Authors: Vincent J. Cannato
French authorities complained to the American embassy about Braun’s investigation. A member of the French ministry told Braun that his country would not assist the United States in its fight against white slavery and prostitution. He said it was outrageous that American immigration laws excluded not only prostitutes, but also those women who were guilty of having committed adultery or premarital sex. To the French, American attitudes towards sex were prudish and provincial.
The Hungarian-born Braun even wanted to expand the categories for exclusion, suggesting that “pederasts and sodomites” be added to the list. He seems to have been traumatized by the thousands of young male prostitutes he saw in Berlin. Not only were these
Puppenjungen
, as they were called, practicing prostitution in the open, but many would blackmail their customers and some got into the business of procuring female prostitutes. It was a menace, Braun warned, that needed to be stopped at the border.
Ellis Island officials had always been worried about forced prostitution. As early as 1898, Edward McSweeney warned Terence Powderly about allegations that some immigrants were selling children into prostitution. Lurking in the coffee houses of the Lower East Side, McSweeney believed, were nefarious individuals “luring to lives of shame children of innocent years and that their down-fall, once they enter into this course, is incredibly rapid.”
McSweeney focused on the case of thirteen-year-old Bertha Hondes, who arrived from Buenos Aires with a woman named Rosa Seinfeld, who claimed to be her aunt. Rosa took Bertha to a brothel in New York where, in McSweeney’s words, “the woman had attempted to sell her for immoral purposes.” Rosa was not Bertha’s aunt, but a prostitute, and Bertha’s mother was a madam in Buenos Aires. The United Hebrew Charities intervened and took the girl away.
In 1907, Congress banned the “importation into the United States of any alien woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral purpose,” as well as the pimps and procurers who imported these women. The law gave officials more tools with which to clamp down on those who violated middle-class sexual norms.
In 1908, the case of John Bitty made its way to the Supreme Court. He was accused of bringing his British mistress to the United States. The woman was excluded and Bitty was arrested. The woman was not a prostitute, but since her sexual relationship with Bitty was outside the bounds of marriage, the government argued it fell under the “for any other immoral purpose” clause. The Supreme Court agreed, with Justice Harlan concluding that the clause was designed “to include the case of anyone who imported into the United States an alien woman that she might live with him as his concubine.”
More serious than the case of Bitty were the procurers who trafficked in human flesh and imported women against their will. In the years before World War I, as many as twenty-two white slave narratives were published, with titles such as
Fighting for the Protection of
Our Girls: Truthful and Chaste Account of the Hideous Trade of Buying and Selling Young Girls for Immoral Purposes
. These lurid books told of innocent young women lured into degrading lives of prostitution by sinister male pimps.
Former New York police commissioner Theodore Bingham published his own exposé, entitled
The Girl That Disappears: The Real Fact About the White Slave Traffic
, warning that at least two thousand immigrant white slaves came to America each year, “brought in like cattle, used far worse than cattle, and disposed of for money like cattle.”
Newspapers and magazines further fanned the flames. S. S. McClure’s eponymous magazine had helped give birth to the classic American journalistic tradition of muckraking, publishing Ira Tarbell’s exposé of Standard Oil and Lincoln Steffens’s attack on corrupt city government. Tarbell and Steffens had left the magazine in 1906, and McClure had to find other writers and crusades.
He found that talent in George Kibbe Turner and that crusade in white slavery. Turner’s 1909 article “Daughters of the Poor” explained how Tammany Hall allowed New York to become one of the world’s leading centers of the white slave trade. Turner focused on Jewish prostitutes on the Lower East Side and immigrant aid societies such as the New York Independent Benevolent Association and the Max Hochstim Association, which procured women for prostitution rings under the protection of Tammany. Turner thought the political machine was the biggest culprit and showed the evolution of the prostitution trade. “The trade of procuring and selling girls in America—taken from the weak hands of women and placed in control of acute and greedy men—has organized and specialized after its kind exactly as all other business has done,” he wrote.
The fight against white slavery was about more than nativism, repressed sexuality, or mass hysteria. It embodied many of the themes of Progressive reform. In the eyes of antivice activists, prostitution and white slavery stood at the intersection of greedy business interests, corrupt political machines, and degraded immigrant masses. Women were exploited by male pimps, selfish businessmen—the owners of bars, cafés, hotels, theaters—who profited from the sex trade, and corrupt ward bosses who skimmed their share of the prostitute’s income while providing political and police protection.
Some, like Theodore Bingham, blamed Ellis Island officials for failing to pay adequate attention to the importation of prostitutes. “There seems to be very slight difficulty in getting women in this country,” he wrote in his annual report, “and the requirement of the immigration authorities were easily met by various simple subterfuges.”
In response, the government did more than just send Marcus Braun to Europe to investigate the sex trade. It stepped up enforcement at Ellis Island, keeping an eye out for prostitutes and pimps entering the country. More importantly, officials actively sought out foreign-born prostitutes operating in New York and beyond. If an immigrant woman was found to have engaged in prostitution within three years of her arrival, she could be deported. Inspectors Anthony Tedesco and Helen Bullis put together a list of over eighty cafés, music halls, and hotels in Manhattan frequented by prostitutes.
Despite the increased vigilance, efforts to bar immigrant prostitutes were often stymied, as in the case of Hermine Crawford. Detained at Ellis Island for prostitution, Crawford became friendly with Roland Colcock, a watchman there. Crawford charmed the humble Colcock, who was in the process of being transferred to the immigration station in El Paso. Crawford was released on bail while the courts decided her habeas corpus petition. While out on bail, Crawford married Colcock, making her ineligible for deportation no matter what the courts or immigration officials decided.
Two months after the wedding, Colcock was at his new job in El Paso and Crawford was soliciting sex on Broadway. She told a policeman she had no interest in moving to Texas with her husband. He did not make enough money for her, and she hoped he would stay in Texas and leave her alone. To make matters worse, Colcock was charged with violating his oath of office for his relationship with Crawford. Acknowledging that his interest in his wife was ill advised, Colcock admitted that he was “impetuous by nature and no one has ever accused me of being of a reasoning disposition. A proposition appeals to me and I enter into it without going into details.” A month later, Colcock resigned from the immigration service.
The 1911 Dillingham Commission attempted to determine the extent of immigrant prostitution, as well as assess how well immigration officials detected prostitutes at ports of entry. On one hand, the commission found that many immigrant women were admitted who listed addresses of well-known brothels as their destination or claimed to be heading for known red-light districts in San Francisco or Seattle.
Investigators set out to discover whether the addresses given by a random selection of sixty-five women who had arrived at Ellis Island in January 1908 matched up. Thirty women were found to be living at the same address they listed on their ship’s manifest. Not surprisingly, many of the other women could not be found because they had moved or the address provided was incorrect. Of the sixty-five, only three were found to be living under suspicious conditions: two appeared to be prostitutes and the third was married to a man who already had a wife.
On the other hand, the Dillingham Commission found that Ellis Island authorities had improved their enforcement of the law against prostitutes and procurers. Between 1904 and 1908, only 205 prostitutes and 49 procurers were barred at the gate. By 1909, officials had grown more vigilant. They arrested 537 people for prostitution, of whom they deported 273. Much of the work was done after landing, as Inspectors Tedesco and Bullis investigated alien prostitutes working in the city and beyond. Suspected prostitutes from as far away as Utah were brought to Ellis Island for deportation.
Single French women, especially those traveling alone in first- or second-class, were always looked upon with suspicion. Of new immigrant groups, however, Jews were most often linked to prostitution. Even Marcus Braun found that a majority of the procurers he came across in Europe were Jewish. Helen Bullis described the workings of the Independent Benevolent Association, which included “practically all the Jewish disorderly house keepers of prominence in New York.” This included the owners of cafés frequented by pimps and prostitutes, clothes dealers who sold their wares in brothels, saloonkeepers, bondsmen, and even doctors who attended to the residents of brothels.
The charge of Jewish involvement in the sex trade could easily descend into anti-Semitism, but the actual numbers show a more complicated picture. In one study in New York, Jewish women made up a little less than half of the 581 prostitution arrests, followed by French, German, and Italian women. In another study, of the ninety-eight women deported for prostitution from Ellis Island in 1907 and 1908, only thirteen were Jewish. Half of these women were French.
The link between prostitution and immigration was a persistent one, even if officials had trouble nailing down exact figures. Marcus Braun estimated that there were 50,000 foreign-born prostitutes and 10,000 foreign-born male pimps in America. He also thought there were around 10,000 immigrant prostitutes in New York, while reformer James Bronson Reynolds argued that the number was three times higher. On the more conservative side, a federal grand jury investigation led by John D. Rockefeller looking into white slavery put the number at only 6,000. The Dillingham Commission had to admit that it was “impossible to secure figures showing the exact extent of the exploitation of women and girls in violation of the immigration act.”
Were most prostitutes foreign-born? The Dillingham Commission examined over 2,000 prostitution cases in New York courts between November 1908 and March 1909, and found that only about one-quarter were foreign-born, in a city that was over 40 percent foreign-born. Three other surveys from this time show similar results, showing that an average of around 75 percent of prostitutes were native-born Americans.
Were large numbers of women forced into lives of prostitution as white slaves? Officials could not make up their minds. Commissioner Keefe warned that an “enormous business is constantly being transacted in the importation and distribution of foreign women for purpose of prostitution.” One year later, he had changed his mind and now believed that “women and girls are rarely imported into this country for purposes of prostitution.”
The Dillingham Commission mixed alarmist rhetoric with data that told a more nuanced tale. “The importation and harboring of alien women and girls for immoral purpose and the practice of prostitution by them,” the report began, “is the most pitiful and the most revolting phase of the immigration question.” Yet later in that same report, the commission admitted that “the majority of women and girls who are induced to enter this country for immoral purposes have already entered the life at home and come to this country,” of their own free will.
William Williams also believed that most prostitutes were not forced into the profession. Even so, he noted that male pimps were increasingly dominating the profession and controlling the earnings of female prostitutes, but he did not think this was white slavery. As he saw it, while there might be some “incidental slavery, particularly at the outset,” for the most part women were “usually glad to place themselves under the control of and receive their direction from men.”
Williams was probably close to the truth. As one historian has put it, “the vast majority of women who practiced prostitution were not dragged, drugged or clubbed into involuntary servitude.” By one estimate, less than 10 percent of American prostitutes were victims of white slavery. At the height of the white slavery scare, slightly more than a thousand individuals were convicted of white slavery.
Many women chose to become prostitutes. Economic necessity and a poor home life were more often greater recruiting tools than physical force and enslavement. Yet it was easier to believe that passive and virtuous women could only become prostitutes at the hands of greedy men. Eva Ranc and Hermine Crawford show that women were often willing participants in the sex trade. They were smart, shrewd, and savvy, often outwitting immigration authorities, the police, and male suitors.
The public may have overreacted to the white slavery scare, but for those women forced into the profession it was a harrowing experience. After her arrest for prostitution, a young Swiss girl named Jeanne Rondez told her story at a deportation hearing at Ellis Island. She had been brought to America at age nineteen to work as a servant. She told inspectors about a few photographs she had made in France, which a friend of hers had given to a man named Lucien Baratte. The photos were likely nudes, and it appears that Baratte was trying to blackmail Jeanne.
While searching for Baratte in New York, Rondez ended up at the home of Mrs. Eloy Miller, who invited Jeanne to dinner. After dinner, the woman refused to allow Jeanne to leave and made her spend the night. Then Baratte entered Jeanne’s room and demanded sex. Jeanne refused and was kept in the room for two days before she succumbed to Baratte’s advances. She had been a virgin, and the shame of her situation allowed Baratte and Miller to force her into prostitution. For the next six weeks, Jeanne was made to receive men, who paid her $2 for sex. Six weeks after her ordeal began, Jeanne was arrested for prostitution and taken to Ellis Island.