Sex and the City: The White Slavery Scare and Social Governance in the Progressive Era

Abstract

In 1912 Jane Addams breathed a sigh of relief that social control was on the rise. "Fortunately . . . for our moral progress," Addams noted optimis-tically, "the specious and illegitimate theories of freedom are constantly being challenged, and a new form of social control is slowly establishing itself on the principle, so widespread in contemporary government, that the state has a responsibility for conditions which determine the health and welfare of its own members; that it is in the interest of social progress itself that hard-won liberties must be restrained by the demonstrable needs of society."1 In attacking such "specious and illegitimate theories of freedom," Addams joined a broad coalition of Progressive reformers seeking to reshape the tenets of liberalism. Had not the very forces of modernity, these reformers asked, rendered liberal ideals of personal freedom from state control obsolete and out of fashion? As the Supreme Court has infamously shown by its 1905 Lochner decision, in the machine age, individual freedom had all too often become an excuse for economic exploitation, striking down New York's ten-hour workday as an obstacle to "freedom of contract." Appeals to laissez-faire freedom—whatever "laissez-faire" might mean in the era of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and the U.S. Rubber Company—only tied the hands of reformers, who increasingly felt that state and federal government offered the sole counterbalance to corporate control, urban degeneration, and social anomie. As Herbert Croly argued in The Promise of American Life, individual liberty was no longer a good to be protected from state intrusion, but rather a product of state regulation to be actively generated by a vigilant state. In this Progressive reconstruction of liberalism, the groundwork for true liberty lay in forms of "social control" that might paradoxically seem a restraint on "hard-won liberties."2 Yet what, in Jane Addams's view, necessitated such restraints? The attacks against "illegitimate theories of freedom" appear in her 1912 examination of commercial vice and white slavery, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil. The white slavery scare, sweeping through Great Britain in the 1880s, but arriving [End Page 411] in the United States shortly before World War I, offered a particularly powerful context for social regulation. Unlike other Progressive Era issues concerning working hours or occupational safety, white slavery threatened to upset the basic framework of classical liberalism—the division of society into distinct private and public spheres. For if evil could penetrate into the home and steal away its most precious goods, was not the state obligated to leave the public sphere and enter into the hallways and bedrooms of the home to ensure every young girl's safety? Prostitution therefore came to dramatize, as few issues could, the practical necessity of responding to social problems on their own terms and tracing the roots of commercial vice into the private lives and daily routines that nurtured public immorality. Addams's own account illustrates such a tentative foray into the home. Basing her book upon the investigations waged by the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, Addams finds herself inundated in "a bewildering mass of information" gathered on the home life of one hundred Juvenile Court children and four thousand parents, supplemented by the personal histories of nearly a thousand girls working in the department stores, factories, offices, hotels, and restaurants of Cook County. In response to this mass of social data, Addams's book works to construct what she calls a "counter-knowledge" that would answer the pervasive network of sexual allurement in dance halls, nickelodeons, and amusement parks with an equally expansive circuit of social control involving, in her words, "city officials, policemen, judges, attorneys, employers, trades unionists, physicians, teachers, newly arrived immigrants, clergymen, railway officials, and newspaper men."3 In this essay, I will use one of the most popular linkages in the white slavery panic—the release of George Loane Tucker'...