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The Mann Act, formally the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, codified as 18 U.S.C. §§ 2421-2424, is a federal law that criminalizes the transportation of individuals across state lines for the purpose of prostitution or other illegal sexual activity. 

Here’s a more detailed explanation:

• Purpose:The Mann Act was originally intended to combat forced prostitution and human trafficking, particularly the “white slavery” phenomenon of the early 20th century. 
• Key Provisions:The law criminalizes knowingly transporting or causing to be transported, or aiding or assisting in the transportation of, any individual in interstate or foreign commerce for the purpose of prostitution or sexual activity that is a criminal offense under federal or state law. 
• Historical Context:The Mann Act was passed in 1910 during a period of great social change and “moral panic” surrounding urbanization, immigration, and the changing role of women. 
• Broad Interpretation and Criticisms:While designed to combat forced prostitution, the law’s broad wording and subsequent interpretations led to its use in cases involving consensual sexual activity and, at times, political persecution. 
• Modern Application:The Mann Act has been amended over time, including in 1978 to update the definition of “transportation” and to add protection for minors of either sex against sexual exploitation. 
• Enforcement:Cases arising under the Mann Act are investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and referred to the appropriate United States Attorneys. 
• Current Status:The Mann Act, in its current form, remains a federal law used to address human trafficking and the exploitation of individuals for sexual purposes. 

One of the landmarks of Progressive Era legislation was the White Slave Traffic Act — better known as the Mann Act for its author, Illinois congressman James Robert Mann. The Mann Act made it a crime to transport women across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” While designed to combat forced prostitution, the law was so broadly worded that courts held it to criminalize many forms of consensual sexual activity, and it was soon being used as a tool for political persecution of Jack Johnson and others, as well as a tool for blackmail.

The Mann Act was born during the “white slavery” hysteria of the early 20th century. Along with other moral purity movements of the period, the white slavery craze had its roots in fears over the rapid changes that the Industrial Revolution had brought to American society: urbanization, immigration, the changing role of women, and evolving social mores. As young, single women moved to the city and entered the workforce they were no longer protected by the traditional family-centered system of courtship, and were subjected to what Jane Addams called the “grosser temptations which now beset the young people who are living in its tenement houses and working in its factories.”

As Progressive Era social reformers (many of whom did not distinguish between sexually active women and prostitutes) began to call attention to what they saw as a widespread decline in morality, foreigners emerged as an easy target. Unfettered immigration provided an endless supply of both foreign prostitutes and foreign men who lured American girls into immorality. Muckraking journalists fueled the hysteria with sensationalized stories of innocent girls kidnapped off the streets by foreigners, drugged, smuggled across the country, and forced to work in brothels. Borrowing a term from the 19th-century labor movement, muckraker George Kibbe Turner called prostitution “white slavery,” and in a 1907 article in McClure’s Magazine claimed that a “loosely organized association… largely composed of Russian Jews” was the primary source of supply for Chicago brothels. Pulp fiction and movies (then a novelty) fanned the flames even more.

Politicians seized upon the “crisis” for political gain. Edwin W. Sims, the U.S. district attorney in Chicago, claimed to have proof of a nationwide white slavery ring:

“The legal evidence thus far collected establishes with complete moral certainty these awful facts: that the white slave traffic is a system operated by a syndicate which has its ramifications from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean, with ‘clearinghouses’ or ‘distribution centers’ in nearly all of the larger cities; that in this ghastly traffic the buying price of a young girl is from $15 up and that the selling price is from $200 to $600… This syndicate is a definite organization sending its hunters regularly to scour France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Canada for victims. The man at the head of this unthinkable enterprise is known among his hunters as ‘the Big Chief.”

Sims was never able to produce his “evidence,” but his friend James Robert Mann, chairman of the powerful House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, quickly drafted a bill to show the public that Congress was doing something about the “crisis.” It was also intended to bring the United States into compliance with a 1904 international treaty on forced prostitution, but much of the wording was drawn from a section of the 1907 Immigration Act, which banned the “importation into the United States of any alien woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral purpose.” Introduced in Congress in June 1909, the bill was quickly passed with little opposition and President William Howard Taft signed it into law later that same month.

While intended as a specific response to commercialized vice, the ambiguity of the “or for any other immoral purpose” clause of the Mann Act (and the similarly worded 1907 Immigration Act), and the fact that the Justice Department’s new Bureau of Investigation (now the Federal Bureau of Investigation) was simply unable to find evidence of a widespread “white slavery” network, led prosecutors to begin using it against other forms of sexual conduct.

The Supreme Court repeatedly held these prosecutions to be constitutional. In United States v. Bitty (1911), the Court ruled that the 1907 Immigration Act applied in the case of a man, John Bitty, who had brought his English mistress into the United States. Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in the opinion that “the words, ‘or for any other immoral purpose,’ after the word ‘prostitution,’ must have been made for some practical object. Those added words show beyond question that Congress had in view the protection of society against another class of alien woman other than those who might be brought here merely for purposes of ‘prostitution.'”

Two years later, in Hoke v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the Mann Act did not unconstitutionally limit the right of free travel. In Wilson v. United States (1914), the Court declared that travel across state lines with the intention to commit an immoral act was grounds for conviction, even if the immoral act was not executed.

The Supreme Court dramatically widened the scope of the Mann Act three years later in Caminetti v. United States. In March of 1913 Drew Caminetti, the son of a prominent California politician, and a friend, Maury Diggs, both married and having affairs, took their mistresses by train from Sacramento to Reno. Their betrayed wives tipped off the police, and both men were arrested upon their arrival in Reno. Caminetti and Diggs were tried and found guilty. On appeal, Caminetti’s lawyer argued that the intent of Congress was to target only “commercialized vice,” and that while his client’s behavior may have been immoral, it was “free from commercialism and coercion.” Citing Bitty, Justice William R. Day wrote for the majority that the language of the Act “being plain… is the sole evidence of the ultimate legislative intent” and that not applying the law in this case “would shock the common understanding of what constitutes an immoral purpose.”

Such an interpretation of the law in effect criminalized all premarital or extramarital sexual relationships that involved interstate travel. With behavior that was so commonplace now illegal, federal prosecutors had a weapon that could very easily be abused in order to prosecute “undesirables” who were otherwise law-abiding citizens. Jack Johnson’s conviction in 1913 was ostensibly for transporting a white prostitute from Pittsburgh to Chicago, but was motivated by public outrage over his marriages to white women. In 1944, actor Charlie Chaplin was acquitted of a Mann Act indictment stemming from a paternity suit. In actuality, the case was motivated by Chaplin’s left-of-center political views and was personally instigated by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had called Chaplin one of Hollywood’s “parlor Bolsheviki.” In 1959, black rock ‘n roll star Chuck Berry was convicted of violating the Mann Act and served 20 months in prison for transporting across state lines an underage Apache girl who was weeks later arrested on a prostitution charge.

The Mann Act has never been repealed, but it has been substantially amended in recent years. In 1978, Congress updated the definition of “transportation” in the act, and added protection for minors of either sex against commercial sexual exploitation. A 1986 amendment further protected minors and added protection for adult males, and replaced “debauchery” and “any other immoral purpose” with “any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense.”

The Full Text of The Mann Act

Full text of the White-Slave Traffic Act, as passed by the Sixty-First Congress on June 25, 1910:

CHAP. 395 — An Act to further regulate interstate commerce and foreign commerce by prohibiting the transportation therein for immoral purposes of women and girls, and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the term “interstate commerce,” as used in this Act, shall include transportation from any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, and the term “foreign commerce,” as used in this Act, shall include transportation from any State or Territory or the District of Columbia to any foreign country and from any foreign country to any State or Territory or the District of Columbia.

SEC. 2. That any person who shall knowingly transport or cause to be transported, or aid or assist in obtaining transportation for, or in transporting, in interstate or foreign commerce, or in any Territory or in the District of Columbia, any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose, or with the intent and purpose to induce, entice, or compel such woman or girl to become a prostitute or to give herself up to debauchery, or to engage in any other immoral practice; or who shall knowingly procure or obtain, or cause to be procured or obtained, or aid or assist in procuring or obtaining, any ticket or tickets, or any form of transportation or evidence of the right thereto, to be used by any woman or girl in interstate or foreign commerce, or in any Territory or the District of Columbia, in going to any place for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose, or with the intent or purpose on the part of such person to induce, entice, or compel her to give herself up to the practice of prostitution, or to give herself up to the practice of debauchery, or any other immoral practice, whereby any such woman or girl shall be transported in interstate or foreign commerce, or in any Territory or the District of Columbia, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment of not more than five years, or by both such fine and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court.

SEC. 3. That any person who shall knowingly persuade, induce, entice, or coerce, or cause to be persuaded, induced, enticed, or coerced, or aid or assist in persuading, inducing, enticing or coercing any woman or girl to go from one place to another in interstate or foreign commerce, or in any Territory or the District of Columbia, for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose, or with the intent and purpose on the part of such person that such woman or girl shall engage in the practice of prostitution or debauchery, or any other immoral practice, whether with or without her consent, and who shall thereby knowingly cause or aid or assist in causing such woman or girl to go and be carried or transported as a passenger upon the line or route of any common carrier or carriers in interstate or foreign commerce, or any Territory or the District of Columbia, shall be deemed guilty of a felony and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not more than five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years, or by both fine and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court.

SEC. 4. That any person who shall knowingly persuade, induce, entice or coerce any woman or girl under the age of eighteen years from any State or Territory or the District of Columbia to any other State or Territory or the District of Columbia, with the purpose and intent to induce or coerce her, or that she shall be induced or coerced to engage in prostitution or debauchery, or any other immoral practice, and shall in furtherance of such purpose knowingly induce or cause her to go and to be carried or transported as a passenger in interstate commerce upon the line or route of any common carrier or carriers, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and in conviction there of shall be punished by a fine of not more than ten thousand dollars, or by imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years, or by both such fine and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court.

SEC. 5. That any violation of any of the above sections two, three, and four shall be prosecuted in any court having jurisdiction of crimes within the district in which said violation was committed, or from, through, or into which any such woman or girl may have been carried or transported as a passenger in interstate or foreign commerce, or in any Territory or the District of Columbia, contrary to the provisions of any of said sections.

SEC. 6. That for the purpose of regulating and preventing the transportation in foreign commerce of alien women and girls for purposes of prostitution and debauchery, and in pursuance of and for the purpose of carrying out the terms of the agreement of project of arrangement for the suppression of the white-slave traffic, adopted July twenty-fifth, nineteen hundred and two, for submission to their respective governments by the delegates of various powers represented at the Paris conference and confirmed by a formal agreement signed at Paris on May eighteenth, nineteen hundred and four, and adhered to by the United States on June sixth, nineteen hundred and eight, as shown by the proclamation of the President of the United States, dated June fifteenth, nineteen hundred and eight, the Commissioner-General of Immigration is hereby designated as the authority of the United States to receive and centralize information concerning the procuration of alien women and girls with a view to their debauchery, and to exercise supervision over such alien women and girls, receive their declarations, establish their identity, and ascertain from them who induced them to leave their native countries, respectively; and it shall be the duty of said Commissioner-General of Immigration to receive and keep on file in his office the statements and declarations which may be made by such alien women and girls, and those which are hereinafter required pertaining to such alien women and girls engaged in prostitution and debauchery in this country, and to furnish receipts for such statements and declarations provided for in this act to the persons, respectively, making and filing them.

Every person who shall keep, maintain, control, support or harbor in any house or place for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral purpose, any alien woman or girl within three years after she shall have entered the United States from any country, party to the said arrangement for the suppression of the white-slave traffic, shall file with the Commissioner- General of Immigration a statement in writing setting forth the name of such alien woman or girl, the place at which she is kept, and all facts as to the date of her entry into the United States, the port through which she entered, her age, nationality, and parentage, and concerning her procuration to come to this country within the knowledge of such person, and any person who shall fail within thirty days after such person shall commence to keep, maintain, control, support, or harbor in any house or place for the purpose of prostitution, or for any other immoral purpose, any alien woman or girl within three years after she shall have entered the United States from any of the countries, party to the said arrangement for the suppression of the white-slave traffic, to file such statement concerning such alien woman or girl with the Commissioner-General of Immigration, or who shall knowingly and willfully state falsely or fail to disclose in such statement any fact within his knowledge or belief with reference, to the age, nationality, or parentage of any such alien woman or girl, or concerning her procuration to come to this country, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction shall be punished by a fine of not more than two thousand dollars, or by imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years, or by both such fine and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court.

In any prosecution brought under this section, if it appear that any such statement required is not on file in the office of the Commissioner- General of Immigration, the person whose duty it shall be to file such statement shall be presumed to have failed to file said statement, as herein required, unless such person or persons shall prove otherwise. No person shall be excused from furnishing the statement, as required by this section, on the ground or for the reason that the statement so required by him, or the information therein contained, might tend to criminate him or subject him to a penalty or forfeiture, but no person shall be prosecuted or subjected to any penalty or forfeiture under any law of the United States for or on account of any transaction, matter, or thing, concerning which he may truthfully report in such statement, as required by the provisions of this section.

SEC. 7. That the term “Territory,” as used in this Act, shall include the district of Alaska, the insular possessions of the United States, and the Canal Zone. The word “person,” as used in this Act, shall be construed to import both the plural and the singular, as the case demands, and shall include corporations, companies, societies, and associations. When construing and enforcing the provisions of this Act, the act, omission, or failure of any officer, agent, or other person, acting for or employed by any other person or by any corporation, company, society, or association, within the scope of his employment or office, shall in every case be also deemed to be the act, omission, or failure of such other person, or of such company, society, or association as well of that of the person himself.

SEC. 8. That this Act shall be known and referred to as the “White-slave traffic Act.”

Approved, Sixty-First Congress, June 25, 1910.

Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI

Excerpted from Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI by Jessica R. Pliley (footnotes omitted). Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reprinted, reproduced, posted on another website or distributed by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

Introduction

The Mann Act and Federal Sexual Surveillance

In October 1920, an Oklahoma City federal judge sent Hewitt Ratcliffe to jail for the crime of white slavery. Earlier that summer, police arrested Hewitt’s wife Janie when bellboys at the Lee-Huckins Hotel informed them that she was practicing prostitution in the hotel. The bellboys had been approached by Hewitt, who offered them a generous tip if they would arrange “dates” for his wife. When the city police discovered that Hewitt and Janie had come to Oklahoma from Little Rock, Arkansas, they immediately contacted the Bureau of Investigation because they suspected a violation of the White Slave Traffic Act, also known as the Mann Act. Passed in 1910 to protect women and girls from forced prostitution and sex trafficking, the federal statute made it illegal to transport, or cause the transport of, women over state lines for the purposes of prostitution, debauchery, or “any other immoral purpose.” The Bureau of Investigation, as it was called until 1935 when the agency would be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), enforced this antitrafficking law.

The Bureau built a strong case against Hewitt Ratcliffe. Janie stated that she had started dating Hewitt in 1914 and by 1918 they had married in Atlanta. Hewitt claimed to be a travelling salesman, but made most of his money by gambling. He travelled throughout the country looking for poker games, and Janie always accompanied him on the road. About a year after their wedding, after a particularly brutal losing streak in Kansas City, Hewitt recommended that Janie should “hustle,” or prostitute herself, to earn some extra cash for the couple. When she balked at his suggestion, he gave her what she called “an unmerciful beating.” From this point onward, she hustled for him everywhere they went. Using bellboys, Hewitt arranged all of her customers, ensuring that she usually brought in fifty dollars a night, which he used to stake his gambling habit. With a bevy of witnesses prepared to testify against him, Hewitt chose to plead guilty with the promise that he would not serve more than two years in jail; instead he served only eight months. For the Bureau, Hewitt represented a professional pimp “of the worst type,” and was exactly the type of scoundrel that the Mann Act was aimed at stopping.

The ranks of prostitutes had been growing steadily in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, becoming spectacularly visible in red-light districts throughout the country. Fears about the prevalence of prostitution led to the rise of the white slavery narrative that asserted—in various forms— that vicious procurers seduced, coerced, lured, tricked, or forced girls and young white women into brothels far from their homes and the protections those homes offered. Antivice activists thought of white slavery as an international and transnational crime, and they were particularly fearful that a young girl would be stolen from one country and placed in a brothel in another country where she would not speak the language and have no friends. Fear of sex trafficking prompted the United States to amend its immigration laws, to join the 1904 International Agreement for the Suppression of the “White Slave Traffic,” and to create state-level antitrafficking laws. Such fears culminated in the passage of the federal White Slave Traffic Act, which was intended to address domestic trafficking. Much of the public discussion of white slavery characterized it as a crime that was connected to immigration and immigrants. Some reformers argued that young women who migrated alone to the United States remained especially vulnerable to exploitation, whereas others suggested that white slavery, itself, was a crime brought to the United States by deviant immigrants. Woven throughout discussions of prostitution and white slavery, and the enforcement of anti–white slavery provisions, a tension developed between punishing and expelling foreign-born prostitutes and protecting native-born white women from prostitution. Thus, white slavery was a term that evoked racialized understandings of female vulnerability, prompted vigorous debates about prostitution, rampant sexuality, and urban life, and conjured a particular set of conceptions that rendered women as both victims and as subjects of sexual surveillance.

Sex trafficking, the problem at which the Mann Act was aimed, challenged law enforcement officials due to its inherent extrajurisdictional nature; traffickers and those trafficked moved in and out, and frequently beyond single jurisdictions. It was this very characteristic that prompted the U.S. Congress to pass the White Slave Traffic Act because local and state law enforcement could not easily reach sex traffickers and prostitutes who fled to other areas of the country. The national and international scope of sex trafficking necessitated national laws like the White Slave Traffic Act. After Congress passed the Mann Act, the Bureau of Investigation took up enforcement of this new national law, and just as the Mann Act expanded the jurisdiction of the federal government to police sex, so too did the law significantly expand the presence of the Bureau throughout the country.

The Mann Act was the product of the Progressive Era’s faith that thorough investigation could lead to solutions for any social ill. As more and more observers fretted about the growing visibility of prostitution in American cities, the profitability of sex trafficking, and the dangers of white slavery, they couched these concerns into calls for investigations by journalists, social scientists, and government officials. From 1910 to 1917, vice commissions were established in 43 different cities to examine the prevalence, causes, and remedies of prostitution. But these investigations did not occur just at the municipal level: the federal government, concerned as it was with the national borders and migration, launched several white slavery investigations. Taken together, these investigations prompted calls for legislation, resulting in the passage of a flurry of local antivice laws, state-level antitrafficking laws, and the Mann Act. Though the investigations that led to the Mann Act helped to establish the fact of white slavery, the Bureau still had to puzzle out exactly what white slavery was and was not, and, more problematically, it had to contend with that vague and expansive category of “any other immoral purpose.” Did the law only cover sexual slavery characterized by violence and bondage, or did it also apply to voluntary prostitution? Could “any other immoral purpose” apply to consensual, noncommercial interstate sex like adultery and fornication? In addressing these questions, the Bureau had to grapple with the vexing problem of female consent. The enforcement of the Mann Act yielded strange outcomes that were shaped by the Bureau’s understanding of the “any other immoral purpose” clause at any given moment. This is a story about how addressing these challenging questions helped to build the bureaucratic culture of the Bureau of Investigation, and also reflected the pervasive sexually conservative values of the agency.

A Border Had to Be Crossed

This is also a story of traversing, maintaining, and negotiating boundaries. For the White Slave Traffic Act to be invoked a geographic border had to be crossed. The law applied to travel over state borders, territorial borders, and borders that hemmed in Native American reservations. But it also applied to areas under federal jurisdiction—such as Washington, DC, and colonial possessions. National borders came into play as well because U.S. white slavery policy was preoccupied with halting international sex trafficking; the distinctions between the international and national, the external and the domestic, and the foreign and native-born emerged with particular salience. Other borders were more figurative. As a federal antiprostitution law enforced by an agency without the ability to arrest or detain Americans, the lines between state and federal jurisdiction and authority had to be constantly mediated by the Bureau of Investigation. The object of protection (or policing)— prostitutes—revealed the permeability of the boundaries between public and private sexual behavior. Janie Ratcliffe was a public prostitute who had been trafficked to Oklahoma by her pimp Hewitt Ratcliffe. But she was also a wife and in pursuing Hewitt the Bureau denied the legitimacy of their marriage because it did not conform to standards of a monogamous marriage and respectability. As the Bureau enforced the “any other immoral purpose” clause, the lines between prostitutes and wives, bad women and good women, and the brothel bedroom and the marital bedroom became increasingly blurred. The Bureau used the law to police what they considered inappropriate sexuality and those bodies that deviated from respectability.

Gender conservatism permeated the Bureau’s Mann Act investigations, which were routinely among the largest category of cases pursued by the Bureau during the years before World War II.

Implementing the law, the Bureau revealed a peculiar logic in the state’s conception of female citizenship. From the early-twentieth-century perspective, women’s citizenship was defined through her sexual contract with her husband (the marriage contract), and U.S. policy towards women generally emphasized women’s reproductive service to the nation. Between 1855 and 1922, the most common way for immigrant women to achieve citizenship was through marriage to a U.S. citizen (native born or naturalized). More importantly any and all women could become mothers of the next generation of U.S. citizens. Her private domestic service—wifely labor—serviced a public goal, though contained in domesticity, under a male head of household. During the Progressive Era, public women, a euphemism for prostitute, and women in public spaces—like the growing numbers of wage-earning women, the feminists taking to the streets demanding the vote, and migrating women moving from countryside to city—upset these conventional understandings of women’s roles. In the case of migrating sex workers, they were perceived as a threat to the health of the body politic because they could spread venereal disease to customers, who in turn could introduce it to the marital bed. But she was also a threat because she might mother future citizens. With all of these anxieties—about women in public, about racial decline, about the spread of venereal disease—U.S. anti–white slavery policy tended towards criminalizing sex work primarily through the use of state power. The Mann Act helped construct this punitive state by closely monitoring the mobility of sex workers. By casting a wider net to police women’s illicit sexuality more broadly, it managed to bring a wide variety of women under the gaze of the state.

The Bureau’s enforcement of the Mann Act before World War II exhibited an uncanny vision of women as either moral wives and mothers or immoral and vulnerable loose women. The governing gender system configured wives and prostitutes as opposites, connected, if at all, where a man occupied the role of anonymous “John” in the space of the brothel, while also acting as husband when he returned to the domestic space of his home. Moving between spaces, in and out of disreputable sites and the sentimentalized home, the individual man could traverse respectability and vice with little risk to personal reputation, class standing, or status as a citizen. This was in stark contrast to the gendered world that women negotiated, which cleaved to standards of sexual behavior and an idealization of sexual purity in the unmarried, and sexual fidelity in the married. For women, there was no risk-free traversing of space. Because marriage prospects depended on notions of sexual virginity, whispers that cast doubt on a single woman’s behavior could undermine her economic future. A failed wife-to-be, either a woman who violated sexual norms and was rejected from the marriage market, or an abandoned wife, deserted by her husband, or a widowed wife, left without resources by a dead husband could all cross into prostitution. In a labor market defined rigidly by sex, women’s ability to support themselves and any children could be severely compromised.

The double standard of sexuality, which allowed men’s promiscuity while severely restricting women’s sexual behavior to marriage, shaped early-twentieth-century conceptions of victimhood, protection, and morality as well. The Bureau’s Mann Act investigations reflected this double standard. In choosing some victims to protect, while ignoring the fate of other women seeking aid, the Bureau reinforced this double standard. The Bureau consistently advocated on behalf of women who shared the same constellation of characteristics: they were white, young, and had reputations for being previously chaste. Sex workers who did not fit this narrow mold frequently found themselves subjected to state surveillance and punitive intervention. In the early twentieth-century, racialized conceptions of morality excluded nonwhite women from the category of the sexually virtuous. When African American women turned to the Bureau for help, they rarely received it.

The FBI’s enforcement of the Mann Act acted as a bulwark in defense of traditional gender roles at a time when American women were experiencing incredible social and political change. By federalizing the fight against prostitution, the Bureau sought to protect American daughters from being lured into brothels, thus retaining their chastity for marriage. Sex workers were seen as victims of others’ greed. Yet, in its fight against trafficking, the Bureau did not challenge prostitution’s exploitative characteristics nor the right of male customers to purchase sex. After the Supreme Court empowered the “any other immoral purpose” clause of the law, the agency used its investigations to uphold ideals of chaste daughters, faithful wives, and women as dependent domestic beings.

The White Slave Traffic Act fell well within the Progressive Era’s legal reform agenda dedicated to protecting innocent young women from sexual exploitation, but it had the added effect of federalizing this “protection.” The laws passed in this larger effort often had the consequence of closely policing young women’s sexuality, frequently criminalizing their sexual activity, and punishing young women under the guise of protecting them. As the Bureau considered how best to enforce the Mann Act and protect America’s young women from sexual slavery, it had to puzzle out whether the Congress intended the law to protect innocent young women or to police professional prostitutes. The lines between these two categories of women often collapsed, as investigations hinged on special agents’ ideas of female innocence and reputation, as well as young women’s own volition. In Mann Act investigations, protection could easily slip into paternalism and prosecution. The central question confronting special agents was this: were victims of the Mann Act really victims? Or were they criminals complicit in the violation of the law? The tension between protecting and policing was ever present.

This tension spoke directly to the challenges posed by recognizing female sexual activity in the early twentieth century. Narratives of white slavery minimized female sexual assertion by arguing that no woman would sell sex in the marketplace unless she was under duress, whether that duress was the result of economics, fraud, deceit, or enslavement. In these tales, the conditions of women’s lives produced a situation where consent to sex work was rendered meaningless. But as the Bureau began to enforce a law that had been passed to “protect” young women, it encountered a dynamic social world where female sexual desires and consent could not be so easily swept aside. In October 1921, only free from jail for a few months, Hewitt Ratcliffe was arrested again in Dallas, Texas, when city detectives swept up his new wife—Grace Ratcliffe—in a vice sting at the Adolphus Hotel. Hewitt had divorced Janie immediately after he was released from the Comanche County Jail and married Grace, with whom he had grown up and who had been his girl friend on the side for several years. At age twenty-seven and fully aware of Hewitt’s work as a gambler, Grace Ratcliffe refused to cooperate with the Bureau’s special agents as they tried to build a second case against him for violating the White Slave Traffic Act. She argued that she had chosen to prostitute herself and that Hewitt was unaware of her actions, and she adamantly refused to testify against her husband. Grace’s defense of Hewitt confounded the logic of the White Slave Traffic Act, which assumed all prostitutes to be victims. Instead it prompted the Bureau to look at her as a co-conspirator and criminal. Realizing that they were unlikely to get a Mann Act conviction with such an unwilling witness, the Bureau handed Hewitt over to Mississippi state authorities, who had a warrant out for his arrest. He was sentenced to serve five years in the Mississippi State Penitentiary for fraud and forgery.

When Congress passed the Mann Act in June 1910, the Bureau had only sixty-one special agents on its payroll. Though its jurisdiction was national, in practice those agents were based in Washington, DC, and their sphere of activity centered on the mid-Atlantic states on the Eastern seaboard. Based on the vast mandate within the Mann Act the Bureau expanded rapidly. Not only did it have a new jurisdiction—Americans’ sexual behavior—but to enforce the law it also had to establish itself throughout the country, setting up field offices and local representatives in each state. When it could, the Bureau yielded prosecution of Mann Act offenders to local authorities, as it did with Hewitt Ratcliffe, a practice that in itself represents an extension of state authority. When the Bureau took on the broad and undefined authorization of the Mann Act, it stimulated federal law enforcement, but it also fortified the power of law enforcement on the local and state levels.

Historians of the FBI typically emphasize the Bureau’s role in domestic political policing of ideological and racial minorities. This preoccupation with the Bureau’s sins is certainly appropriate considering the FBI’s activities against organized labor, leftist, and civil rights organizers, but it overlooks how central policing of sexuality was to the development of the FBI as a national agency with the capacity to conduct such political surveillance. The FBI’s policing of sexuality sheds light on the conservative culture within the FBI. Gender conservatism permeated the Bureau’s Mann Act investigations, which were routinely among the largest category of cases pursued by the Bureau during the years before World War II. Though American society went through a revolution in ideas and values about women’s roles, marriage, and sex during the years between 1900 and 1941, the Bureau consistently served as a defense against these cultural shifts. Instead it celebrated the male-headed household and the dependent wife, just as it policed prostitutes’ mobility and fought the sexual exploitation of young white women. The FBI spread nationally in order to enforce the Mann Act. The law became central to the day-to-day operations of the Bureau. Indeed, policing sexuality shaped the early history of the FBI.

Resources

pbs.org, The Mann Act.”; popmatters.com, “Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI.” By PopMatters Staff;

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