American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [155]
French authorities complained to the American embassy about Braun’s investigation. A member of the French ministry told Braun that his country would not assist the United States in its fight against white slavery and prostitution. He said it was outrageous that American immigration laws excluded not only prostitutes, but also those women who were guilty of having committed adultery or premarital sex. To the French, American attitudes towards sex were prudish and provincial.
The Hungarian-born Braun even wanted to expand the categories for exclusion, suggesting that “pederasts and sodomites” be added to the list. He seems to have been traumatized by the thousands of young male prostitutes he saw in Berlin. Not only were these Puppenjungen, as they were called, practicing prostitution in the open, but many would blackmail their customers and some got into the business of procuring female prostitutes. It was a menace, Braun warned, that needed to be stopped at the border.
Ellis Island officials had always been worried about forced prostitution. As early as 1898, Edward McSweeney warned Terence Powderly about allegations that some immigrants were selling children into prostitution. Lurking in the coffee houses of the Lower East Side, McSweeney believed, were nefarious individuals “luring to lives of shame children of innocent years and that their down-fall, once they enter into this course, is incredibly rapid.”
McSweeney focused on the case of thirteen-year-old Bertha Hondes, who arrived from Buenos Aires with a woman named Rosa Seinfeld, who claimed to be her aunt. Rosa took Bertha to a brothel in New York where, in McSweeney’s words, “the woman had attempted to sell her for immoral purposes.” Rosa was not Bertha’s aunt, but a prostitute, and Bertha’s mother was a madam in Buenos Aires. The United Hebrew Charities intervened and took the girl away.
In 1907, Congress banned the “importation into the United States of any alien woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral purpose,” as well as the pimps and procurers who imported these women. The law gave officials more tools with which to clamp down on those who violated middle-class sexual norms.
In 1908, the case of John Bitty made its way to the Supreme Court. He was accused of bringing his British mistress to the United States. The woman was excluded and Bitty was arrested. The woman was not a prostitute, but since her sexual relationship with Bitty was outside the bounds of marriage, the government argued it fell under the “for any other immoral purpose” clause. The Supreme Court agreed, with Justice Harlan concluding that the clause was designed “to include the case of anyone who imported into the United States an alien woman that she might live with him as his concubine.”
More serious than the case of Bitty were the procurers who trafficked in human flesh and imported women against their will. In the years before World War I, as many as twenty-two white slave narratives were published, with titles such as Fighting for the Protection of
Our Girls: Truthful and Chaste Account of the Hideous Trade of Buying and Selling Young Girls for Immoral Purposes. These lurid books told of innocent young women lured into degrading lives of prostitution by sinister male pimps.
Former New York police commissioner Theodore Bingham published his own exposé, entitled The Girl That Disappears: The Real Fact About the White Slave Traffic, warning that at least two thousand immigrant white slaves came to America each year, “brought in like cattle, used far worse than cattle, and disposed of for money like cattle.”
Newspapers and magazines further fanned the flames. S. S. McClure’s eponymous magazine had helped give birth to the classic American journalistic tradition of muckraking, publishing