Mann Act
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Wikipedia
Featured:  |
The first person prosecuted under the act was heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, who encouraged a woman to leave a brothel and travel with him to another state. Though he later married the girl, and took her away from a brothel, he was nevertheless prosecuted and sentenced to a year in prison.
Pioneering sociologist William I. Thomas's academic career at the University of Chicago was irreversibly damaged 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, although he was later acquitted in court.
British film actor Charles Chaplin was prosecuted in 1944 by Federal authorities for Mann Act charges related to his involvement with actress Joan Barry. Chaplin was acquitted of the charges, but the trial permanently damaged his public image in the US, and contributed to his departure for Switzerland in the early 1950s.
Canadian author Elizabeth Smart describes being arrested under the Mann Act in 1940 when crossing a state border with her lover, the British poet George Barker, in her (partly fictionalised) book By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. She memorably intertwines the callous police interrogation aimed at arresting her under this law with quotations about love from the Song of Songs.
In the late 1950s, Kid Cann, a notorious organized crime figure from Minneapolis, Minnesota, was prosecuted and convicted under the Mann Act after transporting a prostitute from Chicago to Minnesota. Although his conviction was later overturned on appeal, Kid Cann was later prosecuted and convicted of offering a $25,000 bribe to a juror at his trial under the Mann Act.
