Sitting in my office one afternoon I listened, my blood almost freezing,
to the following story vouched for by Mr. C----, an immigration inspector
and brother of a well-known Chicago reform worker. Here it is as he told
it to me:
"One evening some time ago I was looking up a case down in the
Twenty-Second Street red-light district, and visited and inspected,
looking for immigrant girls held illegally, a certain house of the
lower class in that neighborhood of prostitution. While in the house
I noticed a young woman lying very ill (in the last stages of
pneumonia, if I remember the story exactly) and in a semi-conscious
condition, and to my horror upon inquiry I learned that in the rush
hours of business this helpless, pain-racked young woman was _open to
all comers_ holding an accredited room check."
Dear friends, there are true stories heard and known every day around the
City's seething, blood-red Soul Market that cannot be put into
print--stories, though, that were they to become known, would make decent
Chicago rise as one man and cry with a voice outspeaking Fort Sumter,
"White Slavery in Chicago and in America must cease!"
During my years of study of this question of prostitution I learned to
know personally many of the characteristic White Slaves of the West and
South Side "levees." One "Alice" I shall never, never forget. Beautiful
aside from her dissipation, a high school graduate, grammar and syntax
perfect, manner exquisite. "Alice," seduced at eighteen, was at the age
of twenty-one away down the line in the West Side levee underworld. I used
to talk many times with Alice as she sat in the back parlor of the "house"
on Peoria street that gave her shelter, awaiting her call of "next" to go
up stairs with whosoever--negro, white or Chinese--might buy for one
dollar (one of the dollars of the Republic on which is eternally stamped
the blessed words, "In God we Trust") possession of her beautiful body for
one hour. Smoking, always smoking her doped Turkish cigarette, Alice told
me much of her life, both in years gone forever and of a daily "levee"
existence. She told me of a father and mother and a beautiful home, of a
lover who came into it and led her away by night into "levee" Slavery--of
the awful disgrace and disinheritance, of a little baby that she only knew
an hour, of insane remorse and anguish, until at last she would stand and
scream and scream with mental pain until some whore-monger knocked her
senseless, and then how she would crawl away to some near-by shanty saloon
and drink herself helpless, to forget.
As far as I know Alice is still on Peoria street, and, oh! men and women,
there are thirty thousand of these Alices in Chicago's great blasting Soul
Market to-day.
United States Attorney Sims puts the average life of a prostitute at ten
years or less, while other excellent authorities put it as low as five
years, as these women must constantly drink any and all drinks purchased
for them by visitors (as much of the business revenue is derived from the
sale of these drinks), thus forcing them at all times into a half-drunken
condition, rendering them helpless to control the abnormal, sickening,
mind and body wrecking demands made upon them by the gonorrheal,
syphilitic, sodden wretches of whom not one in ten is capable of normal
sexual coalition, yet whose debauched, drunken desires and requirements,
no matter how unnatural and revolting, must be satisfied by the use of the
bodies of their hopeless victims at fifty or even as low as twenty-five
cents an hour.
Very few young women entering this cesspool of prostitution are able to
live therein an average of eight weeks without becoming infected with one
or more of the loathsome diseases of the underworld, and thus ruined and
horrible they live on and on for three, four or six years, and at the end
of that time thirty thousand pure young girls, gathered from prairie homes
and village firesides and from out of our own suburban and city families,
must march out into this great Soul Market to take the place of the broken
wretches whose decaying bodies are cast into the refuse of our alleys and
sewers to become the menace of every girl and boy and drunken man who
comes within their clutches or sets foot within their alley hovels.