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

In Policing Sexuality, Jessica R. Pliley analyzes the early history of the Mann Act, a 1910 federal law intended to eliminate “white slavery.” She argues that its enforcement shaped the bureaucratic culture of the Bureau of Investigation (and its successor, the Federal Bureau of Investigation) and significantly expanded the role of the federal government in law enforcement. Pliley is particularly interested in the ways in which assumptions about sexuality, gender, respectability, and domesticity informed Mann Act enforcement and thus influenced early twentieth-century criminal justice.

Written and passed in response to the fear that predatory immigrants, particularly Jewish immigrants, abducted innocent white girls, huddled them into the vice districts of large cities, and forced them into prostitution, the Mann Act initially focused on sex traffickers. Deriving its policing powers from the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, the act criminalized the transportation of women across state lines for prostitution “or any other immoral purpose.” To enforce the law, the Bureau of Investigation quickly grew and expanded its reach, establishing a federal law enforcement presence across the nation.

As social conditions and cultural currents shifted, according to Pliley, federal investigators reinterpreted the “immoral purpose” phrase and changed their enforcement strategies. During the Act’s early years, the Bureau of Investigation targeted foreign-born sex traffickers. A 1917 Supreme Court decision (Caminetti v. United States), however, broadened the definition of “immoral purpose” and hence the focus of Mann Act enforcement. By the 1920s, when conservative policymakers expressed alarm at new sexual morés, federal agents used the enhanced scope of the Mann Act to safeguard traditional marriage and “respectable domesticity” (132). Law enforcers concentrated on runaway girls, promiscuous women, and adulterers who destroyed family life, criminalizing extramarital female sexuality in the process. By the late 1930s, when a crime panic gripped the nation, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI shifted the focus again and used the Mann Act mainly to pursue organized sex traffickers. Through these changing strategies, the number of agents increased, federal investigators assumed a larger role in the criminal justice system, and the outlines of the “surveillance state” began to emerge. Thus, Pliley explains, the crusade against white slavery spearheaded a dramatic expansion in the power and reach of federal law enforcement.

Despite the shifting targets of the Mann Act, there were also elements of continuity. Even as law enforcers redefined the threat from women engaged in “immoral” activities, federal investigators remained committed to the defense of traditional notions of family life, reflecting Hoover’s “conservative gender ideology” (155) and the bureaucratic culture that he created. Moreover, according to Pliley, federal investigators consistently failed to consider the role of women’s consent in their sexual activities. Mann Act enforcement was also unabatingly racialized as the campaign against white slavery framed only white women as innocent and entitled to federal protection from predators and sex traffickers.

Pliley consults a wide range of sources but draws especially from the Bureau of Investigation and Federal Bureau of Investigation Mann Act investigative records, examining almost one thousand case files from the 1910–41 period. She develops her analysis of enforcement strategies by reconstructing cases and providing detailed vignettes of particular investigations. Pliley skillfully connects individual cases to wider cultural pressures and carefully charts the ways in which a ballooning bureaucracy criminalized behavior in a crusade to buttress respectable domesticity and to police women’s sexuality.

Pliley’s rich, engaging analysis complements recent studies of the FBI, criminal justice, and state formation in early twentieth-century America. Although she asserts that the existing scholarly literature focuses “almost exclusively on the Bureau’s role in political policing” (134) and has not adequately explored the FBI’s expanding role in criminal justice, a number of historians have documented the FBI’s growing influence on law enforcement and have even noted the specific role of the Mann Act in this process.¹ Again and again, early twentieth-century reformers identified pressing...