Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [208]
Whatever the underlying reality, the Mann Act had become law. From 1910 on, it was a federal crime, on the statute books in black and white, to “transport ... any woman or girl” across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” What, however, were these “other” immoral purposes? The debates in Congress were mostly about prostitution, venal sex, sexual commerce. But the “crime” that underlay the famous case of Caminetti v. United States, decided by the Supreme Court in 1917, was of an entirely different order.12 Two young men, Drew Caminetti and Maury Diggs, both married, had gone gallivanting about California with their young girlfriends. Their adventures took them across the border to Reno, Nevada, as well.
Commercialized vice had no role whatsoever in these doings, but Caminetti and Diggs were nonetheless arrested, tried, and convicted of “debauchery” and transporting women across state lines “for an immoral purpose.” The Supreme Court brushed aside the argument that the Mann Act had nothing to do with amateur, unpaid sex. What the two men did was “immoral,” and thus fell squarely under the act.
This decision alarmed at least one commentator, who said, a bit hyperbolically, that Caminetti would empower federal courts to act as “censor of the nation’s sexual morals.” There were, in fact, some startling prosecutions and convictions. In one case, the Mann Act was used to prosecute someone who transported a woman across state lines to work as a chorus girl, in a theater where smoking, drinking, and cursing went on; in another case, the villain was a dentist who had a rendezvous with his young love in another state, shared a hotel room with her, and talked about her pregnancy; in yet another case, two students at the University of Puerto Rico had sex on the way home from a date; in still another, a man and woman lived together for years as man and wife and roamed around the country while the man sold securities.13
Cases like these unquestionably stretched the words of the statute and inserted the national government into people’s intimate affairs. ci Still, these were not typical cases. People crossed borders for “immoral purposes” every day by the thousands, or committed their immoral purposes in the territories or in Washington, D.C.; but only a handful were ever prosecuted. Critics (and the dissenting opinion in the Caminetti case) claimed that the unscrupulous would use the Mann Act to blackmail people. No doubt this sometimes happened.
The Mann Act was also used for other unsavory purposes. In one notorious instance, Jack Johnson, heavyweight champion of the world and a black man, was arrested for crossing color lines, not state lines. Johnson lived with a white woman, Belle Schreiber. He sent her seventy-five dollars to travel from Pittsburgh to Chicago, where she would meet up with him. Johnson was convicted and sentenced to a year in jail. The verdict, said the district attorney, “will go around the world” as a warning against “miscegenation.”15
Between 1910 and 1915, more than a thousand defendants were convicted of white slavery in the United States.16 Most of the defendants were men. But women, too, were sometimes caught in the Mann Act web. A study of 156 women sent to prison in this way, between 1927 and 1937, found a fair number (23 percent) who were not prostitutes at all, and were totally unconnected with commercial vice. Many of them were unmarried women traveling with married men—men they loved and wanted to marry. They ran afoul of the law when an enraged and scandalized wife complained to authorities.17 The Mann Act, in short, was used as a blunt instrument of conventional morality. Not until later in the century, as we shall see, did it loose its grip.
Red-Light Abatement
The age of the Mann Act was also the climax of the so-called Red-Light Abatement Movement. The point was to put teeth