Jean Turner-Zimmermann

“ Case after case has recently come to light of women supporting their children on the fashionable avenues, in Harvard and military colleges, while they themselves with hearts of hell, wring the dollars that pay for these luxuries from the bleeding, broken bodies of a gang of Levee White Slaves—your sister and mine—younger than her own, better born, better raised, but lost forever in the crushing, barred and screened gehenna of modern harlotry. ”

“ 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 feverish 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 whore-monger! I slipped quietly out into the street; night was coming on, and I walked down Madison and south on Peoria. ”

“ Slavery—of the awful disgrace and disinheritance, of a little baby that she only knew an hour, of insane remorse and anguish, until at last she would stand and scream and scream with mental pain until some whore-monger knocked her senseless, and then how she would crawl away to some near-by 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 thirty thousand of these Alices in Chicago’s great blasting Soul Market to-day. ”

“ In view of all this, it must be clearly apparent that the need of the hour is legislation which will make it as difficult and dangerous for a White Slaver to take his victim from one State into another as it is to bring them from France, Italy, Canada or any other foreign country, to a house of ill-fame in Chicago or any American city. Therefore, it is suggested that if each State in the Union would enact and enforce laws against this importation, this terrible traffic would be dealt a blow in its most vulnerable part. ”

“ Sixty-nine per cent of the little girls who must, through necessity and environment, grow up in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the segregated vice districts of such cities as Chicago, New York, Seattle, etc., are ruined before they reach the age of eighteen years. Think of it! These children know little else than drink and prostitution, hear little else, see little else. To them harlotry is in all its blasting, withering phases, a familiar story before they have reached the age of ten years. ”

“ 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. ”

“ American men raise the girlhood, make the laws and elect the officials whereby this bloody business may be carried on and exploited by a foaming pack of foreign hell-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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have read and known all this and wished that we could die that these children might be saved—but listen, do we realize that with the influx into our midst, into our larger cities, of the vilest, most degenerate men and women on earth, thousands upon thousands of the most hellish brutes of Asia and China—men who reckon girlhood lower than the female dog, has come this very thing—this reeking, diabolical crime against innocent girlhood. ”

“ It is out of this great outlaw district, this vast West Side charnal house of harlotry, that the City gets its supply of girls for that class of vice known as degeneracy.
Five years of work in prostitution constitutes the life of the average harlot. Many, before the time allotted to them in a life of ill-fame expires, die; many commit suicide, yet some live on, their diseased bodies constituting that class of girls known as street walkers and degenerates. ”

“ Our hearts have been almost stilled as we have listened to the terrible stories of the hundreds of little girls in the ghastly fleshmarkets of India and China who, by the knife and the insertion into their tender bodies of wedges of expanding wood, are thus made ready, through months of torture, for the use of some inhuman Hindu or Chinese monster who for the sum of a few dollars purchases the use of their shrieking, quivering bodies, to leave them after a day or two of unparalleled debauchery, dead, or if still living, then with broken back or limbs, a human sacrifice indeed. ”

“ These hotels are a constant menace to the girlhood of our Land—girls who come to the city strangers, and are unable to discriminate between the good and bad. Dozens of these hotels flourish all around the districts [Pg 26] of vice in our cities, the abiding place of the pimp, the beggar, the criminal, and yet flourish under complete political protection. We sincerely believe that the time for cleaning up has come in such cities as New York, Chicago, etc., and we believe that we have with us in this stand, not only decent Chicago and New York, but decent America. ”

“ Almost invariably, the street boy haunting these underworld sections of our city is first led into sexual sin by one of the crippled, half-rotten, yet painted vampires of the streets whose only care or hope is a crust of free lunch and enough whiskey or “dope” to drown for a time at least the last throb of heart and conscience and keep life a little longer in the wretched body, and the boy having purchased for a small fee his own destruction trails out again into the night and on [Pg 56] into disease and crime and prison, and finally death. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These little children, painted and showily dressed, are fast making their appearance in such cities as New York and Chicago, and they are the forerunners of Oriental child debauchery. These little girls are seldom seen on the streets, but may be recognized when seen, by their deformed, bowed legs, bent backs and shrivelled little, old faces—such faces as we find in cripples aged by pain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In all Chicago there could not be a generally worse neighborhood than the one in which the White Slave Cigar is manufactured and advertised for sale. Within a few blocks of the factory, which is two doors west of the corner of Washington Boulevard and Halsted Street, there are a thousand broken, pitiful lost White Slaves. ”

“ 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 ownership 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 whore-master, but very seldom—an American or an Englishman conducting such a business is almost entirely unknown. ”

“ 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 (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 average parent of to-day has little idea of the temptations which constantly surround and beset the growing boy. I recall a case in Des Moines, Iowa, where a little degenerate girl of sixteen caused the moral, and in several cases physical, ruin of five young boys, all this happening in an exclusive East Side neighborhood and under the watchful care of honest parents and friends, so what must be the temptation thrown out to the young boys of our city when through block after block of our central districts they must come in contact with those whose only mission is to ruin and debauch. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This answers the question I have been asked a hundred times from all over the Country since Chicago’s Soul Market was first published, as to whether a woman in a house of prostitution is allowed any respite from service during the Menstrual Period. She is not allowed a single day. The average number of men who must be served by each woman in a medium or lower class house of ill-fame is thirty-six per day. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ I take for granted as I write, that if the heart and soul and body of a young black woman of Kentucky, Georgia or Mississippi was in the slave market of fifty years ago worth intrinsically $1800.00, the soul and body of a clean, decent, young Northland white woman is to-day worth about the same. ”

“ It is estimated by those who should know, that at least five thousand men in Chicago live off of the earnings of prostitution. For instance as to the plan: A young girl, alien or American, is sold into a life of ill-fame for say Two Hundred Dollars, as the actual price of her procuring. ”

“ The horror of conditions surrounding a woman without money or friends in Chicago makes the living of a moral life almost impossible for her. I have in mind the case of a deserted little Italian woman, G. P—— [2] , living in Plymouth Court, south of Polk Street. G. had three little baby girls, the eldest only four years, and was expecting another child soon. She was deserted by her husband and left without a dollar or a friend to face life and care for herself and babies. ”

“ Street walkers carry on their nefarious business of securing trade for the “house” almost entirely unmolested. Women stand in the doors of the West Side houses of ill-fame and solicit those who pass.
At 737 Washington boulevard, two doors west of the Chicago Rescue Mission, with which the writer is connected, a woman [1] stands in the door constantly soliciting each male passer-by; boys are invited to come in and take their first lesson in vice, and on this block are many, many children, boys and girls. ”

“ 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 [Pg 15] 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 ”

“ 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. ”