American Activists’ Efforts to Export Their Undercover Tactics and Their Abolitionist Agenda to the League of Nations

The success of the American abolitionist movement during the Progressive Era helps to explain why private reform activists transposed their methods and agenda onto the international arena. As delegates to the League of Nations Advisory Committee on Trafficking of Women and Children into White Slavery, undercover activists visited brothels around the world and used their first-hand observations to author a 1927 vice report that promoted both their abolitionist agenda and their undercover tactics. While French regulationists focused primarily on coercion and kidnaping, American abolitionists sought to expand the definition of White Slavery to include voluntary participation in prostitution by female immigrants, framing prostitution as the product of mass immigration. The ensuing conflict between American abolitionist delegates and other national delegations reflects a gulf between what European delegates and American reformers considered acceptable methods of “fact-finding” about vice. While the Americans’ first-hand accounts of visits to brothels drew a great deal of attention to the authors’ findings and abolitionist recommendations, the use of undercover methods (often exposing the corruption of local authorities) engendered a tremendous amount of criticism from other national delegates who viewed American reformers’ undercover visits to the delegates’ respective countries as an encroachment on the states’ sovereign investigative priorities.