MENACE OF THE WHITE SLAVE TRADE.
By Edwin W. Sims, United States District Attorney,
Chicago.
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 repellent to me. On the other hand, no
matter how carefully the public prosecutor may preserve the legal
viewpoint and the legal temperament, his work may lead him into
situations where he feels that he cannot, in common humanity, withhold
from the public a knowledge of the things which he knows cannot fail to
be of actual protective benefit to many homes; that to withhold the
facts and disclosures which have come to him as an officer of the law
would be to deprive the innocent and the worthy of a protection which
might save many a home from sorrow, disgrace and ruin.
Again: The results of this legal work and of the explanations of the
conditions uncovered in my former article have brought to me a
gratifying knowledge of the practical and most effective rescue work
being done by Rev. Ernest A. Bell of the Illinois Vigilance
Association, of which Rev. M. P. Boynton is the president. These men
and many of the settlement and slum workers of Chicago with whom I have
come in contact are not only specialists in this field, but they are as
devoted as they are practical. More perhaps because of the urgent
assurances of the Rev. M. P. Boynton, Mr. Bell and others that giving to
the public a statement of actual conditions has been of a great service
to them in their hand to hand fight than to any other reason, I am moved
to make another statement.
When the editor of the Woman's World urged me to write of "The White
Slave Traffic of Today," I felt that I had an official knowledge of
facts which the fathers and mothers of the country had a right to know
in order to prevent the possibility of their daughters falling victims
to the most hideous form of human slavery known in the world today. This
consideration moved me to put aside my strong personal feelings against
appearing in print in connection with a subject so abhorrent. Many
results of that article have made me glad that I did so--and those
results have also contributed to overcome my antipathy to a further
pursuit of that subject. But in following this topic as I now do, I
shall again emphasize the fact that I wish to say what seems to be
needful in as unsensational a way as possible, and that I also wish to
do that from the viewpoint of a public prosecutor who has, in the
ordinary discharge of his duties, encountered this appalling situation,
and not at all from the standpoint of the sentimentalist.
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 word 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 my first article 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
transportation 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
each night 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 cleaning 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 a 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 shows that during this period of
slavery she earned for those who owned her not less than eight thousand
dollars--and probably ten thousand dollars!"
If this is not slavery, I have no definition for it.
Let me 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 by the procurer who owns her. Not until
she has lost all possible desire to escape is she given any liberty.
Many--very many--letters have been received from parents who read the
first article on this subject. A considerable number of them are from
ministers of the gospel, from officers and members of law and order
leagues, woman's clubs and kindred organizations. But there is a
pathetic reminder which does not come from the public-spirited servants
of the common good. These letters are from the fathers and mothers
whose fears and suspicions were aroused by the warning that the girl who
has left her home in the country, gone up to the city and does not come
home to visit, needs to be looked up.
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.
While the case was a sad one there appeared to be no violation of the
Federal laws, the girl having come from a neighboring state. A Federal
prosecution against those detaining her was, therefore, impossible.
However, the case was placed in the hands of Mr. Bell of the Illinois
Vigilance Association. Through his efforts she was rescued and shortly
thereafter returned to her mother and brothers and sisters who had
supposed that she was holding a respectable, but poorly paid position.
They, however, welcomed a very different person from the pretty girl who
went out from that home to make her way in the big city. She was
pitifully wasted by the life which she had 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 shattered and 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 degradation and who are as inhumanely cunning in
their awful craft as they are in 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 folk 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 the
testimony of many "white slaves" enforces this conclusion. That 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 (I use the technical term) 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 struggle 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 protective
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 innocence, her trusting faith in humanity in general, her
ignorance of the underworld and her loneliness and perhaps homesickness,
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 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 the
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 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.
One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the
city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to
be a spider's web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true
of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores
of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step
towards "white slavery" in places of this character. And it is hardly
too much to say that a week does not pass in Chicago without the
publication in some daily paper of the details of a police court case in
which the ice cream parlor of this type is the scene of a regrettable
tragedy. The only safe rule is to keep away from places of this kind,
whether in a big city like Chicago or in a large country town. I believe
that there are good grounds for the suspicion that the ice cream parlor,
kept by the foreigner in the large country town, is often a recruiting
station, and a feeder for the "white slave" traffic. It is certain that
this is the case in the big city, and many evidences point to the
conclusion that there is a kind of free-masonry among these foreign
proprietors of refreshment parlors which would make it entirely natural
and convenient for the proprietor of a city establishment of this kind,
who is entangled in the "white slave" trade, to establish relations with
a man in the same business and of the same nationality in the country
town. I do not mean to intimate by this that all the ice cream and fruit
"saloons" having foreign-born proprietors are connected with the "white
slave" traffic--but some of them are, and this fact is sufficient to
cause all careful and thoughtful parents of young girls to see that they
do not frequent these places.
In this article it is of course impossible to more than hint at the
protective measures which conscientious parents of girls should employ
in order to make the way safe for their daughters. There can be no doubt
that Judge Lindsay of Denver, Judge Mack of Chicago, and Mr. Edward W.
Bok of the Ladies' Home Journal, are right in insisting upon greater
frankness between parents and children and that every child should have
a sex education at home instead of being compelled to pick it up from
contaminating sources on the street and at school. And I may add that
the world owes a debt to these men who have handled this delicate and
difficult problem in a practical as well as a powerful manner; and I
feel impelled to add that, in face of the horrifying disclosures brought
to me in the form of legal evidence, every boy and girl of high school
age should be taught something of the awful physical as well as the
moral consequences which lurk behind allurements of the life in which
the "white slave" is the central figure. These things cannot be
presented in the public prints, but the father who keeps close to his
boy and the mother who is a companion to her daughter may reveal these
things, in the home, in a way which may save almost untold suffering.
And to such parents I would say that the investigations of the United
States District Attorney's office in Chicago have brought together, as
legal evidence, a mass of facts as to sanitary conditions in the
districts where the "white slaves" are kept, which are horrifying and
scarcely capable of exaggeration.