Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls Part 1

Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls.

by Jean Turner-Zimmermann.

Foreword

My sole aim in bringing this little pamphlet to you is to definitely call the attention of the men and women of the Central Western States, and especially those of the City of Chicago into whose hands it may come, to the vicious, thoroughly organized white-slave traffic of to-day, and its attendant, far-reaching, horrible results upon the young man and womanhood of our Land.

During a constant residence covering seven years of time in the central slum districts of the West and South Sides of Chicago, I have gained much actual knowledge of the questions of poverty, drink and prost.i.tution among the lost men and women of these great neighborhoods, have become personally acquainted with very many of them, visiting them, listening to their heart stories and growing to know much of their inside lives, and have learned a real tender interest and pity for them in their remorseful, helpless, hopeless condition.

All incidents, references and statistics (as far as possible) herein given are strictly authentic, and have been collected with great care and fairness either by myself or my a.s.sistants.

Statistical references have been taken from the writings of United States Attorney Sims, Rev. Ernest A. Bell and others engaged in prosecuting and reform work, all of whom I thank sincerely and wish well in what they are accomplis.h.i.+ng for good where it is so desperately needed in this submerged underworld of our city.

So in bringing this eighth edition of CHICAGO'S BLACK TRAFFIC IN WHITE GIRLS to you, a part of which has already been published under the t.i.tle of CHICAGO'S SOUL MARKET, it is the aim of the writer to give more thought and time to real, existing conditions--descriptions and actual facts relative to public prost.i.tution and its attendant frightful results, rather than to such matter as incidents, "cases," etc., knowledge of which can usually be acquired by simply reading the daily press of Chicago or New York. All descriptions, statistics and photographs are taken by the author from actual contact with the great underworld and quoted with names, dates, etc., of those concerned and are absolutely authentic.

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 flouris.h.i.+ng 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 prost.i.tution as something secret--something to be kept from the public eye, something to be ashamed of. Not so to the great throng of Chicago wh.o.r.e-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 wh.o.r.e-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 s.h.i.+pping 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 s.h.i.+pped on and on until at last in some Chinese underground cellar or under the lash of a South American or Philippine wh.o.r.e-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 s.h.i.+p, 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 sc.u.m 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 wh.o.r.e-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.

The "Protected" White Slave Traffic.

Open prost.i.tution--White Slavery, as it exists to-day in Chicago, is almost entirely under =foreign= control. Of the twenty-seven hundred houses of ill-fame in Chicago, a very large percentage are owned and controlled by foreigners from Southeastern Europe, while almost without exception all Levee and White Slave resorts in the segregated districts are under the direct owners.h.i.+p of the moral and civic degenerates of the French, Italian, Syrian, Russian, Jewish or Chinese races--once in a great while you may find a German or Swedish wh.o.r.e-master, but very seldom--an American or an Englishman conducting such a business is almost entirely unknown. American men raise the girlhood, make the laws and =elect= the officials whereby this b.l.o.o.d.y business may be carried on and exploited by a foaming pack of foreign h.e.l.l-hounds, who after their work of death is accomplished and their coffers filled, go home to their South Europe or Turkish haunts with their blood and soul money, to lives of filth and idleness in their own lands.

I appeal in the name of Jehovah, to the Church, to the women's clubs, to the labor federations and all honorable Jews and others of foreign birth who have come to America for a home and a decent, honorable living, to aid in every possible way the great work now going on to eradicate segregated, protected White Slavery from our Land.

EXTRACTS FROM THE DAILY PAPERS

Quoting from the Daily Press, May 4, regarding the recent investigations in New York concerning the question of White Slavery by the Rockefeller jury (which after buying two girls themselves, later declared, "there is no traffic in women in New York"):

Harry Levenson, the acknowledged "trader" of women who is in the Tombs under $25,000 bail, made a startling confession to the District Attorney to-night, giving names of men and women whose sole occupation is dealing in unfortunates.

"I know of three places in New York," Levenson said, "where five to ten girls are kept constantly at hand for sale. At any hour of the day or night one of them, two or the whole ten, can be bought by any one with the money to pay for them. They can be s.h.i.+pped anywhere at an hour's notice."

GIVES HINT ON ARRESTS

The "trader" gave to Mr. Whitman the addresses of the three places, which are known as "stockades." He also made suggestions as to how their operators might be apprehended.

More than that, Levenson told how the financial arrangements of the sales are made and how recruits are obtained.

Agents are continually at work obtaining young girls, the prisoner said. The slave sellers do not want hardened women, he explained; they want pretty, immature girls. The agents are generally well dressed women who ingratiate themselves with their childish victims at matinees and moving-picture shows, and by dining them and painting rosy pictures of a life of ease, win them away from their homes or their ill-paid positions.

"When there is a call for girls," Levenson continued, "the buyer hands over the money paid for them to the keeper. Then an agent--these are usually men--take the girls to wherever the "order"

comes from. These agents then collect 10 per cent of the girl's weekly earnings."

Quoting from the National Prohibitionist, May 12:

THE SLAVE TRADE AND THE VOTER

The Christian voter who reads, and reads with blood boiling, as the blood of every honest man must, the shameful story of the exposure of the traffic in girls especially in New York, must not allow his imagination to run away with his reasoning faculties.

Awful as the story is, we invite attention, not to its horror--the horror of herds of little girls sold at a per-head price below the value of pigs--but to the practical questions of responsibility and cure.

Why does this infamy exist in our cities?

How can it exist?

Who is responsible?

The answers all come to one point--the governments that rule our cities.

The black and white wretches who are the immediate agents of vice are hardly worth considering. They are mere incidents. Practically it is a waste of time to even prosecute them.

The trail of the real criminal leads into the police headquarters, leads up the steps of the city hall, goes across the threshold of the mayor's private office, enters the homes of Christian citizens and lies broad through the doors of the church.

For this infamy of the sale of innocent girls for vice and the whole wider, deeper, fouler vice system is a part of governmental policy, not in New York and Chicago alone, but all over the Country, under Republican and Democratic administration.

The very district attorney's office that exposes these particular instances of crime is one of the strong pillars of the system of which the crime is only an outcropping.

Even now there is not a voice lifted in official Chicago and New York in favor of doing the one thing that alone can stop the sale of girls, the one thing that the law clearly prescribes in the matter--wiping out the vice preserves, stopping the whole system of trade in vice. This fact needs to be burned deeply into the hearts of American voters: =If you want this thing to go on, if you want little girls still to be bought and sold like pigs, if you want pure young lives to be overwhelmed in fathomless shame, all you need to do to help keep up the system is to keep on voting for men who protect these criminals.=

Quoting from McClure's (July) Magazine concerning the recent investigation of the White Slave trade in New York City by a specially appointed jury:

In order to establish the existence of the White Slave traffic a.s.sistant District Attorney James B. Reynolds arranged to make actual purchases of girls in the Tenderloin and other sections of the underworld from those reputed to be large dealers. Skilled investigators who were not known in New York were engaged and put to work in the heart of the Tenderloin.

They were represented as purchasers of girls. Friendly and confidential relations were established with some of the most influential White Slave dealers. By these means valuable first-hand information was obtained regarding the White Slave trade. The agents were told the price of girls, the methods employed in the business, and, in some cases, the corrupt relations existing between the traders and certain officials.

Past and present conditions of the traffic were contrasted frequently, the trading during the present winter being described as exceptionally light because of the general alarm caused by the sitting of the "White Slave" Grand Jury. One large dealer told the agents that though two years ago he could have sold them all the girls they wanted at $5 or $10 apiece, he would not risk selling one in New York now for $1,000.