The Cause of the Social Evil and the (Impossible) Remedy
Weston, Ga. The Home Publishing Co., 1914. Second Edition, Revised. A Progressive-era tract on prostitution (“the social evil”) combining evangelical purity reform with contemporary hereditarian and quasi-eugenic ideas. Elliott attributes prostitution to poverty, sexual exploitation, parental neglect, unhealthy social environments, inherited tendencies, and the unequal moral standards imposed upon men and women. Chapters including “The Scarlet Trail,” “The Truth About the Prostitute,” and “The Clutch of Heredity” advocate preventive education, parental discipline, religious conversion, and the cultivation of healthier homes and social conditions. Its repeated analogies to plant and livestock breeding make the work a revealing example of the intersection between American social-purity campaigns and popular eugenic thought.
Elliott had promoted this work publicly for several years. In a July 6, 1911 article entitled “Saving Our Young Women,” published in Thomas E. Watson’s Jeffersonian, he described himself as editor and business manager of the Sunny South Brotherhood and claimed that, during five years of rescue work, he had entered brothels, conducted prayer services, and spoken personally with more than 5,000 prostitutes. He solicited financial support for rescue homes and preventive lectures, castigated ministers who denied him their pulpits, and announced a forthcoming exposé of the “white slave traffic in the South.” These activities provide the immediate institutional and ideological background for the present pamphlet, in which Elliott enlarged his claimed number of interviews to more than 15,000.
The revised edition was promoted for mass circulation—the wrapper claims “one million copies”—and includes advertisements encouraging churches, businessmen, and wealthy patrons to purchase copies by the hundred. Particularly notable is its sensational added feature concerning the murder of thirteen-year-old Atlanta factory worker Mary Phagan and the conviction of Leo Frank, described on the wrapper simply as the man who “stands convicted.” Its appearance connects Elliott’s purity campaign with the publicity surrounding the Frank case and with The Jeffersonian, which under Watson subsequently became one of the principal newspapers agitating against Frank and encouraging the climate that culminated in his 1915 lynching. The pamphlet itself predates that lynching, preserving an unusually immediate example of the Phagan case’s appropriation for contemporary campaigns concerning sexual danger, child welfare, prostitution, and public morality.
A beleauguered copy. Wrappers are worn, soiled, creased, and chipped, with penciled doodling; spine reinforced with linen tape; bottom corner of the rear wrapper missing triangular piece affecting a few words inside the rear wrapper. Owner's name to title page, else an unmarked copy. Item #15263
Price: $125.00