In 1949 Los Angeles, a police officer arrested Isidore Edelman as he spoke from a park bench in Pershing Square. Twenty years later, an officer in Jacksonville, Florida, arrested Margaret “Lorraine” Papachristou when she was out for a night on the town.
Edelman and Papachristou had very little in common. Edelman was a middle-aged, Russian-born, communist-inclined soapbox orator. Papachristou was blond, statuesque, twenty-three, and a Jacksonville native. The circumstances of their arrests were different, too. It was Edelman’s strident and offensive speeches that caught the attention of the police—his politics were just too inflammatory for the early Cold War. For Papachristou, it was her choice of companions—she and her equally blonde friend had been out with two African American men in a southern city not quite transformed by the civil rights era.
What Edelman and Papachristou shared despite their differences was the crime for which they were arrested: vagrancy. California law made a vagrant of everyone from wanderers and prostitutes to the willfully unemployed and the lewd. Edelman’s earlier arrests off the soapbox had made him “dissolute” and therefore a vagrant under the law. 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. They noted that Papachristou and her companions were vagrants for an improvised and far more modern reason: “prowling by auto.”
As the evocative language of these laws suggests, the crime of vagrancy had long historical roots. Since the 16th century, vagrancy laws had been used in England to uphold hierarchy and social order. Despite much-touted myths of American upward and outward mobility, the laws proliferated along with English colonists on this side of the Atlantic too. Indeed, when Edelman was arrested in 1949, vagrancy was a crime in every state and the District of Columbia.