Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

“But where shall I have the police drive them? Over to Detroit or to Cleveland, or merely out into the country? They have to go somewhere, you know.”

It was a detail that had escaped them, and presently, with his great patience, and his great sincerity, he said to them:

“I’ll make you a proposition. You go and select two of the worst of these women you can find, and I’ll agree to take them into my home and provide for them until they can find some other home and some other way of making a living. And then you, each one of you, take one girl into your home, under the same conditions, and together we’ll try to find homes for the rest.”

They looked at him, then looked at each other, and seeing how utterly hopeless this strange man was, they went away.

XLVIII

To be sure, that was in another day. Prostitution had not become a subject for polite conversation at the dinner table; pornographic vice commissions had not been organized and provided with appropriations so that their hearings might be stenographically reported and published along with the filthy details gathered in the stews and slums of cities by trained smut hunters; it had not yet been discovered that the marriage ceremony required a new introduction, based upon the scientific investigations of the clinical laboratory, and on the same brilliant thought that centuries ago struck the wise men of Bohemia, who, when the population increased too rapidly, prohibited marriages for a number of years that proved, of course, to be the most prolific the land had ever known.

The new conception was created in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, by the necromancy of a striking phrase. I do not know who it is that had the felicity to employ it first in its present relation. I remember that long years ago, when as a boy I used to frequent the gallery of the theater, I sat rapt afar in the mystery and romance of life on the Mississippi while gazing on the scenes of Bartley Campbell’s melodrama “The White Slave.” I can call back now, with only a little effort of the imagination and the will, that wonderful pageant—the Natchez, the Robert E. Lee, the great steamboats I knew so well from Mark Twain’s book, the plantation hands, the darkies singing on the levee, the moonlight and the jasmine flower—and there was no David Belasco in those days to set the scene either, nor, for the imagination of youth, any need of one! And then the beautiful octoroon, so lily white and fragile that it should have been patent to all, save perhaps an immoral slave-holder, from the very first scene, that she had no drop of negro blood! And the handsome and cruel owner and master, with his slouch hat and top boots, and fierce mustache and imperial, taking her to her awful fate down the river! It was an old story Bartley Campbell used for his plot, a story which had for me an added interest, because my grandfather had told it to me out of his own southern experiences, in those far-off days when he had business that took him down the river to New Orleans. And it was a story which, for a while, in many variants of its original form, was told all over the land to illustrate the immorality of slavery. I suspect that it was not altogether true in its dramatic details; surely no such number of lovely and innocent creatures were permitted to fling themselves into the Mississippi from the hurricane decks of steamboats as the repetitions and variations of that tale would indicate; it would have been altogether too harrowing to the voyagers, some few of whom at least must have been virtuous, and journeyed up and down on peaceful moral missions of one sort and another. No doubt it was symbolic of a very wrong condition, and I suppose that is what justified it in the minds of those who told it over and over without the trouble of verifying its essential details. It was a good story, and in the hands of Mr. Howells it made a good poem, and it made surely a pretty good play, which, could it enthrall me now as once it did by its enchantments, I should like to see again to-night!

But I doubt if I could sit through any one of the plays that have been written or assuredly are to be written about the white slaves of to-day. The plot has been right at hand in the tale that has gone the rounds of two continents, and resembles that elder story so closely in its incidents of abduction that I presume the adapter of its striking title to the exigencies of current reform must have been old enough to recognize its essential similarity to the parent tradition. It was told in books, it served to ornament sermons and addresses on sociological subjects, and it has, I believe, already been done in novels that are among the best sellers. The newspapers printed it with all its horrific details; it was so precisely the sort of pornography to satisfy the American sense of news—a tale of salacity for the prurient, palliated and rendered aseptic by efforts of officials, heated to the due degree of moral indignation, to bring the concupiscent to justice. I had been in England, too, when the subject was under discussion there, and this same story was told to such effect that Parliament, as hysterical as one of our own state legislatures, had been led to restore the brutality of flogging. It was always the same: some poor girl had been abducted, borne off to a brothel, ruined by men employed for that purpose, turned over to aged satyrs, and never heard of more. Of course there were variations; sometimes the girl was lured away in a motor car, sometimes by a request for assistance to some lady who had fainted, sometimes by other ruses. The story was always told vehemently, but on the authority of some inaccessible third person, to doubt or question whom was to be suspected of sympathy with the outrage. But however high the station, or unimpeachable the character of the informants, anyone who had the slightest knowledge of the rules of evidence, unless he were especially credulous, would have reason to doubt the tales. In Toledo it had its vogue. It went the rounds of gentlemen’s clubs and the tea tables of the town, and in the curious way stories have, it went on and on with new embellishments at each repetition. I had a curiosity about it, not because I cared for the realistic details that might as Pooh Bah used to say, “lend an air of artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” but because here was a chance to test it at first hand, and so I asked the person most heroically concerned to come and tell me of an experience that had earned for him the plaudits of many of his fellow citizens and citizenesses. And so he came. He was a social worker, as they are called, and had had the training in settlement work which is said to qualify young persons to deal professionally with the poor and wicked. He was a rather good looking young chap, with a smile about his full red lips, who lifted his mild eyes to yours with perhaps an effort at frankness too pronounced. He spoke well and fluently.

One night (he said) at the close of a hard day’s work in his mission, a man came to him in evident distress. The man was a business man, in comfortable though modest circumstances, with a family of which perhaps the most interesting member was a beautiful girl of seventeen. The girl was attending a high school, where she was in one of the advanced classes, and the evening before had gone from school to spend the night at the home of a friend, a girl of her own age. The next evening, on her failure to return home, the parents became alarmed, and after unavailing inquiry at her schoolmate’s house, and in other quarters, the distraught father had appealed to the social worker. The social worker at once caused an investigation to be made, and by a process of elimination (as he said, though unlike Sherlock Holmes, he did not detail the successive steps of his logic), he concluded that the girl was in a certain quarter of the city, in fact in a certain street. He then sent for the father, told him to supply himself with sufficient money, instructed him in the part he was to play, and was careful to stipulate that if he, the social worker, were to feign drunkenness or to indulge in conduct out of keeping with his character, the father was patiently and trustingly to await results. Thereupon they set forth, and before midnight visited some thirty houses of ill fame. In the thirty-first house the suspicions of the social worker were confirmed, and, pretending to be intoxicated, he invited an inmate to accompany him, and ascended to the upper floor. He tried the doors along the hall, and finding them all open but one, and that locked, he lurched against it, broke it open, and on entering the room surprised a young woman, entirely nude, who screamed—until he muttered some word of understanding and encouragement. Meanwhile the inmate had summoned madame the proprietress, who flew up the stairs, burst into the room and emptied her revolver at the social worker.

The social worker, at this supreme moment in his recital, paused, and with a weary but reassuring smile, as who should say such adventures were diurnal monotonies in his life, remarked: “with no damage, however, to anything but the furniture and the woodwork.”