The White-Slave Traffic Act, better known as the Mann Act, is a United States law, passed June 25, 1910 (ch. 395, 36 Stat. 825; codified as amended at 18 U.S.C. §§ 2421–2424). It is named after Congressman James Robert Mann, and in its original form prohibited white slavery and the interstate transport of females for "immoral purposes". Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution, "immorality", and human trafficking; however, its ambiguous language of "immorality" allowed selective prosecutions for many years, and was used to criminalize forms of consensual sexual behavior.^[1] It was later amended by Congress in 1978, and again in 1986 to apply only to transport for the purpose of prostitution or illegal sexual acts.^[1]

Promotion[link]

Suffrage activists, especially Harriet Burton Laidlaw and Rose Livingston, worked in the Chinatown section of New York and in other cities to rescue young white and Chinese girls from forced prostitution, and helped pass the Mann Act to make interstate sex trafficking a federal crime.^[2]

Prosecutions[link]

The most common use of the Mann Act was to prosecute men for having sex with underage females.^[3] It was also used to harass others who had drawn the authorities' wrath for "immoral" behavior.

The first person prosecuted under the act was African-American heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson.^[4] He had had an interracial affair with a white prostitute named Lucille Cameron, but she refused to cooperate with the prosecution; Johnson later married her. Less than a month later, he was re-arrested for having crossed a state line, before the Mann Act was passed, with Belle Schreiber, a prostitute who had left a brothel. She testified against him, and Johnson was convicted and sentenced to the maximum penalty of a year and a day in prison.

Pioneering sociologist William I. Thomas's academic career at the University of Chicago was irreversibly damaged^{[citation needed]} after he was arrested under the act when caught in the company of one Mrs. Granger, the wife of an army officer with the American forces in France. Thomas was acquitted at trial.

Canadian author Elizabeth Smart described being arrested under the Mann Act in 1940 when crossing a state border with her lover, the British poet George Barker, in her book By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. She memorably intertwined the callous police interrogation under this law with quotations about love from the Song of Songs.

The 1948 Mann Act prosecution of Frank LaSalle for abducting Florence Sally Horner is believed to have been an inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov in writing his novel Lolita. The book's protagonist Humbert Humbert, seeking to escape watchful eyes and bind the girl, Dolores Haze, more closely to him, also conducted a multi-state road trip during the course of the story.^[5]

In the late 1950s, Kid Cann, an organized crime figure from Minneapolis, Minnesota, was prosecuted and convicted under the Mann Act after transporting a prostitute from Chicago to Minnesota. His conviction was later overturned on appeal. Even later, Kid Cann was prosecuted and convicted of offering a $25,000 bribe to a juror at his trial under the Mann Act.

As there is no federal U.S. law against polygamy as such,^[6] except in territories,^[7] the Mann Act has been used by federal officials wishing to penalize polygamy to prosecute various polygamist individuals known as Mormon fundamentalists.^[6][8] (All U.S. states have anti-polygamy laws; in recent years state authorities have sometimes targeted organized polygamists.) The twin communities of Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah, Bountiful, British Columbia, and sites in Mexico^[9] are historic locations of several Mormon Fundamentalist sects.^[10]Mormon fundamentalist leaders and individuals^[6] have been charged under Mann when "wives" are transported across the Utah-Arizona state line or the U.S.–Canadian and U.S.–Mexican borders.^[6][11]

Notable individuals arrested[link]

Notable individuals investigated under the Act[link]

• Anwar al-Awlaki, an American Islamist cleric, was investigated for violations of Mann Act, authorities primarily wanting to arrest him for his ties to the 9/11 hijackers, but left the United States for Yemen before he could be detained.^[24]
• Dusan Popov, a World War II Allied spy with a "James Bond" lifestyle, was threatened with arrest under the Mann Act.^[25]
• Individuals associated with a Emperors Club VIP prostitution ring that had former Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer as a client.^[26]

• Individuals associated with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) church, such as Warren Jeffs and Merril Jessop have refused to answer questions during depositions and court hearings, citing the 5th amendment, over concerns of self-incrimination related to "potential state investigation still ongoing, as well as criminal investigations under the Mann Act out of the U.S. Attorney's Office."^[27]

Mann Act case decisions by the United States Supreme Court[link]

• Hoke v. United States, 227 U.S. 308 (1913). The Court held that Congress could not regulate prostitution per se, as that was strictly the province of the states. Congress could, however, regulate interstate travel for purposes of prostitution or "immoral purposes".
• Athanasaw v. United States, 227 U.S. 326 (1913). The Court decided that the law was not limited strictly to prostitution, but to "debauchery" as well.
• Caminetti v. United States, 242 U.S. 470 (1917). The Court decided that the Mann Act applied not strictly to purposes of prostitution, but to other noncommercial consensual sexual liaisons. Thus consensual extramarital sex falls within the genre of "immoral sex".
• Gebardi v. United States, 287 U.S. 112 (1932). The Court held that the statutory intent was not to punish a woman's acquiescence; therefore, consent by the woman does not expose her to liability.
• Cleveland v. United States, 329 U.S. 14 (1946). The Court decided that a person can be prosecuted under the Mann Act even when married to the woman if the marriage is polygamous. Thus polygamous marriage was determined to be an "immoral purpose".
• Bell v. United States, 349 U.S. 81 (1955). The Supreme Court decided that simultaneous transportation of two women across state lines constituted only one violation of the Mann Act, not two violations.

Congressional amendments to the law[link]

In 1978, Congress updated the act's definition of "transportation" and added protections against commercial sexual exploitation for minors. It added a 1986 amendment which further protected minors and added protection for adult males. In particular, as part of a larger 1986 bill focused on criminalizing various aspects of child pornography that passed unanimously in both houses of Congress,^[28] the Mann act was further amended to replace the ambiguous "debauchery" and "any other immoral purpose" with the more specific "any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense"^[1] as well as to make it gender-neutral.^[28]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Langum, David J. (1994). Crossing over the line. Legislating Morality and the Mann Act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46880-1. 

External links[link]

• Text of the Act, from PBS
• 18 USC 2421, the current version of the law

Look up Mann in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Mann may refer to:

• Isle of Man, known as "Mann" as an alternative shorter name
• Mann (military rank), a Nazi paramilitary rank
• Mannaz, conventional name of the Futhorc m-rune
• Mann Theatres, a theatre chain corporation
• Mann (magazine), a Norwegian magazine
• Mann (film), a 1999 Bollywood motion picture
• Mann (rapper), a rapper signed to Beluga Heights Records
• Mann+Hummel, a German automotive OEM and aftermarket parts company
• Mann language, a Mande language
• Mann (unit), an obsolete Arabic unit of mass
• Mann (surname), people with the surname Mann

See also[link]

• Maan (disambiguation)
• Man (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Look up act in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Act may mean:

• Act/Power is a philosophical notion defined by Aristotle and known as entelechy
• Act (band), a British band
• Act (document), a document recording the legality of a transaction or contract
• Act of Parliament, Act of Congress or Act of Tynwald, a statute or law passed by a legislature
• Act (drama), a segment of a performance, such as a play or opera
• Act or Acts, an obsolete name for the defence of theses at the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge
• Acting, action of an actor in a theatrical performance
• Acting (law), in law when someone is acting in a position of higher expenses
• Acting (rank), in the military when someone assumes a higher rank temporarily
• Act or S-act, the action of a monoid on a set, or a semiautomaton.
• ISO 639-3 language code for Achterhooks

Acts may mean:

• Acts of the Apostles, a book of the Christian New Testament
• Sage ACT!, a customer relationship management software

See also[link]

• ACT (disambiguation)
• ACTS (disambiguation)
• ACTE (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Anthony Comstock
Photograph of Anthony Comstock from a 1913 publication
Born	(1844-03-07)March 7, 1844 New Canaan, Connecticut, United States
Occupation	United States Postal Inspector
Organization	United States Postal Inspection Service
Known for	Creation of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice Comstock law
Awards	Queen's Police Medal Prime Minister's Above and Beyond award

Anthony Comstock (March 7, 1844 – September 21, 1915) was a United States Postal Inspector and politician dedicated to ideas of Victorian morality.

Biography[link]

Comstock was born in New Canaan, Connecticut. As a young man, he enlisted and fought for the Union in the American Civil War from 1863 to 1865 in Company H, 17th Connecticut Infantry. He served without incident, but objected to the profanity used by his fellow soldiers.^[1] Afterward he became an active worker in the Young Men's Christian Association in New York City.

In 1873, Comstock created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an institution dedicated to supervising the morality of the public. Later that year, Comstock successfully influenced the United States Congress to pass the Comstock Law, which made illegal the delivery or transportation of "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material as well as any methods of, or information pertaining to, birth control and venereal disease. George Bernard Shaw used the term "comstockery", meaning "censorship because of perceived obscenity or immorality", after Comstock alerted the New York City police to the content of Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession. Shaw remarked that "Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all." Comstock thought of Shaw as an "Irish smut dealer."^[2] The term comstockery was actually first coined in an editorial in The New York Times in 1895.^[3]

Comstock lived in Summit, New Jersey from 1880 to 1915.^[4] He built a house there in 1892 at 35 Beekman Road, where he died in 1915.^[5]

Comstock's ideas of what might be "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" were quite broad. During his time of greatest power, even some anatomy textbooks were prohibited from being sent to medical students by the United States Postal Service.^[1]

Comstock aroused intense loathing from early civil liberties groups and intense support from church-based groups worried about public morals. He was a savvy political insider in New York City and was made a special agent of the United States Postal Service, with police powers up to and including the right to carry a weapon. With this power he zealously prosecuted those he suspected of either public distribution of pornography or commercial fraud. He was also involved in shutting down the Louisiana Lottery, the only legal lottery in the United States at the time, and notorious for corruption.

Comstock is also known for his opposition to Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, and those associated with them. The men's journal The Days' Doings had popularized images of the sisters for three years and was instructed by its editor (while Comstock was present) to stop producing images of "lewd character". Comstock also took legal action against the paper for advertising contraceptives. When the sisters published an expose of an adulterous affair between Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton, he had the sisters arrested under laws forbidding the use of the postal service to distribute 'obscene material'–specifically citing a mangled Biblical quote Comstock found obscene–though they were later acquitted of the charges.

Less fortunate was Ida Craddock, who committed suicide on the eve of reporting to Federal prison for distributing via the U.S. Mail various sexually explicit marriage manuals she had authored. Her final work was a lengthy public suicide note specifically condemning Comstock.

Comstock claimed he drove fifteen persons to suicide in his "fight for the young".^[6] He was head vice-hunter of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Comstock, the self-labeled "weeder in God's garden", arrested D. M. Bennett for publishing his "An Open Letter to Jesus Christ" and later entrapped the editor for mailing a free-love pamphlet. Bennett was prosecuted, subjected to a widely publicized trial, and imprisoned in the Albany Penitentiary.

Comstock had numerous enemies, and in later years his health was affected by a severe blow to the head from an anonymous attacker. He lectured to college audiences and wrote newspaper articles to sustain his causes. Before his death, Comstock attracted the interest of a young law student, J. Edgar Hoover, interested in his causes and methods.

During his career, Comstock clashed with Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger. In her autobiography, Goldman referred to Comstock as the leader of America's "moral eunuchs". Through his various campaigns, he destroyed 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates for printing 'objectionable' books, and nearly 4,000,000 pictures.^[1] Comstock boasted that he was responsible for 4,000 arrests.^[7]

A biography of Comstock written in 1927, "Anthony Comstock: Roundsman Of The Lord" by Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech of the Algonquin Round Table examines his personal history and his investigative, surveillance and law enforcement techniques.

Works[link]

• Frauds Exposed (1880)
• Traps for the Young (1883)
• Gambling Outrages (1887)
• Morals Versus Art (1887)

He wrote numerous magazine articles relating to similar subjects.

References in fiction and culture[link]

• Comstock is one of many prominent New Yorkers of his time that appear in the historical fiction novel The Alienist, by Caleb Carr.
• The protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Beautiful and Damned is named for Comstock by his own reformist grandfather. “Emulating the magnificent efforts of Anthony Comstock, after whom his grandson was named, he leveled a varied assortment of uppercuts and body-blows at liquor, literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres."
• James Branch Cabell was prosecuted on obscenity charges relating to his novel Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice after lobbying by the Society. Cabell retaliated with a chapbook entitled The Judging of Jurgen (later inserted into subsequent reprints of the novel), in which the title character is consigned to oblivion for being "obscene, lewd, lascivious and indecent" in a trial presided over by a dung beetle who swears "by Saint Anthony".
• Anthony Comstock is one of the four "point of view" characters in Marge Piercy's novel Sex Wars. Piercy explores Comstock's personal history and mindset as he goes from clerk to active "vice" suppressor.
• Comstock makes a cameo (rescued from a burning building) in Jack Finney's novel Time and Again.
• He is portrayed by Rod Steiger in the 1995 made for TV film Choices of the Heart: The Margaret Sanger Story.^[8]

Contemporary Bibliography[link]

• Anna Bates: Weeder in the Garden of the Lord: Anthony Comstock's Life and Career: Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America: 1995: ISBN 0-7618-0076-X
• Nicola Beisel: Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America: Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1997: ISBN 0-691-02779-X
• Helen Horowitz: Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth Century America: New York: Knopf: 2002: ISBN 0-375-40192-X
• Andrea Tone: Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. ISBN 0-8090-3816-1

See also[link]

Biography portal

• Birth control movement in the United States
• Comstock Act
• New York Society for the Suppression of Vice
• Jack Thompson (activist)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Anthony Comstock's "Chastity" Laws
• "Anthony Comstock". Find a Grave. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=19982. Retrieved 2009-04-23. 
• Comstockery, Contraception, and the Family: The Remarkable Achievements of an Anti-Vice Crusader

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (June 2011)

Austin Allegro

Triumph TR7

Harris Mann (b. April, 1938) is a British car designer.^[1] Mann took over from Roy Haynes as chief stylist at British Leyland in 1970.

Biography[link]

Harris Mann was born in London in 1938, and attended engineering school in Westminster. Mann's automotive design career started, first with the bus and coach building firm Duple, followed by a short time working in the U.S. with Loewy Consultancy. After a short spell of National Service back in the UK, Mann worked, first for Commer, then for Ford.

Cars on which Mann was involved at Ford included the first Escort and the Capri. Mann's boss at Ford, Roy Haynes, persuaded Mann to go with him when he moved to BMC to lead their design studio in Cowley in 1967.

Mann worked alongside Haynes on the BMC Marina project, and when the design department they were working in was relocated to Longbridge, Haynes left the company, leaving Mann to lead the design team for, what was by then, British Leyland (BL).

Mann took over the Allegro project, and then worked on the Diablo project, which became the Princess. This was followed by the work for which he is most famous, the Triumph TR7. His final projects with BL were the Metro, and the Maestro. After these he left and went freelance. In this capacity he worked for MG Rover on the MG "Z" series (the ZR, ZS, and the ZT).

Today, Mann is involved in independent design consultancy in the automotive sector, and in passing on his experience by tutoring design at Coventry University.

References[link]

• "Harris Mann Interview". Classic Cars Magazine: 70–73. January 2005. 
• "The Designer: Harris Man". Classic Car Weekly. December 2004. http://www.leylandprincess.co.uk/HarrisMann.htm. 

Notes[link]

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