3 December 2021
Opificio delle Acque
This paper examines the life and work of a tattoo artist born in Kingston, Ontario named Joseph George Simmons, better known by his pseudonym “Sailor Joe.” Employing visual culture, archival documents, and popular media from across Canadian and the United States, I begin by investigating Simmons’s occupation as both a tattooist and showman across North America between the 1920s and 1940s. I then consider how he became the subject of nearly a decade long manhunt by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after he was charged with violating the White Slave Traffic Act (1910) in 1942 for allegedly taking a teenage girl from Mississippi to Louisiana. Simmons avoided apprehension in America by fleeing to Canada. Accordingly, I proceed to demonstrate how a liaison between the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) created during wartime enabled American law enforcement to continue to monitor the tattooer’s movements within Canada. I consider the implications of this surveillance on his private life and public career as an entertainer and tattooist and ask: What tactics did Simmons employ to evade law enforcement and how did his line of work as a tattoo artist both facilitate and hinder such efforts? What sorts of interagency cooperation and techniques did law enforcement in Canada and the United states use to pursue him? Crossing several areas of historical inquiry, including the history of tattooing, labour, travel, popular entertainment, and policing in a transnational context within Canada and the United States, this paper argues that “Sailor Joe” was an amalgam of identities—some true, many half-true, and several completely false—cultivated and maintained by the tattooer to serve purposes ranging from occupational self-promotion to evading law enforcement.
