Abstract
This article examines the development of a taxi drivers’ transportation network in the “marriage mill” of Elkton, Maryland between 1913 and 1941. It explores how legal conditions for marriage engendered particular forms of spatial organisation meant to accomplish the intensive production of weddings. Social policy impacted how space was organised and connected, but in ways different than authorities expected. The network drivers sought to maintain took direction from the conditions set by political authorities yet simultaneously threatened those conditions’ corruption in the eyes of many. Local and state authorities’ further attempts at regulation as well as changes in transportation together created a greater need for more durable associations between drivers, clergy, and technologies such as vehicles, trains, and advertising signs that they enlisted in their efforts. The article contends that a full accounting of the social consequences of marriage policies should encompass the networks that those policies facilitated.
Introduction
Observers of contemporary marriage in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century discerned threats posed to the institution by modernity. They maintained that habits of “industrial civilization” had been adopted by the residents of “the mechanized, impersonal self-seeking world of the modern city”, resulting in a diminution of genuine affection between men and women. It is no wonder, then, that “marriage mills” garnered both public censure and fascination. These sites drew an influx of couples from adjacent areas with more burdensome restrictions on marriages. The term associated such places with a prominent symbol of the industrial revolution and suggested that the marriage ceremony there was subject to the same process of profit maximisation. Newspaper stories dramatically described operators in sites such as Elkton, Maryland as having rationalised the marriage production process, leading to continual improvements “in hymenal convenience”. 1
Perhaps too much convenience, some claimed. Marriage mills were both cause and symptom of the early twentieth century's “marriage panic”, characterised by fears that changing marriage habits would undermine the stability of the family and the strength of the nation. Developments in transportation technology, marriage law, and perceptions of marriage itself combined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to facilitate the emergence of places such as Elkton, which flourished as a destination for weddings between 1913 and 1938. The prominence of these sites partly reflected the perception that marriage should act as a vehicle for the realisation of an individual's contentment. Marriage mills were one facet of the “romanticization of marriage”. Those who profited from them held them up as a testament to the primacy of love. One justice of the peace's poetic advertisement for his wedding services, for instance, claimed that “if a girl loves a man/that's her business”. Needless to say, the advertisement endorsed the obverse as well. 2
Marriage mills also illustrated what many felt were the ambiguous outcomes of the embrace of such a notion. They were reminders of the growing impermanence of modern marriage. The perception of marriage as a means of “individual fulfilment” rather than a duty implied the greater acceptability of separation. The rise in divorces in the early twentieth century helped to shape perceptions of marriage mills; as Kristin Celello notes, perceptions of marriage and divorce informed one another. The consternation generated by marriage mills underscores this insight. As divorces grew in number, the role of the institutions that facilitated the kinds of marriages that were presumed to more easily lead to divorce came under increased scrutiny. The picture of marriage mills, Russell Sage Foundation scholar F. Emerson Andrews claimed in 1929, was incomplete without their darker consequences. The recognition that marriage's permanence could no longer be assumed in turn focused particular attention not only on intergenerational marriages but also on “hasty” unions, which were associated with marriage mills such as Elkton. When such marriages were seen as not necessarily permanent, it led to a greater fear that they operated as a temporary pretence to legitimise sexual activity. 3
The efficiency with which marriage mills were known in the early twentieth century also complicated the perceived relationship of these sites to modern marriage. Hasty and intergenerational marriages raised questions about both partners’ ability to consent, which was a crucial feature of popular understandings of contemporary American marriage, according to historian Nancy F. Cott. While a marriage mill town might have expressed the centrality of the notion of personal choice in a marriage decision, descriptions of the efficiency of Elkton's cab drivers and ministers highlighted the limited opportunities of the wedding party's members to express their will and provide consent. One imaginative newspaper description of the rushed wedding process appearing in 1919, for example, noted that from the beginning of the actual wedding service until its conclusion, “the dazed duo aren’t very sure of things”. The ease of marriage in towns such as Elkton also threatened to overwhelm another feature of modern marriage: the responsibility of the clerk to act as a guardian of the institution and arbiter of who could and could not marry. A 1920 newspaper article published in the same county as Elkton accused the clerks there of carrying on a “wholesale” business in licenses. 4
Marriage mills thus highlighted the ambiguous consequences of this association for marriage partners and for the state. Religious authorities had struggled unsuccessfully since at least the mid-nineteenth century against the pre-eminence accorded love in motivating marriage decisions. As William Kuby has observed, reformers advocated specific procedures meant to curb the role of personal choice in marriage. These included changes in the ages at which men and women could get married with and without parental permission, the time that had to elapse between the application and issuance of a marriage license or a person's divorce and their remarriage to a different spouse, and the medical information couples were required to submit in order to receive a license. These and other changes promised to sharpen marriage as a tool of social management. However, legal change proceeded unevenly across states. By generating the possibility of elopement and evasion of burdensome state laws, this lack of uniformity supported the establishment and popularity of marriage mills. Essential to this popularity was mobility, as since the mid-nineteenth century railroads and then automobiles enabled couples to more easily seek marriages in other states. 5
Despite their involvement in many of the aspirations and anxieties of modern marriage, however, relatively little direct attention has been paid to marriage mills such as Elkton. If anything, divorce mills have garnered more historical attention. Most significantly, legal borderlands such as Elkton have instead mostly been discussed in relation to what they can tell us about developments elsewhere. They are treated as significant insofar as they contributed to an impression that marriage faced a critical challenge nationwide in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Their existence spurred reformers who sought to curb such practices as the marriage of minor girls by convincing states to adopt waiting periods between the application and the issue of a wedding license. They are also relevant for understanding the development of legal uncertainty, as a growing confidence in the existence of a “‘public interest’ in marriage” encouraged state courts to refuse to recognise some marriages that were performed in other states. 6
By highlighting the impact of the religious and legal conditions of marriage on how transportation networks were organised and contested, this article calls attention to the spatial effects of wedding policy in a way and in places previously elided in the literature on marriage policy in the first half of the twentieth century. It explores what the role of a group of taxi drivers in constructing the marriage mill of Elkton can tell us about how marriage regulation impacted the relationship “between political economy and urban space”, which labour historians have examined elsewhere. It demonstrates that social policy impacted how space was organised and connected, but in ways different than authorities expected. The resulting conflicts over space in Elkton simultaneously entailed contention over the respectability of both wedding couples and those who facilitated and profited from their unions. This dynamic is suggested by the Wilmington Evening Journal's claim that the true “meaning of ‘elopement’” could be discerned by watching “the young men and girls get off the train at Elkton, hurry almost blinding to a taxicab and then stand in line” at the clerk's office in order to receive their marriage permit. As was the case with much reporting on the marriage mill in Elkton, this article dramatised the behaviours of couples, taxi drivers, and ministers that departed from social expectations. In similarly vivid reporting and stern editorials, newspapers shaped the perception of the boundaries and conditions for respectable and disreputable marriage, consistently casting Elkton firmly in the latter category. Nonetheless, as the passage's diagnostic assertion suggests, a full perspective of the social consequences of marriage policies should encompass the networks that those policies engendered. If, as Priscilla Yamin has concluded, during the Progressive Era “how, what, and why one married became important questions in drawing the boundaries of USA civic belonging”, then the enabling and constraining networks that greeted couples arriving in Elkton and similar places should not be considered only for their impact on developments elsewhere. 7
This article therefore places at the centre of its analysis those networks and the “strategies of stabilization” taxi drivers pursued to maintain them. This continual maintenance generated both conflicts and accommodations between drivers and authorities. These conflicts and accommodations concerned three elements considered by David Harvey fundamental to the urban experience: “command over money, command over space, and command over time”. Drivers’ activities in Elkton complemented and competed with political and legal authorities’ own efforts at social governance. Cab drivers’ organising efforts took direction from the Maryland's legal conditions of marriage, particularly the investment of power in both a county circuit court clerk responsible for issuing licenses and a religious functionary responsible for joining people. However, to many observers, drivers’ efforts simultaneously threatened those conditions’ corruption. Such concerns reflected critics’ implicit recognition of a characteristic of networks: their potential to alter their constituent elements. 8
This was a sedimentary process; as Henri Lefebvre put it, “time was thus inscribed in space”. The contrary efforts of taxi drivers and authorities were cumulative rather than offsetting. Their strategies did not cancel each other out. Instead, one continually influenced and built off the other. In order to trace these aggregations, this article employs a perspective indebted to actor-network theory (ANT). Both local and state authorities’ further attempts at regulation and changes in transportation only created a greater need for more durable associations between drivers, clergymen, and technologies such as vehicles, trains, and advertising signs that they enlisted in their efforts. The cab drivers’ evolving network was only one of multiple and contending “processes of socio-technical ordering” seeking to enlist wedding parties and marriage law in their operation. That is, authorities and cab drivers sought in antagonistic ways to organise space by nurturing particular connections among humans and non-humans. In addition to shedding light on the histories of USA taxicab transportation outside the country's metropolises, then, this article broadens notions of social impact to encompass the human/non-human connections facilitated by marriage regulation and transportation technology, more fully bringing urban space into histories of marriage regulation. 9
This article first examines the early formation of the marriage production circuit created by taxi drivers in Elkton. There were two key features of these early circular networks: the arrival of most people with an intention to marry via train, and the fee-splitting arrangements reached by drivers and the ministers who married the great majority of these couples. When Elkton emerged as a marriage destination, most couples arrived by train and there were no legal limitations on the economic relations between ministers and cab drivers. The latter brought men and women who were marrying from the train station to the license office and then to a minister, splitting the resulting marriage fees with the minister. The next section traces a shift in those arrangements between drivers and ministers. The successful effort of members of the state legislature in 1924 to bar fee-splitting arrangements between ministers and cab drivers led to the employment of a minister on a set salary, a less flexible arrangement predicated upon stability. The fourth section examines the proliferation of sites whose enlistment was crucial to drivers’ continual efforts to stabilise their network of marriage production. By the mid-1930s more people arrived in the city via their own automobile. This shift multiplied the sites that had to be managed, entailing the expansion of the cab drivers’ network and further increasing conflicts and accommodations with authorities. Finally, the article concludes by considering the implications for taxi drivers' transportation networks of two legislative actions repeatedly contemplated by Maryland state legislators during this period: the legalisation of civil marriages and the imposition of a pause of forty-eight hours between the application and the conferral of a marriage license.
Competition for passengers and ministers
Changes in the marriage laws of the states in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States made Maryland an attractive destination for weddings after 1913. Unlike nearby states, no minimum amount of time had to be observed in the state between the application for a marriage license and its issuance until the implementation of an interval of forty-eight hours in December 1938. Maryland law also stood out for its lower minimum marriage age. By 1929 the state had raised the minimum age for a girl to marry without her parents’ permission to 18; for men, it was 21. The minimum age for marriage with parental consent was 12 for girls and 14 for boys in 1929. In the same year, in adjacent Pennsylvania the age at which men and women could marry without parental permission was 21; with permission, the age was 16. Elkton, a small town of about 3,000 in 1920 close to the cities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Wilmington, in particular garnered national attention as a busy place for weddings. The town was also on the Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington (hereafter PBW) Railroad line. Their frequent critical portrayal of the town's business notwithstanding, articles about Elkton appearing in the newspapers of surrounding states informed distant readers of the ease of marriage there. In 1917, two rival ministers in town who specialised in weddings cumulatively presided over 3,500 of them. In only one-tenth of these were the people being married town residents. Two years later there were 4,336 wedding permits issued. 10
In addition to its other distinctions in marriage law, Maryland was one of two states by 1929 that prohibited all kinds of civil marriages. While another wedding industry operated in the northwestern Maryland town of Cumberland during the 1910s, the state was effectively bookended by marriage mills that were each shaped by relations between cab drivers and clergymen. The 1929 Russell Sage Foundation report Marriage and the State found that civil and religious officiants commercialised the wedding process in very similar ways, including how they shared payments with taxi drivers. This proscription on civil marriage was nonetheless central to visitors’ experiences when they arrived because it shaped how taxi drivers organised and maximised transportation networks. Cab drivers were among the five groups identified in Marriage and the State that most commonly took advantage of couples looking to be wed. In Elkton, they assumed a leading role in organising the industry. Their prominent position was supported by the longstanding requirement that a member of the clergy was required to make a marriage legal. The drivers allegedly protected this restriction. A group of them in Elkton reportedly “maintained a lobby” at the seat of state government in Annapolis with the purpose of blocking any attempt to allow civil marriages, which would deprive ministers of their exclusive privilege. In 1929, 1933, and 1935, the state assembly indeed resisted legislative attempts to allow non-clergy to officiate at weddings, although opponents of civil marriage could also be fierce critics of Elkton's marriage mill. 11
This initial period from 1913 until roughly 1923 was characterised by competition among taxi drivers for spots at the railroad station and by mutable arrangements between drivers and ministers. When trains arrived, drivers apparently wasted no time in hunting fares. While some travellers may have desired a cab ride on their wedding day, by meeting potential fares at the train, cab drivers took advantage of their ignorance of the small town's geography and encouraged the automobile's perceived centrality to the day's activities. The dramatic language employed in newspaper reporting cast drivers’ activity in disreputable and indecorous terms. As soon as passengers alighted at the station “the traffic in couples” commenced. The roughly dozen drivers competed to shepherd customers to the clerk's office and then the minister before returning them to the train station. Travelers sometimes appealed to the police to shield them against the persistence of drivers, who could incur legal trouble as a result of their jockeying for position. For instance, two drivers in October 1919 were held for assault and battery at the train station. The local Cecil Whig interpreted the charges as arising from the intra-driver rivalries generated by the indispensable nature of that space to the wedding industry. Drivers’ solicitation practices also violated the rules of the railroad company. In April 1920, four drivers were detained by a railroad detective and subsequently fined $7.50 for approaching potential customers on railroad property. One week later, three more drivers were fined ten dollars. The company demarcated on the station platform the boundary “over which no Jitney Trust operator can pass” in pursuit of fares. 12
In the midst of this intense competition, drivers charged passengers what they could with no set price. Emphasising the arbitrary and predatory character of negotiations between them, in 1919, the Wilmington Evening Journal claimed that drivers would take from the prospective groom whatever they could obtain. While the floor for driving passengers from the station to the courthouse to the minister and back to the station was $3, the amount could go up depending on circumstances, as the Journal suggested cab drivers would prefer to negotiate rather than display a set price. One year later, the Baltimore Sun quoted the lower floor for drivers at two dollars and a typical ceiling of five dollars. Such descriptions of drivers’ behaviours ignored the potential of competition among drivers to lower the amount they received. One newspaper account demonstrated this dynamic when drivers were faced with “diffident” prospective passengers. Their price to take the passengers from station to courthouse to minister and back to the station sunk to the relatively modest amount of 50 cents. 13
Even this sum likely represented a moderately profitable outcome for drivers, given the extent of the town and the low costs of a flat-rate taxi service. Four blocks covered the distance between the station and the courthouse where licenses were procured; another four blocks brought people to the closest minister. It took approximately 15 minutes on foot. The drivers were known to take a circuitous journey to lengthen the trip. Even though they did not charge based on the distance they travelled, this practice may have helped to justify their services. The town's small size likely avoided the need for a taximeter, which was an expensive piece of equipment requiring not only maintenance but also the purchase and use of specialised cabs rather than “regular” vehicles. The spatial relationships within the town facilitated particular associations between taxi drivers and machines that were less expensive than cabs outfitted with taximeters, increasing the flexibility of the transportation network and ease of entry into it. 14
Competition between drivers was focused on the train station. This focus encouraged their consolidation into factions. There were two “cliques” by the early 1920s. The more populous clique of roughly a dozen drivers also somehow had secured the most desirable spots closest to the station. The other group of five or so had to park at the back. The organisation of drivers into factions led to an uptick in arrests and fines, as a local ordinance also banned those involved in the wedding industry from approaching potential customers throughout the town. The opposing groups used the law against one another. More than 50 drivers incurred fines of five dollars in April 1921. Despite the competition and the efforts by railroad and town authorities to restrain their solicitation of customers, reports indicated that some drivers thrived, having become “prosperous beyond all other men of their station” and possessors of “fat bank accounts”. This florid language marked drivers’ transgression of expected norms – in this case, norms of economic success and power. 15
The revenues raised from the conveyance of passengers were only a part of drivers’ income. Another portion came from arrangements made between drivers and ministers. Ministers paid the drivers a commission on a per-wedding basis. This amount climbed steadily. Beginning at 25 cents, the drivers “demanded and received” double that amount, which was quickly doubled yet again to one dollar due to “the pressure of competition” by 1920. The competition in this case was between ministers vying for a stable relationship with the drivers. William Moon, who had no congregation and officiated at supposedly about one-half of the between 300 and 400 weddings each month in 1919, paid drivers one dollar per wedding. Already, then, the drivers were able to assert their power in this relationship. In 1920, the number of ministers specialising in officiating these unions was only two, down from four earlier, but this would have been sufficient to create competition for drivers’ service. In collecting fees from both passengers and minister, drivers were, as one description critically phrased it, “playing both ends for all they’re worth”. Much as was the case with the public perception of New York taxi drivers as crooked and underhanded, this newspaper described Elkton drivers’ business practices as unethical at the very least. 16
In 1920, even after the drivers apparently channelled the majority of wedding traffic to Moon, the fee continued to rise. This suggests that the volume of weddings allowed the minister to realise a handsome profit from the five-dollar wedding fee even while paying $1.50 to each driver. In 1921, the amount that Moon paid the “certain clique” of roughly a dozen drivers who steered practically all wedding business his way was put at two dollars and 50 cents by Reverend G.T. Alderson, the pastor of the M.E. Church in Elkton. According to Alderson, Moon simply passed the cost along to wedding customers. 17
The early years of the industry were marked by intense competition among drivers for the spaces most suited to attracting passengers arriving on the train, for those passengers themselves, and for the most advantageous arrangements with willing ministers. This competition had begun to coalesce into an organisation. In an indication of the developing organisation of drivers and their relationship with Moon, the minister supposedly paid nothing to independent drivers who brought him passengers. 18 This organisational impulse also impacted an important second feature: the economic relations between drivers and ministers. These relations, expressed by the jockeying and conflict that occurred between drivers at the station, acquired a greater degree of order early in the 1920s. Groups of drivers established more stable relations with particular clergymen and particular spaces, creating regularity in the process. Further state regulation was essential to this shift.
Stabilising and destabilising the network
In December 1922, the PBW Railroad advertised its plan to sell “the auto-bus privilege” at the station. This move toward recognising only one set of claims to the space aided an ordering process already at work, as there was less disorder surrounding the station. This change was a result, the Wilmington Evening Journal stated, of the creation of a “combine” of drivers. A greater degree of organisation had mitigated the trouble that the competition for passengers formerly produced. The group brought passengers to one particular minister and received a set amount in return. However, the opportunity to secure a permanent spatial privilege would likely have acted to bring drivers into closer relationships with one another. The permanent place and the market logic that rendered the place both valuable and available demanded a more stable relationship between drivers. 19
The eventual winner of the “taxi-service privilege” was a group of five drivers. One newspaper account stated the group was paying “quite a good sum for” the space. Elsewhere the monthly payment was put at “as much as $550.” Drivers not affiliated with this group were forbidden from driving onto railroad property. The Wilmington Evening Journal claimed that drivers created “a system that no lone cabby can ride through”. The newspaper presented a picture of an orderly process of matching drivers to passengers. The drivers who were part of the group that secured the privilege of parking at the station “work in turns and the one whose turn it is makes the approach” to the couple descending from the train. The drivers could afford to be patient because they took an equal share from a common pot, a pot that was significantly augmented when the weekly proceeds from the weddings presided over by their chosen minister were added. 20
The railroad company contributed to drivers’ orientation towards organisation not only by auctioning off stable spatial privilege but also by creating a uniform fare that drivers could charge in this space. This uniformity would have lessened the possibility for competition and tension within an organisation of taxi drivers. Beginning 1 January 1923, the price for a trip from the station to the courthouse, minister, and then back to the station was set at three dollars. In comparison, a trip for “a single person to any point in the town” was set at 25 cents, illustrating both the significant profit that wedding drivers could realise when compared with a single fare and the expectation that taximeters were superfluous in Elkton. A police officer was tasked with overseeing and ensuring these two intertwined methods of creating order: the uniform charges to patrons and the exclusive license purchased by the drivers to access what was legally considered railroad space. 21
The regularity afforded by this claim to the space of the railroad station and the train's scheduled arrivals was further buttressed by extensions of the transportation network. Marriage and the State recounted how purchasing the spatial privilege at the train station did not end the ways in which the network's connections between the taxis and the train were tightened. The report noted that “trainmen were even observed by our field agent to signal” their estimate of how many wedding seekers were on the arriving train to cab drivers. The mode of transportation offered by the train not only produced regularity by having a set schedule and set destination. It also provided the capability for railroad employees to surveil passengers and relay that information. 22
These forms of ordering were joined with another: the emergence of a different relation between drivers and ministers, which saw the former put the latter on a salary system, replacing the practice of “fee-splitting”. This arrangement was prompted by the state Assembly, which in 1924 outlawed the paying of any sort of fee or tip by ministers to taxi drivers or anyone else who conveyed passengers to the minister for marriage. Much as was the case with the original circuit created by taxi drivers in response to the ecclesiastical requirements of marriage set down by the state legislature, the further legislative attempt at social management was met by the complementary yet competing practice of placing ministers on salary. These efforts did not erase but rather overlaid one another. 23
Some ministers objected to the salary arrangement. William Moon, who had at one point worked with taxi drivers on a fee-splitting basis, in 1925, named Earnest E. Weaver, a Reformed Church minister who like Moon was without a congregation, as the current partner of the leading organised taxi group. In Moon's account, a group of drivers visited Moon at his home and told him “they were going to organise and take over the marrying business in Elkton”. Of the nine drivers Moon named, at least three were among those who had made the winning bid for space at the railroad station, suggesting that this was the same group which would become the Elkton Taxi Company. As part of this drive to organise space, they sought to place a minister on salary. They offered the job to Moon, who claimed to refuse the proposal. After Moon spurned them, the drivers eventually set Weaver up in a particular location as well, adding to the fixity of the circuit they constructed. 24
According to a delegation of Cecil County clergymen who laid before the governor a petition of local voters requesting action against the marriage industry in Elkton, Weaver's salary was $3,000, paid “by a syndicate of taxicab men”. The minister charged ten dollars per ceremony. Eager to distinguish their arrangement from the sort recently forbidden, Weaver and the president of the taxicab company, John McCool, each pointed out that “no monetary consideration is paid by the minister for the thousands of marriage fees borne to Mr. Weaver's door”. Under oath in 1928, one of the company members confirmed the salary arrangement. When a driver was able to steer the passengers to the minister who worked for the group, the group was able to capture almost all the money spent by a wedding party. 25
The drivers sought to maintain the order upon which this arrangement was predicated. Moon asserted that after his refusal the drivers evaded passengers’ efforts to hire him to perform the wedding ceremony. Supposedly, the drivers did not make this unwillingness explicit, but instead gave excuses, claiming that Moon had retired or was even deceased. A local critic of Elkton's wedding industry, the Catholic Reverend Peter Arad, voiced a similar interpretation as Moon: a group of taxi drivers completely commanded the local wedding industry. This mastery was expressed by their ability to scoop up nearly every wedding party from the train and by the consistency of the drivers’ destination, which was always their chosen clergyman. The reverend suggested that the power of the drivers extended to preventing others from changing the dynamics that made the business profitable. “There is no action we take”, he bemoaned, “that cannot in some way be sidetracked”. Indeed, there was some connection between local police and the taxi company: E. Leland Ott, a deputy sheriff who in 1926 sought to keep reporters employed by the Washington Times from taking pictures of the taxi company's centre of operations, was also one of the heads of the taxi company by 1927. 26
However, late in the decade officials in the Cecil County Circuit Court clerk's office attempted to disrupt the circuit that the drivers had created. First, the clerk who assumed the office in 1927, S. Ralph Andrews, declined to give out licenses past 5 p.m. In the estimation of the Wilmington Evening Journal, this restriction sapped the excitement from the act of elopement, “as it was the lure of the ride in the moonlight that” drew couples onward. Andrews refused to specify the number of licenses previously granted after 5 p.m., only saying the quantity was “considerable”. More importantly, deputy clerk C. Ellis Delbert intervened in the opportunity of drivers to bring passengers to their minister. Delbert departed from the practice of previous deputies by filling in the blank on the form reserved for the presiding minister's name. After asking about a couple's religious denomination, Delbert would inform them of the appropriate minister. If the couple voiced a desire to visit the minister, Delbert filled that space in with the name of that minister. He also provided directions. Delbert allegedly also cautioned that the taxi organisation would nonetheless attempt to bring them to the organisation's preferred minister and would advise them to staunchly express their preference. In this attempt to disrupt the taxi organisation's circuit Delbert ostensibly had the support of Elkton's “better element”. 27
Delbert's action reportedly impacted the taxi drivers’ operation, which by this time included five cabs, five drivers, and three “street men to guide” patrons. The “bulk” of their proceeds reportedly “came from the marriage fees”. The stakes for the drivers were high. The Wilmington News Journal predicted that if the clerk was able to continue his practice it would mean their ruin. The minister who worked with the drivers at the time, C.M. Cope, reported to the city the total number of marriages over which he presided the previous week. Supposedly, Cope would typically have presided over three-fourths of the weddings in the county. On 10 October 1927, Cope reported officiating at 17 marriages the previous week, although 81 licenses had been handed out by the county the previous week. In response to Delbert's efforts, the drivers sought a restraining order barring him from offering such counsel, arguing that it amounted to “illegal, coercion, and undue suasion”. Drivers had been portrayed previously as impinging upon passengers’ ability to provide consent; here, they accused Delbert of something similar. As Peggy Pascoe has observed in reference to bans on interracial marriages, clerks were effective guardians of the institution of marriage precisely because of their seeming unobtrusiveness. However, in this case, the taxi company's allegations that Delbert was intruding on the preferences of couples highlighted the clerk's instrumentality. 28
In his answer to the injunction petition, Andrews refuted the claim that his subordinates had advised customers to avoid cab drivers or had harmed them economically. He added that the taxi company asked him to exploit his office to ensure that couples were “delivered to the taxi drivers” in return for monetary payment. Andrews also charged that the taxi company proposed to Delbert the amount of 15 dollars per week in exchange for conveying potential customers to one of its employees waiting right next to the courthouse. These attempts at bribery might have reflected the progressively greater percentage of travellers who arrived in town via car rather than train. Indeed, Andrews noted in his response that a large number of marriage seekers now relied on their own transportation. The drivers were initially successful, as Judge Edwin W. Wickes issued a preliminary injunction which stated Delbert could not give directions to ministers’ locations or ask couples for their preferred minister. 29
In effect, the taxi drivers and license clerks were arguing over the boundaries of autonomy and coercion. At the hearing in January 1928 one of the members of the Elkton Taxi Company acknowledged the bribe attempt and amount but maintained that “our stipulation was merely that our company should take the couples wherever they wanted to go”. Delbert maintained he was helping applicants to do exactly that by providing instruction solely at a couple's invitation. Furthermore, he “wrote the clergyman's name on the marriage license only after those applying for them designated the religious denomination they preferred”. Andrews noted that he informed Delbert when he hired him of the boundaries of acceptable action defined by Judge Edwin W. Wickes, which was that office staff “should not send couples to any particular minister unless the parties asked for that minister”. In his testimony, Delbert himself claimed to toe the line that respected applicants’ autonomy. He refuted the accusation that he falsely told wedding parties that the town possessed but two ministers. Delbert did, however, provide directions to the residences of particular ministers, but only once a wedding party declared their choice of minister. 30
The decision issued in September 1928 dismissed the taxi company's petition seeking to ban Andrews’ and Delbert's alleged intrusions. The judges who denied the petition considered the taxi company's practice of hiring a minister on salary to be nothing more than “a plain conspiracy to evade” the 1924 state law making it a crime to reward in any way the person who brings a wedding party to a minister. Furthermore, the judges noted, during the course of the trial it became evident that members of the taxi company had sought to bribe Andrews and Delbert, efforts that were confirmed by members of the taxi company. Trial testimony also revealed that the taxi company encouraged acts of perjury by helping underage applicants falsely obtain a license, if not in Elkton then at nearby Chestertown. For this extension of their network drivers charged 15 dollars. 31
This decision reportedly delivered a mortal wound to the taxi company and its control over the industry. Such expectations were raised by the taxi company itself, which had claimed that Delbert's actions placed it in imminent danger of collapse. Nevertheless, the taxi company persisted despite an additional challenge posed by the increasing tendency of wedding parties to arrive in Elkton by car. The train had played an important role in the taxi drivers’ efforts at stabilising their network. The taxi company needed to monitor a proliferating number of sites as automobile travel supplanted the train as the main way in which travellers arrived in Elkton. The next section examines the effects of this spatial imperative. 32
Proliferating sites to tend
The shift towards wedding parties arriving in their own vehicles undermined the circuit the taxi company had constructed and sought to maintain. The train station had served as the anchor of that circuit. The later prevalence of automobiles, in contrast, resulted in a proliferation of sites that the taxi company and its competitors sought to monitor and occupy in a manner that ranged on a spectrum from fixed and permanent to mobile and transitory. This proliferation extended beyond Elkton town limits and prompted strategies of both movement and fixity. Furthermore, this proliferation also increased conflict with town authorities, who sought to establish authority over these forms of presence.
First, the taxi company adapted to the changing situation by becoming more mobile itself. The search for passengers was generalised through the town's landscape and beyond. Marriage and the State detailed how in 1928 the taxi drivers were shifting their strategies to account for the greater volume of road traffic. The report related how the taxi company was reputedly “stationing scouts on all the main roads into the town”. These lookouts, part of a larger operation, would follow vehicles that looked to be carrying likely wedding parties. One 1930 newspaper account described the employed to attempt to profit from the changing mode method of transportation once the vehicles were in town limits: “couples entering Elkton by almost any road would find themselves hailed by polite strangers, who inquired blandly if they were seeking the marriage license office”. After receiving assistance and following the stranger's car to their destination, they allegedly rarely balked at compensating them at “the usual taxi rates”. 33
While the effort to secure passengers took place throughout and outside the town limits, the taxi company also established a regular presence at particular sites such as the courthouse. The Wilmington Evening Journal noted in 1927 that the “taxi ring” had a system in place for capturing the patronage of possible customers who arrived not by train but instead by car. The group employed someone to wait outside the courthouse and inform recipients of a marriage license that he knew how to locate a minister for them. Upon receiving a positive response, he conveyed them “across the street to a member of the ‘taxi ring’”. Competing marriage sites were also targeted, as the taxi company engaged in “picketing” places associated with other ministers in town. The “runners” employed by the taxis “stalk[ed] couples bound for” these alternate places. To entice potential customers, the town's Presbyterian and Methodist ministers charged, those allied with the taxis claimed that ministers with congregations refused to provide certificates of marriage or demanded an excessive charge for their service. 34
The response of authorities illustrates the dialogic and cumulative assertions of spatial management. Street solicitation, which was encouraged by wedding parties’ increasing reliance on their own vehicles, was forbidden by a 1921 law. The Wilmington Evening Journal declared that impatient town residents in 1929 were “beginning to ask why” the ordinance was not being imposed. Two years later, there was much criticism about such practices. Enforcement was challenging. It required the cooperation of witnesses, who resisted the obligation to come back to the town for the court date. Without this assistance, the ban on street solicitation did not result in arrests. In September 1931, the town council approved an updated ordinance, promising the latest decisive victory against the marriage industry. The updated ordinance again forbade “any person to solicit couples coming here to be married”. The penalty was a fine of between ten and 50 dollars or up to three weeks in jail for a first-time offender. The police force was ordered to administer the updated ordinance “to the limit”. There were reportedly eight street solicitors, four drivers, and three ministers who would face virtual financial failure were the ordinance strictly enforced. By March 1932, early indications were that the updated ordinance had not halted the taxi company's solicitation practices. 35
During the 1930s, city authorities moved from prohibiting to regulating street solicitation. As late as 1936, the city council demanded that the ordinance be “strictly enforced”. In November 1937, however, Elkton authorities required anyone who approached potential customers on public thoroughfares to pay $100 for the privilege of doing so. At such a level, only a relatively well-organised group already prospering from the marriage industry would find it profitable to pay. Regulation conferred respectability, at least according to the reported leader of the taxi company. He defended the company by insisting on its ordinariness, citing the soliciting license expense as evidence: “We’re just business men. We gotta pay for lots of licenses and things just like any other business men, we’re benefactors to this town”. By October 1938, the city had granted 23 solicitor licenses. Fifteen went to the Elkton Taxi Company. These employees cruised around the streets in vehicles and inquired of the passengers in nearby cars whether they “‘wanna get married’”? If the targets of the sales pitch responded with “a nod or even a blush” the solicitor would change course to lead the other vehicle first to the courthouse and then to the company's minister. 36
The taxi company's commitment to mobile and semi-mobile presences throughout the town as a way to maintain the circuit of accumulation its members had constructed existed alongside a growing commitment to fixed and permanent presences. For instance, the company purchased a home that would give their minister a permanent place adjacent to the Glasgow Road, on which the majority of out-of-town wedding parties travelled. The network was re-oriented around the road rather than the train station. The drivers installed Moon in the house and revived the group's formerly close relationship with the minister. After Moon's death in 1934, the taxi group turned again to Reverend Charles M. Cope, who received a salary of $3,000 a year. 37
Another form of fixed presence that expanded during this period was a visual advertisement. Here, too, local authorities and the taxi company engaged in escalating assertions of authority over space. In 1932, the town council charged “special police officers” with the duty “to stand guard by the signs with which the bootleg ministers seek to entice perspective wedding couples to their parlors”. The officer would provide directions to the courthouse, where “the proper authorities” waited. The officer would also counsel couples to avoid engaging the marrying ministers or their agents. The assignment of an officer's physical presence to police ministers’ advertising signs was a demonstration of city authorities’ weakness in governing space. 38
The city eventually banned marriage signs specifically. As reported in the Baltimore Sun, a 1935 ordinance allowed “advertising signs on practically any subject other than marriage”. The two ministers who currently advertised their services had ten signs between them in town. However, a reporter who one year later experienced the Elkton marriage process with his spouse claimed that although the local signs had indeed been removed, they returned shortly, an indication of the force of the industry there. The local ordinance, as apparently ineffectual as it was, extended only to the town limits in any case. It did not regulate billboards placed alongside the long stretches of road between towns and advertised ministers’ marriage services. The highways were the state legislature's responsibility. The state legislature, however, was slow to regulate advertising space. A bill to outlaw large signs that ministers and their allies employed to advertise their services failed in the 1935 legislative session despite the support of pastors with congregations. In the wake of this failure, one newspaper predicted, “bigger and better signs [were] the watchword”. 39
Conclusion
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, some state legislators sporadically attempted to attenuate the legal differences that made Maryland an attractive place for marriage to many people from the surrounding states. They were motivated at least partly by the ambition to alter the operation of the networks of cab drivers and ministers. Cabs’ mobility facilitated the marriage process, but in doing so they did not merely transport people but shaped what an “Elkton marriage” was. This was a dynamic process. As we have seen, attempts of authorities at the state and local levels to manage the marriage process, combined with changing transportation habits like the increased use of private automobiles, changed how cab drivers marshalled their mobility. By the late-1920s, two distinct methods of significantly curbing the ability of Elkton and other places to draw out of state couples emerged. Each reflected different visions of marriage, and each promised particular complications for the maintenance of transportation networks in marriage mills such as Elkton. Each implied a different challenge to the managed mobility that was characteristic of cab drivers’ operation of the marriage mill there.
The first was the effort undertaken by some legislators to provide civil authorities with the ability to perform a wedding ceremony if a couple wished, thereby abolishing the clergy's monopoly. In 1929, a group of 14 Christian and Jewish clergymen signed a letter urging the state legislature to pass the civil marriage bill introduced in that year's legislative session, to no avail. The letter noted that civil marriage would remove a stain on the reputation of ministers by removing their involvement in the commercialisation of weddings. In the mid-1930s, sponsors of civil marriage legislation also claimed that this change would sweep away the existence of ministers who were exclusively occupied with wedding duties. Those who opposed a civil marriage bill argued in contrast that the removal of the necessity of religious sanction would encourage people to take marriage less seriously, thereby possibly contributing to the sorts of hasty marriages that were grist for the mill. State Senator Dudley Roe, for instance, maintained in 1933 that civil marriage would augment the number of hasty marriages and thus divorces. 40
Proponents of civil marriage framed weddings as an expression of personal freedom. The clergymen's 1929 letter noted that the requirement of a religious ceremony appeared to transgress “the principle of the separation of church and state”. The sponsor of a doomed 1931 legislative effort to have civil marriages recognised argued that the measure would simply leave the decision of what sort of ceremony to have up to the couple. These were “the real persons at interest” in this situation. During another attempt two years later, an advocate again highlighted that the wishes and outlook of the couple were paramount. This measure therefore imagined marriage as an expression of personal freedom that should properly take the preferences of the partners into first account. Despite its predicted ability to counter disreputable practices associated with Elkton, civil marriage thus shared with marriage mills a debt to the primacy accorded love in marriage decisions and the notion that marriage was a vehicle for one's own contentment. 41
Mandating a pause of some days between the application for a marriage license and its issuance constituted another effort to alter the legal conditions for marriage. Efforts to enact such a measure went back to at least 1922, when the governor vetoed such a bill on the grounds that it applied to only three counties in the state, including Elkton's county of Cecil. Compared with civil marriage, this method was more clearly aimed at halting the operation of marriage mills. The State Senator from Cecil County in 1922 maintained that a large proportion of Elkton's patrons split up directly after the wedding. The Reverend Dr H. Lenox Hodge claimed in 1932 that a pause would lead to fewer divorces by banning hasty and sometimes drunken marriages entered into by “joy-riding” visitors. In 1938, a Methodist Episcopal minister similarly stated that a delay would target inebriated marriages and those taking place between people who had known one another for only a short time. 42
Senator Roe was not only a consistent foe of civil marriage but also a forceful proponent of a mandatory pause. His vision of marriage differed markedly from that offered by proponents of civil marriage. Roe asserted that marriage was a privileged responsibility which should be limited to those who could meet particular standards in their relationship and finances sufficient to maintain a proper domestic life. He argued that ministers were proper arbiters to decide who could and could not marry. The two means of ameliorating the scandals associated with Elkton, then, pointed towards two very different understandings of marriage. 43
Each proposed legal change would disrupt the operation of the networks that drivers had worked to construct and maintain. Breaking the monopoly that religious authorities held on wedding ceremonies would make access to someone vested with the power to officiate uncontrollable. Taxi drivers would no longer be able to manage networks. A pause of 48 hours would also serve to sever marriage transportation networks. The operation of the taxi drivers’ network was predicated on smooth movement through time as much as through space. Drivers and authorities had sparred over Harvey's triumvirate of money, space, and time. These prior conflicts were cumulative. This solution, however, sought to intervene decisively and break the network, illustrating the importance of what Henri Lefebvre refers to as “the deployment of time” in urban space. 44
While civil marriage bills continued to go down to defeat in the 1930s, legislators enacted a pause of forty-eight hours between the application for a marriage license and its issuance in 1937. While the taxi company played a leading role in a successful effort to have the reform stayed until it could be put to a popular referendum in the November 1938 election, it was unable to swing the popular vote itself. The change to the marriage law passed by a wide margin, not only in Baltimore but also in Cecil County itself. Voters seemed to have finally delivered to the marriage industry in Elkton the “death blow” that had been repeatedly prophesied in prior years. However, even now victory was partial. The state legislature left a loophole in the law allowing for a judge to abrogate the delay. In Elkton, the number of weddings declined, although the industry continued. Continuing the regulation begun in the late-1930s, in 1941, ten people still paid the city $100 each to work as “solicitors” who could shepherd couples through the wedding process. Legal and medical authorities were now particularly important to their work. One local judge between 1 January 1940 and 1 March 1941 signed at least 1,600 court orders that nullified the mandated pause for wedding parties. The judge considered a prospective bride's pregnancy to be a condition warranting an expedited marriage. He relied on a doctor's “certificate” attesting to this condition. One local doctor had provided nearly one-half of these medical reports, at times relying only on what patients told him. Thus, despite the attempt to disrupt them with the device of time, a new network squeezed through the loophole left by the state legislature by lengthening to include legal and medical authorities. New actors’ participation in the network was necessary to maintain a mobility that depended on the management of time as much as space. Marriage policy thus continued to shape the regularised connections of urban space. After further criticism, however, in 1941, the legislature made only couples with at least one Maryland resident eligible for this provision. Even so, the marriage industry in Elkton persisted, a development observers suggested was attributable to the military draft, low unemployment, and the relatively less burdensome state marriage regulations Maryland maintained. 45
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Transport History for their generous and insightful suggestions.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
