Trickle Down Episode 5: White Slavery (Part 3) Sample
After the White Slave Traffic Act passed in 1910, the federal government was ready to start enforcing it with help from the young Bureau of Investigation. The problem is that the gangs of white slavers who snatched innocent girls off the street proved to be more difficult to find than they thought. Instead, the law was used to enforce a moral crusade, punishing citizens who engaged in sexual activity that prosecutors deemed immoral. It was also used by J. Edgar Hoover to target Charlie Chaplin at the beginning of the second red scare.
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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:
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
Sbardellati, John and Shaw, Tony (2003) Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI, and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America, The Pacific Historical Review
Charlie Chaplin’s FBI File
https://vault.fbi.gov/charlie-chaplin
In 1913, during the waning years of the white slave panic, Lew Fields Theater in New York City debuted a spectacular
new movie.
It was called Traffic in Souls and told the story of two young Swedish immigrant women who are ensnared by the manipulations of white slavers who conspire to trap them into a life of prostitution.
The silent film was six reels long as opposed to the typical length of four reels.
It featured groundbreaking cinematography from Henry Elder Leach.
There are multiple stylized shots of New York City locations.
In one scene, a camera pans from a man standing on the shore to two immigrants leaving a ferry in a single carefully choreographed shot.
Near the end of the film, there's a long panning shot of people behind bars in the prison to show that the villains are safely captured.
The film was a hit, earning $450,000 on its estimated $25,000 budget and helped make Universal Pictures into a major player among film studios.
In 2006, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
The subject matter of Traffic in Souls is very much of its time.
Most historians say that the end of the White Slave Panic was in 1914 or 1915.
While fewer people were worried about gangs of white slavers snatching innocent girls off the street, that didn't change the fact that the White Slave Traffic Act was passed in 1910.
And the very young Bureau of Investigation was eager to prove its worth by enforcing this new law.
So while the panic might have died down, the most significant consequences of the white slave narratives were just beginning.
I'm Travis View, 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 5, White Slavery, Part 3.
When we left off the last episode, Stanley Finch, the first director of the Bureau of Investigation,
appointed himself as a special commissioner for the suppression of the white slave traffic out
of a field office in Baltimore.
So now it fell on Finch to investigate violations of this new law.
His initial idea was to employ local part-time officers in cities where the Mann Act might be violated.
These local officers were usually lawyers who already had full-time employment.
Cities were selected by sending letters to city postmasters and chiefs of police and asking if there was a local house of prostitution.
In 1912, brothels were often still operating openly, with the knowledge of the local police force.
When a city was selected, a bureau agent visited the city and attempted to find an attorney willing to act as a local white slave agent.
After a white slave agent was selected, the two then went to the local chief of police to ask for the assistance of a police officer.
So now they had a three-man team, and once this was assembled, they visited every local brothel.
The madam of each brothel was instructed that they had to cooperate with the federal agents or else the local police would shut them down.
The agents then posted notices for the prostitutes to read, which contained information about the Mann Act and other federal laws pertaining to obstruction of justice and kidnapping.
Additionally, they counted and documented the sex workers in residence.
The bureau agent collected information about each prostitute, including age, her parents' country of origin, and each previous brothel where she worked.
For each new prostitute who arrived at the brothel, the madam was asked to fill out a form and then send it to the local white slave agent.
Imagine if this were done not to lash out and, you know, hurt these people, but to make sure that they're safe.
Man, no, let's catalog them, but just for purely nefarious purposes.
I'm sure also the agents who have access to a catalog of prostitutes with all their, like, identifying information weren't at all going to use that to, you know, solicit sex and threaten them.
Or blackmail or whatever.
Mm-hmm.
So the idea was that this local white slave agent would become familiar with the local prostitutes and therefore would be able to recognize when new sex workers arrived.
The white slave agents were paid 50 cents for every report of a prostitute arriving from another state.
If a more complex investigation was required, they could be paid $2.50 per day.
But if a white slaver was convicted due to their efforts, they were paid $10 with a limitation of 50 bucks a month.
Wow, so not at all an incentive structure that basically just gets you to write as many prostitute tickets as you can and leave them on the brothel tours.
By December of 1912, 200 cities had local white slave officers.
By February of 1913, there were 220 local white slave officers in 18 eastern states.
Now, Finch had just started expanding his system to some western states such as Arkansas and Mississippi, but he wanted to implement his system from coast to coast, and that meant more than doubling the amount of white slave officers employed by the government.
In 1914, the Attorney General asked Congress for $400,000 for the detection and prosecution of crimes.
$100,000 of that was intended to go towards white slavery, but there was also an understanding that if any more of that total budget could be spared, then it could be used for this white slave work.
Which is, I don't know, a little wild to me that like in the early days of the FBI, more than a quarter of his budget was dedicated entirely towards fighting white slavery.
So this amount was a big increase over the previous year, and during the Civil Appropriations Committee hearing in the House of Representatives, the Appropriations Committee chair grilled Stanley Finch on the ask for more money.
Finch assured the chairman that his system of part-time officers was cost-efficient and in fact necessary to help the Bureau expand its reach across the entire country.
Finch said this, Mr. Chairman, the white slave work is not a work the expense of which is going to continually increase.
As a matter of fact, when we started this work, it was my opinion that it would take about eight or ten hundred of these local officers to cover the country.
But now that we have extended the work over about one-half of the country, it appears that we will probably need only about 460 local officers in all.
As was stated yesterday, the cost of maintaining such officers is only a small fraction, about one-tenth of the cost of maintaining special agents.
We have extended our special system of work throughout practically all of the eastern states, but we have not yet been able to extend this system to the states west of the Mississippi.
We want to do that at once, because the white slave traffic in its very worst form is going on west of the Mississippi, and the number of real white slave cases is greater in proportion to the population in the west than the east.
As a matter of fact, there is an enormous trade in women going on through New Orleans, Seattle, and San Francisco, and over the Mexican and British borders, and I believe it is absolutely impossible to suppress that traffic by any casual investigation of individual complaints.
So, just because we're not getting white slave complaints, that doesn't mean it's a huge problem.
We need to expand our power and our reach as much as possible.
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 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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