Traffic in Souls (1913)

In 1910, District Attorney Charles S. Whitman’s investigation into vice, instigated in response to George Kibbe Turner’s exposé of the white slave trade in Chicago, and his probing of vice at New York’s Tammany Hall, scandalised America. The Rockefeller White Slavery Report caused further uproar. Novelists such as Reginald Wright Kaufmann, author of the best-selling House of Bondage, were quick to exploit the country’s obsession with the subject, and moviemakers soon followed suit. Films featuring lurid tales of unscrupulous white slavers luring innocent middle-class white girls into prostitution (Decoyed, The Fatal Hour, To Save Her Soul, etc.) inflamed audiences. Yellow journalism fuelled national hysteria, which peaked in 1913 when Universal’s George Loane Tucker and Walter McNamara made a melodrama based on Rockefeller’s report.

Some historians claim they made their lurid six-reel expose without Universal owner Carl Laemmle’s knowledge. They suggest he rejected their proposal before departing on a trip to Europe, believing the public had no appetite for long movies. Undeterred, Tucker obtained guarantees for $1,000 each from Bob Daley, director Herbert Brenon, Universal’s biggest star King Baggott, and editor Jack Cohn. He shot ten reels, trimmed it to six, and showed the completed film to an approving Laemmle on his return.

Other historians, such as Kevin Brownlow, refute these claims. In Behind the Mask of Innocence, he states that Lee Shubert, Joseph Rhinock, an officer of the Shubert Theatrical Company, and Cincinnati businessman George B. Cox each invested $5,000. Other investors contributed a further $10,000. Whichever version is correct, Traffic in Souls was a huge hit, reviving the trend for white slave movies while grossing approximately $450,000, thanks in part to a $1,000 weekly advertising budget and fallacious claims it was a $200,000 extravaganza with 700 scenes and 800 players.

The plot revolves around two sisters, Mary (Jane Gail) and Lorna Barton (Ethel Grandin), who live with their wheelchair-bound inventor father (William Turner) and work in a candy store. Bill Bradshaw (William Kavanaugh) persuades Lorna, the younger of the sisters, to slip away from her sister for a drink. However, Bradshaw is a procurer for a ring of white slave traffickers secretly managed by William Trubus (William Welch), an apparently upstanding member of the community. Trubus runs a reform league whose office is situated directly above the ring’s base of operations. Bradshaw drugs Lorna’s drink at a dance hall and takes her to a house where she is imprisoned by the ring. Realising someone has abducted her sister, Mary helps the police track down the gang and save Lorna before she suffers the customary ‘fate worse than death.’