Sold into White Slavery

PETER: Now to a story about another conspiracy that gripped the imaginations of Americans. This one takes place in the early 20th century. It was then that Americans began to worry that a nefarious international conspiracy was attacking its cities. The idea was that a cabal of foreigners, usually Jews, were working with American pimps to kidnap young girls and force them into lives of prostitution.

BRIAN: One hyperbolic American writer claimed that 70,000 young girls were sacrificed annually to the conspiracy’s death and disease-dealing machinery. Another explained, “A girl in the clutches of any one of them has practically no chance of escape, since the agents of all of them are on the lookout. Their eyes are everywhere and upon every girl. No Black Hand, no secret organization of any kind is more silent and insidious, or, in the end, more ruthless.”

PETER: Progressive reformers were especially worried about this white slavery conspiracy. They were convinced that red light districts in major cities were controlled by a shadow vice trust, with tentacles reaching from seedy brothels to the city council. In their minds, the vice trust not only threatened innocent American girls, it corrupted democracy itself.

BRIAN: In the years between 1909 and 1914, these anxieties inspired a whole genre of books and films. They had names like The House of Bondage and Traffic in Souls. Mara Keire is an historian at Oxford who’s written about all of this. I asked her to walk me through the typical white slavery plot.

MARA KEIRE: Oftentimes, there was a story about a young girl going into the city, taking a train, starting conversation with a older woman or a man who is nicely dressed, if a bit flashy. But she wasn’t sophisticated enough to be concerned about the boutonniere in his lapel. She would say, well, where do I go? Where can I find a place to stay? And they said, well, get off at this station, and I will show you some place. But of course, the “some place” would end up being a brothel.

And she would have her clothes taken away. Or maybe she would be seduced and then abandoned and sold to a madam, who would then make her buy new clothes, often lingerie, and say that for the room and for the clothes, you are now indebted to me, and you have to work off this debt. And of course, I will tell you the way to work off this debt.

BRIAN: So tell me who was behind the white slavery trust in the popular imagination.

MARA KEIRE: So it was most obviously and most visibly the pimps and the madams and the dive keepers. And they were considered to be horrible human beings. But in the progressive writings, even more horrible were the people who were hiding behind them who maintained a facade of respectability, that they were the shadowy higher-ups, such as the landowners and the real estate agents, or– to go completely over the top– as Chicago writer Robert Harland called, “the kimono trust” who sold lingerie at exorbitant prices to keep the prostitutes indentured. But it was this idea that it’s not just the people you can see doing the actions, it’s the hidden people who are profiting from it that are the most guilty.

BRIAN: Was there any truth to these fears about white slavery and this conspiracy behind it?

MARA KEIRE: Well, I mean, I’m going to be such a cultural historian about it. Truth is such a wishy-washy– or it’s not wishy-washy, I’m going to be wishy-washy. I think the thing that’s really important is that people wanted it to be true. They didn’t want to think that the labor markets were such that if a woman gets $7 a week working in a department store she could get $7 a night working in a decent brothel, or even a half-decent brothel. And so I mean, they didn’t want to look at those economics. And so a story of enslavement is much more appealing, I think, to middle class sensibilities.

One thing, though, where they were not accurate about was that it was not a trust, that the market structure was very entrepreneurial. It was very diffuse. If a person owned a venue, whether male or female, they maybe owned, at most, three venues. It wasn’t until the districts were closed down and until Prohibition that, in fact, vice went from being commercialized to being organized.

BRIAN: So where do we get this conception of a vice trust from if, in fact, the actual situation was entrepreneurial, perhaps two or three brothels owned by people at the most? Where does this idea of a vice trust come from?

MARA KEIRE: I think it was strategic. I think it was used to rouse ire, to make people upset, to want to change the ways in which the red light districts were working. Basically, Americans were concerned about business consolidation, and they were concerned about how really big companies, such as US Steel, or such as Standard Oil, could set any price they want for their products and could set any wages they wanted for their workers. And so they saw this control by these very big organizations as essentially undemocratic.

BRIAN: So tell me about these reformers. What did they do in response to the vice trust, as you call it?

MARA KEIRE: Well, the most famous and the most notorious piece of legislation was the Mann Act. And even now we hear about the Mann Act of taking someone across state lines for immoral purposes. How, say, if some New York politician goes down to DC and has a prostitute go over state lines, they can be brought up on charges on the Mann Act. This is coming out of this period.

And the Mann Act was modeled on the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was to break up big combines of business. And it used the Commerce Clause within the Constitution, which said that the federal government had the right to regulate businesses that were multi-state. And so by framing the Mann Act and framing the white slavery trade as something that was national and something that crossed state borders, it meant that it was within the purview of the federal government, not just the local police.

BRIAN: In other words, if there hadn’t been a genuine belief that this was larger than local, that this was at least a national conspiracy, there would have been no basis for national legislation.

MARA KEIRE: Right.

BRIAN: Now, Mara, if part of the concern about white slavery really had to do with American fears of business trusts and the size of business, did the end of white slavery correspond with a kind of acceptance of big business and corporations? Do you see that parallel as well?

MARA KEIRE: No, I don’t. It doesn’t disappear. The fear of larger organizations doesn’t disappear. But as the market for prostitution changed, and particularly with Prohibition and the growth of organized crime, it becomes a different set of concerns.

And indeed, with Prohibition and with organized crime, the worst fears of the progressive reformers happened. I mean, one of the unintended consequences and one of the great ironies of all this vice trust rhetoric was that there was a change from an entrepreneurial structure, market structure, with small business owners. Mom and pop shops, if you will, become run and owned by the mafia, by organized criminals, by the Torrio-Capone gang. So one of the ironies is that, indeed, by closing down, by going so far in terms of prohibiting vice and prohibiting immoral trades, reformers lost the control that things like licensing gave them.

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BRIAN: Mara Keire is a historian at Oxford University. Her book is For Business and Pleasure– Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890 to 1933.