"To live correctly": themes and the significance of character -- "Only the Barbarian waits": New York City's committee of fourteen -- Drifted: feminist reformers and prostitution's changes in the twenties -- "The time has come": vagrancy law, police procedure, and proceeding against the customers -- People v. Edward N. Breitung: not the "simply immoral" -- "To make it an offense for a man to buy what the prostitute has to sell": public policy debates -- "The fruitful mother of blackmail": hope and opposition to the customer amendment -- "Out principles demand": hearings and disappointments -- "Mr. Veiller again prevailed": disappointment and death -- Reflection on a reform.

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"Mackey's contribution to the literature is unique. Instead of looking at how vice commissions targeted female prostitutes or the commerce supporting and surrounding them, Mackey concentrates on how men were scrutinized."--Jacket

"In Pursuing Johns, Thomas C. Mackey studies the New York Committee of Fourteen and its members' attempts to influence vagrancy laws in early-20th-century New York City as a way to criminalize men's patronizing of female prostitutes. It sought out and prosecuted the city's immoral hotels, unlicensed bars, opium dens, disorderly houses, and prostitutes. It did so because of the threats to individual "character" such places presented. In the early 1920s, led by Frederick Whitin, the Committee thought that the time had arrived to prosecute the men who patronized prostitutes through what modern parlance calls a "john's law.""

Description based on print version record.