Joplin Bawdy Houses

Two of the past three weeks I've written about bawdy houses and prostitution in Springfield, but Joplin puts Springfield to shame when it comes to a track record of prostitution. I suppose "put to shame" is a poor way to say that prostitution in Joplin has always been more prevalent than in Springfield because a lot of arbiters of morality, I'm sure, would say that Joplin, not Springfield, has the shameful record. Nonetheless, I thought I'd take a look at Joplin prostitution this week.

From the time Joplin was first founded in 1873 (very likely even before it was officially founded, when it was nothing but a mining camp) prostitution was prevalent in Joplin. Prostitution was not legal, but city officials tended to look the other way. For many years, the only real effort to control the vice was a fine system that served more or less as a de facto licensing system. Periodically, usually toward the end of each month, police would come around to the various houses of ill repute and collect fines from the madam and the working girls. 

Prostitution continued almost unabated throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, although there were occasional attempts, largely unsuccessful, to crack down on the bawdy houses. Prohibition put a damper on prostitution and other vices in Joplin just as it did almost everywhere else, but it didn't stop it altogether. 

For instance, I recently ran across a September 1928 story in the Joplin Globe about the city health commissioner's campaign to try to rid the city of prostitution. The commissioner especially didn't like the fact that bawdy houses were allowed to operate in Joplin under the guise of rooming houses. He thought the city ought to claim down on the licensing of the rooming houses, but members of the city council were cool to his proposition. They seemed to think there was little they could do legally to deny licenses under the current ordinances.

The commissioner responded that they ought to change the ordinances and that police ought to repeatedly raid every rooming house suspected of being a front for prostitution until the prostitutes were forced either to stop business or leave town. He even made a motion to that effect, but "the motion was apparently forgotten during the discussion that followed."