White Slave Trade 1910

Cafe Society
1

There is a book on the the white slave trade copyrighted 1910. Since people have wondered about this topic in the past on this board I’m linking a free download. Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls or, War on the White Slave Trade

By the title you can see this book will not make some people happy.

Please leave this thread on the topic and don’t derail it, with what you think is humor, a raving on slavery in general, or nasty remarks about perceptions of the period the book was written. This is a notice for people that want to learn something about the white slave trade.

Thank you for being courteous in advance.
Harmonious Discord.

2

What exactly do you think is on topic? “Yup, it’s an old book alright.”?

3

I’m putting the link for people that want to read on the topic. Anybody that likes to add links to material on the topic feel free to add them.

4

“White slavery” is an oooooold panic that has recently resurfaced as the term “Human trafficking” . Very similar to the claims of the Know-Nothings against Cathlolics and southern Europeans of the same era to the illegal immigration panic today.

Reason has a fantastic book review that discusses its origins.

5

I’m still confused what Harmonious Discord’s intent with the OP was. It sounds like he’s offering up the book of proof that the claims in it are real, and then saying that any attempt to say otherwise would be getting the thread off topic. If that is the intent, well, sorry, but that isn’t going to fly.

This whole thing needs to be in Great Debates, because the book certainly isn’t going to be discussed as literature but only as a data point in the greater debate about so-called white slavery.

6

My grandfather had a sister who was supposedly white slaved ca. early-mid 1920s. The story that’s passed down goes like this:

She was one of 15 children of an Alabama peasant farmer/mule trader (who lived in a board and tin roofed cabin but wasn’t indigent at all- he was just very thrifty and afraid of letting it be known he actually had a good bit of cash hidden on the place). Being one of a crowd, about 14 or 15 and naive, she probably didn’t get a lot of attention (this too part of the legend) and a “smooth talking dude” she met who sold notions from a rolling store (motorized, not horse drawn) convinced her to go out with him. The date was chaperoned, so she was shocked when he asked her out again, once again chaperoned, and somewhere on the second/third date he asked her meet him secretly.
He told her in one of their quick chaperone free moments (when the chaperones were in the necessary or whatever) something to the effect of "I’m leaving the area tomorrow, I’ll be back on Thursday next week, meet me at the old train depot in [a town about 3 miles away] about noon and we’ll have some private time. It’s noon so you don’t need to worry about your safety, but I’m very afraid of your father and your brothers so don’t tell anyone where you’re going or who you’re going to meet, just tell them you’re going to go to the store or to pick blackberries perhaps.
Anyway, per the story, when she showed up he and a buddy abducted her, drove her away, raped her, and sold her. I have no idea where they sold her, but she supposedly wound up in a brothel somewhere in Chicago, though she was such a prisoner that it took a while before she even realized where she was. She was of course threatened with instant death if she tried to escape, but somehow she managed to get a pencil and piece of paper and convince one of her johns to mail a letter for her along with the address where she was located (which the john obviously knew).
He mailed it and it got back to Alabama where they were worried to death about her- they didn’t know if she’d died in the woods, run away to get married, or what- they did suspect the salesman but he proved impossible to trace and wasn’t seen again in that part of Alabama (though there was a follow-up story).
Per my grandfather (who was not prone to embellishment) the salesman “thought he was dealing with a simple hillbilly girl, which I guess he was… but it was a simple hillbilly girl with a daddy, 10 brothers, and enough men cousins and men uncles to take on the French Foreign Legion and every one of 'em with a car and a gun and a hundred alibis”. The girl’s father (my g-grandfather) and several of his older sons and male relatives went up by train and came back with her a few days later. Several of the brothers were beaten up pretty badly but none had permanent damage. The women of the family were all basically instructed never to ask what happened.
The sister, Rebecca, has only been dead for a few years (she lived into her 90s) and I met her several times, but obviously never mentioned the story. She married a few years later and had a couple of kids and never moved away from the family farm (she lived on a 10 acre or so plot her father gave her) and had a roadside stand and interest in a (still in business and still successful local) sausage company.

Anyway, I don’t know the truth value of this story. I do know my grandfather was not as prone to embellishment as other members of the family, and that the few parts I heard him tell he told in dead serious fashion, including a couple of brothers later coming across the salesman during the Depression. I do know this, though: in the little research I’ve done from scholarly subjects (one thing I tried to find was any mention of hillbillies attacking a Chicago red light establishment ca. 1925- nada) it said that the modus operandi of the salesman was simultaneously the stuff of purple prose and dime store magazines, but also was a tactic that really was known to have happened in real life. The most contradictory element with known real accounts of white slaving (for it did happen) was that Atlanta and Memphis were the two most prominent hubs for the southeast. (I’d have thought New Orleans, but apparently not.)

Still, Chicago could have been an alibi, so who knows?

7

It’s certainly true that some women of the era were forced into sexual slavery, but the problem was overstated. Books like the one linked to were just exercises in panicking the nation; there really wasn’t any need to force women to become prostitutes when there were plenty of willing ones.

8

That’s what gets me. Why force a woman to do what many women are quite willing to do? Perhaps if you have some particularly gorgeous girl, but even so you risk life imprisonment getting caught while a madame gets… what? A fine and probation if that?
Plus as awful as it is to say it is true: there was probably never a huge shortage of desperate families willing to sell their teenaged daughters (and sons) into the trade (impoverished immigrants, alcoholics, just “total bastard to begin with” types, psychos, etc.), which still cuts off anywhere for them to run if they escape. Richard Pryor’s grandmother was not financially desperate or, according to him, an evil person- she was a very successful madam who largely raised him- yet she entered two of her own daughters into the business.

9

The point is people have to read the book to see what it’s about. I’m not starting a thread to debate it at this time.

The subject has arising in GQ before and this is something people may wish to look at before it shows up again. The fact it was written during the time it was being discussed in countries across the world it will have the thoughts of that period injected into the book. This can give us a better idea of what the term really meant back then.

10

There are more than adequate summaries out there. Nobody needs to waste his or her time reading the whole thing. But by all means, those people who are interested can and should.

Seems pretty pointless to make a thread at all then if you don’t want anyone to talk about it.

11

it’s also available as a Google Book, if you’d rather page your way through a PDF file.

I would say, rather, that this is a notice for people who want to learn something about what frightened Middle Class America in the early decades of the 20th century, because there’s isn’t any actual information about a white slave trade therein. I just looked through the Google Books PDF version, and it’s all rhetoric, preaching, and anecdotes about prostitutes–there’s not a single bit of evidence for an actual syndicate of white slavers systematically abducting or persuading young women into a network of organized prostitution. Even the contributions by a district attorney have no actual hard evidence, just more preaching and rhetoric.

It was a time of great social and economic flux, and when people feel their lives are out of control, they sometimes turn to conspiracy theories. The main thrust of the underlying anxiety about white slavery seems to be that parents are losing control over their children, and specifically their daughters. This makes sense because daughters in Victorian Society have a virginity that the Society sets great store by, and losing the virginity is considered a social disaster. So, the anxiety focuses on the daughter losing her virginity, but in your anxiety you cannot conceive that she would do it deliberately, because that would make her a Bad Girl, so you transfer your anxiety to shadowy abductors, and to the ignorance of other (Bad) parents who do not realize the dangers in loosing the apron strings and allowing their (virgin) daughters to leave their immediate orbit, i.e. leave home without being married first, as the Society at large in the early 20th century was encouraging young women to do.

So instead of worrying about the sexuality of the 18-year-old daughter who has just marched off to the Big City to be a typist in an office, instead of worrying that she might have sex with someone voluntarily and so lose her all-important virginity, you worry that she might be abducted and forced into sex. Because your daughter (“My daughter!”) would never, never voluntarily have sex.

Displacement. It’s all about displacement.

So it’s also a good opportunity for us all to learn the word “bugaboo”…

12

Or sometimes as young as 15, in those days. Adulthood started earlier then,

13

Duck Duck Goose has got it exactly. I’d add that white slavery also makes a great alibi for girls who’ve gotten themselves into a bit of trouble. “It wasn’t my fault, Daddy. I didn’t run off to shack up with Billy and get a job on my back. I was enslaved.”

14

Historically, people have been willing to do even tough, dangerous, unpleasant jobs in exchange for a decent wage. And yet, historically, people have been willing to spend large amounts of money obtaining and controlling other people in order to force them to work for nothing. If this is true for brickmaking, mining, cotton-picking, rowing, etc. then it seems reasonable to assume it will also hold true for prostitution. It certainly seems to be thriving in the modern world - estimates for forced prostitution and related human trafficking go up into six figures per year for the EU alone.

Kidnapping them from ice-cream parlours sounds pretty damn unlikely though - one would expect anyone involved in that sort of thing to avoid fixed addresses like the plague.

15

I’ll try to read it, with a grain of salt, judging from the comments of the other posters. Doesn’t look like difficult reading.

Back at ya when I finish.

16

All right, I started reading it a bit. It’s 245 pages, so it’s not going to be done today. But here are some choice things from just the first few pages:

Are you kidding me? This is the greatest crime in the world’s history? Comments like that make me feel the author might be ever so slightly biased. :dubious:

Nicely done…nice little jab included in there. As if white people wouldn’t sell white people if there was a profit! In every race there are those people who think the bottom line is the most important thing…it’s just a feature of the human race.

So there is a part which talks about an “international project of agreement for the suppression of the white-slave traffic” taking place in 1902, adopted by a whole list of countries. It says nothing about whether white slave trade actually takes place, or how much, or how many. Mainly it says the governments, “'being desirous to assure to women who have attained their majority and are subjected to deception or constraint, as well as minor women and girls, an efficacious protection against the criminal traffic known under the name of trade in white women”

So they are protecting the women from a trade that we have not ascertained has happened. It then goes on to say,

Nice.

So far I have not seen one statistic or fact, just a hell of a lot of hyperbole, and what’s that other word? HISTRIONICS. After that it goes on to talk about the pure, innocent, sweet little girls and the ogres who take them away. Appeal to emotion, anyone?

Thus far I am not impressed. I’ll try to continue reading though. Probably will update tomorrow, depends on how much I get through.

17

Another thought: pornography and open discussion of sex were generally Not Okay in polite society in 1910. But . . . if you could dress up a lurid tale of some pristine innocent white girl being subjected to the most vile sexual indignities imaginable as a form of social crusading, why then, any respectable middle class man (or woman – some women certainly have subjugation fantasies) could avidly lap it up in the open, while enjoying the concomitant benefit of the moral high ground. I’m convinced a fair amount of the white slave panic (and maybe even some abolitionist books that gave perhaps-excessive attention to the molesting of nubile slave girls by cruel masters) was market-driven softcore porn, or as close to that as the mores of the day would allow.

18

You run an ice cream parlor, don’t you?

19

I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewheree but I am afraid I am too stupid to get it. :frowning:

20

This is ridiculous. (skimming it)

CITE???

This is tripe. I’ll skim it a bit longer but soon it is going in the trash.