Judicial Decisions
Commercialized vice is a national problem recognized as such by the Mann Act which makes it a violation “for any person knowingly to persuade, induce, coerce, or cause, or to aid or assist any woman or girl to go from one state to another for prostitution, debauchery or other immoral purposes, with or without her consent. The maximum penalty if the victim be over 18 is five years’ imprisonment and $5,000 fine; and twice that amount if she be under 18.”
The difficulty sometimes is to get judgment in the courts in cases of arrest under the Mann Act.
In Minnesota the women’s clubs made a state issue of a case in which a married man, deserting his family, took a girl from Wisconsin to Minnesota, and was sentenced by Judge McPherson to three months in the county jail and a fine of $1,000. The women’s clubs petitioned the judge of the United States Court of Appeals, who makes the assignments of the district judges, to assign Judge McPherson to another district, “lest another case of white slavery be placed upon the calendar subject to Judge McPherson’s judgment.” This petition was refused, on the ground that the degree of punishment is expressly intrusted to the trial judge. It was stated also that the United States district attorney who prosecuted the case was satisfied with the sentence. The man had pleaded guilty to taking a girl under eighteen across state borders for cohabitation. Judge McPherson defended his sentence on the ground that there was no evidence to show that the girl was coerced. The club women countered vigorously with a statement to the effect that coercion was not the point; that by the man’s own story, plus all human experience, the girl was surely entered on a life of prostitution; what they wanted was such punishment as would be the talk of every barroom and a specter to any man who contemplated doing it in the future.[[14]]
The federal judges and attorneys generally take into account the circumstances in the case and only in clear cases where white slavery is accomplished by force have the full penalties been imposed. The transportation of regular prostitutes was not punished, in one instance the judge saying that thus “our own daughters” are better protected. Women with a social conscience take the position that all women are their daughters and that no daughter is safe until the traffic is suppressed. Moreover they seek to protect their sons wherever they are and they call upon the national government to help them do it.
That women voters will not tolerate a wide-open indorsement of vice was proved in the case of the policy pursued by Mayor Gill of Seattle in 1910–1911. It is true that conditions were so flagrantly vile that the instincts of women were in open revolt, yet Mayor Gill, in his alliance with the interests that were profiting by the public traffic, seemed firmly entrenched.
Through the power of the recall, the women of Seattle led a movement against Mayor Gill and his vice policy which was successful; the mayor was removed from office; and a reform policy was instituted.
At the last election, however, contrary to the expectation and to the amazement of women in other parts of the country, Mayor Gill was reinstated as mayor. Criticism was rife and men joined with women in attributing the result to the fickleness of women and their superficiality. They were even accused of worse things.
In explanation of their conduct, the women of Seattle stated that Mayor Gill pleaded with them for a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of his neighbors and friends and in the eyes of the citizens of his city among whom his family had to live and where his son must suffer from the opprobrium in which his father would be held forevermore unless this chance was given. Mayor Gill testified that he had thought a wide-open town was what the people wanted and what would pay best. He found it was not what the people wanted, least of all the women who now were voters, and he would bow to their will for their sakes and for the sake of his family whose respect he must regain. The women claimed that there seemed more security with Mayor Gill under such pressure and in view of his knowledge of women’s actual power if he failed to make good this time; that a big point of view required them to give him a chance to redeem himself. They gave him the chance and Mayor Gill is carrying out the wishes of the women during his present administration.
The women of California undertook a similar campaign in San Francisco in April of 1913. When a police magistrate reduced the bail which another judge had fixed for a prisoner accused of attacking a young girl and the prisoner immediately fled when released on the reduced bail, the women went to work and soon secured the necessary signatures to a petition for the recall of the magistrate. In the recall election, the erring magistrate was defeated and an able young lawyer with a wider view of this grave social problem took his place.
Miriam Michelson, in the Sunset Magazine, tells the story:
Now this threatened recall of a police judge is undertaken, I should say, not because the women believe this particular judge to be unique in flagrant adherence to a police court system of leniency in sex-crimes; not because they think him the worst of his type that San Francisco has known; but because they consider him a type and because they consider the police court system one that must be changed. This recall presents something definite, something to do, which feminine hands have been aching for.
You may talk to women of the futility of figuring social sex sins, but they seem to be congenitally incapable of believing you. I heard a man talk to an audience in behalf of this measure, and when he touched upon that old, old text—it always has been; it always will be—there came a curious resemblance in every woman’s face within my vision; for every face had hardened, stiffened, was marked with the family likeness of rebellion. The lecturer was addressing himself to deaf ears, to eyes determined not to see.
And this is at once the weakness and the strength of the new element in elections. Those who have watched the ardor of the most eager and high-minded reformers burn out in commissions, in barren resolutions and recommendations, see in the average woman’s limitations that power, that one-idead incapacity to look philosophically on both sides of a question which marks Those Who Can Change Things. You may object that such qualities produce a Carrie Nation. They do, but they also make a Joan of Arc, a Harriet Beecher Stowe....
Her recently awakened realization of equality, the new broom that her conscience is, revolts at a policy that establishes a municipal clinic for women prostitutes, yet by a curious, cowardly subterfuge, overlooks the male’s share in infection; as though the plague created and disseminated in common could have but one source! And in addition to all this, she is learning that when she is ready at last to attack the vested, organized, recognized institution of prostitution, the first result of her activities will mean greater misery and perhaps speedier death for the woman who is already at the lowest point of the social scale....
But over against this set this fact: There are seven hundred women in San Francisco whose one aim in civic life is to found a state training school for girls gone wrong who would go right. This association has a representative in Sacramento whose sole business it is to further a bill for the establishment of a helping station to girls on the way to usefulness and moral health, modeled upon similar establishments in other states. Here is work, backed by thirty thousand club women of the state, proceeding definitely, practically to a solution of one of the most appalling obstacles to the crusade against vice.... But the time has not yet come when woman will face her individual share of atonement for a social sin in which she has acquiesced. Ultimately, with universal suffrage, the wheel of time must place at the door of the protected woman responsibility for the prostitute. As yet she cannot see herself, in her own home, taking up the broken lives, diseased bodies, debased minds and deadened souls—the by-product of that which men tell her has always been and always must be.