That was what not only his superiors but also the upstanding taxpayers wanted, expected him to do. He was trained to see difference as dangerous, to see the unusual as criminal. It was his job to see these threats, to determine who was “legitimate” and who not. The officer on the beat in the 1950s and 1960s saw such threats everywhere, in the “queer,” the “Commie,” the “uppity” black man, the “scruffy” young white one. ![]() Over time, states and localities deployed and retooled vagrancy laws for use against almost any-real or perceived, old or new-threat to public order and safety. The vagrancy law was often the go-to response against anyone who threatened, as many described it during vagrancy laws’ heyday, to move “out of place” socially, culturally, politically, racially, sexually, economically, or spatially. As these uses suggest, vagrancy laws were linked to a conception of postwar American society-as they had been linked to a conception of sixteenth-century English society-in which everyone had a proper place. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder.Īrmed with this roving license to arrest, officials employed vagrancy laws for a breath-taking array of purposes: to force the local poor to work or suffer for their support to keep out poor or suspicious strangers to suppress differences that might be dangerous to stop crimes before they were committed to keep racial minorities, political troublemakers, and nonconforming rebels at bay. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. Indeed, when Edelman was arrested in 1949, vagrancy was a crime in every state and the District of Columbia.įor your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Despite much-touted myths of American upward and outward mobility, the laws proliferated along with English colonists on this side of the Atlantic too. Since the 16th century, vagrancy laws had been used in England to uphold hierarchy and social order. ![]() They noted that Papachristou and her companions were vagrants for an improvised and far more modern reason: “prowling by auto.”Īs the evocative language of these laws suggests, the crime of vagrancy had long historical roots. Papachristou was arrested under a Jacksonville ordinance that criminalized some twenty different types of vagrants, including “rogues and vagabonds, or dissolute persons who go about begging, … persons who use juggling or unlawful games or plays, common drunkards, … common railers and brawlers, persons wandering or strolling around from place to place without any lawful purpose or object, habitual loafers, disorderly persons.” Such a law, noted a judge in 1970, sounded like “a casting advertisement in an Elizabethan newspaper for the street scene in a drama of that era.” To the police, the listed categories did not even exhaust the law’s possibilities. ![]() Edelman’s earlier arrests off the soapbox had made him “dissolute” and therefore a vagrant under the law. California law made a vagrant of everyone from wanderers and prostitutes to the willfully unemployed and the lewd. What Edelman and Papachristou shared despite their differences was the crime for which they were arrested: vagrancy.
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