Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI by Jessica R. Pliley (review)

Although there are many books about the Federal Bureau of Investigation, there are few about the White-Slave Act, a federal law passed in 1910 to fight the transportation of women for immoral purposes. Known as the Mann Act, after its author, it passed three years after the founding of the FBI (then the Bureau of Investigation) in 1907. The Mann Act made the federal government a player in moral policing, previously the province of local authorities. “White slavery” stemmed from the moral panic that emerged as fear of immigrants and political violence against people of color peaked in the United States, and as feminists intensified demands for political equality.

That only some white women were worthy of, or desired, rescue made Mann Act enforcement fraught almost immediately. In addition, the law made all women potential criminals. Sexual predators—traffickers, pimps, blackmailers, adulterers, and cads among them—treated women cruelly and sold their sexual services. But the law also gave fathers and husbands new resources for controlling daughters and wives. Because the Mann Act allowed prosecution when women were transported for “other immoral purposes,” it also became a vehicle for the federal government to enforce racial hierarchy. Perhaps the most famous case of this was the prosecution of the boxer Jack Johnson, engaged to a white woman whom he later married. Asian and black women, who muddled the category of “white slave” from the beginning, were presumed to be immoral and were almost never viewed as deserving justice for crimes committed against them, including being trafficked.

Policing Sexuality eventually becomes a history of prostitution as well as trafficking. Prior to World War I, the bureau enlisted hundreds of reformers as “white slave officers,” issuing attractive badges that gave them federal authority to patrol “red light” districts, neighborhoods where prostitution was one of many criminal industries. But because local police were often paid off by madams, pimps, and saloonkeepers, Mann Act investigations were rarely systematic or effective. The war changed that. Arguments that sexual commerce undermined male national character and military readiness were suddenly successful in 1917, and the white slave officers finally put many urban vice districts out of business.

One wonders how many white slave officers were actually hired to enforce the Volstead Act in 1920 as that agency ballooned to over 2500 officers. When J. Edgar Hoover took over the FBI in 1924, remaking the agency into a scientific, professionalized, and national police force, he purged volunteers. However, Hoover’s well-known conviction that national crime rates were linked to moral decline acquires fresh meaning in Policing Sexuality. By the 1930s, the FBI was fully engaged in fighting new forms of criminally organized prostitution that moved women from state to state, using ordinary houses, apartments, and street networks to market sex undercover. In addition, new forms of transportation that also served criminals created easy routes for women to escape parents and unwanted marriages. Pliley’s research shows that, even as the importance of the FBI grew, Mann Act investigations were still often launched at the request of an ordinary citizen: a father; a husband; or, in the case of a female African American runaway, a white employer.

Policing Sexuality is a rich study of how popular audiences and policy makers understood female sexual agency and male predation between 1890 and 1940. It is an excellent example of how police records reveal shifts in sexual practices, and of how a phrase like “white slavery” remained politically useful long after prosecutors knew that no such thing existed. Readers will also learn a great deal about how prostitution evolved over time: a final chapter on commercial sex networks undermines a long-cherished notion that sex work passed from female to male control after World War I. In fact, despite male control of the industry, many women with specialized sexual skills were valued workers and operated with a high degree...