The writer just here wishes to enter vigorous protest against houses of prostitution in Chicago and in America furnishing the American girl or her alien sister for the use of that class of alien men who are either excluded from citizenship in our Country by law, or who without wife or family, are here temporarily and simply to make all the money possible, in as short a time and in any way possible.
At 2130 Armour Avenue, Chicago, stands an old tenement house filled with girls—girls from all over the United States—a beautiful ruined girl from Georgia, girls from Europe. Good girls they were a year or two ago, but are now the chained, wrecked slaves of festering vice and habit. This place is said to be operated by a dope-fiend by the name of W—— and is exclusively for the use of a class of men debarred from the United States by law, except for educational purposes and mercantile interests among their own kind, a class of men with whom no white laborer will live or work—the class of men who a year or two ago murdered Elsie Siegel in New York—the lop-shouldered, smuggled-in, pig-tailed opium parched Chinese. It is a crying shame to-day against our Churches, our Union Labor and our Law that there is allowed to exist on a public street, in the second city in the United States, a public stock-market for wrecked girlhood where the filthy Chinese, in rows, wait their turn to rent for thirty minutes of unparalleled Asiatic debauchery, the bruised, bleeding wreckage of our American home or the girl who came to us a few months ago—to the greatest Christian Republic the World has ever builded, from some European home and a mother, asking only a chance to go to work with her bare hands and earn a decent living.
The American citizen refuses to admit the Chinaman, refuses to work with him, refuses him all rights accorded other aliens coming to us, and yet, for the blood profits of vice and politics, allows to be placed to his exclusive privilege that which a short time ago was our Nation’s best and cleanest womanhood.
For an American girl entering a life of public prostitution there is some chance of salvation, for the immigrant girl there is indeed little. Two years ago I had occasion to visit 21— Armour Avenue, a “50-cent house” in the infamous “bedbug row district.” It was about three o’clock in the afternoon, just before the beginning of regular business hours. In the reception room of the place, around a rusty old stove, sat eight or ten hopeless, lost girls; sick, smoking, cursing girls. Soon they would dress up, dope up with whiskey, cocaine or opium, dash some bella donna in their eyes and go on duty to meet all comers. Shivering by the stove sat a little foreign girl. I asked her name, the girls told me it was Josie and that she was an Italian. Speaking to her in that language, I soon learned that she was a young Russian Jewess. The house seemed to possess sufficient proof, as the law then required, that the girl had been in this Country three years; so there was little I could do except give her my card and tell her if she ever needed a friend to come to me. Less than a year ago there came a ring at my door, and opening it, I found a lost woman begging me to come at once into the West Side “levee” to see a girl who was dying. I went with her, and there, in a mouldy, wretched cellar I found “Josie” of the Armour Avenue resort, dying with syphilis. In that awful underground place I listened to her story and give it to you as she related it to me:
“I am nineteen years old and my name is Gezie Bruvatsky. I saw my father bayonetted to the earth by Russian soldiers. I saw my mother work over the washtub until her hands were bloody that I and my little brother might have bread and my virtue be protected. One day a man came to our house, who was either a Jew or a German, saying he was agent for a steamship company and that he had good work in America for many girls where they could earn as much in one month as they could earn in two years in Russia. My heart leaped with joy. How could we know he was lying. I packed my clothes. I left all—my mother, my brother. I came to America. Soon I could send for them, for I was strong and could work—work day and night. At New York a man and woman met me and sent me on to Chicago. Here I was taken from the Polk Street Station to Armour Avenue where by force I was ruined. I was there many months, sick and starving, and finally got out and crawled over to the West Side where there are many Jews; but now I am dying and I want my mother.”
WHAT THE U. S. PROSECUTING ATTORNEY SAYS:
Hon. Edwin Sims, ex-U. S. Prosecuting Attorney, in a recent conservative statement, says he believes that fifteen thousand immigrant girls are brought into this Country every year for commercialized prostitution.
We believe the actual figures are nearer Twenty-five Thousand, and we appeal to the mothers and fathers of America, in the name of God and the heart-broken mothers and fathers of other lands, to use their personal influence and the money with which God has entrusted them, to wipe from our flag the leprous blotch of shame which permits the importing into our Republic every year of thousands of helpless girls to be ground up in the murder mills of the segregated harlotry of such districts as the 22nd Street district of Chicago, for it was the blood-covered hand of that district that reached across the lands and seas and into that Russian home and tore from it little Gezie Bruvatsky and led her across the waters and under the very shadow of the Statue of Liberty itself and pinning to her the little blue ticket of immigration, led her past the gates or Ellis Island, on past the statues of Washington and Jefferson, of Lincoln and Grant, and into the burning fire of American public prostitution to live a few months, and dying in an underground cellar, be cast, scarce cold, into our nation’s great potter’s field of lost women.
