The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity by Leslie J. Harris

Fed by anxieties about shifting demographics and expanding cities at the turn of the twentieth century, the White slavery controversy espoused fears that White women were being lured, captured, and sold into sexual slavery. In The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity, Leslie Harris traces how, between 1887 and the 1920s, the rhetorically constructed moral crisis of White slavery was wielded to affirm White national identity and shape national space. Little evidence suggests that sex trafficking posed a significant threat to White women specifically; rather, the controversy obscured the realities of sexual exploitation, to which women of color were most frequently subjected. This distinction is important, and Harris asserts that “white slavery is a rhetorical construct that is distinct from a material history of sex and sex trafficking” (127). To illustrate how the controversy was crafted and circulated, she draws from a wide range of sources, including newspapers, reform group pamphlets, special commission reports, speeches, and legislation.In her investigation of the White slavery controversy, Harris diverges from related historical scholarship by focusing on its rhetorical construction and what it “was doing in public culture” (xii), rather than attempting to verify the material reality of White women being sold into slavery. She illustrates how the controversy operationalized the notion that White women were the vessels of morality and, if their safety and chastity were under threat, the nation was under threat. The White slavery controversy positioned the permeability of social and geographic boundaries that allowed for the mobility of people of color and immigrants as threats to White womanhood and, by extension, the nation. Harris employs the concept of “the mobile imagination” to elucidate how mobility was strategically granted and restricted to control people of color, keep women in their proper place, and link national belonging to whiteness.Crafted around sex trafficking, the White slavery crisis played to fears about mobility. Good women ended up in bad places, namely, city neighborhoods filled with vice where they found themselves in close proximity to men of color lying in wait to exploit them, or so the controversy goes. Harris explains: “Rather than focus on space itself, the mobile imagination draws attention to the intersection of space, people, and time. The analysis of mobile imagination accordingly demands reflection on who or what can move, how the mobility occurs, the material and social constraints to mobility, and the cultural meanings of mobility within particular contexts” (xxi). Her analysis of the mobile imagination also reveals how spaces become racialized and how space racializes. Like the controversy itself, The Rhetoric of White Slavery spans multiple locales and examines how the White slavery controversy operated across multiple “concentric scales” (xxiv) and entangled various groups of people. Her analysis ranges from an instance of the controversy that operated on a small, local scale to a transnational treaty that reveals the impact of globalization and colonialism on conceptions of national boundaries and identities. She takes up Lisa Flores’s concept of “stoppage” to consider forced immobility and the relationship between rhetorical constructions of space and material realities. Harris claims: “The rhetorical both reflects and constitutes imaginations of racialized place and belonging in ways that shape material, embodied experiences” (2020, xx).The first chapter turns to the Northwoods in 1880s rural Wisconsin to illustrate how place “writes meaning onto women’s bodies” (24). The Northwoods played an important role in westward expansion through the burgeoning lumber industry and figured in White, masculine conquest narratives. Yet, when stories emerged of young White women trapped in brothels in the woods, the liminal space of the frontier took on new meaning through the threat it posed to White women whose location was incongruous with their perceived status as the moral center of Christian society. Harris analyzes newspaper reporting, letters sent to the Wisconsin governor, and public addresses by reform advocates to demonstrate how official and vernacular discourse intermingled “as part of a complex web constituting a reality of white slavery in Wisconsin” (8). Ultimately, reporters and advocates tried to make sense of White women’s displacement by figuring them as passive objects moved to the wrong place, a figuration that runs through multiple iterations of the controversy and creates possibilities for redemption. Yet redemption was available only to women who were “of previous chaste character” (22), as state legislation passed in 1887 reveals.Chapter 2 moves into the city and the twentieth century, where unstable boundaries insufficiently contained Chicago’s famous vice districts and the people who facilitated the activities that took place therein. Harris reminds readers that “the city is a rhetorical construct” and that, when trying to understand different parts of a city, “people and place become metonymically connected” (27). Therefore, it was not difficult for reformers to discursively connect fears about the rising number of immigrants inhabiting Chicago with concerns about vice districts through geographic proximity. Harris claims that, “despite reformers’ attempts to contain immigration, vice, and women, each leaked through their constructed boundaries”—which for White women meant the country home—“marking the entire city as a site of danger” (47).While reformers in Chicago advocated containment, reformers in New York adopted a rhetoric of science and objectivity that imagined space as stable and, thus, posited social mobility as the solution to White slavery. In chapter 3, Harris argues that “the New York branch of the movement engaged in explicit definitional work to move the definition of ‘white slavery’ from entrapment to redeemability” (56). Spurred by an investigation financed by John D. Rockefeller Jr., the rhetoric of New York reform operated across multiple registers to shift the focus of the White slavery controversy from women’s innate characteristics to environmental factors, potentially broadening the definition of White slavery to include all prostitution. Yet the scientific approach also presumed to determine which women were redeemable and, therefore, worthy of reform efforts, leaving room for the deep-seated racial bias that framed Black women as incapable of social mobility (57). Proper domesticity offered the solution for redeeming fallen White women and those American men who purchased sex. Though this iteration of the controversy acknowledged that men of any social class or race could uphold White slavery by purchasing sex, the primary perpetrators were identified as men born outside the United States, suggesting that a propensity for sexual exploitation was correlated to place of birth and race.In chapter 4, Harris analyzes the content of the 1910 White Slave Traffic Act (or the Mann Act), which aimed to solve the White slavery crisis, as well as the debate surrounding it and its enforcement. She argues that meaning derived from the text of a law and it intertextual context “shapes the roles of the law in public life, the possibilities and limitations of civic identity, as well as understandings of nation” (71). Because legislators lacked an existing, specific definition of White slavery around which they could craft the law, the language of the act remained sufficiently vague to leave room for interpretation to the agents who would enforce it, namely, the employees of the newly formed Bureau of Investigation. The widely publicized prosecution of Jack Johnson, a Black heavyweight boxing champion, serves as Harris’s central example. Johnson had several sexual relationships with White women, and, in response to a White mother’s allegations that he refused to release her daughter, prosecutors used the Mann Act to bring charges against him that were based on small details from his past interactions with another woman. Through Harris’s analysis of Johnson’s prosecution and public scrutiny bolstered by sensationalized newspaper reporting, it becomes clear that prosecutors took advantage of the vague language of the act to police interracial relations. Harris demonstrates how, rather than protecting women from the dangers of sexual exploitation and trafficking, “the rhetoric of the Mann Act worked to restrict Black people’s mobility, constituting whiteness as integral to national identity” (72).Chapter 5 offers a deep dive into how fears around immigration became part of the White slavery controversy. The Mann Act—the focus of the previous chapter—incorporated a provision that built on legislation passed over the preceding thirty years by adding women and girls brought into the country for “the purposes of prostitution, or any other immoral purpose” (103), to the list of restricted migrants. Harris applies analytic concepts from the work of Lisa Flores (2003, 2020) and Karma Chávez (2010), among others, to analyze how rhetoric shapes the meaning of borders and national belonging in relation to race. With a focus on San Francisco’s Chinatown, she illustrates how opponents of immigration utilized White slavery rhetoric to present Asian immigration as “a spatial problem where immorality and barbarism were thought to be invading an otherwise civilized country” (98). Differences in Chinese culture—especially in marriage norms—were represented as uncivilized and sexually deviant, casting Chinese women as “yellow slaves” who could never perform proper womanhood and Chinese men as transient laborers. Racialized spaces like Chinatowns, where women were allegedly held as slaves, posed a threat to White women and, by extension, civilized society. Harris demonstrates that, in addition to attempting to regulate space by restricting immigration, federal immigration law and reform efforts endeavored to regulate womanhood and national belonging through racial differentiation rooted in sexual morality.Chapter 6 expands the scope of analysis to an international scale in order to examine the impact of globalization on conceptions of national identity in Western countries through the White slavery controversy. European nations and the United States established a treaty in 1910 to combat sex trafficking as a transnational issue. Like other responses to White slavery, womanhood and morality were not clearly defined in the treaty, which led to differential implementation according to each nation’s interpretation. Differences in application appeared not only among participating countries but also among European countries and their colonies. Harris argues: “The movement of white women was perceived to endanger a nation while the movement of white womanhood functioned as a mechanism for national expansion and colonial control” (147). Policies that regulated prostitution naturalized the sexual exploitation of colonized women and protected White women from moral contamination, thus restricting racial mobility.To conclude, Harris rearticulates the function of the mobile imagination as a way of understanding how rhetorical constructions of movement “shape understandings of national identity and belonging” (150). She draws parallels between the White slavery controversy of the twentieth century and the rhetoric of modern-day (i.e., twenty-first century) slavery. She finds that the use of the term slavery is loaded and that the rhetoric of slavery often upholds a “victim/whore dichotomy” (158) that fails to capture the complexities of lived experience. She claims: “If enslaved peoples are understood as abject and devoid of agency, few people will self-identify as slaves, and the rhetoric of slavery tends to empower the rescuer of an innocent, while entirely disempowering the person being trafficked” (158). Similarities in the rhetorics of White slavery and modern-day slavery elucidate that trafficking rhetorics not only are about protecting people but also constitute a sense of national identity and belonging.Reading The Rhetoric of White Slavery alongside Annie Hill’s Trafficking Rhetoric (2024) illustrates the extent to which trafficking rhetorics are shaped by surges in anti-immigration sentiments and efforts to control national identity. Where Harris uses mobility to track how the rhetoric of White slavery shaped space and White national identity at the turn of the twentieth century, Hill shifts attention to the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century and how the state wields the rhetoric of modern-day slavery to obscure the violence to which people of color and immigrants are subjected under the guise of protecting women and children. In juxtaposing the United Kingdom’s mission to save White women from sex trafficking with increased hostility toward immigration, Hill’s project illustrates Harris’s claim that “contemporary calls to protect women and children work in conjunction with racialized national identity: The rhetoric of white supremacy is adaptable, but uncovering how white womanhood was appropriated to shore up the whiteness of nation in the white slavery controversy can help make the threads of white supremacy more visible in modern-day slavery rhetoric” (159).