Motion Pictures and Moral Panic: The Reception of 'White Slavery' Films in New York in 1913

Abstract

n November 24, 1913, the Independent Moving Picture Company released Traffic in Souls (Traffic) to three full-house audiences at the Joe Weber Theatre on Broadway. One week later, the Moral Feature Film Company released The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (Inside) at the Park Theatre on Columbus Circle, where its popularity saw several hundred people – mostly young women – turned away at the doors. A month later, both films were still selling-out in greater New York, each grossing close to $5,000 at the weekly box office. Traffic and Inside represented the two most important films of a new genre of sensationalist cinema: the ‘white slavery’ film, which was emerging in the early twentieth century against a background of media-propagated ‘sex hysteria.’ Labelled the ‘twin’ of antebellum African American slavery by Jane Addams, ‘white slavery’ films exploited a growing fear in American society that an extensive and elaborate system of forced prostitution existed within cities like New York, involving the widespread abduction of young and impressionable white native-born women.