walkowitz' City ofDreadful Delight.

What's more, I need to dig in and figure out what my larger question is, as well as how it fits into a larger historiography. Is this about modernity, ethnicity, sex, the creation of a 20th century middle class, what?

Chuck Connors and Konrad Bercovici

I spent a chunk of today and an even larger chunk on Saturday at the New York Public Library (on 42nd and 5th) doing research. I focused most of my energies on two books -- Chuck Connors' 1904 book Bowery Life (written in collaboration with Richard K. Fox, then the publisher of the Police Gazette) and Konrad Bercovici's 1924 book Around the World in New York.

Connors, also widely known as the Mayor of Chinatown for his seemingly amiable relationship with the residents and workers of Chinatown and for his popular slumming tours of the neighborhood, was quite a curious, self-aggrandizing, and mysterious New York character at the turn of the last century. Because he seemed so devoted to fashioning a larger-than-life version of himself for the public -- much like other New York characters like Al Smith and our old friend George Washington Plunkitt -- it's hard to know what's real from this text and what's just part of the show. Placed atop his own flair for the dramatic is that of the Police Gazette -- a sensationalist entertainment rag (and entertaining it is!) with a mostly working-class, male audience. The book is filled with anecdotes, posed pictures of Connors looking tough, and, at the very end, a series of advertisements for jujitsu, boxing, poker playing, and "dumb-bell exercise" manuals. In other words, this is a coffee table book, not remotely related to reportage.

It is interesting, though, as a discursive piece. And by "discursive" here I mean as a representation of the discourse of white, working-class masculinity in relationship to place and ethnicity. Connors' public persona is built upon his knowledge of the exotic world of the Chinese immigrant community -- and as a working class man, as opposed to a genteel "cream cake" (as he describes uptowners), he is deemed to have particularly acute access to the community. And he's a huckster, a descendant of folks like P.T. Barnum and even (to a more minimal extent) Charles Wilson Peale. So his reputation is impressive because of the fantastic things he shows -- opium dens, Chinese-Irish marriages, tong meetings, "joss-houses," and the like. While Bowery Life offered really very little in the way of slumming data (though there is a somewhat interesting episode in "The True Story of Kitty"), it is a fun document. Here's to hoping I get to learn more about this guy.

The other book was Konrad Bercovici's Around the World in New York, which was useful on the level of how New York's ethnic neighborhoods were sold to a consuming public. Indeed, the major sense I got from this book was that it was about salesmanship -- the salesmanship of ethnic types, of ethnic goods and foods, of local color and the celebration of New York's tendency toward camaraderie instead of enmity in the face of cultural diversity. I really only read the sections on the East Side, Little Italy, and Chinatown, though there's more to go. Bercovici is far more knowledgeable about and forgiving of the East Side Jews, quick to feminize the Chinese, and happy to caricature the Italians. It'll take me some time to figure out what his goal is and what position he represents. One of the things I find most interesting about the book is the fact the Bercovici -- at least as far as Stansell is concerned -- was one of the Lower East Side's most successful "bohemians," collaborating with the likes of John Reed, Emma Goldman, Mabel Dodge, and Eugene O'Neill. So as a "bohemian," I wonder what his stake is in this book and these portrayals? Or is it fair to make him representative of "bohemians?" I'd like to consider him together with Hutchins Hapgood, also a "bohemian," who in particular found coverage of the people of the Lower East Side to be essential to adding "authenticity" to his writing.

Finally, I need to think more about urban tourism and what it means. Why do people travel? What interest would people have in going to these places? Sex, authenticity, freedom, danger -- yes. But is this all? And if these things are what it's all about, would these be the way to organize my thinking more?