“A great many persons are yet skeptical of the existence of an organized traffic in girls. They seem to think that those advocating the abolition of this trade are either fanatics or notoriety seekers. They doubt the truth of the impossibility of escape and content themselves with the thought that girls use the plea of slavery to right themselves with their parents and friends when their cases are made public.
“However, if these same people could have been in the courts of Chicago during the past year their minds would be disabused of the idea that slavery does not exist in Chicago.
“The startling disclosures made in nearly a hundred cases ought to arouse not only the citizens of Chicago, but the whole country to the highest pitch of indignation.”
Chicago’s Soul Market.
“O, he keeps a bunch of 'fillies’ in the shanty down near the corner of Monroe and Peoria streets, and they’re not foreigners, either. They’re your nice American girls. No wonder he can make a bet like that on a mere chance, from a roll of yellow-backs.” The speaker was a madam of a Peoria street resort, the listeners a motley crowd of women gathered in the rear room 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 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 the little eighteen-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 woman 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 bookmaker, 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 came with them until three hundred dollars had been placed to win upon a “clocker’s tip” in that day’s last race in Louisville.
There was a 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 on the favorite—“Yes, a bunch of American 'fillies’ peddled out at fifty cents an hour to all comers, black and 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 fevered, 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 Jewish whoremonger! I slipped quietly out into the street; night was coming on as I walked down Madison street 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 of drunken harlots, mingled with the groans and 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 the little shed just north of the slum saloon occupied by one S——, 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 twenty-two thousand public women. Yes, there they were—the fair young American girl, the stolid Russian Jewess, the middle-aged, syphilitic harlot, living, prostituting, dying, like so many hurt, broken moths around that great Red Light—Chicago’s west side soul market—their poor, wretched 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, chained slaves—my sisters in Christ in this great free American Republic—and so with a heart full of consuming desire to know more of the real 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 in various capacities 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 heartstrings bleeding and souls 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 months or years of final, relentless wretchedness and woe, to be at last thrown out sick and broken to die in some alley or be carted off to Dunning poorhouse to gradual physical decay and a pauper’s burial, and grave and 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 up the vacancy in the ranks of this vast army of white slaves. A woman said to me the other day, and it was 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, and 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 at 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 consumption, 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, painracked young woman was open to all comers holding an accredited room check.” My friends, there are true stories heard and known every day around the city’s seething, blood-red soul market that cannot be put in print—stories though, that, were they to become known, would make decent Chicago rise as one man and cry with a voice outspeaking Fort Sumpter, “White Slavery in Chicago and 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 “upstairs” with whatsoever—negro, white or Chinese—might buy possession for one dollar (one of our dollars of the Republic on which is eternally stamped the blessed words, “In God we trust”) 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 awful disgrace and inheritance, of a little baby that she only knew one hour, of hours of insane remorse and anguish, until at last she would stand and scream and scream with mental pain until some whoremonger knocked her senseless, and then she told me how she would crawl away to a nearby 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 twenty-two thousand of these “Alices,” your sisters and mine, in Chicago’s great blasting soul market today. United States Attorney Sims puts the average life of a prostitute at ten years or less, while other excellent authorities as low as five years, as these women must constantly drink any and all drinks purchased for them (as much of the business revenue is from the sale of these drinks) by visitors, thus forcing them at all times into a continual half-drunken condition, rendering them helpless to control or resist the abnormal, sickening, mind and body-wrecking demands made upon them. Very few women live therein an average more than three, four or six years, and at the end of that time twenty-two thousand pure young girls gathered from prairie homes and village firesides and from our own suburban and city families must march out in 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.