“Hudson River Undercover” explores how working-class recreation and private surveillance collided aboard Hudson River steamboat excursions during the early twentieth century. The talk focuses on an investigation report written mere weeks after the onset of federal wartime alcohol prohibition in July 1919 by an undercover agent working for New York’s Committee of Fourteen, an influential private anti-vice organization backed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Held in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, the investigation report reveals how wage-earning women articulated femininity and sought out individual freedoms, companionship, pleasure, and romance via Hudson River steamboat excursions
