



Produced by Bryan Ness and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)









  Chicago's Black Traffic
  in
  White Girls


  _An article on the Great "White Slave" Question_

  _ILLUSTRATED_


  By
  Mrs. Jean Turner-Zimmermann, M. D.


[Illustration: JEAN TURNER-ZIMMERMANN, M. D.]


  CHICAGO'S
  BLACK TRAFFIC
  IN
  WHITE GIRLS


  _By_
  _MRS. JEAN TURNER-ZIMMERMANN, M. D._

  _President of the_
  CHICAGO RESCUE MISSION and
  WOMAN'S SHELTER

  AND

  _Superintendent of_
  The DEPARTMENT OF PURITY AND HEREDITY of the
  COOK COUNTY W. C. T. U.

  733 Washington Boulevard, CHICAGO


[Illustration: REV. R. IRA STONE

_Superintendent of the Chicago Rescue Mission_]




Foreword


My sole aim in bringing this little pamphlet to you is to definitely call
the attention of the men and women of the Central Western States, and
especially those of the City of Chicago into whose hands it may come, to
the vicious, thoroughly organized white-slave traffic of to-day, and its
attendant, far-reaching, horrible results upon the young man and womanhood
of our Land.

During a constant residence covering seven years of time in the central
slum districts of the West and South Sides of Chicago, I have gained much
actual knowledge of the questions of poverty, drink and prostitution among
the lost men and women of these great neighborhoods, have become
personally acquainted with very many of them, visiting them, listening to
their heart stories and growing to know much of their inside lives, and
have learned a real tender interest and pity for them in their remorseful,
helpless, hopeless condition.

All incidents, references and statistics (as far as possible) herein given
are strictly authentic, and have been collected with great care and
fairness either by myself or my assistants.

Statistical references have been taken from the writings of United States
Attorney Sims, Rev. Ernest A. Bell and others engaged in prosecuting and
reform work, all of whom I thank sincerely and wish well in what they are
accomplishing for good where it is so desperately needed in this submerged
underworld of our city.

       *       *       *       *       *

So in bringing this eighth edition of CHICAGO'S BLACK TRAFFIC IN WHITE
GIRLS to you, a part of which has already been published under the title
of CHICAGO'S SOUL MARKET, it is the aim of the writer to give more thought
and time to real, existing conditions--descriptions and actual facts
relative to public prostitution and its attendant frightful results,
rather than to such matter as incidents, "cases," etc., knowledge of which
can usually be acquired by simply reading the daily press of Chicago or
New York. All descriptions, statistics and photographs are taken by the
author from actual contact with the great underworld and quoted with
names, dates, etc., of those concerned and are absolutely authentic.

We, together with thousands of others--editors, legislators, club women,
ministers and everybody else who has the welfare of the girlhood of our
Land at heart, believe that the time for prudery and concealment is past
and that honest men and women should know what there is to know about this
thoroughly organized, solidly financed system of White Slavery flourishing
and growing in America to-day--a system which controls and ruins hundreds
of thousands of women in our midst every year and which requires a
constant sacrifice of more than sixty thousand young girls annually to
feed its death and disease dealing machinery.

Most people think of harlotry or prostitution as something
secret--something to be kept from the public eye, something to be ashamed
of. Not so to the great throng of Chicago whore-mongers. Everything that
can be done to attract attention and custom is done by the five thousand
men and hundreds of hideous, brutish madams who in this city exploit the
bodies and live off the earnings of thirty thousand public women in our
midst. The twenty-seven hundred (quoting from a statement of Chief of
Police Stewart) houses of ill-fame here are conducted with as much
publicity and advertising as the grocery or meat market nearby. Each
adjoining and nearby saloon, with its wine rooms and booths, is an
advertising and recruiting agency; the ward politician, the officers on
the beat, the common "pimp" and the recognized whore-mongers, work
harmoniously together to exploit this vast business.

Reckoning the number of White Slaves in Chicago at thirty thousand, and
the average number of men entertained by each of these unfortunate women
nightly at five (a very low average) with an average per man of one
dollar, there is poured monthly =Four Million Five Hundred Thousand
Dollars=, blood money, into the coffers of these human dealers--as the
rental for profit of the bodies of our American girl and her alien sister
who has been mercilessly trapped, lured from her home and sold into the
great festering cesspool, without the slightest knowledge of our customs
and laws, and ruined forever.

New York City is the great eastern headquarters and westward shipping
point for Oriental and European White Slaves. Mark this statement:

     _"Seventeen hundred girls, by actual count, were lost on the way from
     New York to Chicago last year, according to an investigation now
     being made by the Commissioner of Immigration. Somehow these girls
     were spirited away from the care of the agents to whom they were
     entrusted and were never seen nor heard of again."_

Isn't that an appalling fact? for fact it is--seventeen hundred girls lost
and gone forever just from this one line of travel alone and in just one
year! These girls, who came to this Country to better themselves, to make
an honest living, broken and rotting to-day behind bolts and bars in some
of our cities' foul dives, or else shipped on and on until at last in some
Chinese underground cellar or under the lash of a South American or
Philippine whore-master, Death at last comes to the rescue.

Please remember, as you read this, that America is becoming more and more
un-American every day. Each ship, each train Westward or Eastward bound,
the now daily dumping into our Land, so lately the goal of the home-seeker
from Germany, Sweden, Ireland, etc., the real future citizen--thousands
of the scum and vice and criminal element of South Eastern Europe, Asia
and the Orient, and remember too that a short five-years of residence here
converts the filthiest criminal from Turkey, Arabia, Syria, Italy, or of
any place else where vice and brutality reign supreme, into an American
citizen with the right to vote into office men who will and are sworn to
protect and aid in every possible way the Jewish, Russian, French or
Chinese whore-master as he rents a shanty and proceeds to fatten on the
very life-blood of the young girlhood of this and other lands.

JEAN TURNER-ZIMMERMANN, M. D.




The "Protected" White Slave Traffic.


Open prostitution--White Slavery, as it exists to-day in Chicago, is
almost entirely under =foreign= control. Of the twenty-seven hundred houses
of ill-fame in Chicago, a very large percentage are owned and controlled
by foreigners from Southeastern Europe, while almost without exception all
Levee and White Slave resorts in the segregated districts are under the
direct ownership of the moral and civic degenerates of the French,
Italian, Syrian, Russian, Jewish or Chinese races--once in a great while
you may find a German or Swedish whore-master, but very seldom--an
American or an Englishman conducting such a business is almost entirely
unknown. American men raise the girlhood, make the laws and =elect= the
officials whereby this bloody business may be carried on and exploited by
a foaming pack of foreign hell-hounds, who after their work of death is
accomplished and their coffers filled, go home to their South Europe or
Turkish haunts with their blood and soul money, to lives of filth and
idleness in their own lands.

I appeal in the name of Jehovah, to the Church, to the women's clubs, to
the labor federations and all honorable Jews and others of foreign birth
who have come to America for a home and a decent, honorable living, to aid
in every possible way the great work now going on to eradicate
segregated, protected White Slavery from our Land.


EXTRACTS FROM THE DAILY PAPERS

Quoting from the Daily Press, May 4, regarding the recent investigations
in New York concerning the question of White Slavery by the Rockefeller
jury (which after buying two girls themselves, later declared, "there is
no traffic in women in New York"):

     Harry Levenson, the acknowledged "trader" of women who is in the
     Tombs under $25,000 bail, made a startling confession to the District
     Attorney to-night, giving names of men and women whose sole
     occupation is dealing in unfortunates.

     "I know of three places in New York," Levenson said, "where five to
     ten girls are kept constantly at hand for sale. At any hour of the
     day or night one of them, two or the whole ten, can be bought by any
     one with the money to pay for them. They can be shipped anywhere at
     an hour's notice."


     GIVES HINT ON ARRESTS

     The "trader" gave to Mr. Whitman the addresses of the three places,
     which are known as "stockades." He also made suggestions as to how
     their operators might be apprehended.

     More than that, Levenson told how the financial arrangements of the
     sales are made and how recruits are obtained.

     Agents are continually at work obtaining young girls, the prisoner
     said. The slave sellers do not want hardened women, he explained;
     they want pretty, immature girls. The agents are generally well
     dressed women who ingratiate themselves with their childish victims
     at matinees and moving-picture shows, and by dining them and painting
     rosy pictures of a life of ease, win them away from their homes or
     their ill-paid positions.

     "When there is a call for girls," Levenson continued, "the buyer
     hands over the money paid for them to the keeper. Then an
     agent--these are usually men--take the girls to wherever the "order"
     comes from. These agents then collect 10 per cent of the girl's
     weekly earnings."

Quoting from the National Prohibitionist, May 12:

     THE SLAVE TRADE AND THE VOTER

     The Christian voter who reads, and reads with blood boiling, as the
     blood of every honest man must, the shameful story of the exposure of
     the traffic in girls especially in New York, must not allow his
     imagination to run away with his reasoning faculties.

     Awful as the story is, we invite attention, not to its horror--the
     horror of herds of little girls sold at a per-head price below the
     value of pigs--but to the practical questions of responsibility and
     cure.

     Why does this infamy exist in our cities?

     How can it exist?

     Who is responsible?

     The answers all come to one point--the governments that rule our
     cities.

     The black and white wretches who are the immediate agents of vice are
     hardly worth considering. They are mere incidents. Practically it is
     a waste of time to even prosecute them.

     The trail of the real criminal leads into the police headquarters,
     leads up the steps of the city hall, goes across the threshold of the
     mayor's private office, enters the homes of Christian citizens and
     lies broad through the doors of the church.

     For this infamy of the sale of innocent girls for vice and the whole
     wider, deeper, fouler vice system is a part of governmental policy,
     not in New York and Chicago alone, but all over the Country, under
     Republican and Democratic administration.

     The very district attorney's office that exposes these particular
     instances of crime is one of the strong pillars of the system of
     which the crime is only an outcropping.

     Even now there is not a voice lifted in official Chicago and New York
     in favor of doing the one thing that alone can stop the sale of
     girls, the one thing that the law clearly prescribes in the
     matter--wiping out the vice preserves, stopping the whole system of
     trade in vice. This fact needs to be burned deeply into the hearts of
     American voters: =If you want this thing to go on, if you want little
     girls still to be bought and sold like pigs, if you want pure young
     lives to be overwhelmed in fathomless shame, all you need to do to
     help keep up the system is to keep on voting for men who protect
     these criminals.=

Quoting from McClure's (July) Magazine concerning the recent investigation
of the White Slave trade in New York City by a specially appointed jury:

     In order to establish the existence of the White Slave traffic
     Assistant District Attorney James B. Reynolds arranged to make
     actual purchases of girls in the Tenderloin and other sections of the
     underworld from those reputed to be large dealers. Skilled
     investigators who were not known in New York were engaged and put to
     work in the heart of the Tenderloin.

     They were represented as purchasers of girls. Friendly and
     confidential relations were established with some of the most
     influential White Slave dealers. By these means valuable first-hand
     information was obtained regarding the White Slave trade. The agents
     were told the price of girls, the methods employed in the business,
     and, in some cases, the corrupt relations existing between the
     traders and certain officials.

     Past and present conditions of the traffic were contrasted
     frequently, the trading during the present winter being described as
     exceptionally light because of the general alarm caused by the
     sitting of the "White Slave" Grand Jury. One large dealer told the
     agents that though two years ago he could have sold them all the
     girls they wanted at $5 or $10 apiece, he would not risk selling one
     in New York now for $1,000.

     In spite of this general caution, purchases for cash were made of
     four girls, two through an East Side dealer, who boasted of formerly
     having made large sales in other cities, and two from a so-called
     black and tan dealer. Two of the girls are under 18.

     ... With rare exceptions, not only the innocent women imported into
     this Country, but the prostitutes as well, are associated with men
     whose business it is to protect them, direct them, and control them,
     and who frequently, if not usually, make it their business to plunder
     them unmercifully. Now this system of subjection to a man has become
     common. The procurer or the pimp may put his woman into a disorderly
     house, sharing profits with the "madam". He may sell her outright; he
     may act as an agent for another man; he may keep her, making
     arrangements for her hunting men. She must walk the streets and
     secure her patrons, to be exploited, not for her own sake, but for
     that of her owner. Often he does not tell her even his real name. If
     she tries to leave her man, she is threatened with arrest. If she
     resists, she may be beaten; in some cases, when she has betrayed her
     betrayer, she has been murdered.

     The ease and apparent certainty of profit has led thousands of our
     younger men, usually those of foreign birth or the immediate sons of
     foreigners, to abandon the useful arts of life to undertake the most
     accursed business ever devised by man.

     Those who recruit women for immoral purposes watch all places where
     young women are likely to be found under circumstances which will
     give them a ready means of acquaintance and intimacy, such as picture
     shows, dance-halls, sometimes waiting rooms in large department
     stores, railroad stations, manicuring and hair dressing
     establishments.

     The strongest appeal to the instincts of humanity in every
     right-minded person is made by a consideration of the brutal system
     employed by these traffickers to in every way exploit their victims,
     the hardened prostitute as well as the innocent maiden. It is
     probable that a somewhat larger proportion of the American girls are
     free from the control of a master; and yet, according to the best
     evidences obtainable--according to the stories of the women
     themselves and the keepers of the houses--nearly all the women now
     engaged in this business in our large cities are subject to pimps,
     to whom they give most of their earnings, or else they are under the
     domination of keepers of houses, a condition that is practically the
     same.

     It is the business of the man who controls the women to provide
     police protection, either by bribing the police not to arrest her,
     or, in case of arrest, to secure bail, pay the fine, etc., to make
     all business arrangements, to decide what streets, restaurants,
     dance-halls, saloons and similar places she shall frequent.

     There are large numbers of Jews scattered throughout the United
     States, although mainly located in New York and Chicago, who seduce
     and keep girls. Some of them are engaged in importation, but
     apparently they prey rather upon young girls whom they find on the
     street, in the dance-halls, and similar places, and who, by the
     methods already indicated--love-making and pretense of marriage--they
     deceive and ruin. Many of them are petty thieves, pickpockets and
     gamblers. They also have various resorts where they meet and receive
     their mail, and transact business with one another, and visit.
     Perhaps the best known organization of this kind throughout this
     Country was one legally incorporated in New York in 1904, under the
     name of the New York Benevolent Association.

     It is, of course, difficult to prove by specific cases the relation
     of the police to this traffic, and to establish by specific evidence
     the fact generally accepted that the girls of disorderly house
     keepers regularly pay the police for protection; but high police
     officials, prosecuting officers, and social workers in all quarters
     assert that in many, if not all of our large cities, much corruption
     of this kind exists.

     The importation and harboring of alien women and girls for immoral
     purposes and the practice of prostitution by them--the so-called
     "white slave traffic"--is the most pitiful and revolting phase of the
     immigration question. This business has assumed large proportions,
     and it has been exerting so evil an influence upon our Country that
     the Immigration Commission felt compelled to make it the subject of a
     thorough investigation.

     The investigation was begun in November, 1907, under the active
     supervision of a special committee of the Immigration Commission; and
     the work was conducted by a special agent in charge, with numerous
     assistants.

     The investigation has covered the cities of New York, Chicago, San
     Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Ogden, Butte, Denver,
     Buffalo, Boston and New Orleans.

     There are between seven and eight hundred men in Seattle who live
     from the revenue from the "white slave traffic", almost all of whom
     could be reached by the State Courts, if proper efforts were made. It
     was established by the Grand Jury that the Federal Government has
     gone as far as the law allows. It is now up to the State authorities,
     who could break up this business in short order.




What are We Going to Do About the Children?


[Illustration: A Group of Children in the Midst of the "Red Light"
District]

Levee women, women living in prostitution, "madams," etc., do not bring up
their children (and most of Chicago's female dealers in prostitution have
several of them) in or =near= segregated districts of vice. Like the saloon
keeper who moved to Evanston to get his children away from the harmful,
degenerating influences of the saloon and its environing neighborhoods, so
the "madam," that active principal in the slavedom of the girls of our
Land, in almost every case sees to it that =her= children are well brought
up, away from the influences and knowledge of prostitution, while her
agents and keepers are out scouring the department stores, factories,
villages and country homes for girls to fill the sickening, festering,
shrieking ranks of the great death army of publicly protected White
Slaves.

The writer has investigated many cases, and in every instance has found
the children of these vultures of girlhood in exclusive colleges or
military schools, being excellently prepared to take decent positions in
business and social life. Case after case has recently come to light of
women supporting their children on the fashionable avenues, in Harvard and
military colleges, while they themselves with hearts of hell, wring the
dollars that pay for these luxuries from the bleeding, broken bodies of a
gang of Levee White Slaves--your sister and mine--younger than her own,
better born, better raised, but lost =forever= in the crushing, barred and
screened gehenna of modern harlotry.

Sixty-nine per cent of the children raised in the vast slum neighborhoods
surrounding the segregated districts of prostitution are ruined before
reaching the age of eighteen. This dreadful, appalling feature has been
recently brought to light through close investigation by the writer and
her co-workers, together with the sickening fact that little girls
scarcely more than babies, are being constantly sought, secured and
sacrificed to satisfy the cravings of abnormal, degenerate vice and
debauchery abounding in every large city. These little children, painted
and showily dressed, are fast making their appearance in such cities as
New York and Chicago, and they are the forerunners of Oriental child
debauchery. These little girls are seldom seen on the streets, but may be
recognized when seen, by their deformed, bowed legs, bent backs and
shrivelled little, old faces--such faces as we find in <DW36>s aged by
pain. Our hearts have been almost stilled as we have listened to the
terrible stories of the hundreds of little girls in the ghastly
fleshmarkets of India and China who, by the knife and the insertion into
their tender bodies of wedges of expanding wood, are thus made ready,
through months of torture, for the use of some inhuman Hindu or Chinese
monster who for the sum of a few dollars purchases the use of their
shrieking, quivering bodies, to leave them after a day or two of
unparalleled debauchery, dead, or if still living, then with broken back
or limbs, a human sacrifice indeed.

We have read and known all this and wished that we could die that these
children might be saved--but listen, do we realize that with the influx
into our midst, into our larger cities, of the vilest, most degenerate men
and women on earth, thousands upon thousands of the most hellish brutes of
Asia and China--men who reckon girlhood lower than the female dog, has
come this very thing--this reeking, diabolical crime against innocent
girlhood. Two especially revolting cases have come under the direct notice
of the writer, yet without sufficient legal proof to face in court the
organized, thoroughly financed hand of men and women exploiting these
dreadful conditions: one, a girl Louise, on Custom House Place; the other,
Rosie from the 22nd Street environments. The last named, cut, torn and
bleeding, made a statement to the writer that cannot be put in print; yet
she was by her owners accused of masturbation. Both of these girls were
under ten years of age.

The exploitation of women in Chicago in the vast business of White Slavery
and segregated vice, is carried on very openly and above board. Street
walkers carry on their nefarious business of securing trade for the
"house" almost entirely unmolested. Women stand in the doors of the West
Side houses of ill-fame and solicit those who pass.

At 737 Washington boulevard, two doors west of the Chicago Rescue Mission,
with which the writer is connected, a woman[1] stands in the door
constantly soliciting each male passer-by; boys are invited to come in and
take their first lesson in vice, and on this block are many, many
children, boys and girls. One of the "girls" kept by this woman was a
harlot known as "No-nose" whose whole face was so sunken with syphilis
that her nose was almost gone. The writer remembers well when through the
efforts of a fellow-worker "No-nose" was sent to the County Hospital for
medical treatment, and considers this girl one of the greatest menaces to
Chicago boyhood. No man would have touched the woman.

The blocks in this immediate vicinity are all thickly peopled by families
with many children in them. The following group of little girls live in
their alley-homes within a few doors of some of the worst sights and dives
in Chicago.

[Illustration: Children of the Slums]

They see no sights but vice, they hear no talk but filth. At the age of
ten they are perfectly familiar with all the ins and outs of harlotry,
know many prostitutes, many pimps.

Do you think these girls (each one is known to the writer personally) have
any chance for virtue?

       *       *       *       *       *

At 804 Washington Boulevard, almost across the street from the writer's
office, appears the following sign on the window of the cigar store
located there.

[Illustration:

  GEO F. WALZ
  MANUFACTURER OF THE
  WHITE SLAVE CIGAR]

Hundreds of the wreckage of typical White Slavery pass this place daily,
for it is located at the edge of the great West Side dumping ground for
broken, diseased women and young girls whose bodies can no longer be
profitably used in the higher class dives of the South Side segregated
districts, and who must at the end of a year or two become, if they are
still living, the notorious women of the night who walk the streets and
alleys, selling the use of their vile bodies for twenty-five cents, ten
cents, a drink of beer or a crust of free lunch, becoming the prey of the
drunken bum, the low vicious foreigner, the <DW64>, or else the ruination
of every young boy who falls into their vulture-like clutches.

In all Chicago there could not be a generally worse neighborhood than the
one in which the White Slave Cigar is manufactured and advertised for
sale. Within a few blocks of the factory, which is two doors west of the
corner of Washington Boulevard and Halsted Street, there are a thousand
broken, pitiful lost White Slaves.

Within two or three blocks of this corner, five typical White Slaves have
been murdered (butchered would be a better word) within the space of just
a few weeks. Here drunken women, the outcast element of the better class
of dives, trail their filthy bodies day and night, their sunken,
half-starved, syphiletic faces staring in your face, seeking the man or
the young boy who will give them a drink of whiskey or a crust of bread in
return for the wretched commerce they have to offer. Here, too, the
children play and little girls grow into big girls with scarcely a ghost
of a chance to be decent, and facing all hangs the sign "White Slave
Cigar," manufactured by George F. Walz.

It is out of this great outlaw district, this vast West Side charnal house
of harlotry, that the City gets its supply of girls for that class of vice
known as degeneracy.

Five years of work in prostitution constitutes the life of the average
harlot. Many, before the time allotted to them in a life of ill-fame
expires, die; many commit suicide, yet some live on, their diseased bodies
constituting that class of girls known as street walkers and degenerates.
These women, who are really only young girls, hang around the back rooms
and cellars of the barrel houses, consorting with the drunken, crippled,
diseased men who congregate in such places, and from this vast army of
lost girlhood is supplied the material for the immoral Oriental shows
abounding in the segregated districts, where with dogs and burros, the
bodies of ruined, diseased girls are finally used up and destroyed, or in
the bestial dives in which are practiced that horrible crime known as the
"French method."

Sixty-nine per cent of the little girls who must, through necessity and
environment, grow up in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the
segregated vice districts of such cities as Chicago, New York, Seattle,
etc., are ruined before they reach the age of eighteen years. Think of it!
These children know little else than drink and prostitution, hear little
else, see little else. To them harlotry is in all its blasting, withering
phases, a familiar story before they have reached the age of ten years.
Hundreds of whore mongers, panderers, pimps and outlawed harlots, exploit
their awful business and tell their vile stories as they walk the same
pathway day by day with these children--little lost souls they are--the
children of the poor, looked on in pity though by one who said "Inasmuch
as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me."


THE TRANSIENT HOTEL EVIL.

In this vast underworld another trap almost as dangerous as the house of
prostitution abounds on every hand--the so-called "hotel"--really a mere
house of assignation in almost every instance. These hotels are a constant
menace to the girlhood of our Land--girls who come to the city strangers,
and are unable to discriminate between the good and bad. Dozens of these
hotels flourish all around the districts of vice in our cities, the
abiding place of the pimp, the beggar, the criminal, and yet flourish
under complete political protection. We sincerely believe that the time
for cleaning up has come in such cities as New York, Chicago, etc., and we
believe that we have with us in this stand, not only decent Chicago and
New York, but decent America.


CRUSADE AGAINST "WHITE SLAVERY."

Thirteen governments have signed the international agreement to fight the
traffic in women for immoral purposes. The terms have just been announced
at Ottawa, Canada.

The list of countries, British colonies and protectorates which have
decided to adhere to the Anti-White Slave Traffic Agreement are:
Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain,
Italy, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, the Bahamas,
Barbadoes, British Guiana, Canada, Ceylon, Australia, Gambia, Gold Coast,
Malta, Newfoundland, Northern Nigeria, Southern Rhodesia, Trinidad and the
Windward Islands.

[Illustration]




[Illustration: The End of the Way. Where Young Girls, who attend Public
Dances and Other Places of Amusement Unattended, are Likely to Wind Up]


Escape from a Life of Prostitution is Almost Impossible


After more than four years of experience, and after having visited in
various capacities, disguised, etc., many of the worst haunts of vice and
houses of prostitution in Chicago, =I= have personally come to this
conclusion:

There is but a small chance for a girl, once having been sold into or
entered upon a life of prostitution, to ever escape therefrom. Invariably
she is kept in debt to her masters; excessive bills for parlor clothes,
board, dentistry, laundry and all conceivable expenses are kept charged up
against her. She is under constant threat of personal violence and
blackmail in every form (her owners securing whenever possible, some
knowledge of her home and friends, and continually holding this knowledge
as a dagger over her), and there is the ever-present whore-masters and
madams with drugs, drinks and bolts and bars, guarding every avenue of
escape with blows and curses and brutality beyond conception. Very few
young girls enter a life of prostitution voluntarily, and few, having once
entered, ever escape therefrom.


A WORD OF PROTEST

The writer just here wishes to enter vigorous protest against houses of
prostitution in Chicago and in =America= furnishing the American girl or
her alien sister for the use of that class of alien men who are either
excluded from citizenship in our Country by law, or who without wife or
family, are here temporarily and simply to make all the money possible, in
as short a time and in any way possible.

At 2130 Armour Avenue, Chicago, stands an old tenement house filled with
girls--girls from all over the United States--a beautiful ruined girl from
Georgia, girls from Europe. Good girls they were a year or two ago, but
are now the chained, wrecked slaves of festering vice and habit. This
place is said to be operated by a dope-fiend by the name of W---- and is
exclusively for the use of a class of men debarred from the United States
by law, except for educational purposes and mercantile interests among
their own kind, a class of men with whom no white laborer will live or
work--the class of men who a year or two ago murdered Elsie Siegel in New
York--the lop-shouldered, smuggled-in, pig-tailed opium parched Chinese.
It is a crying shame to-day against our Churches, our Union Labor and our
Law that there is allowed to exist on a public street, in the second city
in the United States, a public stock-market for wrecked girlhood where the
filthy Chinese, in rows, wait their turn to rent for thirty minutes of
unparalleled Asiatic debauchery, the bruised, bleeding wreckage of our
American home or the girl who came to us a few months ago--to the greatest
Christian Republic the World has ever builded, from some European home and
a mother, asking only a chance to go to work with her bare hands and earn
a decent living.

The American citizen refuses to admit the Chinaman, refuses to work with
him, refuses him all rights accorded other aliens coming to us, and yet,
for the blood profits of vice and politics, allows to be placed to his
exclusive privilege that which a short time ago was our Nation's best and
cleanest womanhood.

       *       *       *       *       *

For an American girl entering a life of public prostitution there is some
chance of salvation, for the immigrant girl there is indeed little. Two
years ago I had occasion to visit 21-- Armour Avenue, a "50-cent house" in
the infamous "bedbug row district." It was about three o'clock in the
afternoon, just before the beginning of regular business hours. In the
reception room of the place, around a rusty old stove, sat eight or ten
hopeless, lost girls; sick, smoking, cursing girls. Soon they would dress
up, dope up with whiskey, cocaine or opium, dash some bella donna in their
eyes and go on duty to meet all comers. Shivering by the stove sat a
little foreign girl. I asked her name, the girls told me it was Josie and
that she was an Italian. Speaking to her in that language, I soon learned
that she was a young Russian Jewess. The house seemed to possess
sufficient proof, as the law then required, that the girl had been in this
Country three years; so there was little I could do except give her my
card and tell her if she ever needed a friend to come to me. Less than a
year ago there came a ring at my door, and opening it, I found a lost
woman begging me to come at once into the West Side "levee" to see a girl
who was dying. I went with her, and there, in a mouldy, wretched cellar I
found "Josie" of the Armour Avenue resort, dying with syphilis. In that
awful underground place I listened to her story and give it to you as she
related it to me:

     "I am nineteen years old and my name is Gezie Bruvatsky. I saw my
     father bayonetted to the earth by Russian soldiers. I saw my mother
     work over the washtub until her hands were bloody that I and my
     little brother might have bread and my virtue be protected. One day a
     man came to our house, who was either a Jew or a German, saying he
     was agent for a steamship company and that he had good work in
     America for many girls where they could earn as much in one month as
     they could earn in two years in Russia. My heart leaped with joy. How
     could we know he was lying. I packed my clothes. I left all--my
     mother, my brother. I came to America. Soon I could send for them,
     for I was strong and could work--work day and night. At New York a
     man and woman met me and sent me on to Chicago. Here I was taken from
     the Polk Street Station to Armour Avenue where by force I was ruined.
     I was there many months, sick and starving, and finally got out and
     crawled over to the West Side where there are many Jews; but now I am
     dying and I want my mother."


WHAT THE U. S. PROSECUTING ATTORNEY SAYS:

Hon. Edwin Sims, ex-U. S. Prosecuting Attorney, in a recent conservative
statement, says he believes that =fifteen thousand= immigrant girls are
brought into this Country every year for commercialized prostitution.

We believe the actual figures are nearer Twenty-five Thousand, and we
appeal to the mothers and fathers of America, in the name of God and the
heart-broken mothers and fathers of other lands, to use their personal
influence and the money with which God has entrusted them, to wipe from
our flag the leprous blotch of shame which permits the importing into our
Republic every year of thousands of helpless girls to be ground up in the
murder mills of the segregated harlotry of such districts as the 22nd
Street district of Chicago, for it was the blood-covered hand of that
district that reached across the lands and seas and into that Russian
home and tore from it little Gezie Bruvatsky and led her across the waters
and under the very shadow of the Statue of Liberty itself and pinning to
her the little blue ticket of immigration, led her past the gates or Ellis
Island, on past the statues of Washington and Jefferson, of Lincoln and
Grant, and into the burning fire of American public prostitution to live a
few months, and dying in an underground cellar, be cast, scarce cold, into
our nation's great potter's field of lost women.

[Illustration: The Wretched, Pitiful Ending of Gezie Bruvatsky, left by
Her Heartless Masters to Die Unattended in Filthy, Squalid Surroundings]




The Price of a Living Body


Fifty years ago, down in the Southland of our America, we stood a well
formed, sound limbed, healthy, intact young woman on the auction block and
sold her to the biggest bidder for her beauty, her virtue, her heart, her
honor, her soul and her body, and the established average price paid for
such a young woman was eighteen hundred dollars ($1800.00). I take for
granted as I write, that if the heart and soul and body of a young black
woman of Kentucky, Georgia or Mississippi was in the slave market of fifty
years ago worth intrinsically $1800.00, the soul and body of a clean,
decent, young Northland white woman is to-day worth about the same.
Assistant State Prosecuting Attorney Roe in his speech before the Illinois
Vigilance Society, Chicago, February 7th, 1909, placed the number of women
in disorderly resorts in Chicago alone at 30,000.

Stop! Listen: If there are 30,000 young women on this City's Soul-Market,
and we place the average value of one of these young women at $1,800, AND
WE CERTAINLY DO PLACE IT THERE, by established, recognized precedent, then
there is $54,000,000 worth of young womanhood in the Slave-Market of our
City at the present time. In the same statistical speech Mr. Roe places
the number of young girls necessary yearly to recruit the rapidly
decimating ranks of this vast Death Army at six thousand; hence,
$10,800,000 worth of innocent girlhood must be sacrificed from our stores
and factories, our homes or firesides all over the Land every twelve
mouths to feed and satisfy the horrible flesh-market of Human Slavery in
the "levee" districts of Chicago alone.

Harry A. Parkin, Assistant U. S. District Attorney, in WOMEN'S WORLD,
March, 1909, says:

     "The Federal investigations in Chicago and other localities have
     clearly established the fact that, generally speaking, houses of
     ill-fame in large cities do not draw their recruits to any great
     extent from the territory immediately surrounding them; for various
     reasons the White Slavers who are the recruiting agents of this vile
     traffic prefer to work in States more or less distant from the
     centers to which victims are destined."

In view of all this, it must be clearly apparent that the need of the hour
is legislation which will make it as difficult and dangerous for a White
Slaver to take his victim from one State into another as it is to bring
them from France, Italy, Canada or any other foreign country, to a house
of ill-fame in Chicago or any American city. Therefore, it is suggested
that if each State in the Union would enact and enforce laws against this
importation, this terrible traffic would be dealt a blow in its most
vulnerable part.

One of the strangest results brought about by the recent White Slave
prosecutions in Chicago and the wide publicity which they have received
has been the astonishment of thousands of persons, as evidenced by
letters, at the fact that such a wholesale traffic is actually in
existence, but what is still more astounding, not to say discouraging, is
the reluctance of other thousands to believe that many hundreds of men and
women are actually engaged in the business of luring young girls and women
to their destruction and that this infamous traffic is being carried on in
every state of the Union every day of the year.

It is estimated by those who should know, that at least five thousand men
in Chicago live off of the earnings of prostitution. For instance as to
the plan: A young girl, alien or American, is sold into a life of ill-fame
for say Two Hundred Dollars, as the actual price of her procuring. Before
she suspects any real harm, she is lured into a restaurant or a wine-room,
becomes intoxicated, is sufficiently doped to become passive, is taken to
the "house" to which she has been consigned and is immediately "broken in"
in the most violent and nauseating manner, perhaps becoming the prey of
twenty or thirty men. Beaten, threatened with exposure, and, if necessary,
purposely infected with gonorrhea, the girl is within twenty-four hours
absolutely ruined for all time--"spoiled," the police say. Oh! what a
whole world of agony and pain and bruises and disease and Hell is embodied
in that one word "spoiled." She is immediately pressed into service and
from that time on until death relieves her, or she is rescued by some one
enough interested to help her, she must receive all comers THIRTY DAYS
every month.

This answers the question I have been asked a hundred times from all over
the Country since CHICAGO'S SOUL MARKET was first published, as to whether
a woman in a house of prostitution is allowed any respite from service
during the Menstrual Period. SHE IS NOT ALLOWED A SINGLE DAY. The average
number of men who must be served by each woman in a medium or lower class
house of ill-fame is thirty-six per day. On entrance to the place, if the
house be a "Dollar house," a metal room-check is purchased from the madam
or attendant at the door for one dollar. This check is taken up by the
girl in the room and is worth on presentation to the house fifty cents,
half of its face value being received by the house for board, laundry,
hair dressing, etc., all of which must be paid for at the highest possible
rates. Of the remaining fifty cents, twenty-five cents goes to the man who
sold the girl into the house, the remaining twenty-five cents going to the
girl herself and from this amount must be paid all bills for clothes,
dentistry, and all other expenses. In almost every known case, however,
with which the writer is at all familiar, the entire fifty per cent goes
intact to the owner of the girl, her necessary expenses being paid by him
and the balance pocketed for his own use.

Just as the liquor trade is thoroughly and carefully financed and
organized even in its weakest points, making successful prosecution
against it a thing impossible, just so is the traffic in young women
protected in all its details. The writer has in mind the case of Josie
E----, fifteen years old, who came from her suburban home in Illinois,
hoping to secure employment in the City. Arriving at the Dearborn Street
Railway Station about nine o'clock, she started out to find a hotel in
which to spend the night. Walking a few steps from the Station, she was
accosted at State and Polk streets by a young man who asked her what she
was looking for. Replying that she was looking for a hotel, the man
Thompson told her he was employed at a hotel on Polk Street opposite the
railway station and offered to take the girl there. Unacquainted with the
City and relying on his word, she accompanied him to the hotel, where she
was outraged and detained for weeks. She was finally rescued by the writer
and a Y. W. C. A. worker. Taking her to my rooms, I found her physical
condition such that I sent for a detective from the Harrison Street Police
Station who investigated her story and finding it true in every
particular, arrested Thompson at his place of employment, 41 Polk Street.
The case coming up in the Harrison Street Municipal Court, was so
manipulated by the defense that in the transferring of it to the Criminal
Court a technical error threw it out altogether. I simply give this as an
example of how almost utterly impossible it is to secure a conviction in
these cases. Is it any wonder when back of this great evil stands at least
a hundred million dollars?

Listen, seventy-five per cent of the women and girls entering lives of
ill-fame in Chicago are from adjoining States and country districts--they
are utter strangers in our City. Every hour, day or night, year in and
year out, four great central railway passenger stations discharge their
precious human freight within the first ward of Chicago, the richest and
wickedest political ward in the world--the ward of Michael Kenna (Hinky
Dink) and "Bathhouse" John Coughlin--the ward feeding every district of
prostitution and gambling and unnatural horror in the City--the ward with
two miles of indecent resorts, whole armies of reeking lost women,
hundreds of pandering men procurers and White Slavers--the ward of
thousands of Turkish, Italian and Arabian immigrants, and opium-parched
pagan Chinese--the ward in which every day thousands of women, many of
whom without money or friends, are looking for work, are unloaded in this
seething cauldron of vice, their only refuge being, when without funds,
the Police Station or the house of ill-repute.

The horror of conditions surrounding a woman without money or friends in
Chicago makes the living of a moral life almost impossible for her. I have
in mind the case of a deserted little Italian woman, G. P----[2], living
in Plymouth Court, south of Polk Street. G. had three little baby girls,
the eldest only four years, and was expecting another child soon. She was
deserted by her husband and left without a dollar or a friend to face life
and care for herself and babies. The case came into the hands of the
Mission and she was cared for by them until the time of her confinement,
when, with her children, she was taken to Dunning Poorhouse where she was
kindly cared for. A baby boy was born to G. Great pressure was brought to
bear upon this little Italian mother who spoke no word of English, to
induce her to give up her children. Frightened and weeping, she refused to
do this, declaring she would make a living for them, and leaving the
Poorhouse, she started out taking the baby and another child with her,
hoping soon to earn the money to care for the other two.

This she was fortunate enough to accomplish, and, taking the four little
ones dear to her heart, went back to the little room on the top floor of
the tenement in Plymouth Court. G. got work in a sweatshop and made
button-holes at $2.50 a week. She worked hard to keep up, but the baby
sickened and died. The other children began to get thin and wan. They grew
hungry before her eyes and the mother's heart frightened and sank within
her. A fiend in human form, J. F----, came by and offered the half-starved
mother bread for herself and babies, offered her marriage as soon as it
could be arranged for. G. took the bread and fed her children and to-day
up on the top floor of the tenement in Plymouth Court, again deserted and
hungry and helpless, she cries and prays and makes button-holes, and waits
and waits with fear and wretchedness the coming of another little child.

[Illustration: From a flashlight photograph showing 2-ton weight steel
door connecting sound-proof dungeon cell with blind passage-way, between
114 and 116 Custom House Place]

The proprietor of the great resort on the corner of 21st and Dearborn
streets said not long ago to a co-worker of mine who forced her way into
his infamous dive:

     "Don't come here to bother my girls; it is of no use; they are rotten
     and ripe for H----. Soon I will throw them out myself. Go to the
     department stores and the sweatshops and help the underpaid,
     friendless girl _there_ if you must work. I could write a book as
     large as that (pointing to the City Directory) filled with shrieks
     and groans of women _after they are lost_, but what good would it do?
     They are gone then _forever_."

In a great measure, the man told the truth. It is hard to reach a woman
after she has once entered a life of prostitution; for, like the Inferno
of old, there should be emblazoned in letters of blood above the barred
door of every White Slave mart in America, the ancient warning:

     "Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here."

There's many a girl homeless and tempted, underpaid and destitute, who
might be saved from a life of ill-fame if a helping hand and a shelter
were offered her in her hour of indecision and hunger and despair.

In the south wall of the basement of 114 Federal Street, formerly known as
Custom House Place, that congested, central Redlight District of three
years ago, there was a blind passage-way between 114 and 116 Custom House
Place, 116 being the notorious dive "The California" now located at ----
Armour Avenue. On the inside, this door opened into a large dungeon,
windowless, sound-proof (about 7x10 feet) and it is alleged that it was
through the alley and into this blind passage-way that the unwilling
victims of White Slavers (the same syndicate now operating with Chicago as
headquarters) were carried into this little solitary cell to be "broken
in" by fiendish, brute force to a life of shame.

[Illustration: From a flashlight photograph showing heavy steel screen
used inside the iron-barred windows of the houses of prostitution in the
old Custom House district]

The accompanying photograph secured by the writer gives at least a faint
idea of this frightful trap against the pitiless walls of which have, no
doubt, beat the agonized shrieks of many an innocent girl--your sister and
mine--as, baptising this hell-hole with blood and tears, her quivering
body was crucified upon a whore-monger's cross of gold and then torn down
to be cast, bruised, bleeding, but yet alive, into five years of the
awful, seething moral Golgotha of prostitution and then into =lingering
death=.

The Chicago Rescue Mission and Woman's Shelter of which the writer is
President, has for two years occupied the premises at 114 Custom House
Place. Upon moving into the place we found every window incased in heavy
iron bars while between the bars and the glass of each window was mortised
a one-half inch steel screen (see cut). Entrance or exit from the building
was as utterly impossible as from a penitentiary, excepting by the =front
door=, and to bring the place within the requirements of the City law it
was necessary to bring a suit through the Municipal Court against the
owner of the building, Mrs. Spiegel, against whom through the aid of
Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Oleson, we obtained a verdict and forced
her thereon to put in a rear stairway (see Court records).

114 Custom House Place is only one of the fifty similarly notorious dens
in the old Redlight district, and yet it is impossible to make some people
believe that there is such a thing as forcible detention of a woman in a
Chicago house of prostitution.


FROM THE "WOMAN'S WORLD"

I quote the following incident cited by Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Roe
in an article of recent date in WOMAN'S WORLD, illustrating some of the
schemes and plans for leading a girl into a life of ill-fame. Mr. Roe
says:

     "A year ago last summer, 15-year old Margaret Smith was working about
     her simple home near Benton Harbor, Michigan. The father, employed by
     the Pere Marquette Railroad, was away from home a good share of the
     time. One day a graphophone agent came to the house and the family
     became interested in one of his musical machines. Shortly afterward
     this agent brought with him to the Smith home Frank Kelly, and
     introduced him to Maggie, as she was called by her folks. In a day or
     two Margaret was on her way to Chicago with Kelly who promised her an
     excellent position in the City. Upon her arrival Margaret was sold to
     one of the worst dives in Chicago, located on South Clark Street and
     owned by an Italian named Baptista Pizza. Here she learned that her
     captor's name was not Frank Kelly, but an Italian whose real name is
     Alphonso Citro. For a year she was kept as a Slave in this resort,
     which was over a saloon, and the entrance was through a back alley.
     The only visitors were Italians, who came for immoral purposes.
     Learning last summer that Margaret's father, who had been hunting
     relentlessly for his daughter, was on the track of her, the girl was
     taken by Alphonso Citro, alias Kelly, to Gary, Indiana. When the
     father came to the resort with a policeman, he found that his
     daughter had gone. She was kept in Gary about two months and then
     returned to this disreputable place from which she escaped finally,
     the Monday before last Christmas. A young barber took pity on her
     after hearing her story, and enlisted the sympathies of his parents
     who took her to their home. Alphonso Citro (Kelly) looked for her
     almost a week, and at last saw her going from a store to this home,
     where she was staying. He went to the house and demanded at the point
     of a revolver that she be given up, as he said:

     "I am losing money every day she is gone."

     "There was a quarrel over the girl during which some people from the
     outside were attracted to the house by the commotion. Citro, becoming
     frightened, fled down the street, and as he ran, threw away the
     revolver with which he had tried to shoot the father of the barber
     during the quarrel, over the fence into a coal yard. After running
     two blocks, he was caught and arrested. Upon these facts this
     procurer, Citro, alias Kelly, was prosecuted and found guilty under
     the new pandering law of Illinois, and received a sentence of one
     year of imprisonment and a fine of five hundred dollars. The poor
     father and mother, distressed and heart-broken, were in Court during
     the trial with their arms around each other, sobbing with joy because
     their little girl had been found. Pizza[3], the owner of the place,
     was indicted by the State grand jury, but escaped to Italy. This case
     is told to show how girls leave home upon the promise of securing
     employment and are in this way procured for places of ill-repute."




Chicago's Soul Market.


"O, he keeps a bunch of 'fillies' in a shanty down near the corner of
Monroe and Peoria streets, and they're not foreigners, either. They're
American girls. No wonder he can make a bet like that on a mere chance
from a roll of yellow backs."

The speaker was the madam of a Peoria street resort, the listeners, a
motley crowd of women gathered in the rear of a popular saloon and
gambling house not far from the corner of Green and Madison streets, on
the seething, congested West Side of Chicago. These women had assembled in
that screened back room to risk their hard earned or evil-gotten money on
the horses of the Louisville race track.

There sat a little 18-year old, brown-eyed milliner, her dissipated face
hollow and drawn from worry and lack of sleep and an insufficient quantity
of nourishing food, while near her a white-haired old lady in shabby black
was tightly grasping two quarters, her entire worldly possession. Just
across sat a well-dressed woman restaurant keeper, a young eastern star
and half a hundred others, above all of whom shone the yellow haired madam
of the Peoria Street resort, the star patron of that great gambling room
for women, each one of whom was eagerly beckoning the well-groomed
book-maker, feverishly anxious to get her pittance on the race-track
favorite, when a connecting door was pushed suddenly open and in rushed a
fashionably dressed, brutal-faced young Russian Jew, holding loosely an
immense roll of money. Tens, twenties, hundreds--he counted them until
three hundred dollars had been placed to win upon a "clocker tip" in that
day's last race in Louisville.

There was grim, deadly silence--eating, unbearable silence in that
gambling room as they waited the ring of the telephone and the name of the
winner. Again the yellow haired madam's voice screamed shrilly out, for
she was indeed ill at ease, her money was all on the favorite--"Yes, a
bunch of American 'fillies' peddled out at 50 cents an hour to all comers,
black or white, sick or sound. No wonder he can make a play like that on
an outside chance."

Three-hundred dollars! My heart stood still almost. The thought flashed
through my brain that that wager meant hundreds of hours of shame and
slavery and horror to those girls in the shanties down on Peoria street,
some mother's girl, every one of them. I sat still for a little while and
watched the feverish anxious throng about me. My heart kept going faster
and faster until I could bear it no longer. American "fillies" and body
and soul under a brutal Russian whore-monger! I slipped quietly out into
the street; night was coming on, and I walked down Madison and south on
Peoria. Yes, there were the shanties--poor, wretched hovels, every one of
them. Out shone the flickering red lights, out came the discordant,
rasping sound of the rented piano, out belched the shrieks and groans of
drunken harlots mingled with the curses of task-masters in a foreign
tongue, attracting the attention of the hundreds of laborers, <DW64>s and
boys, as they walked home on Peoria street from their day's work. On I
went until I came to a little shed just north of the slum saloon occupied
by one Shellstadt at the corner of Monroe and Peoria streets, and checking
my steps, I looked around me on the squalid, wretched scene. I was in the
midst of prostitution at its lowest--the heart-breaking dregs of Chicago's
thirty thousand public women. Yes, there they were--the fair young
American girl, the stolid Russian Jewess, the middle-aged, syphiletic
harlot, living, prostituting, dying like so many hurt, broken moths around
that great red-light--Chicago's West Side Soul Market--their poor,
wrecked, foul smelling bodies sold day and night at from twenty-five to
fifty cents an hour to all comers who could pay the pitiful price demanded
by their brutal, soulless masters; and, as I looked, the burning fire of
intense pity entered my soul for these drug and drink-sodden, diseased and
chained slaves--my sisters in Christ and this great, free American
Republic, and so, with a heart-consuming desire to know more of the lives
of these scarlet women and to help them, if possible, I began at once a
thorough personal investigation of Chicago's public Slave Market, visiting
these people whenever occasion offered; talking with them, gaining their
much abused confidence, until I gradually learned the inside lines of the
saddest story America has ever known since the black mothers of our
Southland were torn from their black and white babies and with shrieks of
agony and heart strings bleeding and soul rent with blackened horror were
sold to death on the plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi, and I want
to tell you who read this and who think there is little truth in the now
much agitated question of White Slavery in America, that in the dives and
dens of our City's underworld I have heard shrieks and heart cries and
groans of agony and remorse that have never been surpassed at any public
slave auction America has ever witnessed, as these girls, many of them,
oh! so young, realizing their awful fate, with scalding tears and moans of
horror, shut out from their hearts and lives father or mother or husband
and child, and turned their sob-shaken, tortured bodies to face the years
of final, relentless wretchedness and woe, to be at last thrown out sick
and broken, to die in some alley or to be carted off to Dunning poorhouse
to gradual physical decay and a pauper's burial and grave of obliteration,
while those who sold them just a few years before go out in their diamonds
and fine linen and their great automobiles to buy up more girls (it might
be your daughter, father, mother; or it might be mine) to fill the vacancy
in the ranks of this vast army of White Slaves.

A woman said to me the other day, and it was in a lofty, sneering tone,
too: "I doubt if these women are ever coerced or even imposed upon."


LISTEN; READ, THEN LISTEN.

Sitting in my office one afternoon I listened, my blood almost freezing,
to the following story vouched for by Mr. C----, an immigration inspector
and brother of a well-known Chicago reform worker. Here it is as he told
it to me:

     "One evening some time ago I was looking up a case down in the
     Twenty-Second Street red-light district, and visited and inspected,
     looking for immigrant girls held illegally, a certain house of the
     lower class in that neighborhood of prostitution. While in the house
     I noticed a young woman lying very ill (in the last stages of
     pneumonia, if I remember the story exactly) and in a semi-conscious
     condition, and to my horror upon inquiry I learned that in the rush
     hours of business this helpless, pain-racked young woman was _open to
     all comers_ holding an accredited room check."

Dear friends, there are true stories heard and known every day around the
City's seething, blood-red Soul Market that cannot be put into
print--stories, though, that were they to become known, would make decent
Chicago rise as one man and cry with a voice outspeaking Fort Sumter,
"White Slavery in Chicago and in America must cease!"

During my years of study of this question of prostitution I learned to
know personally many of the characteristic White Slaves of the West and
South Side "levees." One "Alice" I shall never, never forget. Beautiful
aside from her dissipation, a high school graduate, grammar and syntax
perfect, manner exquisite. "Alice," seduced at eighteen, was at the age
of twenty-one away down the line in the West Side levee underworld. I used
to talk many times with Alice as she sat in the back parlor of the "house"
on Peoria street that gave her shelter, awaiting her call of "next" to go
up stairs with whosoever--<DW64>, white or Chinese--might buy for one
dollar (one of the dollars of the Republic on which is eternally stamped
the blessed words, "In God we Trust") possession of her beautiful body for
one hour. Smoking, always smoking her doped Turkish cigarette, Alice told
me much of her life, both in years gone forever and of a daily "levee"
existence. She told me of a father and mother and a beautiful home, of a
lover who came into it and led her away by night into "levee" Slavery--of
the awful disgrace and disinheritance, of a little baby that she only knew
an hour, of insane remorse and anguish, until at last she would stand and
scream and scream with mental pain until some whore-monger knocked her
senseless, and then how she would crawl away to some near-by shanty saloon
and drink herself helpless, to forget.

As far as I know Alice is still on Peoria street, and, oh! men and women,
there are thirty thousand of these Alices in Chicago's great blasting Soul
Market to-day.

United States Attorney Sims puts the average life of a prostitute at ten
years or less, while other excellent authorities put it as low as five
years, as these women must constantly drink any and all drinks purchased
for them by visitors (as much of the business revenue is derived from the
sale of these drinks), thus forcing them at all times into a half-drunken
condition, rendering them helpless to control the abnormal, sickening,
mind and body wrecking demands made upon them by the gonorrheal,
syphilitic, sodden wretches of whom not one in ten is capable of normal
sexual coalition, yet whose debauched, drunken desires and requirements,
no matter how unnatural and revolting, must be satisfied by the use of the
bodies of their hopeless victims at fifty or even as low as twenty-five
cents an hour.

Very few young women entering this cesspool of prostitution are able to
live therein an average of eight weeks without becoming infected with one
or more of the loathsome diseases of the underworld, and thus ruined and
horrible they live on and on for three, four or six years, and at the end
of that time thirty thousand pure young girls, gathered from prairie homes
and village firesides and from out of our own suburban and city families,
must march out into this great Soul Market to take the place of the broken
wretches whose decaying bodies are cast into the refuse of our alleys and
sewers to become the menace of every girl and boy and drunken man who
comes within their clutches or sets foot within their alley hovels.


THE END OF THE WAY.

At about ten o'clock on Saturday evening, September 19th, I boarded a West
Madison street car and, transferring north at Halsted street, alighted at
Lake and walked west to Lewinsky's saloon at the corner of Lake and Green
streets. Going around to the side entrance on Green street, I discovered
in the wine and back rooms of the wretched place a crowd of perhaps fifty
drunken, dirty, diseased men and women, most of them foul-smelling, young
white girls huddled in with the worst mob of <DW64>s, whites and Chinese I
have seen in Chicago's slums, all cursing, drinking, singing and
blaspheming in plain view and hearing of the street. I stopped a moment to
make sure I was making no mistake in what I saw and then crossed the
street to interview the dark-eyed little foreign girl who at its door was
boldly soliciting trade for the saloon and its adjacent evils, just
opposite.

I walked on down to Peoria and south on that notorious street.

In the row of houses running from Lake to Randolph street there are
approximately six hundred White Slaves, and diseased, crippled prostitutes
of the lowest class, dumped from the city's cleaner dives, and on that
night it was almost impossible to push one's way through the mass of men
and boys--whites, <DW64>s, Turks, Polocks, etc., gathered in front of
these places of public abomination. At the corner of Randolph and Peoria
streets several earnest men and women were holding a little gospel
meeting, and, stopping with them, I counted during the thirty minutes I
stayed there six hundred and forty (approximately) men and boys stop in
front of or enter this horrible flesh market.

As I left the scene, a young girl in a drunken, filthy, diseased condition
slipped out of an alley and followed me, asking me to help her, and as we
sat on the steps of Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, corner of Washington
boulevard and Peoria street, she told me the worst, most heart-breaking
story of wrong and vice and ruin I have ever listened to (see note.)[4]

As I left that West Side levee of vice I knew I had seen prostitution at
its lowest ebb and that from these holes of horror finally went those
awful alley women of the night to sell their soul and trail their black
disease to any young boy or drunken man who could give them a few cents or
even the price of a drink of whiskey.

Coming down Custom House Place one night about 10:30 o'clock I overtook,
without their knowledge, six boys, ranging from about twelve down to
perhaps seven years, three of whom I knew fairly well. Following them from
shadow to shadow, I gathered sufficient of their low-voiced conversation
to make me certain they had been holding an orgy in a nearby cellar or
basement with a drunken harlot, and that together they had paid her the
small sum of seventeen cents for this damning, soul-destroying commerce.
One boy, a lad of about nine years, had been wheedled by his companions
into paying ten cents of this sum and was arguing for the return of at
least a part of his money, because of the age and helplessness of the
woman and the =extreme short time= allowed him by his companions in his
relations with her.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. J. J. Sloan, when he was superintendent of the John Worthy School,
which is the local juvenile municipal reformatory, reported that one-third
of the street boys sent to him were suffering from the loathsome diseases
and distempers of the red-light district, nor is this to be wondered at
when we consider the fact that sexual commerce may be purchased almost
anywhere in South State street and in the West Side alleys for the
remarkably low price of ten cents, or even a glass of beer or whiskey,
from the gonorrheal, syphilitic denizens thrown out long ago from the
better class houses of prostitution to live off of the half-drunken men
and boys to be found in swarms along South State, Halsted and South Clark
streets.

Almost invariably, the street boy haunting these underworld sections of
our city is first led into sexual sin by one of the crippled, half-rotten,
yet painted vampires of the streets whose only care or hope is a crust of
free lunch and enough whiskey or "dope" to drown for a time at least the
last throb of heart and conscience and keep life a little longer in the
wretched body, and the boy having purchased for a small fee his own
destruction trails out again into the night and on into disease and crime
and prison, and finally death.

The average parent of to-day has little idea of the temptations which
constantly surround and beset the growing boy. I recall a case in Des
Moines, Iowa, where a little degenerate girl of sixteen caused the moral,
and in several cases physical, ruin of five young boys, all this happening
in an exclusive East Side neighborhood and under the watchful care of
honest parents and friends, so what must be the temptation thrown out to
the young boys of our city when through block after block of our central
districts they must come in contact with those whose only mission is to
ruin and debauch.

It should be the direct object, morally and physically, of every father
and mother in this city to banish these parasites--these leeches who suck
the life blood of our boys--from Chicago's streets.

Listen, father, mother, there are thirty thousand pure, dearly beloved
young girls growing up in our midst to-day who within five years must,
under the present business system of White Slavery, put aside father,
mother, home, friends and honor, and march into Chicago's ghastly flesh
market to take the place of the thirty thousand helpless, hopeless,
decaying chattels who now daily, behind bolts and bars and steel screens
(see note[5]), satisfy the abominable lust of (approximately) two hundred
and ten thousand brutal, drunken adulterers.

I believe, as I write, that the final solving of this reeking, hideous
question lies in the moral and Christian teaching and protection of the
growing girls of our Land. I believe in a rigidly enforced law that keeps
girls under legal age and unattended, off the down town streets at nights
after a reasonable hour. Harry Balding, the convicted White Slaver, in his
confession before Judge Newcomer and State's Attorney Roe, said:

     "We would be sent out by resort keepers to work up some girls, for
     whom we were paid from $10 to $50 dollars each, though the cash bonus
     was much more. The majority of them were girls we met on the streets.
     We would go around to the penny arcades and nickel theaters, and when
     we saw a couple of young girls we would go up and talk with them. I
     will say for myself--I never took a girl away from her home; the
     girls I took down there I met in the stores or on the streets."

There is a league of Masonry worldwide that makes it possible for a Mason
anywhere, in trouble or distress, to raise his hand toward the heavens
with a certain sign, and if there be a brother Mason within reach, that
brother, no matter of what nationality, kindred or tongue, is sworn to
give him all needed protection. Listen, father, mother, sister; listen,
brother!

To-day from beneath Chicago's awful moral sewerage system, which has
sucked their hearts and souls under, thirty thousand trembling hands are
held up to High Heaven and to you for help, hands reeking with the blood
on which some whore monger has fattened, the hands though of your sisters
and of mine. And I believe that here in Chicago, the greatest market for
White Slaves on the Continent, should be formed a league that would become
world-wide, of earnest, law-abiding men and women whose efforts, united
with those of the proper police, municipal and Federal authorities, would
make it practically impossible for a girl to be sold into or compelled to
lead an immoral life, and through whose influence such open,
publicly-protected flesh markets as our red-light and levee districts
would be banished forever from Chicago streets. And I believe with all my
heart that this can only be accomplished by education, by agitation, by
legislation, by the ballot and by the power of God, directing a great
national army of well informed, moral and Christian men and women against
this vast, thoroughly organized, well administered and heavily financed
public horror of our Republic.

I believe in helping, God knows, with heart and hand and money every
fallen, or as one has put it, every "knocked down" woman in our Land whom
there is the slightest chance to help in any way; but I believe, first of
all, in using every known measure =to keep our girls from falling=.

You and I live beneath the only flag in all the world that has never known
defeat, and the very basic principle upon which that flag is built is
human liberty and human protection, and so by personal work and
co-operation with every other reform and labor organization for the
uplifting of womanhood, by song and by prayer and the Power of the Cross,
let us set ourselves to help these helpless ones in our midst until the
angels shall take up the story of shame and bitterness and wrong and bear
to all the world and to Heaven itself the swift acknowledgment that you
are your brother's keeper.

[Illustration]


[Illustration: The above picture is from a Flashlight Photograph taken by
the author and is a side view of 114 Custom House Place. The demolishing
of 116 Custom House Place and several adjacent buildings gave the chance
of a life time in securing this and many other photographs. The
demolishing of these houses, which up to three years ago were used
exclusively for purposes of prostitution, brought to view a perfect
network of bars, screens and steel doors (see heavy steel door at right of
cut) scarcely dreamed of before as existing outside of our State
Penitentiaries.]




  The Only Place of
  Its Kind
  In Chicago

  _Five Thousand and Forty Night's Lodging_ and
  over Six Thousand Meals furnished to
  _Homeless Women_ by the

  WOMAN'S SHELTER

  733-735-737 Washington Boulevard
  (near Halsted)

  during the year ending September 1, 1911.

  Seventy per cent of these women have
  been aided into _honest employment_.


  A Hundred Girls

  have been _Saved from Lives of Sin and given a
  chance to earn a Respectable Living_.


  Our Doors are Never Closed

  We are in touch with every _Slum_
  and _Vice District_ in the city--every
  Prison and Hospital, and with
  the Poorhouse at Oak Forest.

  We are Non-Sectarian and Co-operative with all Reform
  and Christian Works



  A dozen Christian Homes and a Municipal
  Lodging House care for the friendless
  down-and-out man. The

  Chicago Rescue Mission's
  Woman's Shelter

  cares for the Friendless "down-and-out"
  Woman. Our Shelter is not a
  "Rescue Home" in the ordinary
  sense of the word, but

  A Place where a Clean Bed, Food, Coffee and Clothing
  may be Obtained by any Homeless Woman

  not a subject for Police interference,
  for One or More nights as she needs;
  and where she is given Definite Aid
  to Immediate Employment and assured
  of shelter until she receives
  her week's wages.


  FIVE THOUSAND AND FORTY NIGHT'S LODGINGS
  TOGETHER WITH
  OVER SIX THOUSAND MEALS

  have been furnished to cold, hungry,
  Stranded Girls and Women this
  year by Our Institution.


  Seventy per Cent of These Have been Aided to Secure
  Honest Employment,

  but scores have been turned away
  because we lacked Equipment,
  Warmth, Funds, etc., to aid them.



  Our Work Reaches
  Every Slum and Redlight District
  in the City

  the Hospitals, Prisons, Poorhouses, everywhere
  unfortunate women are found.

  We co-operate with Churches, Missions, Employment
  Bureaus, Charitable Institutions,
  etc., throughout the City

  Our Institution has Thirty-one Large Rooms

  [Illustration: A Corner in Our Woman's Shelter]

  What We Need--

  We need to add _Forty More Beds_.
  We need a _better Hot Water System_.
  We need a _Systematic Employment Bureau_.
  We need another good Outside Worker.
  We need Coffee, Clothing, Coal.

  We need _Your Help, generously_, in a supreme
  effort to raise _One Thousand Dollars_ with which
  to accomplish all these things.



  Schedule of Work

  Year ending August 31st, 1911.

  Number of Nights Lodgings Furnished by the
    Chicago Rescue Mission's Woman Shelter      5,040

  Number of Meals                               5,200

  Special Lodgings                                489

  Special Meals                                   677

  Calls and Distribution of Fruit at Oak Forest
    Poor House                                  4,914

  Religious Services White Cross Woman's Shelter   26

  Jail, Court and Slum Visits                   1,210

  Reform Literature Distributed, pages, about 300,000


  Yours and His,

  CHICAGO RESCUE MISSION

  733-735-737 Washington Blvd.,
  NEAR HALSTED
  CHICAGO, ILL.

  PHONE MONROE 4833

  Mrs. Jean T. Zimmermann, M. D.

  President Chicago Rescue Mission and Woman's Shelter.

  Superintendent Department of Health and Heredity of the Cook
  County and Chicago W. C. T. U.




Footnotes:

[1] Through the effort of the writer and the aid of the agent of the
building this woman was made to move a little further west.

[2] N.B.--G. P.'s is strictly authentic. The Chicago Rescue Mission will
give you details and take charge of any help you may care to give her.

[3] NOTE.--Baptista Pizza, it was discovered, did not go to Italy, but
after a few months of hiding, again engaged in his nefarious business. He
was recently arrested for selling an American girl, fined $1000.00 and
sentenced to two years in the House of Correction.

[4] This girl was turned over to the Chicago Rescue Mission, cleaned and
clothed and fed and pointed to Jesus Christ. Her story was investigated
and found true and after receiving medical attention she was quietly
returned to her country home.

[5] Visit any of the great line of abandoned houses in the red-light
district of Custom House Place or Plymouth Court and note the bars and
screens and underground steel doors.




Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.

Passages in bold are indicated by =bold=.

Footnote markers have been added on pages 38 and 45.

The following misprints have been corrected:
  "neigborhood" corrected to "neighborhood" (page 23)
  "Squlid" corrected to "Squalid" (page 32)

Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in
spelling and hyphenation usage have been retained.






End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls, by 
Jean Turner-Zimmermann

*** 