Throughout her political career, Sarah Palin has benefited from establishing and exploiting contrasts. The contrast between Palin the women-of-integrity and dishonest Republican bosses. The contrast between the fresh new Palin and old clumsy incumbent governor, Frank Murkowski. The contrast between women-of-the-people Palin and screw-the-people oil companies. Even the contrast between young, vital Sarah Palin and aging, stiff John McCain - which perversely enough has helped McCain in the polls.
Now the contrast is between Sarah Palin as she really is - the Mat-Su Valley woman with limited exposure to the world despite less than two years as governor - and the Palin look-alike mouthing McCain phrases, slogans and assertions.
You will remember Palin's sarcastic reference to Barack Obama's years as a community organizer when she spoke at the Republican convention. That wasn't her; some Washington whiz kid in the McCain campaign told her to say that. Sarcasm is alien to her - or was.
Similarly, when Katie Couric asked Palin why she didn't have a passport until recently, here's what the recently made-over Palin had to say: "I'm not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world. No, I've worked all my life."
The put upon attitude is not the Sarah Palin who lived in Alaska until last month. Nor is the crude appeal to the resentment of those who missed educational opportunities in their youth because they were working.
John McCain probably ought to be arrested for white slavery. That's pretty much what we have witnessed on our television screens during his campaign: The transformation of a respectable woman into a working girl. Not that she wasn't willing. And not that the white slavery statute or Mann Act requires actual slavery; 'the woman was willing' is not a defense, John McCain.
Those who want to know more about the origins of the white slavery law, read on.
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 finds it a struggle 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 - or Victorian virgins captured by the Barbary pirates and shipped to a harem, a 19th-century pornographic theme.
As a matter of law, the statute that prohibited white slavery was the White Slavery Act of 1910, or Mann Act, named for its author, Congressman James Mann of Chicago. Mann, a Republican, served in the House 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 December 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 although the treaty makers seems to have been influenced more by loud tabloid journalism than by quiet assessment of fact.
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, who was a U.S. 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.
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Michael Carey is the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News. He hosts the weekly public affairs program "Anchorage Edition" on KAKM television.