Morals, Mobility, and the Law

For once, the usual back-of-the-jacket encomium for a book does not lie. Lawrence M. Friedman describes Crossing Over the Line as “fresh, lucid, at times witty, at times intense and passionate,” and “tremendously fun to read.” Despite a personal dislike of the word “fun” used as an adjective, I dissent in no way from that verdict. However, on another purely mechanical matter, I think the august University of Chicago Press needs to check the credentials of anyone who accepted a sentence beginning: “The appellate court noted with rye [sic] amusement” (p. 218). The omission of a bibliography that prevents a quick overview of the sources is also surprising in a work issued by a scholarly press.

Setting that aside, Crossing Over the Line is admirable on many counts. Most of the story unfolds in the courts where the Mann Act—prohibiting the interstate transportation of women for an “immoral purpose”—was enforced, and Langum is very good at explaining prosecutorial and judicial strategies without lapsing into legalese or losing sight of the piquant details of cases. He generally keeps to a firm timeline and drives his tale with the energy and focus of an author who wants to convince. Langum does not confuse objectivity with neutrality. He dislikes the Mann Act. It is to him “a splendid example of the failure of American democracy . . . so far as the politicalization of morality is concerned; like other laws of its kind it allows ‘the exercise of a tyranny of the majority’” (pp. 258–59). Although many of the thousands of people convicted under the act were no angels, it was a badly drafted law. Enacted to deal with a real but overhyped public evil—coerced prostitution—it quickly underwent a moralistic interpretation that ignored the realities of human sexual behavior and became a tool of aggressive prosecutors and even blackmailers. Eventually outmoded by changing popular attitudes, it remained unamended largely through political inertia and cowardice.

The facts are hardly disputable. In the early years of the twentieth century, prostitution was an established feature of big-city life and a subject of intense concern among the progressive-minded. Whether the “fallen women” who sold their bodies were seen as wicked or pitied as forced recruits to “vice” by reason of poverty, there was agreement that the business itself was a threat to public decency and (via venereal diseases) to public health. For puritans, social reformers, and hygienists alike prostitution was a behavioral problem that “could be controlled and changed through legislation” (p. 6).

Superimposed on relatively rational discussion of these issues was a 1907 to 1914 wave of hysteria about “white slavery,” the alleged practice of actually kidnapping young women and forcing them into brothels. Sensationalized reports and lurid works of fiction, including movies (then a novelty), told tales of country lasses and immigrant maidens enticed off city streets, “pricked by poisoned darts or hypodermic needles and then dragged off to dens of iniquity” (p. 27). No girl, it appeared, was safe alone. The kingpins of the business were alleged to be foreigners, part of a “far-flung, evil syndicate.” Reviewing recent studies, Langum finds more fancy than fact in the “white slave” literature, but notes its connection to swelling uneasiness about the bad effects of big cities, immigration, and female independence on supposedly traditional American virtues. He wisely refrains from belaboring the obvious then-and-now similarities between that war on vice and the current one against drugs. The parallels speak for themselves.

The key point is that the Mann Act itself was intended as a specific response to forced sex-for-hire. It is actually titled “The White Slave Traffic Act” and in part implemented United States adherence to a 1904 international treaty on the subject. Introduced in June 1909 by Illinois congressman James R. Mann, chair of the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, it sailed through both houses of Congress with very little opposition, and...