“Close that Place of Hell”

Abstract

Historians have emphasized the animosity that urban working-class people felt toward Prohibition. In fact, many poor women called for Prohibition enforcement to abolish what they perceived as a chief cause of poverty and violence in their homes: the illicit saloons where their husbands spent their wages. In Chicago, poor women wrote letters to Mayor William E. Dever, asking him to enforce Prohibition in their immigrant neighborhoods. This article places those letters in a long tradition of petitioning in American political culture that extends from the colonial period through the New Deal. Although the institutional tradition of the petition encouraged the women to position themselves as supplicants to the mayor's authority, the letter writers made bold demands upon the local state to use crime fighting to protect home life. Their petitions echoed the political rhetoric of “social responsibility for crime” forged by middle-class women reformers during the Progressive Era. Mayor Dever acted on these petitions, and they triggered numerous arrests.