Crime and Reform: An Underworld of Journalism

This article reconstructs the shrouded career of undercover reporter Natalie de Bogory (mostly from 1911–1922) to illustrate how reporters collaborated with public-private networks to regulate real or perceived crime and extend the reach of the security state, before the practice later expanded within the FBI. De Bogory was twice a guide. Undercover for newspapers, she escorted readers through an urban working-class underworld of dance, sex, and employed single women. Her journalism, however, obscured her more covert work. For private reformers who partnered with city officials, she investigated social issues, including allegations of "White slavery," the alleged sex trafficking of immigrant women. That work, during the nativist hysteria of World War I, drew de Bogory into a scheme to promote the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a forged anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that was later dubbed a "Warrant for Genocide." This history of de Bogory is an argument for studying the careers of relatively unknown journalists who often worked multiple jobs to understand their impact, and expose the interconnectivity of journalism with other professions and institutions. This article reconstructs de Bogory's career to reclaim the tradition of reporters collaborating with reformist public-private networks. Then, that neglected history is framed as a model for Henry Ford's newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which publicized the Protocols.