My sole aim in bringing this little pamphlet to you is to definitely call
the attention of the men and women of the Central Western States, and
especially those of the City of Chicago into whose hands it may come, to
the vicious, thoroughly organized white-slave traffic of to-day, and its
attendant, far-reaching, horrible results upon the young man and womanhood
of our Land.
During a constant residence covering seven years of time in the central
slum districts of the West and South Sides of Chicago, I have gained much
actual knowledge of the questions of poverty, drink and prostitution among
the lost men and women of these great neighborhoods, have become
personally acquainted with very many of them, visiting them, listening to
their heart stories and growing to know much of their inside lives, and
have learned a real tender interest and pity for them in their remorseful,
helpless, hopeless condition.
All incidents, references and statistics (as far as possible) herein given
are strictly authentic, and have been collected with great care and
fairness either by myself or my assistants.
Statistical references have been taken from the writings of United States
Attorney Sims, Rev. Ernest A. Bell and others engaged in prosecuting and
reform work, all of whom I thank sincerely and wish well in what they are
accomplishing for good where it is so desperately needed in this submerged
underworld of our city.
* * * * *
So in bringing this eighth edition of CHICAGO'S BLACK TRAFFIC IN WHITE
GIRLS to you, a part of which has already been published under the title
of CHICAGO'S SOUL MARKET, it is the aim of the writer to give more thought
and time to real, existing conditions--descriptions and actual facts
relative to public prostitution and its attendant frightful results,
rather than to such matter as incidents, "cases," etc., knowledge of which
can usually be acquired by simply reading the daily press of Chicago or
New York. All descriptions, statistics and photographs are taken by the
author from actual contact with the great underworld and quoted with
names, dates, etc., of those concerned and are absolutely authentic.
We, together with thousands of others--editors, legislators, club women,
ministers and everybody else who has the welfare of the girlhood of our
Land at heart, believe that the time for prudery and concealment is past
and that honest men and women should know what there is to know about this
thoroughly organized, solidly financed system of White Slavery flourishing
and growing in America to-day--a system which controls and ruins hundreds
of thousands of women in our midst every year and which requires a
constant sacrifice of more than sixty thousand young girls annually to
feed its death and disease dealing machinery.
Most people think of harlotry or prostitution as something
secret--something to be kept from the public eye, something to be ashamed
of. Not so to the great throng of Chicago whore-mongers. Everything that
can be done to attract attention and custom is done by the five thousand
men and hundreds of hideous, brutish madams who in this city exploit the
bodies and live off the earnings of thirty thousand public women in our
midst. The twenty-seven hundred (quoting from a statement of Chief of
Police Stewart) houses of ill-fame here are conducted with as much
publicity and advertising as the grocery or meat market nearby. Each
adjoining and nearby saloon, with its wine rooms and booths, is an
advertising and recruiting agency; the ward politician, the officers on
the beat, the common "pimp" and the recognized whore-mongers, work
harmoniously together to exploit this vast business.
Reckoning the number of White Slaves in Chicago at thirty thousand, and
the average number of men entertained by each of these unfortunate women
nightly at five (a very low average) with an average per man of one
dollar, there is poured monthly =Four Million Five Hundred Thousand
Dollars=, blood money, into the coffers of these human dealers--as the
rental for profit of the bodies of our American girl and her alien sister
who has been mercilessly trapped, lured from her home and sold into the
great festering cesspool, without the slightest knowledge of our customs
and laws, and ruined forever.
New York City is the great eastern headquarters and westward shipping
point for Oriental and European White Slaves. Mark this statement:
_"Seventeen hundred girls, by actual count, were lost on the way from
New York to Chicago last year, according to an investigation now
being made by the Commissioner of Immigration. Somehow these girls
were spirited away from the care of the agents to whom they were
entrusted and were never seen nor heard of again."_
Isn't that an appalling fact? for fact it is--seventeen hundred girls lost
and gone forever just from this one line of travel alone and in just one
year! These girls, who came to this Country to better themselves, to make
an honest living, broken and rotting to-day behind bolts and bars in some
of our cities' foul dives, or else shipped on and on until at last in some
Chinese underground cellar or under the lash of a South American or
Philippine whore-master, Death at last comes to the rescue.
Please remember, as you read this, that America is becoming more and more
un-American every day. Each ship, each train Westward or Eastward bound,
the now daily dumping into our Land, so lately the goal of the home-seeker
from Germany, Sweden, Ireland, etc., the real future citizen--thousands
of the scum and vice and criminal element of South Eastern Europe, Asia
and the Orient, and remember too that a short five-years of residence here
converts the filthiest criminal from Turkey, Arabia, Syria, Italy, or of
any place else where vice and brutality reign supreme, into an American
citizen with the right to vote into office men who will and are sworn to
protect and aid in every possible way the Jewish, Russian, French or
Chinese whore-master as he rents a shanty and proceeds to fatten on the
very life-blood of the young girlhood of this and other lands.