We, together with thousands of others—editors, legislators, club women, ministers and everybody else who has the welfare of the girlhood of our Land at heart, believe that the time for prudery and concealment is past and that honest men and women should know what there is to know about this thoroughly organized, solidly financed system of White Slavery flourishing and growing in America to-day—a system which controls and ruins hundreds of thousands of women in our midst every year and which requires a constant sacrifice of more than sixty thousand young girls annually to feed its death and disease dealing machinery.
Most people think of harlotry or prostitution as something secret—something to be kept from the public eye, something to be ashamed of. Not so to the great throng of Chicago whore-mongers. Everything that can be done to attract attention and custom is done by the five thousand men and hundreds of hideous, brutish madams who in this city exploit the bodies and live off the earnings of thirty thousand public women in our midst. The twenty-seven hundred (quoting from a statement of Chief of Police Stewart) houses of ill-fame here are conducted with as much publicity and advertising as the grocery or meat market nearby. Each adjoining and nearby saloon, with its wine rooms and booths, is an advertising and recruiting agency; the ward politician, the officers on the beat, the common “pimp” and the recognized whore-mongers, work harmoniously together to exploit this vast business.
Reckoning the number of White Slaves in Chicago at thirty thousand, and the average number of men entertained by each of these unfortunate women nightly at five (a very low average) with an average per man of one dollar, there is poured monthly Four Million Five Hundred Thousand Dollars, blood money, into the coffers of these human dealers—as the rental for profit of the bodies of our American girl and her alien sister who has been mercilessly trapped, lured from her home and sold into the great festering cesspool, without the slightest knowledge of our customs and laws, and ruined forever.
New York City is the great eastern headquarters and westward shipping point for Oriental and European White Slaves. Mark this statement:
“Seventeen hundred girls, by actual count, were lost on the way from New York to Chicago last year, according to an investigation now being made by the Commissioner of Immigration. Somehow these girls were spirited away from the care of the agents to whom they were entrusted and were never seen nor heard of again.”
Isn’t that an appalling fact? for fact it is—seventeen hundred girls lost and gone forever just from this one line of travel alone and in just one year! These girls, who came to this Country to better themselves, to make an honest living, broken and rotting to-day behind bolts and bars in some of our cities’ foul dives, or else shipped on and on until at last in some Chinese underground cellar or under the lash of a South American or Philippine whore-master, Death at last comes to the rescue.
Please remember, as you read this, that America is becoming more and more un-American every day. Each ship, each train Westward or Eastward bound, the now daily dumping into our Land, so lately the goal of the home-seeker from Germany, Sweden, Ireland, etc., the real future citizen—thousands of the scum and vice and criminal element of South Eastern Europe, Asia and the Orient, and remember too that a short five-years of residence here converts the filthiest criminal from Turkey, Arabia, Syria, Italy, or of any place else where vice and brutality reign supreme, into an American citizen with the right to vote into office men who will and are sworn to protect and aid in every possible way the Jewish, Russian, French or Chinese whore-master as he rents a shanty and proceeds to fatten on the very life-blood of the young girlhood of this and other lands.
Jean Turner-Zimmermann, M. D.