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.”
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.