The Christian voter who reads, and reads with blood boiling, as the
blood of every honest man must, the shameful story of the exposure of
the traffic in girls especially in New York, must not allow his
imagination to run away with his reasoning faculties.
Awful as the story is, we invite attention, not to its horror--the
horror of herds of little girls sold at a per-head price below the
value of pigs--but to the practical questions of responsibility and
cure.
Why does this infamy exist in our cities?
How can it exist?
Who is responsible?
The answers all come to one point--the governments that rule our
cities.
The black and white wretches who are the immediate agents of vice are
hardly worth considering. They are mere incidents. Practically it is
a waste of time to even prosecute them.
The trail of the real criminal leads into the police headquarters,
leads up the steps of the city hall, goes across the threshold of the
mayor's private office, enters the homes of Christian citizens and
lies broad through the doors of the church.
For this infamy of the sale of innocent girls for vice and the whole
wider, deeper, fouler vice system is a part of governmental policy,
not in New York and Chicago alone, but all over the Country, under
Republican and Democratic administration.
The very district attorney's office that exposes these particular
instances of crime is one of the strong pillars of the system of
which the crime is only an outcropping.
Even now there is not a voice lifted in official Chicago and New York
in favor of doing the one thing that alone can stop the sale of
girls, the one thing that the law clearly prescribes in the
matter--wiping out the vice preserves, stopping the whole system of
trade in vice. This fact needs to be burned deeply into the hearts of
American voters: =If you want this thing to go on, if you want little
girls still to be bought and sold like pigs, if you want pure young
lives to be overwhelmed in fathomless shame, all you need to do to
help keep up the system is to keep on voting for men who protect
these criminals.=
Quoting from McClure's (July) Magazine concerning the recent investigation
of the White Slave trade in New York City by a specially appointed jury:
In order to establish the existence of the White Slave traffic
Assistant District Attorney James B. Reynolds arranged to make
actual purchases of girls in the Tenderloin and other sections of the
underworld from those reputed to be large dealers. Skilled
investigators who were not known in New York were engaged and put to
work in the heart of the Tenderloin.
They were represented as purchasers of girls. Friendly and
confidential relations were established with some of the most
influential White Slave dealers. By these means valuable first-hand
information was obtained regarding the White Slave trade. The agents
were told the price of girls, the methods employed in the business,
and, in some cases, the corrupt relations existing between the
traders and certain officials.
Past and present conditions of the traffic were contrasted
frequently, the trading during the present winter being described as
exceptionally light because of the general alarm caused by the
sitting of the "White Slave" Grand Jury. One large dealer told the
agents that though two years ago he could have sold them all the
girls they wanted at $5 or $10 apiece, he would not risk selling one
in New York now for $1,000.
In spite of this general caution, purchases for cash were made of
four girls, two through an East Side dealer, who boasted of formerly
having made large sales in other cities, and two from a so-called
black and tan dealer. Two of the girls are under 18.
... With rare exceptions, not only the innocent women imported into
this Country, but the prostitutes as well, are associated with men
whose business it is to protect them, direct them, and control them,
and who frequently, if not usually, make it their business to plunder
them unmercifully. Now this system of subjection to a man has become
common. The procurer or the pimp may put his woman into a disorderly
house, sharing profits with the "madam". He may sell her outright; he
may act as an agent for another man; he may keep her, making
arrangements for her hunting men. She must walk the streets and
secure her patrons, to be exploited, not for her own sake, but for
that of her owner. Often he does not tell her even his real name. If
she tries to leave her man, she is threatened with arrest. If she
resists, she may be beaten; in some cases, when she has betrayed her
betrayer, she has been murdered.
The ease and apparent certainty of profit has led thousands of our
younger men, usually those of foreign birth or the immediate sons of
foreigners, to abandon the useful arts of life to undertake the most
accursed business ever devised by man.
Those who recruit women for immoral purposes watch all places where
young women are likely to be found under circumstances which will
give them a ready means of acquaintance and intimacy, such as picture
shows, dance-halls, sometimes waiting rooms in large department
stores, railroad stations, manicuring and hair dressing
establishments.
The strongest appeal to the instincts of humanity in every
right-minded person is made by a consideration of the brutal system
employed by these traffickers to in every way exploit their victims,
the hardened prostitute as well as the innocent maiden. It is
probable that a somewhat larger proportion of the American girls are
free from the control of a master; and yet, according to the best
evidences obtainable--according to the stories of the women
themselves and the keepers of the houses--nearly all the women now
engaged in this business in our large cities are subject to pimps,
to whom they give most of their earnings, or else they are under the
domination of keepers of houses, a condition that is practically the
same.
It is the business of the man who controls the women to provide
police protection, either by bribing the police not to arrest her,
or, in case of arrest, to secure bail, pay the fine, etc., to make
all business arrangements, to decide what streets, restaurants,
dance-halls, saloons and similar places she shall frequent.
There are large numbers of Jews scattered throughout the United
States, although mainly located in New York and Chicago, who seduce
and keep girls. Some of them are engaged in importation, but
apparently they prey rather upon young girls whom they find on the
street, in the dance-halls, and similar places, and who, by the
methods already indicated--love-making and pretense of marriage--they
deceive and ruin. Many of them are petty thieves, pickpockets and
gamblers. They also have various resorts where they meet and receive
their mail, and transact business with one another, and visit.
Perhaps the best known organization of this kind throughout this
Country was one legally incorporated in New York in 1904, under the
name of the New York Benevolent Association.
It is, of course, difficult to prove by specific cases the relation
of the police to this traffic, and to establish by specific evidence
the fact generally accepted that the girls of disorderly house
keepers regularly pay the police for protection; but high police
officials, prosecuting officers, and social workers in all quarters
assert that in many, if not all of our large cities, much corruption
of this kind exists.
The importation and harboring of alien women and girls for immoral
purposes and the practice of prostitution by them--the so-called
"white slave traffic"--is the most pitiful and revolting phase of the
immigration question. This business has assumed large proportions,
and it has been exerting so evil an influence upon our Country that
the Immigration Commission felt compelled to make it the subject of a
thorough investigation.
The investigation was begun in November, 1907, under the active
supervision of a special committee of the Immigration Commission; and
the work was conducted by a special agent in charge, with numerous
assistants.
The investigation has covered the cities of New York, Chicago, San
Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Ogden, Butte, Denver,
Buffalo, Boston and New Orleans.
There are between seven and eight hundred men in Seattle who live
from the revenue from the "white slave traffic", almost all of whom
could be reached by the State Courts, if proper efforts were made. It
was established by the Grand Jury that the Federal Government has
gone as far as the law allows. It is now up to the State authorities,
who could break up this business in short order.
What are We Going to Do About the Children?
[Illustration: A Group of Children in the Midst of the "Red Light"
District]
Levee women, women living in prostitution, "madams," etc., do not bring up
their children (and most of Chicago's female dealers in prostitution have
several of them) in or =near= segregated districts of vice. Like the saloon
keeper who moved to Evanston to get his children away from the harmful,
degenerating influences of the saloon and its environing neighborhoods, so
the "madam," that active principal in the slavedom of the girls of our
Land, in almost every case sees to it that =her= children are well brought
up, away from the influences and knowledge of prostitution, while her
agents and keepers are out scouring the department stores, factories,
villages and country homes for girls to fill the sickening, festering,
shrieking ranks of the great death army of publicly protected White
Slaves.
The writer has investigated many cases, and in every instance has found
the children of these vultures of girlhood in exclusive colleges or
military schools, being excellently prepared to take decent positions in
business and social life. Case after case has recently come to light of
women supporting their children on the fashionable avenues, in Harvard and
military colleges, while they themselves with hearts of hell, wring the
dollars that pay for these luxuries from the bleeding, broken bodies of a
gang of Levee White Slaves--your sister and mine--younger than her own,
better born, better raised, but lost =forever= in the crushing, barred and
screened gehenna of modern harlotry.
Sixty-nine per cent of the children raised in the vast slum neighborhoods
surrounding the segregated districts of prostitution are ruined before
reaching the age of eighteen. This dreadful, appalling feature has been
recently brought to light through close investigation by the writer and
her co-workers, together with the sickening fact that little girls
scarcely more than babies, are being constantly sought, secured and
sacrificed to satisfy the cravings of abnormal, degenerate vice and
debauchery abounding in every large city. These little children, painted
and showily dressed, are fast making their appearance in such cities as
New York and Chicago, and they are the forerunners of Oriental child
debauchery. These little girls are seldom seen on the streets, but may be
recognized when seen, by their deformed, bowed legs, bent backs and
shrivelled little, old faces--such faces as we find in cripples aged by
pain. Our hearts have been almost stilled as we have listened to the
terrible stories of the hundreds of little girls in the ghastly
fleshmarkets of India and China who, by the knife and the insertion into
their tender bodies of wedges of expanding wood, are thus made ready,
through months of torture, for the use of some inhuman Hindu or Chinese
monster who for the sum of a few dollars purchases the use of their
shrieking, quivering bodies, to leave them after a day or two of
unparalleled debauchery, dead, or if still living, then with broken back
or limbs, a human sacrifice indeed.
We have read and known all this and wished that we could die that these
children might be saved--but listen, do we realize that with the influx
into our midst, into our larger cities, of the vilest, most degenerate men
and women on earth, thousands upon thousands of the most hellish brutes of
Asia and China--men who reckon girlhood lower than the female dog, has
come this very thing--this reeking, diabolical crime against innocent
girlhood. Two especially revolting cases have come under the direct notice
of the writer, yet without sufficient legal proof to face in court the
organized, thoroughly financed hand of men and women exploiting these
dreadful conditions: one, a girl Louise, on Custom House Place; the other,
Rosie from the 22nd Street environments. The last named, cut, torn and
bleeding, made a statement to the writer that cannot be put in print; yet
she was by her owners accused of masturbation. Both of these girls were
under ten years of age.
The exploitation of women in Chicago in the vast business of White Slavery
and segregated vice, is carried on very openly and above board. Street
walkers carry on their nefarious business of securing trade for the
"house" almost entirely unmolested. Women stand in the doors of the West
Side houses of ill-fame and solicit those who pass.
At 737 Washington boulevard, two doors west of the Chicago Rescue Mission,
with which the writer is connected, a woman[1] stands in the door
constantly soliciting each male passer-by; boys are invited to come in and
take their first lesson in vice, and on this block are many, many
children, boys and girls. One of the "girls" kept by this woman was a
harlot known as "No-nose" whose whole face was so sunken with syphilis
that her nose was almost gone. The writer remembers well when through the
efforts of a fellow-worker "No-nose" was sent to the County Hospital for
medical treatment, and considers this girl one of the greatest menaces to
Chicago boyhood. No man would have touched the woman.
The blocks in this immediate vicinity are all thickly peopled by families
with many children in them. The following group of little girls live in
their alley-homes within a few doors of some of the worst sights and dives
in Chicago.
[Illustration: Children of the Slums]
They see no sights but vice, they hear no talk but filth. At the age of
ten they are perfectly familiar with all the ins and outs of harlotry,
know many prostitutes, many pimps.
Do you think these girls (each one is known to the writer personally) have
any chance for virtue?
* * * * *
At 804 Washington Boulevard, almost across the street from the writer's
office, appears the following sign on the window of the cigar store
located there.
[Illustration:
GEO F. WALZ
MANUFACTURER OF THE
WHITE SLAVE CIGAR]
Hundreds of the wreckage of typical White Slavery pass this place daily,
for it is located at the edge of the great West Side dumping ground for
broken, diseased women and young girls whose bodies can no longer be
profitably used in the higher class dives of the South Side segregated
districts, and who must at the end of a year or two become, if they are
still living, the notorious women of the night who walk the streets and
alleys, selling the use of their vile bodies for twenty-five cents, ten
cents, a drink of beer or a crust of free lunch, becoming the prey of the
drunken bum, the low vicious foreigner, the negro, or else the ruination
of every young boy who falls into their vulture-like clutches.
In all Chicago there could not be a generally worse neighborhood than the
one in which the White Slave Cigar is manufactured and advertised for
sale. Within a few blocks of the factory, which is two doors west of the
corner of Washington Boulevard and Halsted Street, there are a thousand
broken, pitiful lost White Slaves.
Within two or three blocks of this corner, five typical White Slaves have
been murdered (butchered would be a better word) within the space of just
a few weeks. Here drunken women, the outcast element of the better class
of dives, trail their filthy bodies day and night, their sunken,
half-starved, syphiletic faces staring in your face, seeking the man or
the young boy who will give them a drink of whiskey or a crust of bread in
return for the wretched commerce they have to offer. Here, too, the
children play and little girls grow into big girls with scarcely a ghost
of a chance to be decent, and facing all hangs the sign "White Slave
Cigar," manufactured by George F. Walz.
It is out of this great outlaw district, this vast West Side charnal house
of harlotry, that the City gets its supply of girls for that class of vice
known as degeneracy.
Five years of work in prostitution constitutes the life of the average
harlot. Many, before the time allotted to them in a life of ill-fame
expires, die; many commit suicide, yet some live on, their diseased bodies
constituting that class of girls known as street walkers and degenerates.
These women, who are really only young girls, hang around the back rooms
and cellars of the barrel houses, consorting with the drunken, crippled,
diseased men who congregate in such places, and from this vast army of
lost girlhood is supplied the material for the immoral Oriental shows
abounding in the segregated districts, where with dogs and burros, the
bodies of ruined, diseased girls are finally used up and destroyed, or in
the bestial dives in which are practiced that horrible crime known as the
"French method."
Sixty-nine per cent of the little girls who must, through necessity and
environment, grow up in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the
segregated vice districts of such cities as Chicago, New York, Seattle,
etc., are ruined before they reach the age of eighteen years. Think of it!
These children know little else than drink and prostitution, hear little
else, see little else. To them harlotry is in all its blasting, withering
phases, a familiar story before they have reached the age of ten years.
Hundreds of whore mongers, panderers, pimps and outlawed harlots, exploit
their awful business and tell their vile stories as they walk the same
pathway day by day with these children--little lost souls they are--the
children of the poor, looked on in pity though by one who said "Inasmuch
as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me."