The Mann Act? Really?

[I meant to post this on Edge of the American West, but Eric and Ari neglected to give me the admin privileges I so richly deserve, so I'm stuck posting it here.]

According to the Wall Street Journal, Governor Spitzer will be charged with violating what is popularly called the Mann Act, but which Congress passed as the White Slave Traffic Act.  It was designed to  "regulate interstate commerce and foreign commerce by prohibiting the transportation therein for immoral purposes of women and girls, and for other purposes."  That the bill prohibits transportation for "immoral purposes" and "other purposes" is as problematically vague as you suppose.  Shortly after its passage, the Virginia Law Review voiced its concern that those phrases grant:

the statute such sweeping comprehensiveness as to include every form of conduct contrary to good order. 

Or as the New York Times put it:

GIVES WIDE SCOPE
TO WHITE SLAVE LAW
_____
Supreme Court Holds That the
Act is Not Limited to Com-
mercialized Vice.

________
INCLUDES ESCAPADES ALSO

The Act not only included escapades, it threatened to criminalize all larks, shenanigans, antics, frolics, capers, flings, and high jinks—at least as practiced by the citizenry.  Because the very same ambiguity allowed ideologues in police departments and district attorney offices to prosecute anyone and everyone for anything and everything.  The first person arrested under the act, heavy-weight champion Jack Johnson, was charged with consorting with his white wife shortly after defeating "The Great White Hope" in "The Fight of the Century" in what is most certainly a coincidence.  (Also coincidental: the judge who presided over Johnson's case was none other than Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who while serving as the commissioner of Major League Baseball, blocked the sale of teams to owners who would integrate their roster.)

As H.L. Mencken noted, this expansiveness was a feature, not a bug:

It was carried through Congress, over the veto of President Taft, who discerned its extravagance, on the plea that it was needed to put down the traffic in prostitutes; it is enforced today against men who are no more engaged in the traffic in prostitutes than you or I. Naturally enough, the effect of this extension of its purposes, against which its author has publicly protested, has been to make it a truly deadly weapon in the hands of professional Puritans and of denouncers of delinquency even less honest. "Blackmailers of both sexes have arisen," says Mr. Justice McKenna, "using the terrors of the construction now sanctioned by the [Supreme] Court as a help—indeed, the means—for their brigandage. The result is grave and should give us pause."

Lest you think Mencken's merely grinding another of his innumerable axes, in 1936 the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology comforts its readers with this balm salve:

Although many believe the "Mann Act" has become a dead letter through the policy of non-enforcement, a recent statement by J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, shows that this is not true.  He said: "During ... the month of June, 1936, there were more convictions for the violations of the White Slave Traffic Act than in any month during the past three years."

What does all of this mean for Spitzer?  I don't know.  Maybe some of you legal types know how the Mann Act works behind the scenes.  It obviously could be used to coerce testimony from someone.  (The Times didn't dub it "the Encouragement of Blackmail Act" for nothing now.)
 

Comments

[Ari]

Dude, any time you want to post, all you have to do is say the word.* Our blog is your blog. Surely you know that.

* You know the word. Don't play with me.

[Ari]

There really was supposed to be a "coy" between "with and "me." In fact, I remember typing it. That's just weird.

[JPool]

In my natal neighborhood "Don't play with me." meant the same thing as "Don't play coy with me."

[Luther Blissett]

Two words: President McCain.

[Ari]

Mine, too, JPOOL. But I didn't want to assume the same was true for everyone. And Luther, I'm really not sure I'm following you. You think Spitzer's fall will yield victory for McCain in the general?

[onymous]

Wait, it was supposed to be "don't play with coy me"?

[John Emerson]

Humbert Humbert was knowledgeable about the Mann Act, the Children and Young Persons Act of 1933, and the age of consent in various jurisdictions and in Roman Catholic canon law. He makes the requisite joke about the name of Mann Act.

At my URL I tell you who the model for Humbert Humbert was, and also many other things.

Paterno State University has posted an interesting piece on the legal ramifications of Lolita.

[Belle Lettre]

You want legal perspectives on the Mann Act? I give you legal perspectives on the Mann Act.