White Slavery

DESIGNS IN SCARLET--Courtney Ryley Cooper--Little, Brown ($2.75).

In a Dine & Dance joint between Kansas City and St. Louis a tall, dapper, bald customer tipped the pretty red-headed waitress 50-c-. She goggled archly. "Nobody's thrown that much money at me for two days." "Sweetheart," said the customer, "I'd like to throw more than that at you." Ten minutes later, heading for another joint on Route 40, this fast worker quoted the waitress's price to his chauffeur. "I'm supposed to come back for her at two-thirty," he said.

Not long afterward the same customer began joining marriage bureaus, get-acquainted and lonely-hearts clubs. He was, he lied, a middle-aged dairyman with $100,000. The answers poured in, mainly from women between 35 and 50 (80%, overweight)--nurses, stenographers, club women, even a few plane-owners. Unasked and unequivocally, one out of three offered physical surrender on sight.

The red-headed waitress is still waiting for that date. Waiting likewise in thousands of U. S. roadside taverns, "jook joints," "pig joints," barbecue stands, taxi-dance halls, are thousands of other "dating" waitresses, B (bar) girls, "carhops," itinerant prostitutes. The dairy farmer's correspondents are also wondering what happened to that good catch.

If they want to find out, let them read Designs in Scarlet. The customer was Courtney Ryley Cooper, onetime newsboy, salesman, marine, circus pressagent, vaudeville actor, star reporter, popular fiction writer and good pal of J. Edgar Hoover, who calls him "the best informed man on crime in the U. S." Author Cooper was merely propositioning women in order to make a first-hand survey of U. S. white slavery. (Sponsors: the F. B. I. and the Post Office Inspection Department.)

Main breeders of U. S. harlotry (and main subject of Designs in Scarlet) are Dine & Dance joints, liquor, tourist camps, obscenity peddlers. Author Cooper does not, however, neglect organized brothels nor the many ramifications of his subject--camp followers of the WPA, sex degeneracy, and worse. As in his previous crime writings (Here's To Crime, Ten Thousand Public Enemies), he is a powerful and even petrifying publicist. But he is, as ever, a highly confusing sociologist. Formerly Author Cooper denounced Prohibition as a main root of U. S. crime. But U. S. prostitution, which he considers worse than the liquor racket, he attributes mainly to Repeal. Taverns, he says, are brothel incubators; ex-bootleggers have turned syndicate white slavers, doing business on a nationwide scale (even in trailers).

The result, summed up for Author Cooper by a procurer: "A guy doesn't have to break a girl in any more. . . . That's all old stuff now." Cooper's harrowing corroboration: Chicago's Cicero Danny has 500 girls under 18 on his waiting list. Cooper's conclusion: Localize the infection by restoring the old supervised red-light districts.

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