Policing the Future in interwar New York City
By Dalen Wakeley-Smith
As Europe erupted in war in 1914, a very different battle was fought on the streets of New York City. Fortune tellers, dreaded soothsayers who supposedly conned thousands of New Yorkers out of their money, had overrun the city. Such anxieties had even led to the state law against “those pretending to tell the future” by 1900.
But such laws did not contain the anxiety over the identity of the fortune tellers. Worst amongst them were the “Gypsy fortune tellers,” Romani women whom other Americans believed had a primordial connection to the occult which gave them special powers of duplicity. In fact, New Yorkers were convinced that the problem of the “Gypsy fortune teller” had become so bad that the New York Police Department (NYPD) was forced to develop a new strategy to deal with the them. The crackdown on telling the future would come to include the use of discretionary policing, enlisting women into law enforcement roles, and punitive measures doled out by magistrate courts. Ironically, through this campaign against predicting the future, the NYPD would itself become a modern police force.
Progressive-era authorities regarded fortune telling as a kind of fraud. New York law classified fortune tellers as “disorderly persons” by the late 19th century. Even though fortune telling was illegal, the allure of securing an authentic purveyor of magical knowledge swayed many would-be customers to seek out their Romani neighbors. Romani people, often classified as “Gypsies”, are a diverse ethnic community hailing from across Europe whose ancestors entered the United States throughout the nineteenth century. Cast as timeless wanderers, child thieves, and magical con artists by Europeans, anti-Romani racism and state sanctioned acts of violence was the norm in Europe for most of the modern period. By the close of the 19th century, New York City was home to thousands of Romani people who had left Europe and other locales seeking stability. Still, economic opportunities were often limited; alternatively characterized as “careless wanderers” and racially “undesirables,” Romani communities often found it difficult to make ends meet. [1]
“She Will Fight For Right To Wear Trousers, and Ask President Roosevelt to Help Her,” Evening World, July 11, 1908.
Yet by the 1910s, Romani women had learned that their association with mysticism could be exploited for gainful employment. Romani women in New York realized that exaggerated clothing and jewelry was enough to mark them as “Gypsies”; simply spending time in public view garnered attention. While some of these women advertised their future sight from front stoops or street-front parlors, others were more clandestine. Aware of the illegality of fortune telling, some women rented several locations throughout the city and filled them with secondhand spiritual items such as books, charts, and other items in an attempt to hide their main source of income.
It did not take long before the NYPD came to profile American Romani women as the only true fortune tellers. The man who would lead the NYPD against them was police commissioner Arthur Woods. In 1914, Woods organized a special squad to surveil and arrest fortune tellers caught plying their trade. At first, Woods’s task force was largely successful. Police officers swept across city streets, stoops, and stairwells, arresting people who offered to reveal the future for a price.
Woods’s strategy seemed to be working to put an end to such schemes. Moreover, the anti-fortune telling unit played a major role in supplementing the department’s finances with fortune tellers’ forfeited bail bonds. In 1915, Woods proudly reported that “the amount of $6,100 in bonds {…} was forfeited and collected, demonstrating the close attention being given these offenders {fortune tellers}, who inflict a great amount of misery upon their dupes, rob them of their money and in some cases of their minds.” [2]
“She Masquerades As Man In Fight For Life,” Oakland Tribune, July 12. 1908.
But the task force was soon overburdened. As the war in Europe expanded, police units were assigned to guard docks and other sensitive infrastructure fearing German sabotage. When America joined the war in 1917 and military enlistments increased, the manpower of the NYPD was further reduced. That year, the number of fortune tellers arrested in the city dropped to a mere seventy-five. In 1917, Woods sought to reinforce his anti-fortune telling task force with another new innovation: policewomen.
Through its anti-disguise law, the state of New York claimed the power to determine its citizens’ “true” identities, in order to decide if and when they were disguised. “However much you may look like what you are not,” a San Francisco newspaper wrote addressing crossdressers, “you will very feel very much like a curtailment of your real self as you proceed…to the nearest police station. [17] Here and elsewhere, the process of being apprehended and arrested for crossdressing was framed as a process of exposure. Police were tasked with unmasking, or rather, undressing, people’s true selves. Crossdressing was not only offensive to Anglo-Christian moral sensibilities, it was often portrayed as a form of deceit — and in New York, it was legally constructed as such.
It was clear, then, that crossdressing raised not only social, cultural, and moral questions about sartorial regulation, but also legal ones. Complaints of police arrests violating crossdressers’ liberties often conveyed a belief that dressing was an intimate part of bodily autonomy, outside of the sphere of government regulation. These complaints also often questioned the link between dress and identity, which served as the legal basis for policing crossdressing in New York. For example, when a “Miss Denyse” was arrested in January 1884 “because she chose to dress in what is called male attire” in Brooklyn, their friend wrote to Phoenix, a small Brooklyn newspaper, that “Through the act of this ignoramus Miss Denyse was deprived of her liberty for several days, only to be discharged by the judge at last because she had committed no crime in thus dressing.” [18] The writer emphatically denied that Miss Denyse had done anything criminal, asserting that they had liberty to dress in men’s clothes. It was “no excuse for either society or the officer to say” that Miss Denyse had “unsexed herself.” [19] Miss Denyse was simply exercising their liberty to dress as they pleased. In arresting and convicting crossdressers under New York law, police and judges had to (at least in theory) establish that dressing in clothing of the opposite sex was a statement of identity — flattening a diverse range of sartorial presentations and practices into a singular prohibited self-fashioning: disguise. [20]
As crossdressers were brought to New York courts for violating the state’s anti-disguise law, they challenged state authority to know and sort its citizens. New Yorkers insisted that they possessed the freedom to dress up as anyone or anything. They could cavort and express themselves in any number of leisure establishments. Such freedom blurred traditional hierarchies, provoking elite anxieties. The development of the city’s trademark anonymity led reformers, lawyers, and elites to call on police to know, sort, and discipline an increasingly unruly urban population. [21]
Vagrancy laws were one way in which states used their police powers to assign a deviant status to particular kinds of people — beggars, prostitutes, and “disguised persons,” to name a few. [22] Vagrancy laws attached public dress to identity, including New York’s, and were thus useful catch-all tools for “keeping people in place.” [23] Although the law itself was ambiguous, banning disguise and concealment, not dressing contrary to one’s biological sex, police and most judges treated crossdressing as definitively criminal. Police filled in the blanks left by the vagueness of the law by enforcing it as they saw fit. Crossdressers were easy targets.
Black crossdressers were doubly deviant under the law. While white crossdressers were sometimes treated with some sympathy, Black crossdressing, when it was reported, was often linked with other kinds of crime. John Moore was arrested for vagrancy in Brooklyn when a detective heard “there was a man masquerading in women’s clothes on the corner” who had been robbing white men with “extraordinary muscular power.” [24] White Americans had long pointed to Black style—flamboyant or flashy dress in particular — as evidence of racial otherness and criminality. Black crossdressing was thus perceived as more dangerous to the social and legal order than white crossdressing. Yet it was often white responses to Black self-fashioning that veered into violence. [25]
In the Magistrate’s Court records at the New York Municipal Archives, Moore’s crime was listed as “Vagrancy (Going about in Disguise). [26] Usually the charge written for people arrested for crossdressing was simply “vagrancy,” which makes it difficult to identify crossdressers using lower court records alone. Many different types of people were brought to court for vagrancy between the end of slavery and the Great Depression. Without further context, there is usually no way to distinguish between a beggar or a crossdresser, both of whom were types of vagrants under New York law. It is interesting that the clerk added the disguise specification to Moore’s vagrancy charge. This may have been because Black people were regularly arrested for vagrancy for little more than looking “raggedy.” [27] Perhaps the clerk wanted to specify that Moore was not in court because they dressed shabbily, but because they dressed contrary to the identity they were supposed to.
Page from Magistrates’ Court Docket Book, with highlighted portion showing John Moore charged with vagrancy (going about in disguise). At the bottom, there was another person who was charged with vagrancy (begging), showing the different types of vagrancy cases seen in New York City courts. People v. John Moore (December 3, 1913), Magistrates Court Docket Books, First District, Brooklyn, New York Municipal Archives.
In the press, Moore’s “masquerade” was depicted as a simple means to a criminal end. We do not know if they always preferred to wear women’s clothes, or sometimes wore them for fun, or to scratch out a living. In a crucial period where knowledge of race, gender, and sexuality was produced and remade, newspaper accounts of white and Black crossdressing tended to reinforce racialized gender: white crossdressers, especially those assigned female at birth, wore men’s clothes to claim autonomy, wages, and citizenship reserved for white men. It was unbecoming, but understandable. Black crossdressers, on the other hand, reflected the idea that Black men were “true” men, and Black women were not “true” women. Deviant gender presentation was seen as just another part of Black criminality. [28]
Sometimes crossdressers explicitly declared that no police officer or judge had any business telling them how they should dress, and that their choice of clothes was not illegal. Others acted as if they had a right to choose their self-fashioning by ignoring judicial mandates that they change their clothes, sometimes preferring to go to jail (multiple times) rather than agree to dress as they were ordered. Some New Yorkers possessed physical characteristics that did not allow them to neatly fit into legal categories of man or woman, causing them to be arrested by police no matter how they dressed.
These fashion-forward, gender-crossing New Yorkers refused to stay put. Their stories reveal how people have long dressed contrary to their assigned sex at birth, and asserted that they had every right to do so. They experimented and innovated in fashion and scorned intervention by the state. We tend to take for granted the process by which we assign meaning to fashion, especially gender. When we undress this process, we see how people have always pushed boundaries through dress, despite legal repression. Without them, this city would not be the fashion capital that it is today.
Margot Lipin (she/hers) is a Ph.D. candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley. Margot’s research lies at the intersection of American legal and cultural history. Her dissertation examines the role of fashion in the legal process of constructing individuals as deviant and criminal subjects according to their dress and appearance between the end of slavery and the Great Depression. Margot’s work has been supported by the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley and the Organization of American Historians.
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