Selling Sex in the Silver Valley
Page 4
At the federal level, calls for reform led to the passage of the Mann Act in 1910. This law prohibited the transportation of women across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose, or with the intent and purpose to induce, entice, or compel such woman or girl to become a prostitute or give herself up to debauchery, or to engage in any other immoral practice.”72 Such sweeping and vague language was oriented toward eradicating what was known at the time as “white slavery,” or the procurement and confinement of women for the purpose of coercive or nonconsensual sex. Sex trafficking and slavery were problems, but reformers’ rhetoric and fear mongering were likely out of proportion to the reality. This legislation was driven by moral panic about prostitution and anxiety about immigrants. The Mann Act’s passage ultimately led to the development and growth of the FBI, which began as a niche investigative branch of the Department of Justice. Before the passage of this act, the FBI was a boutique agency, but the need to police the interstate transportation of women demanded more employees, increased funding and, of course, a larger bureaucracy.73
STEPS TOWARD REFORM:
THE SEX TRAFFICKING PANIC
The Silver Valley remained relatively immune to nationwide pressures to reform prostitution until conditions in the dance halls, variety shows and disreputable theaters finally prompted community members to take action. The suicide of one young man in connection with Dan McInnis’s Arcade Theater led some Wallace residents to urge the eradication of sex work. Despite the many instances of women’s suicide in the papers, it took the suicide of a man before people began to care enough to try to change things. For the first time in the city’s history, “moral concerns rather than business interests were emphasized,” and this moral argument “could only align itself with a prohibitionist position.”74 The reformers argued that “young men are, and have been, debauched, even into suicide,” and that “young women are being imported for immoral purposes,” suggesting that the women were simultaneously seducers and victims.75
The Arcade would outlast the other dance halls, however, probably because of McInnis’s connections or standing in the business community. Instead, the city targeted Emil VauCamp and Jennie Girardi, who ran the Surprise Theater and Palm Garden. After being denied a liquor license in 1909, VauCamp ignored the city and operated the combination brothel and bawdy theater without a license.76 City police seized “obscene films” and slot machines when they arrested VauCamp and Girardi, who were raided several more times before they finally came under scrutiny for procurement.77 In front of a federal court in Moscow, Lillie Dubois, a French immigrant, testified against the VauCamps through an interpreter, claiming that she had been kept a prisoner against her will, not allowed to leave the premises and not allowed to keep her earnings.78 The girl explained that “at all times her clothes had been taken from her and they had refused to let her leave the house unless under some sort of guardianship or unless accompanied by one or other of the two defendants or their satellites.”79 VauCamp and Girardi did not serve time, but they continued to be targeted by police and eventually left town.80
Newspaper ad for the Palm Garden, one of the last bawdy theaters in Wallace. From the Daily Times, July 16, 1908.
The story of Dubois was similar to a common narrative about sex work at this time. Across the country, a trend of literature detailed the procurements of young women by those trafficking in sex slavery, and it made the middle-class and elite populations nervous about the welfare of their daughters. According to the mostly sensational stories about this time, it’s unclear whether the women were trafficked or wanted an exit from sex work that wouldn’t leave them branded as prostitutes. Of course, many prostitution prohibitionists who encouraged the printing and distribution of these stories had self-serving agendas. They passed around exaggerated stories meant to invoke pity and generate political influence. But there were also those who genuinely felt called by God or their conscience to be a voice for others. They believed prostituted women could not speak for themselves or choose otherwise because they were essentially pressured into sex slavery by con artists who took advantage of vulnerable women. These men, who we might now refer to as pimps, were then called “procurers,” “peddlers,” “undesirables” or “secretaries.” The Mann Act targeted the men and labeled the women who were “inmates of bawdy houses” victims, effectively absolving them of moral responsibility and reframing them as rescued or saved.
Local papers fanned the flames by reprinting stories of sex slavery across the country, publishing tales of sex trafficking in Pittsburgh or nearby Butte.81 For example, the Wallace Press-Times featured this story of a San Francisco woman on trial for murdering her former peddler with a hatchet before proceeding “for more than 24 hours to dismember his body and hide the evidence of her crime”:
“Weinstein was a fiend,” she sobbed. “He followed me here from the east and threatened to ruin my home by exposing my former actions unless I again became his slave. Monday evening he went down town with my husband, but quickly returned home. He demanded that I leave my husband and go with him, or that he would show my husband letters. When I refused, he intimated we would begin the old life then. He advanced toward me, partly dressed. I can see his fiendish glare now. Oh it was horrible.
“Possibly it was because of the fear of losing my husband’s love that I struck him over the forehead with the hatchet. I must have been partly demented. It seems now that it was like a dream.”82
Even though the fears and rhetoric surrounding sex trafficking were overblown, as journalistic and popular reports around the country produced literature sensationalizing the seduction and procurement of women by predatory men, “a careful review of the evidence” does document “a real traffic in women: a historical fact and experience that must be integrated into the record.”83 Many vulnerable women who ran into financial insecurity were indeed coerced into prostitution and felt unable to leave even when not physically constrained, because they felt degraded and believed they would bear the stigma of immorality.
Procurers and madams lured women with promises of marriage or jobs like dressmaking, met them at train stations and then manipulated the women until they felt too demoralized or “ruined” to leave. Once a woman had been procured, her street clothes were taken away and replaced with “flimsy transparent gowns” to prevent her from entering the street until she was properly “broken in,” usually by being drugged and raped by customers until she felt disgraced and intimidated.84 Some men staged mock marriages that had no legal status, deliberately attempted to “entangle a woman in financial debt or emotional dependency” or took advantage of foreign immigrant girls who had no immediate family ties or could not speak English.85 Other women were told they would have to “work off ” their train tickets, and then they entered into what amounted to indentured servitude, unable to pay the original debt as well as the constantly accruing room and board debt.
In Wallace, few people were actually convicted under the Mann Act, but several were arrested. In most of these cases, the evidence was determined insufficient, or there were problems with the witnesses. But in the case of a madam named Effie Rogan, the charges stuck. Rogan ran a house called the Reliance from 1895 to 1911. Her brothel was located at 510 Pine Street from 1891 to 1904, at which point she moved to the triangle-shaped patch of land by the river, where she lived with two other women on the alley.86 Like many women who were selling sex in those days, her housemates’ occupations were listed as “dressmaker” or “hairdresser” during the 1910 census. Within a year, Rogan was in court on charges of keeping a house for the purpose of prostitution.87 Rogan ran into further trouble in 1912 when the district court convicted her on a charge of “white slavery” under the Mann Act.88 The details of these cases are missing from the files, but we do know Rogan ended up serving time in prison and paid a $1,000 fine.89
Wallace madam Effie Rogan in 1906, later convicted under the Mann Act. Barnard-Stockbridge Collection,
University of Idaho Library Special Collections and Archives.
Effie Rogan, madam of the Reliance, pictured here in 1906. Barnard-Stockbridge Collection, University of Idaho Library Special Collections and Archives.
In the cases where the charges were dropped, the offending parties were supposedly run out of town. In 1915, William Fanrick (or Fanrich—his name is spelled both ways) ended up in court for “being fighting drunk,” and upon further investigation, “it was found that he is in the class termed as ‘undesirables.’”90 Two days later, however, the newspaper claimed that the evidence against him “was submitted and pronounced insufficient to warrant a prosecution,” so the man promised the judge he “would mend his ways and leave the state of Idaho at once if he were turned loose.”91 The charges for disorderly conduct were dropped, and the article concluded he left town.
District court records also reveal one case against Charles Dereanzio, who apparently paid for a woman to travel across state lines under the false pretense of marrying him. The arrest warrant reveals that Dereanzio
did furnish to a certain woman, namely Pearl Ray, transportation on the railroad from the City of Spokane, State of Washington, to the City of Wallace, State of Idaho, and by such transportation and by letters and divers methods did induce, entice and procure the said Pearl Ray to come into this state for immoral purpose, to wit—for the purpose of prostitution; contrary to the form, force and effect of the Statute in such cases made as provided and against the peace and dignity of the State of Idaho.92
Witnesses on behalf of the state included Mrs. Harley Lamb, who ran the rooming house by the Northern Pacific Roundhouse where Dereanzio rented a room. Dereanzio admitted to buying Pearl Ray’s train ticket. Ray testified that she did housework as a domestic girl in Spokane, and she claimed to have known Dereanzio for about one and a half years, writing back and forth until he asked her to come to Wallace. Supposedly, they would be married as soon as she came to Wallace. They lived together in Mrs. Lamb’s rooming house until Ray decided he’d “told a lot of stories that wasn’t true and I just picked up and left him.”93
Mrs. Lamb, who ran a boardinghouse involved in a 1916 sex trafficking case. She is pictured here in 1918. Barnard-Stockbridge Collection, University of Idaho Library Special Collections and Archives.
Dereanzio’s lawyer, A.H. Featherstone, implied that she had been a “streetwalker” in Spokane before moving to Wallace and that she had requested Dereanzio bring her to town. Dereanzio therefore shouldn’t be prosecuted under the Mann Act, irrespective of the statute’s vague language, which might have justified the charge. A copy of the letter Pearl wrote is in the file (errors as in original):
My Dearest Husband
Your most kind and loveing letter recived and was very glad to here from my dear say sweetheart be sure and send for me right away. That if you want your wife I am so lossome I don’t know what to do now if you want me to come send right away say dharling I want you to have me up there befor wensday now be sure and wire me the ticket right away
love and kisses from your wife
address Pearl Ray
Gen Del
Spokane
write soon
and send for me94
Ray claimed that she wrote it according to Dereanzio’s instruction. She does appear to have been naïve and desperate. It’s obvious that her position was vulnerable, and it would have been easy for someone to take advantage of her by promising marriage. The case was eventually dismissed on June 24, 1916, by prosecuting attorney H.J. Hull, “due to the witnesses taking off.”95
During this time, according to Richard Magnuson, there was a series of attempts to eradicate gambling and pass “blue laws” as the reformist attitude spread.96 Sweet, W.A. Simons and the Sweet Hotel Company were charged with “willfully, unlawfully and knowingly” permitting “the games of poker and pangingy [panguingue],” but the case was dismissed by a grand jury in 1914.97 Stories about raids on poker games and bars having to close on Sundays appear in the Wallace Press-Times on December 17, 1915, and December 29, 1915. Most of the arrests appear to have been for show, and little was actually done to stem drinking, gambling or prostitution. Within individual cities in the Silver Valley, the women became less visible and less mobile, but in the greater region, they became increasingly mobile and began to move from city to city, facilitated by improvements in rail transportation.98 In later days, this would come to be called “the circuit.” Women frequently revised their names when they moved or changed working houses.99 Jessie Morin, also known as Josie Morin and Josie Moore, for example, ran several houses in Wardner and Wallace before settling in as a madam at the U&I Rooms in 1914.
Instead of attempting to eliminate sex work in town, city leaders chose to generate income for the city, in the form of both fees and fines. According to a Wallace Press-Times article, there were thirty-four women working in the red-light district in January 1912, and “the only effort” the town had made “to deal with the evil” was to charge them with “vagrancy, made in the police court once each month, where a fixed and nominal fine” was levied, basically amounting to authorized regulation “at the expense of the county.” In fact, the houses and saloons provided a major source of revenue that came into the city of Wallace, appearing in the form of taxes and “liquor and city licenses,” or “fines, costs, & forfeitures.”100 Street paving and an overall upgrade in the town’s appearance and structure, funded in large part by underground economies, began in September 1913, beginning with the section of town that housed the saloons and red-light district.101
Newspaper article about the Wallace Board of Health’s Inspection of Avenue A, around the time the city chose to regulate the houses rather than eradicate the district. From the Idaho Press, 1911.
In 1915, the city council passed Ordinance No. 94, requiring that hotels and lodging houses keep publicly available registers of occupants and visitors, with a fine of twenty-five dollars or a fifteen-day jail sentence as penalty. Every owner, proprietor or manager was instructed to record true names, not “false or fictitious,” and keep said register “open for the inspection of all persons at all times.”102 With large numbers of people moving into and out of town, this move appears to have been oriented toward improving records at ordinary hotels and lodging houses, but the ordinance would also provide the perception that the city would be better able to investigate sex slavery cases and regulate the women working in the houses.
WAR AND SOCIAL HYGIENE
By 1917, it had become apparent that the United States would intervene in the war ravaging Europe. Everyone was expected to support the war effort—newspapers published articles encouraging people to buy bonds, conserve resources and help keep morale high. The government singled out restricted districts as a special part of the preparations, with the War Department and the attorney general launching a massive campaign that they called a “war on prostitution.” Even in communities like Wallace, where people generally feared what they called “scatteration”—the idea that the women would scatter throughout the community if they were not contained within red-light districts—government officials recognized the power of citizens’ support, so they drove home arguments equating moral cleanliness with healthy soldiers and patriotism. Propaganda distributed to businesses recruited community members to pressure their local law enforcement officials: residents’ “eternal vigilance” would be needed to ensure a “morally clean city,” the materials urged. These pamphlets explained that “flimsy arguments in favor of segregation as the only alternative to ‘scatteration’” would not only “separate the soldier from his two dollars” but also “infect him with syphilis or gonorrhea” and “keep him out of the trenches.”103 The government literature linked prostitution to bootlegging and other so-called vice industries. This line of argument reasoned that there was a powerful web of mutual economic interests at stake, an alliance of people who had been “loud in their denunciations of the enforcement of laws against prostitution.”