Prostitution is one of the oldest vices of the human race, and civilized communities have been experimenting with its control for centuries. The only definite conclusion that has been reached is that it is likely to exist as long as the passions of the human beings remain what they are today. – Victor Houston, in his report to Congress on prostitution in Honolulu
Though the early 20th century social purity movement came to Hawaii as to every other place there were Americans, the anti-whore laws it spawned were never strictly enforced. This is partly due to the fact that neither the natives nor the sizable Asian minority saw prostitution as a “social evil” as the puritanical whites did, and the wealthy planters at the top of white society wanted hookers available to protect their daughters from being raped or seduced by laborers or American sailors. As in many other places and times, the police were therefore given the power to “regulate” prostitution in Honolulu, and they did so by establishing a series of practices so Draconian they eventually led to the collapse of the system.
Only brothel prostitution was allowed; independent whoring of any kind was strictly suppressed, and of course the madams had no objection because that meant all girls had to work for them (just as in modern Nevada). Every passenger ship which arrived in Honolulu was met by the police vice squad, and any unescorted woman was assumed to be a prostitute; she was fingerprinted, registered and given a copy of the “Ten Commandments” she was expected to obey:
She may not visit Waikiki Beach or any other beach except Kailua Beach [across the mountains from Honolulu].
She may not patronize any bars or better class cafes.
She may not own property or an automobile.
She may not have a steady “boyfriend” or be seen on the streets with any men.
She may not marry service personnel.
She may not attend dances or visit golf courses.
She may not ride in the front seat of a taxicab, or with a man in the back seat.
She may not wire money to the mainland without permission of the madam.
She may not telephone the mainland without permission of the madam.
She may not change from one house to another. She may not be out of the brothel after 10:30 at night.
The police enforced these rules by beatings and threatened eviction from the islands. Though working in Honolulu was lucrative ($30,000 or more per year at a time most women were lucky to make $2000), most girls could only handle it for about six months, and when they left the islands they were not permitted to return for at least a year.
Originally most brothels (or “boogie houses” as they were called locally) were in the Iwilei district, but they were later forced to relocate to Hotel Street and a few adjoining parts of Chinatown. They were a normal and accepted part of Hawaiian life; there was no stigma attached to men who patronized them, and most wives even accepted their husbands’ going there for the rational reasons we’ve discussed here many times. When Naval ships came in, the lines at the brothels literally stretched down the block, and contemporary accounts describe Honolulu housewives passing unconcernedly through the lines to reach the businesses beyond them. The going rate was $2.00 (a full day’s wages) for locals and $3.00 for servicemen; most businesses had two separate doors and waiting areas because, due to pervasive racist attitudes of the time, white sailors did not like to think they were being served by the same girls who attended to the Asian locals. During the Second World War, the demand from servicemen grew so large that most of the better brothels on Hotel Street simply stopped seeing local men altogether. To speed things along, a “bull pen” system was instituted: Hawaiian matrons guarded the doors, turning away any man who was drunk or looked like a troublemaker. Each then paid his fee and received a poker chip, then waited for an available room where he undressed and waited for the whore who was working in the next room; she would come in, collect her chip, inspect him for signs of venereal disease, quickly wash him and do her work. He had three minutes to achieve release, after which she said “aloha” and was off to the next room while he washed up and got dressed. Most brothels required girls to see at least 100 men a day and to work at least 20 days per month, but despite this enormous volume there were only about 166 cases of sexually transmitted disease per year in the entire prostitute population (a number some clueless historians have called “extremely high” when it in fact represents an infinitesimal percentage of the tremendous number of clients).
The “bull pen” system is said to have been the brainchild of Jean O’Hara, a gutsy Irish Catholic native of Chicago. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, many prostitutes fled back to the mainland and many others volunteered to nurse wounded men, lowering the available supply just as the demand increased; O’Hara and many of the other girls used the situation to leverage better working conditions for themselves. First they raised the price to $5.00, but Major Frank Steer, the Army officer in charge of vice under martial law, vetoed that and enforced the $3.00 price. They then began to flout the old rules, going out in public as they wished and enjoying their earnings for the first time. The police chief, William Gabrielson, was furious; how dare these dirty whores flout his regime and pretend to be real people! He complained to General Emmons, the military governor, who told him he didn’t care what the hookers did as long as they were happy, because happy whores meant happy troops. But Gabrielson couldn’t stand his little dictatorship being threatened, so he ordered his men to continue business as usual (and more brutally). In April, 1942 they evicted four prostitutes from a house in Waikiki, and the women complained to Captain Benson of the military police. Benson told them the civilian police didn’t run things any more, and they could do as they liked; when Gabrielson heard this he was livid and announced to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that he was officially turning control of vice over to the military. Emmons was of course forced by Washington to deny this, and officially returned control to Gabrielson while at the same time ordering the MPs to protect the prostitutes from Gabrielson’s uniformed hooligans.
O’Hara, realizing the tenuousness of the whores’ position, instigated a strike which endured for three weeks in July of 1942, demanding the basic human rights of American citizens. The prostitutes pointed out that their work was vital to the war effort, and they had already collectively purchased $132,000 in war bonds. The establishment was humiliated and the newspapers were ordered not to print a word about the strike, but obviously something had to be done so General Emmons, in a Solomonic maneuver, made a very calm and diplomatic appeal to Gabrielson to rescind the movement and residence restrictions, in return for which the military agreed to take over the weekly health and hygiene inspections. Gabrielson had little choice but to comply, and the whores were afterward free to move about the island as they pleased. O’Hara took advantage of this to carry out a real estate scam; she would buy a house in a genteel neighborhood and then let it be known what she did for a living, at which point she would be promptly bought out at a considerable profit by bluenosed neighbors.
Eventually, however, she pushed too hard; in 1944 she published a popular book entitled My Life As a Honolulu Prostitute (later republished as Honolulu Harlot). Since the Japanese were in retreat and the islands no longer in danger, martial law had been lifted and a new ruling elite decided that Hawaii would never win statehood if most Americans thought of them as backward “natives”; O’Hara’s book called unwelcome attention to an institution now regarded as an embarrassment, and a “concerned citizens” group published a map showing the addresses of every registered prostitute in Honolulu so as to provoke a witch-hunt. The police forcibly evicted prostitutes from their homes and returned them to the brothels, and territorial governor Ingram Stainback sent letters to all the high military officials informing them that prostitution was illegal and asking if they approved of the regulated brothel system. Obviously they could not admit that openly, and so stood by while the police closed the brothels on September 22nd, 1944 and all of the whores were either forcibly evicted from the islands or harassed until they either left or managed to evade police surveillance. Apparently, Chief Gabrielson soon missed the “good old days” of bullying hookers, because he eventually retired from his position to serve as a “consultant” to the Tokyo police department in catering to U.S. military demands for increased control of prostitutes.
Hi Maggie.
Just saw this quote…thought you would like it.
Another interesting example of media control comes from John Swinton, the former Chief of Staff of the New York Times and “the Dean of his profession”. He was asked to make a toast before his peers of the New York Press Club. He responded with the following statement:
“There is no such thing as an independent press in America, if we except that of little country towns. You know this and I know it. Not a man among you dares to utter his honest opinion. Were you to utter it, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.
I am paid one hundred and fifty dollars a week so that I may keep my honest opinion out of the newspaper for which I write. You too, are paid similar salaries for similar services. Were I to permit that a single edition of my newspaper contained an honest opinion, my occupation – like Othello’s – would be gone in less than twenty-four hours. The man who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinion would soon be on the streets in search of another job.
It is the duty of the New York journalist to lie, to distort, to revile, to toady at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread – or, what amounts to the same thing, his salary. We are the tools and the vessels of the rich behind the scenes. We are marionettes. These men pull the strings and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our capacities are all the property of these men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
http://www.jamiemcintyresecrets.com/if-we-become-wealthy-and-manage-our-debt-then-our-nation-becomes-wealthier-money-is-just-an-idea-by-jamie-mcintyre/
What does this have to do with Honolulu prostitutes of the 1930s and 1940s?
I would say a lot. It’s about the hypocrisy that pits the establishment against the “non-establishment”. The military might have nothing against whores, but this reply explains exactly why those in control are obliged to crack down on them.
Very interesting and well written. This style (historical) suits you.
Thank you, Ellimist; once a month I do an article about a famous prostitute from history, and I also try to get in occasional articles like this one examining prostitution in some particular place and/or time.
I always enjoy your articles. This is in no way intended to question your scholarship, but is merely a question. 100 men a day at 3 minutes per man would be 300 minutes, or five hours. That doesn’t count the quick washing and inspection. I know you said the conditions were brutal, but could this schedule really be kept up, day in and day out? (By the way, has anyone ever tried to keep a record of the highest number of men a woman could see in a single day?)
It does seem like an awfully high number, but it was the same one in every article I consulted. I suspect the shifts were 8-10 hours, and it’s no damned wonder they usually burned out after six months!
After the whores, the ones I sympathize with most in this story are the military authorities. They could be (and often were) amazingly stone-headed, but they were at all times caught between the iron realities of human behavior and the necessities of managing large numbers of young men under stress, and the adamantine prejudices of the Democracy and the hysteria of the moral wowsers. In his classic UP FRONT Bill Mauldin pointed out that a small ration of decent booze would have immunized soldiers against the awful rotgut that they could make or find on the front. But the remains of the ‘Temperance’ movement would have raised horrified howls and millions of servicemen’s mothers weren’t ready to admit that – being in a war zone – dear Johnny was probably no longer a virgin teatotaler.
All that and having to manage a war too. Yuck.
Aside; Maggie, do you believe the legend that the term ‘hooker’ derives from the name of the Civil War general of that name?
Not for one second. “Hooker” to mean “prostitute” appears in print as early as 1845, when the general was just an unknown young officer. It is far more likely that the term originated as a synonym for “streetwalker”, perhaps specifically for a dishonest streetwalker who “hooked” men so a male confederate could rob them (as Ginny Foat was accused of doing).
I thought that it might be the case that a General named ‘Hooker’ was just too good an opportunity to pass up for the myth-makers. I also wonder if maybe the story first saw light in connection to some politics. I don’t see that Hooker ever ran for any office, but somebody connected to him probably did at some point.
Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) says “the term “hooker” was used in print as early as 1845, years before Hooker was a public figure, and is likely derived from the concentration of prostitutes around the shipyards and ferry terminal of the Corlear’s Hook area of Manhattan in the early to middle 19th century, who came to be referred to as “hookers””
It’s a pity about the legend, though. A General who was more interested in taking care of his men’s appetites than in placating the bluenoses would be a fine addition to our Military history.
The “Corlear’s Hook” story is as much folk etymology as the connection to the general, especially considering the first print usage of the term was from North Carolina.
Well, I did say it was Wikipedia. I wonder if H. L. Mencken has anything about “hookers” in his AMERICAN LANGUAGE. I’ll have to look.
My understanding of the etymology is it came from a section of NYC along the East River, known as The Hook – where in the 19th century, women-for-hire would congregate to ply their trade.
That’s another common folk etymology, but it’s first known in the US from North Carolina in the 1830s and is probably related to 16th century slang for a thief or pickpocket.
Thanks Maggie – I was stationed in Honolulu for eight years – I never knew this part of it’s history.
I’m fairly new to your blog … but I’ll have to search through your archives to see if you’ve ever written anything about New Orleans and “Storyville” … which is an intensely interesting story that also apparently involved the US military to some extent.
But of course I have! 😉
Great and interesting post, as usual.
I watched a documentary about Honolulu prostitutes during WWII on a cable channel. I said much the same thing and had a similar hooker positive point of view. I didn’t recall from that though that the era of tolerance ended in 1944.
It also made no mention of the 3 minute time limit that I can recall. That’s pretty brutal for the men for $3 in those days — probably about what $50 in today’s inflated money.
The thing about prostitutes is that they are like other people — including poor people. Poor people can be morally good or morally bad, just as rich people can. There is no inherent virtue in being “poor” or “rich”.
I once took up with a former prostitute thinking that it didn’t matter as long as she made me a good wife. And indeed, her stint as a prostitute turned to be irrelevant. What mattered was that her other, non-prostitute-related faults turned my life into a living hell.
A person should be judged not by the trade she happened to follow at a certain time in her life, but by her personality and (human, not institutional) morals. There are virtuous whores, just as there are unscrupulous whores. The epithet goes with the person, not the profession.
Since I’ve mentioned the Honolulu Harlot at least twice, I want to say that I’m sorry it took me so long to get around to reading this. There was the long holiday weekend, I was away from home, blahyadda blahyadda…
Mostly, I wanted to be sure I could give it the attention it deserved, with my memory sharp (or as sharp as my memory ever gets) to remember anything else I’d heard or read on the subject.
As has become expected, you did well.
The History Channel segment on this (it was a part of their History of Sex series, which I recommend) did mention the three minute time limit. You’d almost think a sailor would be better off jacking off. He could take four minutes if he wanted to. Maybe it was just the fact of A WOMAN!!! that made this acceptable.
A couple of decades ago, I had the opportunity to look through a Honolulu Yellow Pages (I’ve never actually been there). The section on escorts was freaking HUGE!
Write that book.
Maggie, did the police keep a registry of sorts to regulate the madams or the brothels? I am doing research on someone who was reputed to be a madam in Honolulu between 1936 and 1942.
I would suspect they had to, since we know that if a girl left Hawaii she wasn’t allowed to return for a while. I’m not sure where those records would be available, though; perhaps someone in the history department of the University of Hawaii could tell you where the records are stored if they still exist.
Kristi I would be interested in asking you some questions about your findings if you don’t mind…could I have your email address?
If Kristi doesn’t want to publicly post her email but would still like you to have it, I’ll be happy to forward it to you with her permission.
Not that much has really changed in Honolulu since the war years. As someone who spent much of his life living in the Bible Belt of Alabama and Texas, I was shocked to arrive here and discover how relatively open Honolulu is about massage parlors and what goes on in them. The Sports section of the daily newspaper carries a half-dozen or more advertisements and it is no secret of the intent. The one thing has has changed the most is that they are no longer limited to the area around Hotel Street in Chinatown, but are now widespread along King Street, Beretania, Queen and the rest of the downtown area. There are seveal within a few blocks of the main Police headquarters.
These brothels are mentioned, at some length, in Harry Turtledove’s alternate-WWII series.
Eventually I’ll get around to reading some Turtledove.
This is interesting story. My grandfather was born in Honolulu. Before he shipped out to the merchant marines in WW2, as a young man he used to hang out at a local brothel. Being the eldest son in a family of 9 siblings during the depression, my grandfather was always taking care of people and so he ended up helping out around the brothel doing odd jobs and random manly tasks for the madam and the girls. One of the stories he mentioned was how he was playing cards in the parlor when a drunk client started harassing the madam’s teenaged daughter and so my grandfather told him to stop and eventually had to confront and knock him out even though the belligerent client was at least a foot and a half taller than him. He said that after that incident the daughter started taking a liking to him and they kind of dated for a while whatever that means.
I always thought it was interesting how the brothel was pretty racially integrated. (The madam and her daughter were white, my grandpa was korean, the belligerent client was black) It’s not the picture of race relations that mainstream American history paints for that time period even in Hawaii. Anyway, i found this article online because I was wondering about what kind of place my grandpa would have been hanging out in when he was younger. Cool post.
Thank you for sharing your grandfather’s story!
Great story.
Just goes to show you can’t trust the government.
They will use you and then double cross you.
Chief Gabrielson sounds like a total fucking asshole.
Yes, he does. I think I’d’ve just as soon taken my chances with the “official” crooks.
Hello Maggie,
Fantastic article. I enjoyed it immensely.
I’m writing a series of novels set in Hawaii between 1949 (the ILWU strike figures in the first one) and 1959, and was wondering if you could point me to source material that could help me answer some questions.
Al
The absolute best sources for stuff like that are usually known to academic librarians (and often public reference librarians) in the place you’re writing about. I strongly suggest you consult the librarians at the University of Hawaii and even Honolulu Public (who helped me with some research years ago, and were ace). They usually know about stuff that’s so obscure even some historians don’t know about it.
Thanks, Maggie. That’s really helpful.
It seems I can’t send and e-mail (problem on my end), so here are my questions.
First, I’d like to discover something of how prostitution operated during this period.
Second, I’m wondering what happened to places such as the New Senator Hotel. Was it an hotel in terms of design, and did it (and other places) revert to being amore “regular” hotel after?
Finally, I like to know how the police force changed after the war (they sound more like an armed gang during the period you discuss).
Anything you can tell me would be great, though I’m guessing that pointing me at sources would be easier for you.
Thanks,
Al
Police forces are always armed gangs, though putting “vices” under their control nearly always engenders very serious corruption. That’s the main reason New South Wales decriminalized prostitution: keeping it illegal but sort-of tolerated led to rampart police corruption. See also 19th-century France and Prohibition-era New York City.
Okay, sure, I can see that, but as you wrote, “putting ‘vices’ under their control nearly always engenders very serious corruption,” so I was wondering what happened once they no longer controlled prostitution. I’m guessing the HPD might be all that helpful answering this question.
The police chief was a close friend of my great uncle, also a police inspector. I have a personal letter from him written about the first days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor with a carbon copy of the emergency plan implemented by the Police Department, “A Police Department Under Fire.” Interestingly, I also found an article from the Chicago Daily News Foreign Service by Keyes Beech, entitled “Cop blows lid off Honolulu vice with confession. In the article, William K. Clark, former vice squad sergeant signed a confession with a complete picture of “wartime graft running into millions of dollars for protection of gambling houses and vice dens.” Clark had $125,000 in a safe deposit box from the project, no small amount for the year (1947), He implicated three other policemen who were fired, thirteen more who were suspended during the investigation. According to the article, “Former Police Chief W. A. Gabrielson, who resigned when the probe started, took a military government job in Japan…” Not sure if he had to return after the prosecutor, Joseph Esposito, presented his findings to the grand jury.
Hi Maggie I have only just found your blog and I I am anxious to read your book! I loved your post! I touched on many of these issues in my Pearl Harbor trilogy set in Honolulu on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack, then the war years, and the final book covers the end of the war. You are right about the ten commandments and the three-minute men. And yes, the women serviced about 100 men each a day.
This was well covered in the TV documentary Sex in World War II: The Pacific Front and also a wonderful book called The First Strange Place by Bailey and Farber, which chronicles the history of prostitution in Hawaii etc. I researched my books heavily and chose to focus my story from the POV of a gay male prostitute. I learned there was at least 1. But he wore women’s clothes so the men who frequented him – climbing the stairs they called it – wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. I also found a lot of useful information from Mr. Ted Chen’s oral history report “Dousing Honolulu’s Red Lights. He was featured in the documentary. He said the hookers of Hotel Street were heroic. I think so too. They were the first women men young soldiers were ever with and for many, they were maternal, caring figures.
Those hookers also worked side by side with the nurses in the hospitals when Pearl Harbor was hit.
I got to speak to Mr. Chen before he died. He spoke fondly of a hooker named Bobbie with whom he lost contact. He was a remarkable man.
I also managed to get hold of a copy of Honolulu Harlot. I wish I could have met Jean O’Hara. I find her so fascinating!
The Hotel Street of today still has a few of the original hotels (The Midway still exists, for example) but the street is dilapidated and shabby. It’s full of homeless people, tattoo parlors, and really dumpy bars.
There is no indication there of the history of the place. Honolulu is indeed ashamed of the significance of it. It really bothers me.
Why did you use a photo of Peggy Corday for Yank Magazine in 1944. Was she a prostitute?
[…] the Second World War, the demand from servicemen grew so large that most of the better brothels on Hotel Street simply stopped seeing local men […]
[…] McNeil M. (2011, July 05). Honolulu harlots. Retrieved March 04, 2016, from https://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/honolulu-harlots/ […]
Thanx Maggie for the info. I am a former Chinatown independent hooker and am now researching historical prostitution in Honolulu for my college research paper. I learned a lot about the old days, my friends grandma ran a house during WW2, I know a family of 5 generations of being massage girls (family business). I have some close older generation relatives who were merchant marines and regaled me with stories of Honolulu’s underbelly from the 30’s to the early 70’s. Interesting stuff. Never thought I would ever be a character in that scene, but I surely was. I participated in every permutation of prostitution in Honolulu over the years from high class call girl and kept woman to the back streets and by “the river in Chinatown and every thing in between!! It was never boring and since I was an independent and local, never had problems with pimps except when I went to Waikiki. Serious turf issues. I don’t regret my life and someday write a book…
Aloha, Anela Britt
Hi Anela. I’m writing about Jean and that period of time. I’d love to hear some of the stories you heard about Honolulu’s underbelly. Many thanks!
Maggie — i am fascinated by your blog and thank you for introducing me to the Honolulu Harlot book by Jean Ohara — i lived in Honolulu just after WW2 as a teenager and recall The Bullpen reference many times…we knew the HPD deputy chief of police in the 50’s