Save Our Children, Justice, and the Bold Journalist Who Shook the World and Died on the RMS Titanic

W.T. Stead (1849-1912) 

There is a child sex trafficking pandemic taking place in the United States in 2020.

The moral depravity of a culture more focused on preventing Covid-19 than putting an end to covert sexual trafficking of children or preventing the deaths of innocent and powerless children through abortion should turn the stomach of every American.

The words of a London policeman about child sex trafficking, words spoken while being interviewed by the subject of this blogpost in 1882, are just as appropriate today as they were a century and a half ago:

"Although it ought to raise hell, it does not even raise the neighbors."

Pedophilia and blatant disregard for the lives of children infect the backrooms of Congress, the boardrooms of Wall Street, and the back alleys of small-town America.

To grasp the moral courage it takes to shut down child sex trafficking and the evil practice of abortion in our country, one needs to look no further than the most famous man to die during the sinking of the RMS Titanic.

His name was William Thomas Stead (1849-1912). His friends called him W.T. Stead.

In 2012, one hundred years after his death, the first biography of Stead's remarkable life came to the public market. Famous in his day, Stead's name had faded from the collective conscience of British and American societies.

Stead's anonymity is unfortunate. Tristam Hunt, a member of Britain's House of Commons, wrote of W.T. Stead in the foreword of that 2012 biography:

"Imprisoned for abducting a child in the course of exposing the vicious sex trade that existed in Victorian London, Stead realized, as few before him had, that governments are powerless to resist the coordinated voice of the public – when harnessed by a newspaper – to help put an end to such evils."

Substitute the words "social media" for newspaper and the words of Tristam Hunt are an inspiration for every person who uses social media to drive out evil through social activism on behalf of the powerless and voiceless.

W.T. Stead Memorial at Central Park, New York

My cousin and his wife live on 5th Avenue in New York City. Across from their townhouse, set on the east wall that surrounds Central Park, there is a bronze statue of W.T. Stead. Thousands walk by every day and have no idea who this man is. 

To know him is to grasp the courage it takes to change a culture of complacency.

Born the son of a clergyman on July 5, 1849, in Embleton, England,  William Thomas Stead learned to read and write both English and Latin by the age of 5.

Thought by loved ones to eventually follow his father's footsteps in becoming a preacher, Stead instead took an interest in journalism and worked his way up the newspaper management ladder. He became the youngest newspaper editor in England at the age of 22. 

Deeply spiritual and well-versed in the Bible, the day before his 26th birthday, W.T. Stead records in his journal how God called him that year to use his gifts and talents for the good of society:

"The great event of this year has been... (through) reading Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs, a sense of my prophethood returned. I felt once more the sacredness of the power placed in my hands, to be used on behalf of the poor, the outcast and the oppressed. It was a gift of renewed faith. I clearly and decidedly grasped the idea that everything is given to one to be employed on behalf of those that have nothing, and that only by the patient laborious unselfish labor of the good can the bad be extinguished, and that my mission was to labor unceasingly, by all methods and in every season, to help on the social regeneration of the people of the world."

For the rest of his life, W.T. Stead laboriously worked for the good of those who had nothing. He became Britain's first investigative journalist. 

In 1885, Stead shocked the world with a series of articles he wrote on the seamy practice of child prostitution in London, England. W.T. Stead spent months investigating child trafficking before publishing the articles that stunned newspaper readers of Victorian London. W.T. Stead researcher Owen Mulpetre observes about Stead's articles:

"(He wrote) in graphic detail about the entrapment, abduction and 'sale' of young under-privileged girls to London brothels. Written in successive installments, Stead's "infernal narrative", as he called it, revealed to a respectable readership a criminal underworld of stinking brothels, fiendish procuresses, drugs and padded chambers, where upper-class pedophiles could revel 'in the cries of an immature child.'"

London prosecutors had Stead arrested for breaking "decency laws" (his articles) and for "kidnapping" a child (his research and activism) that Stead had rescued from a child sex trafficking house. In jail for three months awaiting trial, the jury acquitted Stead of any criminal behavior in the infamous Eliza Armstrong case.

The fame of W.T. Stead spread after his acquittal. It wasn't long until Americans knew Stead's name too.  

In 1894, Stead traveled to Chicago to attend the World’s Fair. He was horrified by the conditions that he observed in the streets around the glamour of the 1892 Columbian Exposition, called by the people, the World's Fair. He decided to thoroughly investigate for himself the streets of Chicago. 

Stead's Vice Map of Ward 1, Chicago (1894)

W.T. Stead went block by block in Ward 1 of Chicago (see map), noting and mapping the brawling bars, the brothels, and the barbaric human behaviors behind the World's Fair. 

His findings, published in If Christ Came to Chicago!: A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer (1894), is recognized by the prestigious Britannica Encyclopedia as a model of journalistic research.

Every article Stead wrote had the goal of reforming a society held hostage by "the powers of darkness in high places." 

It sounds like 2020.

One of the prized possessions I have framed in my writing office at home is a handwritten postcard to W.T. Stead from Charles Spurgeon, the famous London preacher and contemporary of Stead. Spurgeon congratulates W.T. Stead for his written portraits or character sketches in a magazine, profiling men and women of courage and character who were making a difference in the world during the 1880s and 1890s. Stead called the magazine he founded, and the one to which Spurgeon subscribed,  The Review of Reviews.

For 40 years, W.T. Stead laboriously worked through his writings to bring justice, to practice mercy, and to live humbly in the corridors of power. 

W.T. Stead made a difference for good in the world of child sex-trafficking in his day. We need more men and women of courage, people like W.T. Stead, in 2020.

Biographer Sydney Robinson recounts how William Thomas Stead spent the last hours of his life: 

Shortly before midnight on Sunday 14 April 1912, a stout, prematurely aged gentleman with crystal-blue eyes and a shaggy grey beard appeared on the foredeck of the Titanic. ‘What do they say is the trouble?’ he innocently enquired. No one seemed to know. ‘Well, I guess it’s nothing serious; I’m going back to my cabin to read’. These were the last recorded words of William Thomas Stead, the famous investigative journalist who, thirty years previously, had shocked the world by purchasing a thirteen-year-old girl on the streets of Victorian London. Two hours later he would be plunged into the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean, never to be seen again.

It was a bizarre end for a man who had made his name smiting ‘the powers of darkness in high places’ on behalf of the ‘disinherited and outcast of the world’. The magnificent ship, legendary in its vast scale, luxury and exclusivity, represented everything he had campaigned against during his long career... It was somehow apt that W. T. Stead had last been seen turning the pages of a penny Bible in the first-class reading room of the world’s most expensive cruise liner. (Sydney W. Robinson, Muckraker, Kindle Edition)

 

William Thomas Stead is an inspiration for any who wish to drive out evil by laboriously doing good. Jesus made it clear that when we care for the fatherless, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, speak for the voiceless, and stand for the powerless, we are actually serving Him (see Matthew 25:40).

"This life will soon be past and only what's done for Christ will last." 

#SaveOurChildren