The “Redlight” District.
The “Redlight” District—Houses of Infamy—The Life of a Prostitute—The Blood Price—Hidden Tragedies—The Polluted Grave.
Chicago possesses four “redlight” districts: one on the South side, one on the West side, one on the North side and the Strand of South Chicago.
For the sake of description we have taken the one situated on the South side,—running from Eighteenth street on the north to Twenty-second street on the south, and from Wabash avenue on the east to Armour avenue on the west.
It came into existence in 1905 when Mayor Carter H. Harrison, the present city executive, cleaned out old Custom House place, Plymouth court and South Clark street, the nest of vice, bounding the south end of the commercial district.
It established a new territory and flourishes as prosperously today as it did in its old haunts.
Within the zone described 250 houses of ill fame house the unfortunate women, lure men of all conditions in life, grow rich on sin and on the practice of every form of bestial degeneracy.
SUGGESTED BY A PROMINENT NEWS STORY OF THE MOMENT
By Courtesy of The Chicago Daily Journal.
There are 2,000 enslaved, scarlet women in these infectious prisons!
They are of every nation in the world!
They are young girls in their teens; women in mature years and hags who have outlived their usefulness to the god of lust!
There is an army of 500 to 800 human vultures—“cadets” who live within this district, prodding these women on in the paths of evil!
There are ramshackle hell-holes that are falling to pieces where diseased, broken-down, forgotten women dispense deadly toxins to their customers for fifty cents!
There are “one dollar,” “two dollar,” “three dollar,” “five dollar” and “ten dollar” houses. Those are the prices for some mother’s precious darling! Man buys and woman sells.
There are holes of infamy where white and colored persons mix and sin together.
There are places where the sins that wiped Sodom and Gomorrah out of existence are practiced nightly.
There are places where prostitutes outrival in the forms of obscene acting anything to be found in the Monmartre and other deadly places within the confines of Paris.
There are places of material filth, and uncleanliness and there are places where thousands of dollars have been spent to make sepulchres appear as places of delight and pleasure.
Think of it!
Two thousand women on the slave block of lustsold to the thousands of bidders nightly, in this small district!
Lust, vice, crime and graft are the deities of Chicago’s “redlight” districts.
The “redlight” district gets its name because of the lurid, crimson signs that hang above its entrances. The name “redlight” should signify a burning, blazing warning to every man and woman who is tempted to set his foot or hers on the crime-reeking thresholds!
Let us enter one of the houses and study the interior and the type of the prostitutes corralled within.
The swinging doors admit us. As we appear, a dozen girls or women rush at us like a flock of vultures, ravenous, hungering.
They use terms of meaningless endearment, fight among themselves for the possible prey, coax us to purchase a bottle of beer or whiskey or a mixed drink. They attempt to embrace us, to kiss us to arouse latent passions, whose outburst means half the purchase price to them and half to the owner of the place.
A “professor,” half-crazed by drugs and drink, thumps the latest airs on a piano, or a mechanical instrument furnishes the noise. You are asked to give a dime to the “professor” and you do.
You are talking to a frail, blue-eyed, blonde girl. Across the room a brunette, a red-haired girl and a girl with raven black hair and sparkling eyes watch you, wondering as to the ultimate success of the woman who captured you.
Where do these thousands of women come from?
What are their varied pasts?
Who are their mothers and fathers?
What strange circumstances brought them here?
Who is accountable to God for this wholesale slaughter in women’s souls?
Those are questions that come to the mind when one enters any den of infamy in any of the four “redlight” districts of Chicago.
Every one of these questions has a thousand answers. The solutions to these social problems are as numerous as the women who create the problems.
These women come from every city in the United States, from the farm houses of God-fearing farmers, from the gabled cottage of little country towns, from the hovels of the poor of the great city and from the palaces of the rich of the same city.
They come from across the great ocean:—from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Austria and every nation you can name.
Thirty-three per cent of the women in the “redlight” districts of Chicago are the victims of the most pernicious vice system known to history. They are the victims of the much-talked of and much-discussed White Slave Traffic.
It is not our purpose in this chapter to treat of this cancerous, moral growth. It is of such vital importance in a story of crime and vice and graft that we will dissect and analyze it in a distinct chapter. Weare obliged for the sake of our narrative to name it here.
This portion of the vice population is the women who have been lured by a thousand satanic means to a life of shame and sin, and once steeped in the atmosphere give up all hope or attempt to regain a lost social standing, a new moral conscience or a clean body.
The other portion of this crime colony reach the centers of vice through the thousands of channels which serve such purposes in the city of Chicago.
We have spoken of the cafe evil, the dance hall, the cheap theater and the vicious hotel. These are the major channels. Yearly, hundreds of girls go from one grade of badness to a lower, until there is nothing left but the house of ill fame in which to hide their shame, feed their passions and nourish their broken-down bodies.
The girl clerk in the department store tires of trying to live on her six dollars a week salary; grows envious of the women who have pretty clothes and costly jewelry, and sets about to sell her young body to buy the luxuries of life. The end is inevitably the house of prostitution.
Or it may be, that some depraved man, possibly her employer, lusts for her purity and with threats of discharge coerces her into sin. She never stops, it is a succession of falls to the last level of degradation.
Another, three years ago may have visited aBohemian cafe to see the sights and taste the wine. She goes back again and again. Beyond her confines are the forbidden sins, luring and coaxing. She will taste of them, promising herself that she will go back to her former life and never venture into the pathways of sin again. The step is taken and the barrier erects itself behind her—she can never come back. Gradually she drifts down to the hell haunts and with recklessness as to the future, becomes an inmate of a dive.
There is no standing still in any phase of life—good or evil. There is no stationary point in vice. The beginnings are eternally different; the endings of the Scarlet Women are eternally the same.
These women just described, can scarcely be called White Slaves in the proper sense of that term. They are “slaves,” but they brought the slavery upon themselves.
The Summer excursions on the lake in large pleasure boats where vice can revel without fear and where young boys and girls without any restraint fall into sins that lead to terrible social evils, are another primary “feeder” for the “redlight” districts. The city asleep does not realize the fact that the “moonlight” excursions on the waters of Lake Michigan start a hundred girls on the road to ruin and the prostitute’s grave in one night!
And this is the first chapter of the women dressed in scarlet tonight.
Above these women like an ominous shadow is Man and His Lust! Man and his insatiable passions! Man who reckons not the destruction he sows abouthim, the homes he robs of precious ones, the broken-hearted mothers and fathers sent to an early grave because he inoculated some innocent child with his venom.
To fit our descriptions, somewhere, you can find in the “redlight” districts a woman who will stand up and say:
“That is my story.”
In one night in the South side “redlight” district in a visit to eight houses, twenty-one girls were found who stated that soulless men, who made capital of their ignorance of the world and its ways, robbed them of their virtue while they were under the influence of their first drink, or stole their virginity after they had promised to marry them.
But to return to the scarlet woman as she is today. Here is the routine life of the prostitute in the levee district:
The women in a house rise about two o’clock in the afternoon, dress and eat their breakfast.
They are then sent by the “landlady” or keeper of the house to the parlors, to wait for prospective customers.
When a customer comes in he is “sized up.” If he appears to be a spender and buys plenty of drinks, courtesy is extended to him and an effort made to keep him as long as his money lasts. If he is “a dead one” he is forced to pay his price and depart as speedily as possible.
These women entertain as many as thirty men in one night. That is the record at least, that one girl declared she was forced to maintain.
At six o’clock, or near that hour, supper is served to these women; a number of them in a house eat while the others stay “on watch.”
Then the evening’s work begins. By midnight a greater part of these lost souls are maudlin drunk.
Their work continues until four o’clock in the morning when they are allowed to seek rest.
Even then the evil does not sleep. There is the “dog watch.” One or two girls face a day of horror. They are kept ready for the lax hours of business.
Many of these women do not live in the houses. They live in the flats bordering on the “redlight” districts.
Ninety per cent of these open prostitutes have “cadets.” These men exercise the power of tyrants over them, urging them on to death, beating them brutally when their tired out bodies drop from exhaustion, and stealing their bodily earnings from them.
These women cannot purchase a single article without the consent of the landlady. Two thirds of them have the bondage of debt hanging above them and keeping them prisoners. The landlady buys their clothes and charges them exorbitant prices and they are obliged to pay without a murmur.
These conditions exist in the cheapest and the most expensive houses in the levee districts. Thereis an air of luxury about the big houses but the scarlet prisoners within are all the same, all slaves, all subjects of the great Vice Trust.
The women in the poorer houses have white men for “cadets.” In the higher priced places, we find that the women are in the bondage of negro “cadets.”
And all this infamy, seething, boiling and emitting its stench in the center of the city of Chicago!
Standing out among the small hovels in the South side vice district are several large and pretentious ones, whose interior furnishings are valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Everleigh Club, at Twenty-second and Dearborn streets, the richest and most gorgeously furnished house of prostitution in the United States, is a notable example. Another one is Georgie Spencer’s.
Honesty never cemented a single stone in the building. It was built and furnished out of the blood and flesh dollars of women. Its foundations reach down to hell and each chamber with its beautiful settings is filled with the ghosts of women who suffered untold agonies of mind and body to make it attractive to victims of the women who followed them. Thousands of dollars are harvested nightly there. Wealthy prominent men frequent this place.
Immorality is hideous; but there crimes are committed against nature that make men revolt at the thoughts of them, down in those pest holes. In the slang of the levee, it is called “putting on a show.”
It is bad enough to be obliged through binding circumstances to sell one’s virtue, but think of the horror, the humiliation, the degradation of committing acts for the sake of drunken, orgy-loving men that even the animal nature within us rebels against.
That is a hasty sketch of the “redlight” life as the visitor sees it. There is still another phase, a deeper phase, a commercial phase, a graft phase, and of that we shall speak later as it is our intention to show why these conditions exist without hindrance from the police and how this mighty army of Satan strives, struggles and dies for the earthly lords of hell.
There is no intention here to paint a lurid picture of Chicago’s ulcer spots that might arouse passions and do evil.
We are telling of the Great Curse that we may help destroy it. We have said that the wiping out of the prostitute will not cure the malady and we are soon to prove it. We have told of vice that we may show how it serves its masters.
Who can depict the crying, aching hearts of these lost women of the levees?
Who can tell of the agonies undergone in their short existences?
Who can know of the sleepless nights, of the hours of remorse and despair?
Who can imagine the physical pain of the eating, wasting diseases?
All the world’s wretchedness, sorrow, hunger,thirst and suffering lies behind the lurid lights of the “redlight” haunts. Behind the paint and powder is the blue-white color of coming death.
Every year, a thousand of these women outlive their usefulness to their brutal masters! This is the record for one city. Authorities say this record for the country is 60,000!
We shudder as we answer that question.
Many of them seek the river as a last resting place and their bodies are cast ashore to lie in the county morgue a week, and then to be buried in the paupers’ field.
Many of them go insane and are taken to state institutions where death soon mercifully comes and wipes out their useless lives.
Many of them are cast forth from the dens where they have turned their every drop of blood to gold for their masters, and are picked up dead in the alleys and streets of the city.
Some are sent to other cities to die, and leave no reflections on the men and women that turned them out.
God has destroyed cities for lesser evils, but Chicago lives on, fattening on the dead bodies of these victims!
As the parade of lost women moves slowly to the grave the tributaries pour more souls into the lake of infamy and there is no place left unfilled!
No woman going down there knows of theterrible possibilities until it is too late. That is the secret of vice; its lying lips belch forth the truth only when its shackles are welded about the limbs of its victims.
Lust beckons. The eternal woman answers and approaches the poisoned spring and drinks. The eternal man is there. On and on he leads her, casts her away when he has tired, and the Vice Trust with its directorate of powerful politicians, debased men, takes her and reaps its awful profit from her.
Vice first: then Graft. Graft formulated in the minds of men: Vice born in the blood of women.
Death—dishonored death to the woman.
Wealth—overflowing wealth to the Grafter.
We have seen the city in many phases. We have not taken into consideration the army of women who maintain superficial respectability, who live at homes, some of them with husbands and children, and who yielding to temptation are carrying on liaisons.
They are called “clandestine” women. They may be found in all walks of life.
There are, normally estimated, 15,000 women of this type in the city of Chicago!
Are you convinced that Chicago is the “wickedest city in the world”?
What Will You Bid for This Woman?
White Slavery—Price of a Body and Soul—Hell’s Bondage—The “Cadet” Master—Death the Penalty—The Trapping of the Prey.
Thirty-three per cent of the women fed to the insatiable god of lust in the “redlight” districts of Chicago are White Slaves!
Nearly two thousand women, annually, are sold to the highest vice bidders!
They are procured from every imaginable source and by every imaginable method.
Thousands of women drift yearly into a life of prostitution, driven to it by hunger and want primarily.
Why then must others be sought out, trapped, brought, bound and tied, stood on the auction blocks of vice and sold to the thump of the gavel?
Because the demand is far greater than the supply!
Hell is always hungry; the taste of blood on the lips of the monster Vice, drives him mad with desire for more blood; the crushing of bones and the morsels of white woman’s flesh, frenzies him for other bodies!
More women! more women!—that is the cry.
It is a difficult problem. The question arises, is it simply a feeding of men’s passions that must be satisfied or is it a desire to make men hunger and buy because the women are placed in their pathways, so that the vice lords may reap the harvest?
We believe the latter is God’s truth, or rather the devil’s truth!
Many a man would not be the brute of unrestrained passion that he is, if his paths were clear of temptations.
The temptations are placed, the White Slaves are purchased to make gold and silver for the wretches who create, nourish and commercialize vice.
It isn’t vice that is robbing homes of innocent girls each year. It is the Commerce and Traffic of Sin.
The White Slave Trust is a perfect organization existing in the city of Chicago today.
Its agents procure the flesh and blood product from every source, its agents peddle the human article, from house of ill fame to house of ill fame; sell it, take the profit and divide with the members of an infamous combine.
There are 150 professional procurers or “buyers” for the White Slave corporation!
There are at least 300 more men who at times act as procurers and at other times as “cadets.”
There are thousands of other men in every walk of life who are constantly on the lookout for a possiblevictim for whose sale they reap a small return in bloodstained dollars.
The professional procurer, hired by the members of this trust; the owners of houses of prostitution or men whose business depends on the prosperity of places of ill fame—play on the three inherent characteristics of every woman’s heart—
Ambition, vanity and love!
By attacking the points of weakness they trap their victims.
Out in the country town they dazzle the fresh, pretty creatures by stories of the pleasures and delights of life in the big city, by making love to innocent children, by depriving them of their sacred chastity.
In the city they appeal to their vanity: they tell them they are beautiful, loveable; they promise them clothes and jewelry, and again the woman falls.
Every form of amusement, from the nickel theaters to the wine rooms, is used to entice the prey.
Outside the professional procurer, the city is infested with men who make the business a side issue.
The extra procurers are found in the department stores, in the dance halls, in the nickel theaters and penny arcades, in the waiting rooms of the railroad stations, on the lake boats, at excursions, at rest rooms, at employment agencies, theatrical agencies, factories, business offices, and a hundred other places where girls are employed at meager salaries.
AND ALL THIS TO FILL THE ROTTEN COFFERS OF THE VICE TRUST!
In 1860 one black woman was sold for $25!
In 1860 one black woman was sold for $500!
You shudder when you remember those times!
In 1911, in the city of Chicago, one white woman is sold for $25.
In 1911, in the same city, one white woman is sold for $500!
Slavery succeeded by slavery, or worse than slavery!
After a victim is procured, the next step on the part of the perfidious combine is to dispose of her to the highest bidder.
Absolute examples of women-selling and the prices paid by resort keepers for the women purchased are in the hands of the federal government. Uncle Sam does not tolerate fiction. That is why we know this is the truth.
Investigation has shown that the prices for women sold into bondage of crime run from $25 to $500.
That scale is sliding and depends on the qualities, mostly physical, of the woman, and the immediate demands of the purchaser.
A girl taken by a procurer who has dazzled her by his insidious lies, and who is not of a type that would attract men of wealth or particular tastes, can be bought by a keeper of a house of ill fame from theagents of the White Slave Trust for the inhuman price of $25.
If the girl is ruddy with the glow of health, well-formed of limb and innocent of deep crime—the price soars.
Cases have been cited by ministers and reformers within the past year, where keepers of high-priced houses in the levee districts have paid outright, $500 to the White Slave combine’s agents for girls whose purity has only been defiled by the procurer himself, and whose bodies are capable of bringing their masters thousands of dollars within the year.
These are the treasure-slaves of the hell-hounds!
It is of standing record, according to an investigator into the flesh traffic, that one procurer in one trip into the country districts of Illinois, trapped eight girls and sold them at prices ranging from $40 to $350!
One of these girls was a virgin. She was drugged by the procurer and awoke the next morning to find that she was a prisoner in a house of ill fame. She had been sold while robbed of her senses. She had been outraged while unconscious. The landlady approached her the next morning with an air of good fellowship, told of the benefits of the new life, promised her beautiful gowns and jewelry before night and attempted to make her forget the real, sweet and pure things of life which had been so mercilessly stolen from her.
This is the story of but one out of thousands.
We have said there are 2,000 White Slaves sold every year.
The average price is $100 a girl, according to a well known federal official, who has investigated and prosecuted several hundred cases of White Slavery.
That makes the aggregate purchase price of White Slaves in Chicago annually, $200,000!
This same official declared that the South side levee district contributes $60,000 a year to the White Slave Trust for new victims.
The balance is paid by the resort keepers of the other districts of vice and by keepers of the “houses of call”—the places where men of wealth and bestial perversion seek for virgins on whom to wreak the fury of abandoned passions!
Here is a terrible example of the procuring of an innocent girl for the perversion of a wealthy man.
Detectives investigating the conduct of a man implicated in graft charges affecting the high personnel of a big railroad, discovered that at a Michigan avenue “house of call” a tender and unsullied virgin procured by White Slave agents, was given into his lust-stained hands for desecration weekly!
That same man, the investigation showed, paid as high as $500 for an undefiled child!
He even went so far as to go outside of the city, in search of purity and goodness to be sacrificed in the fires of his degenerate passions.
Many a girl after a month of horror, revolts against the conditions confronting her; the terrors in her dreams of the future fill her soul with fear and she yearns for freedom once again.
The dreams, which the stories told her by the procurer aroused, have never materialized; she is as poor as she was before she was trapped into the life of shame; she is broken in spirit and in health.
Can she walk out a free woman?
No. She is a White Slave; the slavery is not just one of selling and purchasing; it is one of permanent bondage in ninety cases out of one hundred.
The man who trapped her has become her “cadet.” He is her “guardian” for her master. His word is law. She is a slave forever. She is treated brutally if she makes serious attempts at escape; she is even locked in a room and in some instances women have been tied hands and feet to bedposts.
She is at times drugged in order to make her forget her misery and her plans of escape. Every possible precaution is taken to prevent her release from bondage.
Her procurer in dull times, may take her from one house and resell her for a new price. She is thus bartered as a dead commodity instead of a woman of flesh and blood.
There is nothing in human history that is so filled with horror as this. There is no deeper stain on theannals of this nation than the crimson stain of White Slavery.
It is the evil that cries daily to Heaven for vengeance. Thousands of mothers lift their trembling arms and cry out to God to kill the monster that has eaten their daughters.
And this White Slave Trust, taking the money from these ill-fated women, turns part of its profits over to the magnates of the great Vice Trust,—to men who stand high in the world of politics, to men to whom we intrust the task of making our laws and administering them!
The law stands without and makes no effort to stem the tide of infamous traffic in women. Political leaders listen to the voice of a people’s protest, sham a “clean-up” and then send forth the word to the vice lieutenants to “lay low” for a short time. Within a few weeks, the monster creeps from his hiding place and feasts ravenously on the victims piled up and waiting for him.
We have shown the price of these pitiful victims of a vice system.
We are now ready to show how every form of vice in which woman stands as the central figure is protected by the police department at the command of the political lords and their friends, in order that they may derive a vast income from the human sacrifice.
Vice and Graft.
Police Collectors—The Prostitute’s Graft Price—The Kimona Trust—Laundry Trust—The Woman and the “Cadet”—Terrible Examples—To the Woman: Death—How About Your Daughter?
From the enemies of moral progress and from those who find it to their personal interest to exploit the shame of women and the crimes of men, the cry has been raised:—
Vice, segregated and otherwise, is absolutely essential in a large city. Passions must be given an outlet; lusts must be allowed to exhaust themselves.
That view, in the face of earnest study of the subject, is a pernicious fallacy.
Take away from man the open temptation; cleanse his paths of the thousand lures to evil; bar his coming in contact with the lost woman as far as it is possible and you will minimize vice to a marvelous degree.
It is on the fallacy and sophistry of the theory that passions of men must be satisfied, that Chicago today carries on its terrible exploitation of vice.
It is on that theory that the Vice Trust has built its superstructure, created its gigantic business,bartered its thousands of women for flesh-prices and harvested millions of dollars annually.
Vice exists under the conditions which we have depicted, because the Vice Trust—the all powerful coterie of police and politicians,—wish it.
The would-be municipal leaders, are the powers behind the city’s ignominy and shame!
Every evil that cries out in the big city, every crime that is committed in the day or in the night, every vice that is practiced to the ruin of human souls and bodies, does so because the Vice Trust commands it, because the Vice Trust waits for its monstrous returns from them.
Chicago’s four levee districts with the hundreds of resorts and the thousands of unfortunate inmates, furnish a tremendous capital to their owners, but the owners have a lease of vice existence from the political powers behind and above them, simply because these men and women pour into their coffers a constant stream of graft money.
The saloon evil, the cafe evil, the hotel, the dance hall, obscene theater evil, the “house of call,” “flat” and White Slave evil, pay a tribute of existence to the agents of the big alliance who have the political power to crush them out of existence if they so desired.
That is why we stand on the statement that if the CORRUPT POLITICIANS and their slaves and corrupt police officials were stripped of their power and sent to the penitentiary, Chicago could swiftlypurge herself and become the City Beautiful in the most ideal meaning of the term.
The evil lies today in the alliance between Vice, Police and the Politician!
The sore festers so that the matter running from it may be turned into dollars and cents by men we elect at the polls each election!
It is our purpose in this chapter to show in cold, conservative figures, just the price that vice pays to its political masters to live; just the gold that is beaten from women’s bodies so that the political bosses can be given their share and the slave masters of prostitutes can still make a profit.
We shall show that from every possible channel graft is derived. We shall show that to the big powers goes the big share; to their friends go smaller amounts, so that the pie is so divided that a tempting morsel is cut for all the favored few.
“Give me so much gold from the earnings of defiled women and we will give you so much protection, so much liberty and so many privileges,” offers the directorate of the Vice Trust.
That protection money is counted out: so much per woman, so much per sin, so much per vice.
The Vice Trust of the grafting directorate accepts the money and vice lives and flourishes.
The purchased souls of policemen, ready to do the bidding of the graft masters, are the agents through which this protective power is dispensed, in the primary matter of existence.
Graft for protection is the vital graft and the primary one. Policemen collect this themselves and turn it over to their superior officers. Their superior officers in turn take out their percentage for the damnable work and pass the bulk on to “men higher up.”
The graft for police protection is not always paid to policemen. High officials, fearing that their hand may show in corrupt and incriminating transactions, hire private and debased citizens to carry on this pernicious work of collecting from the resort keepers and from those whose business depends on the resorts.
That is the graft exacted for the simple existence of prostitution and the carrying on of the trade in women’s bodies.
The more the earnings of the house of ill fame, the higher the value of the women enslaved, the more liberty granted to make hellish profits, the greater the protective graft.
As a corroboration of our flat statement we have scores of men of prominence in every walk of life who have first-hand knowledge of the existence of this alliance of vice and graft.
Recently, an attorney whose business takes him into the “redlight” district on the South side, made the following statement in a Chicago daily paper:
“There is one police official who should be punished for his activity in collecting tribute for theprotection he dispenses to levee resort keepers. He is a smooth article, however, and he goes straight to headquarters in a fine show of indignation whenever anyone makes any charges against him.
“My business takes me into the district and I know that there is a regular tax levied on these people. It all depends on the size of the establishment and the amount of business done. The collecting is done by plain clothes men who turn it over to a police official and he takes or sends it to a higher official and after he takes out his share the balance goes to a city official. I’ve had that told me so many times by so many different persons, some of them policemen, that I know it is true.
“But you couldn’t get a person in the district to talk; they are run out of the district as soon as they threaten trouble.”
The man who made the above statement is one of the most prominent attorneys in Chicago. He is simply corroborating our charge of the existence of the practice of protection.
The high city official to whom the money goes and to whom he refers is one of the organizers of the great Vice and Graft Trust; a man who has made thousands of dollars by corrupting the power placed in his hands, and who today continues in the face of reform movements, to instruct his sycophantic police officials to allow vice to flourish just as long as it pours its gold into his coffers.
THE DRUGGED CONSCIENCE.
Copyrighted 1910 by The Midnight Mission.Used by permission of owners of copyright.
Steeped in iniquity.—Blind to his sin.—One step from eternal ruin.
As an instance that vice is shut down when it fails to make its tribute, we quote the following story froma well known criminal lawyer. It is astonishing in its features and in its revelations. This man said:—
“I was obliged in the course of my professional duties while searching for a woman important to a case at hand to visit the Empire Hotel on Wabash avenue. A week before my visit I had read that the police had raided the hotel and arrested several girls who lived there. These girls were not prosecuted and were discharged the morning after their arrest. The matter was fresh in my mind when I made my visit. I questioned the proprietress of the hotel as to the recent raid, and she smiled at me and said:
“‘Oh, we have to stand for these police gags. You see we weren’t paying protection money and they simply raided us as a warning. We are running full blast now and without any police interference, because we are coming across every week with our protection price.’”
The protection money is gathered principally in the levee districts but it also comes from every other place in the city where vice is made a business.
The protection money that is exacted from the keeper of the brothel is exacted from the keeper of the hotel, cafe, saloon and other species of places of infamy.
Here is another example of the truth of the story of protective graft.
An investigator for the Vice Commission corroborates our own investigation.
This investigator witnessed the following scene and conversation.
A man who had remained in a South side levee resort all night, complained to the police the next day that he had been robbed of fifty dollars by one of the inmates.
Accompanied by two detectives from the Twenty-second street police station, the man went to the house.
The landlady, when she heard his charge, became angry and while the investigator listened made this remark:
“That man never possessed fifty dollars in his life. It’s a frame up. Why are you police bothering me? Are you looking for more money? What do you want? I paid my protection money two days ago.”
We will show the price exacted from the prostitute’s master in order that she may exist as a creature of vice and sell every drop of blood in her body to make more money.
In an investigation that took in the cases of 500 prostitutes it was found that their average earnings were $100 a week.
We are aiming to be conservative. Let us place the average earnings at forty dollars a week, as a basis for figuring out some astounding results.
There are 5,000 outright prostitutes in the city of Chicago. Five thousand women making forty dollars a week will make $200,000 a week.
Five thousand women at forty dollars a week earn in one year—
$10,400,000!
Is it conceivable? Is it possible?
Tortured bodies of women yielding that gigantic income!
These are the women who live in the levee resorts, the inmates of flats and hotels and the slaves of the cafe owners.
Those women who live within houses whose owners pay protection for their inmates, give up half of the weekly earnings to the “madam.”
Those women who are known as “hustlers” in the slang phrase, give fifty per cent of their earnings to the police for individual protection.
No matter how and where that protection money is paid, it eventually percolates through the hands of the police or agents to the members of the Vice Trust.
The women of the street who frequent the hotels with their victims, pass their protection money to the hotel owners. They act in furthering protection, in the same capacity as do the keepers of the houses of ill fame for their victims.
The police trail these girls to the favorite hotel and then compel the hotel men to collect from the women.
Investigation again discloses a terrible condition of things.
We are going to show what these unfortunate women pay to exist:—the amount of money they pay the police for protection and the money that is passed on.
The prices exacted from a levee house by the police or other agents of the Vice Trust for police protection, varies according to the liberties given these slaves.
From investigation of a thorough character it is safe to say that the average protection price paid per woman in Chicago is twenty dollars a month!
Figuring on the basis of 5,000 women who are prostitutes in the accepted sense of the term, this means a payment of $1,200,000 in protection money a year.
In support of our monthly protective price of twenty dollars, we quote the following from a woman, for twenty years the owner of a big house of prostitution in Chicago and now a married and reformed member of the best society of Cedar Rapids, Ia. This woman in speaking of the question of protection money, said:
“During my experience of twenty years as the keeper of a Chicago resort, 900 girls passed through my hands. The protection prices I paid depended largely on the profits that the girls made. I had as many as forty-five girls in my establishment at once. The girls got half of their earnings and I got the other half. From my part I paid my protection money. I paid from fifteen to thirty-five dollars for each girl to the police. The average for all the girls was twenty dollars a month for each girl I kept. I will not give the names of the police or the collectors.”
When prominent investigators were searching for facts to use in a crusade against the sale of liquorwithout a license, they visited the Everleigh Club on Dearborn street.
Minnie Everleigh, one of the two women who own that notorious resort, made the following statement, showing the existence of police protection:
“I would be perfectly willing to pay a liquor license of $1,000 a year. I would like to see the entire business legalized. I would pay the price legally demanded.
“As it is today, someone permits us to conduct our establishment. I am paying in other ways.”
The payment which that dive keeper made “in other ways” was the protection money and a dozen allied forms of graft to the Vice Trust through its “lieutenants.”
The protection graft is the beginning of the great graft system. It is created to be used as a foundation for a thousand and one other sources of graft from sin and vice.
It has been shown that the woman either personally or through the woman or man to whom she is sold or has sold herself offers the first tribute to the Vice Trust and pays for a lease on her demoralizing and destructive life.
Now that she has paid her protective graft, she is to be fleeced by the great trust with its political leaders, out of the remaining part of her earnings.
The women in the resorts are the greatest victims of the “consequential graft.”
Take for instance, the woman inmate of a house who is in need of clothes and other necessities and watch the way the Vice Trust robs her over and over again.
The average earnings of a woman was placed at forty dollars. Of that twenty dollars was turned over to the resort keeper. That leaves an average of twenty dollars weekly to a woman. That is $1,000 a year.
Of this amount these women are compelled to spend $500 yearly. That leaves them but $500. Even that succumbs to a mere nominal figure when graft has finally stopped feasting on it.
There is a subsidiary trust of the Vice Trust which robs the 2,000 inmates of resorts in the city.
That combine is called the Kimona Trust. It is composed of certain clothing makers who sell exclusively to the inmates of the houses of prostitution. It received its name from the fact that the prostitutes buy and wear light house apparel, consisting of kimonas, wrappers, flimsy gowns and gaudy lingerie.
The operation of this trust, the extent of its graft and the way that graft is divided, with its portion going to the vice lords is interesting and not well known.
Take for instance, the girl who is in need of a kimona. Here is a truthful story from a girl in an Armour avenue resort as to the way she was victimized by the kimona grafters. Thousands of others could tell the same story.
“I had not been in the resort very long,” said the girl to the investigator, “when I needed some clothes. I told the ‘madam’ and she said the agent of a clothing house would call within a few days. I wanted to go out and purchase the things where I desired, but she told me she had to see that her girls got them from a certain man.
“The man came and I made my selections from a number of articles of apparel which he displayed. I had worked in a department store before I entered upon this life and I knew the value of clothes.
“I was compelled to pay $15 for a kimona which I could have purchased for $3 at any department store. I paid $120 for a hat with plumes on that was worth only $30. I was forced to give up $67 for a dress whose value I knew could not have been more than $25.
“The man then showed me some jewelry which he had with him and the keeper told me I should get some to make myself look more attractive.
“He showed me some cheap rings and bracelets and earrings. I paid $20 for a bracelet, some neck beads and a ring which were not worth any more than $4. They fell to pieces a short time later.”
These girls, according to their own stories are obliged to pay two dollars for a pair of stockings that are not worth more than fifty cents.
That is the system of the Kimona Trust!
Increased value on articles of clothing sold the inmates is about the same in every instance.
Three hundred per cent excess profit is the taxation made by the agents of the kimona trust!
The purchase prices on all things are so increased as to make that enormous profit.
There are 2,000 women buying clothes at a yearly expenditure, or rather robbery, of $500.
That means $1,000,000 spent by these poor, dying, unfortunates yearly to feed the avaricious grafters!
That enormous sum is spent for materials that are worth only one fourth of that value.
That means that the Kimona Trust brings an annual harvest of graft of $750,000!
The figures are so startling as to strike one dumb with horror, yet they are as true as the annual statement of the earnings and capital of a reliable bank.
The Kimona Trust agents are satisfied to make the normal profit on the goods as if they were sold at their legitimate price. They raise the price and create the graft in return for the favor of having a big business with no competition.
The $750,000 is then split up. To the police undoubtedly a small share goes for their general work in the district, the keepers get a share for compelling the girls to buy and the big bulk goes to the directors of the Vice Trust.
The Kimona Trust has not eaten to the last bill in the purse of the vice slave. She still has money left which the Vice Trust must batten on.
The Kimona Trust has a logical successor, the Laundry Trust.
This combine proceeds in the same manner as the combine that furnishes clothing to the 2,000 prostitutes in the houses.
It proceeds by boosting the prices and robbing its victims.
In the ordinary laundry service, the laundry man with a cleaning establishment is satisfied with sixty per cent of the income of a man who has a private route and brings his collections in clothing to the place. He is allowed forty per cent for himself and for his wagon.
In the levee districts the privilege of the laundry business is hard sought after, but it is limited to a few men. These men pay for the privilege. They add 100 per cent to their prices for work done, so that the Vice Trust which grants the favor may reap its profits.
Speaking conservatively, every girl is obliged to have a laundry bill of two dollars a week.
Two thousand girls with an average laundry bill of $2.00 means $4,000 a week or $208,000 a year!
The just laundry bill for those poor, fleeced women of sin should be but $104,000.
But the Vice Trust must have its toll. That graft of $104,000 is carried to the under lords and again the capital of the deadly combine is swelled while its victims starve!
Even science has prostituted itself to aid the Vice Trust collect its tithes from the lost women.
In the South side “redlight” district about ten physicians who are graduated from good schools have sold themselves to the lords of vice, crime and sin.
These men are employed to examine the women inmates of the houses to see if they are suffering from diseases of a venereal nature that might sow the seed of death in thousands of men.
This practice is also carried on in the other “redlight” districts.
It is the biggest farce in the whole system. It is a criminal perversion of science.
It has to the resort keeper an advertising value. The word is sent forth that his girls are “healthy,” or the man who accompanies her to her room, sees stuck in a prominent place a certificate signed by a physician declaring he has examined her and found her free from venereal afflictions.
It is a terrible and criminal deception.
Those physicians are supposed to give each girl a personal, clinical examination each week.
That is rarely done.
For this “examination” these girls are taxed fifty cents a week and given signed certificates. Often they do not see the physician for months at a time, yet they receive their certificates.
The physicians making a living at this terrible exercise of their sacred profession are slaves of the trust. They sold their manhood to receive the position.To the trust they give back a large part of the money taken from these unfortunate victims.
This graft, is said by those acquainted with the subject, to reach $15,000 a year!
It has been demonstrated that the graft yielded by prostitution direct is enormous. It has been shown how the disgraced and fallen women not only give up a share of the earning from their dying bodies, but also are compelled to assist in the collection of subsidiary graft.
But the Vice Trust has not finished with the picking of the bones and the sucking out of the marrow. There is still more to be taken for the price of sin and shame and misery.
The women who have the seeds of death in their bodies must be pushed and shoved swiftly to their dishonored graves. As they go they must yield more gold to the money lust of the vice lords. Gold must be their price even on the brink of the grave.
The Beer Trust must fatten on the last pieces of flesh and the last drops of blood!
There was the Kimona Trust; then the Laundry Trust, and now the Beer Trust.
In order to further its business and increase its income, these unfortunates must poison their already decaying systems with quantities of beer that would revolt even the average drunkard. They must inoculate themselves with the virus of slow death!
They must drink, drink, always drink!
As a lure and a bait to force these already underpaid wretches to fill themselves with the venom of the beer vats they are given a meaningless profit for every glass of poison they force a customer to buy.
They are obliged to drink with the customer in a spirit of good fellowship. Even after they are sick and drunk they pour the cheap, over-fermented liquor into their stomachs—for the sake of sociability and to appease the Vice Trust through its brewery graft.
The girls thus become the Beer Trust’s agents. The woman that is not a good “beer agent” in a house of ill fame, is either punished by being deprived of some privilege or her body bruised and discolored by a brute employed just for such purposes.
But we have demonstrated that subsidiary graft has reduced the ill-gotten gains of the women until there is scarcely anything left for them.
Do you wonder that they sit hour after hour at a table guzzling beer with their drunken customers?
It is the old story of—“Do this or starve.”
In the “redlight” districts of Chicago certain breweries have the monopolized concession from the vice lords to sell their commodity. No one else dare enter into the precincts to peddle his goods.
The Vice Trust demands a terrible stipend. Therefore the beer must be sold at an outrageous price. The over lords must get their share, the girls in the houses must be paid their horrible commission and the keepers must make their profits.
The sale of this beer in the disorderly houses is a direct violation of the law governing the sale of liquors. All this beer and other intoxicants are sold without a city license.
There are one thousand places in the city selling liquor without a license. Nearly all these are houses of prostitution. This figure is arrived at by a comparison of federal tax records on the sale of liquors and the records in the city license department of the city clerk. The houses of ill fame dare not ignore the laws of the United States. So, they purchase a federal liquor license at the nominal sum of twenty-five dollars a year.
The yearly graft in beer in the holes of vice in the city is unbelievable. We shall quote an authoritative source.
According to the report made by the recent Vice Commission to the Mayor of Chicago the annual graft from the sale of intoxicants in the restricted districts of the city, is—
$2,915,760!
That means that many dollars in graft over the price paid the brewery for its product.
That income must be divided among three factors: the prostitutes, the keepers of the houses and the members of the Vice Trust.
In the calculations of the Vice Commission, the prostitutes receive forty per cent, which amounts to $1,166,304.
From sources reliable and from interviews with keepers of disorderly houses, we have learned that the Vice Trust exacts fifty dollars a month from each disorderly house for the privilege of selling beers, whiskeys and other death-dealing drinks.
From the houses of prostitution in the levee districts, from the “houses of call,” the “flats” and other disorderly places, numbering 1,000, figuring on the basis of fifty dollars a month, the beer graft to the over lords is $600,000 a year.
That is the price that the minions of vice pay for the privilege of violating the municipal laws, of taxing vice to its last strength, of murdering the women who must promote the vicious industry!
The over lords, cunning and commercial to a degree, have never lost an opportunity to grow dollars from cents.
Realizing that the breweries made golden harvests from their privileges of monopoly, the vice kings sought to extend their power to these corporations.
They did it by practically buying the breweries!
Three of the politicians who are members of the Directorate of Ten—the graft spirits of Chicago’s underworld—have profit-yielding interests in breweries that serve levee trade.
In this way the over lords have another source of swollen income.
Nothing escapes from their talons.
In the levee resorts large quantities of cigarettesare sold daily. Again the vice masters seek out and gain the gold. One member of the all powerful Directorate of Ten has a controlling interest in the agency of a certain brand of cigarette. Every effort is made in the vice districts to sell this cigarette because the vice lord has commanded that it be disposed of.
In the ante bellum days when slavery flourished in the South, the blacks were directly ruled over by foremen who goaded them on at their tasks of making dollars for the plantation lord until they found welcome rest in death.
The modern slave is the prostitute. She, too, must have a boss to urge on her tired body to make more dollars for her masters, to keep up the constant stream of graft to the Vice directorate, to boost the earnings of such industries as in turn pay a tribute to the great trust.
The boss of the miserable outcast woman is the “cadet.” That low species of perverted human, crunching on the few morsels of food thrown at his feet from the well-heaped table of vice, is also known as “mack.” History has given him the name of “pimp.”
The pickpocket, the burglar, the safe cracker, even the murderer, command more respect—we say respect for lack of a better term—than do these human, creeping, craven parasites.
They are the real slave-men; the lowest form of the Vice Trust’s vassals.
Among these men are also the men who first destroyed the sacred chastity of the women over whom they now rule. Nothing is sacred to them; nothing good; nothing inviolable.
They have become an essential element to the nefarious scheme of the Vice Trust. Whip in hand they are the appointed lashers of the thousands of lost women, beating them to urge them to work harder, faster, and thus yield a return for their purchase price until the cold earth falls with hollow sound upon the cheap casket purchased to hide away their shame and sin in the ground.
The subsidiary trusts of the great Vice Trust have taken their toll. But the unfortunate women, through their commissions, particularly on liquors, have still some of the terrible wage drained from their bodies.
The trust must have the greater part of that. It is the duty of the “cadets” to get it. They do.
They collect from the girls, take their share and turn over a large percentage to the Directorate of Ten.
The trust has a strange reason for this. The trust considers the “cadet” primarily as a parasite. That parasite must pay a price for existence. To get it, he must compel the woman he controls to make more money.
In urging her to make more money he is boosting the graft in every possible way.
There is a psychological connection between the “cadet” and his prostituted slave-woman.
Inherent in the nature of every woman is the primitive instinct of the mastership of man and obediance to it. In the good woman that obediance to that subconscious instinct finds its expression in love and in strange submission to his theories and practices of life where there exists no moral conflict.
To be loved, to be cared for, to be desired, are the impulses developing out of the conception of man’s mastery.
In the lost woman, the instincts are the same; so, too, the impulses.
When a woman has fallen she never gives up her dream of a “one man” who might love her, treasure her and protect her, until the eternal night blots out the colors of the vision.
Failing to find a return love, the thousands of unfortunate women fall victims to their own loves for men. Rather than lose even the hollow, empty sham of love, rather than to miss the presence of a brute, they submit to indignities, brutality and tortures that are indescribable.
It is the under current carrying the idea of Man the Master. The woman is willing to be the slave.
Playing on this perverted instinct of the woman, the Vice Trust makes capital of it. The “cadets” are brought in on the general plan of graft.
The “redlight” districts of the city are infested with these men, fattening on their lost women.
Judging from the number of well dressed men of no apparent occupation who hang about the saloons, resorts, poolrooms, cigar stores and other places nearthe levees, there are more than 1,000 of these worms of the earth at large, feeding on the city’s great ulcer, flaunting their crimes in the faces of our young men and young women of clean morals, and murdering their women hirelings!
They have no fear of the police because they know that the police dare not molest them just as long as they “hand over” their graft to the “men higher up.”