Days at the law library can be tedious and frustrating, with the latter usually depending on how busy it is that day, and on how many of the people visiting are actually sane. We all enjoy working with each other and have plenty of laughs and interesting conversations, though usually behind-the-scenes. So in that work environment we take our fun where we can get it. One source of entertainment and enlightenment is perusing some of the older (which invariably means smaller as well) law books that we have either on the shelves or lying around in the back hallway.
One such tome is the 1911 edition of the Dallas City Code, a book of city ordinances and regulations. I read parts of it during a very slow morning on Friday and found a few statutes from that time which paint an interesting picture of where our culture was 97 years ago, and just how far we’ve come since then. Here are a few examples.
Article 29 – Accosting a female in a public place
This made it unlawful for a male to make “any improper or indecent suggestions either by word or gesture or use any insulting words to any female” in a public place. Laws from this era were often aimed at one gender or another, and this was among several that specifically punished males for certain (vaguely defined) actions against females. I suppose Dallas didn’t have a problem with females accosting other females in public in those days. Violation of this article was punishable by a fine that could be as high as $100, which doesn’t sound like much until you consider that $100 in 1911 money was equivalent to well over $2,000 in today’s money. That’s a high price to pay for insulting a woman.
Article 34 – Accompanying a prostitute in a public place
This made it unlawful for a male to walk or ride in any public street or other public place “with a commonly reputed prostitute or lewd woman” (I think that was the polite way of saying “slut” during the Taft administration.) This was also punished by a maximum fine of $100, but it had a qualifier. Article 35 made it okay for a male to accompany a prostitute in public if he was “related to such prostitute or lewd woman within the third degree of relationship” or if it was shown to be necessary for him to accompany her for “some legal purpose or lawful business transaction.” You can insert your own joke there.
Article 38 – Disturbing a female in a public assembly
Unlike Article 29, this law applied to “any person” and not just to men, and it made it unlawful to engage in “rude or indecent behavior” or to use profane or obscene language to disturb any female for purposes of amusement, instruction, or recreation. I guess it wasn’t enough to ban the accosting of women and threaten people with the equivalent of a $2,000 fine, they had to go the extra mile and specifically ban people from disturbing females for amusement. I’m not sure how using profane or obscene language to disturb a female could be done under the guise of “instruction”, but obviously the people who ran Dallas in 1911 knew better than me.
Article 40 – Disturbing religious worship
This is pretty much the same law as the previous one, except it made it unlawful to make a disturbance in a church service. The maximum fine was the same as with the previous articles. A city ordinance that protects “religious worship” against disturbances? The ACLU would have had a field day with that.
Article 117 banned “playing ball in public parks”, which shows just how boring life was in 1911. You could go to Dallas’s public parks, but once you got there you couldn’t play cricket or even throw a ball around. The law actually makes specific mention of cricket, but not baseball or any other sport, it just outlaws playing any similar sports or games in the public parks.
Article 118 – Injuring the grass, vegetation and improvements in parks
This would probably be Al Gore’s favorite city ordinance from that time. If you thought going to a city park and not being allowed to throw a ball around was bad, this law was even more draconian. It said, “No person shall lie upon, or sit upon, or stand upon, or go upon, the grass, lawn or turf of any” public parks of the city of Dallas, “unless by direction of the authorities.” They didn’t go through the trouble of defining what “improper or indecent suggestions” or “rude or indecent behavior” were, but they made sure to cover all their bases in protecting the grass in the city’s public parks when they said people couldn’t “lie upon”, “sit upon”, “stand upon”, or “go upon” it without permission.
Article 203 – Playing ball, etc., in the city streets
This one shocked me when I read it, not because it banned playing ball, throwing stones, or using blow guns, air guns, and various other shooters in city streets, but because of one specific item it referenced. In one sentence it made it unlawful to throw stones, “or use a nigger-shooter or sling”, or discharge gravel or marbles with a shooter, etc. The city code normally sticks to legal terms and avoids nicknames and slang terms, so my jaw dropped when I read the sentence that mentioned what I later found out was a crude term for a sling shot, and what was most jarring to me was that they wrote “nigger-shooter” the same way they wrote “air gun” or “blow gun”, not within quotation marks (which would show that it was a slang term) but just as another term in that article, as if it was a normal and accepted term, and one that was well-known enough that anyone reading would know what item it meant. I was born 18 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by President Lyndon Johnson, and the world I’ve grown up in bears little to no resemblance to that which existed in 1964, much less 1911, so I’m always a little shocked to see that terms like this were included in something as official as the city code for a city as big as Dallas (which had a population of over 92,000 at the time).
Article 210 – Bananna peels, etc. [typo in the original]
This was one of the more amusing article headings, and it banned the throwing of “banana peelings, or fruit peelings of any kind, on any public sidewalk.” I somehow doubt this article is still a part of the city code, but if it is, I sincerely hope someone has corrected them on how to spell “banana” at some point in the last 97 years. Why they even bothered to specifically mention bananas when they could have skipped that part and just banned leaving any fruit peelings on public sidewalks is unknown to me. It is interesting that they didn’t ban throwing vegetable peelings onto city sidewalks, and for that matter, they didn’t ban throwing them onto city streets. This was possibly because people were a lot less likely to slip on them if they were thrown onto the street, and this was still an era where the streets would have been teeming with horses, which might have made a quick snack of any fruit peelings thrown into their path. (I actually researched this a little, and found a message board where somebody said their horses loved eating banana peels, but not so much the bananas themselves, so this actually kinda makes sense why it would only be illegal to throw them on the sidewalks but not the streets.)
Article 292 – Intoxicated driver
Yes, even in 1911 they had laws against driving while in a state of intoxication, though I don’t remember if it specified drivers of motor vehicles or horse-drawn carriages. The punishment for this was a little more severe and included the violator being arrested and jailed for a night, and his horse(s) being put in the city livery for a period of time.
