Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [218]
The federal campaign against “debauchery” became, as it were, much more flaccid. From 1940 on, the Mann Act entered, as one author put it, a period of “twilight.”80 During the Second World War, there was at least one notorious case: the great comedian Charlie Chaplin was arrested in 1944. A woman named Joan Berry claimed Chaplin gave her money for a trip to New York (from Los Angeles). In New York, they had sexual relations. J. Edgar Hoover, who considered Chaplin a dangerous red, was the driving force behind this bizarre trial, which provided sensational copy for the gentlemen and ladies of the press. The jury acquitted Chaplin, but he later left the country in disgust.81
By now it was, in fact, deep twilight. The Mann Act had come to seem—archaic. The conviction rate dropped dramatically in the sixties. In U.S. v. McClung (1960), a district court case out of Louisiana, Clarence C. McClung was indicted for transporting Lula Belle and Barbara Raub from Huntington, West Virginia, to La Place, Louisiana, “for the purpose of engaging in sexual intercourse.” The district court threw the case out. Isolated acts of sexual dalliance did not violate the act, said the court; what was needed was some “sordid commercial scheme.”82 There were 157 convictions in 1961, but only 36 at the end of the decade. The last splashy prosecution resulted in the conviction, in 1962, of Chuck Berry, the rock-and-roll celebrity.83
The Mann Act was not quite dead. But it was dying. Word went out to U.S. attorneys: use the Mann Act sparingly, and only for commercialized vice. As a blunt federal weapon against immorality, the act passed into a state of suspended animation.84 In 1978, the law became a bit more unisex; Congress outlawed the “commercial exploitation” of minors in the sex industry, adding minor boys to the protected class.85 Finally, in 1986, Congress overhauled the whole bloody business. It dropped from the law the obnoxious and racist term “white slavery.”86 The pungent and evocative old word “debauchery” also departed, along with the reference to “immoral purposes.” The act was now firmly gender-neutral. The crime consisted of transporting any “individual” with the “intent that such individual engage in prostitution, or in any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense.”87 Plain interstate lust was no longer illegal. The ghost of Caminetti was at rest at last.
The Well of Loneliness
Homosexual behavior was a crime throughout American history. In the colonial period, as we have seen, a few men found guilty of sodomy swung from the gallows. In the nineteenth century, the wages of sodomy was no longer death, but the “crime against nature” was very much a crime, and it carried, potentially, heavy penalties. It is hard to say much about enforcement. There was never any systematic crackdown. Fear of the police, and of scandal, made gay men and women outlaws and drove their behavior underground. There were times and places where arrest and prosecution were genuine risks. Police reports everywhere record at least small numbers of arrests. Thus, in 1908, there were 73 felony arrests (out of 7,721) in Chicago for the “crime against nature”; in 1909, there were 31 (out of 6,460).88
The morality revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries probably had an impact on the law of same-sex behavior as well. The total number of reported appellate cases on sodomy and related matters increased. There were only six cases recorded