CHAPTER XIV.
BARRED WINDOWS: HOW WE TOOK UP THE CAUSE OF THE WHITE SLAVES.
This afternoon, August 26, 1909, between half past two and half past three o'clock, Mr. Ralph Radnor Earle took photographs of various places in Chicago's principal vice district. Among these were several photographs of barred windows of resorts, positively known to myself and Miss Dedrick, who both accompanied the photographer, as disorderly, flagrant, infamous houses. Some of these barred windows on the dens of crime are here reproduced from the photographs. The bars are on the windows of both floors of these buildings; these are the back windows of these dives, and look towards Clark street, a great Chicago thoroughfare, from which the upper windows are plainly seen.
Five years ago barred windows on a house of sin, which had been turned into a mission, alarmed some of us and gave us almost our first ideas of the fate of the white slaves. The house was a notorious place, the most notorious in Chicago a dozen years ago. The name of the woman who kept it was known and is still spoken in the circles of the immoral throughout Chicago and far beyond it. Stories are told of princes of European houses, pouring out wine and money like water in this glittering palace of mirrored walls and brilliant lights.
The woman died and the probate court would not allow her estate to use the property for immoral purposes. It was leased for a mission and rescue home by Mr. O. H. Richards, founder and superintendent of Beulah Home. Many of the windows were barred, and whatever explanations might be offered, we were never satisfied that they were not barred to keep in girls who at least at times would gladly escape. When we learned that many other houses in the vice district had windows similarly barred we were obliged to conclude that girls were constantly detained against their will.
To this refuge which had been a dive, Edith E—— fled one morning, having escaped from a resort on Custom House Place. She ran first to a drug store, telephoned to the police to get her street clothes from the dive, and then came to the rescue home. She explained that she had heard the midnight missionaries two nights before singing, in a gospel meeting which they were holding in front of the den where she was:
"Throw out the life-line to danger-fraught men,
Sinking in anguish where you've never been."
So deep an impression was made upon her that she was wretched all the next day, quite unfitted for her old life. Next morning she escaped. She told me that she had been a very wicked girl, that her young husband had committed suicide because of her sin. She never went back to her evil life. Her physical heart was seriously weakened from her addiction to drugs, liquor and vice.
In October, 1906, the National Purity Federation, of which Mr. B. S. Steadwell of La-Crosse, Wisconsin, is president, held a conference in Chicago, at Abraham Lincoln Center. Among the speakers was the late Rev. Sidney C. Kendall, whose whole soul was torn and bleeding over the shame of making commerce of women. He told us of the crimes of the French traders, of their systematized traffic in girls and of their organization for defense when any of them is under prosecution in the courts. Mr. Kendall was sick when he was here and died the next summer. With his latest strength and his dying breath he antagonized the loathsome white slave trade. He was a member of the National Vigilance Committee for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic. Mr. Kendall's most conspicuous work was done in Los Angeles. Some of his spirit remained with a few of us in Chicago and we could not rest until some effort was made here to rid us of the shame of slavery in the twentieth century under the flag of the free.