The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 17 (2006)

The 1910s Anti-Prostitution Movement andthe Transformation of American Political Culture

Hiroyuki MATSUBARA*

The chastity of woman is at the foundation of Anglo-Saxon society. Our laws
are based upon it, and the ﬁnest and most binding of our social relations.
Nothing could be more menacing to a civilization than the sale of this as a commodity.1
George K. Turner, “The City of Chicago:
A Study of the Great Immoralities,” 1907
About twenty-ﬁve years ago the third great ﬂush of immigration, consisting ofAustrian, Russian, and Hungarian Jews, began to come into New York. Amongthese immigrants were a large number of criminals, who soon found that they
could develop an extremely proﬁtable business in the sale of women in New
York.2
George K. Turner, “The Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of theDevelopment of New York City as a Leading Center of the White
Slave Trade of the World, under the Tammany Hall,” 1909
[I]t cannot be too strongly emphasized that the spirit which dominates the workof the Bureau is . . . essentially a spirit of constructive suggestion and of deep
scientiﬁc as well as humane interest in a great world problem.3
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., “The Origin, Work, and Plans of the
Bureau of Social Hygiene,” 1913
Copyright © 2006 Hiroyuki Matsubara. All rights reserved. This work may be
used, with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of thiswork may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Associate Professor, Yokohama National University

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A sensational report ignited the anti-prostitution movement in the
United States. In 1907, an article written by George Kibbe Turner in
McClure’s Magazine warned Americans that white women were in danger of forced prostitution. According to this narrative of so-called “whiteslavery,” the most worrisome situation was the new immigrants from
Eastern and Southern Europe taking control of the sex industries in the
United States. Turner argued in his report that they were not merely sex
traders, but criminals in essence. The offenders among the new immigrants took advantage of the massive immigration from poor rural areas.
Easily utilizing and recruiting their ignorant fellow countrymen, thesecriminals had succeeded in organizing a network to trade women. This
network was a formidable threat to society because it preyed on white
women. The organized industry of seducers and pimps deceived, kidnapped, and even raped innocent girls and women to force them into
prostitution. This narrative further stated that not only immigrants but
also American women were in danger of being forced into this whiteslavery.4
As this story spread, it caused panic and eventually led to the 1910santi-prostitution movement in urban America. Historians have questioned whether such forced sex laborers were as plentiful as the reportsuggested. However, Turner’s warning initially convinced a number ofAmericans. Even Congress was concerned about the trading of “whiteslaves.” Referring to an ofﬁcial report on immigration by its Dillingham
Committee, Congress passed the so-called Mann Act to prevent the trading of white women. In the early 1910s, popular literature and ﬁlms
further developed this plot of kidnapped women, and these almost pornographic images of commercialized sex offered an ample base with which
to support and accelerate the anti-prostitution campaign in the 1910s
United States.5
For many existing studies, this white slavery panic is a perfect entry
point from which to explore many typical representations of the 1910santi-vice campaign. They easily notice that anti-immigration sentiment
was present in the form of sexual fear, coupled with middle-class
Americans’ anxiety about lower-class residents in the rapid urbanization
process. As several studies point out, the white slavery narrative was aconvenient vehicle for the middle class to express such feelings in symbolic form. At this point in time, the prostitution problems appeared tobe the essence of troubled urban America.6
However, this general account should be further grounded in a longer

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history of political culture. For instance, there almost always exists a fearof newcomers. What were the exact conditions that allowed this fear togrow into the speciﬁc form of the anti-prostitution campaign? Moreover,although the earlier studies focus little attention on this fact, the whiteslavery panic declined rather quickly and was replaced by another typeof campaign in the 1910s. How can this change in the mode of the antivice movement be explained? These questions lead us to explore thebehind-the-scenes transformation of American political culture. In fact,
the 1910s controversies over prostitution constituted a series of sites inthe battle for new authority at the end of nineteenth-century American
republicanism. We now reexamine the earlier studies to search for analternative research plan.
I REVISITING THE CONTEXT
The lack of historicity in the earlier literature is a striking fact. What
was the reason for the 1910s United States’ deep concern about prostitution issues? Historians who presume the importance of gender and sexuality have spent little time pondering this question. Otherwise, scholars
appear to regard this campaign as merely a spontaneous eruption of hysteria in the age of the Progressive reform movements. With little connection to a broader historical context, studies of this anti-vice drive haveconﬁned themselves to a relatively secluded ﬁeld by themselves.
Why did prostitution matter in the 1910s United States? Why at thattime, why in that shape and process, and what were its consequences forhistory in a broad sense? These questions are indispensable for probing
the course of the anti-prostitution campaign, which was actually rather
winding.
It is true that urban American reformers in the 1910s were extremelyinterested in containing prostitution. Forming a united front against those
who wished to maintain the prevailing status of the sex industry, brothel
abolitionists discovered a cause and means to police the lives of lowerclass residents. The tragedy of captured white women sufﬁciently
boosted public outrage against the sex industry. However, the anti-prostitution reformers were not concerned only about the trading of sex;
often, they were upset at each other for supporting different ideas andapproaches to this problem. The cause of the agitation against prostitution was not as self-evident as it appears. Throughout the 1910s, whichis considered to be the period when the anti-vice movement was at its

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peak, its campaigners found more disagreements than consensus among
themselves. There were various views on the following questions: Howshould prostitution be deﬁned? What led to prostitution? What wasessentially wrong with the system that gave rise to prostitution? Who
had the legitimate knowledge and values to deal with this problem: doctors, clergymen, sociologists, feminists, or others? These issues wereconstantly discussed among the reformers.
It would be worthwhile to examine the roots of these discrepancies,
which were derived from the fundamental transformation of American
political culture since the late nineteenth century. Political culture is not
merely a certain orientation to support a political party, but a system thatcomprises the laws and formal politics as well as the values, beliefs,
knowledge, symbols, discourses, and actions that endorse the allocationof this authority and power to someone. This cultural basis is acceptedby people and is considerably broader than the formal political process.
It gives legitimacy to particular individuals, organizations, or more formal institutions and justiﬁes particular social relations.7
This cultural system of justiﬁcation is in constant need of maintenance; this was especially evident at the turn of the twentieth century.
Discussions over the prostitution problem in the 1910s were a criticalarea in which a wide range of values, knowledge, and rhetoric were
employed and tested to redeﬁne the conﬁguration of political culture. In
fact, these disagreements and negotiations constituted an attempt at
resettling American political culture. The issue of prostitution, otherwise
merely fodder for gossip and inconsequential talk, was in the 1910s oneof the central areas in which competing reform groups debated the initiative of changing American political culture. The earlier studies tend
to overlook the diversity in this anti-prostitution movement and conﬁnetheir views to the conﬂict between the middle-class reformers and thelower class. As a result, these studies have ended up reproducing essentially the same social control thesis. Instead, by paying attention to thedifferences and contests among the various actors, this paper examines
the politics at this critical junction.
Let us begin by addressing the tangled historical contexts that madethe prostitution problem central in particular ways: the end of nineteenthcentury American republicanism. It is certain that we cannot simply
assume the existence of stable American republicanism. During theIndependence War and even in its aftermath, painstaking effort wasinvested in establishing a common membership of the United States.8

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Yet the myth of Americanism was a viable idea that people could employ
at any occasion to suit their various demands.9 Its variants constituted aloosely united mainstream narrative to deﬁne the meaning of decent
Americans. In essence, good citizens of the United States were supposed
to be independent and civic-minded individuals.10
The emancipation of slaves in 1865 was one of the major triggers thatchallenged this master narrative. It was signiﬁcant not only in the South,
where the social structure was founded on slavery, but also in the Northand even the West. As historian David Roediger vividly shows in his
study of “whiteness,” in addition to the African American ex-slaves, theemancipation movement affected virtually all the residents of the UnitedStates.11 The distinction from the unfree status of slaves had been theforemost basis of American republicanism. The disappearance of thisboundary led to chaos in deﬁning decent Americans. The overall reconﬁguration of American citizenship was in order, coupled with socioeconomic changes that kept undermining the authority of the conventional
power holders, nurtured the new middle class, and invited the rise ofworkers and immigrants throughout the nineteenth century.
Given this context, we can obtain a better understanding of why analmost hysterical narrative of kidnapped women made Americans apprehensive. Indeed, the forced sex labor of white women appeared to be theworst nightmare, or the reality, in the post-emancipation era. As if replacing black slaves, white women were dragged down by un-American
intruders to a ﬁlthy corner of a city crowded with poor workers and immigrants. After the formal end of black slavery, Americans were now afraidof being confronted with white slavery.
It is noteworthy that this white slavery panic was not merely an expression of racial fear. The speciﬁcally sexual narrative of the white slavery
panic was also born in the same context of the post-emancipation era.
Besides emphasizing race, class, and immigration problems, pointing
out the sexual danger confronting white girls and women was anotherreaction to the decline of American republican ideals, which weredeﬁned not only in racial terms but also in a male-centered manner. The
feminist demand for equal suffrage was the tip of an iceberg that required
Americans to carry out a gendered reconﬁguration of citizenship. In thiscontext, by provoking men’s responsibility to protect their “weak”
daughters and wives, the white slavery narrative helped men regain andmaintain their superiority over women, who had begun to claim accessto the public sphere from workplaces to politics.12

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Planted in the changing soil of American political culture, white slavery panic developed. It began in muckraker journalism and further spreadto the wider popular culture. Reginald Wright Kaufmann’s novel Houseof Bondage became a bestseller in 1910. George Loane Tucker’s 1913
ﬁlm Trafﬁc in Souls proved how powerful this plot could be. Cultivatedby this series of exposures, Americans supported the anti-prostitution
movement in the 1910s.13
II

A BREAK: THE RISE OF PROFESSIONALS AND THE DECLINE OF
THE WHITE SLAVERY PANIC

However, more noteworthy topics for this study are the decline of thewhite slavery panic and its replacement by a more practical campaign toclose brothels. Although the panic story survived and even remained
strong in popular culture for a few years, it quickly faded from the social
policies of the 1910s. Instead of targeting mythical villainous immigrants, an alliance of various reformers sought more practical and policyoriented measures. Physicians known as sex-hygienists, sociologists,and various professionals played crucial roles in this task. Stressing theurgent need to ﬁght venereal disease, they formed a united front ofdiverse reformers and pushed municipal governments to close the prostitution industry in their cities. Later, with the founding of the American
Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) in 1914, this new type of reformer
took the place of the earlier moral crusaders. This shift was crucial since
it represented the rise of science and professionalism, which presented
another challenge to conventional republicanism in terms of knowledge.
The earlier studies do not ﬁnd a major rupture in this process. For
many, this shift from the white slavery panic to the brothel abolition
movement was simply a natural transition. Even historians such as Alan
Brandt and Nancy Bristow, who speciﬁcally examine the rise of scienceoriented professionals, take this shift for granted. In their view, the antiprostitution campaign began with emotional panic and naturally
developed into the proposal and implementation of practical policies. In
any case, those who were opposed to prostitution wished to contain andcontrol the lower-class city dwellers.14
Such an account has overlooked the fact that the 1910s brothel abolitionists strongly refused to continue the course of anti-white slavery
efforts. Instead of picking up the previous threads, they explicitly emphasized their own difference. With the help of the ASHA, Vice Commis-

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59

sions were founded in many cities. These commissions appropriately
expressed the ethos of the 1910s movement and reported the situation in
their cities. They claimed to have scientiﬁc authority, which was to be
distinguished from the earlier sensationalism and dependence on morality. As cited by the leading sociologist George J. Kneeland, theyasserted that their work was “not sensational or hysterical.”15 The Vice
Commission of Philadelphia clariﬁes this point at the opening of its
report.
[W]e determined, therefore, to study the problems in all its phases and aspects, and to base our conclusions not upon prejudice, —religious, moral, or
social, —but entirely upon the facts as we found them.16

From this viewpoint, those who were agitating against the danger ofwhite slavery were believers of “vague rumors” and even “imaginary
occurrences explained by hysteria or actual malingering.”17
Instead of hysteria or morality, the 1910s campaigners highlighted
their scientiﬁc conviction to challenge the conventional tolerance ofbrothels. Another report by the Vice Commission of Louisville states thefollowing:This trade is unlawful; it is immoral; but, laying aside all questions of thelegality and morality of it, it breeds disease; it ruins men and women; it makes
physical lives, physical wrecks; it destroys thousands of unborn babes andbrings idiots and blind children into the world.18

These reports claimed to have unique authority. They speciﬁcally deﬁned the prostitution problem as the source of venereal disease and thus
projected it as a threat to society in general. They certainly did not accept
the conventional tolerance of brothels as a necessary evil. However, they
underlined their difference from the earlier critics of brothels. Clearly
showing the strong inﬂuence of sex hygienists, who had begun working
a decade earlier, these Vice Commissions in American cities attempted
to convince the public of the medical danger of prostitution.
It is important to understand this conﬂict in the context of the changing political culture. When new types of reformers such as sex hygienists
emerged and joined the anti-prostitution movement, they offered both atheoretical and a practical backbone to the campaign. Trumpeting therise of sex science, they also posed a serious challenge to the conventional values and knowledge that had framed the prostitution issue aswell as other social problems in general. In essence, this move was not

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merely aimed at asking for the addition of sex hygienics as just another
legitimate ﬁeld of knowledge required to discipline American society.
Rather, sex hygienists claimed to have exclusive authority in a ﬁeld
where the vernacular sexual culture and morality-based evangelism hadcompeted with each other to deﬁne what constituted decent, respectablebehavior in Americans.19 The implication of this claim extended beyond
the mere issue of prostitution. By introducing medical aspects into thisissue, the believers of sex hygienics implicitly demanded that the sinequa non of respectable Americans be rethought. They declared the deathof the conventional republicanism that was lacking any scientiﬁc basis.
Without taking account of this implication, one cannot comprehend contemporary Americans’ excessive concern about the house of infamy in
the age of Progressivism.
Many contemporaries must have been aware of this potential impactof the prostitution controversies. Especially at the turn of the twentiethcentury, the seemingly familiar issue of prostitution was gaining renewed attention as one of the major urban tasks for the modern bodypolitic. The demand for social policies was evident in the United States
as well as in many other industrializing nations. Yet, as historian Daniel
Rodgers points out, the United States lagged considerably behind moreadvanced nations in Europe and some other emerging countries such as
New Zealand. In the absence of strong state institutions, both local andfederal administrations in the United States were quite ineffective indealing with growing social problems in the industrial age. The
American Revolution had made it possible for Americans to be proud of
their body politic as the most advanced institution. A century later, they
suddenly noticed that progress had reached an almost stagnant stage.20
Given this context, the individuals or organizations that handled prostitution problems, one of the most visible social issues, could take the initiative in framing American social policies and contribute signiﬁcantly
to future American political culture. Thus, the stakes were high in the
1910s prostitution debate.
It can be noticed that in this process as well, gender was of considerable importance. In reality, it was women who might have held the key
for American society to match the progress of advanced nations andrebuild the post-emancipation political culture. In theoretical terms, withthe end of slavery, not only ex-slaves but anyone, including women, who
had no access to formal power could claim full membership in theAmerican republic. In the arena of social policies, this was not merely aTHE 1910s ANTI-PROSTITUTION MOVEMENT

61

theory. As Theda Skocpol shows, in the United States, women were virtually the only reliable agents who could take care of social policies in
the late nineteenth century; in this manner, they substituted for weak
American state institutions.21 No one could dismiss the activities of these
benevolent women. Indeed, the exercise of social policies was indispensable for the United States to reclaim its status in the international
community. Given the decline of American republicanism, this contest
could prove to be crucial in setting the conﬁguration of authority. Here,the prostitution problem was undoubtedly one of the most visible issues
in troubled American cities, and women had been the central players indealing with this issue.
Sex hygienists, sociologists, and professionals in the ASHA entered
this charged situation. Pointing out that “mankind has gained much newknowledge concerning . . . transmissions of many diseases,” the ﬁrst
president of the ASHA, Charles W. Eliot, was conﬁdent that the Association’s approach against venereal disease was in keeping with thenatural progress of science.22 However, when they presented themselves
as the only authority in the 1910s anti-prostitution movement and discounted other actors, these science-oriented reformers did not actuallydescribe the situation in accurate terms. Instead, they were waging a war
over political culture. Would old American republicanism and its laissezfaire institutions give way to new capable actors? If so, who were these
actors: benevolent women, sex hygienists, or others? In any case, one of
the major issues was the manner in which the prostitution problem should
be dealt with.
A close examination of this battle over the changing political culture
reveals the complicated aspects of the 1910s anti-prostitution movement.
Unlike the descriptions in the early literature, the campaign itself was aﬁerce battle among diverse reformers over the initiative of changing
American political culture. Professionals relentlessly stressed the newness of their discipline as proof of the most advanced position. They did
not hesitate to describe others as backward, old-fashioned, moralitybased crusaders. However, the others were unhappy to conﬁne themselves
to old and backward ideas. While nineteenth-century republicanism was
no longer fully functional, even the conventional power holders did not
simply relinquish their authority. Women were also unwilling to be
restricted to the conventional domestic sphere. A wide range of actors
remodeled themselves and were prepared to ﬁght back and participate
in the prostitution controversy.

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The earlier studies have probably presumed an excessive dominanceof science-oriented professionals. In fact, since the founders of the
ASHA had coined the term “social hygiene” instead of using the medical
term “sex hygiene,” the 1910s anti-prostitution movement was carriedout by a loose and varied alliance of reformers who compromised andsometimes competed with each other.23 A more careful examination isrequired to explore the complicated struggle for cultural authority that
underlay the 1910s prostitution controversy.
III REWRITING THE 1910S ANTI-PROSTITUTION MOVEMENT: SAN
FRANCISCO (1911–13) AND THE COMMISSION ON TRAINING CAMP
ACTIVITIES (1917–19) AS FORGOTTEN SITESIn order to further explore this ﬂuid situation, it would be helpful toexpand the geo-cultural scope of our study. Historians have focused considerable attention on the vocal campaigners of the ASHA and theEastern cities where the Association was relatively successful. However,in addition to reexamining the loose alliance of campaigners in the
ASHA, it is required to locate their activities in both the national andinternational contexts beyond the ASHA-dominated American East.
This will help us rewrite the history of the 1910s anti-prostitution movement without neglecting the fragility of American political culture.
Two forgotten sites are extremely promising. One is San Francisco
from 1911 to 1913; the other is the Commission on Training Camp
Activities (hereafter CTCA), which was established by the United Statesin 1917 to take care of the sexual health of soldiers until the end of WorldWar I. Both cases reveal the ASHA’s various difﬁculties that the massive publication of the Association has hidden from many historians.
They also provide us with further insight into the dynamics of American
political culture.
Besides providing information on the development of sex hygienics,
another of the ASHA’s major tactics was to discount other approaches
against prostitution. The self-conﬁdence of the ASHA professionals was
based on speciﬁc comparisons. The success and legitimacy of the 1910s
brothel abolition campaign in the American East were guaranteed by failures in two particular areas. One was a group of American cities that had
tolerated prostitution under certain regulations; this group was represented by San Francisco. With regard to the eventual closure of brothelzones in these “reactionary”24 cities, the reports of the social hygienists

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found “indications that these remaining strongholds of the segregation
policy will ultimately give way.”25 The other area that contributed to thesuccess and legitimacy of the abolition campaign in the American East
was the decline of the tolerance/regulation policy in European nations.
A researcher wrote the following: “When we are told that regulation ispracticed in Europe, we may conﬁdently reply that the system has diedout in many countries and is moribund almost everywhere else.”26 Thiskind of report conﬁrmed the trend from tacit tolerance of the sex industry
to the brothel abolition policy. Even if the new American professionals
actually had a difﬁcult time establishing their authority, by introducing
these domestic and international cases, social hygienists succeeded in
representing their own knowledge to be the most advanced.
However, these supposed evidences were dubious. In fact, instead ofendorsing the campaigners’ claim of professional authority, these cases
conversely reveal that such self-presentation does not always yield thedesired result. In 1911, San Francisco did permit prostitution, but itchanged its policy later, in 1913, and began closing its red-light district.
However, the implications of this process were quite different from theexplanation given by the ASHA. What set apart the course of the San
Francisco case was a distinctive form of political culture that differedfrom the one assumed by the ASHA.
First, one cannot dismiss San Francisco’s decision as merely a reactionary policy. Curiously, it was another version of sex hygienics that
proposed tolerance of the sex industry under the city’s regulation. Many
physicians in the city chose not the closure of brothels, but the Health
Board’s plan to create the San Francisco Municipal Clinic for the periodical inspection of prostitutes. They supported the clinic system as a
medically viable option against the spread of venereal disease.27 This
battle between the sciences indicated that the brothel closures that the
ASHA asserted as the inevitable progress of medicine was actually justone of many possible plans.
Second, and more importantly, these physicians as well as the scienceoriented reformers could not settle the debate in San Francisco. It wasvarious non-science-based groups that were vocal in the controversy. In
particular, women’s groups in San Francisco played decisive roles inforcing the city to discontinue its system of regulated legal brothels. The
ASHA repeatedly emphasized the dominance of science and professionals in the new age of the anti-prostitution movement. Yet, it was feminist organizations, which the ASHA often dismissed as old-fashioned

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crusaders, that offered indispensable help to the struggling brothel abolitionists who had failed to end the 1911 system.28
This San Francisco situation was by no means exceptional. On thecontrary, the strong presence of women in San Francisco city politics
exempliﬁed a major trend in the changing American political culture. It
is possible that San Francisco experienced such a situation a decade earlier than many other parts of the United States. However, this was not
an exception but an indication of the city’s advanced situation, whichpeople in other regions were watching.29 In the post-emancipation era,
women’s claim to citizenship of the United States could not be dismissed. As I mentioned earlier, this pressure was especially intense in
the ﬁeld of social policies. Women had proven their capability not only
in denouncing sexual immorality but also in rescuing troubled womenand offering social services and a better environment for the community.
This gendered politics was especially salient in the rapidly urbanized cityof San Francisco. Given a less organized bureaucracy that was inadequate to meet the city’s rapid development, the San Francisco womenactivists had satisfactorily demonstrated their capability.
Thus, it was not surprising to ﬁnd the visible inﬂuence of San
Francisco women in this anti-prostitution campaign. In addition,
California women had recently acquired the right to vote at the California
Legislature of 1911. When leading women’s organizations in San
Francisco decided to exercise not only their voting power but also their
responsible commitment to social policies, the issues of prostitution andvenereal disease were their appropriate targets.
In terms of political culture, these San Francisco women posed a challenge to the self-proclaimed scientiﬁc professionals in the ASHA.
Women claimed their own legitimacy in the post-republican era. Suchan assertion was more than simply a battle between men and women.
When these women presented themselves as “citizens,” they called into
question the role of gender in citizenship. When they joined the discussion over prostitution issues in San Francisco, they never discounted
their own position and actively competed with other reformers. The San
Francisco women activists did not allow sex hygienists or sociologists
to monopolize scientiﬁc authority. In the decline of conventional, malecentered republicanism, these women fully utilized their past achievements and new enfranchised status and were prepared to remodel
themselves for the new age.30

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In the meantime, the authority of the ASHA was also damaged internationally. The related issues of prostitution, venereal disease, crime
control, family protection, and so on were all on the agenda in the ageof social politics. In an attempt to match the relentless development of
capitalism-driven expansion, some nations had already begun to experiment with a variety of social policies. The future of the United States
could be forecast based on whether or not it could appropriately follow
and match this trend. American reformers were fully aware of this situation and their position in it. While waging a domestic battle over cultural
authority in the United States, they never forgot to present their knowledge and approach as the most advanced in the world and in history.
However, their claim was not accepted by everybody.
World War I ﬁnally presented an opportunity for American reformers
to prove themselves internationally. Although anti-vice laws werepassed in many local assemblies with considerable publicity, it was not
until 1917 that the brothel abolitionists, especially the ASHA, ﬁnallyacquired an opportunity to fully realize their vision in the national context. Despite a heated campaign, and even after the closure of the San
Francisco Municipal Clinic, the brothel abolitionists had not fully
attained their goal. But at this difﬁcult point in the movement, preparing
for its entry into the European battleﬁeld, the United States government
decided to contain venereal diseases and suppress prostitution in orderto protect the health of its soldiers. By establishing the CTCA, the federal government revitalized the 1910s anti-prostitution movement.31
It is noteworthy that the health of its soldiers was more than a practical goal for the United States. It was crucial for Americans to send young
troops who were totally different from the old and plagued European
armies.32 In other words, the activity of the CTCA was a part of theAmerican effort to reestablish its legitimacy, which had to be recognized
not only domestically but also internationally. Thus, in the European battleﬁelds, the American reformers found a tangible area to prove themselves.
In the earlier studies, the establishment of the CTCA marks the eventual climax of the 1910s campaign. However, such a view misses anotherpoint. What was truly important was not the rise but the eventual declineof the CTCA and the entire campaign to suppress prostitution. As wehave observed, the attempt to contain prostitution was a pivotal matterin deciding who could claim the initiative in the twentieth-century

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American political culture. The question of the consequence of the failure of this endeavor was indispensable in examining the course and conﬁguration of the new American political culture.
The cases of San Francisco and the CTCA ﬁrst suggest the fragile
authority of those who led the ASHA. The activists involved with the
ASHA were vocal in stressing the legitimacy of their knowledge as thenatural development of scientiﬁc truth. They sought to dominate
American political culture by pointing out the end of virtue-based republicanism. However, their claim was not actually accepted by everyone
as self-evident. In San Francisco, sex hygienists were powerless in leading the city’s discussion. Another type of medical scientist, resistant andconﬁdent non-scientists, and enfranchised women reformers were all
aggressive in pursuing their own authority. With the demise of theCTCA, medical professionals found that their conviction in medicallyclean and healthy Americans failed to actually uplift the lives ofAmerican soldiers, convince the public, and prove the superiority of theAmerican body politic to European nations. Throughout these campaigns, regardless of the extent of their success at the superﬁcial level,
the bid to replace American republicanism with a version of “scientiﬁctruth” failed to produce the desired result. Those who wished to monopolize objective righteousness invariably met with setbacks.
However, these difﬁculties did not simply imply the revival of conventional values and knowledge; further, they did not indicate someone
else’s exclusive triumph in the prostitution controversy. The wide rangeof reformers formed a complicated alliance, not only competing but also
sometimes fusing with each other. The eventual failure of the CTCA project posed a more difﬁcult task of rebuilding and securing American
standards internationally. Instead of simply assuming the dominance of
science-oriented professionals, we need to examine the kind of transformation that occurred and the manner in which it affected the conﬁguration of American political culture.
These tangled questions would show us a more dynamic transformation of American political culture. Who had what kind of authority, andin what bases? Earlier scholarship has paid little attention to irregularcases, not only within the ASHA but also in cases such as San Francisco
and the CTCA, since these situations do not ﬁt well with the social
hygienists-centered view that has been prevalent so far. However, when
we sense the hidden tensions in the post-emancipation United States, we
can comprehend the process in a more nuanced way. What kind of com-

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petitions, alliances, fusions, metamorphoses, and failures did reformers
experience through the 1910s prostitution controversy? Further, how did
they affect the course of the American political culture? These are questions still to be asked.
NOTES
1
George Kibbe Turner, “The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities,”
McClure’s Magazine 28, April 1907, 582.
2
George Kibbe Turner, “The Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the Development of New York City as a Leading Center of the White Slave Trade of the World,
under Tammany Hall,” McClure’s Magazine 34, November 1909, 47.
3John D. Rockefeller, Jr., “The Origin, Work and Plans of the Bureau of Social
Hygiene,” January 27, 1913, statements 1913 folder, box 9, series Bureau of Social
Hygiene, Record Group [RG] 2. Rockefeller Boards, Rockefeller Family Archives,
Rockefeller Archival Center, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. [hereafter RAC].
4
Turner, “The City of Chicago.”5
Turner, “The Daughters of the Poor”; S. S. McClure, “The Tammanyizing of a
Civilization,” McClure’s Magazine 34, November 1909, 117–28; Theodore A.
Bingham, “Foreign Criminals in New York,” North American Review 188 (September
1908): 383–94; U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Immigration, White Slave TrafﬁcReport, 61st Cong., 2d sess., 1909–1910. Ernest Albert Bell, Fighting the Trafﬁc inYoung Girls; or, War on the White Slave Trade; a Complete and Detailed Account of
the Shameless Trafﬁc in Young Girls (Chicago: Illinois Vigilance Association, 1910);
U.S. Congress, Senate Immigration Commission, Reports of the Immigration Commission, 61st Cong., 3d sess., 1911, V. 37; Theodore A. Bingham, The Girl That Disappears: The Real Facts about the White Slave Trafﬁc (Boston: R.G. Badger, 1911).
6
Frederick K. Grittner, White Slavery: Myth, Ideology, and American Law (NewYork: Garland, 1990); Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the
Progressive Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Ruth Rosen, The
Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1982); Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
7
Ronald P. Formisano, “The Concept of Political Culture,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31 (2001): 393–426.
8David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American
Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Ruth
H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought 1756–1800(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town:
Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York:
Knopf-Random House, 1995); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American
Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992).
9
Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes.
10
Eric Foner, “Free Labor and Nineteenth-Century Political Ideology,” in The Market
Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880, ed.
Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1996), 99–127; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the
Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

68

HIROYUKI MATSUBARADavid R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).
12
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and theMetalanguage of Race,” Signs 17 (1992): 251–74; Etienne Balibar and Immanuel
Maurice Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991).
13
Reginald Wright Kauffman, The House of Bondage, (New York: Moffat Yard &Co., 1910); George Loane Tucker, dir. Trafﬁc in Souls (1913), New York: Kino on
Video, 1994.
14
Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the
United States since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Nancy K. Bristow,
Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War (New York: New York
University Press, 1996).
15
George J. Kneeland and Katharine Bement Davis, Commercialized Prostitution in
New York City (New York: Century, 1913), x.
16
Vice Commission of Philadelphia, A Report on Existing Conditions with Recommendation to the Honorable Rudolph Blankenburg, Mayor of Philadelphia (Philadelphia,
1913), 1.
17
Massachusetts Commission for the Investigation of the White Slave Trafﬁc, So
Called, Report of the Commission for the Investigation of the White Slave Trafﬁc, So
Called (Boston, 1914), 21–22.
18
Vice Commission, Louisville, Kentucky, Report of the Vice Commission, Louisville,
Kentucky: Survey of Existing Conditions with Recommendation to the Hon. John H.
Bushemeyer, Mayor (Louisville, 1915), 17.
19
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge andSuppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf-Random House, 2002).
20
Daniel T. Rodgers, “An Age of Social Politics,” in Rethinking American History ina Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1998); Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States:
Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1995); Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National
Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
21
Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social
Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Skocpol,
Social Policy in the United States.
22
Charles W. Eliot, “The American Social Hygiene Association,” Social Hygiene 1,
no. 1 (1914): 1–2.
23
Eliot to JDR, January 31, 1913, American Vigilance Association folder, box 6, series
Bureau of Social Hygiene, RG 2. Rockefeller Boards, Rockefeller Family Archives,
RAC.
24
Franklin Hichborn, “The Organization that Backed the California Red Light Abatement Bill,” Social Hygiene 1, no. 2 (1915): 194–206.
25
William F. Snow, “Progress, 1900–1915” Social Hygiene 2, no. 1 (1916): 46.
26
Abraham Flexner, “The Regulation of Prostitution in Europe,” Social Hygiene 1,
no. 1 (1914): 16.
27
Board of Health, Annual Report of the Department of Public Health, San Francisco,Cal. for Fiscal Year, July 1, 1910, to June 30, 1911 (1911), 1–7; Julius Rosenstirn, Our
Nation’s Health Endangered by Poisonous Infection through the Social Malady: The
Protective Work of the Municipal Clinic of San Francisco and Its Fight for Existence(San Francisco: Town Talk Press, 1913); Julius Rosenstirn, “The Municipal Clinic of
11

THE 1910s ANTI-PROSTITUTION MOVEMENT

69

San Francisco,” Medical Record: A Weekly Journal of Medicine and Surgery 83 (1913):
467–76.
28
Hiroyuki Matsubara, “The Anti-Prostitution Movement and the Contest of the
Middle Class Reformers over Cultural Authority: San Francisco, 1910–1913,” Japanese
Journal of American Studies 12 (2001): 83–104; Hiroyuki Matsubara, “Seiji bunka nochitsujo wo kakete,” in Sei to kenryoku kankei no rekishi [“Struggling for Cultural
Authority: A Controversy over San Francisco Municipal Clinic for Prostitutes, 1911–
1913” in History of Sexuality and Power], ed. Rekishigaku Kenkyu-kai (Tokyo: Aoki
Shoten, 2004), 239–68.
29
Gayle Ann Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the
California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000);
Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States,
1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
30
Matsubara. “Seiji bunka no chitsujo wo kakete.”
31
Bristow, Making Men Moral.
32
Edward Frank Allen and Raymond Blaine Fosdick, Keeping Our Fighters Fit for
War and After (New York: Century Co., 1918), 16–17; Woodrow Wilson, “Special
Statement,” in Allen and Fosdick, Keeping Our Fighters Fit, n.p. Also see Alan Dawley,
Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003).