Chapter 3

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.

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.

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, negroes 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--negro, 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 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 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, negroes, 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.