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Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls

CHICAGO'S BLACK TRAFFIC IN WHITE GIRLS

AND

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 prostitution 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 herein given are strictly authentic, and have been collected with great care and fairness either by myself or my assistants.

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 accomplishing 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 title 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 prostitution 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 flourishing 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 prostitution as something secret--something to be kept from the public eye, something to be ashamed of. Not so to the great throng of Chicago whore-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 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 whore-mongers, work harmoniously together to exploit this vast business.

New York City is the great eastern headquarters and westward shipping point for Oriental and European White Slaves. Mark this statement:

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 shipped on and on until at last in some Chinese underground cellar or under the lash of a South American or Philippine whore-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 ship, 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 scum 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 whore-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.

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 :

Harry Levenson, the acknowledged "trader" of women who is in the Tombs under ,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 shipped 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.

Quoting from McClure's 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 Assistant 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.

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 or apiece, he would not risk selling one in New York now for ,000.

In spite of this general caution, purchases for cash were made of four girls, two through an East Side dealer, who boasted of formerly having made large sales in other cities, and two from a so-called black and tan dealer. Two of the girls are under 18.

... With rare exceptions, not only the innocent women imported into this Country, but the prostitutes as well, are associated with men whose business it is to protect them, direct them, and control them, and who frequently, if not usually, make it their business to plunder them unmercifully. Now this system of subjection to a man has become common. The procurer or the pimp may put his woman into a disorderly house, sharing profits with the "madam". He may sell her outright; he may act as an agent for another man; he may keep her, making arrangements for her hunting men. She must walk the streets and secure her patrons, to be exploited, not for her own sake, but for that of her owner. Often he does not tell her even his real name. If she tries to leave her man, she is threatened with arrest. If she resists, she may be beaten; in some cases, when she has betrayed her betrayer, she has been murdered.

The ease and apparent certainty of profit has led thousands of our younger men, usually those of foreign birth or the immediate sons of foreigners, to abandon the useful arts of life to undertake the most accursed business ever devised by man.

Those who recruit women for immoral purposes watch all places where young women are likely to be found under circumstances which will give them a ready means of acquaintance and intimacy, such as picture shows, dance-halls, sometimes waiting rooms in large department stores, railroad stations, manicuring and hair dressing establishments.

The strongest appeal to the instincts of humanity in every right-minded person is made by a consideration of the brutal system employed by these traffickers to in every way exploit their victims, the hardened prostitute as well as the innocent maiden. It is probable that a somewhat larger proportion of the American girls are free from the control of a master; and yet, according to the best evidences obtainable--according to the stories of the women themselves and the keepers of the houses--nearly all the women now engaged in this business in our large cities are subject to pimps, to whom they give most of their earnings, or else they are under the domination of keepers of houses, a condition that is practically the same.

It is the business of the man who controls the women to provide police protection, either by bribing the police not to arrest her, or, in case of arrest, to secure bail, pay the fine, etc., to make all business arrangements, to decide what streets, restaurants, dance-halls, saloons and similar places she shall frequent.

There are large numbers of Jews scattered throughout the United States, although mainly located in New York and Chicago, who seduce and keep girls. Some of them are engaged in importation, but apparently they prey rather upon young girls whom they find on the street, in the dance-halls, and similar places, and who, by the methods already indicated--love-making and pretense of marriage--they deceive and ruin. Many of them are petty thieves, pickpockets and gamblers. They also have various resorts where they meet and receive their mail, and transact business with one another, and visit. Perhaps the best known organization of this kind throughout this Country was one legally incorporated in New York in 1904, under the name of the New York Benevolent Association.

It is, of course, difficult to prove by specific cases the relation of the police to this traffic, and to establish by specific evidence the fact generally accepted that the girls of disorderly house keepers regularly pay the police for protection; but high police officials, prosecuting officers, and social workers in all quarters assert that in many, if not all of our large cities, much corruption of this kind exists.

The importation and harboring of alien women and girls for immoral purposes and the practice of prostitution by them--the so-called "white slave traffic"--is the most pitiful and revolting phase of the immigration question. This business has assumed large proportions, and it has been exerting so evil an influence upon our Country that the Immigration Commission felt compelled to make it the subject of a thorough investigation.

The investigation was begun in November, 1907, under the active supervision of a special committee of the Immigration Commission; and the work was conducted by a special agent in charge, with numerous assistants.

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