Fifty years ago, down in the Southland of our America, we stood a well
formed, sound limbed, healthy, intact young woman on the auction block and
sold her to the biggest bidder for her beauty, her virtue, her heart, her
honor, her soul and her body, and the established average price paid for
such a young woman was eighteen hundred dollars ($1800.00). I take for
granted as I write, that if the heart and soul and body of a young black
woman of Kentucky, Georgia or Mississippi was in the slave market of fifty
years ago worth intrinsically $1800.00, the soul and body of a clean,
decent, young Northland white woman is to-day worth about the same.
Assistant State Prosecuting Attorney Roe in his speech before the Illinois
Vigilance Society, Chicago, February 7th, 1909, placed the number of women
in disorderly resorts in Chicago alone at 30,000.
Stop! Listen: If there are 30,000 young women on this City's Soul-Market,
and we place the average value of one of these young women at $1,800, AND
WE CERTAINLY DO PLACE IT THERE, by established, recognized precedent, then
there is $54,000,000 worth of young womanhood in the Slave-Market of our
City at the present time. In the same statistical speech Mr. Roe places
the number of young girls necessary yearly to recruit the rapidly
decimating ranks of this vast Death Army at six thousand; hence,
$10,800,000 worth of innocent girlhood must be sacrificed from our stores
and factories, our homes or firesides all over the Land every twelve
mouths to feed and satisfy the horrible flesh-market of Human Slavery in
the "levee" districts of Chicago alone.
Harry A. Parkin, Assistant U. S. District Attorney, in WOMEN'S WORLD,
March, 1909, says:
"The Federal investigations in Chicago and other localities have
clearly established the fact that, generally speaking, houses of
ill-fame in large cities do not draw their recruits to any great
extent from the territory immediately surrounding them; for various
reasons the White Slavers who are the recruiting agents of this vile
traffic prefer to work in States more or less distant from the
centers to which victims are destined."
In view of all this, it must be clearly apparent that the need of the hour
is legislation which will make it as difficult and dangerous for a White
Slaver to take his victim from one State into another as it is to bring
them from France, Italy, Canada or any other foreign country, to a house
of ill-fame in Chicago or any American city. Therefore, it is suggested
that if each State in the Union would enact and enforce laws against this
importation, this terrible traffic would be dealt a blow in its most
vulnerable part.
One of the strangest results brought about by the recent White Slave
prosecutions in Chicago and the wide publicity which they have received
has been the astonishment of thousands of persons, as evidenced by
letters, at the fact that such a wholesale traffic is actually in
existence, but what is still more astounding, not to say discouraging, is
the reluctance of other thousands to believe that many hundreds of men and
women are actually engaged in the business of luring young girls and women
to their destruction and that this infamous traffic is being carried on in
every state of the Union every day of the year.
It is estimated by those who should know, that at least five thousand men
in Chicago live off of the earnings of prostitution. For instance as to
the plan: A young girl, alien or American, is sold into a life of ill-fame
for say Two Hundred Dollars, as the actual price of her procuring. Before
she suspects any real harm, she is lured into a restaurant or a wine-room,
becomes intoxicated, is sufficiently doped to become passive, is taken to
the "house" to which she has been consigned and is immediately "broken in"
in the most violent and nauseating manner, perhaps becoming the prey of
twenty or thirty men. Beaten, threatened with exposure, and, if necessary,
purposely infected with gonorrhea, the girl is within twenty-four hours
absolutely ruined for all time--"spoiled," the police say. Oh! what a
whole world of agony and pain and bruises and disease and Hell is embodied
in that one word "spoiled." She is immediately pressed into service and
from that time on until death relieves her, or she is rescued by some one
enough interested to help her, she must receive all comers THIRTY DAYS
every month.
This answers the question I have been asked a hundred times from all over
the Country since CHICAGO'S SOUL MARKET was first published, as to whether
a woman in a house of prostitution is allowed any respite from service
during the Menstrual Period. SHE IS NOT ALLOWED A SINGLE DAY. The average
number of men who must be served by each woman in a medium or lower class
house of ill-fame is thirty-six per day. On entrance to the place, if the
house be a "Dollar house," a metal room-check is purchased from the madam
or attendant at the door for one dollar. This check is taken up by the
girl in the room and is worth on presentation to the house fifty cents,
half of its face value being received by the house for board, laundry,
hair dressing, etc., all of which must be paid for at the highest possible
rates. Of the remaining fifty cents, twenty-five cents goes to the man who
sold the girl into the house, the remaining twenty-five cents going to the
girl herself and from this amount must be paid all bills for clothes,
dentistry, and all other expenses. In almost every known case, however,
with which the writer is at all familiar, the entire fifty per cent goes
intact to the owner of the girl, her necessary expenses being paid by him
and the balance pocketed for his own use.
Just as the liquor trade is thoroughly and carefully financed and
organized even in its weakest points, making successful prosecution
against it a thing impossible, just so is the traffic in young women
protected in all its details. The writer has in mind the case of Josie
E----, fifteen years old, who came from her suburban home in Illinois,
hoping to secure employment in the City. Arriving at the Dearborn Street
Railway Station about nine o'clock, she started out to find a hotel in
which to spend the night. Walking a few steps from the Station, she was
accosted at State and Polk streets by a young man who asked her what she
was looking for. Replying that she was looking for a hotel, the man
Thompson told her he was employed at a hotel on Polk Street opposite the
railway station and offered to take the girl there. Unacquainted with the
City and relying on his word, she accompanied him to the hotel, where she
was outraged and detained for weeks. She was finally rescued by the writer
and a Y. W. C. A. worker. Taking her to my rooms, I found her physical
condition such that I sent for a detective from the Harrison Street Police
Station who investigated her story and finding it true in every
particular, arrested Thompson at his place of employment, 41 Polk Street.
The case coming up in the Harrison Street Municipal Court, was so
manipulated by the defense that in the transferring of it to the Criminal
Court a technical error threw it out altogether. I simply give this as an
example of how almost utterly impossible it is to secure a conviction in
these cases. Is it any wonder when back of this great evil stands at least
a hundred million dollars?
Listen, seventy-five per cent of the women and girls entering lives of
ill-fame in Chicago are from adjoining States and country districts--they
are utter strangers in our City. Every hour, day or night, year in and
year out, four great central railway passenger stations discharge their
precious human freight within the first ward of Chicago, the richest and
wickedest political ward in the world--the ward of Michael Kenna (Hinky
Dink) and "Bathhouse" John Coughlin--the ward feeding every district of
prostitution and gambling and unnatural horror in the City--the ward with
two miles of indecent resorts, whole armies of reeking lost women,
hundreds of pandering men procurers and White Slavers--the ward of
thousands of Turkish, Italian and Arabian immigrants, and opium-parched
pagan Chinese--the ward in which every day thousands of women, many of
whom without money or friends, are looking for work, are unloaded in this
seething cauldron of vice, their only refuge being, when without funds,
the Police Station or the house of ill-repute.
The horror of conditions surrounding a woman without money or friends in
Chicago makes the living of a moral life almost impossible for her. I have
in mind the case of a deserted little Italian woman, G. P----[2], living
in Plymouth Court, south of Polk Street. G. had three little baby girls,
the eldest only four years, and was expecting another child soon. She was
deserted by her husband and left without a dollar or a friend to face life
and care for herself and babies. The case came into the hands of the
Mission and she was cared for by them until the time of her confinement,
when, with her children, she was taken to Dunning Poorhouse where she was
kindly cared for. A baby boy was born to G. Great pressure was brought to
bear upon this little Italian mother who spoke no word of English, to
induce her to give up her children. Frightened and weeping, she refused to
do this, declaring she would make a living for them, and leaving the
Poorhouse, she started out taking the baby and another child with her,
hoping soon to earn the money to care for the other two.
This she was fortunate enough to accomplish, and, taking the four little
ones dear to her heart, went back to the little room on the top floor of
the tenement in Plymouth Court. G. got work in a sweatshop and made
button-holes at $2.50 a week. She worked hard to keep up, but the baby
sickened and died. The other children began to get thin and wan. They grew
hungry before her eyes and the mother's heart frightened and sank within
her. A fiend in human form, J. F----, came by and offered the half-starved
mother bread for herself and babies, offered her marriage as soon as it
could be arranged for. G. took the bread and fed her children and to-day
up on the top floor of the tenement in Plymouth Court, again deserted and
hungry and helpless, she cries and prays and makes button-holes, and waits
and waits with fear and wretchedness the coming of another little child.
[Illustration: From a flashlight photograph showing 2-ton weight steel
door connecting sound-proof dungeon cell with blind passage-way, between
114 and 116 Custom House Place]
The proprietor of the great resort on the corner of 21st and Dearborn
streets said not long ago to a co-worker of mine who forced her way into
his infamous dive:
"Don't come here to bother my girls; it is of no use; they are rotten
and ripe for H----. Soon I will throw them out myself. Go to the
department stores and the sweatshops and help the underpaid,
friendless girl _there_ if you must work. I could write a book as
large as that (pointing to the City Directory) filled with shrieks
and groans of women _after they are lost_, but what good would it do?
They are gone then _forever_."
In a great measure, the man told the truth. It is hard to reach a woman
after she has once entered a life of prostitution; for, like the Inferno
of old, there should be emblazoned in letters of blood above the barred
door of every White Slave mart in America, the ancient warning:
"Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here."
There's many a girl homeless and tempted, underpaid and destitute, who
might be saved from a life of ill-fame if a helping hand and a shelter
were offered her in her hour of indecision and hunger and despair.
In the south wall of the basement of 114 Federal Street, formerly known as
Custom House Place, that congested, central Redlight District of three
years ago, there was a blind passage-way between 114 and 116 Custom House
Place, 116 being the notorious dive "The California" now located at ----
Armour Avenue. On the inside, this door opened into a large dungeon,
windowless, sound-proof (about 7x10 feet) and it is alleged that it was
through the alley and into this blind passage-way that the unwilling
victims of White Slavers (the same syndicate now operating with Chicago as
headquarters) were carried into this little solitary cell to be "broken
in" by fiendish, brute force to a life of shame.
[Illustration: From a flashlight photograph showing heavy steel screen
used inside the iron-barred windows of the houses of prostitution in the
old Custom House district]
The accompanying photograph secured by the writer gives at least a faint
idea of this frightful trap against the pitiless walls of which have, no
doubt, beat the agonized shrieks of many an innocent girl--your sister and
mine--as, baptising this hell-hole with blood and tears, her quivering
body was crucified upon a whore-monger's cross of gold and then torn down
to be cast, bruised, bleeding, but yet alive, into five years of the
awful, seething moral Golgotha of prostitution and then into =lingering
death=.
The Chicago Rescue Mission and Woman's Shelter of which the writer is
President, has for two years occupied the premises at 114 Custom House
Place. Upon moving into the place we found every window incased in heavy
iron bars while between the bars and the glass of each window was mortised
a one-half inch steel screen (see cut). Entrance or exit from the building
was as utterly impossible as from a penitentiary, excepting by the =front
door=, and to bring the place within the requirements of the City law it
was necessary to bring a suit through the Municipal Court against the
owner of the building, Mrs. Spiegel, against whom through the aid of
Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Oleson, we obtained a verdict and forced
her thereon to put in a rear stairway (see Court records).
114 Custom House Place is only one of the fifty similarly notorious dens
in the old Redlight district, and yet it is impossible to make some people
believe that there is such a thing as forcible detention of a woman in a
Chicago house of prostitution.