Motus Mentis

A passage from Henry F. Pringle’s excellent 1931 biography of Theodore Roosevelt describes a piece of legislation known as the Raines Law (passed in Albany in 1896, when Roosevelt was president of the New York City Police Commission). It gives us a lovely example of another, higher Law, having to do with unintended consequences:

Ostensibly a liquor-control measure, the Raines Law continued the provision that hotels could serve liquor on Sunday and defined a hotel as a structure with ten bedrooms and facilities for serving meals. Soon hotels were springing into existence at an astonishing rate. Competition became excessively keen as hundreds of new ones appeared; the ten rooms required by law were used for prostitution in order to pay the overhead. Previously Roosevelt’s problem had been merely to see whether, in places where intoxicants were served, there had actually been dining-rooms. Now his men had to judge whether the hotels themselves were genuine.

Roosevelt failed utterly to realize the significance of the new law, and was inclined to praise it. The defects, however, were promptly called to his attention. In November, 1896, Chief Conlin reported that criminals were opening these places and could not be controlled. Roosevelt then complained that the word “hotel” had been put into the law with “utter laxness of definition”. In December it was estimated that 2,000 new hotels had been started and Roosevelt, making a tour of inspection, found ample evidence that a crisis had arrived. One of the “hotels” on the Bowery had stable stalls roofed over with wire for rooms. Over the bar at this inn was a sign reading “Sleeping in This Hotel Positively Prohibited”. There were other places as bad, or worse.

– Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, p 148-9

A contemporary of Roosevelt’s, Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed, once said this:

“One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.”