RECENT LEGAL ENACTMENTS
At the present moment even the least conscientious citizens agree that,
first and foremost, the organized traffic in what has come to be called
white slaves must be suppressed and that those traffickers who procure
their victims for purely commercial purposes must be arrested and
prosecuted. As it is impossible to rescue girls fraudulently and
illegally detained, save through governmental agencies, it is naturally
through the line of legal action that the most striking revelations of
the white slave traffic have come. For the sake of convenience, we may
divide this legal action into those cases dealing with the international
trade, those with the state and interstate traffic, and the regulations
with which the municipality alone is concerned.
First in value to the white slave commerce is the girl imported from
abroad who from the nature of the case is most completely in the power
of the trader. She is literally friendless and unable to speak the
language and at last discouraged she makes no effort to escape. Many
cases of the international traffic were recently tried in Chicago and
the offenders convicted by the federal authorities. One of these cases,
which attracted much attention throughout the country, was of Marie, a
French girl, the daughter of a Breton stone mason, so old and poor that
he was obliged to take her from her convent school at the age of twelve
years. He sent her to Paris, where she became a little household drudge
and nurse-maid, working from six in the morning until eight at night,
and for three years sending her wages, which were about a franc a day,
directly to her parents in the Breton village. One afternoon, as she was
buying a bottle of milk at a tiny shop, she was engaged in conversation
by a young man who invited her into a little patisserie where, after
giving her some sweets, he introduced her to his friend, Monsieur Paret,
who was gathering together a theatrical troupe to go to America. Paret
showed her pictures of several young girls gorgeously arrayed and
announcements of their coming tour, and Marie felt much flattered when
it was intimated that she might join this brilliant company. After
several clandestine meetings to perfect the plan, she left the city with
Paret and a pretty French girl to sail for America with the rest of the
so-called actors. Paret escaped detection by the immigration authorities
in New York, through his ruse of the "Kinsella troupe," and took the
girls directly to Chicago. Here they were placed in a disreputable house
belonging to a man named Lair, who had advanced the money for their
importation. The two French girls remained in this house for several
months until it was raided by the police, when they were sent to
separate houses. The records which were later brought into court show
that at this time Marie was earning two hundred and fifty dollars a
week, all of which she gave to her employers. In spite of this large
monetary return she was often cruelly beaten, was made to do the
household scrubbing, and was, of course, never allowed to leave the
house. Furthermore, as one of the methods of retaining a reluctant girl
is to put her hopelessly in debt and always to charge against her the
expenses incurred in securing her, Marie as an imported girl had begun
at once with the huge debt of the ocean journey for Paret and herself.
In addition to this large sum she was charged, according to universal
custom, with exorbitant prices for all the clothing she received and
with any money which Paret chose to draw against her account. Later,
when Marie contracted typhoid fever, she was sent for treatment to a
public hospital and it was during her illness there, when a general
investigation was made of the white slave traffic, that a federal
officer visited her. Marie, who thought she was going to die, freely
gave her testimony, which proved to be most valuable.
The federal authorities following up her statements at last located
Paret in the city prison at Atlanta, Georgia, where he had been
convicted on a similar charge. He was brought to Chicago and on his
testimony Lair was also convicted and imprisoned.
Marie has since married a man who wishes to protect her from the
influence of her old life, but although not yet twenty years old and
making an honest effort, what she has undergone has apparently so far
warped and weakened her will that she is only partially successful in
keeping her resolutions, and she sends each month to her parents in
France ten or twelve dollars, which she confesses to have earned
illicitly. It is as if the shameful experiences to which this little
convent-bred Breton girl was forcibly subjected, had finally become
registered in every fibre of her being until the forced demoralization
has become genuine. She is as powerless now to save herself from her
subjective temptations as she was helpless five years ago to save
herself from her captors.
Such demoralization is, of course, most valuable to the white slave
trader, for when a girl has become thoroughly accustomed to the life and
testifies that she is in it of her own free will, she puts herself
beyond the protection of the law. She belongs to a legally degraded
class, without redress in courts of justice for personal outrages.
Marie, herself, at the end of her third year in America, wrote to the
police appealing for help, but the lieutenant who in response to her
letter visited the house, was convinced by Lair that she was there of
her own volition and that therefore he could do nothing for her. It is
easy to see why it thus becomes part of the business to break down a
girl's moral nature by all those horrible devices which are constantly
used by the owner of a white slave. Because life is so often shortened
for these wretched girls, their owners degrade them morally as quickly
as possible, lest death release them before their full profit has been
secured. In addition to the quantity of sacrificed virtue, to the bulk
of impotent suffering, which these white slaves represent, our
civilization becomes permanently tainted with the vicious practices
designed to accelerate the demoralization of unwilling victims in order
to make them commercially valuable. Moreover, a girl thus rendered more
useful to her owner, will thereafter fail to touch either the chivalry
of men or the tenderness of women because good men and women have become
convinced of her innate degeneracy, a word we have learned to use with
the unction formerly placed upon original sin. The very revolt of
society against such girls is used by their owners as a protection to
the business.
The case against the captors of Marie, as well as twenty-four other
cases, was ably and vigorously conducted by Edwin W. Sims, United States
District Attorney in Chicago. He prosecuted under a clause of the
immigration act of 1908, which was unfortunately declared
unconstitutional early the next year, when for the moment federal
authorities found themselves unable to proceed directly against this
international traffic. They could not act under the international white
slave treaty signed by the contracting powers in Paris in 1904, and
proclaimed by the President of the United States in 1908, because it was
found impossible to carry out its provisions without federal police. The
long consideration of this treaty by Congress made clear to the nation
that it is in matters of this sort that navies are powerless and that as
our international problems become more social, other agencies must be
provided, a point which arbitration committees have long urged. The
discussion of the international treaty brought the subject before the
entire country as a matter for immediate legislation and for executive
action, and the White Slave Traffic Act was finally passed by Congress
in 1910, under which all later prosecutions have since been conducted.
When the decision on the immigration clause rendered in 1909 threw the
burden of prosecution back upon the states, Mr. Clifford Roe, then
assistant State's Attorney, within one year investigated 348 such cases,
domestic and foreign, and successfully prosecuted 91, carrying on the
vigorous policy inaugurated by United States Attorney Sims. In 1908
Illinois passed the first pandering law in this country, changing the
offence from disorderly conduct to a misdemeanor, and greatly increasing
the penalty. In many states pandering is still so little defined as to
make the crime merely a breach of manners and to put it in the same
class of offences as selling a street-car transfer.
As a result of this vigorous action, Chicago became the first city to
look the situation squarely in the face, and to make a determined
business-like fight against the procuring of girls. An office was
established by public-spirited citizens where Mr. Roe was placed in
charge and empowered to follow up the clues of the traffic wherever
found and to bring the traffickers to justice; in consequence the white
slave traders have become so frightened that the foreign importation of
girls to Chicago has markedly declined. It is estimated by Mr. Roe that
since 1909 about one thousand white slave traders, of whom thirty or
forty were importers of foreign girls, have been driven away from the
city.
Throughout the Congressional discussions of the white slave traffic,
beginning with the Howell-Bennett Act in 1907, it was evident that the
subject was closely allied to immigration, and when the immigration
commission made a partial report to Congress in December, 1909, upon
"the importation and harboring of women for immoral purposes," their
finding only emphasized the report of the Commissioner General of
Immigration made earlier in the year. His report had traced the
international traffic directly to New York, Chicago, Boston, Buffalo,
New Orleans, Denver, Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Ogden, and
Butte. As the list of cities was comparatively small, it seemed not
unreasonable to hope that the international traffic might be rigorously
prosecuted, with the prospect of finally doing away with it in spite of
its subtle methods, its multiplied ramifications, and its financial
resources. Only officials of vigorous conscience can deal with this
traffic; but certainly there can be no nobler service for federal and
state officers to undertake than this protection of immigrant girls.
It is obvious that a foreign girl who speaks no English, who has not the
remotest idea in what part of the city her fellow-countrymen live, who
does not know the police station or any agency to which she may apply,
is almost as valuable to a white slave trafficker as a girl imported
directly for the trade. The trafficker makes every effort to intercept
such a girl before she can communicate with her relations. Although
great care is taken at Ellis Island, the girl's destination carefully
indicated upon her ticket and her friends communicated with, after she
boards the train the governmental protection is withdrawn and many
untoward experiences may befall a girl between New York and her final
destination. Only this year a Polish mother of the Hull House
neighborhood failed to find her daughter on a New York train upon which
she had been notified to expect her, because the girl had been induced
to leave the New York train at South Chicago, where she was met by two
young men, one of them well known to the police, and the other a young
Pole, purporting to have been sent by the girl's mother.
The immigrant girl also encounters dangers upon the very moment of her
arrival. The cab-men and expressmen are often unscrupulous. One of the
latter was recently indicted in Chicago upon the charge of regularly
procuring immigrant girls for a disreputable hotel. The non-English
speaking girl handing her written address to a cabman has no means of
knowing whither he will drive her, but is obliged to place herself
implicitly in his hands. The Immigrants' Protective League has brought
about many changes in this respect, but has upon its records some
piteous tales of girls who were thus easily deceived.
An immigrant girl is occasionally exploited by her own lover whom she
has come to America to marry. I recall the case of a Russian girl thus
decoyed into a disreputable life by a man deceiving her through a fake
marriage ceremony. Although not found until a year later, the girl had
never ceased to be distressed and rebellious. Many Slovak and Polish
girls, coming to America without their relatives, board in houses
already filled with their countrymen who have also preceded their own
families to the land of promise, hoping to earn money enough to send for
them later. The immigrant girl is thus exposed to dangers at the very
moment when she is least able to defend herself. Such a girl, already
bewildered by the change from an old world village to an American city,
is unfortunately sometimes convinced that the new country freedom does
away with the necessity for a marriage ceremony. Many others are told
that judgment for a moral lapse is less severe in America than in the
old country. The last month's records of the Municipal Court in Chicago,
set aside to hear domestic relation cases, show sixteen unfortunate
girls, of whom eight were immigrant girls representing eight different
nationalities. These discouraged and deserted girls become an easy prey
for the procurers who have sometimes been in league with their lovers.
Even those girls who immigrate with their families and sustain an
affectionate relation with them are yet often curiously free from
chaperonage. The immigrant mothers do not know where their daughters
work, save that it is in a vague "over there" or "down town." They
themselves were guarded by careful mothers and they would gladly give
the same oversight to their daughters, but the entire situation is so
unlike that of their own peasant girlhoods that, discouraged by their
inability to judge it, they make no attempt to understand their
daughters' lives. The girls, realizing this inability on the part of
their mothers, elated by that sense of independence which the first
taste of self-support always brings, sheltered from observation during
certain hours, are almost as free from social control as is the
traditional young man who comes up from the country to take care of
himself in a great city. These immigrant parents are, of course, quite
unable to foresee that while a girl feels a certain restraint of public
opinion from the tenement house neighbors among whom she lives, and
while she also responds to the public opinion of her associates in a
factory where she works, there is no public opinion at all operating as
a restraint upon her in the hours which lie between the two, occupied in
the coming and going to work through the streets of a city large enough
to offer every opportunity for concealment. So much of the recreation
which is provided by commercial agencies, even in its advertisements,
deliberately plays upon the interest of sex because it is under such
excitement and that of alcohol that money is most recklessly spent. The
great human dynamic, which it has been the long effort of centuries to
limit to family life, is deliberately utilized for advertising purposes,
and it is inevitable that many girls yield to such allurements.
On the other hand, one is filled with admiration for the many immigrant
girls who in the midst of insuperable difficulties resist all
temptations. Such admiration was certainly due Olga, a tall, handsome
girl, a little passive and slow, yet with that touch of dignity which a
continued mood of introspection so often lends to the young. Olga had
been in Chicago for a year living with an aunt who, when she returned to
Sweden, placed her niece in a boarding-house which she knew to be
thoroughly respectable. But a friendless girl of such striking beauty
could not escape the machinations of those who profit by the sale of
girls. Almost immediately Olga found herself beset by two young men who
continually forced themselves upon her attention, although she refused
all their invitations to shows and dances. In six months the frightened
girl had changed her boarding-place four times, hoping that the men
would not be able to follow her. She was also obliged constantly to look
for a cheaper place, because the dull season in the cloak-making trade
came early that year. In the fifth boarding-house she finally found
herself so hopelessly in arrears that the landlady, tired of waiting for
the "new cloak making to begin," at length fulfilled a long-promised
threat, and one summer evening at nine o'clock literally put Olga into
the street, retaining her trunk in payment of the debt. The girl walked
the street for hours, until she fancied that she saw one of her
persecutors in the distance, when she hastily took refuge in a sheltered
doorway, crouching in terror. Although no one approached her, she sat
there late into the night, apparently too apathetic to move. With the
curious inconsequence of moody youth, she was not aroused to action by
the situation in which she found herself. The incident epitomized to her
the everlasting riddle of the universe to which she could see no
solution and she drearily decided to throw herself into the lake. As she
left the doorway at daybreak for this pitiful purpose, she attracted the
attention of a passing policeman. In response to his questions, kindly
at first but becoming exasperated as he was convinced that she was
either "touched in her wits" or "guying" him, he obtained a confused
story of the persecutions of the two young men, and in sheer
bewilderment he finally took her to the station on the very charge
against the thought of which she had so long contended.
The girl was doubtless sullen in court the next morning; she was
resentful of the policeman's talk, she was oppressed and discouraged and
therefore taciturn. She herself said afterwards that she "often got
still that way." She so sharply felt the disgrace of arrest, after her
long struggle for respectability, that she gave a false name and became
involved in a story to which she could devote but half her attention,
being still absorbed in an undercurrent of speculative thought which
continually broke through the flimsy tale she was fabricating.
With the evidence before him, the judge felt obliged to sustain the
policeman's charge, and as Olga could not pay the fine imposed, he
sentenced her to the city prison. The girl, however, had appeared so
strangely that the judge was uncomfortable and gave her in charge of a
representative of the Juvenile Protective Association in the hope that
she could discover the whole situation, meantime suspending the
sentence. It took hours of patient conversation with the girl and the
kindly services of a well-known alienist to break into her dangerous
state of mind and to gain her confidence. Prolonged medical treatment
averted the threatened melancholia and she was at last rescued from the
meaningless despondency so hostile to life itself, which has claimed
many young victims.
It is strange that we are so slow to learn that no one can safely live
without companionship and affection, that the individual who tries the
hazardous experiment of going without at least one of them is prone to
be swamped by a black mood from within. It is as if we had to build
little islands of affection in the vast sea of impersonal forces lest we
be overwhelmed by them. Yet we know that in every large city there are
hundreds of men whose business it is to discover girls thus hard pressed
by loneliness and despair, to urge upon them the old excuse that "no one
cares what you do," to fill them with cheap cynicism concerning the
value of virtue, all to the end that a business profit may be secured.
Had Olga yielded to the solicitations of bad men and had the immigration
authorities in the federal building of Chicago discovered her in the
disreputable hotel in which her captors wanted to place her, she would
have been deported to Sweden, sent home in disgrace from the country
which had failed to protect her. Certainly the immigration laws might do
better than to send a girl back to her parents, diseased and disgraced
because America has failed to safeguard her virtue from the machinations
of well-known but unrestrained criminals. The possibility of deportation
on the charge of prostitution is sometimes utilized by jealous husbands
or rejected lovers. Only last year a Russian girl came to Chicago to
meet her lover and was deceived by a fake marriage. Although the man
basely deserted her within a few weeks he became very jealous a year
later when he discovered that she was about to be married to a
prosperous fellow-countryman, and made charges against her to the
federal authorities concerning her life in Russia. It was with the
greatest difficulty that the girl was saved from deportation to Russia
under circumstances which would have compelled her to take out a red
ticket in Odessa, and to live forevermore the life with which her lover
had wantonly charged her.
May we not hope that in time the nation's policy in regard to immigrants
will become less negative and that a measure of protection will be
extended to them during the three years when they are so liable to
prompt deportation if they become criminals or paupers?
While it may be difficult for the federal authorities to accomplish this
protection and will doubtless require an extension of the powers of the
Department of Immigration, certainly no one will doubt that it is the
business of the city itself to extend much more protection to young
girls who so thoughtlessly walk upon its streets. Yet, in spite of the
grave consequences which lack of proper supervision implies, the
municipal treatment of commercialized vice not only differs in each city
but varies greatly in the same city under changing administrations.
The situation is enormously complicated by the pharisaic attitude of the
public which wishes to have the comfort of declaring the social evil to
be illegal, while at the same time it expects the police department to
regulate it and to make it as little obvious as possible. In reality the
police, as they themselves know, are not expected to serve the public in
this matter but to consult the desires of the politicians; for, next to
the fast and loose police control of gambling, nothing affords better
political material than the regulation of commercialized vice. First in
line is the ward politician who keeps a disorderly saloon which serves
both as a meeting-place for the vicious young men engaged in the traffic
and as a market for their wares. Back of this the politician higher up
receives his share of the toll which this business pays that it may
remain undisturbed. The very existence of a segregated district under
police regulation means, of course, that the existing law must be
nullified or at least rendered totally inoperative. When police
regulation takes the place of law enforcement a species of municipal
blackmail inevitably becomes intrenched. The police are forced to
regulate an illicit trade, but because the men engaged in an unlawful
business expect to pay money for its protection, the corruption of the
police department is firmly established and, as the Chicago vice
commission report points out, is merely called "protection to the
business." The practice of grafting thereafter becomes almost official.
On the other hand, any man who attempts to show mercy to the victims of
that business, or to regulate it from the victim's point of view, is
considered a traitor to the cause. Quite recently a former inspector of
police in Chicago established a requirement that every young girl who
came to live in a disreputable house within a prescribed district must
be reported to him within an hour after her arrival. Each one was
closely questioned as to her reasons for entering into the life. If she
was very young, she was warned of its inevitable consequences and urged
to abandon her project. Every assistance was offered her to return to
work and to live a normal life. Occasionally a girl was desperate and it
was sometimes necessary that she be forcibly detained in the police
station until her friends could be communicated with. More often she was
glad to avail herself of the chance of escape; practically always,
unless she had already become romantically entangled with a disreputable
young man, whom she firmly believed to be her genuine lover and
protector.
One day a telephone message came to Hull House from the inspector asking
us to take charge of a young girl who had been brought into the station
by an older woman for registration. The girl's youth and the innocence
of her replies to the usual questions convinced the inspector that she
was ignorant of the life she was about to enter and that she probably
believed she was simply registering her choice of a boarding-house. Her
story which she told at Hull House was as follows: She was a Milwaukee
factory girl, the daughter of a Bohemian carpenter. Ten days before she
had met a Chicago young man at a Milwaukee dance hall and after a brief
courtship had promised to marry him, arranging to meet him in Chicago
the following week. Fearing that her Bohemian mother would not approve
of this plan, which she called "the American way of getting married,"
the girl had risen one morning even earlier than factory work
necessitated and had taken the first train to Chicago. The young man met
her at the station, took her to a saloon where he introduced her to a
friend, an older woman, who, he said, would take good care of her. After
the young man disappeared, ostensibly for the marriage license, the
woman professed to be much shocked that the little bride had brought no
luggage, and persuaded her that she must work a few weeks in order to
earn money for her trousseau, and that she, an older woman who knew the
city, would find a boarding-house and a place in a factory for her. She
further induced her to write postal cards to six of her girl friends in
Milwaukee, telling them of the kind lady in Chicago, of the good chances
for work, and urging them to come down to the address which she sent.
The woman told the unsuspecting girl that, first of all, a newcomer must
register her place of residence with the police, as that was the law in
Chicago. It was, of course, when the woman took her to the police
station that the situation was disclosed. It needed but little
investigation to make clear that the girl had narrowly escaped a
well-organized plot and that the young man to whom she was engaged was
an agent for a disreputable house. Mr. Clifford Roe took up the case
with vigor, and although all efforts failed to find the young man, the
woman who was his accomplice was fined one hundred and fifty dollars and
costs.
The one impression which the trial left upon our minds was that all the
men concerned in the prosecution felt a keen sense of outrage against
the method employed to secure the girl, but took for granted that the
life she was about to lead was in the established order of things, if
she had chosen it voluntarily. In other words, if the efforts of the
agent had gone far enough to involve her moral nature, the girl, who
although unsophisticated, was twenty-one years old, could have remained,
quite unchallenged, in the hideous life. The woman who was prosecuted
was well known to the police and was fined, not for her daily
occupation, but because she had become involved in interstate white
slave traffic. One touch of nature redeemed the trial, for the girl
suffered much more from the sense that she had been deserted by her
lover than from horror over the fate she had escaped, and she was never
wholly convinced that he had not been genuine. She asserted constantly,
in order to account for his absence, that some accident must have
befallen him. She felt that he was her natural protector in this strange
Chicago to which she had come at his behest and continually resented any
imputation of his motives. The betrayal of her confidence, the playing
upon her natural desire for a home of her own, was a ghastly revelation
that even when this hideous trade is managed upon the most carefully
calculated commercial principles, it must still resort to the use of the
oldest of the social instincts as its basis of procedure.
This Chicago police inspector, whose desire to protect young girls was
so genuine and so successful, was afterward indicted by the grand jury
and sent to the penitentiary on the charge of accepting "graft" from
saloon-keepers and proprietors of the disreputable houses in his
district. His experience was a dramatic and tragic portrayal of the
position into which every city forces its police. When a girl who has
been secured for the life is dissuaded from it, her rescue represents a
definite monetary loss to the agency which has secured her and incurs
the enmity of those who expected to profit by her. When this enmity has
sufficiently accumulated, the active official is either "called down" by
higher political authority, or brought to trial for those illegal
practices which he shares with his fellow-officials. It is, therefore,
easy to make such an inspector as ours suffer for his virtues, which are
individual, by bringing charges against his grafting, which is general
and almost official. So long as the customary prices for protection are
adhered to, no one feels aggrieved; but the sentiment which prompts an
inspector "to side with the girls" and to destroy thousands of dollars'
worth of business is unjustifiable. He has not stuck to the rules of the
game and the pack of enraged gamesters, under full cry of "morality,"
can very easily run him to ground, the public meantime being gratified
that police corruption has been exposed and the offender punished. Yet
hundreds of girls, who could have been discovered in no other way, were
rescued by this man in his capacity of police inspector. On the other
hand, he did little to bring to justice those responsible for securing
the girls, and while he rescued the victim, he did not interfere with
the source of supply. Had he been brought to trial for this
indifference, it would have been impossible to find a grand jury to
sustain the indictment. He was really brought to trial because he had
broken the implied contract with the politicians; he had devised illicit
and damaging methods to express that instinct for protecting youth and
innocence, which every man on the police force doubtless possesses. Were
this instinct freed from all political and extra legal control, it would
in and of itself be a tremendous force against commercialized vice which
is so dependent upon the exploitation of young girls. Yet the fortunes
of the police are so tied up to those who profit by this trade and to
their friends, the politicians, that the most well-meaning man upon the
force is constantly handicapped. Several illustrations of this occur to
me. Two years ago, when very untoward conditions were discovered in
connection with a certain five-cent theatre, a young policeman arrested
the proprietor, who was later brought before the grand jury, indicted
and released upon bail for nine thousand dollars. The crime was a
heinous one, involving the ruin of fourteen little girls; but so much
political influence had been exerted on behalf of the proprietor, who
was a relative of the republican committeeman of his ward, that although
the license of the theatre was immediately revoked, it was reissued to
his wife within a very few days and the man continued to be a menace to
the community. When the young policeman who had made the arrest saw him
in the neighborhood of the theatre talking to little girls and reported
him, the officer was taken severely to task by the highest republican
authority in the city. He was reprimanded for his activity and ordered
transferred to the stockyards, eleven miles away. The policeman well
understood that this was but the first step in the process called
"breaking;" that after he had moved his family to the stockyards, in a
few weeks he would be transferred elsewhere, and that this change of
beat would be continued until he should at last be obliged to resign
from the force. His offence, as he was plainly told, had been his
ignorance of the fact that the theatre was under political protection.
In short, the young officer had naïvely undertaken to serve the public
without waiting for his instructions from the political bosses.
A flagrant example of the collusion of the police with vice is instanced
by United States District Attorney Sims, who recently called upon the
Chicago police to make twenty-four arrests on behalf of the United
States government for violations of the white slave law, when all of the
men liable to arrest left town two hours after the warrants were issued.
To quote Mr. Sims: "We sent the secret service men who had been working
in conjunction with the police back to Washington and brought in a fresh
supply. These men did not work with the police, and within two weeks
after the first set of secret service men had left Chicago, the men we
wanted were back in town, and without the aid of the city police we
arrested all of them."
When the legal control of commercialized vice is thus tied up with city
politics the functions of the police become legislative, executive and
judicial in regard to street solicitation: in a sense they also have
power of license, for it lies with them to determine the number of women
who are allowed to ply their trade upon the street. Some of these women
are young earthlings, as it were, hoping to earn money for much-desired
clothing or pleasure. Others are desperate creatures making one last
effort before they enter a public hospital to face a miserable end; but
by far the larger number are sent out under the protection of the men
who profit by their earnings, or they are utilized to secure patronage
for disreputable houses. The police regard the latter "as regular," and
while no authoritative order is ever given, the patrolman understands
that they are protected. On the other hand, "the straggler" is liable to
be arrested by any officer who chooses, and she is subjected to a fine
upon his unsupported word. In either case the police regard all such
women as literally "abandoned," deprived of ordinary rights, obliged to
live in specified residences, and liable to have their personal
liberties invaded in a way that no other class of citizens would
tolerate.
The recent establishment of the Night Court in New York registers an
advance in regard to the treatment of these wretched women. Not only
does the public gradually become cognizant of the treatment accorded
them, but some attempt at discrimination is made between the first
offenders and those hardened by long practice in that most hideous of
occupations. Furthermore, an adult probation system is gradually being
substituted for the system of fines which at present are levied in such
wise as to virtually constitute a license and a partnership with the
police department.
While American cities cannot be said to have adopted a policy either of
suppression or one of regulation, because the police consider the former
impracticable and the latter intolerable to public opinion, we may
perhaps claim for America a little more humanity in its dealing with
this class of women, a little less ruthlessness than that exhibited by
the continental cities where regimentation is relentlessly assumed.
The suggestive presence of such women on the streets is perhaps one of
the most demoralizing influences to be found in a large city, and such
vigorous efforts as were recently made by a former chief of police in
Chicago when he successfully cleared the streets of their presence,
demonstrates that legal suppression is possible. At least this obvious
temptation to young men and boys who are idly walking the streets might
be avoided, for in an old formula one such woman "has cast down many
wounded; yea, many strong men have been slain by her." Were the streets
kept clear, many young girls would be spared familiar knowledge that
such a method of earning money is open to them. I have personally known
several instances in which young girls have begun street solicitation
through sheer imitation. A young Polish woman found herself in dire
straits after the death of her mother. Her only friends in America had
moved to New York, she was in debt for her mother's funeral, and as it
was the slack season of the miserable sweat-shop sewing she had been
doing, she was unable to find work. One evening when she was quite
desperate with hunger, she stopped several men upon the street, as she
had seen other girls do, and in her broken English asked them for
something to eat. Only after a young man had given her a good meal at a
restaurant did she realize the price she was expected to pay and the
horrible things which the other girls were doing. Even in her shocked
revolt she could not understand, of course, that she herself epitomized
that hideous choice between starvation and vice which is perhaps the
crowning disgrace of civilization.
The legal suppression of street solicitation would not only protect
girls but would enormously minimize the risk and temptation to boys. The
entire system of recruiting for commercialized vice is largely dependent
upon boys who are scarcely less the victims of the system than are the
girls themselves. Certainly this aspect of the situation must be
seriously considered.
In 1908, when Mr. Clifford Roe conducted successful prosecutions against
one hundred and fifty of these disreputable young men in Chicago, nearly
all of them were local boys who had used their personal acquaintance to
secure their victims. The accident of a long acquaintance with one of
these boys, born in the Hull-House neighborhood, filled me with
questionings as to how far society may be responsible for these wretched
lads, many of them beginning a vicious career when they are but fifteen
or sixteen years of age. Because the trade constantly demands very young
girls, the procurers require the assistance of immature boys, for in
this game above all others "youth calls to youth." Such a boy is often
incited by the professional procurer to ruin a young girl, because the
latter's position is much safer if the character of the girl is
blackened before he sells her, and if he himself cannot be implicated in
her downfall. He thus keeps himself within the letter of the law, and
when he is even more cautious, he induces the boy to go through the
ceremony of a legal marriage by promising him a percentage of his wife's
first earnings.
Only yesterday I received a letter from a young man whom I had known
from his early boyhood, written in the state penitentiary, where he is
serving a life sentence. His father was a drunkard, but his mother was a
fine woman, devoted to her children, and she had patiently supported her
son Jim far beyond his school age. At the time of his trial, she pawned
all her personal possessions and mortgaged her furniture in order to get
three hundred dollars for his lawyer. Although Jim usually led the life
of a loafer and had never supported his mother, he was affectionately
devoted to her and always kindly and good-natured. Perhaps it was
because he had been so long dependent upon a self-sacrificing woman that
it became easy for him to be dependent upon his wife, a girl whom he met
when he was temporarily acting as porter in a disreputable hotel.
Through his long familiarity with vice, and the fact that many of his
companions habitually lived upon the earnings of "their girls," he
easily consented that his wife should continue her life, and he
constantly accepted the money which she willingly gave him. After his
marriage he still lived in his mother's house and refused to take more
money from her, but she had no idea of the source of his income. One day
he called at the hotel, as usual, to ask for his wife's earnings, and in
a quarrel over the amount with the landlady of the house, he drew a
revolver and killed her. Although the plea of self-defense was urged in
the trial, his abominable manner of life so outraged both judge and jury
that he received the maximum sentence. His mother still insists that he
sincerely loved the girl, whom he so impulsively married and that he
constantly tried to dissuade her from her evil life. Certain it is that
Jim's wife and mother are both filled with genuine sorrow for his fate
and that in some wise the educational and social resources in the city
of his birth failed to protect him from his own lower impulses and from
the evil companionship whose influence he could not withstand. He is but
one of thousands of weak boys, who are constantly utilized to supply the
white slave trafficker with young girls, for it has been estimated that
at any given moment the majority of the girls utilized by the trade are
under twenty years of age and that most of them were procured when
younger. We cannot assume that the youths who are hired to entice and
entrap these girls are all young fiends, degenerate from birth; the
majority of them are merely out-of-work boys, idle upon the streets, who
readily lend themselves to these base demands because nothing else is
presented to them.
All the recent investigations have certainly made clear that the bulk of
the entire traffic is conducted with the youth of the community, and
that the social evil, ancient though it may be, must be renewed in our
generation through its younger members. The knowledge of the youth of
its victims doubtless in a measure accounts for the new sense of
compunction which fills the community.