In F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic Jazz age novel This Side of Paradise, the young Amory Blaine, his friend Alec and Alec's young female companion are holed up in an Atlantic City hotel, as detectives search floor by floor, looking for an unmarried couple seen entering the hotel. Amory, unaware of the gravity of the situation, is unconcerned. "Well, better let them in," he says. "You don't understand," cries Alec. "They can get me under the Mann Act."
New York governor Elliott Spitzer's resignation over a prostitution scandal this week mirrored Alec's situation, as federal prosecutors at the Justice Department circled like vultures overhead, threatening an indictment. But his unfortunate maritial lapse was not simply the end of his political career. Rather, Spitzer's legal and political woes have dragged an ancient turn-of-the-20th century legislative relic-the Mann Act-back into the limelight and, along with it, the sordid (and racist) history of that particular statute.
Based on the fact that only the states could legislate, regulate and outlaw prostitution, the federal government reacted in 1910 by passing the White-Slave Traffic Act. This was named colloquially for Congressman James Robert Mann. The act banned both "white slavery" and the transportation of females across interstate lines for "immoral purposes." The Supreme Court upheld this restriction in 1913 and expanded the definition of "immoral" to also include "debauchery." By 1917, an act that was designed only to apply to prostitution was expanded in Caminetti vs. United States to include all consensual extramarital affairs, leading to incidents like the one described in Fitzgerald's novel.
Still, all extramarital affairs and trysts with prostitutes were not investigated or prosecuted equally. From its inception, the act was not applied fairly or consistently. According to some historians, the Mann Act was part of the arsenal of Jim Crow tools that Southern officials regularly used to harass and punish African-Americans. Indeed, some of the high profile figures prosecuted under the act-singer Chuck Berry, boxer Jack Johnson and actor Rex Ingram-were prominent and sometimes controversial black figures who had achieved fame in an age of state-sanctioned segregation. Trials conducted using Mann Act-related charges helped put a damper on the careers of all three men and all three served prison time.
2008 Woodie Awards
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Thomas Bowles
posted 3/19/08 @ 9:25 AM EST
Ancient? A hundred years or so is not "ancient." The law exists to enforce morality. That's why law exists. The trouble now is that a number of people such as yourself no longer share the same general idea of morality and dare call it "archaic". (Continued…)
Duong Pham
posted 3/19/08 @ 2:41 PM EST
I think a lot of people are missing the point about Spitzer. This guy made his name by prosecuting cases involving securities fraud AND prostitution. The fact that he got caught in a buying sex from a high end prostitution ring makes him a hypocrite. (Continued…)
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