You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (29 page)

The transformation of the child was now complete. Children were sexless beings, and any sexual activity on their part was the blame of parents and society. Both their morality and their physical health depended on denying them any exposure to sexuality whatsoever. They were officially victims.

The rise of secular humanism and the separation of church and state forced moralists to develop a strategy. No longer could behavior be criminalized solely on questionable interpretations of the Bible. Now there had to be a demonstrable victim and a demonstrable harm. The first part was accomplished. Women and children were now the “victims” and there was “science” supporting their “harms.” The next stage was to use these ingredients to alter other peoples’ behavior.

In
Hellfire Nation
, James Morone describes the moral crusades that continually enlarge our government and whittle away at the liberties provided by our
country’s humanist founders.
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Moral crusades begin with an assertion that society is suffering because of its sins and that reform is urgently needed. Religious moralists first try to get miscreants to conform with threats of eternal damnation. With the rise of humanism this threat lost its power, and it now has to be accompanied by warnings of earthly dangers. When citizens still do not conform, moralists then launch a crusade, and turn to the politicians to demand criminal prohibitions that will save the “victims” and society.

Moral crusades have three common features:

(1) Absolutism
—Usually such crusades are based on a questionable interpretation of the Bible that does not allow for rational scrutiny. There is only right and wrong, good and evil. The goal is easy to understand and simple. Research and factual analysis are not welcome, and compromise is not an option.

(2) Alarmism
—Extremists make the claim of an impending Apocalypse, the second coming of Jesus in which the world will be destroyed and people will be judged to go to either heaven or hell. The less shrill merely assert that the current time is more sinful and troubled than any before it and is therefore ripe for collapse. They refer back to the idealized “good old days” that were supposedly free from sin. Fears are stoked by lies, gross exaggerations, and broadly-applied anecdotal evidence, for example, a condom once broke and therefore condoms are dangerous.

(3) The Other
—Perhaps most importantly, all crusades have an enemy, the other. The enemy is pure evil. This is usually a group that cannot defend itself through the democratic process due to its small numbers. It may be a racial/ethnic group or any group that has a shared interest, such as prostitutes or recreational drug users. The group is often one that is stigmatized, so that prevalent prejudices can be used to rally public support. These minorities often must be protected by the courts, which enforce the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

Although the Bill of Rights was written by the United States’ founders for this exact purpose—protection of minorities from the tyranny of the majority and a power-hungry government—judges who enforce these rights are labeled “activist judges.” Judges also have the unpopular role of ensuring due process for the accused.
During moral crusades, as during the Inquisition, the sound policies developed over centuries to prevent the innocent from being wrongly convicted suddenly become too “litigious” and problematic in the face of this great evil.

One of the first sexual moral crusades to sweep the nation was the war on prostitution. As the middle-class wife was transformed into a sexless angel, many men believed they were doing their wives a favor by taking their sex drive elsewhere.

This perception was supported by the many Victorian physicians who said that only prostitutes enjoyed and desired sex.
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The “asexual” wife, combined with the complete void of even the most basic sexual education, often made marital sex a dull affair. One Victorian man compared sex with his wife to having a bowel movement.
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Not surprisingly, prostitution boomed in the nineteenth century. There was an estimated one prostitute for every twelve males in major Western cities.
³⁸
(In modern America, there is estimated one prostitute for every two thousand males.
³⁹
) The infection of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) boomed as well, with one expert estimating that at one point sixty percent of American men had either syphilis or gonorrhea.
⁴⁰

Until the late nineteenth century, doctors did not even know what gonorrhea and syphilis were, and mistook them for stages of the same illness. These are not minor ailments. Although both exhibit unsavory genital sores and discharge in early stages, late stages of syphilis can be characterized by personality changes, a shuffling gait, a bobbing head, insanity, and death.

Despite its moralistic approach to other sexual matters, such as education and female sexuality, the medical profession did not see prostitution as a moral issue but as a public health issue.
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It recommended that prostitution be legalized and regulated. This model was already used by some European countries, and the United States Army used it with the prostitutes who followed troops during the Civil War. In Memphis, the Army had set up a system whereby prostitutes were medically inspected weekly and granted licenses. The fees women paid for these licenses were used to support a hospital ward where infected prostitutes were treated.
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Several cities debated regulation during the Victorian Era, but St. Louis was the
first to enact it in 1870. The forces of morality gathered quickly. Protestant clergy, former abolitionists, and women’s rights activists led a crusade consisting largely of middle-class women. The victims who desperately needed to be saved were the prostitutes themselves.

Prostitutes were portrayed as miserable people who, as young virtuous women, had been tricked, seduced, or forced into the sex trade by evil licentious men. Former abolitionists compared legalized prostitution to legalized slavery in the antebellum South, and women’s rights groups opposed legalized prostitution on the grounds that it would not control venereal disease. According to them, venereal disease could only be defeated by ending the practice of prostitution.

In an act of beautiful symbolism that combined the two asexual victims of lust, women and children, the anti-prostitution forces had a group of young virginal girls in white dresses present a hundred thousand signatures against legalized prostitution to the Missouri state legislators in 1874. The American experiment with regulated prostitution ended.

The anti-prostitution crusade would lay dormant for several decades. In the cities, nobody seriously thought prostitution could be vanquished, and no one tried to wipe it out completely.
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Christian morality and humanist liberty coexisted in what one historian has called the “Victorian Compromise.”
⁴⁴
During the 1800s there was an unspoken agreement that moral sins were criminal only if they were done openly where they could offend the general citizenry.

During a time when most young men were initiated into sex by prostitutes and Washington, DC had its “female lobbyists” who stayed in town only as long as Congress was in session, the Victorian Compromise was deeply hypocritical, but it worked. Prostitution was relegated to red-light districts in lower-class sections of cities where the morality of the middle classes would not be offended. Government and police officials were paid by the madams to look the other way, and as long as boundaries were observed, the prostitutes avoided prison and had the safety of brothels.

The victimhood of the prostitutes and the evil of their sex-driven male patrons were not powerful enough symbols to overthrow the Victorian Compromise. Because the prostitutes’ victimhood was doubtful, and the sex-driven men were actually normal husbands, more potent symbols were needed by the anti-prostitution crusade. These would be provided by a magazine article.

In 1909,
McClure’s
reported that white slavery had come to America. Jewish flesh traders were stealing innocent girls from the countryside and forcing them to work in locked brothels. The anonymous john from decades earlier was now a Jew. The victims were no longer stray women in the corrupt cities, but sheltered girls plucked from America’s rural heartland. The anti-prostitution crusade was set afire.

Hysteria fanned through the media. One best-seller had on its cover a mother protectively holding her daughter and staring at a wanted ad that read, “Sixty-thousand innocent girls WANTED to take the place of sixty thousand white slaves who will die this year.”
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White slavery films were popular as well, with titles such as
Traffic in Souls, House of Bondage
, and
Is Any Girl Safe
?

Chinese, Mongolian, Italian, and Irish immigrants were also supposed to be complicit in the trade. These “despicable foreigners” were destroying America’s virtue.
⁴⁶
Preachers who walked through cities reported hearing midnight shrieks of “My God, if only I could get out of here!”
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Within months of the
McClure’s
article, President Taft promised action. Representative James Mann of Illinois drafted legislation to give the federal government the power to stop the crisis that incompetent city governments couldn’t. The Mann Act granted the federal government the power to apprehend any criminal who transported a female across state lines for the purpose of “prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”
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The United States Constitution purposely did not give the federal government a police force or police power. However, the federal government was allowed to regulate interstate commerce, and just as it would do countless times in the future to criminalize almost anything it wanted, it took advantage of this clause to give federal agents jurisdiction in the Mann Act. Opponents of the bill believed that this would unleash a federal police force that would grow unchecked, but they were steamrolled by the hype.

The bill’s proponents assured critics that their only goal was to eradicate white slavery which, as one of them described, was “a thousand times worse and more degrading in its consequences on humanity than any species of human slavery that ever existed in this country.”
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The Mann Act became law in 1910.

The two-year-old federal police agency, the Bureau of Investigation, was put in charge of enforcing the Mann Act. At the time of the act’s passage, the Bureau had only thirty-five agents. Congress was suspicious of a federal police organization and had given it little funding, but with this weighty white slavery scourge hoisted upon it, the Bureau grew from a small Washington office to a national presence with offices in every state and large city.
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The Mann Act’s critics were prophetic. The federal police force would change its name to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover from 1924 to 1972, would grow into an extremely powerful organization that would involve itself in almost every aspect of American life,
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keep secret files with embarrassing information on prominent Americans to blackmail those who opposed it,
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and regularly use unconstitutional investigation and enforcement techniques.
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As will be shown, the Mann Act would not have been the Bureau’s meal ticket if it had focused on the white slave trade. However, church groups predictably began lobbying for a literal interpretation of the Mann Act’s text, which criminalized transporting women for any “immoral purpose.” Because of this, the Bureau became a federal investigator of adultery.
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This “crime” was rampant, and fighting it kept tax money flowing into the Bureau. From June 30, 1922 through June 30, 1937, the FBI investigated 50,500
alleged violations of the Mann Act. During the 1920s, the large majority of these would be for noncommercial violations.
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Statistics from specific federal districts showed that seventy-one percent of those convicted of noncommercial Mann Act violations received jail time.
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Typical complaints to the FBI of noncommercial violations were of the home-wrecking variety, made by crossed husbands, wives, and fathers, but they could come from anybody, as this 1927 complaint from West Palm Beach (which resulted in an investigation) demonstrates:

Prosecutions for noncommercial violations of the Mann Act began to peter out in the late 1920s, as juries began refusing to convict defendants. However, the act continued to be used to jail controversial people who would be less sympathetic to juries, including unpopular political figures and black men who openly cavorted with white women. The first black boxing heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, was the most famous example of such racial targeting when he was imprisoned in 1920 for sending his white girlfriend money for a train ticket. As late as 1960, the early black rock-and-roller Chuck Berry was imprisoned under the Mann Act in a highly questionable case.