Hard to believe, but I have seen stories suggesting Eliot Spitzer will be prosecuted for "white slavery" -- violating the Mann Act. Does any Alaskan younger than Ted Stevens, who prosecuted violators of the Mann Act in Fairbanks in the '50s, know the history of this country's white slavery law?
The term "white slavery" is so lurid, so evocative of yesterday's pulp fiction and men's magazines, so central to the history of pornography, one struggles to put it in focus as a matter of law. The mind conjures up scantily clad blondes in chains imprisoned by swarthy foreigners with cigarettes dangling from their lips.
As a matter of law, the statute that prohibited white slavery was the White Slavery Act of 1910 or Mann Act, named for U.S. Rep. James Mann of Chicago.
Mann, a Republican, served in the House of Representatives for more than 25 years. He was a skilled legislator who dominated many major debates, and when he died suddenly in December 1922, the New York Times called him "one of the best-liked men in Congress." Mann's dominance seems to have come to an end two years before he died when he suffered what the Times called, without further explanation, "a nervous breakdown from which he never fully recovered."
As chairman of the House Interstate Commerce Committee, Mann had an important platform from which to launch an attack on the sex trade, and he spoke to a national audience receptive to hyperbole. Public dissenters were few when he said "the white slave traffic, while not so extensive, is much more horrible than black-slave traffic ever was in the history of the world."
The Times, which supported passage of his legislation, maintained in a Dec. 9, 1909, editorial, "the belief that the white slave trade is a great as well as monstrous evil ... has the support of all the commissions and individuals who have given the matter examination at once honest and careful." The "monstrous evil" was so widely accepted as real and so widely reviled that in 1908, the United States joined an international treaty for the repression of white slavery.
In "Crossing Over the Line," a history of the Mann Act, Cumberland Law School Professor David J. Langum says the act was the product of national hysteria. Growing fear of immigration, especially from eastern and southern Europe; increased urbanization, which drew young people from the country to cities, where they mingled freely without their elders' supervision; and the new independence women enjoyed (and sometimes suffered) as they entered the urban work force fueled the hysteria and created a demand for punitive legislation.
Yes, Langum says, prostitution blossomed in the first decade of the 20th century, and yes, some women were induced into prostitution, but the fear of white slavery was disproportionate to its presence.
Langum illustrates the Mann Act proponents' state of mind by quoting Edwin W. Sims, the United States Attorney for Chicago.
"I can say in all sincerity that if I lived in the country and had a young daughter, I would go to any length of privation and hardship myself rather than allow her to go into the city to work or study. ... The best and the surest way for parents of girls in the country to protect them from the clutches of the 'white slaver' is to keep them in the country. ... One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is the ordinary ice cream parlor is apt to be a spider's web for her entanglement. This is especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners."
The paradox of white slavery has been that while women were (and still are) coerced into the sex trade, many were perfectly willing. The records pertaining to Ted Stevens' Mann Act cases confirm this. It's also true the act became subject to great abuse by criminals and lawmen alike.
Men who took their girlfriends from New York City to New Jersey for the night were threatened with the Mann Act by blackmailers. While crossing the Hudson River with their lady friends, the men violated federal law: Transporting women for immoral purposes. Lawmen, meanwhile, often engaged in selective prosecution -- as in the prosecution of rock 'n' roller Chuck Berry in the '50s. Berry's real crime in their eyes was dating white women.
The U.S. Supreme Court further complicated enforcement of the crime of transportation for immoral purposes by ruling in the Caminetti case (1917) that the Mann Act could be applied against those who committed noncommercial consensual sex. (Two affluent young California married men were jailed for taking their girlfriends to Nevada.) Caminetti eventually fell afoul of reality -- was any government going to jail tens of thousands of similar offenders?
Eliot Spitzer has put the Mann Act back in the news, and the history of the Mann Act will be news to most Americans.
Michael Carey is the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com.
MICHAEL CAREY
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