Respectability on Trial by Brian Donovan

Author:Brian Donovan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Belle Moore and the White Slavery Narrative

The trial of Belle Moore was the most publicized compulsory case in New York City. Unlike other compulsory prostitution trials in the Transcript Collection, People v. Moore received extensive coverage in the local papers. Assistant District Attorney James Bronson Reynolds accused Belle Moore, a twenty-nine-year-old mixed-race woman, of serious crimes including running a white slave racket on the West Side, selling teenage girls into forced prostitution, and being responsible for the abduction and death of an eleven-year-old girl named Helen Hastings. The trial of Belle Moore is an important event in New York City history because it exposed the connection between anti-prostitution efforts and racial tensions. The African American community in New York City increased nearly threefold from 1890 to 1920, and an African American woman accused of enslaving white girls crystallized the fear and racism harbored by white city residents. The Belle Moore trial, according to historian Barbara Antoniazzi, was a kind of public performance that laid bare the gender and racial tensions of Progressive-Era New York City.32

The case against Belle Moore started with a chain of events initiated by journalist George Kibbe Turner. Turner was a quintessential muckraker, exposing urban corruption in a series of articles in McClure’s Magazine. A 1909 article titled “Daughters of the Poor” accused Tammany Hall of coordinating a vast white slavery conspiracy. His article contained the hallmarks of the Progressive-Era white slavery narrative. According to the article, white slave procurers (called “cadets”) traveled to the industrial towns of New England to look for poorly paid factory girls to lure to New York City. One procurer, Turner noted, dressed as a priest to gain the confidence of his victims. As the city’s vice industry expanded, white slave procurers heavily recruited from the slums and tenement houses, and Italians and Eastern European Jews haunted the city’s dance halls to look for women to ensnare into prostitution. Turner observed, “The amusement of the poor girl of New York—especially the very poor girl—is dancing.”33 Therefore, the dance hall became the “chief recruiting grounds” for new white slaves.34 Turner directly blamed Tammany Hall Democrats for the city’s vice problem and declared that the only way to address New York City’s prostitution problem was to defeat Tammany Hall at the ballot box.

Tammany Hall politicians responded to Turner’s charges by initiating a grand jury investigation into white slavery. At the time, many believed that the grand jury effort was a way for Tammany Hall to whitewash or downplay the extent of prostitution; the investigation was designed to produce no evidence of white slavery and Tammany corruption. Judge Thomas O’Sullivan, a strong Tammany supporter, commissioned the grand jury and appointed an inexperienced and young foreman, John Rockefeller Jr. Rockefeller’s family name gave the investigative effort a gloss of respectability, and it became known as the Rockefeller Grand Jury in the press. Tammany Hall did not expect, however, for Rockefeller to pursue his investigative work to the extent that he did. The grand jury studied the city’s prostitution trade for over six months, long past the time they were required to meet.

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