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 swiftly purge 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 the protection 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 from a 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 liquor without 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 cigarettes are 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
near the 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.”
These men exercise the most brutal mastership over the prostitute.
Instances have been shown where women were whipped within a few inches of
death by the inhuman dogs.
One night in the South side levee, a “cadet” caught one of his women on
the street in front of a resort, cursed her for her small earnings and
proceeded to beat her into insensibility. Bleeding from his inhuman blows,
she reeled and fell to the sidewalk.
Standing in the glare of the arc light, the man’s face and hands were
smeared with blood. Two policemen approached and stopped. The “cadet” held
up his blood-stained hands and laughed. The policemen pushed him ahead,
and one of them said:
“Fred, you better move on. Go and wash your face and hands.”
A woman came from the resort, kicked the prostrate form of the unconscious
girl with her foot, then grasping her by the hands, dragged her into the
hell chamber from which she had emerged to breathe a little of God’s own
air.
That is not the story of a heated imagination. It was actually witnessed.
Incidents of similar character which beggar description, occur every
night, when these outcasts are confronted by drunken, blood-exacting
degenerates.
Some of these men are the slave masters of several women.
In a recent White Slave case in the federal court, one of these wretches
confessed that he was the “cadet” of four prostitutes. He drove them on in
their vicious labors, forced them to work day and night to bring him money
from which he made his own living and paid protection to the police and
tribute to the Vice Trust.
This man swore that he made from fifty to sixty dollars a week from each
girl.
Many of these “cadets” do not live in the “redlight” districts. They
scatter and come back when it is time to gather in the gold.
The business of exacting graft from these men is a difficult police
problem because of their nomadic habits. Still it is accomplished.
Rendezvous of these men are frequently raided by the police and these
“cadets” to save themselves give up what money they may have with them.
Many of them, however, cannot keep away from the scenes of their crimes
and cravenly and regularly pay their price.
The “cadet” system is highly valued by the Directorate of Ten because it
is the human prod to vice, the medium of increasing infamous profits from
day to day.
As an instance of this, here is a story from police circles which is
confirmed by other corroboration.
Recently, a captain of police was transferred to the Twenty-second street
police station. He was an unsophisticated police official, then. He was
not well acquainted with the workings of the Vice Trust and he was
determined to rid the districts of some of the evils which were more
flagrant than others.
He determined to destroy the “cadet” system and to cast every “cadet” into
jail on charges of vagrancy. He set about to do it and forty-eight hours
later the district was seething with indignation, fear and anger.
A conference of the big resort keepers was held and the police captain
invited to attend. He went prepared to deliver a staggering ultimatum that
would wipe out the evil forever.
When he emerged he was a beaten, broken man, broken on the great, ever
turning wheel of vice.
Those keepers told him in that conference that if he drove the “cadets”
out, they might as well shut down their houses. He was willing that they
should. But there was the rub. He was quietly shown that the graft lords
wanted more money and would not stand for a decrease of profits.
They declared that women without “cadets” to urge them on, did not make
half the money those did who were driven to death by these inhuman
creatures in their exploitation of vice.
To back up their statements they showed him the records of their houses.
The great powers, he realized, were behind commercialized vice. To harm
one member of that Directorate of Ten by shearing him of his profits meant
ruin to himself. He gave up the battle.
Later on, in another police territory, this same official hemmed in and
enmeshed by the exacting system which he had allowed to make him a slave,
fell a victim to the Vice Trust and was sacrificed with much pomp of
public investigation on the altars of the temple of vice and graft to
appease the unseen god of public wrath and indignation.
Another example of how the graft system reaches out and destroys the
upright, is the following:—
Another captain of police was sent to take command of the police district
including the South side levee. A clean-minded chief of police ordered him
to clean up the district. He ordered him to place men in the resorts where
there were flagrant violations of the rules regulating the district.
The police official did so. The resort keepers tried to reason with him,
argue with him and plead with him, but he refused to listen. “I shall
carry out my orders,” he said firmly. Then they predicted his transfer
from the police station. They predicted that within thirty days he would
be in command at another station. They missed their calculations by but
one day. He was transferred to a district where his honesty could do no
harm. Beyond and above the chief of police ruled a power—the political
power of the Directorate of Ten, that made the final ruling.
A chief of police in a strange manner has admitted the power of the vice
combine which he was sworn to annihilate. As a sergeant of police he was
powerless to stem the tide of sin and vice. When he received the highest
executive office in the department, the Vice Trust compelled him to move
from the home in which he had lived on the South side for twenty-five
years. The music from the dives floated into the precincts of his home and
disturbed his rest; the unfortunate women carried on their immoral
profession within a stone’s throw of where his innocent daughter slept;
drunken men reeled past his door going to and from the vice haunts. He was
surrounded by scarlet women and vicious men. For the salvation of his
family he was obliged to seek other quarters.
Oh you that are the children of our flesh and blood, you over whom anxious
mothers have watched through the long, weary hours of the night when the
shadow of sickness was upon you, you whose lips are still undefiled by the
kiss of unclean lips, you who still kneel at night and in the solitude of
your chambers, call upon the Master to hold your hearts in the mighty
hollow of His hand, bend your heads in meditation on the truth that is
hideous, but must be known.
You mothers and fathers, sacrificing every hour of your lives for your
daughters, praying for their purity, guarding their chastity, leading them
in the paths of righteousness, turn not from the truth that you must
know, but listen and take warning.
IN THE LIGHT OF MODERNITY IGNORANCE IS NO LONGER INNOCENCE. IGNORANCE IS
CRIME: IGNORANCE IS SIN: THE SIN OF OMISSION AND NEGLECT.
In no age, has a people faced a social problem as vital and crucial as the
one facing the American people today. Our rapid progress in the paths of
commerce has robbed us of a clear moral conscience; it has made the
almighty dollar the ideal, to the detriment of the soul and heart: it has
built taller houses of industry while the church steeples have grown
shorter.
It has crept unconsciously upon us until it has eaten into our vitals—the
commercial and industrial frenzy.
It has recognized in the perversion of woman a source of income and it has
commercialized the vicious instincts, and the depraved desires of
thousands of them.
The baby girl in the cradle is being watched and waited for by the Vice
Trust:—ready to capture her and throw her tortured body into the mart of
sin for filthy dollars.
The school girl is trailed and tempted. She falls often unconsciously and
awakens when it is too late. The girl who is earning her own living is
preyed upon and bartered away; and even the wife and mother is frequently
caught in the ever-tightening mesh of the masters Satan has appointed on
earth.
Statistics show that two thirds of the women who are found in the
infamous resorts of the city drift there in a thousand and one ways.
The White Slaves are in the minority.
Economic and social conditions, starvation wages, environment,
unrestrained sexual desires, lack of religious restraint, improper
association with the male sex in immature ages, desires for pleasures,
luxuries and clothing, betrayal by men, are among the principal reasons
why this vast percentage of the prostitutes fills the houses of iniquity.
Tons of literature have been written, warning the girls of the country
against the perfidious White Slaver.
These warnings have also been directed to the parents of our girls.
The girls and women that need warning today are those who are drifting to
the Lake of Infamy, drifting, some unconsciously and others with
knowledge, in a vague way of what is before them.
To this class we cry out until we are exhausted and our throats are
bleeding with the effort:
“Leave all hope behind, you who enter here.”
At each avenue leading into the hellish centers of the city should stand a
lost woman, peering into the eyes and hearts of each girl who is creeping
silently and shamefully to the vice dens. In her hollow, rasping voice,
the lost woman should be made to cry out:
“TURN BACK ERE IT IS TOO LATE! THIS IS THE CITY OF THE DAMNED! THIS IS
THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSE OF HELL! THIS IS THE CHARNAL-HOUSE OF DEATH! THIS IS
THE SPOT WHERE THE GRAVES ARE ALWAYS OPEN AND YAWNING! LIFE HAS NO HOPE
HERE!”
If each girl could be told the paralyzing truth of the life of the
prostitute as we have told it in this book, would she plunge headlong into
the consuming fire? Would she leap into the ever-present abyss? Would she
take the first drink? Would she give her lips to the poison of the inhuman
wretch who plots her death? Would she give her pure, white body to the
abominations of the Vice Trust?
No, no, no: not unless she were born of hell and deprived of reason and
judgment.
It has been our object to show that not one dream of the girl who enters a
house of prostitution is ever realized.
She has hoped for fine clothes, jewelry, food and money.
She has found nothing but shame, suffering, remorse and sorrow.
“I will become a slave, that is true,” said the girl who is dying in a
resort today, as she entered the abominable life, three years ago, “but I
shall make hundreds of dollars and then leave it and no one shall know.”
That is the lure that has caught up thousands of women and hurled them
into dishonored and polluted graves.
The Vice Trust is the robber combine.
No woman who has once fallen into its inhuman traps can escape until she
has paid the last farthing, as we have shown.
The Vice Trust allows the women of its kingdom to make gold fast, that it
may rob them faster.
We have shown how each agent of the Vice Trust, each subsidiary combine,
each industry dealing with the unfortunate women, suck out the last drop
of blood.
In the last analysis, after we have studied how the earnings of the
prostitute are snatched away from her, you ask this startling question:
“And to the woman, what?”
And with God as our judge and honest, clean, observant men as our
witnesses, we answer:
“DEATH!”
Shudder, all you who today are tempted to give up the struggle against
terrible odds. Tremble with fear, all you who are near the gates of the
City of Sin! Turn back all you who are picking the insidious blossoms in
the pathways that lead to but one end.
DEATH:—not pleasure, not joy, not companionship; not clothes, not the
niceties of life, not money!
The Vice Trust paid a high price in one way or another for each
woman-soul. Death can claim the victim only after it is torn to pieces by
the ravenous wolves.
There is no compensation in the lives of prostitutes for all they have
thrown away; not even a sham of compensation.
The prostitutes of Chicago are not only the commercial slaves of the vice
lords; they are the victims of the most ravaging and most destructive
diseases that science knows. Cold figures prove this. Nearly every woman
in the levee districts of Chicago suffers from dread diseases. They are
the victims of every possible chronic disease and organic trouble.
They are today the greatest agents in the city for the dissemination of
sexual diseases that ruin homes, lead men to suicide and fill the wards of
our city hospitals with dying children.
They are the mistresses of the men of the crime-world, who in the last
stage of degradation, drive them to careers which are checkered with the
murders of their victims.
And now another hideous truth to save our daughters from the blasting
curse.
Death claims these women in from one to seven years! That startling
statement is based on actual figures dealing with the demand and supply of
women for the resorts of Chicago.
Death is really merciful to those whom he takes at the beginning of their
blighted lives, for they escape in the darkness and sleep of the tomb the
nights of nightmare agony, of remorse, of shame, of physical suffering, of
empty and broken hearts, of ghosts of the pure, sweet past, of home with
the sweet-faced gentle mother, the loving father and the brothers and
sisters.
Think of it! These commercialized creatures of hell grind out of body,
blood, heart and soul, millions of dollars for their masters! And for
themselves—the GRAVE!
We have been logical in our statements. We have not delivered simply a
pulpit warning. We have shown, in undeniable figures, that the motto of
the Vice Trust is:
“Millions for ourselves, but not one cent for the women slaves!”
If, as is imagined by thousands of good men and women, these unfortunates
derived a profit from their immoral business, then there might exist an
excuse for the thousands who enter the life each year. But there is no
profit, no matter from what standpoint you might view the situation.
The story of gain is but the lure. The Vice Trust tells lies that are
acceptable because of the strange tendencies in the temperament of women.
Dean Walter T. Sumner, one of Chicago’s most prominent ministers and the
chairman of the recent Vice Commission, declared that each year the men
who visit the many haunts of vice in Chicago spend $60,000,000! He also
declared that of this amount, over $16,000,000 goes to the vice lords!
Before closing we wish to give a concrete example of the tenacious power
of the life of shame once it has fastened its fangs in the heart and body
of its victim. We tell the story so that every girl in this country may
know that once enslaved there is scarcely any redemption.
In one of the most notorious resorts in the South side levee district,
lost to all self-respect and shame, is a certain prostitute who drags her
wornout body about, selling it to vice victims night after night.
That woman is the daughter of an alderman of the city of Chicago!
Four years ago she was the idol of a happy home, the pet of a loving
father and the darling of a happy mother. Today she is a drunken, depraved
creature.
Her father has done everything in his power to rescue her. With his own
political power he has obtained permission from the vice masters to take
his daughter from her infamous prison.
That woman has looked at her father and cried out:
“It is too late! Society would spurn me and I would have to flee away.
Besides my body is wrecked and could not live without the intoxicants and
drugs I can feed it here.”
The father offered her $10,000 a year as an allowance if the girl would
leave her evil ways. Again she refused because she knew in the depths of
her heart that the shackles welded long ago could never be broken, and
that the poison eating through her blood could never be purged out.
If this girl with every possible influence brought to bear to save her was
beyond salvation, what of the thousands who, even if they would, cannot
move hand or foot to escape the death waiting for them but a few years
away?
That is the story of the prostitute. It is not a story of the woman
considered as an entity, deprived of her relative existence; it is the
story of the slave as a commercialized being existing solely for the
enrichment of the Directorate of Ten of the Vice Trust and not because she
is needed to serve the passions of men.
And yet in the face of this staggering truth, thousands of women yearly,
enter upon the life of death. They go to fill the polluted beds and
chambers of horrors from which the gaunt, skeleton form of Death has just
crept noiseless, bearing away the victims whose terms of earthly service
in the interests of hell were at an end.
God of Heaven, Father of the Just, Thou who watcheth over the universe of
living things, teach our daughters to know the truth down to the last,
burning, revolting fact. Save them for the motherhood of a perfect race.
Protect them against the demons who seek them out in the sanctity of the
home. Teach them restraint. Give unto the men and women of Chicago, the
strength and power to rise up and destroy the Vice Trust and its members,
so that the sun may shine on a spotless city, and love, happiness, purity,
and the brotherhood and sisterhood of man may reign supreme!
How long, Oh God, how long?
