Private Activists’ Undercover Tactics and Vice Enforcement in Progressive Era America

Progressive Era America depended heavily on undercover tactics, which led first to geographic containment of vice and then to an abolitionist backlash against the effects of this regulationist reform. Private sector anti-vice activists like social worker George Kneeland made careers of visiting red-light districts across America to infiltrate brothels and to write up the investigators’ findings as first-hand narratives in mass-marketed vice reports. The reports invariably advocated shuttering of brothels and the infrastructure of vice that supported prostitution, including dance halls, gambling parlors, and bars. A close look at Kneeland’s vice report for the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the records of Chicago’s Committee of Fifteen, and contemporaneous newspaper accounts, from the 1910s and 1920s, reveals the extent to which undercover tactics underwrote not only the enforcement of anti-vice initiatives but the adoption of an abolitionist enforcement agenda over the objections of public officials who had long favored the toleration and geographic regulation of vice. Undercover tactics also led the American reformers to adopt a more punitive form of abolitionism than French reformers envisaged and thus to diverge significantly from the shared British origins of French and American movements to abolish brothels and other tolerated forms of prostitution.