Ninety per cent of these open prostitutes have “cadets.” These men exercise the power of tyrants over them, urging them on to death, beating them brutally when their tired out bodies drop from exhaustion, and stealing their bodily earnings from them.
These women cannot purchase a single article without the consent of the landlady. Two thirds of them have the bondage of debt hanging above them and keeping them prisoners. The landlady buys their clothes and charges them exorbitant prices and they are obliged to pay without a murmur.
These conditions exist in the cheapest and the most expensive houses in the levee districts. There is an air of luxury about the big houses but the scarlet prisoners within are all the same, all slaves, all subjects of the great Vice Trust.
The women in the poorer houses have white men for “cadets.” In the higher priced places, we find that the women are in the bondage of negro “cadets.”
And all this infamy, seething, boiling and emitting its stench in the center of the city of Chicago!
Standing out among the small hovels in the South side vice district are several large and pretentious ones, whose interior furnishings are valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars.
BIG PALACES OF VICE.
The Everleigh Club, at Twenty-second and Dearborn streets, the richest and most gorgeously furnished house of prostitution in the United States, is a notable example. Another one is Georgie Spencer’s.
Honesty never cemented a single stone in the building. It was built and furnished out of the blood and flesh dollars of women. Its foundations reach down to hell and each chamber with its beautiful settings is filled with the ghosts of women who suffered untold agonies of mind and body to make it attractive to victims of the women who followed them. Thousands of dollars are harvested nightly there. Wealthy prominent men frequent this place.
Immorality is hideous; but there crimes are committed against nature that make men revolt at the thoughts of them, down in those pest holes. In the slang of the levee, it is called “putting on a show.”