In his review of Traffic in Souls on the website 1000misspenthours, Scott Ashlin describes the film as being part of the “earliest generation of American sexploitation movies”¹ rating it a two and a half stars out of five for its lack of “direct titillation.” He claims that, due to censorship, much of the titillation of the film relied on “the audience to do all the heavy lifting, to seed their heads with salacious thoughts while keeping the screen itself unsullied by anything that even the bluest nose could sniff out as objectionable.” But if we are to take Traffic in Souls² at face value, it is an educational activist film supposedly combating the perilous “white slave” trade by recreating scenarios in which people (specifically, women) were in danger of being abducted and forced into lives of prostitution and forced imprisonment. So how did this film end up being listed by Ashlin alongside films like 1973’s A Virgin Among the Living Dead and 1978’s Sisters of Satan? Is Ashlin correct in his assertion, or has the subject matter of the film coloured his interpretation of it? This essay will ascertain the purpose of Traffic in Souls, by analysing both the film’s text, and the context in which it was made. Was it exploiting the then-current fears of white slavery for financial gain? Was there an element of sexuality within this exploitation? Or was it a sincere attempt at social education about the issue? And if it was, what were its goals?
(1. Ashlin cites the madam’s threatening of “Little Sister” (Lorna Barton) with a horse whip as being one of the only moments of overt kink in the film.)
(2.Directed by George Loane Tucker)
Traffic in Souls originally came about after the President of the Immigrant Girls Home in New York City, Mrs S.M. Haggen, approached its writer, Walter MacNamara, about “producing a film to dramatise the threat of white slavery to immigrant women arriving in the USA via Ellis Island”. Lee Grieveson notes that Haggen, as a member of the Progressive social reform movement, saw cinema as a universal, visual language that could convey to foreign-speakers lessons that speaking or writing could not, and that the cinema could be used as a means of Americanising newcomers. This period¹ has been termed “The Progressive Era” by historians as a time of middle class social activism, Progressives advocating social, economic and governmental improvements. With immigration (mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe) increasing from 1896 onwards, Progressives became concerned with the social effects this would have on cities like New York, and pushed for programmes like “Americanisation” as a means of decreasing the immigrants’ old loyalties and national prides and developing instead a homogeneous devotion to America and American values. Alongside this nativism was a eugenics² movement that raised concerns both about non-white immigrants and African American populations, endorsing segregation and hostility towards both groups (through the Jim Crow and anti-Asian laws). In 1913, twenty-nine states had laws forbidding mixed-race marriages, and it was in this racially conscious and divided society that the concept of “white slavery” was introduced.
(1.Typically between the 1890s and 1920s.)
(2. The eugenics book The Passing of the Great Race, by anthropologist New Yorker Madison Grant, was published three years after Traffic in Souls was released.)
While the film is titled “Traffic in Souls”, its focus is entirely upon the plight of enslaved white women, transforming a universal issue into a specifically racialized, and sexualised one. Eric Olund notes that “vice reports consistently eschewed any substantive consideration of African-American prostitutes” even when some reports “deemed the term white slave a ‘misnomer’” in its exclusion of non-whites. Hysteria surrounding white slavery began in 1909 when George Kibbe Turner, writing for McClure’s Magazine, reported that “New York has become the leader of the world” in white slavery, alongside the city of Lemberg in Poland and Paris in France. The article asserted that immigrants had brought with them this practise (rooted in the Oriental East) and that local governments and police forces had been infiltrated and corrupted by this trafficker underworld. By framing white slavery as an immigrant and Orient-established network, as a crime of the Other, Turner emphasised white people as the victims of a conspiracy against them, that other races deliberately set out towards causing miscegenation, and with that the white civilisation’s decline. It is noteworthy that the immigrants abducted and rescued in Traffic in Souls are Swedish, their being Scandinavian an indication of their being part of the Aryan race (their stereotypical, traditional outfits exaggerating this celebration of “white culture”). Because of this they are worth saving alongside the New Yorker native Lorna Barton and American “country girl” migrant, unlike the Southern and Eastern European immigrants.
Another point of context was the changing economic position of women at this time. Due to the Progressive emphasis on universal education and women’s suffrage, women were becoming increasingly independent both socially and economically. This was the “New Woman”, a feminist ideal of female individualism, contrasting with the domestically-sheltered generation before them. Thanks to their increased financial independence and urban mobility, women would go “unchaperoned to nickelodeons as well as to other venues such as dance halls and vaudeville theatres for cheap entertainment.” With the development of the movie theatre, and increased female attendance, middle class reformers grew increasingly anxious about white working-class woman’s virtue and chastity going unprotected and unsupervised in such private or intimate scenarios, fearing the new dating culture and change in sexual independence.
In this environment of increased fears about immigrants, racial miscegenation and the changing sexualities and independence of modern women, “Lurid headlines played up fears of immigrant mobility and intimated that young women were being caught up in an internationally organised traffic in white or almost-white female bodies”, the argument being that these new independent women were not safe not capable of manoeuvring through the ever-changing urban sphere. Foreign white women were in even more danger due to their lack of knowledge about metropolises. “Vice reports” suspected “any place that catered to bodily pleasure”, specifically places where women went to entertain themselves like “Dance halls and cinemas, candy shops…and even chop suey houses” all of which were suspected of being “recruiting stations of vice.”¹ It was in this period of increased fears about immigration, miscegenation, working women and the venues in which they enjoyed themselves, that Traffic in Souls was made, and it was with these issues in mind that the film centred its narrative.
(1. As described by Suffrage Leader Dr. Anna Howard Shaw)
In arguing for the film’s legitimacy as a documentation of white slaver practises and their infrastructure, it is important to note the information given throughout the film. Through intertitles, we are informed immediately of various members of the organisation, using terms like the “Go-Between” office worker who works with the ground troops, “The Cadet” who goes out and ‘procures’ unsuspecting women, and “the man upstairs” the Rt. Hon. William Trubus, a man of high social standing (dressed in a top hat and coat) and involved with the “Citizen’s League” while secretly involved with the trafficking ring. A specific detail from the Turner article about the political elite.¹ The film depicts common truisms of the time, such as the “Traveller’s Aid Society” report that “Every year, thousands of young women come to the great cities looking for a chance of honorable livelihood. Rich in hope and ambition but lacking in experience and resource, they fall easy prey to the evil that is always in wait for the unprotected woman at the Terminals and Docks.” as specifically seen with the “country girl” and immigrant women.
(1. Turner claimed that the slave rings were being condoned by the political elite in “Tammany Hall.”)
The film goes into detail about the slavers’ tactics, how they would scout out women, like Lorna Barton working in the candy shop, new immigrants just off the boat at Ellis Island, and the “country girl” migrant arriving from Penn Station. In a series of intercut shots, we’re shown the network at work in abducting the Swedish sisters. First a working class man introduces himself, giving them a letter from the “Swedish Employment Agency.” After the sisters confirm that the letter is referring to them, the man walks away and tips his hat to a man above him. The man above is better dressed, in a suit and trilby hat, making it apparent to the audience that the men involved with the slave rings are of all classes, from the working class man in a flat cap to the high-standing William Trubus.
The better dressed man then goes to the telegram operator and receives more information about the sisters. Intercut with this scene, the cadet introduces himself to Lorna in the candy shop, where they start a friendly conversation. Then cutting to the station with the “country girl” we immediately see a small, suspicious man with a moustache and sun hat watch the well-dressed woman as she leaves the station. He proceeds to follow her and starts giving her directions, but he is spotted by a police officer and pushed away from her. The police officer points her in the correct direction, emphasising how easy it is for procurers to mislead those who cannot navigate the city. The small man goes to a more stately-looking gentleman and tells him to follow the “country girl”, which he does by boarding the same tram as her.
The film then cuts to another title card saying that “The ‘look-outs’ wait for the emigrants.”, and after establishing the girls arriving from the boat and their meeting with their brother, another title card begins “the ‘frame-up’ to get rid of the brother” where a man starts a fight with the brother to get him arrested, isolating the sisters with another suspicious working man. With all these details about class-based clothing, appearances and terminology like ‘look-outs’, ‘cadet’ and ‘frame-up’, the film develops the idea that these slave rings are established within society and have been for a long enough time to have strategies and systems in place to succeed more than fail. Through these seemingly numerous suspicious characters, the film makes the slave rings appear large and powerful, the mise-en-scène always isolating the lone women while men, even when seemingly alone, are always part of a collective. The detailing gives weight to the work as an educational film, teaching the audience about the dangers of the white slavery rings.
The film is textually one of social activism, particularly in its discussing of how American women should behave, both as ‘New Women’ of the Progressive era but also in policing their social behaviour. Considering Mrs Haggen’s original push for the Americanisation of immigrant women, we are shown the results of successful or failed Americanisation through the Barton sister protagonists, Mary and Lorna. The sisters are second-generation Americans, as implied by their elderly father “The Invalid Inventor” wearing more traditional European clothing. But where “Mary embodies many of the traits of the New Woman” through her intelligence, resourcefulness and ability to manoeuvre herself throughout the city safely, her sister Lorna is shown to wake up late, be visibly bored at work, and lacking the level of perceptiveness her sister has in dealing with suspicious characters. Mary in contrast works hard at Smyrner’s Candy Store and cares for her wheelchair-using, house-bound father.
Mary is framed with a community, doting over her father and having a sweetheart in the police officer Burke, while Lorna is isolated, similarly to the immigrant women and country girl. Aside from quickly passing Burke on her way to work, she has no established relationships like Mary does. She has failed to integrate into the working world as well as her sister has and it is in this way that she falls prey to procurers. Mary fits within the domestic and working spheres. Though she is described by the film as the “head of the household” she still lives to serve the man of the house, and while she is in a romantic relationship, it operates strictly within a chaste fashion, where she is even conscious of kissing in public, similar to the daughter of William Trubus, Alice, who meets her fiancé, Bobby Kopfman, “the greatest society catch of the season” through arranged meetings, entirely within the domestic space under parental supervision. Eric Olund notes that the middle classes were keen on the New Women becoming part of the workforce “capital”, but were less approving of her “self-assured sexuality” as exhibited by Lorna, which they considered “wasted energy”.
The depiction of older values serve as a contrast to the “New Woman” space in which Mary Barton operates. Alice is still trapped in the world of old domesticity, completely reliant on her father and husband for support, so when her father is exposed as the leader of the slave trafficking ring, her social standing and family fall apart. She is as much a prisoner inside her father’s web as the women his men kidnap, making the Progressive argument for female self-reliance and diminished infantilisation. While Mary is held down by her sister and father, and betrothed to her police officer lover, her individuality is not defined by others, demonstrating her independence and ability to make her own choices as opposed to Alice and Lorna. Mary serves as the archetypical example of perfect integration into American culture and a healthy moral and social understanding. “She is a New Woman, a self-regulating governmental subject.”
But it is with this plot about the two sisters that the education about white slavery element of the film begins to fall apart. While the sisters (and Alice Trubus) do demonstrate facets of femininity that were desirable and undesirable to the Progressive Era, it begins the localisation, and individualisation of an issue that, as Mrs Haggen noted, was more a danger for newcomers to urban spaces than for established members of the working community. As one reviewer for the Minneapolis Journal noted, “[I]f its purpose is to warn, it should be exhibited to those in need of warning” arguing that the film should be shown to immigrant women arriving at Ellis Island and no one else. The magazine Moving Picture World questioned the film’s usefulness, asking “Is there any sensible person…who will honestly say…that even one single individual was saved from white slavery…by means of these pictures?” The thesis statement of the film becomes less about protecting women from slavers and more about blaming women for being complicit in their own abductions and subsequent miscegenation.
It is important to note that “Civic commissions and grand juries found plentiful evidence of prostitution and organised vice in American cities, then, but little proof to support wild tales of white slavery rings abducting young women and holding them against their will.” By inventing slavery conspiracy theories and “portraits of male-run underworlds”, social reformers could ignore the actual socio-economic issues that were causing prostitution (a lot of which was caused by “The New Woman” being underpaid by employers with some needing to rely on bartering sex for anything from leisurely pursuits to paying the rent) as this would affect them financially, so the argument went that their prostitution was a result of male oppression as opposed to a need for financial independence.
The focus on white native women being abducted in locations like the dance hall emphasise the film’s interest in nativist and racial purity as opposed to protecting actual demographics at risk of abduction. Another detail that Traffic in Souls ignored is that one of the “recruiting stations” rumoured to be used by procurers was the movie theatre, and if that were the case, it would be safer for women to not attend these movie theatres which in turn would cause Traffic in Souls to lose its target audience. And as white slavery had been a hot topic for four years already, the issue had already received a great amount of public attention, with “two Broadway plays on the vice trade…The Fight and The Lure” already having been performed three months before Traffic in Soul’s release. In a similar fashion to exploitation films responding to popular films or scandals, Traffic in Souls exploited the factually dubious hysteria over white slavery and became a huge box office success as a result.
Lee Grieveson notes how the film is split between its “educational imperative” and its central melodrama involving the Barton’s. From the film’s visual text and editing the educational elements give way to an adventure-narrative. A notable example through editing is the introduction of the film’s villain, William Trubus. When we first meet Trubus, he is in his family home, sitting stately at his desk going through letters. We see from a close-up of the letter that he is a Right Honourable Gentleman, and that he makes public addresses, placing him from the audience perspective as a politician or social reformer. That the film chose this kind of figure as its central, hypocritical villain implies a snubbing of the people most supportive of the film’s educational qualities, in its implying that they too are implicated in white slavery. We are then introduced to his loving wife, his daughter and his daughter’s fiancé. As we’ve so far been introduced only to the Barton’s and Trubus’, the implication is that both daughters will be abducted. But when we see Trubus go to work, we see him enter the same building as the “Go-Between” character’s office, revealing his association to the slavers visually before we are later informed, via a science-fiction device, the “dictagraph”, that he is in communiqué with the Go-Between. The dictagraph and Trubus’s headphones allow him and the Go-Between to exchange communication through the floor via writing and speaking, the magical element of this fictional technology establishing the amount of power and control Trubus has over his working space. Even his writing and voice are mobile. The use of these, at the time, science-fiction devices places the film more within the conventions of melodrama than documentary, implying that the white slavers are so powerful that they have procured for themselves magical technologies assisting them in covering their tracks.
When Mary infiltrates Trubus’s working space, suspense is built when she is left alone in his office with the dictagraph. The film cuts between her and Trubus outside with other social reformers reading an article informing us that “50,000 girls disappear yearly” (a number that may have seemed plausible during the white slavery hysteria, but rings as absurd today). Close-ups of the article highlight Trubus’s villainy, as a fly lands on the close-up multiple times, emphasising that he is the rotten core at the heart of the anti-white slave movement. Cutting back to Mary, she picks up Trubus’s headset and “recognises the voice of the man who took her sister away”.
The film takes on more of a detective-thriller style here as Mary investigates the source of the headphone’s sounds, discovering the Cadet and the Man-Between downstairs. Suspense is built through intercutting shots of her escapade alongside Trubus’s meeting. If Traffic in Souls is exploitation entertainment, then it makes sense that it would draw inspiration from popular detective serials during the period, many of which featured heroines as the investigative leads.¹ Using another science-fiction invention, her father’s sound-recording device, Mary breaks into the traffickers’ space just as they broke into her sister’s, defeating the technology that gave Trubus power over mobility and harnessing it as a means of rescue, of mobility for her sister. Alongside this building of tension through Trubus’s villainous reveal and Mary’s investigative escapade are Officer Burke’s one-man rescue of the country girl and immigrant women from the brothel, and the police’s later assault on the trafficking ring, making the film more action-adventure serial than informative document. The film implies that there is excitement to be had in scenarios like this, as opposed to it being a horrifying situation for the victims involved.
(1. Lee Grieveson noted that detective films and serials were an increasingly popular genre of film from 1910 onwards.)
Which leads onto the other element of excitement on offer in the film. Is Traffic in Souls, as Ashlin asserts, a ‘sexploitation’ film, allowing audiences to find sexual thrills in its subject matter? When Lorna Barton is kidnapped, she is drugged, then brought into the brothel, where she is promptly carried up to a bedroom by her kidnapper like a mock wedding night. The brothel is a large building with many unopened doors within the mise-en-scène, granting the viewer with implications about what may be going on behind said closed doors. When we are brought into Lorna’s bedroom, there is a sense of voyeurism, of peeking through the keyhole. Once Lorna is inside, the madam takes off her hat and unbuttons Lorna’s coat. When Lorna attempts escape, the madam and Cadet pull her coat off. The scene is intercut with a scene of Mary despairing over Lorna’s disappearance, praying over a bed. This contrasting of the two sisters places them in two different domestic spaces. One is chaste and religiously signified, Mary (appropriately named) praying for salvation, while the brothel’s room is one of violence and seediness. The virgin and whore archetypes as represented through different bedrooms, Lorna literally falling to the floor as “the fallen woman.” To add to the sexual imagery, the madam later returns to Lorna demanding that she put on new clothes. Through the medium close-up of Lorna and the madam, with Lorna’s body angled directly towards the camera, she is bare before the camera’s gaze, on display for the viewer, as though she has already been stripped.
Considering the mixed-gender audience of the time¹, there are several forms of spectatorship occurring in this scene. One is the voyeuristic male gaze, deriving pleasure from Lorna’s sexualised and vulnerable positioning, but the female spectatorship is, as Laura Mulvey argued, is borne out from an “aesthetic of curiosity” combining “scopophilia and epistemophilia”, deriving pleasure through discovery. Shelley Stamp made the case that female mobility was increased by these films depicting the sex trade, that “Female filmgoers repeatedly warned about menacing vice rings were…free to tour the urban underworld, to peer inside brothels, to spy upon procurers entrapping unsuspecting women”. The added sadomasochism of the madam producing a whip to threaten Lorna adds kinaesthesia to an otherwise visual experience, the added physical threat to Lorna’s position increasing her vulnerability and exaggerating the sensuality of the sequence. So not only are there visual thrills in gunfights and detective work to be enjoyed in Traffic in Souls, but sexual and specular pleasure also.
(1. Many commentators of the time were shocked at the large female turnout for vice films “When The Inside of the White Slave Traffic opened a week later…several hundred people had to be turned away, the majority of whom were young women.” Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After The Nickelodeon (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000) 52)
Traffic in Souls began as an educational film warning immigrant women against the urban dangers of kidnappers and the threat of race pollution through prostitution, but ended up becoming a hugely successful film at the box office filled with visual pleasures for an audience to enjoy. In its exploitation of the popular craze of white slavery, Traffic in Souls delivered on its voyeuristic approach to the brothels, filling the story with melodrama and action to hold audience interest beyond its attempts at social commentary, which, with its simplistic representations of immigrants and procurers, comes across as cartoonish by comparison to the fleshed-out story of the Barton sisters. Scott Ashlin was right in his estimation that Traffic in Souls was a sexploitation film, exploiting the sexual subject matter of white slavery while the educational components were neither detailed nor varied enough to be of use as documentary.
An interesting thing to consider is the female audience’s response to the film. Considering the genre’s short-lived popularity with young women, a conclusion can be drawn that the educational value of the film could itself have been enjoyed as a epistemophiliac form of sexual pleasure for the female gaze. The spaces depicted: the safety of the crowded streets, the home and the workspace, in contrast to the seediness and excitement of the dance halls and brothel, all painted a picture of sexual fantasy that young women may not have encountered before. That the girls are rescued by young men in uniform gives the film a sense of escapism that reinforces the excitement of the sexual fantasy, that not only could it be enjoyed safely in the confines of the movie theatre, but that even in these situations there was a literal escape before any real danger was endured. The education elements allowed both the male and female audience to come together and enjoy a film littered with salacious sadomasochistic details, all in the name of progress and social good.
Ashlin, Scott, Traffic in Souls, or While New York Sleeps (1913) **1/2 (1000misspenthours.com 2003-2017)
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Brooking The Vault 