American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [154]
At first glance, Ranc’s case appears to be a triumph over immigration officials eager to punish a woman for her sexual behavior, but there was more to the story. Two years later, a letter signed only by “A Loyal American” arrived at the State Department in Washington. Apparently, the marriage of Eva Ranc and Sig Tynberg had been short and unhappy, with Eva soon fleeing back to France. This anonymous letter warned that Eva was seeking to return again to America “to make trouble for those she wronged.”
Officials at Ellis Island sent an investigator to interview Tynberg, who told his sorry tale. He had truly believed that Eva Ranc was a good woman, but found out shortly after their marriage that she was bringing men back to their apartment and meeting others at the Ritz Carlton. Tynberg also believed Eva had fallen in with a group of blackmailers. After less than four months of marriage, Tynberg served divorce papers on Eva, who left the country before the divorce was finalized. Newly remarried, Tynberg now said that he would do everything in his power to prevent her from returning. There is no evidence that she ever tried to return.
Eva Ranc’s case shows just how engaged immigration officials were in the regulation of sexual morality. As Commissioner Keefe noted in 1909, “the purpose of the immigration act is to prevent the introduction into the United States not only of innocent girls who have been seduced into a life of prostitution, but of all girls and women of sexually immoral class.” Ranc would have been classified under the category of “sexually immoral,” but authorities were also on the lookout for those “innocent girls” forced into prostitution.
There was a term for this: white slavery. Americans believed that unscrupulous men—pimps, “cadets,” and “mackerels”—were forcibly trapping thousands of innocent young women into sordid lives of sexual slavery. The Outlook warned in 1909 that there was an “extensive traffic in white slaves . . . who are bought, sold, and used as instruments for the gratification of men’s lust.”
The imagery implied in the term was forceful, as anti-prostitution activists positioned themselves as the new abolitionists. No less a reformer than Jane Addams made the connection between the “social evil” of young women being forced to sell their bodies and the enslavement of blacks. Like the battle against race slavery, Addams thought that the fight against white slavery would “claim its martyrs and its heroes.” Reformers were ready to take to the battlefield against this newest injustice. “Few righteous causes have escaped baptism with blood,” Addams prophesized.
Reports began to filter into the press about unimaginable horrors inflicted upon innocent women. “There are some things so far removed from the lives of normal, decent people as to be simply unbelievable by them,” U.S. Attorney Edwin Sims claimed with melodramatic flair. Americans would come to believe that there was a vast and organized system enslaving young women into sexual service, with immigrants at the center of that system, as both victims and victimizers.
ELLIS ISLAND INSPECTOR MARCUS Braun would never pass up a trip at the government’s expense, especially if it allowed him to avoid the mundane duties of work at Ellis Island. So Braun spent five months in 1909 traveling throughout Europe investigating white slavery for the federal government.
In Paris, Braun visited the hangouts of pimps and prostitutes and, in his words, “simply played the part of a traveling tourist who is curious enough to make, once in a while, foolish inquiries and to spend his good money to satisfy his curiousity.” He collected the names of suspected European pimps and prostitutes, as well as their mug shots.
After five months, Braun reported back to his superiors that he could find “no such thing as an organized traffic for the shipment of alien women for the purpose of prostitution or any other immoral purpose in existence.” Nor did he find “any organized effort of bringing innocent and virtuous women into this country