XLIX
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 secretdespair 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 thepublic 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 scoreor 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.
Then we found that the police, if they were brutal enough, could drive the girls off the streets. It seemed to me always a despicable sort of business—the actions of the police I mean; I didn’t like to hear the reports of it; I don’t like to think of it, or write of it even now. It is not very creditable to make war on women, whatever the Puritans may say. But the streets would show an improvement, even they would admit; much as they might linger and loiter and leer, the most seductively pure of them could not get himself “accosted” anywhere down town at night. Of course, after a while, the poor things would come back, or others exactly like them would come. Then the police would have to practice their brutalities all over again. Perhaps they were not brutal enough; I am not certain. To be sure they were not as brutal as Augustus with his sumptuary laws, or as Theodosius, or Valentinian,or Justinian, or Karl the Great, or Peter the Great, or St. Louis, or Frederick Barbarossa, or the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna, or as John Calvin in Geneva, or Cotton Mather in Massachusetts, with all their tortures and floggings and rackings and brandings and burnings; or as the English Puritans who used to have bawds whipped, pilloried, branded and imprisoned and for a second offense put to death. And even they were not brutal enough, it seems, since prostitution went right on down the centuries to our times. I suppose that we might have learned from their failures that prostitution could not be ended by physical force and brutality. However, when the girls were driven from the streets, inasmuch as the police did not despatch them, they still had to go somewhere, and the brothels remained. They had their own quarter and if it was not a segregated quarter it was something very like it, since the police bent their efforts to rid other portions of the city of such places. It was perhaps a tolerated rather than a segregated district, and after a while the Director of Public Safety wished to try the experiment of making it a regulated district as well. I felt that the world was too old and I found myself too much of its mood to hope that any good could come from any of the efforts of policemen to dispose of such a problem, but I was glad of any experiment conducted in sincerity that might make for the better, and accordingly the Director of Safety put his scheme into operation. It was notreglementationin the exact European sense, since the temper of our American people will not acquiesce in that,and, as I discovered by some inquiries of my own in the principal cities of Europe, it is not of very valid effect over there. But the Director adopted most of the familiar requirements of the Parisianreglement, except the examinations, and the registration of those noten maison; he required the proprietresses to report at police headquarters the presence of new inmates; he forbade them to have minors or male parasites in the houses, and as far as possible he separated the business from the saloon business. Any house which ignored his orders found a policeman posted before it; then it came to time. The result was, as Mr. Mooney could report in the course of a year, that the number of brothels had been reduced from over two hundred to thirty and the number of prostitutes of whom the police had any knowledge, in an equal proportion. He was very proud when General Bingham complimented his policemen and their policing, as he was at similar compliments from the government’s white slave agents.
Superficially this was a very gratifying report, but only superficially. Five-sixths of the brothels had been closed, but their inmates had to go somewhere, just as Jones said, and the police found that clandestine prostitution had proportionately increased; the women had gone into flats, or hotels, or residences which on occasion could be made to serve as assignation houses. It may perhaps have improved the life of the prostitute, made it freer and more human, or perhaps it indicated that prostitution in America is showing a decadent tendencytoward refinement. But while they had reduced the number of houses of prostitution, the police discovered that they had not reduced prostitution in the least, and when, after a trial of four years, I asked the Director and the Chief of Police what the result of the experiment had been, they said that, aside from the fact that it seemed to make for order in the city, and simplified the work of policing, it had done no good.
The experience was like that of Chicago, where after a police order prohibiting the sale of liquor in houses of prostitution, it was found—according to the report of the vice commission—to be “undoubtedly true that the result of the order has been to scatter the prostitutes over a wide territory and to transfer the sale of liquor carried on heretofore in houses to the near-by saloon keepers, and to flats and residential sections, but it is an open question whether it has resulted in the lessening of either of the two evils of prostitution and drink.”
The experience, I think, is probably universal. I used to hear the systems of regulation used in European cities held up as models by the pessimistic as the only practical method of dealing with the problem. Paris was commonly considered as the ideal in this respect; latterly it is apt to be Berlin. But the fact is that thereglementationwhich for years and years has been in force in Paris is a failure; the experience there was precisely what it was in our little city. And from Berlin, which the well-known German genius for organization has made the mostefficiently governed city in the world, the same failure has been reported.
In England, on the other hand, there is no regulation; any evening along Piccadilly, one may see street walkers whom the police never dream of molesting. It is in part due to the traditional Puritanic attitude of our northern race, and partly to the respect for personal liberty that exists in England. There the principle is much more scrupulously respected than with us, with whom individual liberty indeed, is hardly a principle at all. With us the phrase “personal liberty” is regarded merely as a shibboleth of brewers and distillers, an evidence on the part of him who employs it that he is a besotted slave to drink and an unscrupulous minion of the rum power. The interferences practiced daily by our policemen are unknown there, and if, for instance, it should even be proposed that an enactment like that in Oklahoma limiting the amount of liquor a man may keep in his own house, and providing that agents of the state may enter his domicile at will and make a search, and especially if in the remotest region of the British Isles there should be an instance of what Walt Whitman calls “the never ending audacity of elected persons,” such as is of daily occurrence in that state where these agents enter railway trains and slit open the valises of travelers in their quest of the stuff, the whole of the question hour the next afternoon in the House of Commons would be occupied with indignant interpellations of the home secretary and theTimescould not contain all the letters that would be written.
Other lands have made other experiments, but everywhere and in all times the same failure has been recorded, from the efforts of Greece to control thehetaeraeanddicteriadesand the severe regulations of ancient Rome, down to the latest reform administration in an American city. Nothing that mankind has ever tried has been of the slightest avail. And now come the vice commissions with their pornographic reports, and no doubt feeling that they have to propose something after all the trouble they have gone to, when they have set forth in tabulated statistics what everybody in the world already knows, they repeat the old ineptitudes. That is, more law, more hounding by the police.
The Chicago product is the classic and the model for all of these, and as the latest and loftiest triumph of the Puritan mind in the realm of morals and of law, a triumph for which three centuries of innocence of nothing save humor alone could have prepared it, its own great masterpiece in morals was at once forbidden circulation in the mails because of its immorality!
The problem cannot be solved by policemen, even if—as is now recommended—they be called “morals” police. The word has a reassuring note of course, possibly by some confused with “moral” police, but policemen are policemen still. I have seen thepolice des moeursin European cities, and they look quite like other policemen. And all cities in America have had morals police; that is exactly what our policemen have been, and that is exactly what is the matter with them. That is, all cities havehad detectives especially detailed to supervise the conduct of the vicious, and they always fail. We had such a squad in Toledo for years, though it was not called morals police. It was composed of men, mere men, because we had nothing else but men to detail to the work. They were honest, decent, self-respecting men for the most part, who on the whole did very well considering the salaries they were paid and the task imposed on them. They regulated vice as well as anybody anywhere could regulate it. But of course they failed to solve the problem, just as the world for thousands of years has failed to solve it, with all the machinery of all the laws of all the lawgivers in history. Solon in Athens tried every known device, including segregation. He established a state monopoly of houses of prostitution, confined thedicteriadesto a certain quarter of the city, and compelled them to wear a distinctive dress, but all his stringent laws had broken down long before Hyperides dramatically bared the breast of Phryne to the Areopagus. In Rome there was the most severe regulation in the ancient world and yet—it may be read in Gibbon—the successive experiments of the law under Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Valerian, Theodosius and Justinian were all failures, and when the laws were most rigorous and the most rigorously enforced, immorality was at its height. Charlemagne tried and failed, and though the sentiment of the age of chivalry and the rise of Christianity for a while softened the law, under the English Puritans, bawds were whipped, pilloried, branded and imprisoned,and for a second offense put to death. France was not behind; under Louis IX., prostitutes were exiled, and in 1635 an edict in Paris condemned men concerned in the traffic to the galleys for life, while the women and girls were whipped, shaved and banished for life. Charles V. in the monastery at Yuste, trying to make two clocks tick in union, found his efforts no more vain than his attempts to regulate human conduct, and Philip II. tried again to do what his father had been unable to accomplish. Peter the Great was a grim enforcer of the laws, and in Vienna Maria Theresa was most rigorous with prostitutes, putting them in a certain garb, and then in handcuffs; she was almost as remorseless in her treatment of them as was John Calvin in Geneva, which came to have more prostitutes proportionately than any other city in Europe. Several modern attempts at annihilation have been made. Saxony tried to do away with prostitutes, but they exist in Dresden and other cities of the Kingdom and Hamburg claims to have banished them, but in that Free and Hanseatic city I was told by an American who was investigating the subject that there were as many there as elsewhere.