This double session explores the centrality of illicit work to the urban economy in American cities throughout the twentieth century. Panelists interrogate the relationship between criminalized forms of work and processes of racialization while examining the boundaries--both heavily policed and surprisingly porous--separating licit and illicit spheres of work. The papers attend to how vice has shaped working-class politics across different ethnic groups in the nation’s cities. Finally, our collective goal is to forge connections between scholars of the Prohibition Era and those working on the contemporary War on Drugs to build new understandings of illicit work within the twentieth-century urban experience.

The first session asks how legal sanctions against popular vices shaped working-class experience and racial formation in early twentieth-century American cities. Snyder discusses a thwarted scheme to arrange a police protection racket for vice in Los Angeles’s multiracial districts to ask how Prohibition enforcement shaped processes of racialization. Both Vaz and Del Rio show how illicit work interfaced with legitimate spheres of economic activity. Vaz explores the relationship between illegal and legal economic activity through research on key figures in the illegal numbers game in Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore. Finally, Del Rio turns to the pharmacy profession at the end of the nineteenth century to ask how drug dealing was transformed from a job into a type of person.