What this means is that men of unlimited means live lives of unbridled lust, and then in their old age they are helpless victims of their own impulses. There was a certain enormously wealthy United States Senator from West Virginia, who came very near being Vice President of the United States. This doddering old man would go about the streets of Washington with a couple of very decorous and carefully trained attendants; and whenever an attractive young woman would pass on the street, or when one would approach the Senator, these two attendants would quietly slip their arms into his and hold him fast. They would do this so that the ordinary person would not suspect what was going on, but would think the old man was being supported.
You do not have to take these things on my word; the newspapers are full of them all the time, and they are proven in court. Just now as I write, the president of the most powerful bank in America is claiming in court that his children are not his own, but that their father is an Indian guide. His wife, on the other hand, is accusing the banker of having played the role of husband to several other women. He would take these women traveling on his yacht, which, quaintly enough, was termed the "Modesty."
Also the papers have been full of the "Hamon case." Here is a wealthy man, Republican National Committeeman from Oklahoma, who is about to go to Washington to advise our new President whom to appoint to office from that state. Before he goes, he casts off his mistress, and she shoots him. She was his secretary, it appears, and helped him to make his fortune; she has made many friends, and a million dollars is spent to save her life. The prosecuting attorney calls her a "painted snake," and accuses her of having sat week after week "displaying to the jury twenty-four inches of silk stockinged shin-bone." The jury, apparently unable to withstand this allurement, acquits the woman, and she announces that she intends to bring suit under the man's will to get his money! Also, she is going into the "movies," and tells us that it is to be "for educational purposes." Everything in our capitalist society must be "educational," you understand. It was P. T. Barnum who discovered that the American people would flock to look at a five-legged calf, if it was presented as "educational."
The moving pictures and the theatres are the honey-pots which gather the feminine beauty and youthful charm of our country for the convenience of rich men's lust. These girls swarm in the theatrical agencies, and in the artists' studios; they starve for a while, and finally they yield. In every great city there are thousands of men of wealth, whose only occupation is to prey upon such girls. I know a certain theatrical manager, the most famous in the United States, a sensual, stout little Jew. He is a man of culture and subtle insight, and in the course of his conversation he described to me, quite casually and as a matter of course, the charm of deflowering a virgin. Nothing could equal that sensation; the first time was the last.
Many years ago there was a horrible scandal in New York. The most famous architect in America was murdered, and the newspapers probed into his life, and it was revealed to us that many of the most famous artists and men about town in New York maintained elaborate studios, equipped with every luxury, all the paraphernalia of all the vices of the ages; and through these places there flowed an endless stream of beautiful young girls. In every large city in America you will find an "athletic club," and if you go there and listen to the gossip, you discover that there are scores of idle rich men with automobiles and private apartments, and a staff of procurers used in preying, not merely upon young girls, but also upon young boys. And these are not merely the children of the poor, they are the children of all but the rich and powerful. In the "movies" you see pictures of girls lured into automobiles, and carried out into the country, or seduced by means of "knock-out drops," and you think this is just "melodrama"; but it is happening all the time. In every big city of our country the police know that hundreds of young girls disappear every year. At a recent convention of police chiefs in Washington, it was stated, from police records, that sixty thousand girls disappear every year in the United States, leaving no trace. Unless the parents happen to be in position to make a fuss, not even the names of the girls are published in the newspapers. I do not ask you to believe such things on my word; believe District Attorney Sims of Chicago, who made the most thorough study of this subject ever made in America, and wrote:
"When a white slave is sold and landed in a house or dive she becomes a prisoner.... In each of these places is a room having but one door, to which the keeper holds the key. Here are locked all the street clothes, shoes and ordinary apparel.... The finery provided for the girls is of a nature to make their appearance on the street impossible. Then in addition to this handicap, the girl is placed at once in debt to the keeper for a wardrobe.... She cannot escape while she is in debt, and she can never get out of debt. Not many of the women in this class expect to live more than ten years—perhaps the average is less. Many die painful deaths by disease, many by consumption, but it is hardly beyond the truth to say that suicide is their general expectation."
CHAPTER XXXII
SEX AND THE POOR
(Discusses prostitution, the extent of its prevalence, and the diseases which result from it.)
It is manifest that the rich cannot indulge in vices, without drawing the poor after them; and in addition to this, the poor have their own evil instincts, which fester in neglect. There were several hundred thousand dark rooms, that is rooms without light or ventilation, in New York City before the war. Now the country is reported to be short a million homes, and in New York City working girls are sleeping six or eight in a room. In the homes of the poor in the slums, parents and children and boarders all sleep in one room indiscriminately, and the world moves back to that primitive communism, in which incest is an everyday affair, and little children learn all the vices there are. I have in my hand a pamphlet by a physician, in charge of a hospital in New York, who in fifteen years has examined nine hundred children who have been raped, and the age of the youngest was eight months! I have another pamphlet by a settlement worker, who discusses the problem of the thousands of deserted wives, most of them with children, many with children yet unborn. As I write, there are millions of men out of work in our country, and these men are desperate, and they quit and take to the road. They join the army of the casual workers, the "blanket stiffs"; and, of course, the more there are of these men, the more prostitutes there have to be, and the more homosexuality there will inevitably be.
Also the girls are out of work, and are on the streets. Many years ago I visited the mill towns of New England, "she-towns" they are called, and one of the young fellows said to me that you could buy a girl there for the price of a sandwich. Read "The Long Day," to which I have previously referred, and see how our working girls live. Dorothy Richardson describes her room-mate, who read cheap novels which she found in the gutter weeklies. She read them over and over; when she had got to the bottom of the pile, she began again, because her mind was so weak that she had forgotten everything. And then one day Miss Richardson happened to be groping in a corner of a closet, and came upon a great pile of bottles, and examined them, and was made sick with horror—abortion mixtures.