Scroll down to yesterday's post, or see Harper's Magazine on the Spitzer Investigation.



Stolen Kisses. 

Who're you really after, the hooker or the john?

I know many of you see my fondness for turn-of-the-last-century matters as being quaint and hopelessly irrelevant, but may I just point out that I was the first to bring up the Mann White Slave Traffic Act of 1910 and its relevance to the Eliot Spitzer sting investigation.

Of course you will say the Bush Junta Inquisition "Justice" Department didn't start out investigating Spitzer instead of the prostitution ring, or did they?  In any event, they used the Mann Act as the starting point, and the Harper's piece (link above) points out, "most of the high-profile cases brought under it were politically motivated and grossly abusive.  Here are a few:

• Heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson was the first man prosecuted under the act — for having an affair with Lucille Cameron, whom he later married. The prosecution was manifestly an effort “to get” Johnson, who at the time was the most famous African-American. (All of this is developed well in Ken Burns’s film “Unforgiveable Blackness”).

• University of Chicago sociologist William I. Thomas was prosecuted for having an affair with an officer’s wife in France. Thomas was targeted because of his Bohemian social and his radical political views.

• In 1944 Charles Chaplin was prosecuted for having an affair with actress Joan Barry. The prosecution again provided cover for a politically motivated effort to drive Chaplin out of the country.

• Canadian author Elizabeth Smart was arrested and charged in 1940 while crossing the border with the British poet George Barker."

Let us recall, however, that it was the British who first thought to tackle the issue of prostitution from the white slave traffic angle, and then the Americans saw the possibilities.  That was in 1904, and as I've said on more than one occasion, that was the year when everything important happened.  The rest is footnotes, my darlings.  Footnotes.