Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,005

This is the grave of James Mann.

Born near Bloomington, Illinois in 1856, Mann grew up in a prominent agricultural family interested in reform of the topic. He went to the University of Illinois but rather than follow his older brother into the farm world, he wanted to be a lawyer. He got his law degree from Union College of Law in 1881 and then passed the bar and began practicing in Chicago. Like a lot of people we cover in this series, the law was a pathway to politics. Mann didn’t care so much about agricultural issues, but for a Gilded Age Republican, he was definitely on the reformer side of things and became identified with the growing Progressive movement.

Mann began running for local office in 1887 when he won a seat on a local board of education. That led to additional local runs. He made it to the City Council in 1892 and then in 1896, to Congress. Mann remained in Congress for the rest of his life. He was in a very Republican district and so never faced a serious challenge again. By and large, he was a big reformer.

But you know, when you are talking about Progressives, the reformers play as good or really bad depending on the issue, but they often come out of the same person. Mann is a great example of this. His name is on two enormously important bills. The first is the Mann-Elkins Act. This was passed in 1910 and is one of the key railroad regulation bills. It’s difficult to comprehend just how powerful the railroads were at this time and how loathed they were as corporations. It’s a bit like tech today, except that most Americans love tech so there’s no meaningful opposition to the horror show of the CEOs who want to dominate our lives. After all, who can say no to a world of terrible Netflix shows and Tik-Tok videos and fascist influencers? What a country! Well, back in the days when people actually had a critique of contemporary capitalism, the railroads were the top target.

So what Mann-Elkins did was to empower the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroad rates, also expanding the ICC’s mandate to include the telegraph and growing telephone industries. When western railroads decided to jack up their rates in 1910, Mann and Stephen Elkins, who had lived in New Mexico for quite awhile but was then a senator from West Virginia, decided to act. It’s an important bill that really did reduce the power of corporate America a little bit. He also had introduced the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

But then there’s the other side of the Progressives. That’s the side that liked to police bodies and behavior. The second thing Mann is known for is the infamous Mann Act, also from 1910, that made it a felony to bring women across state lines for sex work. Basically, this was the white slavery scare placed into law. Progressives were all whipped up over the idea that our good little white girls were entering the city and being taken in by evil Italians or Chinese or Blacks and given drugs and then forced into sex and a permanent sense of white slavery. In short, this is the early version of Nic Kristof’s bullshit about sex workers in Cambodia (and never forget that he was completely scammed in his “investigations” in Cambodia and his endless lies did not lead to even the slightest blink by the New York Times over continuing to run his white savior bullshit columns). Sex work was common. And there was some sex trafficking, sure. But was there even the slightest thought given to why this was happening and the economic conditions behind it? Not by too many people. Would they admit that for some women, sex work was a reasonable economic option? Absolutely not. No, it must be those foreigners and darkies.

So when the Mann Act passed in 1910, it was part of a larger freak out (see the 1911 film Traffic in Souls, which still exists, as the best cultural manifestation of this) over white slavery. Incidentally, it was Charles Sumner who actually coined the term “white slavery” back in 1847 to discuss the Barbary pirates’ engagement in the slave trade. Anyway, the first major prosecution of the law was of the boxer Jack Johnson, as whites were desperate to take him off of the throne as heavyweight champion. Johnson loved to date white women and flaunt them in the face of the crackers. And that a boxer would date prostitutes hardly shocked anyone. So Johnson was prosecuted under the Mann Act in 1912. Oddly, Mann opposed the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1912, so that was one area where he did not play the moral scold.

So that pretty much sums up the Progressives. We need to square these two sides. I recently reviewed a book about the horrors of Oregon progressives policing the bodies of women, gender non-binary people, and immigrants for a professional journal. It’s a good book, but I also stated that the overwhelming discussion of Progressives today are as horrible people and the social libertarianism of the left actually plays very well with the economic libertarianism of the right. In short, if all we do is condemn these people for engaging in state interventions with people (and in these cases, yeah, condemn anyway), then aren’t we also playing into the idea across the political spectrum that the state has no role to play in society period. In short, we have to be able to take the good parts of state intervention and also the bad parts and come up with a more sophisticated analysis of when the state should intervene in society. What is freedom anyway? I don’t think it is a libertarian paradise. In fact, that sounds terrible. But this seems to be where critics, both left and right, lean these days.

Anyway, Mann was still in Congress when he got pneumonia and died in 1922. He was 66 years old.

James Mann is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit some of the people Mann worked on with his legislature, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Stephen Elkins is in Elkins, West Virginia (appropriately enough) and Weldon Heyburn is in Birmingham, Pennsylvania (despite being a senator from Idaho). Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.