Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

But he had the girl in his arms, and, thrusting aside foiled madame and the inmate, bore his charge downstairs, snatched a raincoat from the hall rack, wrapped it about her, called to the father to come, and escaped into the street.

After the rescued girl had been restored to her home, and sufficiently recovered from her terrible experience to give a connected account of herself, she related the following incidents: Leaving school on that night she had started for the home of the girl whom she was to visit—the girl not having attended school that day—and while passing a house in a respectable residential district, about five o’clock of the winter evening, darkness already having fallen, a woman came to the door and in great distress told the girl that a baby was sick, that she was alone, and implored the girl to come in and care for the baby while she ran for a doctor. The girl complied, and on reaching the door, was immediately seized, drawn into the hallway, her cries smothered by a hand in which there was a handkerchief saturated with chloroform, and she knew no more until she regained consciousness in the place where the social worker had rescued her.

Here his direct recital ended. I put to him two or three questions: Who is the girl? Where is she now? Where is the house into which she was beguiled? Where is the brothel in which she was imprisoned? He had answers for all these. The girl’s name could not be divulged, even in official confidence, for the family could not risk publicity; the house where she had been summoned to care for the ailing baby was the home of wealthy and respectable people, who had been out of town at the time, and their residence had been broken into and used temporarily by the white slavers. As for the brothel, the social worker, by methods he did not disclose, had compelled the proprietress to leave the city, and the place was closed.

Such was the amazing adventure of the social worker. It was easy to imagine the effect of it when related to neurotic women, to prurient and sentimental men, and in country churches to gaping yokels curious about “life” in the city. It was easy to understand the effect it would have on minds starved and warped by Puritanism, ready for any sensation, especially one that might stimulate their moral emotions, and give them one more excuse for condemning the police. No wonder certain of the elect brethren in gratitude for having been told just what they wished to hear had contributed hundreds of dollars, that the “work” might go on!

I determined, therefore, that in one instance, at least, the truth as to this stock story should be discovered, and I requested Mr. Mooney, the Director of Public Safety, to make a complete investigation. He detailed to the task the best of his detectives; the inspectors of the federal government under the white slave laws were called in, and I asked two clergymen of my acquaintance who knew the social worker and said they believed him, to give what aid they could. Together they worked for weeks. They made an exhaustive investigation, and their conclusion, in which the clergymen joined, was that there was not the slightest ground for the silly tale.

It was, of course, simply another variant of the story that had gone the rounds of the two continents, a story which had been somehow psychologically timed to meet the hysteria which the pulpit, the press, and the legislatures had displayed, as had the people, in one of those strange moral movements which now and then seize upon the public mind, and, in effect, make the whole population into a mob, which is, of coarse, the most moral thing in the world. The subject was investigated in England and it was shown that not one of the stories told in this cause there had any foundation in fact.[C] So far as I know, no authentic verification of the story in any of its forms has ever been made. And yet it was the stock in trade of the professional moralists and was employed by them in two continents to generate that hysteria without which they cannot carry on their reforms. It was repeated and accepted—that is all, and to doubt it was to make oneself particeps criminis, a sort of accessory after the fact.

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It is a subject which only the student of morbid psychology, I suppose, can illuminate properly, but I fancy he would find somewhere a significance in the phrase “white slave,” when acted upon by minds that had never been refined enough to imagine any but the grossest of objective crimes, and out of all this there arose a new conception of the prostitute quite as grotesque as that which it replaced. She was no longer the ruined and abandoned thing she once was, too vile for any contact with the virtuous and respectable; she no longer occupied even the sacrificial pose in which Cato centuries ago and Lecky in our own time figured her; she was not even that daughter of joy whose dalliance is the secret despair of moralists too prudent to imitate her abandon; she became the white slave, a shanghaied innocent kept under lock and key. And thousands and thousands of her sisters were said to be trapped every year in precisely the same way by the minions of a huge system, organized like any modern combination of rapacity and evil, with luxurious headquarters, presumably in some sky-scraper in New York, and its own attorneys, agents, kidnappers, crimpers, seducers, panderers and procuresses all over the land, a vast and complicated organization, with baffling ramifications in all the high and low places of the earth. The sensational newspapers referred to it as “the white slave syndicate,” as though it were as authentic as the steel trust or Standard Oil. It was even said that somewhere in New York the trust conducted a daily auction! With such a bizarre notion, the victims of their own psychic lasciviousness became obsessed. Raids and “revivals” must be inaugurated, a body of new laws enacted, and a horde of official inspectors, agents and detectives turned loose on the land, empowered to arrest any man and woman traveling together, and hold the man guilty of a felony.

To be sure, it was something to have the conception change. It was something that the prostitute should at last be regarded with some touch of human pity. And it was something, a great deal, indeed, that there was, with all the fanatical and zealous law making, some quiet study of the problem. The word “economic,” so long scorned by the proponents of an absolute morality, somehow penetrated the public consciousness, and at last it dawned on the human mind that prostitution is related to economic pressure. But, unfortunately, by the familiar human process, the mind leaped to extremes; it was assumed that all prostitutes were girls who did not receive sufficient wages, and the simple and all sufficient cure was to be the minimum wage; instead of receiving eight dollars a week and going to the bad, all working girls were to be paid nine dollars a week and remain virtuous. And of course new work for the constable was cut out; if the employers of girls did not pay them that much, they were all to go to jail, and if the girls did not remain chaste after they had been assured of that splendid income, they must go to the pillory for the godly to spit at. This, with the laws against white slavery, was to be the panacea, and prostitution, a problem which had perplexed the thoughtful for thirty centuries, was to be solved before the autumn primaries, so that those who solved it might get their political rewards promptly.

I used to wish, when it was presented to me as mayor, that some of these cock-sure persons who would solve the problem off-hand by issuing a general order to the police, could get themselves elected to the opportunity. Of course I issued no general order on the subject; perhaps I was too skeptical, too much lacking in faith in the miraculous powers of the constabulary. Our city was like all cities; there were prostitutes in brothels, prostitutes in saloons, prostitutes in flats, prostitutes on the streets at night. There were, for instance, a score or more of disorderly saloons where men and women congregated. But we found that merely by posting a policeman in uniform before such a place, its patronage was discouraged, and in a few days discontinued. Of course it was a dangerous and preposterous power to wield; in the hands of unscrupulous police it might have appalling possibilities of evil. I had the idea of stationing a policeman before a disorderly house from Tom Johnson, who told me he had it from his father—who was Chief of Police in Louisville. And so we adopted it, and after a while the wine rooms were no more. And that was something. But the girls in them, of course, had to go somewhere, just as Jones said.