Trickle Down Episode 3: White Slavery (Part 1) Sample
In the early 20th Century narratives about “white slavery” led to creation of the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, which was wielded by the U.S. federal government to police sexuality. These narratives also helped fuel the growth of the FBI in its early days. But before these narratives arrived in the United States, they first grew in Victorian England. To help expose the horrible truth of the underground sex trade, Evangelical feminist activists fighting for better treatment of prostitutes and the protection of children found common cause with an unscrupulous London journalist named William Stead. But Stead was more interested in selling newspapers than the truth. The result was a horrifying scandal that involved Stead kidnapping a 13 year girl and a deformed narrative about sex trafficking that rippled through history long after his death.
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Written by Travis View. Theme by Nick Sena (https://nicksenamusic.com). Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Nick Sena. Editing by Corey Klotz.
REFERENCES:
Bartley, Paula (1998) Preventing prostitution: the ladies' association for the care and protection of young girls in Birmingham, 1887-1914, Women's History Review
Donovan, Brian (2005) White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-vice Activism, 1887–1917.
Langum, David (1994) Crossing over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act
Robinson, W. Sidney (2012) Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W. T. Stead
Schucha, Bonnie (2016) White Slavery in the Northwoods: Early U.S. Anti-Sex Trafficking and Its Continuing Relevance to Trafficking Reform, William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law
Schults, Raymond (1972) Crusader in Babylon: WT Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette
Walkowitz, Judith (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London
In 1934, Maurice Shannon did not have much, but he did have a car.
A sedan made by the car company, Grampage.
There wasn't anything for him in his home of Erie, Pennsylvania, so on November 14th, he and his girlfriend, Eleanor Becker, left town to seek a better life and warmer weather in the South.
The long road trip required the pair to stop several times to camp outdoors and seek work to pay for gas.
This was made more challenging by the fact that the country was gripped by the Great Depression.
Against many odds, they finally arrived in Mobile, Alabama.
The couple spent the week of Christmas camped outside of the city, huddling together in the rain and dreaming of the next stage of their lives.
But two days after Christmas, their plans were interrupted when they were arrested by a deputy sheriff and turned over to an agent of the U.S.
Department of Justice.
The Feds accused them of a criminal conspiracy.
Specifically, the charging documents claim that the unmarried couple traveled across state lines with the intention that Eleanor Becker would engage in the practice of submitting her body to carnal illicit intercourse with the said defendant, Maurice Lorenzo Shannon.
The couple couldn't afford justice, so after they were indicted by a grand jury, they pled guilty with the hope that the federal judge would show mercy.
Instead, Maurice Shannon was sentenced to six months in the New Orleans Federal Jail and Eleanor received six months probation.
They were guilty of felonies and consequently many jobs would be closed to them and they would be unable to vote.
Eleanor and Maurice were just two of many victims of the enforcement of the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910, which is also known as the Mann Act, named after the Illinois Congressman James Mann.
The law was intended to prevent human trafficking, but in reality, it was born out of an international social reform movement to protect women and children, which mutated into a moral panic.
In practice, the White Slave Traffic Act was wielded by the federal government to police the boundaries of acceptable sexuality.
Attorneys prosecuted premarital, extramarital, and interracial relationships.
The law birthed a blackmail industry, and it victimized far more women than the trafficking it intended to fight.
I'm Travis View, and this is Trickle Down, a podcast about what happens when bad ideas flow from the top.
With me is Julian Field and Jake Walkitansky.
Episode 3, White Slavery, Part 1.
One of the driving narratives we've seen in QAnon is this sensational,
exaggerated conception of human trafficking.
So human trafficking, sexual exploitation, of course, real problems.
They should be exposed and eradicated.
It's a very noble fight.
But in the mind of conspiracists, human trafficking becomes this pervasive epidemic in which children are snatched off the street every day so that they can be sold into sexual slavery.
You sometimes hear QAnon followers claim that hundreds of thousands of American children are funneled into international sex trafficking every year.
It's like the Liam Neeson's taken conception of the issue, which is wholly absurd on a bunch of levels, especially the idea that like, you know, over a million parents are just silent about their children being kidnapped.
The fact that trafficking is a real issue that is frequently sensationalized and exaggerated makes it very frustrating to engage with if, you know, if you fancy yourself an informed and responsible citizen.
Because if we as a society, we over exaggerate the frequency and severity of the problem, that hurts victims because we're engaging with this cartoonish conception of the problem instead of reality.
You know, freaking out about, like, mole children trapped under Central Park or children being sold through the Wayfair website, it doesn't help anyone.
And this is why virtually every major anti-trafficking organization made a statement against QAnon conspiracy theories.
But at the same time, if you underplay the frequency and severity of trafficking, then that also hurts victims because we're not taking seriously the threats and dangers that real people face.
But since sexual abuse and trafficking are by their nature secret and underground activities, it seems like it's impossible to have this perfectly accurate conception of the reality of the problem.
I was really interested in this issue, so I started researching the roots of modern narratives about human trafficking.
And what I discovered is that all of these issues about trying to contend with the reality of trafficking and the inclination to believe sensationalized ideas of the problem, they actually have a really long history.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, there was what was called the White Slavery Panic, which was based on the belief that young white women were very frequently coerced or threatened into a life of prostitution and that there was an international cartel enslaving these innocents.
Like today, there were, like, real issues with sexual exploitation, but it was always exaggerated until it bore little resemblance to reality.
And this wasn't like a belief held by a minority of conspiracy kooks.
It was a mainstream view of social reformers and high-profile journalists and even federal prosecutors.
The frustrating thing about the White Slavery Act and how it came to be abused is that it was born out of an attempt to address societal problems that were very much worth addressing.
In the 19th century United States and England, women and children, because of their powerlessness, were being abused by unscrupulous men.
And social reformers were very righteous in their quest to solve this problem by, for example, raising the age of consent and providing more resources and protections to sex workers.
And if social reformers focused solely on the reality of the problem and providing women the means for greater safety, freedom, and autonomy, it would have been an unqualified victory for activism.
Instead, the problem was seized upon by journalists who cared more about sensational stories that sold newspapers than strictly factual reporting.
The White Slavery Panic was also exploited by politicians and bureaucrats to massively expand their power.
In fact, there is a direct connection between the White Slavery Panic and the creation of the FBI, as we know it today.
But I'm going to have to get into that in the next episode, because before we talk about that, before we even talk about the law that resulted in Maurice Shannon sitting in a prison cell for driving his girlfriend to another state, we're going to need to travel back in time about 50 years before that arrest to England.
And just a heads up, I'm going to have to talk about sexual abuse and child abuse in this episode and that it will also involve talking about a famous 19th century case in which a 13 year old girl is kidnapped.
And if that's not something you want to hear about, yeah, I get it.
The roots of the white slavery panic can be found in England's social purity movement of the late 1800s.
Social purity was a kind of euphemism for sexual purity.
This was a social reform campaign aimed at eliminating prostitution.
At the time, a common way of dealing with prostitutes was simply jailing them.
The British government detained prostitutes under the Contagious Diseases Act, and the Church of England even had their own penitentiaries in which they incarcerated prostitutes.
These were like semi-prisons in which women were compelled to stay for at least two years, and they had their hair cropped, they wore a special regulatory uniform.
For the crime of trying to find a way to make a living under bad circumstances, for these women, freedom was really curtailed, the letters that they sent and received were inspected, and visits by friends and family were limited.
However, an evangelical feminist named Ellis Hopkins had a different perspective.
Namely, that the prostitutes were not criminals, but victims in need of assistance and rescue.
Hopkins visited the penitentiaries for prostitutes and found them to be totally unhelpful.
She wrote this.
How is it, I ask, that home after home I go into is so utterly wanting?
Unless I had seen it for myself, I could not have believed that dreariness and ugliness was such a fine art as we have made it for the benefit of these poor girls.
The dingy walls, often of some rhubarb and magnesia hue, the torn book, generally unpinned at one corner and flapping forlornly in the draft, The spiritual posters in the shape of hideous black and white texts hung up.
No bright pictures or pretty illuminated texts.
These poor girls.
Shut up with their low memories, low thoughts, low objects, low aims.
They want every help.
Hopkins also spoke out against the common cultural belief that prostitutes were unworthy of anything good because they were sexually impure.
As things are now, men divide us women into two classes.
Us pure women, for whom nothing is too good, and those others, for whom nothing is too bad.
But let us prove by our actions that our womanhood is one, that a sin against our lost sisters is a sin against us.
Hopkins argued, perhaps naively, that this sort of sex trade could be eliminated if women were provided with more support and better options.
In 1876, she founded an organization called the Ladies' Associations for the Care of Friendless Girls.
Wow, that's a very bizarre name.
Yeah, it is, it is.
Yeah.
Yeah, Friendless Girls sounds like a cool band.
I mean, clearly we're exiting a very bad conception of sex work, but we are also entering into another bad one.
Yeah, it's true, it's true.
Yeah, I mean, the name Friendless Girls carries it with this idea like, well, you know, we can prevent all of this because these women, they just have no support system whatsoever.
And therefore, if we provide a small amount of support, we could eliminate prostitution, which of course was a naive idea.
Hopkins tackled what she believes were the underlying causes of prostitution.
Poor parenting, unemployment, homelessness, and immorality.
She was an evangelical crusader, remember.
Ladies' associations were set up in towns and cities across Britain.
By 1879, they were established in about a dozen cities.
These chapters set up night shelters to house homeless young women, free registry offices to help women seek work, and training homes for domestic servants.
They also helped single mothers who otherwise were horribly stigmatized by Victorian society.
They helped them find respectable work.
They also pressured fathers to pay their fair share for child support.
Now, there's obviously nothing wrong with organizing to provide resources to vulnerable people, but the legacy of Alice Hopkins as a feminist and social reformer is complicated, according to the scholarship that I read.
Hopkins believed that young girls who were brought up in immoral surroundings were likely to become sexually abused.
In 1880, after years of campaigning, she pressured the government to pass an amendment to the Industrial Schools Act, making it a criminal offense for children under the age of 16 to live with parents who worked in brothels.
It gave the police powers to remove these children and place them in industrial schools.
Where surely they will live great lives with no abuse.
This act also enabled relatives and friends to obtain a search warrant and enter any house suspected of being a brothel.
If children were found, they were removed, the owner of the house punished, and the mother and father deprived of parental rights.
It was called the Ellis Hopkins Act.
And like, yes, as you can imagine, this law was abused and sadly, It's a pattern that we see repeatedly throughout history, like laws addressing sex crimes can certainly have positive effects on protecting vulnerable people, but they're also very frequently abused and only to hurt vulnerable people.
Hey there, you've been listening to a sample clip of Trickle Down.
This is a side project that I've been working on.
It's a 10 episode series about misinformation and bad ideas that flow from high authority sources.
I think it's fascinating and I mean it's a way for I guess me to explore the way people who Should know what they're talking about, don't always actually.
Not gonna lie, some of it's kind of a bummer, but if you're anything like me, that's actually more of a reason to dive into the subject matter.
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