Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s

Abstract

A Russian-born soapbox orator preached left-wing politics in 1949 Los Angeles. One decade later, a black man who worked odd jobs and occasionally drank in public waited for a bus in Louisville. A bohemian played guitar in Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. In 1969 two young blonde women rode in a car, heading to a Jacksonville nightclub with their African American male companions. Across time and space these individuals shared a common experience: arrest for vagrancy. For centuries, laws criminalizing vagrancy had served as “the go-to response against anyone who threatened … to move ‘out of place’ socially, culturally, politically, racially, sexually, economically, or spatially” (p. 3). Risa Goluboff's Vagrant Nation tells the fascinating story of how this legal regime lost its constitutional validity in just two dramatic decades. Featuring a lively narrative, strong argumentation, and acute analysis, the book offers an integrated history of the social movements that composed the “long 1960s.” Vagrancy regulation constrained the freedom of poor people, civil rights activists, hippies, prostitutes, and gays and lesbians. These movements targeted vagrancy laws in fighting for the right to transgress social and spatial boundaries. Litigants built on each other's legal arguments and established precedents that held utility for other groups. Goluboff thereby reveals a common thread unifying social struggles often treated by historians as fragmented. Her analysis offers an important picture of advocacy focused not on particular identity characteristics but rather on the limits of state power to regulate social difference.