of the women in this class expect to live more than ten years, after
they enter upon their voluntary or involuntary life of white slavery.
Perhaps the average is less than that. Many die painful deaths by
disease, many by consumption, but it is hardly beyond the truth to say
that suicide is their general expectation. “We’ll all come to it sooner
or later,” one of the witnesses remarked to her companions in the jail,
the other day, when reading in the newspaper of the suicide of a girl
inmate of a notorious house.
A volume could be written on this revolting subject, but I have no
disposition to add a single word but what will open the eyes of parents
to the fact that white slavery is an existing condition—a system of
girl hunting that is national and international in its scope, that
it literally consumes thousands of girls—clean, innocent girls—every
year; that it is operated with a cruelty, a barbarism that gives a new
meaning to the word fiend; that it is imminent peril to every girl
in the country who had a desire to get into the city and taste its
excitements and its pleasures.
The facts stated here are for the awakening of parents and guardians
of girls. If I were to presume to say anything to the possible victims
of this awful scourge of white slavery it would be this: “Those who
enter here leave hope behind;” the depths of debasement and suffering
disclosed by the investigation now in progress would make the flesh of
a seasoned man of the world creep with horror and shame.
Why Girls Go Astray
Right at the outset let me say in all frankness that I would never,
from personal choice, write upon a subject of this character. Its
sensationalism is personally repellant to me and cannot fail to be of
actual protective benefit to many homes; and to withhold the facts and
disclosures which have come to me as investigator would be to deprive
the innocent and the worthy of a protection which might save many a
home from sorrow, disgrace and ruin.
The results of this work and of the explanations of the conditions
uncovered in this book have brought to me a gratifying knowledge of the
practical rescue work being done by the settlement and “slum” workers
of Chicago. They are not only specialists in this field, but they are
as devoted as they are practical.
So far as the matter of sensationalism is concerned, that may be
disposed of in the simple statement that the naked recital, in the
most formal and colorless phraseology, of the facts already brought
to light by the “white slave” prosecutions are in themselves so
sensational that the art of the most brilliant orator, or the cunning
of the cleverest writer, could not add an iota to their sensationalism.
And it may as well be said here that it is quite impossible to even
hint in public print of the revolting depths of shame disclosed by this
investigation. Behind every word that can be said in print on this
topic is a world of degradation of which the slightest hint cannot be
given.
If there are any who are inclined to feel that the term “white slave”
is a little overdrawn, a little exaggerated, let them decide on that
point after considering this statement: “Among the 'white slaves’
captured in raids since the appearance of this book, is a girl who is
now about eighteen years of age. Her home was in France, and when she
was only fourteen years old she was approached by a 'white slaver’ who
promised her employment in America as a lady’s maid or companion. The
wage offered was far beyond what she could expect to get in her own
country—but far more alluring to her than the money she could earn
was the picture of the life which would be hers in free America. Her
surroundings would be luxurious; she would be the constant recipient of
gifts of dainty clothing from her mistress, and even the hardest work
she would be called upon to do would be in itself a pleasure and an
excitement.
“Naturally she was eager to leave her home and trust herself to one who
would provide her with so enriching a future. Her friends of her own
age seasoned their farewells to her with envy of her rare good fortune.
“On arriving in Chicago she was taken to the house of ill-fame to
which she had been sold by the procurer. There this child of fourteen
was quickly and unceremoniously 'broken in’ to the hideous life of
depravity for which she had been entrapped. The white slaver who sold
her was able to drive a most profitable bargain, for she was rated as
uncommonly attractive. In fact, he made her life of shame a perpetual
source of income, and when—not long ago—he was captured and indicted
for the importation of other girls, this girl was used as the agency of
providing him with $2,000 for his defense.
“But let us look for a moment at the mentionable facts of this child’s
daily routine of life and see if such an existence justifies the use
of the term 'slavery.’ After she had furnished a night of servitude
to the brutal passions of vile frequenters of the place, she was then
compelled to put off her tawdry costume, array herself in the garb of
a scrub-woman, and, on her hands and knees, scrub the house from top
to bottom. No weariness, no exhaustion, ever excused her from this
drudgery, which was a full day’s work for a strong woman.
“After her scrubbing was done she was allowed to go to her chamber
and sleep—locked in her room to prevent her possible escape—until the
orgies of the next day, or rather night, began. She was allowed no
liberties, no freedom, and in the two and one half years of her slavery
in this house she was not even given one dollar to spend for her own
comfort or pleasure. The legal evidence collected shows that during
this period of slavery she earned for those who owned her not less than
eight thousand dollars!”
If this is not slavery, I have no definition for it.
Let us make it entirely clear that the white slave is an actual
prisoner. She is under the most constant surveillance, both by the
keeper to whom she is “let” and the procurer who owns her. Not until
she has lost all possible desire to escape is she given any liberty.
Before me, as I write, is a letter from a father which is a tragedy in
a page. He begins the note by saying that the warning has aroused him
to inquire after his “little girl.” There is a pathetic pride in his
admission that she was considered an uncommonly “pretty girl” when she
left her home to take a position in Chicago. Her letters, he states,
have been more and more infrequent, but that she does occasionally
write home, and sometimes encloses a small amount of money. From the
tone of the father’s note it is evident that, while he is a trifle
anxious, he asks that his daughter be “looked up” rather to confirm his
feelings of confidence that she is all right than otherwise.
A glance at the address where she was to be found left no possible
question as to the fate which had overtaken this daughter of a country
home. So far as a knowledge of the girl’s mode of life is concerned, no
investigation was necessary—the location named being in the center of
Chicago’s “red-light” district.
However, the case was placed in the hands of a settlement worker,
and at this moment the girl is waiting, in a place of safety, for
the arrival of her father, who is on his way to take her back to the
mother and brothers and sisters who have supposed that she was holding
a respectable, but poorly paid position. They will, however, welcome
a very different person from the “pretty girl” who went out from that
home to make her way in the big city. She is pitifully wasted by the
life which she has led and her constitution is so broken down that she
cannot reasonably expect many years of life, even under the tenderest
care. What is still worse, the fact cannot be denied that her moral
fibre is much shattered, and that the work of reclamation must be more
than physical.
The “White slaves” who have been taken in the course of the present
prosecution have, generally, been very grateful for the liberation
and glad to return to their homes. It has been necessary for their
own protection as well as for other reasons—to commit some of these
unfortunates to various prisons pending the trial of the cases in which
they are to appear as witnesses, and practically every one of them
gives unmistakable evidence that imprisonment is a welcome liberation
by comparison with the life of “white slavery.”
Now, as to the practical means which parents should use to prevent this
unspeakable fate from overtaking their daughters. They cannot do it by
assuming that their daughter is all right and that she will take care
of herself in the big city. In a large measure it seems impossible
to arouse parents—especially those in the country—to a realization
that there is in every big city a class of men and women who live by
trapping girls into a life of degredation and who are as inhumanly
cunning in their awful craft as they are in their other instincts;
that these beasts of the human jungle are as unbelievably desperate as
they are unbelievably cruel, and that their warfare upon virtue is as
persistent, as calculating and as unceasing as was the warfare of the
wolf upon the unprotected lamb of the pioneer’s flock in the early days
of the Western frontier.
I cannot escape the conclusion that the country girl is in greater
danger from the “white slavers” than the city girl. The perusal of
testimony of many “white slaves” enforces this conclusion. This is
because they are less sophisticated, more trusting and more open to
the allurements of those who are waiting to prey upon them.
It is a fact which parents of girls in the country should remember
that the “white slavers” are busy on the trains coming into the city,
and make it a point to “cut out” an attractive girl whenever they can.
This “cutting out” process consists of making the girl’s acquaintance,
gaining her confidence and, on one pretext or another, inducing her to
leave the train before the main depot is reached. This is done because
the various protective and law and order organizations have watchers at
the main railroad stations who are trained to the work of “spotting,”
and quickly detect a girl in the hands of one of these human beasts of
prey. Generally these watchers are women and wear the badges of their
organizations.
But suppose that the girl from the country does not chance to fall in
with the “white slaver” on the train, that she reaches the city in
safety, becomes located in a position—or perhaps in the stenographic
school or business college which she has come to attend—and secures a
room in a boarding house. No human being, it seems to me, is quite so
lonely as the young girl from the country when she first comes to the
city and starts in the struggles of life there without acquaintances.
All her instincts are social, and she is, for the time being, almost
desolately alone in a wilderness of strange human beings. She must
have some one to talk to—it is the law of youth as well as the law of
her sex to crave constant companionship. And the consequences? She is
sentimentally in a condition to prepare her for the slaughter, to make
her an easy prey to the wiles of the “white slave” wolf.
The girl reared in the city does not have this peculiar and insidious
handicap to contend with; she has been—from the time she could first
toddle along the sidewalk—educated in wholesome suspicion, taught that
she must not talk with strangers or take candy from them, that she must
withdraw herself from all advances and, in large measure, regard all
save her own people with distrust. As she grows older she comes to know
that certain parts of the city are more dangerous and more “wicked”
than others; that her comings and goings must always be in safe and
familiar company; that her acquaintanceships and her friendships must
be scrutinized by her natural protectors and that, altogether, there
is a definite but undefined danger in the very atmosphere of the city
for the girl or the young woman which demands a constant and protected
alertness.
The training is almost wholly absent in the case of the country
girl; she is not educated in suspicion until the protective instinct
acts almost unconsciously; her intercourse with her world is almost
comparatively free and unrestrained; she is so unlearned in the moral
and social geography of the city that she is quite as likely, if left
to her own devices, to select her boarding house in an undesirable as
in a safe and desirable part of the city; and, in a word, when she
comes into the city her ignorance, her trusting faith in humanity in
general, her ignorance of the underworld and her loneliness and perhaps
home-sickness, conspire to make her a ready and an easy victim of the
“white slaver.”
In view of what I have learned in the course of the recent
investigation and prosecution of the “white slave” traffic, I can
say in all sincerity, that if I lived in the country and had a young
daughter, I would go to any length of hardship and privation myself
rather than allow her to go into the city to work or to study—unless
that studying were to be done in the very best type of an educational
institution where the girl students were always under the closest
protection. The best and surest way for parents of girls in the country
to protect them from the clutches of the “white slaver” is to keep them
in the country. But if circumstances should seem to compel a change
from the country to the city, then the only safe way is to go with them
into the city; but even this last has its disadvantages from the fact
that, in that case, the parents would themselves be unfamiliar with the
usages and the pitfalls of metropolitan life, and would not be able to
protect their daughters as carefully as if they had spent their own
lives in the city.
More About the Traffic in Shame
The dragnets of the inhuman men and women who ply their terrible
trade are spread day and night and are manipulated with a skill and
precision which ought to strike terror to the heart of every careless
or indifferent parent. The wonder is not that so many are caught in
this net, but that they escape! “I count the week—I might almost say
the day—a happy and fortunate one which does not bring to my attention
as an officer of the state a deplorable case of this kind,” said Mrs.
Ophelia Amigh.
Just to show how tightly and broadly the nets of these fishers for
girls are spread, let me tell you of an instance which occurred to a
girl from this institution:
This girl, whom I will call Nellie, is a very ordinary looking girl,
and below the average of intelligence, but as tractable and obedient
as she is ingenuous. She is wholly without the charm which would
naturally attract the eye of the white slave trader.
Because of her quietness, her obedience and her good disposition, she
was, in accordance with the rules of the institution, permitted to go
into the family of a substantial farmer out in the west and work as
a housemaid, a “hired girl”—her wages to be deposited to her credit
against the time when she should reach the age of twenty-one and leave
the Home.
She had been in her position for some time and was so quiet and
satisfactory that one Sunday when the family were not going to church,
the mistress said:
“Nellie, if you wish to go to church alone you may do so. The milk
wagon will be along shortly and you can ride on that to the village—and
here is seventy-five cents. You may want to buy your dinner and perhaps
some candy.”
When Nellie reached town and was on her way past the railroad station
to the church, the train for Chicago came in, and the impulse seized
her to get aboard, go to the city and look up her father, whom she had
not seen for several months. She went to the city and hardly stepped
from the train into the big station when she heard a man’s voice
saying, “Why, hello, Mary!”
Instantly—foolishly, of course—she answered him and replied:
“My name is not Mary, it’s Nellie.”
“You look the very picture,” he responded, “of a girl I know well whose
name is Mary—and she’s a fine girl, too! Are any of your folks here to
meet you?”
“No,” she answered, “my father’s here in the city somewhere, but he
doesn’t know I’m coming. I’ve been working out in the country for a
long time and I didn’t write him about coming back.”
Her answers were so ingenuous and revealing that the man saw that he
had an easy and simple victim to deal with. Therefore his tactics were
very direct.
“It’s about time to eat,” he suggested, “and I guess we’re both hungry.
You go to a restaurant and eat with me and perhaps I can help you to
find your father quicker than you could do it alone.”
She accepted, and in the course of the meal he asked her if she would
like to find a place at which to work. “I know a fine place in Blank
City,” he added. “The woman is looking for a good girl just like you.”
“Yes, I’d be pleased to get the place, but I haven’t any money to pay
the fare with,” was her answer.
“Oh, that’s all right,” he quickly replied. “I’ll buy your ticket and
give you a little money besides for a cab and other expenses. The woman
told me to do that if I could find her a girl. She’ll send me back a
check for it all.”
After he had bought the ticket and put her aboard the train going to
Blank City, he wrote the name of the woman to whom he was sending her,
gave her about $2 extra and then delivered this fatherly advice to her:
“You’re just a young girl, and it’s best for you not to talk to anybody
on the train or after you get off. Don’t show this paper to anybody or
tell anybody where you’re going. It isn’t any of their business anyway.
And as soon as you get off the train you’ll find plenty of cabs there.
Hand your paper to the first cab driver in the line, get in and ride to
Mrs. A——'s home. Pay the driver and then walk in.”
Believing that she was being furnished a position by a remarkably
kind man, the poor girl followed his direction implicitly—and landed
the next day in one of the most notorious houses of shame in the state
of Illinois outside of Chicago. How she was found and rescued is a
story quite apart from the purpose which has led me to tell of this
incident—that of indicating how tightly the slave traders have their
nets spread for even the most ordinary and unattractive prey. They let
no girl escape whom they dare to approach!
Crime in Chicago
Strange as it may seem, men and women of certain grades of intellect
and temperament deliberately devote themselves to lives of crime. These
constitute the “professional criminals,” who make up such a terrible
class in the population of every great city. In Chicago this class is
undoubtedly large, but not so large as many people assert. That it
is active and dangerous, the police records of the city afford ample
testimony. It is very hard to obtain any reliable statistics respecting
the professional votaries of crime, but it would seem, after careful
investigation, that Chicago contains about 3,000 of them. These consist
of thieves, burglars, fences and pickpockets.
In addition to these we may include under the head of professional
criminals, the following:
Women of ill-fame, 20,000, keepers of gambling houses and of policy and
lottery offices about 600, making in all about 23,600 professional law
breakers. This is a startling statement, but unhappily true.
The population of Chicago is more cosmopolitan than that of any city
in the union and the majority of the people are poor. The struggle for
existence is a hard one, and offers every inducement for crime. The
political system which is based more or less upon plunder, presents
the spectacles of dishonesty. The professionals are not ignorant men
and women, however. Among them may be found many whose abilities,
if properly directed, would win for them positions of honor and
usefulness. There seems to be a fascination in crime to those people,
and they deliberately enter upon it.
The principal form which crime assumes in Chicago is robbery. The
professionals do not deliberately engage in murder or the graver
crimes; though they do not hesitate to commit them if necessary to
their success or safety. They prefer to pursue their vocation without
taking life; and murder, arson, rape and capital crimes are, therefore,
not more common here than in other large cities. Robbery, however, is a
science here, and it is of its various forms the following pages will
treat.
The professional criminals in Chicago constitute a distinct community;
they are known to each other, and seldom make any effort to associate
with people of respectability. They infest certain sections of the city
where they can easily and rapidly communicate with each other, and can
hide in safety from the police.
Chicago thieves are of two sorts—those who steal only when they are
tempted by want, or when an unusual opportunity for successful thieving
is thrown their way, and those who make a regular business of stealing.
A professional thief ranks among his fellows according to his ability.
Many professional thieves are burglars. They drink to excess and commit
so many blunders that they are easily detected by the police. They
gamble a great deal. When successful they quarrel over their booty,
and often betray each other. A smart thief seldom drinks and never
allows himself to get under the influence of liquor. He tries to keep
himself in the best physical trim; and is always ready for a long run
when pursued, or a desperate struggle when cornered. He must always
have his wits about him. A thief of this class makes a successful bank
robber, forger, or confidence swindler. Professional thieves seldom
have any home. Many of them find temporary shelter in a dull season
in houses of ill-repute. They associate with and are often married to
disreputable women, many of whom are also thieves. The smartest thieves
do not have homes, for the reason that they dare not remain long in one
place for fear of arrest. During the summer, Chicago thieves are to be
found at all summer and sea-shore resorts. Later in the season they
attend the county fairs and agricultural shows, and any place where
large crowds assemble and come back to the city at the beginning of
winter. They are fond of political meetings and reap a rich harvest at
some of these gatherings.
If I were asked whether there were any place in the city where thieves
were educated in their business, I would answer, “No.” It would be
impossible for such places to exist without being discovered. Thieves
educate themselves, or get their knowledge by associating with other
thieves more experienced than themselves. Those people who believe in
the existence of schools where boys are taught the art of picking
pockets, have got their belief from works of fiction like Dickens’
“Oliver Twist.” The dram-shops and brothels of the city where the
thieves congregate, are the only places which can be called schools of
crime.
For the purpose of communicating with each other, the professional
thieves have a language, or argot, which is also common to their
brethren in other large cities. It is generally known as “patter,” and
is said to be of Gypsy origin. A few phrases, taken at random from
a leaflet handed me, will give the reader an idea of it. “Abraham,”
Jew; to sham, to pretend sickness; “Autumn cove,” a married man;
“Autumn cacler,” a married woman; “Bag of nails,” everything in
confusion; “Ballum rancum,” a ball where all the damsels are thieves
and prostitutes; “North and South,” State street; “Booked,” arrested;
“City College,” Harrison Street Station; “Consolation,” assassination;
“Dopie,” a girl; “Drawing,” picking pockets; “Family man,” a receiver
of stolen goods; “Gilt-dabber,” a hotel thief; “Madge,” private
place; “Ned,” a ten dollar gold piece; “Plate of meat,” man with
fat pocket-book; “Poncess,” a woman who supports a man by her
prostitution, and so on.
The professional thieves are thoroughly familiar with the language, and
can speak to each other intelligibly, while a bystander is in total
ignorance of their meaning.
The professional thieves are divided into various classes, the members
of which confine themselves strictly to their peculiar line of work.
They are classed by the police, and by themselves, as follows:
Burglars, bank sneaks, safe blowers, sneak thieves, confidence men and
pickpockets. A burglar will rarely attempt the part of a sneak thief
and a pickpocket will seldom undertake burglary.
Bank Burglars.