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Mark D. Steinberg, "Moral Storytelling in 1920s New York, Odessa, and Bombay: Sex, Crime, Violence, and Nightlife in the Modern City" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Mark Steinberg about his book titled Moral Storytelling in 1920s New York, Odessa and Sex, Crime, Violence and Nightlife in the Modern City, published by Bloomsbury in 2026. Now, as that title suggests, we are going to a whole bunch of different places and really investigating kind of what life was like, right? Not just sort of what was officially in law or policy. And as we're probably going to discuss not even what was officially in sort of police reports or journalistic accounts. What is sort of in between all of those things and bringing all those threads together in terms of like what people actually lived in these cities, you know, what happened at 10 o' clock at night or 3 o' clock in the morning. As much as the 1920s are literally a century ago, we can get a sense of what life was like for a lot of different people in these different places. So clearly lots for us to discuss. Mark, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Thanks, Miranda, for having me. I look forward to talking about this thing.
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I do too. I'm very intrigued. But before we dive too far into any of the cities, can you please introduce your yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What sorts of questions were motivating this project?
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Thank you. So I'm Mark Steinberg. I taught for 25 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, but retired a few years ago and moved to New York City and tour in Italy. So and now I'm just a writer and interviewee when somebody's interested. So thank you. It's interesting what got me to this book. So I had only done Russian history before in terms of as a scholar. All the books I wrote were on Russian history. And I always try to think of them in a global way and in comparative way. But in fact, that was just a way to help me ask better questions about Russian history. Never tried to go beyond those boundaries. Russian and Soviet, both sides of 1917, wrote a lot of books on the revolution, but I had been teaching differently and I had been teaching courses in urban history because I had written a book on St. Petersburg in Russia. And I thought, you know, it's so I've been reading so many fascinating books on urban history, on the history of cities that I thought this would make a great undergraduate class. And so I began teaching comparative global urban history both at The University of Illinois. And also when I was teaching at a nearby prison, I was teaching at a medium high security prison. And the incarcerated students really liked this urban history class as well. And so I, when I retired, or just before I retired, I began to think, well, what, what to do? Could I really put my, you know, my sort of money where my mouth was in terms of teaching and actually try to do comparative or global history and do research? And I knew it was going to be around urban history. It also occurred to me when I, when I thought about moral storytelling. And we can talk about what that meant. What that means is it connects to the present. There are, one might say, culture wars now about going on, have been for a while, about difference, about deviance, about gender, about sexuality, about morality, all the sort of questions that came up here. And I also wanted to connect this to the present. So that's sort of what led me to this.
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Yeah, that's really interesting to kind of think about the multiple motivations that go into a project. And I would love to pick up the thread on what moral storytelling means in this context, if we want to go there.
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Sure, sure. So there's two key words there, obviously, right? Morality and storytelling. And these are sort of the defining arguments of the book. But they're also the questions that I asked. One of the things about historians is we don't start with presumed answers. We just have questions and it takes a long time until we actually understand what we're trying to say and in fact, why, to combine these three cities. And we can talk about why I chose these three, if you like, but with moral storytelling. So one thing is, it was quite clear to me, especially from what I knew about the 1920s, about the immediate post World War I period, although one could see the beginnings of the 90s and you could see the continuation into the 30s, that morality really became almost a universal global obsession, which is to say morality in the sense of people behaving in a way that that is considered normative, that is seen as correct. And it seemed two things were going on, especially in the 1920s, almost everywhere in the world. It seems one of those was, one might just call it people who just don't conform. People who are, by various terms that were used at the time, wayward, wild, deviant, transgressive. I mean, the lists are very long of the type of language and at the same time, sort of moral campaigning, moral disciplining, a sort of, one might say in more academic terms, a sort of biopolitics about how people use Their bodies and an attempt at sort of modernizing control. And it didn't seem to really matter what political system or ideology people had in terms of those in authority. The United States, a capitalist country, the, you know, drive for moralism was huge as well as the, the deviants, the ussr Again, there was this sort of moral revolution that was attempted at the time in colonial places like India. The same thing, you know, how to make people civilized and disciplined and the refusal of that by huge numbers of people. Even in India, the nationalists, the anti colonial people like Gandhi and others were also obsessed with moral discipline as necessary for the future of their societies. And the morality questions always seem to be around again, the things that are in the book Sex, crime, violence, leisure, both in terms of thinking about what people were doing, which was experimenting, and in terms of the fact that they faced constant hectoring by elites about being moral. So, so it seemed to be an enormous obsession. Storytelling became a way to get at that. Because obviously I can't live in the past, but I can listen to what people were saying and think about their stories, whether it was stories about other people by elites about why are they immoral and what do they consider immoral. But also looking at the storytelling of elites for the, one might say narrative complexities, the narrative ambiguities in the way they tell their stories, the contradiction between know, for example, their almost pleasure in telling stories about bad people and their alleged claim that they, they're trying to stop badness. So I look at the sort of narrative style and the same thing with, or one might say ordinary people, the people who are being observed and surveyed and controlled, who didn't always, I don't have, you know, we don't as historians always have access to their voices, but indirectly the stories they told, those who were watching them, those who were criticizing them, and also the stories people told with their bodies, what they actually did, that is more or less documentable. So I became interested in the stories told on both sides, both the way elites told stories that turned out more complicated than one might expect. And the way ordinary people told stories that when Mike said, answer the question of can the subaltern ever speak right. As Gayatri Spivak once asked. And of course her answer was no, never hear the voice of the subalterns, of the ordinary people. And this is a way of getting at that through looking at their stories and what we have of it.
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Yeah. And then comparing them with the sort of official accounts and sort of seeing like, well, hang on a second, you know, what does all this complexity mean when we put it together in many cases?
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Exactly.
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This does, of course, raise the question of answering or asking even these kinds of questions could be done in sort of many different places and times. Why then New York, Odessa and Bombay in the 1920s?
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You know, it's funny, because this was a question that I kept asking myself as to whether this was justified, choosing these three cities. And in fact, I started with a long list of cities that I was considering. The one thing I chose to do at the beginning, I said, let's just consider port cities. Port cities are famously a little wilder. They're more open to the world. They're more interconnected, more. There's a whole literature, scholarly literature on port city. So I said, okay. They're cosmopolitan, which I was interested in questions of race and ethnicity. So I thought, okay. And I began looking at literature on and even did some research on a ton of cities. I mean, Leningrad and Shanghai and Buenos Aires and Calcutta and London and other places. And actually, in my teaching, a lot of these cities came up. San Francisco, which is where I was born. I thought I'd love to do research on my native city, Naples, which is the most interesting city here in Italy, where I am talking to you from right now. But I decided this would be unwieldy. And so I ended up picking three cities. And one should often books that are comparative say, here's why these three cities are unique, they're special, they're worth comparing, because there's something really distinctive about, in this case, New York, Odessa and Bombay. But actually, I would say, no, there's nothing at all. I could actually have picked three totally different cities and probably come up with, yes, slightly different stories. History unfolds locally in its own way. But fundamentally, I'd be making the same arguments. So that sort of surprised me that actually I won't make the case that there's something unique about these cities. What is important about these cities is I wanted them to be different and not actually connected. So most global history tends to be things that are connected. You know, economic connections, ideological connections. I mean, it would have been really easy to do one that in Bombay, for example, because they're connected, because one is the. Is the colonial. It's the colonial metropole and the colonial city. But what I wanted is three different and unconnected cities, and different in the sense that New York is at the height of sort of booming capitalism in the wake of World War I, and one might say one of the most dynamic economic cities in the world. Odessa is a Port city, but also a communist one. Communism being installed, to be sure, only in about 1920. They were later than after the revolution because of the civil war. But having communist leaders in authority and communist moralizers. And then, of course, the colonial city. This. Both colonialism, but also rising nationalism at the time. And what I wanted to show, what I wanted to find out, at least eventually, I think I show is that despite those very. The fact that they're not really connected to one another except through some things like jazz and cinema that connect them. And there's some awareness of other. Of other cities, that in all three, under those very different civilizational, cultural and ideological distinctions, fundamentally there. There's remarkable similarity. There's important differences. But when it comes to this moral campaigning and the way ordinary people live their lives in their own moral way, different from what authorities are telling them, turned out to be quite similar. And so. So that's what I. That's. I. I chose them precisely because of their difference. But pushing hard on the question of what can I see that connects them not literally, not materially, but connects them, one might say, in the stories that are unfolding in these three cities. It's important that they're cities, although they're of different sizes, because urban is like an obsessive theme here. I'm very interested in what goes on in urban spaces. And I don't think these things were similar in small towns.
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Yeah, I mean, the urban aspect definitely comes through in looking at each of the cities individually and in comparison with each other, which I think is what we're going to try and do now in our conversation, and we'll see how we get on. Because, of course, as you said, there are such similarities between them that we might end up kind of jumping back and forth, but starting with, I mean, somewhat arbitrarily, New York. One thing I was really intrigued by reading the sort of accounts of the people, kind of trying to make sense of it, right? Whether they were journalists or detectives or police, sort of words like wayward and wild sort of kept coming up, which I suppose, you know, now when we look at the culture wars, like, I would kind of expect that sort of thing in a sort of sensationalist news headline. But I would be kind of surprised to see words like that show up in a detective report or a police report. And yet, as you clearly document, like, these words are being used a lot. So what did that mean in the context of New York? Like, why was this such a prevalent way of describing what was going on?
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So I need to Give credit to the fact that there are a couple of scholars who are. Who have noticed the importance of those two words, especially wayward and wild. And that's Saidiya Hartman, who's a specialist on US History, who wrote quite really interesting stuff on this obsession with the idea of waywardness and even analyzed it as a term. She's a great scholar. And then Jack Halberstam, who wrote recently published a whole book on wildness, who's a really interesting queer studies, cultural studies person. So that helped me because it was nice to see I wasn't crazy in noticing how obsessive these terms were. What struck me is this, one might say the wildness of the vocabulary itself because. And I can come back to what I think, why wild and wayward are so interesting as English words. But it's like the moralists are out of control in their vocabulary and trying to define these things. So there's yes, wayward and wild, but there's also things like willful and vulgar and indecent and evil and immoral and fallen and vicious. Vicious meaning in the sense of overwhelmed by vice. And in fact, if you don't mind me throwing in the comparison, what really struck me is the exact same sort of promiscuity of language in Odessa and Bombay in. In seeing all these people who are actually doing different things, as in in action in Odessa, they. They use very similar terminology, but of course they're using it in Russian or Ukrainian, but fundamentally saying, you know, they're deviant and they're licentious and they're lax and they're perverted and they're pathological. It's a very rich Russian vocabulary. And. And in Bombay, they're using English words as well, and they using wayward and willful, but also disreputable and bad and wicked and fallen and things like that. I mean, that's part of this. What I found striking is even the vocabulary becomes sort of wild. Two things about those words, though, that I found really striking. One is wild. And it was actually an environmental historian who I was giving a talk on wildness who said, this is really important in terms of thinking about humans and the environment, humans and nature. Because while in this sense says human beings seem to be leaning more toward untamed nature rather than tamed civilization. And I thought that's a really important way to see it that somebody drew me to, because the vocabulary does suggest this isn't civilized and civilization or respectability. There's another rich vocabulary. There is what everybody's trying to impose, whether it's religious activists in New York or feminists or socialists or people in Odessa and Bombay. And Wayward is equally interesting because Wayward has to do with space. And I have to say that when I first started this project, I still have a folder that's called Urban Spaces. That's what I thought this project was, was a. Was going to be called or something like this, focus on space. Because I was really interested in what happened in urban public space as well as private, but mostly urban public space. And Wayward is a spatial idea, right? It's about, you know, you're not walking in a straight line. You're not walking where you're supposed to. You're. You're wandering off the. The correct path. And that the, the other thing that I noticed besides Wayward is this obsession with talking about the crooked and the straight path, which is another way of thinking about it, which draws on the Bible and this whole idea about straight. Straight is the. What is the Bible phrase? Straight is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, unto purity, unto morality, whereas everybody else goes through that wide gate which leads them to immorality and destruction. Something in, I think, Gospel of Matthew. And I found that people were using a lot of vocabulary in addition to wayward and wild, of crooked and straight. They're not walking on the straight path. They're yielding to temptation in this sort of religious language. And all these things are entwined, but they add up to the same thing, right? That there is a correct, straight, let's use that term, civilized way. And too many people. And this is the story that I find so interesting. The moralizing, the obsessive moralizing of this era is not just because of its own story of why they want to create moral discipline, but because they're up against something really terrifying. This sort of people who aren't. People who are wandering off the straight path, people who aren't accepting the. The bridal of civilization as. As somebody in Odessa once called it, that they're becoming wild. And this is. This is a ubiquitous part of the story. So the vocabulary reflects that. 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Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack. Yeah. I'm so glad you talked about the vocabulary because it really is quite striking. It's like, hang on a second, what are all these words doing? And they're really coming up a lot. It's not just kind of one person whose, you know, flights of fancy takes them away. There really is a lot of concern as evidenced by this sort of very striking vocabulary. So let's talk about what they were concerned about. Right. We've got, for example, sex and sexuality. But if we're looking at New York, for instance, this is also when alcohol is banned. So I was kind of surprised that a lot of this did seem to be about sex and sexuality and did seem to be quite sort of consistently of concern comparing the three cities. Even though, like, I kind of would have expected that in this sense New York would be the outlier worrying about alcohol and you know, the sex concern would be Bombay and Odessa. But that's not what the pattern seems to be, is it?
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No, no. And I admit I was surprised at first too, when I began doing this research. Remember, I'm not trained as an Americanist primarily, so this was a new terrain and even less as a specialist in South Asia. And I too thought, well, prohibition, that's obviously. And when I thought of the project, obviously that's going to be the big thing that's proof of this moral obsession. And what do I find is that almost everybody from, you know, from 1920-34, during the years of Prohibition, it seemed like nobody was particularly concerned, at least in New York, that the investigators whose job, who were, who are a major part of my source, the journalists, you know, I mean, we all know the movies, right? Everybody's always drinking all the time. But actually the anti vice investigators, you know, they go out, they order a drink. I even know what their favorite drinks were because they, they reported it to their authorities. They talked about it even in the newspaper. I mean, it was really, there was really a sense of whatever but about, about alcohol and, and the what. But what really concerned them and what these investigators wrote constantly about was not just sex, but sex that was not in its proper place. That seemed to be, again, the wayward sex, one might say wild sex, which took a lot of different forms. And I think the obsession with sex and, and other things that they were concerned about, things like what was going on in the cinema, the type of music people were listening to, namely jazz dancing, these were all connect. What really troubled everybody about all those things was the sex, was the sexuality, that is to say, the sexuality that didn't. That was wayward, to use that term. And I, I wondered about that also. I mean, it's like I need how to explain it. And I read a lot of stuff on gender and sexuality. A lot of people had written about prostitution, looking for answers. And what I was convinced by, because it worked for all three cities, which is to me essential in sort of honing in on what is sort of the driving motive for this obsession, which was considerable, has to do with questions of self probably more than anything else. And it seems to me that this idea of what is the proper nature of the human individual self, right, it needs to be controlled. The anxiety, one might say, the moral panic about selfhood, about individuality, about how people make their own way in the world was a big concern. And hence I'm not surprised by how often people would criticize self indulgence. Don't indulge yourself, you know, control yourself. Where the, you know, somebody. Once, I think I used this phrase before the bridle of civilization. It's like, no, don't be a wild horse, right? You need to have your bridle. So that's, so that society controls you. So disorderly self, that's the other word they loved, disorderliness. And the thing that people were worried about is of course, what is human, which is people's human selves leaning toward self autonomy, toward freedom, toward pleasure, towards self fulfillment. And that leads them away from just self discipline. And yet moralists kept talking about, and that includes the religious moralists of New York, who were the really big ones, but also these societies like the committee of 14, which were out looking for disorderly sex, but also the colonial authorities in India, the, the nationalists, the communists in, in the Soviet Union, everybody was concerned with selves that were not controlled because to build a future society, an ideal society, whether it's capitalist, communist, nationalist, independent or whatever it would be, the idea was that you need to create order, you need to create, one might say, civilization as self discipline. And everybody kept talking about this. So I think the sex became a sort of touchstone for selves that were not fully controlled, that were not fully bridled.
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That makes a Lot of sense, as you said, kind of no matter what your end goal is in designing a society, kind of that thread connects them regardless of the ideology. But aside from sex that officials weren't happy with, what else were people like actually doing that created whole idea of wild or jazzed up or wayward, like it wasn't just sex. Can we get more of a sense of sort of what people were up to in these cities?
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Yeah, yeah. So key people, my key investigators. And I found it. You know, at first I began noticing the, the real authoritative moralists in each society, right? The colonial state in India, the, the communist state and the Soviet Union and Odessa, the religious fundamentalists and the organizations, civic organizations for moral order that were being created. And I read a lot of that stuff. It's, you know, it's, it's all very cliched and it's all remarkably similar. And I do notice that what I became really interested in is the, the investigators, mostly journalists in all three societies. So newspapers became a really key source. And reading about what, reading what these new journalists reported, sadly all the archives have vanished. So I know nothing outside of what they actually wrote. I don't even know who they're much about their lives. Which is sort of was frustrating but. But itself interesting. So what I have is the newspaper accounts and also anti vice investigators which either were police in many societies, like in Bombay especially, but in the United States in particular and of course in Soviet Union there are the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League and other organizations as well as the police. But in New York it was the real ones were the vice squad working together with these civic anti vice organizations. And the interesting thing is the most important anto to narrow down to go back to New York here. The most important anti vice organization in New York was the committee of 14. And it included all sorts of various elites. There was a religious motivation, but not primarily. There were also these famous ministers who were preaching from the pulpits about everything deviant. But the Committee 14 was looking for prostitution, basically commercialized sex, as they like to say. They have nothing against sex. They have something against commercialized sex because it's exploited against. So they said it was sort of a. But it turns out without going into what they thought they were doing. The investigators are the interesting ones. And I have one particular investigator in New York, there's a few others. But Harry Kahan was my main source because he was everywhere. And I have his reports, his raw reports. They sit in the New York Public Library. His raw reports to his bosses not Their summaries of what was going on. And this is where I get a sort of ground level view. And we can talk about the investigators in other cities and what they see. But just taking New York, he goes into a club, right, and he orders a drink. He liked whiskey he orders, or scotch in particular. He was a high class drinker. He goes in and he sits there and he pretends to be a regular guy. That's the phrase that was used for a sort of man on the town willing to have fun, not too worried about morality in order to basically entrap prostitutes. And what he observed was the drinking didn't bother him, although he thought, yeah, if there's a lot of drinking, that's not a good sign. He didn't, he thought women who smoked, bad sign, sign of immorality. Women who swore, who told dirty stories, who laughed too loudly, who seemed to be enjoying themselves too much. But. And really what troubled him was dancing. And this is, this we see in all three cities dancing to jazz. There's a whole thing about jazz that we could talk more about. But the dance is something that he really focused on, as did investigators and journalists in other cities, including the main journalist I have in New York, a woman. So we get a woman's eye view on this story. And what they both notice. The woman who called herself Martha, I don't know her real name, and Harry Kahan is dancing. That reminded them of sex. And they kept saying this again and again and again, that when people get out up on the dance floor and they dance around, what are they doing? They're simulating sexual intercourse. This is how they often put it. They're shaking their bodies in an unseemly way, as Martha the reporter put it. They're dancing in a way no nice girl would ever dance. And this, this became really their, their. The thing that. What troubled them. We turn the table right and we say, so what are people doing? The way you asked the question, and that is the correct way to ask it. They are having fun, they're looking for pleasure. Many of them are working class girls. Let's focus on the young women who are looking for something other than their wage earning job. There's interracial mingling which really troubled these investigators. There's obvious homosexuality. And this is noticed by Harry Kahan, who even. It's not his job to entrap homosexuals. And yet he, he starts pursuing them as a particularly troubling evil. In, in his mind, generally, the organizations couldn't care less about it. All these things Were going on people. This is the nightlife that, that is actually quite famous in the 1920s. But here it was all framed as part of the job of fighting vice. But what really we find is that people were out with a whole variety of motives. Right? And this is sort of the question, what did people think they were doing? The critics said they were indulging themselves, they were out of control, they were deviant, they weren't behaving well, they were disreputable. So we turn the table and say, what did they think they were doing? And then we get to a whole nother category. Potential analysis that has to be, of course, partly speculative, right? Because we don't have their voices, we have their behaviors, we have their words in terms of what we're told they say, and they do. Oh, and obviously there was sex out of, out of proper bounds, as the elite, the moralists would put it. There was prostitution. But even prostitution was very hard to pin down. It's like they're looking for professional prostitutes, right? And that's what, especially the committee of 14. And what they find is women who will go out, they're dancing, they're drinking, they're smoking, they're having a good time. They know that on Monday they have to go back to their boring office or factory and some guy says, you know, for a night together, you know, I'll buy you some jewelry or treat you to drinks all night or even give you a little money. Are they prostitutes? And even professional anti prostitution vice squad people said, I can't tell if they're prostitutes or they're just women having a good time, women looking for a good time, wild women, wayward woman, but not professional prostitutes. They had trouble defining all of these behaviors. They were, one might say, promiscuous in the best sense of the word. Things that just didn't fit in a simple box of definition.
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Yeah. This is what makes it so interesting to kind of piece all these things together, but staying on this idea of kind of correct gendered behavior for a moment, and what that meant in terms of behavior, but also in terms of dress. Were there any interesting differences you found between comparing the cities, for example, I don't know, Odessa, New York?
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Well, the biggest difference was the, the context, one might say the political and ideological context. What, what women were doing and what men were doing was not all that different. In these, in these cities, there's a lot of similarities. One could, the stories are remarkably similar, but the frame is very different. So in, in Odessa, it's now the Soviet Union. And. Or Soviet Union after 24. But it's. It's after the revolution, Soviet Russia, as many called it, but actually it's Ukraine, as we know now and has been for a long time. The frame is socialism. And they thought socialism, and they insisted there was an official ideology, went beyond feminism. It was about not just equality, but women's rights, women's freedom, including sexually. There was talk of free love. There was talk of the double standard that applied in the US and other capitalist countries and in capitalist Russia, we're beyond that. There was really an ideology of women's liberation, women's emancipation. In the US There was the same ideology, but it was coming from feminists who were not empowered. I mean, it was. It was not anywhere near an official ideology. And the United States and the sort of patriarchal ideals of a lot of leaders were quite strong. So there's a different context, but in terms of what. And in India, similarly, there's very different views. The colonial state had very traditional ideas about what women and men should do, but they wanted them to be civilized behavior leaders, as in England. What is not different is what it seems women in these societies are actually doing, which is the same sort of story. And even if one gets interpretive about it, what are they seeking? Women are seeking choice. Women are seeking freedom, whether it is in smoking or dancing or the clothes they wear or when they go out at night, and with whom. This is usually before, almost always we're talking about young people is a whole generational question here. Women are being modern. And they'll say that in all three societies, they're surviving too. Because there's also questions of being rational. And there are stories women will tell journalists. For example, I have a case where, that I remember well, where this journalist, Martha, is trying to figure out, why are you taking money for sex? Because she says, I'm not a prostitute and I'm not immoral. I'm just, you know, getting by. And she says, you know, my sister works in a factory and she makes $15 a week. I can't remember the exact amount. Whereas I work as a dance hall instructress who often had sex with their. With their clients. Iron $45 a week. Who's rational? You know, she's just doing what makes sense, one might say, in a capitalist context. So the behaviors, the motivations are. The actual actions are remarkably similar. And we could even interpret them similarly in terms of self, in terms of desire, in terms of autonomy, in terms of being modern. In all three societies, no matter what the moralists are telling them, even including in the Soviet context, where they're telling them, oh, you're all liberated now. And yet in reality, they're not at all. And so even the same fight is there.
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B
Yeah, that's a really interesting similarity across the three cities. But staying in the Soviet context just for a moment, again, going back to this idea of kind of words that pop up are really intriguing. Let's discuss hooliganism, because very evocative word can mean a ton of different things. What did this actually mean in Odessa? And was this the same as when we see the word gangster popping up in Bombay?
- [38:00]
A
So hooligan. It has a real history as a. It's not an English word. It's an Irish English. Irish English word. But it was adopted, you know, in the late 90s, 19th century in Russian. This just sounds different, but it's the same basic word. And even before the revolution, there was this obsession in Russia, the Russian Empire, with a behavior that was of course, well known from England. That's why the word comes from there. And it was common in, in. In Bombay, as well as sort of any form of behavior and again, the sort of variety of what they were anxious about as hooliganism, any sort of behavior that seemed to irrationally create disorder, mischief, as the English like to call it, that seemed to challenge proper use and behavior in public spaces. And this included fighting with. On the streets, with each other. There were sort of respectable women would be walking down on the street and mocking them, going into a club, let's say a nightclub, or in the context of Odessa, into a workers club, which is supposed to be the headquarters for bringing civilization, bringing the new culture, which was the whole idea. Idea of the revolution and, you know, knocking over tables and drinking too much and screaming, all sorts of behaviors that just were defiant, somewhat violent, that were really, really common. And these were happening before the revolution. And they. That what really troubled the Soviet is that these were young male workers, right, the proletariat, who were still engaging these in these actions. And we could. We could talk about the way in which the exact same word was used in India. In the United States, there seemed to be less problem or less concern with everyday sort of street rowdyism. But there was some. And then the term tended to be rowdyism, tend to just be violent, sometimes just wild youth. This is a. This is an issue you'd asked about gender. This is an issue especially about masculinity. Masculinity. And it seemed to be. There's this idea of what is Civilized masculinity supposed to look like. It doesn't look like this. This is everything that men are told not to do. Being overly rough, overly violent. Violence that seemed to have to be for the pleasure of violence. This is again masculinity not wearing the civilizing bridal of restraint. It also was at emotions. I haven't really talked about thinking about emotion history, which is something I've. I've worked on actually and written about. This is also emotions out of control. And I forgot to mention that when we talked about sexuality. But obviously this, this is a realm in which you have to. There are key questions of feeling and emotion and desire. Similarly with hooliganism. This seems to be violence that is pleasurable, that is wild, that lacks reason. One might say it's emotional transgression as much as transgression of what are you supposed to do in public spaces.
- [41:28]
B
Yeah, that's a really interesting way to think about it. To link as well to gender and to bring an emotion. Is this what shows up when we hear gangster in Bombay or is that something else?
- [41:39]
A
I think it's different, but there is a Bombay dimension to this that's really important. With gangsters in Bombay, one might say these are organized crime. They're much more disciplined than hooliganism, than hooligans. And there is a term for hooligans that's used in India. Gangsters are these sort of organized groups in which control of public space. Because gangsters are very neighborhood based, as always. Even as in the movies. Right. They're involved in crime. They think crime is perfectly a legitimate form of business, one might say, which is, which is disturbing to those who want to control both public space and the economy. They're very neighborhood based. So the question of the control of public space is really key. The only thing that makes them like hooligans is they're seen as disreputable. They're not civilized, they're bad characters. The difference is that the people who are called hooligans and I almost never saw a description of a gangster. There's some great gangster stories that because of the big public trials of several ones. The thing about the gangsters, the thing about hooliganism in the Indian context is it's a term applied especially to riots. And one of the one things that are very different about the Bombay context is the violence in the streets. That is both part of an anti colonial against the colonial state. This is the period of the rising movement in which Gandhi's nonviolence wasn't the only approach to fighting colonialism in the 1920s and beyond. But there were also regular riots, violence, street violence. I mean, the state called them riots between Hindus and Muslims as the two big groups who were in some ways vying for control of their parts of the city. And the state's job was to supposedly keep them apart. Invariably, when these riots took place, when there was violence involved between communities, rather than saying, this is the deep ethnic hatred of two religions, Hindus and Muslims, they always said, no, no, no, no. Hindus and Muslims get along. They get. They're. They're fine. And we, as colonial leaders, of course, have done a great job, they would say, in making sure everybody's happy here. These are just hooligans. These are people with no reason. These are people who just are so out of control that they engage in violence for its own sake. In other words, they were bad characters. They were disreputable. That's the one connection to gangsters. The difference is the gangsters. It was hard for people to see them as irrational and out of control, as wild. They were simply criminals, and they were very organized, and they had their own rules. And in fact, the stories about them. The real amazing thing, and one of the things I highlight throughout this book is the. As I've suggested, is the sort of ambivalence, the ambiguity of moral storytelling at the. By journalists and others and also by special readers of newspapers, people who consume these stories is the admiration for gangsters. The pleasure in reading their stories. The way even responsible newspapers wrote about them was very different than how people wrote about the sort of rioting hooligans on the streets. And some of these gangsters. There should be movies about them because these stories were so dramatic and so florid and so incredibly popular. Popular. I mean, people packed the courtrooms to see these trials because there was so much pleasure. Again, this is sort of this ambiguity of public morality as they're enjoying gangsters. Nobody really admired the hooligan rioters. So there's a significant difference, except for the connection. They're all disreputable, they're all immoral, but in a different way. And it was easier to enjoy gangsters as we do, to be honest. Look at the popularity of watching gangster movies. I mean, it's still. There's still a sort of appeal about it, if we think about it. It's like, why are we attracted to people who reject the law, who reject normativity, who are local powers and the gangster. There's gangster stories in New York we know from cinema Interestingly, they hardly ever talk about the criminal gangs of New New York. That doesn't seem to be a moral question. It seems to be a legal question for both Bombay and Odessa, where there's also an issue of gangsters, most of whom are Jewish, which is also a whole nother story, is the Jewish dimension in all of this. Gangsters were. Were a big moral issue, but of a different sort. And one that was irresistibly pleasurable to read about, it seems.
- [46:52]
B
Yeah. And to listen about in courtrooms. I mean, is there any sort of anecdote or bit of a story like that that you want to tell us now to give us a sense?
- [47:02]
A
So maybe the most interesting person in. In India, but there's some good ones from Adasa. I'll just take one. Is a guy named Babu Chasmuala. I don't even know what his real name is, but, you know, Chasmoala man, he was a watchmaker. That was his cast. And cast's a whole other story. And he was so incredibly interesting. People packed courtrooms to listen to his story. After he was arrested, he escaped prison many times. They seemed to be impossible to hold him. He comes to court and he's beautifully dressed, elegant costume, seems to speak multiple languages, including English, which is useful in the courtroom. The thing that people really admired about him, besides the fact that he can constantly escape every time he was arrested and that he should have been, one of the newspapers said he should have been a lawyer. He defends himself so beautifully, so elegantly, is he was two things. One is he loved to disguise himself. And he's like the classic cosmopolitan character. Right. He could become a Muslim, he could become a Hindu, he could be a Jew, he could be whatever he felt was useful at the moment. And he constantly disappeared because he was constantly. He actually ran a whole business pretending to be somebody he wasn't. The other is he had a moral logic. This is the classic right criminal underground, like the Mafia, we have our moral rules. And the moral rule that he got a lot of coverage in court for was you have to be polite to women. We're chivalrous. We don't swear in their presence. We don't beat them up. We behave very well. In fact, no violence should be used, even against the police, unless absolutely necessary. We have a high morality. And people were fascinated by this character of Babu Chasmanwala. Everybody was. Was talking about him. And later, not that long after this, one of the great Indian writers, a Muslim man who wrote in. In Urdu named Sadat Mando Manto. Wrote a book, wrote a series of books. And one of them is about a gangster named Mahmud Bai, who was a sort of neighborhood boss living in the neighborhood of Kamatipura, which is this poor, rough neighborhood, the brothel neighborhood of the city. And he resembled this real guy very much. And similarly, in Odessa, we have, excuse me, some remarkable gangsters in which Isaac Babel, the great writer, also turn some of them into literary figures. So the. The fascination with their stories and again, the what's the moral message of these stories about gangsters? It's incredibly ambiguous. It's hard to really pin them down as simply negative evil. And that's sort of the thing that most interests me is the way moral storytelling isn't about some simple binary of, here are the moralists and then, ah, those wonderful people who are resisting in all sorts of ways. And there's some ugly parts of that deviance and resistance too. I don't want to romanticize it, but I also don't want to say there's a simple binary of moralists and deviants. It's ambiguous, you know, all the way down, like turtles. All the way down. Every level we see ambiguity, including the. Including around gangsters. Example.
- [50:46]
B
Yeah, no, I mean, that's what makes it so interesting and also interesting to sort of see what the reactions are to this ambiguity. Because it's not just you looking back going, oh, it's so ambiguous. Right. Like, everyone at the time kind of on both sides of the law, for instance, was sort of aware of, like, well, that doesn't quite work. Or, oh, no, I'm trying to enforce this. But, like, how do I define prostitute? Right. The ambiguity was clear at the time. So perhaps as a. I mean, there's thousands of more things I could ask you about the book. But thinking, going perhaps on one more topic that again, really struck me just in terms of sort of reading this through and kind of what jumped out one of the ways, maybe this is a way that they're trying to tackle the ambiguity. Perhaps you can let me know if that makes any sense. But one thing that seemed to happen across all three cities, really all. Every time, you know, whether we are talking about sex or jazz or whatever, is the people trying to make sense of this on the law enforcement or moralizing side. They wrote a lot of lists, they talked to a lot of people, they thought about things, they made speeches, fine, but they wrote a lot of, like, very specific lists, as if somehow they were trying to, like, write down every possible variation of prostitution. Like, what was up with the intensive list making yeah, yeah.
- [52:06]
A
No, it's extremely interesting is that sort of trying to, one might say, create a social, behavioral, moral catalog of urban life. And they keep discovering how impossible it is, but it doesn't. The fact that they so much need to know. For example, when Harry Khan goes into a club looking for commercialized sex, that's his job. And he keeps finding, you know, oh, well, you know, I went into this club, and what did I see? I saw fast women. I saw gold diggers. I saw charity girls. I saw some questionable types. I saw, you know, prostitutes. But it was very hard to say which ones were which, Right? I mean, what's the. The distance difference between. But he has to have a category. He wants to say, no, no, she's a fast woman. No, no, no, she's a gold digger. Oh, no, no, no, she's a charity girl. And he's constantly trying to define it. And. And the same thing is happening in all. All three cities of these very long, elaborate lists of trying to define. To fix identities, let's put it that way. In the face of. Of a reality in which practices, what people really do are constantly shifting and varied. One might say if we go back to the sort of idea of straightness as opposed to waywardness, right? There should be, you know, create a box, a grid with straight lines in which, you know, where to put everybody. This is an obsessive evidence of the sign of a desire to control what can't be controlled. And this is a storytelling act that is extremely important to people in authority. And the smart ones, which are most of the ones at the street level, journalists, police investigators, constantly admit that really they can't do it. They're constantly failing. They write reports. I mean, I have these reports by police commissioners, mostly the chiefs of police, who say, you know, the eye of power, you know, we. We know what's going on. We see in the darkness of the cities. We. We. We. Our power to understand is enormous. And therefore we. We create, one might say, the knowledge that power requires by creating an ordering, orderly catalog of people. And so the people who do the work, the journalists and the investigators and the ordinary policemen, are constantly trying to actually do just that. And the very fact that they have so many terms suggests a problem, but it ends up they're constantly losing track of what to call people. And I think that's one of the more interesting things. And prostitution being a great example of it, because the very term prostitute, just to leave aside all those others, is an attempt to very specifically define a type of behavior that in fact, doesn't really reflect the complexity, the diversity, the instability in what people are doing. What women are doing sexually, even if we say they exchange sex for some material benefit, doesn't make them a prostitute. The word prostitute is an enormously powerful attempt to create order. It's one key in a list of which there are many terms that again, constantly fails. And that's, to me, the most interesting part of the story. Both the list making as an act of power, knowledge and power, but also all the multiple terms that our attempt to account for all the ways in which those terms aren't working.
- [56:00]
B
Yeah, this was a very fun aspect and kind of, I think, goes right back through the thread we've had through the whole conversation, right. Of like interesting words that jump out and how the words are trying to describe what's going on and constrain it. And it all sort of doesn't really work. And kind of clearly life is sort of bursting out of the seams of what various officials, despite, as you said, very different ideologies, are all sort of trying to achieve at this point. So definitely an interesting comparison indeed. And although I'm sure there's many other aspects of the book we could discuss, I don't want to keep you here for the next six hours.
- [56:34]
A
So no one wants to listen that long anyway.
- [56:36]
B
I mean, they can go read the book, there's loads more there. But before I do let you go, is there anything you're currently working on you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [56:44]
A
Sure. Just starting. It's very preliminary, slightly bizarre. I mean, the one thing that I have to say is I'm still fascinated by cities and stories, and so I'm not. I haven't left that. And as when you describe, paying attention to. To language is so interesting. This is one of the key aspects of storytelling. But I'm taking it in a very different direction. And I'm still staying in the world of sort of global, not just one country. In any case, I'm. For various political reasons, not really real ones, just the nature of the Russian government. I can't go there anymore. I'm on a stop list. So I'm banned from doing research anywhere in the Russian Federation until they remove that list. So I'm staying with other places. But I might have done this anyway. And the book that I'm beginning to think about and work on is actually what I'm calling migrants Stories. And it leads me into the direction of thinking about migration, global migration and immigration, with a particular focus on Jewish migration from Eastern Europe to the United States to China to England. And I'm still interested in the sort of storytelling of ordinary people, how just ordinary non famous migrants understood the experience of migration. And obviously this, I'm thinking of this because we talk in the present a lot about issues of migration and immigration. And so there's a connection to the present here too. What's really different about this, besides shifting to the question of migration is globally, is I really don't have sources. There are really an enormous absence of sources about everyday experience of migrants. And so in the conclusion, which you didn't mention, but so, you know, to give away a little bit of the. The book moral storytelling, the conclusion is an attempt to connect those three cities speculatively. And I do it in this weird way of sending people from each of those cities to other cities that they never went to. I actually imagine interactions between some of the storytellers in my book. It's a. And. And it got me to thinking about doing speculative history, which is a growing field, imagining things that are plausible but not actually factual. And so in this case, I'm interested in creating stories, as it were, that are plausible, that are realistic, that are rooted in historical knowledge, to really bring to life the voices of migrants and their experiences in a way that is speculative, fundamentally. So it's migrant stories, but it's actually creating an archive. I don't know if I'm allowed to do that, but I'm going to try that. The other thing that is experimental about the book is that in order to pick stories that exist, ordinary people who were not historically important, I'm using my own family as the fundamental story. So the skeleton of the book is where my ancestors moved and their stories and the people they encountered. So every person in the book is real, including the people they encounter, using censuses and other sources to find out who they were on the boat with and who they live next door to. But recreating their experience is going to be done in a angular, unusual, speculative way. That's what I'm going to try to do. If anybody accepts this experiment, we'll see.
- [60:19]
B
We will certainly have to see. And of course, in the meantime, listeners can read the book we've been discussing that has so many things in it, titled moral storytelling in 1920s New York, Odessa and Sex, Crime, Violence and Nightlife in the Modern City, published by Bloomsbury in 2026. Mark, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [60:39]
A
A pleasure. Thank you, Miranda, for talking and your interest in the book. And thanks to anybody who's listening for listening and thinking about all these questions and hopefully reading the book. Thank you, Sam.