The speaker was the madam of a Peoria street resort, the listeners, a motley crowd of women gathered in the rear of a popular saloon and gambling house not far from the corner of Green and Madison streets, on the seething, congested West Side of Chicago. These women had assembled in that screened back room to risk their hard earned or evil-gotten money on the horses of the Louisville race track.
There sat a little 18-year old, brown-eyed milliner, her dissipated face hollow and drawn from worry and lack of sleep and an insufficient quantity of nourishing food, while near her a white-haired old lady in shabby black was tightly grasping two quarters, her entire worldly possession. Just across sat a well-dressed woman restaurant keeper, a young eastern star and half a hundred others, above all of whom shone the yellow haired madam of the Peoria Street resort, the star patron of that great gambling room for women, each one of whom was eagerly beckoning the well-groomed book-maker, feverishly anxious to get her pittance on the race-track favorite, when a connecting door was pushed suddenly open and in rushed a fashionably dressed, brutal-faced young Russian Jew, holding loosely an immense roll of money. Tens, twenties, hundreds—he counted them until three hundred dollars had been placed to win upon a “clocker tip” in that day’s last race in Louisville.
There was grim, deadly silence—eating, unbearable silence in that gambling room as they waited the ring of the telephone and the name of the winner. Again the yellow haired madam’s voice screamed shrilly out, for she was indeed ill at ease, her money was all on the favorite—“Yes, a bunch of American ‘fillies’ peddled out at 50 cents an hour to all comers, black or white, sick or sound. No wonder he can make a play like that on an outside chance.”
Three-hundred dollars! My heart stood still almost. The thought flashed through my brain that that wager meant hundreds of hours of shame and slavery and horror to those girls in the shanties down on Peoria street, some mother’s girl, every one of them. I sat still for a little while and watched the feverish anxious throng about me. My heart kept going faster and faster until I could bear it no longer. American “fillies” and body and soul under a brutal Russian whore-monger! I slipped quietly out into the street; night was coming on, and I walked down Madison and south on Peoria. Yes, there were the shanties—poor, wretched hovels, every one of them. Out shone the flickering red lights, out came the discordant, rasping sound of the rented piano, out belched the shrieks and groans of drunken harlots mingled with the curses of task-masters in a foreign tongue, attracting the attention of the hundreds of laborers, negroes and boys, as they walked home on Peoria street from their day’s work. On I went until I came to a little shed just north of the slum saloon occupied by one Shellstadt at the corner of Monroe and Peoria streets, and checking my steps, I looked around me on the squalid, wretched scene. I was in the midst of prostitution at its lowest—the heart-breaking dregs of Chicago’s thirty thousand public women. Yes, there they were—the fair young American girl, the stolid Russian Jewess, the middle-aged, syphiletic harlot, living, prostituting, dying like so many hurt, broken moths around that great red-light—Chicago’s West Side Soul Market—their poor, wrecked, foul smelling bodies sold day and night at from twenty-five to fifty cents an hour to all comers who could pay the pitiful price demanded by their brutal, soulless masters; and, as I looked, the burning fire of intense pity entered my soul for these drug and drink-sodden, diseased and chained slaves—my sisters in Christ and this great, free American Republic, and so, with a heart-consuming desire to know more of the lives of these scarlet women and to help them, if possible, I began at once a thorough personal investigation of Chicago’s public Slave Market, visiting these people whenever occasion offered; talking with them, gaining their much abused confidence, until I gradually learned the inside lines of the saddest story America has ever known since the black mothers of our Southland were torn from their black and white babies and with shrieks of agony and heart strings bleeding and soul rent with blackened horror were sold to death on the plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi, and I want to tell you who read this and who think there is little truth in the now much agitated question of White Slavery in America, that in the dives and dens of our City’s underworld I have heard shrieks and heart cries and groans of agony and remorse that have never been surpassed at any public slave auction America has ever witnessed, as these girls, many of them, oh! so young, realizing their awful fate, with scalding tears and moans of horror, shut out from their hearts and lives father or mother or husband and child, and turned their sob-shaken, tortured bodies to face the years of final, relentless wretchedness and woe, to be at last thrown out sick and broken, to die in some alley or to be carted off to Dunning poorhouse to gradual physical decay and a pauper’s burial and grave of obliteration, while those who sold them just a few years before go out in their diamonds and fine linen and their great automobiles to buy up more girls (it might be your daughter, father, mother; or it might be mine) to fill the vacancy in the ranks of this vast army of White Slaves.
A woman said to me the other day, and it was in a lofty, sneering tone, too: “I doubt if these women are ever coerced or even imposed upon.”
LISTEN; READ, THEN LISTEN.
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!”