The City Council's Yellow Flag Fiasco
When Seattle officials passed a health ordinance to curb contagion, they refused to apply it to a notorious local brothel, sparking a public outcry against political hypocrisy.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
It seems that our astute and august City Council, after carefully compounding a medicine with which to cleanse Seattle from the effects of, and prevent the further spread among us of all contagious or infectious disease, are themselves making wry faces and refusing to swallow a dose of it. It is no use, gentlemen; you may struggle as much as you please, the public are holding it to your lips. You have enacted a Health Ordinance compelling the people of Seattle, under the penalty of one hundred dollars, to raise a yellow flag on any building where a case of contagious or infectious disease exists. And then, when the citizens petition you to carry out the provisions of the said Ordinance by placing a yellow flag on the house of John W. Pinnell (that brothel of pollution), you—in order to escape a task your fear or interest deters you from undertaking—shrink from the responsibility by deciding that, in your opinion, John W. Pinnell’s premises do not come within the provisions of City Ordinance No. 30. That they all come within the provisions of the ordinance—mumps, measles, itch, chicken pox, syphilis, smallpox, scarlet fever, or any other—no sane person will deny. But the Council claims this is a 'smallpox ordinance.' Then why does the word 'smallpox' not once occur in the nine sections of the document? We would not for a moment entertain the suspicion that any of our City Council might possibly belong to the class of 'respectable men' who frequent these places and are therefore afraid of too close an investigation.
“It is no use, gentlemen; you may struggle as much as you please, the public are holding it to your lips, and it will kill you politically if you don't swallow it.”
This 1872 editorial highlights a timeless tension in Seattle: the selective enforcement of public health and safety regulations, particularly when those regulations intersect with the city's red-light districts. Much like modern debates over how and where the city applies its zoning and nuisance laws, the residents of 1872 were quick to point out when political 'respectability' took precedence over stated civic policy.
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