Irving Kristol and Prostitution

I bet that grabbed your attention.

I've always wanted to write a headline like that even though the reality is in this case one had nothing to do with the other (at least nothing that I'm aware of). Let me start by saying when Irving Kristol died this weekend, I went digging into the archives to see what the magazine had to say about him. I found quite a few stories and selected two. Both are reviews of his books. The first is Philip Green's 1978 review of Two Cheers for Capitalism. Five years later, Robert Lekachman reviewed Kristol's memoir Reflections of a Neoconservative. What I found so fascinating about it was Lekachman's admission that he Kristol came across as rather likable: "Buried beneath his vulpine neoconservative intellectual garments," Lekachman writes, "beats - perhaps faintly and certainly irregularly - a startlingly enlightened heart."

Who knew?

Now, regarding prostitution. This week's cover story on sex trafficking in Asia got me thinking about what the magazine had to say about the sex industry here in America. After some poking around, I found this article in which an anonymous writer decries the epidemic of prostitution in New York City. The remedy he proposes is not necessarily unique. He suggests that since prostitution will probably always be an issue, the answer is regulation rather than elimination.

But here's why the article is well worth reading. It was written in 1867. Here is "The Social Evil and Its Remedy."

Have a question about any aspect of The Nation's archives or its history? Drop me a line at jeff.kisseloff@gmail.com To be notified of new posts to this blog, follow me on twitter @jeffisme.

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