White Slavery, What Is?

White Slavery is a term that gained prominence in the late-nineteenth century to refer to prostitution. The yellow press as well as new media produced a large number of lurid tales of unsuspecting white girls being lured into sex work by predatory men. One of the key ideas in this discourse was that no white woman would voluntarily submit to such demeaning activity, so they were informal slaves controlled by their pimps. Films like 1913's Traffic in Soulsperpetuated a common narrative of deception and kidnapping as the fundamental traits of a white prostitute. Other media emphasized the connection between prostitution and other vices, such as the 1912 book From Dance Hall to White Slavery: The World's Greatest Tragedy which made an explicit connection to drinking and moral decay. The 1910 Mann Act of Congress allowed federal power to intervene in cases of sex-trafficking.

Looking back over a century later, it is obvious that much of this moral panic over white slavery covered a number of other social anxieties. The common meta-narrative of a good girl lured into the big bad city speaks volumes about concerns over the decline of rural America and the explosive growth of cities during industrialization. The racial components of white slavery were not only explicit in its name, but also in the enforcement of the Mann Act. The most famous example of this was when the black boxer Jack Johnson was prosecuted under the Mann Act for transporting white women across state lines. George Kibbe Turner in this article and others asserted Jewish immigrants were behind the surge of prostitution enabled by the immigrant-friendly machine of NYC's Tammany Hall. While sex-trafficking and forced prostitution certainly did occur in turn of the century US, discussions of white slavery tended to assert that it was a foreign or racial other behind the phenomenon.

The MPPC's forbidding of depictions of white slavery was part of a larger crackdown on the depictions of vice in film. Films like the original Scarface tended to play fast and loose with the rules of respectable society showing gangsters victorious. The Hay's Code was a way to both satisfy state and federal demands that Hollywood reel in its depictions of morally questionable activities as well as add social respectability to the burgeoning film industry. White slavery in this case meant depictions of prostitution or other sex work on screen. This led to a curious situation for some movies where the original source materials were more explicit but the film toned them down. Gone with the Wind's character of Belle for instance is a madame in the novel, but runs a "social club" where men drink and gamble in the film. Likewise, Alma in From Here to Eternity is a private dancer and hostess, which was one of many changes to the novel to fit the Hays Code which greatly annoyed the author James Jones. Contemporary audiences may have recognized these characters as prostitutes, but the script had a veneer of plausible deniability to their occupation.