Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [207]
The background was an excited campaign against “white slavery.” It had, in its brew, a fairly strong dash of nativism. Foreign prostitutes, flocking into America, with a repertoire of exotic sexual ways, threatened the national morals. Congress set up a commission in 1907, headed by Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont, to look at how immigration affected vice and crime, among other things. The commission’s report claimed that “The vilest practices are brought here from continental Europe”; “imported women and their men” were corrupting this innocent land with “the most bestial refinements of depravity.” The “continental races,” apparently, could somehow tolerate these evils, but these unspeakable acts were sure to bring about “moral degradation” in America.5
There was already a federal law against importing “women for the purposes of prostitution.”6 The Mann Act strengthened this principle; one section of the act specifically applied to people who “harbored” any “alien” prostitute who had entered the country within the previous three years.7 But there was another image, too, behind the Mann Act, and it pushed its way forward during the debates. This was the horrific image of the simple country girl lured by the glitter of city life, enticed and seduced to her ruin by dark, evil men. These were the true white slaves: blond, blue-eyed girls in “dens of infamy”—“drugged, debauched and ruined,” reduced to a life so abject that even murder “would be a mercy after such treatment.”8
Historians have tended to be skeptical about “white slavery;” the evidence, such as it was, dredged up by vice commissions and congressional committees seems, on examination, skimpy and overblown. Did sexual bondage really exist? Reformers of the time had rigid, inflexible ideas about women and their sex lives. They refused to believe that any healthy young girl would ever choose “the sporting life” unless some devil drugged her, kidnapped her, and held her a prisoner of vice. Sally Stanford, who wrote a book about her life as a madam (although at a somewhat later period), sneered at the very idea: “Personally, I never met a white slave in my life.... If captive females were sold, drugged, or slugged into prostitution, I never knew a case.” On the contrary, Stanford wrote, it was a “continual nuisance” to her how many women arrived “at my various front doors” begging for a job in her house; and most of them, she writes, were far from destitute.9
Sally Stanford no doubt reported on life as she experienced it. Exaggeration and hysteria were obvious in the Mann Act crusade. But if we peel these away, along with the racism, sexism, and general phobic behavior of the time, a solid residue of sexual oppression remains that, if we wish, we can call a form of slavery: women were recruited into the business of sex; some were even bought and sold, or forced to live lives in which they traded their bodies for money.10 Maude E. Miner, writing in 1916, attached the label of “white slaves” to any “unprotected girls” who were drawn into the life either by promises or by force. She tells the story of two girls, sixteen and seventeen, who came from their small city in Massachusetts to New York “on a lark” with two men. In New York, threats and beatings forced them into prostitution; they were held prisoner in a “parlor