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Hellraisers Journal – Monday April 19, 1909
Chicago, Illinois – Crusade Against Traffic in Girls Halted by U. S Supreme Court
From the Appeal to Reason of April 17, 1909:
TRAFFIC IN GIRLS.
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When it comes to suppressing real crime the law, as administered under the present system, always proved a mockery and a farce. The decision is invariably in favor of the strong and against the weak; in favor of the class in power and against its subjects.
Recently there has been a federal investigation of the unspeakable white slave traffic in Chicago. District Attorney Edward W. Sims has been honestly trying, be it said to his credit, to suppress the revolting commerce in young girls which has blackened the centers of our so-called civilization. About the time the district attorney had his evidence complete and felt sure of his case the United States supreme court rendered a decision shattering the prosecution and in effect legalizing the shocking white slave traffic. It seems unbelievable and yet the facts stand forth beyond dispute. The decision in question has just been rendered and in referring to it District Attorney Sims says:
It will be necessary now to prove the actual importation in each case. I think the federal government will be able to do very little in obtaining convictions. The entire prosecution of such cases will be left to the state courts and to the police.
Which means that the white slave traffic will be left to the gamblers, blacklegs, hack-politicians and pimps, agents of the commercial pirates who established the traffic, and who are carrying it forward to the everlasting disgrace of the state and for their own private gain.
Under this odius and abhorrent traffic thousands of poor, innocent girls are lured to this country, ruined and placed in brothels under contract to end their blasted lives in nameless horror.
The point above all others to take into account is that these girls are uniformly the children of poverty, the daughters of the working class, and for this reason it is of grave significance and its lesson should be graven deeply upon the hearts of all the millions who toil.
It is not after all so very strange that a capitalist class supreme court should legalize the white slave traffic, seeing that the white slaves are all of the working class and a part of the great bulk of human commodities in which capitalism traffics to maintain its trust-blown power upon a foundation of broken hearts and blasted lives.
The legalizing of the white slave traffic is a peculiarly virulent symptom of class ruled and class corrupted society.
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[Photograph adde.]
From the Duluth Labor World of April 17, 1909:
WHITE SLAVE SYSTEM UPHELD BY JUDGE
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Renders Decision That Will Place
Alien Girls at Mercy of
Redlight Cadets.
—–CHICAGO, April 15.-The federal crusade against the white slave traffic was effectually checked and the elaborate machinery which the government had constructed in the secret service for fighting this evil has been smashed to bits by a decision of the United States supreme court which has held that a person cannot be prosecuted for harboring an alien woman in a house of ill-frame.
The ruling was in the cases of Joseph Keller and Louis Ullman, who were convited last June in the United States district court for the northern district of Illinois, on a charge of harboring for improper purposes in South Chicago an alien woman, Irene Bodi. The woman was a subject of Austria, and had been in the United States less than three years.
According to District Attorney Sims the decision will limit the activity of the federal court in cases of traffic in alien women.
Under the law of 1875, before it was amended a conviction in a case of this nature could not be obtained unless the prosecution proved that the offender actually imported an alien woman for immoral purposes. The amendment of 1907 made a keeper of a disorderly house liable to five years imprisonment and a fine of $5,000 for harboring, keeping or maintaining in any way for questionable purposes an alien woman within three years from the time after her arrival in the United States.
“Under the law of 1875 it has been found very difficult to obtain convictions in cases of importation of alien women,” Attorney Sims said yesterday. “If it will be necessary now to prove the actual importation in each such case, I believe that the Federal government will be able to do very little in obtaining convictions. The entire prosecution of such cases will be left to the state courts and to the police.”
The opinion of the supreme court was announced by Justice Brewer who said that the matter was one of falling within the jurisdiction of the state courts as a police power. The supreme court directed that the cases be reconsidered and the indictments quashed.
Attorney Benjamin C. Bachrach, who conducted the cases of Keller and Ullman said last night that the decision of that tribunal would result in the release of more than a hundred men now serving sentences on convictions obtained under the amended law.
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Note: Emphasis added throughout.
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SOURCES
Quote Joe Hill, White Slave, LRSB 1913
Joe Hill 100, Songs, White Slave
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-Apr 17, 1909
https://www.newspapers.com/image/66981801/
The Labor World
(Duluth, Minnesota)
-Apr 17, 1909
https://www.newspapers.com/image/49588195/
IMAGES
War on White Slave Trade by Ernest A Bell, Bars p194, 1909
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=lfg3AQAAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA194-IA1
War on White Slave Trade by EAB, Edwin W Sims p2, 1909
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=lfg3AQAAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PR10
See also:
United States Supreme Court
KELLER v. U. S., 213 U.S. 138 (1909)
No. 653, 654
Argued: March 1, 1909
Decided: April 5, 1909
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/213/138.html
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/213/138/
War on the White Slave Trade
-ed by Ernest A. Bell
Chicago, 1909
https://books.google.com/books?id=lfg3AQAAMAAJ
Des Moines Tribune p3 of Dec 15, 1909, “new book”
https://www.newspapers.com/image/323207689/
1910 Edition with more drawings and photos:
Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls
-or War on the White Slave Trade
-ed by Ernest A. Bell
https://books.google.com/books?id=CwBdhVA9FrcC
The Shame of a Great Nation
-by E. Norine Law
United Evangelical Pub, 1909
https://books.google.com/books?id=rRgEAAAAYAAJ
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The White Slave – Lucas Stark
Lyrics Joe Hill