The Vice Trust: A Reinterpretation Of The White Slavery Scare In The United States, 1907-1917

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2001 by Mara L. Keire

In the narratives of the white slavery scare, which peaked in the United States between 1910 and 1913, urban reformers intertwined the story of the sexually coerced maiden with a heated condemnation of the business of vice. Although the white slavery scare was an international panic, local reformers gave white slavery narratives local relevance by retelling the story in language particular to period and place. [1] Unlike the French, American reformers did not counterbalance tales of violently raped virgins with a defense of regulated prostitution. Americans were trying to shut down, not keep open, tolerated brothels. [2] Nor did they follow British author W.T. Stead's lead and critique aristocratic privilege using the ambiguous classical imagery of labyrinths and minotaurs. [3] Instead, Progressive-era reformers turned to the language of economics, particularly the corrupting power of trusts and their control of society, to frame their attack on urban vice. [4]

Anti-monopolism was an overriding imperative of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Turn-of-the-century Americans perceived an alarming spread of organizational conspiracies--"the Trust and Wall Street, the Political Machine and the System of Influence"--that dominated ordinary citizens, but eluded their control. [5] Driving their fears were broad definitions of monopoly, trust, and dangerous "bigness." From the Progressive perspective, the informal, but extensive cooperation among service corporations like insurance companies and banks was as worrisome as the "tight combinations" of industrial trusts like Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. [6] For example, during the 1913 Congressional investigation of investment banking, the Pujo Commission charged that the "Money Trust," led by J.P. Morgan, not only dictated the distribution of credit, but also controlled industry in the United States through the interlocking directorates that oversaw the management of the largest corporations. [7] The Money Trust 's influence did not, however, end there. Morgan and his Wall Street confreres were the "Money" Trust, not the "Banking" Trust, because they allegedly manipulated the country's currency, not just its corporate capital. [8] This climate, in which Americans feared the impact of corporate centralization and perceived a cooperative complicity among economic interests, was the context for urban reformers' concern that ruthless profit-mongers had extended their control to yet another business: "commercialized vice." [9]

By situating the tale of the captive maiden within a broader critique of monopoly capitalism, anti-vice reformers adopted a language, and a legislative agenda, that resonated with other Progressive-era reforms. Economic allusions permeated anti-vice rhetoric, but three metaphors in particular anchored reformers' representation of social relations in urban red-light districts. The first metaphor depicted the business of vice as a trust composed of allied interests. The second metaphor was that red-light districts were like marketplaces where the Vice Trust bought and sold prostitutes to fill district brothels. And finally, contemporary writers correlated white slavery with debt peonage. [10] By shifting the rhetorical terrain away from sin and individual salvation and toward an economic analysis of social structures, Progressive-era anti-vice reformers appropriated laws governing commerce as a new set of legal referents and strategically employed the three interlocking metaphors as juridical analogies for cons tructing legislation and interpreting the laws that regulated vice. [11] To unpack and situate the metaphors, this essay is broken into six sections. The first section traces the genealogies of "white slavery," while the second section situates the different factions in the anti-vice movement politically and rhetorically. In the body of the essay, I analyze the origins and implications of the three metaphors, and then conclude with an analysis of how the Progressives' economic interpretation of urban vice shaped their legal endeavors. The commercial critique was not the only language that American reformers used to describe urban vice, but during the Progressive era, their economic interpretation served as the unifying discourse from which anti-vice reformers constructed a powerful legislative agenda.

This article is a reinterpretation of the white slavery scare in the United States because it departs from traditional historiography. Influenced by Richard Hofstadter's dismissal of temperance as outside of the mainstream of Progressive reform, scholars of prostitution have, since the late 1960s, characterized the white slavery scare as the irrational rantings of a paranoid social group. [12] In 1967, for example, historian Egal Feldman, in his well-known article "Prostitution, the Alien Woman, and the Progressive Imagination," argued that the white slavery polemics represented the hyper-nativism of a status-conscious middle-class, while the vice commission reports exemplified the best of Progressive-era municipal research. [13] Following Feldman's lead, scholars have emphasized the racialized cast of the white slavery narratives, even as they have discounted the white slavery scare as an almost Freudian manifestation of middle-class fears about urbanization, immigration, and women's increased mobility. [14 ] Analytically separating the white slavery polemics from the more measured vice commission reports reached its logical conclusion, in the early 1980s, during the "myth-versus-reality" debate between historians Ruth Rosen and Mark Thomas Connelly. Rosen argued that white slavery had existed, while Connelly argued that it had not, but both historians based their conclusions on the veracity that they accorded to the white slavery literature--an evaluation in which the vice commission reports served as the objective index. Thus, Rosen's and Connelly's interpretive disagreement centered on the sharp dichotomy that scholars had created within the anti-prostitution movement of the Progressive era. [15] In contrast, my research returns to Roy Lubove's landmark article from 1962, "The Progressive and the Prostitute," in which Lubove gave equal weight to white slavery polemics and municipal vice commissions in order to draw out their shared critique of commercialized vice. [16] Looking for commonalities, I found that despite the range of rhetorical modes that reformers employed--from melodramatic hyperbole to social-scientific rationalism--the disparate factions within the anti-vice movement shared a common economic discourse for interpreting urban prostitution that superseded their more superficial, stylistic differences. [17]