Chapter 2

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.

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?

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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.

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 negro, 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.

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.

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.