Trickle Down Episode 4: White Slavery (Part 2) Sample
Americans added their own twist to white slavery narratives around the turn of the century. They placed a greater emphasis on the threat of immigration. The new flow of immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe made middle class Americans anxious about the changing ethnic character of the country. This growing fear was seized upon by President Teddy Roosevelt’s Immigration Bureau inspector: Marcus Braun. Braun, himself an immigrant from Hungary, traveled the country investigating white slavery. His shocking report was echoed by a congressional investigation. This provided all the pretext necessary for the creation White Slave Traffic Act in 1910. “White slavery” became much more than a narrative. It was law with which the federal government could enforce its version of sexual morality.
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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
Allerfeldt, KM (2019) Marcus Braun and “White Slavery”: Shifting Perceptions of People Smuggling and Human Trafficking in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Journal of Global Slavery
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
Pliley, Jessica (2014) Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI
Letter from Marcus Braun to Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt Papers. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record?libID=o37642. Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. Dickinson State University.
On July 10, 1910, the New York Times published a tiny report about a recent arrest in Chicago.
It was headlined, First Arrest Under White Slave Act.
In just 59 words, it told the story of the first law enforcement action under the authority of a new federal law passed just a few weeks earlier.
This law was designed to prosecute evil men who attempted to kidnap helpless women and force them into a life of prostitution.
But curiously, the events described in the report did not involve the arrest of a man, nor did it involve anyone being forced into prostitution.
The report said, quote, The first arrest under the Man-White-Slave Act, approved by President Taft on June 23rd, was made yesterday.
Miss M. Jenkins, a resort keeper of Houghton, Michigan, was arrested by Deputy United States Marshals at the Union Station here just after she had bought tickets and boarded a train with five girls.
This arrest, carried out by multiple federal agents of a female brothel keeper traveling with five experienced sex workers, was very far away from the white slavery narratives that had frightened Americans for decades.
But by this point, it was too late.
The fear generated by white slavery narratives birthed a sweeping law which helped empower a new federal detective agency, which the government could now use to punish anyone who traveled across state lines with a woman for any immoral purpose.
The best part for the federal officers who wielded this new law was that an immoral purpose was any purpose that the government decided was immoral.
I'm Travis Few, and this is Trickle Down, a podcast about what happens when bad ideas flow from the top.
With me are Julian Field and Jake Rokitansky.
Episode 4, White Slavery, Part 2.
In the last episode, I talked about the birth of a white slavery narrative, and white slavery was a
name given to stories of young white women or underage girls who were being forced into the
sex trade.
These narratives started in 19th century England as part of the social reform movement to eliminate prostitution, but they were picked up by the scum-packed journalist William Stee to tell these exaggerated, manufactured stories of children being kidnapped in this landmark investigation called the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.
Then they traveled to the United States where newspapers and social reformers told stories of women being forced to work in brothels in the logging towns of Michigan and Wisconsin.
And in this episode, which I'm going to make part two of three parts, I'm going to talk about how the white slavery narrative mutated and started to be enforced in the United States.
Because white slavery narratives initially in the 19th century centered on a desire to protect children and vulnerable women.
But these narratives transformed into a way to crack down on willing, experienced sex workers.
And the force of law usually hurt them more than being involved in the sex trade ever did.
And these narratives expanded yet again to being about consensual sexual activity that the federal government didn't approve of.
Of course, preventing young, unmarried adults from being in sexual relationships is light years away from preventing children from being preyed upon by abusive men.
I think it's worth breaking down the differences between the American and British white slavery narratives.
And one key distinction is the role of immigration.
In the British narratives, there was this big emphasis on the threat of girls being snatched up and then taken to brothels in foreign countries.
Remember, William Steed, as part of his investigation, basically kidnapped a 13-year-old girl and had her shipped to France with the assistance of the Salvation Army.
The American narratives, they weren't so much fixated on foreign brothels.
Rather, they were worried about the danger of girls being trafficked to American brothels run by foreign immigrants.
And so it was an inversion of the British narrative.
This element of the American white slavery narrative started at the very beginning with the investigation of the Logging Town brothels by the social reformer Catherine Bushnell in 1888.
Essentially, Bushnell's narrative asserted that immigrants were unfamiliar with American values.
In Bushnell's report on the conditions of the Wisconsin brothels, she wrote this.
The men who run these dens are all either foreigners or of foreign extraction.
However, Bushnell described the sex workers of these brothels like this.
Largely, young American girls who, if in times previous, guilty of immorality, are of a higher grade of civilization.
Mmm, higher grade of civilization.
Higher grade.
Sure.
Don't know if I like that.
The publication The Philanthropist, which was run by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, went even further by directly blaming foreigners for the depraved activities of the Wisconsin brothels.
These foreign brothel keepers come to our shores to do here, without law and in defiance of law, what they have been accustomed to do with its sanction, under the regulation system at home.
Yes, they didn't like the idea that those dirty Europeans had a more regulated system of prostitution than the United States did.
In white slave stories in the United States, the slavers were often described as having swarthy features.
Take, for example, the description of this villain in the 1911 book The Great War on White Slavery by the Chicago prosecutor Clifford Rowe.
Clarence stood motionless.
His brows were knitted together and the disappearing lines in his low forehead and dark face showed that his anger was subsiding.
They always had dark faces in these stories.
The unibrow men are coming to our country to take our women.
Some anti-white slavery activists were even more explicit.
Take, for example, the anti-white slavery activist Erdos Bell, who said this.
Shall we defend our American civilization from the threat posed by white slavery, or lower our glorious flag to the most despicable foreigners, French, Irish, Italians, Jews, and Mongolians?
Oh boy.
Yeah.
I mean, this was actually kind of an interesting discovery to me personally, because I knew that around the turn of the century, the Irish, Italians, and the Jews weren't considered fully white, but I didn't know that racism of some Americans extended even to the French.
This is, you know, impressive.
Because white slavery narratives were so closely tied to immigration in the U.S., they really didn't get a lot of traction in the late 19th century outside of the social purity movement.
Like I talked about in the last episode, the Women's Christian Temperance Union pushed really hard to change laws in Wisconsin regarding prostitution and human trafficking.
But policymakers generally didn't give a shit.
That changed in the early 20th century, and it slowly became a more galvanizing public issue.
And this change happened because there was growing anxiety about immigration.
Between 1900 and 1914, 13 million immigrants entered the United States.
But this was a new breed of immigrant.
Previous waves of immigration came from Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, and Ireland.
Middle-class Americans were mostly fine with that.
There were some mixed opinions on the Irish, but other than that, they were kind of okay with that.
However, this new wave of immigration included a lot of Roman Catholics and, frankly, Jews from countries like Italy, Poland, and Russia.
This made white Americans fearful that their country was losing their ethnic identity.
They also viewed the new immigrants as lovers of alcohol and sexually immoral.
In 1909, the American solicitor Francis E. Hamilton made these comments about the flow of immigrants.
Interestingly, they could appear today on Tucker Carlson's show with a few tweaks.
We no longer draw from Northern Europe.
Today, this enormous influx hails from Russia, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and the southern countries about the eastern end of the Mediterranean.
Men of alien races, mixed in blood and of many tongues, and often the last resultants of effete and decaying civilizations.
We no longer receive accessions from the best peoples beyond our border, but from the mediocre and the worst.
Year by year the tone has changed.
Little by little the morale has fallen, until notwithstanding somewhat more stringent laws and most watchful enforcement thereof, we are steadily adding to the percentage of pauper and criminal aliens in our country, in spite of every effort.
It's just amazing to me how little this messaging has changed in a hundred years.
Oh yeah, this is exactly the same as, they're not sending their best, oh no no, not sending their, not their best!
Imagine how the Native Americans felt when the Americans arrived, they're like, what the fuck is this?
Who are these guys?
Yeah, and the quote earlier where it was basically like, oh we are like losing our ethnic identity, it's like ethnic identity of what?
Of sailing from a different place and stealing the land from the people who lived here?
I mean, I feel like, yeah, if you're excluding the French, I feel like you are white if you were German, English, Dutch, Scandinavian, and then that's it.
Yeah.
We want some nice Aryan boys.
We got some unibrows coming in.
And so as a consequence, the Feds didn't really get involved in the white slavery issue until it was framed as an immigration issue.
This was reflected in the immigration laws passed in the early 20th century, which specifically excluded immigrants involved in the sex trade.
In the Immigration Act of 1903, it excluded immigrants that were procurers of prostitutes.
And in the Immigration Act of 1907, it excluded persons who admitted the commission of a crime involving moral turpitude and women coming to the United States for immoral purposes.
If an immigrant was found to have been involved in prostitution within three years of their arrival, they could be deported.
The Immigration Bureau wanted to get a better handle on the state of white slavery, and so they commissioned a bureau officer named Marcus Braun to investigate.
And Marcus Braun will play the role of the main villain of this chapter of our story on white slavery.
Because Braun is a man who first mobilized the federal government to crack down on immigration via the pretext of fighting this white slave threat.
He also whipped up the panic inside the government that eventually led to the horribly oppressive White Slavery Act of 1910.
And like William Steed, who helped kick off the white slavery panic in England, Marcus Braun worked as a journalist.
And this is my favorite guy to learn about and discover because he is someone who is highly influential in history, who actually made a pretty big impact, but seems to be totally forgotten otherwise.
Now, Marcus Brown himself was an immigrant, and he's perhaps one of the more egregious examples of a man who comes to America, achieves the American dream, and then worked hard to pull the ladder from behind him so that it would be harder for other immigrants to achieve the kind of success that he did.
Braun was a Hungarian Jew who arrived in New York in 1892.
Before he left Europe, he was a private soldier in the 1st Hungarian Infantry.
On leaving the army, he spent some time traveling around Germany, France, and Holland.
Records at Ellis Island show that he was 28 years old when he arrived in New York aboard the ship the SS Mastam.
When he arrived in the U.S., he immediately found work in a dry goods store and then got a job as a reporter for a publication called the German Herald.
Brown found success as a newspaper man.
He worked for the New York Journal and the New York Herald.
And even before he became a naturalized American, he showed a knack for being featured in newspaper reports, even when he wasn't writing them.
While covering the Chicago World Exposition of 1893, he publicly bet a fellow Hungarian he would eat his lunch while locked in with some circus lions.
According to the article about that incident, he was about to carry out the act, but then he was stopped because of a telegram sent by Carl Hagenbeck, who owned the lions.
The money was posted and the intrepid newspaper man appeared in the arena, ready to carry out his contract, when a telegram from Mr. Hagenbeck was at Niagara Falls, en route to Hamburg, checked the foolhardy exhibition.
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.
I'm not going to 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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