Committee of Fifteen Bulletin (all published) and Annual Reports

(Antiprostitution - Chicago) Committee of Fifteen Bulletin. Vol. 1, No. 1 (Nov. 1919) through Vol. 2, No. 5 (March 1921) (all published). Chicago: Committee of Fifteen, 1919-1921. Five issues, each a single-fold pamphlet, [4] pp. Together with three issues of the Annual Report of the Committee of Fifteen (1918, 1920, 1921), each 18 or 19 pp., in orig. wrpprs; one Supplemental Report of the Work of the Committee of Fifteen [1917], [4] pp.; and Testimony and Addresses on Segregation and Commercial Vice. Presented Before the City Council's Committee of Nine. No. 2. Chicago: American Vigilance Association, 1912, 23 pp., in orig. wrppr. Most with small ex-library stamp from the California Commonwealth Club, a few with penciled shelf labels or scattered other marks or edge-wear, a couple of small closed tears. Good. Uncommon documentation from Chicago's private antivice group, the Committee of Fifteen. Established in 1911 following the Chicago Vice Commission's final report, The Social Evil, it was comprised of affluent business leaders and social reformers, including Julius Rosenwald, Clifford Barnes, and Jane Addams. But antiprostitution proved to be a uniting cause for disparate political interests; the bulletin and reports bring together the liberal Progressive focus on worker's rights and labor conditions with uncompromising religious sexual mores, questionable racial implications, and coercive methods. The Committee primarily worked through the Injunction and Abatement Law, a public nuisance ordinance, which allowed them to file complaints and compile evidence against private citizens and landlords as they pursued the closure of ‘houses of vice’in the face of police and judicial corruption. Both the cooperation with and resistance by Chicago landlords to these actions are documented in the bulletin. The Red Light Abatement movement, like the Liquor Abatement Laws, marked and unprecedented transformation of public nuisance law into a “legal weapon for controlling public and private property.” OCLC finds only two holdings for the Committee's bulletin, one incomplete. SOLD See Peter C. Hennigan. Property War: Prostitution, Red-Light Districts, and the Transformation of Public Nuisance Law in the Progressive Era. 16 Yale J.L. & Human, 2004.