Part 3

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 “upstairs” with whatsoever—negro, white or Chinese—might buy possession for one dollar (one of our dollars of the Republic on which is eternally stamped the blessed words, “In God we trust”) 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 awful disgrace and inheritance, of a little baby that she only knew one hour, of hours of insane remorse and anguish, until at last she would stand and scream and scream with mental pain until some whoremonger knocked her senseless, and then she told me how she would crawl away to a nearby 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 twenty-two thousand of these “Alices,” your sisters and mine, in Chicago’s great blasting soul market today. United States Attorney Sims puts the average life of a prostitute at ten years or less, while other excellent authorities as low as five years, as these women must constantly drink any and all drinks purchased for them (as much of the business revenue is from the sale of these drinks) by visitors, thus forcing them at all times into a continual half-drunken condition, rendering them helpless to control or resist the abnormal, sickening, mind and body-wrecking demands made upon them. Very few women live therein an average more than three, four or six years, and at the end of that time twenty-two thousand pure young girls gathered from prairie homes and village firesides and from our own suburban and city families must march out in 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 L——'s saloon. I discovered in the wine and back rooms of the wretched place a crowd of perhaps fifty drunken, dirty men and women, young white girls, huddled in with the worst mob of negroes, 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 foreigner who at its door was boldly soliciting trade for the saloon and its adjacent evils just opposite. I walked down to Peoria and south on that notorious street. In the row of houses running from Lake to Randolph street there are approximately 300 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, negroes, Turks and Pollocks, gathered in front of these public abominations. At the corner of Randolph and Peoria streets several earnest looking men and women were holding a little gospel street 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 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, heart-breaking story of wrong and vice and ruin I have ever listened to. As I left that West Side levee of vice I knew I had seen prostitution at its lowest ebb and that out from these holes of horror finally went those awful alley women of the night to sell their souls to any young boy or drunken man who could give them a few cents or even the price of a drink of whiskey.

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.

Mr. J. J. Sloan, when he was superintendent of the John Worthy School (which is the local municipal juvenile 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 the South State street and West Side alleys for the remarkably low price of ten cents, or even a glass of beer or whisky from the gonorrheal and syphilitic denizens thrown out long ago from the better class houses of prostitution to live off the half drunken men and young boys to be found in swarms along South State, Halsted and South Clark streets. Almost invariably the street boy hunting these underworld sections of our city is first led into sexual sin by one of the crippled, half rotten, yet painted vampires of the street whose only care or hope is a crust of free lunch and enough whisky or “dope” to drown for a time at least, the last throb of heart and conscience and keep life a few days longer within her wretched body, and the boy, having purchased for the 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 today 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 certain districts they must come in direct contact with those whose only mission is to ruin and debauch. It should be the direct object morally and politically, of every father and mother in this city to banish these human parasites—these leeches who suck the life blood of our boys—from Chicago’s streets.

Listen, father, mother, there are twenty-two thousand poor, dearly-beloved young girls growing up in our midst today 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 twenty-two thousand helpless, hopeless, decaying chattles who now daily behind bolts and bars and steel screens, 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 night after a reasonable hour. Harry Balding, the convicted white slaver, in his confession before Judge Newcomer and Assistant State’s Attorney Roe, says: “We would be sent out by resort keepers to work up some girls, for whom we were paid from $10 to $50 each, though the cash bonus was much more. The majority of them were girls we met on the street. We would go around to the penny arcades and nickle theatres and when we saw a couple of young girls we would go up and talk with them. I will say this 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! Today from beneath Chicago’s awful moral sewerage which has sucked their hearts and souls and bodies under, a thousand trembling hands are held up to high heaven, and to you for help, hands reeking with the blood on which some whoremonger 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 worldwide, 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 public flesh markets as our “red-light” and levee district would be banished forever from Chicago streets. I believe in helping, God knows, with heart and hand and money, every fallen 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 builded is human liberty and human protection, and so by personal work, by song, prayer and by 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 acknowledgement that you are your brother’s keeper.

Smashing The Traffic

There are some things so far removed from the lives of normal, decent people as to be simply unbelievable by them. The “white slave” trade of today is one of these incredible things. The calmest, simplest statements of its facts are almost beyond the comprehension or belief of men and women who are mercifully spared from contact with the dark and hideous secrets of “the under world” of the big cities.

You would hardly credit the statement, for example, that things are being done every day in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and other large cities of this country in the white slave traffic which would, by contrast, make the Congo slave traders of the old days appear like Good Samaritans. Yet this figure is almost a literal truth. The man of the stone age who clubbed a woman of his desire into insensibility or submission was little short of a high-minded gentleman when contrasted with the men who fatten upon the “white slave” traffic in this day of social settlements, of forward movements, of Y. M. C. A. and Christian Endeavor activities, of air ships and wireless telegraphy.

Naturally, wisely, every parent who reads this statement will at once raise the question: “What excuse is there for the open discussion of such a revolting condition of things in the pages of a household magazine? What good is there to be served by flaunting so dark and disgusting a subject before the family circle?”

Only one—and that is a reason and not an excuse! The recent examination of more than two hundred “white slaves” by the office of the United States district attorney at Chicago has brought to light the fact that literally thousands of innocent girls from the country districts are every year entrapped into a life of hopeless slavery and degradation because parents in the country do not understand conditions as they exist and how to protect their daughters from the “white slave” traders who have reduced the art of ruining young girls to a national and international system. I sincerely believe that nine-tenths of the parents of these thousands of girls who are every year snatched from lives of decency and comparative peace and dragged under the slime of existence in the “white slave world” have no idea that there is really a trade in the ruin of girls as much as there is a trade in cattle or sheep or the other products of the farm. If these parents had known the real conditions, had believed that there is actually a syndicate which does as regular, as steady and persistent a “business” in the ruination of girls as the great packing houses do in the sale of meats, it is wholly probable that their daughters would not now be in dens of vice and almost utterly without hope or release excepting by the hand of death.

The purpose of all our laws and statutes against crime is the suppression of crime. The protection of the people, of the home, of the individual, is the purpose which inspires the honest and conscientious prosecutor. This is what the law is for, and if this result of protection to individuals and home can be made more effective and more general by a statement such as this, then I am willing to make it for the public good. And the most direct and unadorned statement of facts will, I think, carry its own conviction and make everything like “preaching” or denunciation superfluous.

The evidence obtained from questioning some 250 girls taken in Chicago houses of ill repute leads me to believe that not fewer than fifteen thousand girls have been imported into this country in the last year as white slaves. Of course this is only a guess—an approximate—it could be nothing else—but my own personal belief is that it is a conservative guess and well within the facts as to numbers. Then please remember that girls imported are certainly but a mere fraction of the number recruited for the army of prostitution from home fields, from the cities, the towns, the villages of our own country. There is no possible escape from this conclusion.

Another significant fact brought out by the examination of these girls is that practically every one who admitted having parents living begged that her real name be withheld from the public because of the sorrow and shame it would bring to her parents. One said: “My mother thinks I am studying in a stenographic school,” another stated, “My parents in the country think I have a good position in a department store—as I did have for a time, and I’ve sent them a little money from time to time; I don’t care what happens so long as they don’t know the truth about me.” In a word, the one concern of nearly all those examined who have homes in this country was that their parents—and in particular their mothers—might discover, through the prosecution of the “white slavers,” that they were leading lives of shame instead of working at the honorable callings which they had left their homes and come to the city to pursue. There are, to put it mildly, hundreds—yes, thousands—of trusting mothers in the smaller cities, the towns, villages and farming communities of the United States who believe that their daughters are “getting on fine” in the city, and too busy to come home for a visit or “to write much,” while the fact is that these daughters have been swept into the gulf of white slavery—the worst doom that can befall a woman. The mother who has allowed her girl to go to the big city and work should find out what kind of life that girl is living and find out from some other source than the girl herself. No matter how good and fine a girl she has been at home and how complete the confidence she has always inspired, find out how she is living, what kind of associations she is keeping. Take nothing for granted. You owe it to yourself and to her and it is not disloyalty to go beyond her own words for evidence that the wolves of the city have not dragged her from safe paths. It is, instead, the highest form of loyalty to her.

Again, there is, in another particular, a remarkable and impressive sameness in the stories related by these wretched girls. In the narratives of nearly all of them is a passage describing how some man of their acquaintance had offered to “help” them to a good position in the city, to “look after” them, and to “take an interest” in them. After listening to this confession from one girl after another, hour after hour, until you have heard it repeated perhaps fifty times, you feel like saying to every mother in the country: Do not trust any man who pretends to take an interest in your girl if that interest involves her leaving your own roof. Keep her with you. She is far safer in the country than in the big city, but if, go to the city she must, then go with her yourself; if that is impossible, place her with some woman who is your friend, not hers; no girl can safely go to a great city to make her own way who is not under the eye of a trustworthy woman who knows the ways and dangers of city life. Above all, distrust the “protection,” the “good offices” of any man who is not a family friend known to be clean and honorable and above all suspicion.

Of course all the examinations to which I have referred have been conducted for the specific purpose of finding girls who have been brought into this country from other lands in defiance of the federal statute, passed by Congress February 20, 1907. This act declares that any person who shall “keep, maintain, support or harbor” any alien woman for immoral purposes within three years after her arrival in this country shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be liable to a fine of $5,000 and imprisonment for five years at the discretion of the court. When the department of justice at Washington decided that this law was being violated, the United States district attorney at Chicago was instructed to take such action as was necessary to apprehend the violators of the act and convict them. One of the first steps required was the raiding of the various dives and houses of ill-fame and the arrest of the girl inmates as well as the arrest of the keepers and the procurers of the white slaves.

While the federal prosecution is officially concerned only with those cases involving the importation of girls from other countries—there being no authority under the present national statutes for the federal government to prosecute those concerned in securing white slaves who are natives of this country—it was inevitable that the examination of scores of these inmates, captured in raids upon the dives, should bring to officers and agents of the department of justice an immense fund of information regarding the methods of the white slave traders in recruiting for the traffic from home fields.

Whether these hunters of the innocent ply their awful calling at home or abroad their methods are much the same—with the exception that the foreign girl is more hopelessly at their mercy. Let me take the case of a little Italian peasant girl who helped her father till the soil in the vineyards and fields near Naples. Like most of the others taken in the raids, she stoutly maintained that she had been in this country more than three years and that she was in a life of shame from choice and not through the criminal act of any person. When she was brought into what the sensational newspapers would call the “sweat box,” it was clear that she was in a state of abject terror. Soon, however, Assistant United States District Attorney Parkin, having charge of the examination, convinced her that he and his associates were her friends and protectors and that their purpose was to punish those who had profited by her ruin and to send her back to her little Italian home with all her expenses paid; that she was under the protection of the United States and was as safe as if the king of Italy would take her under his royal care and pledge his word that her enemies should not have revenge on her.

Then she broke down, and with pitiful sobs related her awful narrative. That every word of it was true, no one could doubt who saw her as she told it. Briefly this is her story: A “fine lady” who wore beautiful clothes came to where she lived with her parents, made friends with her, told her she was uncommonly pretty (the truth, by the way), and professed a great interest in her. Such flattering attentions from an American lady who wore clothes as fine as those of the Italian nobility, could have but one effect on the mind of this simple little peasant girl and on her still simpler parents. Their heads were completely turned and they regarded the “American lady” with almost adoration.

Very shrewdly the woman did not attempt to bring the little girl back with her, but held out hope that some day a letter might come with money for her passage to America. Once there she would become the companion of her American friend and they would have great times together.

Of course, in due time the money came—and the $100 was a most substantial pledge to the parents of the wealth and generosity of the “American lady.” Unhesitatingly she was prepared for the voyage which was to take her to the land of happiness and good fortune. According to the arrangements made by letter the girl was met at New York by two “friends” of her benefactress who attended to her entrance papers and took her in charge. These “friends” were two of the most brutal of all the white slave drivers who are in the traffic. At this time she was about sixteen years old, innocent and rarely attractive for a girl of her class, having the large, handsome eyes, the black hair and the rich olive skin of a typical Italian.

Where these two men took her she did not know—but by the most violent and brutal means they quickly accomplished her ruin. For a week she was subjected to unspeakable treatment and made to feel that her degredation was complete and final.

And here let it be said that the breaking of the spirit, the crushing of all hope for any future save that of shame, is always a part of the initiation of a white slave. Then the girl was shipped on to Chicago, where she was disposed of to the keeper of an Italian dive of the vilest type. On her entrance here she was furnished with gaudy dresses and wearing apparel for which the keeper of the place charged her $600. As is the case with all new white slaves she was not allowed to have any clothing which she could wear upon the street.

Her one object in life was to escape from the den in which she was held a prisoner. To “pay out” seemed the surest way, and at length, from her wages of shame, she was able to cancel the $600 account. Then she asked for her street clothing and her release—only to be told that she had incurred other expenses to the amount of $400.

Her Italian blood took fire at this and she made a dash for liberty. But she was not quick enough and the hand of the oppressor was upon her. In the wild scene that followed she was slashed with a razor, one gash straight through her right eye, one across her cheek and another slitting her ear. Then she was given medical attention and the wounds gradually healed, but her face was horribly mutilated, her right eye is always open and to look upon her is to shudder.