The Vice Bondage of a Great City, by Robert O. Harland

THE VICE BONDAGE
OF A GREAT CITY

The Wickedest City in the World

—By—

ROBERT O. HARLAND.

The Reign of Vice, Graft and Political Corruption.

Expose of the monstrous Vice Trust. Its personnel. Graft by the Vice Trust from the Army of Sin for protection. A score of forms of vice graft. Horrifying revelations of the life of the Scarlet Woman. New lights on White Slavery. Protected Gambling and the blind police. The inside story of an enslaved police department. A warning to the parents. How to save YOUR GIRL or BOY.

ALSO remedies to cure the Municipal Evil that in one city alone fills the pockets of not more than ten Vice Lords with $15,000,000, annually, made from the sins of 50,000 unfortunate men and women; an evil that is blasting our nation’s decency and prosperity and is eating into the very vitals of our Republic.

Save the growing generation of men and women.

A book to create public and saving opinion, to destroy lethargy and inoculate the germ of activity; to enlist every aid to wipe out the curse of this nation.

PUBLISHED BY
THE YOUNG PEOPLE’S CIVIC LEAGUE
301-305 Security Building
Chicago, Ill.

This book is a recital of sin, crime and graft. It is fact, not fiction. Commercialized crime, police collusion with underworld power and the barter of men’s and women’s souls is going on today.

The investigation conducted by the Civil Service Commission, which has resulted in the discharge of several police inspectors and a number of subordinates, has tended to minimize, temporarily, the vice conditions.

The vice lords have sneaked away to their lairs, and are waiting until the brooms of the municipal house-cleaners are stacked away in a corner.

The axe of the Civil Service Commission has hacked deep into the trunk of the Vice-Graft tree, but the roots from which the sap of crime flows still live and flourish.

A few policemen have been thrown into the discard, the victims of the System that is still unharmed.

The Temple of Crime, Vice and Graft will be rebuilded. The foundation is intact.

The conditions which are exposed in this book flourished until a few months ago. Their human causes still live, but craven with fear.

It shall exist until the root of evil is killed—until corrupt and ruling politics is hounded out of the city—to death!

CONTENTS.

Preface.

From a trading post with Fort Dearborn standing guard over its small population, Chicago has grown until today she ranks among the great metropoles of the world.

Today her name is reckoned with in every country. Her industries are the supply houses of the nations; her manufacturing plants deal with all peoples; her financial institutions figure vitally in the world’s exchanges.

Chicago is the most cosmopolitan city on the globe. The children of all races have been attracted to her because of the thousands of opportunities in all walks of life.

We live in a sordid age of commercialism suffering from intense neurasthenia. We have made our factories and our places of business our temples. We have enthroned the dollar-god, and fawning, have paid worship to it seeking its gold and silver in return.

It has been said by an English philosopher that the optic nerve of the American people has been paralyzed by the glitter of gold. That is true of Chicago. It is true that our moral sense has been warped. Morality[Pg 9] has lost its value except as it subserves our financial and material interests.

Vice has been co-existent with human consciousness. An abuse of natural laws affecting the race through the individual, is vice in its broadest interpretation. In the annals of the world’s history we find moral degradation triumphant on one page and defeated on the next. There seems to be a constant balancing of the moral and social scale.

In all ages vice has been, in a sense, commercialized. The vicious have always lived off it, fattened upon it, and died of its slow insidious poison.

It remained for this industrial and much-vaunted age systematically to commercialize vice.

Chicago with its 2,000,000 inhabitants, its vicious element of unfortunate men and women, its haunts of degradation and shame, its wealth and its poverty, and its democratic form of government, was the experimental place of a “scientific,” systematized commercialization of sin.

God knows and men are beginning to realize how well the experiment has succeeded!

There is no excuse or reason for trumpeting a city’s shame if the conditions are simply the result of isolated vice and terrible social environments. If that were all, this book would never have been written.

Tersely, we have come to our task with a solemn duty and moral obligation in our heart, mind and soul, viz:—

To show the world at large that Chicago is today[Pg 10] the Wickedest City in the World, because a small body of men, invested with a sacred power, political and social, has created a gigantic and ever-growing Vice Trust, annually becoming richer and more dangerous off the sins and crimes of degraded men and abandoned women.

It is our intention to demonstrate to the world the machinations of the corporation of crime, its political power, its enslavery of 5,000 fallen women in the segregated districts and twice as many more at large within the city, its annual earnings from a toleration of vice and crime, its prostitution of the police department, and its hideous and myriad ways of trapping new victims to take the places of those whom it had driven to despair and untimely death.

The story is shocking to your moral sense; paralyzing to your brain; but it is the Truth. It should be known. Too long have we groped blindly in the dark. An hour of awakening is needed.

Vice might be eradicated if the vast system, whose existence we are about to describe, could be first obliterated. Unless the root be removed, the evil will grow rapidly again, despite sincere and persistent reforms. It is our intention to show by logical narration of facts how the annual tribute paid to the Vice Trust for protection and nourishment by the hordes of living demons in the city of Chicago is at least $15,000,000.

The life-blood of women, bought and sold on the auction block of the Vice Combine, the innocent girls who barter their lives of purity for a sip of the poison[Pg 11] of the bitter wine of life, the men who drag the shackles of sin on their limbs, and the hellish fiends who serve Satan on earth, prostrate before the directorate of the Vice Trust, offer their tribute to the over lords of the city’s degradation.

This book is not the fantastic, lurid picturing of the shames of women and the crimes of men. It is an expose of how not more than ten men whom we call the Directorate of Ten, create, organize, mobilize and lead, and derive almost fabulous profits from, an army of thousands of unfortunates.

It is the story of a power wrested from the people at the debauched ballot boxes and used as the weapon to murder men and women annually. This is not the dream of an overzealous mind seeking sincerely to right a terrible wrong. It is a cold, statistical narration of facts. It is the observations of one who for ten years has studied every phase of the demoniacal system, who has been intimately associated with the Directorate of Ten, who has stood by and watched the never-ending procession of the men and women slaves who have done the monster’s bidding and fallen inevitably into the charnal houses of the dead.

The average Chicago man or woman knows of the thousand and one forms of vice that flourish in Chicago, but he or she does not know that the entire vice system works in harmony like the most delicate piece of mechanism. The voters do not know that vice is more perfectly organized in Chicago today than any corporation in existence. The writer has set out to show in[Pg 12] the glaring, white light of truth the real causes of the present social evil.

The social evil today does not find its ultimate reason in unrestrained passions, human viciousness and weakness; it finds its reason in the commercialization of debased creatures and the enslavement of them in profitable labors to their masters, until death.

The Vice Trust to increase constantly its profits has a thousand lures for the unwary. The masters of these infamous pitfalls are the lieutenants of this monstrous trust. The writer knows of all these chasms and has studied the horrifying details of the men and women traps. He has attempted to set them forth and nail the sign of warning above them.

The wages of sin is Death! If once a woman or a man is enslaved in any one of the traps set by the Vice Trust then death lies at the end of a short path. Yearly, thousands of young and pure girls and ambitious and clean young men, come to Chicago as to the city of dreams, pleasure and glory. Yearly, thousands are trapped and soon pay the awful penalty. The city boy and the city girl are not immune. Many of them meet similar fates. If the writer can stem the rush of these young souls to the fires of living hells he will feel well rewarded for his task. He has endeavored, by placing the responsibility for the social evil on corrupt politics that has created a grafting, robbing, and murdering Vice Trust, to put the subject in a new and interesting light. To the men and women who sleep not, because their children, young and undefiled, are growing up within the reach of an insatiable monster, does the[Pg 13] writer particularly appeal. He has attempted to show that the Vice Trust, the secret cause of municipal degradation, is the monster that must be annihilated.

The Chicago police department is an inefficient and corrupted body today, that is protecting vice and not destroying it, because a majority of its members are enslaved by the Vice Trust. Every vice, every sin, every crime has its price of toleration. This is the reign of the triumvirate of vice, graft and political corruption.

To all men of character and worth, to every father and every mother with the welfare of their children at heart, the writer appeals in the battle against this hideous evil.

One soul saved, one man helped, one woman turned from the pathway of hell will give this volume a human value. The author in conclusion asks a thorough consideration of the facts related and hopes that all to whom this book may come, may feel its message of truth and join the ranks of the army of righteous men and women who have pledged their lives to make Chicago a city after man’s highest conception, a place where our children may grow to maturity imbued with the spirit and character that make true American men and women.

CHAPTER I.

The Story of Chicago’s Subjugation to Political and Police Corruption—The Corrupt Ballot Box—The Mechanism of the Trust—The Prices of Sin and Vice—The Horror of Ruined and Purchased Lives—The Remedy.

Seventy-five years ago a body of pioneer souls who dared death for the dream of individual liberty, wealth and happiness, founded a city, and after the manner of the times, adopted an Indian name and called it Chicago.

The city grew, prospered, flourished; likewise did the inhabitants. Nature seemed to bless all who settled within her boundaries. Resources undreamed of were discovered.

The lake breezes fanned the tiny flame of future greatness and the sun warmed the ambitious blood of the early inhabitants. She became the golden gate to the unexplored West. She became the cosmopolitan and central point of a world power. Chicago was talked of, considered, bargained with from East to West, and North to South.

[Pg 16]With vastness came power; with power, abuse; with abuse, vice; with vice, crime; with crime, graft.

Chicago has blinded herself to the hideous truth. She has hidden her head, closed her eyes and cried out:

Vice, like some slimy, hideous, mephitic, green-eyed monster from the deepest abyss of Hell has crept, sinuous and noiseless, on an unsuspecting people.

It has battened upon red, pure life-blood. It has fattened on white flesh. It has destroyed virginal purity, public morals and political honesty.

The monster has been insatiable. Satan, king of the damned dead since the Beginning, urged on the monster Vice.

His political minions kneeled and offered sacrifice to the incarnate Evil of the World. To save themselves they fed him of the rich and sacred stores of the city. They took their portion.

They still feed the monster. They are its slaves; they, appointed by the people to safeguard them and to make their laws.

The monster Vice is fed by the police and politicians, who, under cover of night and darkness, plunder, steal, cheat and murder to satisfy its greed.

[Pg 17]If Satan came out of the depths of his Inferno, away from the shrieks of the lost millions, he would wander from city to city until he reached Chicago.

Then, in this twentieth century of culture, refinement and progress, he would stand outside the gates, smile in triumph and speak this,—the living, shameful, naked truth:

This is the CITY ACCURSED! This is the CITY OF THE LIVING DAMNED! This is the CITY OF MY DESIRE! This is the CITY AFTER MY OWN HEART! VICE, CRIME, CORRUPTION RULE:—MY TRIUMVIRATE!

Babylon had its vices; so, too, Alexandria. Greece and Rome struggled and died in a national moral degeneracy they had created.

Nay, Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed by the wrath of Heaven, were pure when compared to Chicago.

Chicago leads the world in evil today. She stalks at the head of the Army of Sin:—a beautiful, sensuous mistress and paramour to a personalized god of named and unnamed Crime. The army is composed[Pg 18] of bodies and souls that Hell has claimed but not called. Their destinies are still unfinished on earth.

Because she has taken the failings, sins, defects, crimes, miseries and vices of humanity, hurled them into a seething caldron of infamy, melted them, amalgamated them and commercialized them.

A Vice-Graft system has been created. It has been formed along the lines of modern commerce and finance.

Today the institution is stronger, more powerful, more impregnable than the biggest financial or industrial combine in the United States!

In fact, it has absorbed many and invaded mysteriously and secretly every other enterprise founded on decency and honesty. It is living off every legitimate trade, business and industry in Chicago.

That is the limitless scope of the Vice Trust of Chicago, unincorporated, but possessing a capital running high into the millions of dollars and souls.

There are three stockholders, speaking in a collective sense, in Chicago’s Vice Trust, namely:—

These form the board of directors of the ruthless, merciless, parasitic, powerful corporation of Vice, Graft, Crime & Co.

Scarcely an individual, scarcely an industry fails to yield its life-blood to that infamous trust! It[Pg 19] feeds like a great octopus on the entire city. Many of us are its unconscious victims!

CHICAGO—THE LIVING, BREATHING HELL.

To those who know and understand, that line flames as if written by the fiery finger of Fate, in the heavens above Chicago.

You, all of you, dwelling without its polluted precincts, cannot enter it without being trapped into the meshes of the Vice-Graft combine!

Spider-like, it has woven its web over and about the city. Enter and you are entangled, consciously or unconsciously.

From the depot to the cab, from the cab to the hotel, from the hotel to the dining room, barber shop, manicure room or other places, the monster trails you. The Vice Trust’s agents are forever lurking in your shadow.

To the store, place of business, halls of amusement, the silent form sneaks behind you, exacting from you a toll for the privilege of walking the streets of Chicago and breathing God’s free air.

When you leave for your quiet, peaceful hometown, the minions of the trust follow you almost to[Pg 20] the sacred entrance of an undefiled home. Only the sanctity, purity and goodness, stops them there.

THE SYSTEM AND ITS CAUSES.

Vice crept in, grew and flourished. Its resources were human souls and bodies,—men and women.

It became a great, eating, nauseating, foul-smelling ulcer on the body municipal.

Control—police regulation—was given it. Flagrant, unblushing vice was hidden away in the corners of the city, to fester and die unseen.

But vice never dies. It lives on the body it has destroyed. Its existence is parasitic.

It grew, grew, grew. Then like a many-armed octopus it stretched out and out about it.

Craven souls, dealing with it, sworn by law to slay it, felt the terror of death upon them. Also, with Satanic insight they saw the—

THE COMPACT WRITTEN IN FLESH AND BLOOD.

“Let the creature Vice live and thrive, but give us part of the red blood and white flesh of its victims”—was the thought.

The politician saw the opportunity. He could not evolve the scheme without the aid of the police, so he confessed his conceived crime. The police consented. Then the leaders of the cohorts of vice were told of the combine and its ultimatum. They, too, consented.

“Give us part of the blood and flesh money and you may live and we will protect you.”—said the politicians and the police officials.

Out of the cavernous depths of Chicago’s Hell, where thousands yearned to be free to sow death without hindrance, came the fiendish answer:—

The compact was written in letters of blood. Thousands gave up health, happiness and life to launch the Vice Trust.

THE DIRECTORATE OF GRAFT, CRIME AND CORRUPTION.

Individually, today, ten powerful politicians lay down the law, exact the toll, distribute it, after taking[Pg 22] their major share, pass sentence of life and death on good and bad, direct the huge and intricate machinery, pay off the hundreds of employes,—principally members of the police department,—high and low, and plan to enlarge and strengthen the greatest, strangest and most complex organization in the world.

They have divided the city between them and their vassals. They are the rulers of the mysterious underworld, living like princes and rulers in the white palaces of the overworld, surfeited with the heavy luxuries of life.

POLITICS, POLICE AND VICE.

Political power is the greatest of all power. It can subjugate with iron hand all other powers.

The Directorate of Ten found willing agents in the police department of Chicago. It has them today, and if needs be, can find more. Human souls are easily purchased.

Today the system is intricate. So intricate that the combine has received the appellation,—the Vice System.

To exist, vice, in any one of its thousand forms, must pay tribute. The tribute is shared with the police for protection.

Many police inspectors, captains, lieutenants, sergeants and patrolmen receive portions.

Segregation, flaunted to the world as the best[Pg 23] remedy yet found for the social evil, is but a lie on the part of the Vice Trust.

Only a portion of the unit Vice is kept within the limits of four “redlight” districts. The rest stalks the streets, free, robbing its victims in the glare of the noon-day sun.

The lost women-souls of the levees are but a pitiful and small part of the army of Vice. They simply dwell in the rendezvous of the thousands who live by infamy.

FOR EACH CRIME A PRICE!

From all vice-sources tribute is exacted monthly by the police themselves or by the low, inhuman collectors of the Vice Trust.

Every possible violation of the law, the powers that be will wink at at so much per wink!

All this infamy,—this protection of crime and reeking corruption, exists today in Chicago.

THE ATTACK UPON THE TRUST.

The Civil Service Commission of Chicago attacked the bulwarks of the Trust of Crime.

The police department was the point of assault. Several officials were discharged for incompetency and inefficiency. Had they destroyed that Satanic allegiance the backbone of the Combine might have been broken.

Chicago stood paralyzed at the revelations. The[Pg 24] truth was murderous in its hideous nakedness. No one had ever dreamed of the scope of its business—the vice business.

The unholy alliance struggled to outlive the attack. Back on to the weak, narrow shoulders of unsystematized infamy the politicians and the police threw the blame.

The network of vice, the spiderweb of crime, the intricate working of the System, the collusion of vice-parasites and political and police magnates have become known. The story has more interest than a novel born of the imagination of genius; more lure than the best detective story ever penned; more fascination than any page in ancient or modern literature; because it is palpitating, aching present day truth. Because it is a living fact. Because it is an “elbow to elbow” condition. Because it is the story of a great city, lost to goodness, and won to wickedness.

The hideous ulcer is no longer concealed. It festers no longer in the dark. Its poison seeths in the searing light of inquiry.

THE VICE-GRAFT CIRCLE:—WITHOUT BEGINNING, WITHOUT END.

Political power to become absolutism without danger of extinction needs strong, imperishable foundations.

THE BALLOT:—THE SECRET OF VICE POWER.

This is the way it was done and still is being done. Take those political precincts within whose boundaries the “redlight” districts exact their toll from the thousands of unfortunate souls, who live in the iniquitous Hell-holes or haunt them in search of pleasure.

Political powers were busy systematizing. Elections threatened to defeat them and kill their plans.

The prostitution of the ballot came into existence and lives and flourishes today, the primal blot on Chicago’s once honorable escutcheon!

To gain an election, to hold political and vice-power the ballot box was and is stuffed by a subtle and almost unpunishable method.

A district, by way of example, is populated by a floating and transient element, brought into Chicago by the agents of the corrupt or drawn here by promises of lucrative gain.

These men are used to stuff the ballot boxes and secure a victory of crime, sin and iniquity.

On the South Side there are scores of hotels, whose standard and character are written in unmistaken language on their very exteriors. These also exist on the West and North sides of the city.

[Pg 26]The assignation houses and the cheap lodging houses are the media for slaying the honest ballot.

Men, brought to the city to corrupt elections, register in these places under the names of prostitutes and absent inmates and under this guise, cast polluted votes.

THE BALLOT-CONTROL OF VICE.

One man on election day can easily cast ten votes under ten names of ten dissolute women, who live in the hotels under cognomens, giving initials for their first names.

One hundred men can cast 1,000 illicit votes. That is sufficient to carry an aldermanic election.

That, in a pinch, could sweep honesty from the highest office in the city, and crown a Vice Trust vassal,—mayor!

This is how the Vice Trust wields the balance of power in Chicago, a power that can crush any business, any man, can remove to the “woods” any policeman or police official who refuses to obey its decrees, and so on without limit.

Destroy this and Chicago might once more rear her head in pride. It is the clutch that sets in motion all the machinery of evil.

Wreck that clutch and the delicate, subtle mechanism of concerted crime would disintegrate.

Chicago is blind to the terrible evil of the plethoric ballot box, but the eyes of thousands are being slowly opened.

[Pg 27]The “prostitute-repeating” system is but one of the means employed to gain and sustain political control. Hundreds of other methods are in vogue today and working their evil effects.

“Stamp out Vice and Evil. Eliminate the red-lighted, tinsel Houses of Shame; give our city to God.”

Oh, ye with eyes that see not, and ears that are deaf to the voices of hell, strike now and strike hard.

But strike not at the thousands of fallen women, nor at the brothel keepers, nor at the dive owners, nor at the panderers, not yet, at least.

Break the power that begins and ends at the ballot box. Break the power that sucks at the veins of the myriad army of the lost, and lives on the white ways of decency.

In showing the Unbroken Circle of Iniquity we have shown where the control of crime is begotten.

And now the parts, interlocked so finely that the connecting points are lost, are to be revealed.

Once political power is assured, all else is inevitable by the nature of things.

THE POLICE COLLECTORS.

The political power finds its agents. They are of necessity, the police. Willing spirits are found.

The guardians of the law and public safety are hired out by the political kings to collect their tolls from their sycophants and vassals.

Chicago policemen, high and low,—we venture to say eighty per cent of them,—are today by virtue of the collection and tribute system the confederates of every species of criminal, of every exploiter of every known kind of vice.

Vice and crime must pay its tribute to the police. The police must turn over the bulk of the proceeds to their political masters. No criminal can continue in his nefarious business without paying the price. It is called Police Protection.

That is the blind. In reality it is Political Protection. The police are but the body guard, the secret service of the corrupt—

Under Police Protection, for so many dollars per day, according to the nature of the crime-business being carried on, every form of vice flaunts itself in the face of Chicago’s 2,000,000 inhabitants and its thousands of country visitors.

It is no secret. Chicago knows. But she has failed to observe the reason, and to open her eyes is the mission of this book.

THE PRICE OF CRIME:—$15,000,000 A YEAR!

From the army of vice the yearly tribute to the Directorate of Ten—the controlling power—is almost unbelievable.

We are not dealing with the thieving contractors who rob the citizens through fixed contracts. We treat only of the crime that the police are sworn to slay.

$15,000,000 put into the coffers of men supposed to be representing the people that the donors may go on destroying the souls and bodies of women, the souls and bodies of men!

That astounding offering to appease the human Juggernauts and to sow in the youths and maidens of our nation the seeds of incurable diseases!

That sum in the blood-stained hands of demagogues to blast a city’s decency and prosperity and to eat into the very vitals of our Republic!

In small envelopes, dirty and diseased, bacteria-bearing paper money and grimy silver are handed in the dark or the light to policemen or outside collectors to be turned over to the Directorate of Ten.

Let the figure $15,000,000 in tribute burn into[Pg 30] the recesses of your brain if you would realize the gigantic and almost indescribable character of crime in Chicago.

It is estimated that the $15,000,000 annual vice tribute is less than half a year’s aggregate earnings.

A VICE CAPITAL OF FLESH AND BLOOD.

But the capital in this business is not so many dollars. It is human flesh, human souls, human blood! Can they be measured in dollars?

There is no capital in this hideous trust that stands in banks. The real capital must be turned over and over. The exhausted bodies of men and women fill the incurable disease wards of the hospital, the crippled and broken down inhabit the shacks of the tenements, and thousands are buried in paupers’ graves.

There is nothing but the world of infamy. Nothing but the aching, diseased bodies of women. Nothing but the outraged purity of childhood. Nothing but the toiling, unrestrained passions of fiends. Nothing but the lust that is insatiable, the desire that fattens on the poisons it eats.

After years of investigation, acquiring information from politicians, police officials and their subordinates, gamblers, habitues of the levees, and nearly[Pg 31] five hundred more vassals of the vice trust, we have placed the protection figure at $15,000,000.

Attorney W. W. Wheelock, counsel for the Civil Service Commission and the man who attempted to break up the Vice-Police-Political graft combine, in speaking of this subject, said:

“I have as yet only scratched the veneer and the surface of this terrifying evil, but the results have made me reel in horror and amazement. At this time I estimate that the yearly graft is $15,000,000.

“The true figure, when all things are considered, must run far above that. It is evident that at least eighty per cent of the police, at some time or other, are grafters. The system of tribute and graft burrows into every legitimate pursuit and finds some undreamed of channel of graft.”

And Ellis Geiger, an alderman, made an astounding statement in full council session, when the subject of appropriation to aid in the police graft investigation was before that body. He said:—

“From the reports of investigators and men who have knowledge of conditions in our city, vice pays tribute of $15,000,000 annually to the police for its liberty of existence.”

Both these men are citizens of high repute, men of intelligence and understanding. Both have placed the vice-graft at a tremendous figure, but they have not carefully studied all the sources of collection. These when considered, make $15,000,000 a very conservative estimate.

[Pg 32]What must be the murderous heart and the demon’s soul of a monster that is willing to pay such a price to wallow in the trough of moral filth and physical bestiality!

THE EVILS OF A WORLD IN A MELTING POT.

“Name a vice, a crime, a sin, that was known from the Beginning to the present day, and I’ll show it to you in Chicago today.”

Several years ago when the agents of the system were bolder in their depravity, a “guide” stood outside the Polk street depot, waited for the “gentlemen of the long green” and excited curiosity by the above pronouncement.

“I will show you not only every crime, but I will tell you the price of its existence paid to members of Chicago’s police department, and other collectors of the Vice Trust.”

Salient shows, obscene amusement houses, houses of prostitution, segregated and otherwise, fashionable “flats” in choice neighborhoods, dens of reeking infamy for the congregation of humanity’s lowest dregs, rendezvous for degenerate white women and negro men, clubs and resorts where degeneracy in its most revolting forms are practiced, professional beggars, rich pickpockets, pretty shoplifters, leering[Pg 33] street-walkers, cocaine, morphine and opium dens, fake palmists and fortune tellers, and gambling in its hundreds of luring, deceptive forms.

That is Chicago’s generic crime list. If we omit, name the sin and it can be found. That is the army that pays the graft to the police and other creatures of the Vice Trust.

Then, there are walking the streets of Chicago, known to the police, a score of bomb throwers, men under pay of the gamblers, who have the police as partners, who threw over half a hundred bombs that destroyed nearly $1,000,000 worth of property.

THE UNDERWORLD CONTRIBUTORS.

Five thousand women, offered as slaves on the auction block of prostitution, give their lives to make up the hellish tolls.

More than five hundred keepers of houses of ill fame contribute their blood-dripping dollars.

Owners of five hundred “flats” or assignation houses pay their “life-price.”

We have said that every form of evil exists. We shall show in this book the amounts of money paid by the minions and promoters of each vice for police and political protection.

Our figures are accurate. They are founded on the statements of men who once paid blood-money[Pg 34] to live. They are the prices demanded by the Vice Trust today.

Cold figures are set down by the over lords; cold dollars are paid by the lawless. Failure to pay means ruin. Grace is rarely given. The new man or woman seeking to open a vice-business must pay a high entrance fee to the political powers. Their protection price is always higher than that exacted from the “old timers.” The more hideous the crime-business the higher the protective compensation for it. The greater the profits accruing, the more the weight of the gold and silver poured into the coffers of the corrupt politicians and their allies.

In the white palaces of hidden sin, where degeneracy boasts of its infamous acts, and where men of wealth and women of fashion congregate to turn loose their insane lusts without fear of detection or restraint, the price of existence runs into the thousands of dollars.

In several vice emporiums, fitted as sumptuously as the homes of millionaires on Lake Shore Drive, the protection for traffic in white, delicate and beautiful bodies of young girls is $1,000 a month!

From the elegantly furnished roulette parlor to the den of quarreling, cursing negroes in the “black belt,”—from the highest place of gaming to the[Pg 35] lowest—the price to go on filching thousands of men and women is paid, and paid willingly.

THE WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC ANDS ITS LIFE-PRICE.

The White Slave Traffic—the most infamous, foulest, lowest and destructive feature of Chicago’s wickedness,—pays a terrible price to the lords of the underworld.

Police protection is granted it at terrible risk to the police and politicians themselves. For this reason the price is high.

The buying, by insidious means, of thousands of pure, trusting and innocent girls, the casting of them into the horrifying flesh markets and the auctioning of them to infamous, polluted and brutal slave masters and mistresses for a blood price.

It is the desecration of virginal sanctity. The bartering of women-souls for dollars.

It is the tearing away of beautiful girls from their parents and the fireside, and the thrusting of them into living hells.

Of this evil and its relation to the Vice Trust we shall speak at length in a separate chapter.

PROTECTION PRICES OF ALL VICES.

And now here are some startling figures. We will tabulate them, so they will leave their proper impression.

[Pg 37]Such is the record of vice and crime and it is not complete. Such is the record as it appears on the debtors’ pages of the Vice Trust.

Hundreds of petty forms of infamy have a price. Other crime-trades pay, but the prices cannot be learned or estimated, so intricate are the workings of the vicious combine.

The trust has the secret blood price. Investigation by the state, city and particularly the federal government, has shown its existence. The monthly figure must be upwards of $10,000.

SIDE ISSUES IN THE VICE GRAFT.

Nothing is consumed by the slaves of crime, nothing is used or even wasted that does not hand over its pittance to the avaricious over lords.

We shall give specific instances of the far-reaching, grasping power of the trust to collect.

In the South side “redlight” district but one brand of whiskey can be sold today.

Because a politician has the controlling interest in the manufacture and sale of a certain brand of whiskey. Therefore, that is the kind of whiskey sold. It is as logical as all things in the harmonious and well-oiled system. No keeper of a house of ill fame, no bloated, blear-eyed saloonkeeper of the district would offer any other brand. Wisely, if not[Pg 38] honestly, another capitalist of the vice-corporation has bought up a cigarette concern. He makes and sells a poisonous, brain and moral-destroying cigarette. Ask for cigarettes in any den of infamy in the levees of the city, and this brand will be forced on you. Perhaps if you strongly protest, you can obtain some other brand, but your protest must be loud and insistent.

Once more is evidenced the overwhelming, overreaching power of operative and unified lawlessness.

Another member of the Trust has sunk his crime-tainted dollars into a taxi-cab concern. The corporation must yield a profitable harvest.

Result: The man, who after satisfying his lust and passions, drunk with the wine he has paid dearly for, and exhausted from a repulsive debauch, is put into a taxi-cab and driven away from a “redlight” resort. That taxi-cab belongs, through invested capital, to a member of the Crime Directorate. Again the shadow of the monster.

If a business man engages in the manufacture of gambling paraphernalia he looks for a market,—usually the saloon or dive. When he seeks contracts he is told:

He sees him. He pays him, and then he installs his machines at will, even over the protest of resort keepers.

Hundreds of pounds of opium are smuggled into Chicago yearly. The opium dens pay their protection[Pg 39] price, but long before that the policeman has held out his hand behind his back, accepted the graft from the “importer” and sent him on to sow a slow death to thousands through the petals of the poppy bud.

THE QUACK DOCTORS OF CHICAGO.

The city is overrun with quack doctors. Sensational and horrifying signs adorn their windows, they advertise their “cures” in the columns of the daily newspapers. They are the destroyers of health instead of the givers of strong physiques and clear minds. Their prey is, in the most part, out-of-town men and women and the illiterate of the city, who suffer, or fear they are the victims of unmentionable diseases.

Far from it. They pay a stipend from the fee wrung from the unfortunates who enter their laboratories of crime.

The professional bondsmen, usually “lieutenants” or friends of the men “higher up” are useful assets in times of emergency. When the outlook is dull, when the collection days are far away, they do good service, aided by members of the police department.

Suppose an unfortunate cesspool has failed to meet its obligations to the vice lords. As a result the police are ordered by the “powers” to raid it. They do so. At least a score of men are caught in the net. The professional bondsman signs their bonds[Pg 40] at a price ranging from $5 to $25 each. The bondsman retains a small percentage, as also the police. The rest goes to the vice rulers.

THE KIMONA TRUST AND THE VAMPIRE TRUST.

The light, cheap and thin apparel worn by the lost women of the dens of pollution contribute their small share to buy diamonds for the vice-magnates.

There is a vice-asset called the “Kimona Trust.” Every stitch of clothing worn by the women denizens of the underworld is made and sold by its agents.

The Vampire Trust is one of the novelties of Chicago’s crime-world. It is of recent creation. It is a subsidiary corporation of the “big combine.”

One hundred women, it is estimated, form its rank and file. They are women of luring, attractive appearance, insidious “good-fellows,” smartly educated and vice’s students of human nature.

Like vultures they prey on Chicago’s wealthy visitors. They infest the lobbies, restaurants and cafés of Chicago’s most exclusive hotels. They search out their victims, wile them away from business cares by sensuous charms, take them “slumming,” drug them and rob them.

Then, too, there is the “hotel thieves combine.” It is estimated that more than $1,000 worth of valuables is stolen from the hotels in a month.

Bell boys are numbered among the hotel thieves. The police watch them and follow them to the “fences”—the places where the stolen property is sold for less than one half its value. Once more the trust does its work. The “fence” manager must pay tribute or go to jail. He pays, of course.

WHEN AND WHERE WILL IT END?

It is not brutal, primitive, disorganized, heterogenous vice and crime, such as inoculated nations that crumbled to decay; it is systematized, organized, commercialized corruption.

THE MEAGER PURCHASE-PRICE OF POLICEMEN’S SOULS.

The police department in a large majority is corrupted. But the evil hides behind that body. It would be like paring a corn to destroy that body. The root is still imbedded in the flesh.

The honest policeman is but a plaything. If he wanders into a vice king’s district he is tried out. If found wanting in rottenness his transfer is effected. A more plastic man is found to fill his place.

The police department has sold its soul of honor for a mess of decaying pottage.

It is estimated that of the $15,000,000 in graft annually, the corrupt members of the department receive but ten per cent.

They do the slave’s work, the pander’s work, etc., for a bagful of blood-dripping dollars!

THE BATTLE OF GOODNESS WITH THE POWERS OF HELL.

A saint might sit in the seat of power,—the Mayor’s chair—and be powerless to stem the evil.

He is the creation of an election. Vice is the creation of satanic wisdom and diabolical cunning.

The Mayor of the city is battling against the sea of iniquity about him. He has appointed municipal physicians to cut out the moral cancer that is rapidly destroying the city. God speed this noble work.

Justice has scarcely any way of reaching these criminals. They create their own power, build the citadel of crime and vice about them and dwell securely within.

[Pg 43]To save herself Chicago needs a new civic conscience or the stimulation of a latent one.

Chicago needs leaders,—men willing to become martyrs for the sake of their city, their children and their children’s children.

A general awakening to the gigantic, monstrous evil is the only palpable salvation.

Destroy corrupt political power and the victory is won. Then the police force will fulfill the object of its creation. Then concerted crime and vice will fall to pieces. Then the glaring plague spots of assembled infamy will be dissipated. Then we will have a city after God’s own heart and man’s best desires.

We are telling the truth to create public and saving opinion, to destroy lethargy and inoculate the germ of activity.

CHICAGO!—TAKE WARNING, YOU WHO ENTER!

Chicago today is an unsafe city. Although first in the world in progressiveness, it is first in rottenness.

Thousands of young women of the country come, live and die victims of its iniquity, day after day, year after year.

An army of young men, fired by dreams of great futures, enter and are defiled, and slain by the poisons that are disseminated.

[Pg 44]Shall it go on interminably:—this reign of the triumvirate-Vice-Graft-Corruption?

Back of the ruin of world-nations, if stripped to an ultimate cause, is the one word—Vice.

Its grip is on Chicago; a stronger grip than any other city of the world has ever felt. Our life-blood is thinning; the flesh of our bones is wasting. The crucial hour is here.

Save Chicago from a record on history’s page of “Forgotten and Ruined Cities, Victims of Sin and Crime.”

Let the ministerial forces fight for the betterment. Let them seize the leaderships.

WHY THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN.

In this little volume each page is a sign post of warning, for the Chicago man and woman, and particularly, for those who visit or intend visiting this city.

This book is not a mere setting forth of facts without explanation of the reason for their existence.

It is a clear, truthful analysis of crime, vice and graft from every standpoint.

It is the first story, as far as we are aware, of the monstrous Vice-Graft system.

We have given a general outline of crime and its relation to the conscienceless, fattening Trust.

In the later chapters we shall treat of the hideous and most important evils of the city, in detail.

[Pg 45]The “Debauchery of the Ballot,” the “redlight” districts and their machinery and thousands of ruined women, the White Slave Traffic, the gambling games and their alliance with the police, the “Vampire Trust,” petty crimes that flourish, buried plague spots of the city, and other startling features in the kingdom of crime will be separately and truthfully treated.

CHAPTER II.

The Sacredness of the Ballot—Its Corruption by the Vice Trust—Methods of Corruption—Affidavits Showing Corruption—A Cleansed Ballot Box—A Cleansed City.

American advancement has its foundation in the principles of government by the people, for the people and of the people.

Every American citizen, in theory at least, is an ideal autocrat. He is the judge of his personal conduct; the maker of his surroundings; the master in his home; the ruler of his nation by his power of representative government.

Individual right to create a governing power is an American citizen’s first prerogative.

The most sacred thing in the mechanism of self-government of the United States,—is the Ballot Box.

Tamper with the ballot box and you aim a body blow at the constitution of the United States.

Chicago is a seething mass of corruption, vice, graft and iniquity today, as has been generally shown in the first chapter. That must be admitted.

The Vice Trust rules supreme. It is almost impregnable. The secret of that herculean strength and power is—

Not more than ten men, powers in the political world, by insidious methods have poisoned it, killed its political value for municipal betterment, and made it the armament of their corrupt forces. With its aid they have built up the monstrous Vice combine, and with it they retain year after year the sceptre of vicious tyranny.

Investigations have proven the debauchery of the ballot. Investigators have shown that the corrupted ballot box has won disastrous, political victories. Investigation has demonstrated that all the forces of moral-decaying vice have been used to destroy the honesty of the ballot, so that vice might flourish and pay its tribute to its sleek-faced, big-bellied masters.

It is our intention to show in this chapter how the debauched ballot box is the secret power of the forces that make Chicago the wickedest city in the world.

Granted the necessary political despotism to rule[Pg 49] and pass sentence of life and death on good and bad, what opportunity have the powers for good to destroy the parasite?

40,000 ILLEGAL BALLOTS IN ONE YEAR.

From reliable sources, and from information gained by investigating bodies backed by the reform element, 40,000 illegal names stand on the poll-list of the city!

This is the heavy, moral and political-destroying artillery of the vice generals. This is the battalion that drops “yes” in the ballot box to make vice supreme.

It is composed of the riffraff of humanity, of the wreckage and driftwood of the country.

Every member sells his citizenship for a piece of silver, a poisonous drink, a mess of pottage.

They are the army of “floaters” and “repeaters,” who are massed, housed and fed in the regions of the vice lords, a week or two before elections, and proclaim their unholy allegiance to their masters by the prostitution of the ballot box and the overthrow of clean, honest, moral government.

Each man has a past;—vice wrecked the moral conscience of some, brutal crime destroyed respect in others and drink slew the convictions of still other thousands.

They infest, in the large majority, those political territories where crime and vice are centered.

[Pg 50]The means of defeating an honest election and securing politico-vice control are many.

CHARACTER OF THE VICE CORPS; ITS WORK.

Every hobo, degenerate and criminal at large, knows when Chicago’s elections come due. From Maine to Washington, from Florida to Northern Michigan comes the immigration to Chicago.

Six hundred lodging houses and cheap hotels in the First, Eighteenth and Twenty-first wards—the vice territories of the city—throw open their doors to the hired assassins of the ballot.

The barrel-houses, whiskey halls and underground hells furnish the nutrition for the human vultures.

That is part of their agreement of existence. They, too, are concerned. A defeat of their rulers would mean financial ruin and the loss of a channel to protection for their crime doings.

Soaked with destructive liquor, fed with de-energizing food the “floaters” and “repeaters” wallow in the mire, waiting to do their filthy service and then depart.

The sub-leaders of these men are the appointed guardians of the ballot, clerks and judges of election, principally.

They, too, are corrupt. Recent elections have even resulted in fixing election crimes on them and sending some to jail.

[Pg 51]The question, “Shall this city (Chicago) become anti-saloon territory?” was to have been placed on the ballot, April 5, 1910. Sixty-eight saloonkeepers and bartenders qualified as judges and clerks for this election. No “floater” or “repeater” would have been prevented from voting by these clerks and judges.

PADDED ELECTION REGISTERS.

In the primary election, held September 15, 1910, one third of the vote cast in the First ward was made by “repeaters” or personators, in the names of individuals who did not live at the addresses from which they were recorded as voting.

This terrible condition was unearthed by investigators working for Arthur Burrage Farwell, president of the Chicago Law and Order League. This fact was ascertained by a comparison of the poll books used at the primary with the records of a house-to-house canvass of the ward.

In March of that year the same reform organization caused the erasure of 702 illegal names from the registry books of the notorious First ward. In a single precinct in that ward, with a registration of 668, 269 names were those of “floaters” and “repeaters.” These were stricken off.

Investigation before that September primary in the First Ward showed 10,996 names on the registry list. It also showed that 5,552 of the names were of persons who did not live at the addresses given, but who cast their purchased ballots at the primary election!

[Pg 52]Similar conditions exist in the other lodging house wards, previously mentioned, and also known as the “river” wards, because they are separated by the Chicago river, the last resting place of many revolters from the system.

THE PROSTITUTE: A MASK FOR THE “FLOATER.”

Three hundred and twenty hotels, whose occupants are mainly prostitutes and their unfortunate victims, are used to render honest elections impossible.

The “floater” is called into the corner of the barrel-house and given the “dope” by the boss’ lieutenant.

His name is “Panhandle” Harry for instance. He is told that on election day his names are successively, M. Graham, L. Wilson, B. Smith, etc. He is to use his suddenly acquired aliases at different precincts.

He is to cast one, two, three or perhaps ten votes for the vice lords. He does so. Hundreds like him do so.

For each name he has an address of the prostitute’s name he bears, for that is the subterfuge. Her name with but an initial for the maiden name appears on the register of the hotel. It is sold to the man who sells himself and then sells his vote.

Carter H. Harrison was a candidate for Mayor. He sent a printed note of appreciation signed with a printed autograph to the registered voters of the[Pg 53] First ward in which he urged attendance at the primaries. Of course, Mr. Harrison, himself, did not do this. His supporters did it with permission for the use of his name.

One of these went to a notorious woman living in the Cadillac hotel, Wabash avenue and Twenty-second street. That is on the edge of the South side “redlight” district.

That woman’s name had been placed on the registry list as hundreds of others had been, by “repeaters”!

The woman who received the letter was puzzled. She showed it to the man for whom she daily sold her body for hire. The mystery of the prostitute subterfuge was revealed.

There are sixty-three women living in the Cadillac hotel. It is certain that each one casts a vote by the proxy system explained, for the existence of the hellish combine.

THE LODGING HOUSE PERIL.

In one lodging house in the Eighteenth Ward there is room to accommodate 200 men.

During the lapses between elections but 75 to 100 men occupy these unsanitary quarters. At election they are crowded.

The occupants of these rooms are then registered under meaningless names and cast ballots.

[Pg 54]A majority of the men who count the ballots in these wards are also corrupt. They help the stuffing of the ballot boxes. They are the supposed defenders of the greatest privilege given to the American citizen;—that of self rule. They are in reality, the slaves of the Vice Trust.

Occasionally the regular residents of the lodging houses work at employments that they secure through the licensed labor agencies. But, no matter how great the demand may be for laborers, no agency dares furnish these men with work just previous to elections. What agent will deny that to send voters out on the road to work at election time would mean ruin through the loss of his license to do business?

As a specific proof of our statement of the debauchery of Chicago’s ballot-box, we print below the affidavit of a young man who voted six times at the primary on September 15, 1910.

The affidavit is one of a score secured by Mr. Farwell of the Chicago Law and Order League.

I, James Barnes, residing at 419 State street, being first duly sworn, of my own free will and accord upon my oath depose and say:

That on Thursday, September 15, 1910, I and Frank Burns, and one Smith whose first name is to me unknown, were standing at the corner of Clark and Van Buren streets, when a man, a heavy set fellow with iron-gray mustache, Hackett, by name, a hanger-out at Kenna’s saloon, north-east corner of[Pg 55] Van Buren and Clark streets, asked us if we were doing any voting. I said no. He said that he could take the three of us over and vote us and that he would pay us 50c a piece and give us a couple of cigars each. We said we didn’t want to take any chances. He said it was all fixed up—that he would give us the names we were to vote under and go down with us and tell them it was all right. He gave us the names, typewritten on a plain envelope, of which he had a pocket-full.

Burns and I went with him to the polling place on Clark street, between Jackson and Van Buren streets, down in the basement. (4th Precinct, 1st Ward, within 300 feet of the Union League Club.) He went down stairs with us. There were two or three others waiting to vote. We gave the names we had—I voted under the name of T. M. Hayes, 99 Van Buren street. Hackett told the man in charge of ballots to give me a Democratic ticket. He did so. I then went into the booth and was followed by another man who said he would fix it up for me and he marked the ticket, told me to fold it and take it out and vote it. He had small gray mustache, gray hair, forty-eight or fifty years old, gray suit. I gave the ballot to the man at the ballot box who took it and put it in the box. I then went out and the man who marked the ticket went up stairs with me and said to me, “Go down to the corner and meet the other fellow,” meaning the man who took me down, Hackett. I met him by the Princess Hotel doorway.[Pg 56] He took me inside the hallway and gave me half a dollar and two cigars—ten centers.

I voted again in about half an hour under the name of Henry C. Williams, 99 Van Buren street (same ward and precinct), under same conditions as before and got seventy-five cents the second time, as he had no more cigars. He took two other fellows down while we waited for him.

He later told me to go with another man, a big heavy set man in a gray suit who told me that if I would hunt up two or three other fellows he would give me an extra half dollar. He offered a dollar for votes. I got one fellow for him and another lad got three or four. Six of us went over to LaSalle and Adams, where we were halted in the alley and two at a time taken to the polling place at 146 LaSalle street, in a basement bookstore where I voted under the name of William Johnson, 172 Madison street (2nd Precinct, 1st Ward). The big man gave us the names on an envelope and a sample ballot marked as we should vote. It was a Democratic ticket. At the door of the polling place we met another man who went in with us. I gave the name assigned, asked for instructions and the judge told the man who went down with us to go down and help me. He went in with me and marked the ballot. I did not even open the sample ballot. When I came back to the alley the man gave me a dollar and also gave the other man who went with me to vote a dollar.

I then went back to Van Buren and Clark and met a man from the West side who said he wanted[Pg 57] twenty or twenty-five men to go over there. There were seven or eight of us went over together and I voted at the corner of Sangamon and Madison streets, under the name of Danford Stowe, 27 North Sangamon street (Pct. 11, 18th Ward). We went in three at a time. We got the names from an old man who had them written on a slip. We had to remember them as he gave out no printed or written names. I was paid a dollar after I voted by the man who gave me the names.

We then went up the street and were told to ask for “George”; we went west three or four blocks and I voted under the name of Gordon Seymour, 19 Bishop Court; the polling place was on Madison street in rear of a barber shop. We asked for “George” and were directed to a man who stood on the corner with a poll list. He gave me the name of Gordon Seymour (Pct. 5, 18th Ward). The fellow with me was given the name of James A. Sharp, 22 Bishop Court. I don’t remember whether or not it was Democrat or Republican ticket but think it was Republican. George went in with us and marked the ballot. He then took both of us and gave us a dollar a piece. The saloon was full of men. A man there had another list.

George wanted us to go in and vote again but we refused to go back to the same place again. He then sent us down to the “brick-layers hall” on Monroe street where we asked for Barney who gave me the name of Sheldon. The polling place was across the street from the brick-layer’s hall. Barney took us to[Pg 58] the door. Another fellow went in with us and marked the ticket. Barney took us into a saloon and bought a drink for us and paid us each a dollar.

Other affidavits show that three men voted thirteen times in the fourth precinct of the First Ward. The Union League Club, one of the largest and most influential clubs in the country, stands in the center of that district.

While the members sat and discussed a renovated city, cleansed of graft, crime and vice, these crimes against every upright citizen were being committed.

ILLEGAL VOTING COSTS MAYORALTY.

Edward F. Dunne, former Mayor, declared that his recent defeat for nomination as mayor for another term was due, in part, to illegal votes cast at the primaries in the First Ward.

“Over 2,600 affidavits for registration were filed for men in the First Ward. These men all voted at the primary, February 28, 1911. On March 14, registration day for the election, less than a month from the day the affidavits were filed, about 800 out of the 2,600 who registered by affidavit, appeared at the polling places to register for the election. This was[Pg 59] due to the vigilance of reform organizations which centered their efforts on that ward.

“The inference is plain. Nearly 1,800 votes were registered for the primary by men not eligible to vote and who dared not face the challengers for the forces of good.”

And that is the result of seventy-four years of effort to build a city for the welfare, happiness and advancement of its inhabitants!

MR. FARWELL ON THE BALLOT CRIME.

“Chicago has never faced a graver problem,” declares Mr. Farwell. Vice, crime and graft are heinous offenses in the body municipal, but they are secondary to the debauchery of the ballot.

“Corrupt that and you sweep all things to ruin. Honest elections mean honest officials and the end of vice conditions. You cannot solve the social problems nor remedy the social wrongs until you have cleansed the ballot box of its pollution. I believe that today 50,000 illegal names stand on Chicago’s election books. That means 50,000 votes for crime, graft and ultimate ruination.”

THE LAW ABETS EVIL.

[Pg 60]The Vice Trust evidently had a hand in the creation of that travesty on justice. The tentacles of the octopus reach into Springfield, the State capital!

To the agents of the Vice Trust who pay tainted dollars for votes, freedom and prosperity!

To the starving, human wretches, forgetful of their birthrights, who sell their votes for the price of food or drink—shame and prison cells!

IN CONCLUSION.

That is the source whence comes the power to create, foster and nourish vice and crime.

THE POLICE FORCE, ASSISTING IN SUCKING THE STAGNANT BLOOD FROM THE CITY’S LEVEES, MIGHT BE SWEPT AWAY BY A WAR OF PROTEST AND REFORM, BUT THE EVIL WOULD GROW ANEW.

New agents could be speedily found. The foundry where the iron manacles for the vice-slaves are forged, would still exist.

Guard the ballot box night and day; wipe out the padded registry list; arrest the thousands of “floaters” and “repeaters”; compel prostitutes to register their full names to show their sex; and send to prison the corrupt judges and clerks of election; send to the workpiles the buyers of votes, and you will strike a fatal blow at the Vice Trust.

Because the ballot box remains debauched, the Vice Trust exists. Because it exists, Chicago is a cesspool of the world’s mingled corruptions.

CHAPTER III.

The Cafe Evil—The Rich Man’s Girl Trap—The Borderland of Hell—Crimes that Thrive by Night—State Street and Its Pitfalls—The Stages of Sin.

It is night. Over the city of 2,000,000 souls is the light of God’s stars and the pale moon.

Innocent children are tucked into their little, white beds. The kiss from loving lips goes with them into the land of dreams. The future has no terror for them, because they know not.

He is hungry for his victims. They have been fattened for him. The hour has come for the nightly sacrifice on the altars of debauchery.

Right across from where God’s and man’s laws are administered in the County Courthouse, a stone’s throw from one of the oldest churches in Chicago, we shall stop.

It is George Silver’s “Rialto.” It is one of the most popular cafes of its kind in Chicago. It is a place where human souls are valued for just the worth of the body’s hire. An alderman is said to be part owner of this place.

It is a typical example of the hundreds of drinking places for men and women that are found in Chicago.

Virtue is slain there every night. Hearts are broken there and lives ruined. It is no worse than other places of the same type.

On a raised dais, a bent-over consumptive looking young man plays a piano. The airs are the popular hits of the day.

A pale-faced youth wipes his purple lips after a hasty sip at a beer glass and advancing to the front of the dais sings a song, usually of sensuous import.

He is extravagantly applauded. He is “sent up” a drink by some pleased patron.

There are more than one hundred tables. At each table sit at least one man and one woman.

In every woman’s face, if you are observant, is[Pg 65] written a tragedy, either beginning that night, or in its unfolding or finished years before.

Do you see that “washed-out” bleached blonde with colorless eyes, who smiles at the drinking youth who sits with her? She has lived through the tragedy. Life to her is but an aftermath of unending agony.

The monster Vice has long ago sucked the life blood from her veins. She has been discarded. She lives from day to day on her passing victims.

They are usually unsophisticated youths, proud to sit with her, buy her more poison and peril their young lives by contact with her.

She is coughing. That is the warning signal she knows well but attempts to forget. It is the signal that death has placed his hands upon her. She has fulfilled her mission. Hell must claim its own.

She is a favorite among men. A much-sought after girl on the border line of womanhood.

Her blood flows fast; her pulse thrills her; her thoughts burn with pleasing fire.

She learned the secrets of the girl who worked beside her; how she purchased the “good things” of life.

The path is still one of beauty and fascination. The tragedy is in its inception.

The bright eyes will become dull, the sweet voice harsh, the cheeks pale, the face haggard.

The wine shall have been sipped. Nothing then but the bitter dregs! Oh, the horror of that approaching tragedy!

An early grave, a house of prostitution or an insane asylum! There is rarely ever a turning back.

THE FIRST STEP.

“Dearie, don’t be afraid of that. Really, it’s like a ‘soft’ drink. It won’t make you drunk.”

He is leaning over the table;—a gray-haired, fashionably dressed man. The young girl he is talking to, is not more than sixteen years of age.

[Pg 67]Her face is white. Her eyes are like those of a hunted deer. Her hands tremble.

The fiendish brute induces her to take the drink. You see her take another. She seems suddenly to become stupid.

Somewhere a little, gray-haired mother prays that her daughter may be protected from the sins of a great city.

There is an unfathomable abyss waiting for that girl, a chasm in the depths of which lurk torture, sin, disease and death.

In that cafe all is levity and enjoyment. It is a living in the present, a forgetfulness of the past, a shutting of the eyes to the terrors of the unborn future.

In one night while the music pleases the senses, while song brings an ephemeral joy, while drink quickens the pulse, while the atmosphere lulls the conscience to sleep, innocent young girls, barely out of school, are inoculated with the poison of forbidden fruit.

Every year, hundreds of young girls, undefiled and pure, drift into the wickedest city in the world, are carried away by the glare of the “Great White Way” and the sensuous lures of the dazzling cafes and the[Pg 68] Bohemian pleasures, and become unconsciously, the recruits of the great absorbing Vice Trust.

As we pass from this cafe,—the type of hundreds of others,—note the attractive pictures on the wall,—pictures of popular actresses, actors, prizefighters and men of the world of sports.

The girl who a year ago knew comparatively nothing of the world outside of her harmless, narrow sphere, can point to the pictures and give you the names with dangerous accuracy. They are now a part of her Bohemian world. She boasts today of familiarity with them.

Late in the night, or to speak accurately, at early dawn, the cafes empty their drunken revelers into the streets. In pairs they stagger away, some to houses of assignation, others to the disorderly hotels where they live, and still others to the “redlight” districts of the city, of which we shall soon speak.

That is the cafe evil of today. It is the outward threads of the enmeshing web of the insidious and poisonous spider-Vice. Once trapped, redemption is scarcely possible.

Two hundred department store girls, according to a reform association’s statistics, take the first downward step each year, in these cafes.

It is the outside trap, with luring bait, set by the Vice Trust for the unsuspecting victims. The girls from out of the city are drawn to it for the pleasures of life because other avenues of enjoyment are not open to them. A conscious or unconscious emissary of the vice lords lures them to these cesspools, robs[Pg 69] them of their senses by subtle intoxicants and destroys that same night their virginal purity. In a night they have fallen from the highest estate to the bottomless pit of a living hell; they have been stripped of their robes of innocence and clothed in the shameful, sinful, scarlet garb of the thousands of women who have fallen before them.

No mother, no father, who kisses a daughter goodbye as she leaves the fireside to plunge into the foaming sea of Chicago life, can be certain that the child of his or her flesh and blood will return to the fireside undefiled, pure of body and clean of heart, as long as those cancers fester and flourish in the city of Chicago.

It is a sociological axiom that a nation’s integrity depends on its womanhood.

The depraved woman means the depraved man. Each night thousands of youths, full of physical strength, mental energy and ambition, seek recreation in the cafes. It is there they meet or take the lost women. It is there they wreck bright futures, sow the seed of crime, deaden their moral consciences, and contract fatal diseases and rush unthinking down the path that leads to ruin and to death.

Back of a murder, in which some young man of good parentage and of promising hopes figures as the principal, you can read the word “cafe.” It began there, it progressed, until its end meant the gallows in the court yard of the county jail.

STATE STREET AND ITS PITFALLS.

Let us leave the accursed place. We have other places to visit before the sun flares red above the waters of Lake Michigan.

We stroll down Randolph street, through Chicago’s well lighted avenues and its “Rialto” to one of the busiest thoroughfares in the world,—during the day—State street.

As we walk along we are conscious of the number of unescorted women, walking the main loop thoroughfare. We mentally comment on it.

They seem to saunter aimlessly about, jauntily swinging their purses, and looking up into your face in a questioning, puzzling manner.

These are the outposts of the great army of Vice. These are the women, stripped of the last element of self-respect, who like vultures attack their prey in the glare of the arc lights, in the face of the uniformed guardians of the law.

In the vernacular of the street, these are the privates of the army of “street-walkers.” Unblushingly they flirt with their victims, catch their eyes, draw them into a side street and quibble over the purchase price of their flesh.

There is an army of 2,000 of these women infesting the loop district and its adjoining neighborhoods[Pg 71] every night in the year. To the shady hotels within the loop or just outside of it, where no embarrassing questions are asked, these brazen prostitutes take their temporary masters.

No decent woman is safe on a downtown street after dark when alone. The haunting evil is about her wherever she goes. She is good, but the men who walk the streets do not know it and they may offer her insults at any moment.

At times the evil becomes so open that police regulations are issued, driving them from their byways of crime. Invariably within a few days, the same painted faces and expressionless eyes are to be found on the old corners, carrying on their disease-distributing trade.

These women are not free agents of evil any more than other slaves of the Vice Trust. They pay toll for every step their tired feet take during the night and the early hours of the morning. They take their victims to the cafes of which we have spoken and lure them into buying poisonous intoxicants. For every drink they bring to the house,—and they must bring many if they are to enjoy the favor of the vice lords,—they are given a commission. The “drink check” is a part of the nightly income of every woman of the underworld.

But let us pass on. We have only scratched the superficial, outer covering of the crime life of Chicago. There are a thousand more revolting sights to be seen, not for the purpose of morbid curiosity but[Pg 72] in order to prove to our readers the magnitude and the power of the Vice Trust in Chicago.

We are taking a trip through the greatest kingdom in the world, the empire of unhampered, bold-faced, threatening sin.

THE STAGES OF SIN.

As we pass down the well lighted streets of the loop district we are halted in our progress by a man standing in front of a garish-appearing theater just south of Van Buren on State street.

“Come on, I know every man here is dying to take a peep at Chicago’s only and original Salome lady! She’s inside in all her glory and all her—well, you know, Gents, the best ever. Come on, it’s a whole pile of fun for a dime. You will thrill all over when the cutest girl in the world hugs a man in a grizzly-bear wiggle!”

Strains of music float from the place and a swarm of men of all types and conditions wedge their way to the inside.

That is another of the sore spots of the big city. It is just one of hundreds of indecent forms of entertainment that have enough air of respectability about them to exist on the borders of Chicago’s loop district. Here they flourish and reap their harvest.

In such places, many a promising young man has committed, in mind at least, his first moral murder. It is in this kind of places that vice sows its first seeds—they are the first stepping stones down the[Pg 73] abyss ending at the dishonored grave. Every night young men pour out of these places with their minds poisoned and with the fiery hand of temptation on them, and from there they drift southward to the great whirlpool of iniquity, falling victims to the deadly perils about them and tasting the deadly but subtle poison for which they return until they die at the source.

Every form of indecency may be found on the small and poorly lighted stages of these theaters. Suggestive songs are sung, obscene witticism spoken, until pent up, disastrous passions burst forth with demoniacal fury and slay their own masters.

THE RICH MAN’S GIRL TRAP.

We have crossed over to Michigan avenue—to one of the main boulevards of the world. It is the promenade of men of millions and women of blood. It is the location of some of the most exclusive, most fashionable and most expensive hotels in the world.

Surely, you say, these hotels do not figure in the great vice plot which exists in Chicago?

They do! They figure in a way that will make every father and mother who reads this narration, tremble with fear and horror.

These hotels are infested with men of wealth and time, men of dead consciences, men of diseased moral senses, who are always in search of young, innocent, pretty prey for their decaying passions.

[Pg 74]Under the pretense of respectability, and with the false counsel that they are safe and protected from harm, these parasites bring their young victims to these hotels, dazzle them with the beauty and luxury about them, rob them of their senses with new and intoxicating delights, and then steal the only priceless gift that God gave them.

That is one phase of the hotel evil, as we see it from a superficial glance. There are a score of others.

In one of the leading hotels of the world, there is a great crime center. Let us enter it.

Down the corridors we walk until we enter the portals of a new vice palace. It is a cafe scene but not of the character witnessed at the place first visited. Everything bespeaks luxury. The music is subtly and softly sensuous. Obsequious waiters tread softly from table to table, taking their orders from rich patrons.

The men sitting about bear the marks of wealth and prosperity. They are money lords, feasting at the table of life and toying away the moments with women who are ready to be purchased for pretty clothes, suppers with wines, and hard, cold dollars and cents.

In the majority, the women we see, are dressed in the latest fashions, brilliant with delicately rouged faces and penciled eyebrows, set off by large and attractive picture hats.

If you study the majority of the faces you will see that they are cut as if of stone. They are faces of women who have lived through tragedies, have[Pg 75] thrust those tragedies aside and have reduced life to a mere living from day to day, prepared every hour to barter flesh and blood for cash. But, as in the less pretentious cafe, we find here also the type of girls and women who are just beginning to stray into the broad path of destruction.

Money buys a false air of respectability. It has purchased that pharasaical atmosphere for the big hotels.

It is in these fashionable hotel cafes and restaurants that sin is suggested and the road to ruin prepared. Of course, we must not lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the women who enter such places, have long since drunk the first glass of poison and eaten the first piece of forbidden fruit.

Into these places, nightly, thousands of men and women bent on shameful missions come and depart, inebriated by wines and liquors and forgetful of respect to each other. There are, however, hundreds who enter and depart without being contaminated by the vice that haunts the handsomely furnished apartments.

Out in the lobby of the hotel, we notice a nattily-dressed man of mature years with the gray showing in his hair, holding a conversation with one of the hotel attaches. We are curious. We notice he is being given directions.

We follow him to a room in one of the hotels adjoining the one we have just visited. He is taken to a certain room and is admitted by a rather flashingly dressed woman of about forty-five years, of florid complexion and sharp, raucous voice.

[Pg 76]She smiles at the man. He speaks to her in a low voice. We might overhear this conversation or one similar to it in import:

“I am Mr. Edwards from Cincinnati. I am a business man and the evening is boring. Mr. ... the hotel clerk, tells me you can find me a companion?” queries the caller.

The woman smiles knowingly, stops and thinks and then says in a half jesting manner:

“Why, certainly, Mr. Edwards. I can make the evening agreeable. I can find you the best little partner in the world.

“But”—and she smiles some more—“what do you want, something rather young and new to the game, or a ‘woman of some experience?’ I can certainly produce a choice assortment.” Then she laughs that meaningless laugh again.

Mr. Edwards hesitates a moment, laughs off a possible embarrassment and then answers in assumed flippancy:

“Oh, as long as they are numerous, serve me up a young blonde chicken of about seventeen summers, one that will go the limit and not try to put mucilage on her fingers to stick to the long green. I’ll pay her right for her trouble.”

Then he makes his first flesh payment at that moment to the mistress of a dozen women’s bodies. He strolls down to the lobby and waits. A few moments later he is “paged” by a bellboy and a note is given him. If we should follow him we would find that the note named the rendezvous and that the[Pg 77] purchased woman waited for him there to do his bidding during the night of shame.

In a Jackson boulevard hotel, there is a “Miss Harris,” who is the procuress of girls of every description, character, temperament and physical type, for men of wealth.

There are a dozen of such women with headquarters in Chicago’s big hotels. They are the fashionable panderers for the rich human beasts, who live or stop at the hotels or who go there to find their victims.

These places in the criminal world have a name. They are named “Houses of Call.” They are employment agencies for young and old prostitutes. If a man is willing to pay the price demanded, the woman, “Miss Harris,” or other such women, will produce for his pleasure, a young virgin and turn her over to the merciless, insane lust of human Satan.

These places are the fashionable flesh-markets, the slave blocks where women are sold to men of wealth.

That is another phase of the great Vice Trust, for those women panderers, and those girl slaves pay tribute to carry on their traffic to the great kings of the underworld. Of the relation of these classes of criminals to their protectors we shall speak later.

“Miss Harris”—we shall use her as a type—has a secret directory to the covert, hidden but expensive haunts of vice.

After Mr. Edwards departs, we might see another caller on a similar mission. He is not a new customer.[Pg 78] He is an old one. He makes his demand without hesitation. He wants a young girl of innocence. He wants a girl in the first flush of maturity, a girl who fears the things of sin, but who, paradoxically, craves for the cloying sweet things of life.

The girl is found for the monster. His crime must be committed in the dark, in a secure and safe place, in a place where no one shall see him committing his soul-murder.

Again “Miss Harris” comes to the front. She directs her customer with the trembling, wondering and frightened girl, to the “Arena,” a pretentious residence in Michigan avenue near Fifteenth street.

His coming is known before his arrival. “Miss Harris” has informed the “Madam” that a “live wire with a young kid” is on the way to the place. The man and his victim are received politely and ushered into a luxuriously furnished room, delicately scented with perfume and stripped of any suggestion that it is a crime-chamber where sin is intangibly present, waiting for the next victim.

The desecration of soul and body begins and ends in that room. If the man wishes it, supper with delicate morsels of food and wines of choice and expensive brands are served. The atmosphere wooes to sleep the last moral rebellion and all is lost.

The “Arena” is mentioned here as a type, again. Chicago is infested with such places. They may be found in our best residence districts, near fashionable churches and adjoining homes where purity is sacred.

[Pg 79]To state more specific facts on such places we will name several more similar “flats.”

A “Mrs. Clouds” conducts a similar place on La Salle avenue near Erie street. It is necessary to have a letter of introduction or be known before entrance can be effected. Here, nightly, men of wealth and even of prominence with wives and families, ignorant of their orgies, take young girls.

The automobiles of the wealthy drive up to this place every evening and their occupants seek their pleasure within.

Here many-course dinners with wine as a zest giver—usually champagne—are served to the patrons for $12 a plate. It is the vice haunt of the millionaires and their purchased women.

Then there is the place of Mrs. Mohr in Erie street, west of Rush street, where the same luxuries are in evidence, where the same vices are committed and where the range of prices eats deep into anything but a plethoric bank account.

These places run without intervention. They are known to few outside the patrons. They pay, as do all other forms of vice, for police toleration. Reform movements have not attacked them because they are scarcely aware of their existence. They are but a small part of the contributing elements of graft and corruption.

We have digressed, but it was necessary to show the source and end of a vice evil starting in the big hotels. In these “flats” of secrecy, girls will be[Pg 80] furnished in the same manner as they are furnished by “Miss Harris” and her ilk of panderers.

But let us resume our trip in the underworld. From the hotels, we move southward again.

THE BORDERLAND OF HELL.

Down Michigan avenue, Wabash avenue, State street, Fifth avenue and many other prominent thoroughfares leading out of the loop district, are the “assignation hotels” of Chicago. These are the houses where men bring their victims at a cost of one dollar to five dollars a room, where street walkers “steer” their customers and where vice festers with the roar of the business world outside the windows.

Within the loop district alone there are fifty hotels of this vicious character. Their average earnings, according to a prominent investigator and reformer, are $600 a night. As we move southward we pass them at every step, little dreaming of the lives that have been ruined within and the tragedies that have begun and culminated there.

The part of the South side in which we have entered was at one time a fashionable neighborhood of wealthy and respectable residents. The Vice Trust drove them away by its encroachments. Today those same buildings are tenanted by lost women, living there and carrying on their nefarious trade in the district but a short distance away.

From Twentieth street south on Michigan avenue, in sections, and in Wabash avenue and State street, vice reigns openly and supreme. There is no pretense[Pg 81] at respectability. Vice has thrown off its masks and flaunts its hideousness, its diseases and its crimes in our faces.

It is the Borderland of Hell,—it is the city’s death-spot. Similar borderlands are found on the West and North sides.

As you look farther south you can count the electric signs flaring over the haunts of vice—they spell saloon, cafe or hotel. They run into the hundreds.

The interiors of these cafes are similar to the loop cafe we have described, stripped of its air of hidden sin. Here sin stalks about as the fearless master.

The woman who a year ago reveled in the pleasures of a night at some fashionable restaurant with a “friend” may be found drunk and maudlin, vulgarly and cheaply clothed, dropping “dope” into her glass of whiskey to revive her tired brain and body to attract another victim and stave off the wolf of starvation a little while longer.

These are the “hangouts” of the women who are going down and down. They have ceased to attempt to appear respectable; they have tired of hiding their shame and infamy; they have torn off the mask and their faces peer leeringly at you and their blue-colored lips seem to cry out in hellish abandon:

“I am a damned, lost creature. I sold my birthright. I bartered the body my good mother gave me. I drank to the last lees the glass and I am accursed. Death has placed his seal upon me and I am struggling to cheat him of a few days longer. Life, life, more life!”

[Pg 82]Here women smoke cigarettes openly, embrace the men they are with, expose their limbs in licentious manner to attract prospective customers. Here a sign is made, and a half drunken waiter brings a half crazed creature sitting alone in the shadows of a pillar, a white powder, which she snuffs. That is cocaine.

A majority of the women who live in and about the levee districts of the city, are the slaves of the opium, cocaine and morphine habit, and fourteen per cent, according to a conservative estimate, are yearly sent to the state insane institutions as hopeless victims of drugs.

In the “near-levee” cafes we come across a vice-creature, whose type we have not yet encountered in our night tour.

Watch that young man, dressed in a stylish, brown suit of clothes, who is talking to the painted unfortunate beside him. His voice rises as he shakes his finger at her. Her hand trembles as she reaches down in her stocking. He curses her and tells her to hurry. Then she gives him a number of bills.

“Damn you, you cheap cur; have you quit hustling or have you another man?” he yells at her above the jarring music of a tin-pan piano and the cigarette voice singing to it.

“Get out on the street and get some business!” he says to her hoarsely, striking her across the face.

Pale and trembling the pitiful creature rises and hurries out into the street to search for more prey.

That man is the woman’s “cadet.” That is the more[Pg 83] polite word for the old word “pimp.” That is her master:—the man who takes from her the infamous earnings of her body.

Lower than the murderer, in the moral scale, are these debased creatures. They are men stripped of every instinct of honor, lost to every sense of shame. They are the lowest form of the human parasite.

In the borderland of the levee they live, breathe, eat and drink off the earnings of thousands of depraved women. From the earnings of their slaves they pay the police to grant their women immunity from prosecution.

These men are also termed “macks.” The name means nothing; it is the character of its bearing that is the horrible fact.

In the South side levee district, including the places that encircle the open houses of prostitution, there are 800 of these low vile creatures. We are but describing one of the levees of the city. Conditions are similar in the others.

We have seen them in the notorious cafes of the South side but they exist in swarms within the levee zone proper.

The hours are swiftly passing and our trip is by no means over. Let us leave the haunts we have just visited.

Let us go down to one lower level of crime and vice. We have reached Twenty-second street and Wabash avenue and we stand on the edge of the Great White Ulcer.

ANTE ROOMS OF HELL.

Let us follow the crowd of men and women into that large building on Twenty-second street.

A novel sight greets us as we enter. Our hats and coats are checked and we walk out from behind a mirror used as a screen into a large hall on the floor of which several hundred couples are dancing to the strains of an orchestra in a balcony above.

Some of the faces which we saw earlier in the evening within the loop district have also “come south,” as the expression is. They are here to revel until dawn. There is no letup until the bright sun drives vice blinking and blinded back into its holes.

Every type of woman, from the woman who is simply “slumming” to the most depraved and degenerate creature can be seen in this notorious levee dance hall. As the music dies down, the couples with unsteady steps, caused by the whirling about the floor and the drinks which have been freely imbibed, seek rest at the dirty, wet chairs and tables which encompass the room. Drinks are served in profusion, regardless of the state of inebriety of the patrons and regardless of the one o’clock closing law, which the police declare is in effect.

Women, rendered senseless by drink, are dragged from the place nightly and carted away—God knows where!

Let us get away from the reeking atmosphere, from the smell of stale beer and sickly, perspiring women.

Before we enter the biggest cesspool of all, let[Pg 85] us stop at Buxbaum’s Cafe at Twenty-second and State streets,—the most notorious outside-levee dive in the city of Chicago.

Its habitues, with few exceptions, are the overflow, the outcasts of the levee, or the women who seek a few moments of so-called relaxation from their labors of sin.

All night this place reeks with infamy; all night orgies impossible to portray are carried on; all night the saturnalia of vice wrings the blood from women’s hearts and crushes life in its ever grinding mill.

South of the street where we have stopped, the cafes continue. Again they take on an air of respectability and trap the young and innocent girls and with hands dripping with blood the vampires of vice push them on and on, until they reach the point where we have stopped.

We are on the shores of a Lake of Infamy. The tributaries flow from the north, the south and the west, coursing through every section of the city, sweeping their victims in a surging current, without hope of rescue to the waters, whose eddies close forever over the drowned. The cafes and disorderly saloons and dance halls are the traps at the beginning of the avenues of vice. They are the feeders to the infamous hotels. The chain has no missing link. The Vice Trust has made it in perfect manner.

We are standing on the shores of a lake—that lake is one of the “redlight” districts of Chicago.

CHAPTER IV.

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.

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 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.

Two thousand women on the slave block of lust[Pg 90] sold 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.

THE QUESTIONS UNANSWERED.

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. We[Pg 92] are 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 FEEDERS OF THE “REDLIGHT” DISTRICTS.

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 a[Pg 93] Bohemian 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!

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 about[Pg 94] him, 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:

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.

THE DAILY LIFE OF A PROSTITUTE.

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.

[Pg 95]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.

THE SLAVES OF THE “CADETS.”

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. There[Pg 96] is 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.

BIG PALACES OF VICE.

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.”

[Pg 97]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.

THE HIDDEN TRAGEDIES.

All the world’s wretchedness, sorrow, hunger,[Pg 98] 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!

WHAT BECOMES OF THEM?

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 the[Pg 99] terrible 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.

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!

CHAPTER V.

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!

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?

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!

[Pg 101]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?

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.

THE TRAPPING OF THE PREY.

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 possible[Pg 102] victim 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—

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.

PRICE OF ONE BODY, ONE HEART, ONE SOUL.

THE TRAFFIC OF WHITE 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 the[Pg 104] agents 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.

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.

$200,000 ANNUAL WHITE SLAVE PRICE.

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.

THE SHACKLES OF THE WHITE SLAVE.

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.

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 the[Pg 107] annals 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 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.

CHAPTER VI.

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,[Pg 109] 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[Pg 110] purge herself and become the City Beautiful in the most ideal meaning of the term.

THE TRIUMVIRATE.

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.

PRICE OF PROTECTING VICE.

“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.

[Pg 111]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[Pg 112] 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.

Copyrighted 1910 by The Midnight Mission.
Used by permission of owners of copyright.

As an instance that vice is shut down when it fails to make its tribute, we quote the following story from [Pg 113]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.

[Pg 114]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.

FIGURES THAT FREEZE THE BLOOD.

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.

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.

POLICE PRICE FOR THE SCARLET WOMAN.

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.

[Pg 116]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[Pg 117] 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.”

GRAFTS THAT FEED ON FLESH AND BLOOD.

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.”

[Pg 118]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.

THE KIMONA TRUST.

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.

[Pg 119]“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.

Increased value on articles of clothing sold the inmates is about the same in every instance.

[Pg 120]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.

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 LAUNDRY 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.

This combine proceeds in the same manner as the combine that furnishes clothing to the 2,000 prostitutes in the houses.

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!

THE CRIMINAL DOCTOR.

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.

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.

Those physicians are supposed to give each girl a personal, clinical examination each week.

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.[Pg 123] 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!

THE PROSTITUTE AND THE BEER GRAFT.

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!

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!

[Pg 124]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.

“SELL DRINKS OR STARVE.”

Do you wonder that they sit hour after hour at a table guzzling beer with their drunken customers?

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.

[Pg 125]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.

BEER GRAFT—$2,915,760.

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—

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.

[Pg 126]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 INVESTED VICE CAPITAL.

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.

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 the levee resorts large quantities of cigarettes[Pg 127] 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.

THE PROSTITUTE AND THE “CADET.”

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.

[Pg 128]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.

[Pg 129]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.

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[Pg 130] 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.”

BRUTALITY OF THE “CADETS.”

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:

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.

[Pg 131]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.

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.

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.

“CADETS” AND POLICE GRAFT.

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[Pg 132] 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.

[Pg 133]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[Pg 134] 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.

AND TO THE WOMAN?—DEATH!

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[Pg 135] 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[Pg 136] are found in the infamous resorts of the city drift there in a thousand and one ways.

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.

“LEAVE ALL HOPE BEHIND.”

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:

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[Pg 137] 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.

THE LURE OF THE “LIFE.”

“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[Pg 138] women and hurled them into dishonored and polluted graves.

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 with God as our judge and honest, clean, observant men as our witnesses, we answer:

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[Pg 139] 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.

THE PACE THAT KILLS.

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[Pg 140] 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:

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!

“TOO LATE TO TURN BACK”—CRIES WOMAN.

Before closing we wish to give a concrete example of the tenacious power of the life of shame once[Pg 141] 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.

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.

“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[Pg 142] 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.

THOUSANDS ENTER THE “LIFE” YEARLY.

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!

CHAPTER VII.

Rent Graft—Saloon Graft—Dance Halls and Protective Prices—Graft from the Vice Palaces—The Massage Parlor—The Drug Crime—The Vampire Trust.

When directly enmeshed in the woman-traps of the Vice Trust she is the enriching factor as has been shown.

Indirectly connected with the Vice Trust or serving it off and on, she is still the axis of swollen profits to the Trust.

It is the purpose in this chapter to show the side grafts which are derived from the existence of the persons and places contributing to the social evil.

Again the police department figures as the “go-between” hand from the victims of sin to the Directorate of Ten. It is through their protecting agency, permitting haunts of crime and vice to flourish that the already monstrous fortunes of the vice masters are further swollen.

It is astounding to learn the varied sources of side graft in the city of Chicago today. As we have said[Pg 144] before, everything must have its price of toleration or cease to exist.

A few of the most notorious and flagrant forms of side graft as separate from the prostitute and her profession are to be exploited in this chapter.

THE RENT GRAFT.

The excess rental profit, due to the fact that at least 1,000 buildings in Chicago are the rendezvous or dwelling places of prostitutes and women of loose character, is today $1,000,000.

This figure is based on the conservative estimate of the Vice Commission arrived at in its recent investigation. In its calculation the members began with the figure of 577 places immorally used. They conservatively estimated that $1,000 was the average excess profit of rent in open houses in the restricted districts, and $300 was a similar profit per year on “flats” and assignation hotels.

This same profit would not exist if vice did not place a high price on the haunts where it thrives. If the profits on vice are so enormous, the Vice Trust figures that the resort keepers and hotel and “flat” renters can pay high prices.

The prices for rent on “flats” are boosted from $20 to $40 above the actual rental valuation of the property.

The rental price on property in the segregated parts of the city is raised five times the actual rental figure.

The real estate owners, and the real estate agents[Pg 145] raise the price. But they cannot steal this vast rental profit. The Vice Trust must have a share. A split is made. The lords of the vice combine get their share of the rental theft and back into the pockets of the Directorate of Ten goes the graft.

If this money is not paid by the real estate men and property owners, then they are the losers in the long run. The police department closes the place, refusing to allow prostitutes to live in the building.

Result: The property must be rented to people of poor condition who can pay but small rent. The physical value of the property is so small that a large rent could never be exacted from decent citizens. Therefore in order to make a profit himself, the lessor holds the rent high, countenances prostitution in his buildings and pays his graft to the Vice Trust.

A certain real estate agent controlling a building in Cottage Grove avenue, which is infested with immoral “flats,” declared that he boosted the rents in the building $30 for each flat above the actual rental valuation. This same man declared that he was obliged each month to hand over to detectives who visited him, $20 on each flat, leaving him but a boost of ten dollars per flat.

A woman who keeps a “flat” in Cottage Grove avenue declared that she was compelled to pay $50 for a $25 flat. She argued with the real estate agent but he showed her that if she desired police protection she would have to meet the demand. She did so.

Some time later, on account of public protest by clean-living citizens near this place, the police shut[Pg 146] down the “flats” in the building in one day. The women inmates moved out. A week later those flats which had rented from $40 to $75 to the immoral women, were rented for $15 to $25 a flat.

Another example of the rent graft is given on the West side levee. A resort keeper who was once known as a king of the West side levee, owned a two-story building, which was used as a house of prostitution from which he derived the enormous rental of $250 a month. The place was situated in Curtis street. The street was “wiped out” by the police. A week later the two flats were being rented for $20 apiece.

There is one estate in Chicago today situated in a levee district which is valued at $1,000,000. If the segregated districts were wiped out this property would not be worth $20,000.

As an indication of the difficulty that would be experienced in wiping out this graft, remember that three city officials are owners of property used for immoral purposes. They are members of the great Combine. They would not permit the destruction of the immoral “flat” system because it would deprive them of an enormous revenue.

This rental graft is either paid to the police who take a small percentage and then turn the remainder over to the agents of the Directorate of Ten, in return for their protection, or is given to the vice powers direct by the real estate agents.

This rental graft is one of the big factors in maintaining a City Defiled. To strike at these places is[Pg 147] to strike at the vice lords not alone through their enslaved women but through their property valuations.

THE DISORDERLY SALOON AND ITS GRAFT.

There exist in the city of Chicago 500 disorderly saloons. Those are the places where women are allowed to frequent the backrooms and the wine-rooms for the purpose of soliciting drinks from men.

These places are to be found within the loop district and also in the resident sections of the city.

The owners of these places make enormous profits by the exploitation of vice, but they pay monthly large sums to the Vice Trust in order to carry on their business.

Each one of these places has an average of five women “hustling” for it. That figure is a low estimate.

Drinks are sold in these establishments at exorbitant and robbing prices. It is estimated that the gross profit, on an average, is 175 per cent in such places.

On the basis of five women in each place, earning three dollars a day as commission, which is formed on a twenty per cent basis, the daily net profit from these five girls, is $44. For a year this calculation brings forth the enormous figure of $16,060 for the proprietor. By computation this shows that the total profit of 500 saloons for one year is $8,080,000!

Think of that fortune in poison to thousands of men and women who frequent these infectious places!

[Pg 148]But the big split must be made. Out of that swollen profit, the Directorate of Ten by some hook or crook, must get its dividends.

Although the price of protection by the police, in reality protection by the Big Ten, varies according to the location, possibilities in return and the number of women who work, investigation has shown that the average protective price of the disorderly saloon is $100 a month.

This runs as high as $300 for the big loop places and those whose revenues are excessively high.

Computing on the conservative basis of $100 per month, this means that the Vice Trust reaps a golden harvest of $50,000 a month from the disorderly saloons and cafes of Chicago! This means $600,000 graft a year!

In many of these places forms of entertainment are given, as for instance obscene theatricals and immoral dances. These places increasing their revenue by such displays, must of necessity increase their graft to the powers above. To run such “shows” they are compelled to pay the police $50 a month more, it is said.

In some districts the police charge for permitting music after closing hours. This graft usually is divided among the local police, from some of the police captains down to the man on the beat.

DANCE HALLS AND THE IMMORAL THEATERS AND THEIR GRAFT.

The dance halls which are found in every section of Chicago and the cheap arcades and some of the theaters with their suggestive dramas and vaudevilles are the starting points from which many girls go to ruin. These places earn many a big dollar for their owners. But again the Vice Trust holds out its aching and itching palm and cries for lucrative salve and is anointed with it. These places pay a protective police price ranging from $25 to $100 according to the degree of evil displayed, and the amounts of money taken in at the doors.

The privilege of selling beer at these infamous places to facilitate the work of destroying the souls of young women and young men is placed at $50 a month more to the police.

VICE PALACES AND THEIR GRAFT.

In previous chapters we have spoken of the richly furnished homes of vice and sin where the man of wealth and position can covertly enjoy his debased passions and ruin young and innocent girls with the assurance that his sins will not find him out.

These places to carry on their trade in human souls, where thousands of dollars are spent on elegant furnishings and where large profits accrue, also have their prices to pay the police and the political powers in the Vice Trust.

Protection prices, ranging from $500 to $1,000[Pg 150] are paid each month to insure their guests and deprive them of the fear of molestation.

MANICURE AND MASSAGE PARLORS AND THEIR GRAFT.

These evils are not commonly known. The loop district is infested with such shops which are nothing but thin veils for prostitutes. Many hotels in Chicago contain such forms of vicious evil. These places are known to the police and the women in them, who make a pretense of legitimate work but in reality are ever on the alert for vice victims, are compelled to pay high protective sums to continue in their illegal professions.

These places in the loop district pay an average graft and protective price of $100 a month. This money, taken stealthily by the agents, is sent in the bulk to the members of the Vice Trust as in every other form of graft.

DRUG SELLING AND ITS GRAFT.

A large percentage of the lost women in Chicago and their male associates are the victims of the drug habit. They are enslaved either by the opium, cocaine or morphine curse. They must have these insidious stimulants to exist, once they are trapped by this form of misery among men and women.

The sale of these drugs is prohibited by law except under the most precautionary methods. In the South side “redlight” district four druggists make a profit[Pg 151] on the sale of these drugs which is larger than their income on all other articles combined.

The sellers of these drugs must of necessity be known to the police who see the constant throng of hundreds of unfortunates sneaking shamefully into the places to procure the poisons that bring pleasant dreams, and even unconsciousness.

These places pay on an average $150 a month protection money to officials through their subordinates.

THE VAMPIRE TRUST AND ITS GRAFT.

Wherever wealth congregates, and men seek to while away the leisure hours, willing to spend thousands of dollars in a night’s enjoyment, there you will find the agents of vice ready to minister to the wants of those men.

It is composed of more than 100 women of loose character, women steeped in sin and vice, women of apparent refinement and dashing appearance, women of beauty and luring manner.

These women infest the lobbies, cafes and restaurants of the most exclusive hotels in the city. Their victims are the wealthy Chicago visitors who are compelled to forget their troubles and business worries over a glass of wine with charming, siren members[Pg 152] of the trust. These women drug, rob, steal and blackmail their victims.

Many of these women have extensive police records. Their faces are known to the old and young detectives who are appointed to protect the city’s guests.

Then why are they allowed to carry on their thieving trade and fatten on their ill-gotten gains?

They pay their protection for existence and are allowed by the Vice Trust to thrive unmolested. When a victim does muster up enough courage to complain to the police that he has been victimized by a Vampire, he obtains no satisfaction. In fact he is given a significant warning against prosecution.

Most of the victims are married men, with almost unimpeachable reputations and social positions and families. They are told by the police officer to whom they complain that if they attempt to punish the woman who robbed them, the story would become public and the notoriety would do more harm than the loss of the money.

These women concert with the members of the blackmailers’ trust. These men point out prospective victims. If the men cannot be robbed, their reputations are jeopardized and then the women threaten to disgrace them by telling the story of a night of shame.

[Pg 153]It is hard to estimate the protective price paid by these women. Judging from the number of their victims and the large amounts of money stolen, the relative protective price must be enormous.

The police admit the existence of this trust as was shown by a high police official in a recent attempted prosecution of one of its notorious members, who had served a sentence in the state penitentiary and who at one time was the respected wife of a Milwaukee jeweler and a prominent member of Wisconsin society. They do not admit that these women pay them a price to carry on their open robbing of victims.

One man in Chicago, who had been held up by these infamous wretches and bled until he rebelled against the slavery, recently gave up the battle, committed suicide and in a letter penned to his wife before his death, told of the outrages he had been subjected to because of his misstep.

And so these women are the agents of the Vice Trust, the associates of the lowest male creatures in Chicago, the parasites of rich men and the causes of suicide, murder and wrecked homes.

Because the Vice Trust must have its toll. Because the treasury has still space for more silver and gold. Because the hunger and thirst of the Directorate of Ten is never appeased.

[Pg 154]Not because men must submit to these things because unruly passions drive them to shame, misery, remorse and death, as has been fallaciously charged.

These are the subsidiary vices from which millions of dollars are garnered yearly to feed the Directorate of Ten, to put new diamonds on shirt fronts, brighter stones in heavy gold rings, new automobiles to wait for them outside their palaces whose every stone is hewn by the torn, cut and bleeding hands of thousands of women slaves and raised to its place by exhausted weakened and dying creatures.

That word sings, echoes and reverberates through the underworld of Chicago. It is the slogan of the Vice Trust. It is the mystic sign of the vice fraternity.

Who can really estimate the actual amount of graft reaped from sin which eats into the hearts of a lost and perished womanhood?

Our estimates have been conservative. They have been based on an average system of computation.[Pg 155] The actual figures if we were able to carry our searchlight of truth into the coffers of the Directorate of Ten must be far above those we have given.

We have sought to tell the truth. In our hearts we know that such graft passes from the vicious to their masters each day. From the victims themselves we have learned the figures which we have given above.

Is there any wonder that after a thorough consideration of the subject from every viewpoint, we have closed our eyes and from the depth of our soul cried out in sincere conviction:—

CHAPTER VIII.

The Gambler’s Fate—The Handbook, Other Games of Chance and Their Protection—Police Profit—All Gambling Crooked—A Warning.

In the very heart of every man, woman and child is an instinct to risk the tangible and present for the intangible and the possible future things.

Since the beginning man has played some game of chance in his struggle for existence. He has counted his own possibilities as against those of his enemy, he has abided for what seemed the most opportune time and then he has risked and taken the leap. Often the goddess of Chance has been with him. More often that strange goddess has risen against him.

The boy risks his marbles against those of his playmate. The girl casts her jacks against those of her small companion.

As civilization went on and reason developed, the game of chance became a sport which had for its object a lucrative gain in some manner or other.

[Pg 157]It became gambling:—the risking of something valuable on the basis that the risk may prove profitable to the risker.

The pages of history are dotted with evidences of gambling in every age. Gambling has passed through a million forms. In our present day life it is looked upon by the general public as a sport.

It is the purpose here not to dissertate on gambling as a moral and commercial evil alone, but to show that it is nothing today but another asset of the Vice Trust, stolen out of the not too plethoric pocket of the sucker public.

It is our purpose to show that a gambling ring, backed by millions of dollars, headed by powerful men and strengthened by the support of the members of the Vice Trust, thrives in Chicago, adding one more stain to her already besmirched municipal escutcheon.

It fattens on those men and women who have already been fleeced by the way of the social evil and on those who have not fallen victims to that sin, and whose besetting sin is gambling.

RUIN, PRISON OR DEATH, THE GAMBLER’S END.

Yearly, thousands of young men are hurled to financial ruin, sent or headed to the penitentiary because of the gambling houses in the city of Chicago that run full blast with the officers of the law walking blindly past their open doors.

The gambling vice grasps its victims in a clutch as powerful as the grip of the drug habit or as unyielding as the toils of immorality.

[Pg 158]The gambling combine in Chicago is as strong as the most powerful house of finance. It is bulwarked by every possible protection. You cannot beat it, in the long run, no matter what your talents, judgment and experience may be.

The average man or woman would stand a fair show of winning in the average gambling game in Chicago were that game “on the square.” But it is not; the entire system is crooked. That is how its profits are enormous.

The thousands of persons who play the handbooks during the day, the poker games and other forms of the gambling evil at night, have no more choice of emerging with the “long green” bulging from every pocket than has the mouse that is caught by the soft-pawed cat in a room and played with until tired and then killed. There is no escape. Everything is crooked and the gambling sucker is dubbed the “bleating sheep” the minute he enters where the chips rattle on the table or where the man with the dirty dollar smears your name on a chart with a stub pencil.

Each year hundreds of men and women end their blasted lives after they have emerged from the dens of the gambling lords, robbed of their last cent and face to face with ruin, disgrace, and punishment.

Each year, men are sent to our state prisons because they dipped their trembling hands into the gold in their employers’ till to make up the money the gambling fraternity had taken from them.

Each year, hundreds of women see their homes crumble beneath them, stand with tear-stained eyes[Pg 159] and watch their social positions taken from them, lose the love and protection of their husbands and are turned adrift to stray into the hell houses we have described, because the gambling germ was imbedded and flourished in their blood and drove them on to unnameable ruin.

There is no way of estimating the evils consequent on the vice of gambling as it exists in Chicago today.

A GAMBLER’S END.

As a specific instance of the destructive power of the gambling combine a Chicagoan recently committed suicide after dissipating a fortune in flirting with the goddess of Chance.

In his pockets, stained with blood from the bullet wound through which his life had ebbed away, was the following note:

“Several persons have the right dope on the dive, gamblers and the police. They let a victim go there until they get all and then they blackball him. Why not destroy these vicious people and close the dives and save people from committing suicide?

“This is the raving of a dying and ruined man but I know what I am doing just the same.”

Do the police dare tamper with these men flaunting their violations of the law in their faces?

Even if they desired they could not do them harm. The gambling kings are in direct alliance with members of the Directorate of Ten of the Vice Trust. They turn over to it fifty per cent of their[Pg 160] enormous income for the privilege of making the other fifty per cent.

Even in the face of a rigid and apparently sincere recent crusade against the unholy combine between police and gamblers, gambling continued to carry on its trade within a stone’s throw of the City Hall and underneath the shadows of certain big police stations.

The gambling kings are even more avaricious and selfish in their wealthy combine than are the members of the combine living off the social sin.

A POWER SUPREME.

No one dares attempt to come into the chosen circle unless by direct consent of the big lords, and after he has sworn abject allegiance to the gambling chiefs. He must show the proper spirit by yielding up a large per cent of profit. If this is not forthcoming, the police suddenly and mysteriously awaken to the fact that the unfortunate man is running a gambling establishment. He is raided, arrested and put out of business, while a chosen servant of the fraternity shovels in the golden harvest from the suckers across the street, drops a few choice coins into the hands of the police who raided the opposition place and plies his trade in perfect quiet, comfort and security.

That is the power of the gambling kings. They are the high “lieutenants” of the Vice Trust. They are given big concessions and extraordinary powers because they are in position to show their fealty by[Pg 161] the payment of thousands of dollars of tribute weekly.

Copyrighted 1910 by The Midnight Mission.
Used by permission of owners of copyright.

A drugged conscience awakened by a word picture
of men’s and women’s shame and degradation.

The gambling organization is so perfect today that there is no chance to beat it.

To perfect the system now in vogue it was necessary to do away with all forms of competition and opposition. This was finally accomplished after the expenditure of thousands of dollars by the gambling combine in control today.

CHICAGO’S BOMB WAR.

It was the spirit of competition and the rivalry of factions that led to the bomb throwing epoch which has left such a deep stain on the history of Chicago.

Dynamite, gun cotton, nitroglycerine and other dangerous combustibles were used to whip the enemies into line.

The bomb throwing era which was the talk of the nation, was nothing more than the outward expression of the gamblers’ hate. The bombs thrown were the means of eliminating the competitor and bringing the enemies into the ranks of the favored as mere slaves.

In three years, fifty bombs were hurled by gamblers in the city of Chicago. A million dollars’ worth of property was destroyed, men were maimed and families broken up in this terrible war. The first bombs were directed against the men in command of the gambling forces. These men then realizing the power of the dynamiters, employed them to destroy the enemies of the protected organization.

As a result the gambling combine today is based[Pg 162] on dynamite and gunpowder. The police knew who threw the bombs but dared not arrest the criminals.

Every form of gambling controlled by the gambling combine can be found in Chicago. The high-priced forms are found in the loop district, the gambling handbooks are found everywhere, and the cheap forms can be met with in any part of the big city.

MEMBERSHIP OF THE GAMBLING COMBINE.

There are nine residents and property holders of Chicago in the directorate of the gambling fraternity and combine. These men control the vicious gambling situation today.

These men control one of the largest and most influential systems in the world. They employ thousands of men to do their bidding and exact thousands of dollars daily from the pockets of an unwary public.

These men as a combine, are subsidiary to the great Vice Trust. These men play directly into the hands of the Directorate of Ten which we have shown as feasting off the well laden tables of prostitution, sin and women. They derive their terrible and crushing power through the big vice masters. They divide the profits with them. They pay high protection in order to operate the thousand and one forms of gambling which they back daily, from the cheap crap games to the highest and most money yielding games of bridge or to the most lucrative, whirling roulette wheels.

One of these men controlling this terrible vice is[Pg 163] today a member of the city council making Chicago’s laws for righteousness; one is a former member of the Illinois State legislature; one holds a high place in City Hall circles, and another is a prominent business man carrying on a business as a veil to his real and disgraceful profession.

THE HANDBOOK EVIL AND ITS GRAFT.

A handbook, for the benefit of the unsophisticated reader, is a record made in a local place of horse races which are being run off at a distance. As for instance, a cigar store in the loop district makes bets on races which are being run off at Jacksonville, Florida.

The handbooks are run in saloons, cigar stores, hotels, and on newsstands. Here the dollars of the sucker patrons are drawn from their pockets as by magic, turned over to the agents of the gambling trust, never to return. Clerks, stenographers, office boys, all classes of salaried men and women are the victims of the handbook habit in Chicago.

Day after day this unseeing public scratches its head of “solid ivory,” puzzles its brain in desperation and goes out to “beat” the combination that never has known a real defeat.

Barnum said “there is one sucker born every minute.” Truly there is. The birth statistics of the Chicago sucker, male and female, mostly male, is greater than the birth rate of innocent children. This is a queer world.

THE WOMAN GAMBLER.

In quiet and refined neighborhoods, in the rear of candy stores and even dry goods stores, women who are considered spotless by their social associates drop in daily, nervously look over the “dope sheet,” pick their winner, and hurl their husbands’ hard-earned dollars into the yawning pockets of the gambling combine.

THE GAMBLING VEINS OF THE COUNTRY.

These thousand handbooks daily furnishing the names of horses running on every track in the United States, must have some means of acquiring that important information.

The Vice Trust is never at loss to furnish a medium through which its graft may be increased.

The members of the Vice Trust looked about for men trained to the fine arts of separating the innocent and unwary from their dollars, and found the men who today are the leaders of the gambling combine.

These men incorporated themselves secretly into a powerful corporation,—the gambling industry, capital unlimited.

The superintendent of the strangest gambling news agency in Chicago is Mont Tennes, for twenty years associated with the gambling world in one way or another. Through a news service, which leases telephone and telegraph wires, this man gathers into his clearing houses and exchanges in Chicago, the daily news of the race tracks of the world.

[Pg 165]This news, once gathered into “headquarters,” is sold to every handbook runner in the city at prices ranging from $12 to $250 a month.

This news is the same to every place in the city to which it is sent by telephone, or telegraph. The price for that news varies in proportion to the size of the place receiving the service and the amount of the daily profits scraped from the skins of the sucker patrons.

This wire service is national, not local. It is the veins and arteries through which the gambling fluid flows daily to many cities in the country.

On the circuit, furnishing gambling news, there are twenty-nine cities that are receiving gambling information daily and paying for it.

In each of these cities, this gambling magnate has an agent selected to receive his information and to distribute to places in that city demanding it on the payment of high sums of money.

The agent pays for the right of such dissemination. This man in the aggregate receives $40,000 a month from the agents in twenty-nine cities on his circuit who reap vast fortunes from the sending of the gambling news to the handbooks in their respective territories. The “boss” is not satisfied with the swollen profit. He demands a certain percentage in the various cities from the profits of the local men using his service.

THE HANDBOOK PROFIT AND GRAFT.

Sixty thousand “pikers” in Chicago feeding the gambling goddess through her handbook mouth daily!

The “piker” plays in small spurts from fifty cents to three dollars a day. Then the bets soar up the ladder until you reach the rich sucker who shovels out as much as $500 a day on an average. Bets are paid as high as $10,000 in one day on downtown handbooks.

One man in State street has maintained a $25,000 a day business for ten years on an average. This has been actually proven.

There are twenty places downtown where handbooks are maintained that do an average business of $5,000 a day year in and year out, with men who dream and plan to beat the unconquerable combine.

Police officials who have consented to talk because they have been disowned by political masters and a former partner of the present gambling head declare that $300 is a fair and conservative estimate of the income from a horde of suckers of each of the 1,000 handbook establishments daily.

This means $300,000 per day changes hands in the race of men to exercise their gambling interests.

The betting combinations are so arranged, according to experts, that the one sucker is pitted against his brother and not against the house.

The placement of money on horse flesh is so arranged that no matter how the horses run, a profit[Pg 167] of at least ten per cent accrues to the bookmaker. He is never the big loser. In cold cash that means $30,000 a day to the handbook men of the city.

Few of the races or the racing tips are “on the square.” The sucker plays and attempts to defeat a system which is nothing more than one crooked scheme within another.

Fifty per cent of that is needed by the handbook men to operate their places. It is used in the payment of salaries to hirelings, wire service, rent, telephone service, printing and miscellaneous financial obligations.

The balance or $15,000 is split between two mighty factors. Seven thousand five hundred dollars are kept by the poolroom combination and an equal sum is paid, through members of the police force, or other collectors, as protection money to the great powers of the Vice Trust.

THE POLICE PROFIT.

The local police for their vigilance in steering reformers from the door of the gambling holes, carrying on fake raids and helping the sucker to forget the loss of his bankroll by rubbing his injured pocketbook with the salve of warning to keep away and learn a lesson, must be given their share. Then the “big fellows” who in the department are the spokesmen for the Vice combine must dig out their share. Then the remainder,—a large remainder,—must go back to the Directorate of Ten.

Stop and think how swollen and bloated this figure[Pg 168] becomes when considered from the standpoint of an annuity.

Two million six hundred and twenty-four thousand dollars are paid each year to the Vice Trust and the big political lords for the right to rob the general public, prey upon its tempting instinct to dare a chance, and drive the individual to ruin, starvation and death.

That same amount of money is split up yearly between the handbook combination and the agents throughout the city.

OTHER FORMS OF GAMBLING AND GRAFT.

The handbook which we have described in its method of operation and its graft for police protection is the common man’s expression of his gambling instinct.

There are five hundred other temples of the goddess of Chance, in which a variety of gambling games are played nightly. In some of these places every form of chance game can be found in full force each night. In others, a specialty of one kind of game is made.

The principal forms of gambling that flourish today are roulette, poker, stuss (a Jewish form of poker), fan-tan, faro, whist, craps, black jack and hearts.

In a Michigan avenue hotel at Twenty-second street a roulette wheel is spun nightly to the tune of $3,000. Hundreds of men and women crowd into the stuffy room, filled with smoke and the fumes of[Pg 169] beer and wine, and stake their all on the whirling colors.

The man that plays to break the bank at that place is playing the same game as the man who starts out to tear the cast-iron bottom out of the bank of Monte Carlo.

Behind the whir and hum of that maddening wheel is $50,000 held by the keepers of the game. Try to break into that treasury with pick, axe or jimmy and you will be caught, trapped and bled to death.

In a house recently closed because of the objectionable notoriety it had obtained, the gambling and vice powers are said to have cleaned up over $100,000 in three months. That place was located in Michigan avenue near Thirteenth street. All forms of chance were thrown into the gambling pot, melted and handed out to the “pikers” as so many gold bricks nightly.

In a famous, or rather infamous, whist club in a downtown building, whose doors open in the face of the offices of several prominent lawyers, $20,000 a night is cleaned up by the keepers.

There are a dozen similar places in the loop district where the money that changes hands in one night, averages $10,000. Men acquainted with the situation declared that $500 a day is a very conservative average of money changing hands in the various gambling holes in Chicago.

Oh, will a freshly awakened civic conscience save a demoralized public from itself, or will the lethargy which is upon Chicago allow the thousands of young men, men with wives and families, to hurry themselves on to ruin and to death?

The gambling houses, according to old time gamblers, on all forms of gambling, make a “rakeoff” of about seven per cent on each dollar cast by a victim before their greedy eyes.

This means $17,500 a day. Fifty per cent of that or $8,750, is retained by the gambling house keepers for expenses. The remaining profit goes the old, old way, one half—$4,375—is split between the gambling under lords and the gambling kings.

An equal amount, goes to the Vice Trust for the protection received from the police.

GAMBLING IN CONCLUSION—ITS CROOKED CHARACTER.

So greedy and avaricious are the big chiefs of the gambling fraternity and the members of the Vice Trust that after all is said and done, there is little left for the game keeper.

As a result even the little sporting instinct he may have is sacrificed and he becomes crooked in every dealing he has with the paying public.

“Ninety-eight per cent of the gambling games in[Pg 171] Chicago today are crooked,” declared a well-known gambler. “There is no money in the profession unless the public can be hoodwinked.”

Science, electricity, hypnotism, sleight of hand, or other means are used to deceive the player.

Unless you can note the swift touch of the gambler’s foot on the electric button, which drops the little ball into the red hole when you bet on the black, you face ruin every time you face the roulette wheel.

Can you see the invisible hand that is doping the racetrack sheet? If you cannot, stay away from the handbook or be prepared to look into the dark and murky waters of the river as a final hiding place of shame.

Do you think the friendly game of poker is on “the square”? If you do you are mistaken. The house has two men, professional sharks, fishing for your money. They are out to get it and they will succeed. They will whip-saw you back and forth until they exhaust you and tire your alertness. Then they will crucify you on the cross of your own cupidity and zeal to make a millionaire’s fortune in a night on the income of a counter clerk.

The game has not been beaten. That is why the gambling combine is strong. That is why it has the support of the Vice Trust. Like the man who hopes to withstand the temptations of the crime-centers, and as the woman who ventures is poisoned unto death with the venom of sin, so the man who goes forth to tempt Fate and win a kiss from the cold lips of[Pg 172] Chance, is enmeshed before he is aware of it and borne onward in the terrible maelstrom which hurls him into the bottomless pit of infamy and shame.

The gambling curse is a terrible one. Its stigma burns on the cheek of its victims forever. Scarcely any hope can be held out to the man who is trapped by its subtle lure.

To those young men and young women of the city and the country, we write this warning. We have shown that you “cannot beat the game,” no matter how intelligently you try.

The Vice Trust has never known defeat. It will not know defeat in this enormous source of revenue pouring into its coffers annually from the favored, police-protected, bomb-throwing, life-destroying Gambling Combine.

CHAPTER IX.

A Story of the Hypocrisy of the Police Department—Its Neglect of Duty—Its Protection of Crime—The Fate of the Honest Policeman—Collusion of Police and Thieves.

The minds which conspire to create a system such as the Vice Trust is shown to control, must of necessity find agents to carry on the various phases of the work.

It has been demonstrated that no species of vice or sin exists in Chicago except at the will of the vice lords and in return for the payment of large sums of money.

In a large majority, the police department, holding in its hands the power to enforce or ignore the laws of the city, state or country, is the thumb screw used by the Vice Trust to exact its toll of sin-existence.

This body of men, each one of whom swore on his word of honor before God and man to enforce the man-made laws, as a whole, is decaying with the poison of graft and vice in its veins.

From a servant of the people, the policeman has become the servant of the people’s enemies.

[Pg 175]Trapped and enmeshed by the political powers above them hundreds of policemen prostitute their power for the purpose of aiding and abetting sin and vice and in defrauding the people of their proper tax-paid protection.

There are 4,000 members of the department of police in Chicago today. There are a chief of police, twenty captains, numerous lieutenants and sergeants and at least 3,800 patrolmen. Through this body of men, many of whom promised their God and their own conscience to do their duty, are men sold body and soul to the vice lords who, it has been shown, control Chicago and derive fortunes from the exploitation of vice.

These are the men to whom every law abiding citizen trusts his or her life year in and year out. These are the men appointed to protect property against criminal depredation, to make the streets clean of crime, and to watch over our children.

And yet, investigation has shown that the executive heads of this big law enforcing system, in many instances, are crooked, corrupt and purchased.

Many of the men holding high positions in the police department are there because the Vice Trust has found them of service and because they are ready ever to do the bidding of their masters.

The politics of the department is largely a matter of the politics of the Vice Trust, as has been shown by recent investigations.

Gambling runs full blast, houses of prostitution openly carry on their immoral practices, street walkers[Pg 176] wink at the policemen on their beats, pickpockets laugh at the plain clothes men, robbers loot homes and places of business, crimes of every conceivable description are committed, a gambling war is allowed to terrorize Chicago, because the police department is sold body and soul, revolver and star, to the masters of the underworld.

The hundred and one duties of the policeman are neglected daily because he is busy helping some vicious criminal friend of the Vice Trust.

The history of the Chicago police department today is a history of a duty neglected and a sacred responsibility shirked.

Even if certain members of the police force desired to do their duty, the meshes have so tightened about them, they are so compromised with the big lieutenants of vice and sin, that to save themselves and their families, they must go on violating their sacred oath of office and living a life of cowardice and hypocrisy.

If the police department was not a subsidized body, the Vice Trust would have a hard time carrying out its plans. It could not whip into line the varied and complicated characters of sin with which it deals to lucrative advantage.

THE FATE OF ONE POLICE OFFICIAL.

Its subsidy was proven clearly in the recent conviction of a West side inspector of police for the acceptance of protection money. He was one of [Pg 177]hundreds. He was not of a really bad stripe. Circumstances gave him scarcely any other alternative.

Copyrighted 1910 by The Midnight Mission.
Used by permission of owners of copyright.

Where one escapes the toils of vice and sin, thousands
perish as slaves to the inexorable Vice Trust.

There are honest policemen in Chicago. Far be it from us to cast mud of dishonor and obloquy at all members of the department. We simply state that a large majority of the members are corrupt and that is a positive and known fact, although these men have managed through the protection afforded them by their political masters to escape the penitentiary.

The police duties, consequent on the assumption to such a position are numerous. In Chicago these are forgotten daily.

Wherever vice and sin flourish as they do here, the same condition of police corruption is to be found. It was found in San Francisco, Louisville, Seattle and other big cities.

THE LOST CHILD THAT IS NEVER FOUND.

To kidnap an innocent child, to rob a fond mother of the greatest treasure God can give her, to tear away from a mother’s sweet and pure embrace her own flesh and blood—that is a crime as heinous as murder.

What is the result? About forty-five per cent of the kidnapped children are never found.

What of the remaining? God alone can tell of the tragedies which they have probably endured. Many of them have been slain by the demons who stole them, many, particularly those of maturer years, have been sold into abominable White Slavery, and others[Pg 178] have been made slaves in other ways to make a living for their masters.

It is the custom of the police to put the name of a missing child, who is usually a kidnapped child, lured away from its home, on the pages of the “missing book.”

The story is sent over police wires to the various stations and precincts as a kind of conformity to the letter necessity. These cases are not given individual attention by the police. They are forgotten and all that is left of the case is the faded, written report.

Occasionally a tragedy that has brought sorrow and misery to some home, driven a mother mad with grief and robbed a father of his reason, comes to light through the powerful influences of the newspapers.

The cases which are given display heads in the papers with pathetic pictures accompanying them, are but few in hundreds of the stories of missing and kidnapped children in which the tragedies are just as deep, just as abiding and just as horrible.

These cases are usually found by some energetic and enthusiastic reporter who “happens” upon them by chance. The circumstances appeal to him and he “gets busy.”

Day after day he prods the police into annoying activity. He finally arouses public sympathy and interest and the police are of necessity obliged to make a pretense at hard labor. They work on the case and frequently obtain successful results that gladden the heart of some frantic mother.

[Pg 179]To be fair and honest—No. The thanks are due the unknown members of the press and not the police department.

THE EXPOSURE OF BIG CRIMES.

As the newspapers are greatly responsible for the finding of children, so they are the mind and pushing power behind the police department in the exposure of big crimes, particularly murders, and the punishment of criminals.

Criminals are brought to justice every day, men are sent to the penitentiary, not through the police department working as a thinking body but through the efforts of newspapers, expressed in the tireless energies of newspaper reporters.

The police department as a body has been clearly shown up as a body of inefficient, unthinking and unscrupulous men.

One of the shining examples of inefficiency is to be found in a famous murder case which stirred Chicago to its depths several years ago.

A Bohemian living on the Southwest side murdered a mother, a father and four children.

The police when the case was first brought to their attention as one worthy of investigation, it then being considered a strange havoc wrought by sudden deaths, laughed at the sincere efforts of a newspaper man.

They told him he was a dreamer and “hard up” for a story. The newspaper man after gathering all the circumstances and facts, all suspicious, went to the Coroner, over the heads of the police, and placed[Pg 180] the case before him. The Coroner saw that all clews pointed to a horrible series of murders. He began an investigation, assured himself that he was right, and then “called” the police in and ordered the arrest of the murderer. The man was later found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. He escaped the gallows through a strange popular sentiment and was sent to the penitentiary for a life term.

Another case that gives evidence of the lack of initiative in the police department came to light recently.

Two small children disappeared from their home on the South side. The mother was frantic with grief and sorrow and the father dogged the police day after day trying to arouse them from their lethargy to search for his two children. He received no encouragement.

In desperation he went to a newspaper office and stated the case. He told how the police had failed to make any strenuous efforts to find his children. A reporter was sent out who “stirred” the police to activity. Every possible clew was followed but to no effect. A physician declared that unless news of the discovery of the children, alive or dead, was soon forthcoming the mother would succumb to her grief.

A newspaper reporter suggested that the waters in the slip at Thirty-ninth street and the lake where the children were accustomed to play, be dynamited.[Pg 181] It occurred to him and not to the police, that the two children might have fallen into the water. The lake was dynamited at that place by the police and the bodies found.

The police when compelled by the pressure of public opinion are obliged to resort to the bolstering of a case.

Judging from later developments innocent men have been arrested on serious charges, thrown into filthy and unsanitary cells, dragged to the Criminal court and subjected to the most shameful and humiliating treatment, in order that the police force may purge itself temporarily from the stigma of being inefficient.

It is only a matter of inference, but it seems probable that hundreds of confessions of crimes are wrung from innocent victims by the brutal “third degree” methods. That these confessions are in many instances false, is proven by the fact that when presented in a court of law they are thrown out as valueless. However, they have served their purpose. The public indignation over the crime in question is given an opiate and the police can once more turn their energies to the protection of the business and properties of the vice lords. That is the police department today.

THE POLICE AND PETTY LOCAL GRAFT.

The police are not satisfied with the percentage which is granted them for the protection which they grant to the vice holes. The little fellow is still itching for the little graft. To obtain it he uses all the[Pg 182] brutality that is usually a strong asset of an unintelligent nature.

When police in a district discover that certain gamblers are running small games and not paying protection money, they walk right through rows of open-faced gamblers, select the man in question and throw him into jail. The arrest is supposed to serve as a warning. The man usually heeds the warning and goes forth to gather protection money for the local police.

Hundreds of street walkers, new to Chicago, who have not been registered regularly by the vice lords and are not paying the regulation protection, are victimized by the policeman on his beat. They are compelled to give him a mere pittance to cover up their sins and ease his hunger for filthy money.

Even in the police department itself there is a constant bickering and quarreling over the division of graft. They are like a lot of hungry vultures circling about their loathsome carcass of dead meat. One police official wars against the entrance of another police official within his territory.

Recently a negro opened a crap game in Cottage Grove avenue. He paid high protection money to the police of the district which was supposed to be turned over in part to the vice lords to appease their hunger. Things ran along smoothly for some time. Then a new and brutal face that showed a star came to his place and demanded money. The negro declared he had already paid his money.

“Not the big boss,” said the detective meaningly.[Pg 183] “My boss used to have this district but he was transferred. You must still come across to him.”

The negro refused to do so. The “big boss” police official went to the gambling fraternity and the result was that the negro was put out of business. The night his place was closed, another, run by a friend of the “big boss,” opened across the street. The police never molested it. A local lieutenant told the negro that the “big boss” police official was known in the department as a “double-crosser.”

“TIPPED OFF” RAIDS.

In violation of their oaths, the police daily hand the public that is paying their salaries over to the gamblers.

Often they are compelled by public demand or through some newspaper to raid places which are running flagrantly. Frequently, as has been shown, the keepers of the places are “tipped off” before the raid is “pulled.” The keepers leave a “blind” to impersonate them and “ringers” to appear as customers. These men are arrested with a great flourish and blowing of trumpets by the police. They are fined. The fines are readily paid by the real gamblers who are thankful to the police for the advance information given them.

STRANGE IGNORANCE OF POLICE.

The police pretend not to know of the existence of gambling places, as evidenced by the recent statement of a high police official when formally asked[Pg 184] by his superior if he knew of any gambling in his district. He declared he did not know the location of one place and was sure there was no gambling in his district.

A day later the Mayor of Chicago, angered at the fact that the gamblers were flaunting their trade in the face of the public, and while a gambling and police investigation was under way, ordered that a policeman be stationed in every gambling house in the district of that police official.

Strange to say, although he had sworn he knew of no gambling, when he realized that the Mayor meant business, he mysteriously found nineteen gambling places that same night and stationed men in them. That is one of the laughable inconsistencies of the police department.

One of the policemen, assigned to the work of standing guard over a gambling house when questioned about the matter, said:

“Of course we all knew these places were here and running full blast. But that wasn’t the question. I have been a policeman for fifteen years and I haven’t been asleep all that time. I have learned that the policeman must not obey the law written in the statutes. He must follow the tacit customs of the department. A policeman must never make a move until he is told to do so. If he does, he finds he is treading on some big man’s toes and then the transfer slip comes to him soon.”

POLICE, BURGLARS AND PICKPOCKETS.

It seems incredible but investigation and constant observation has proved that many big police officials and a number of smaller ones, have fallen so low that they “hold up” the burglar and the pickpocket and make them pay for their silence and protection.

There is a thieves’ rendezvous on the West side that is known to the police, but the members of this gang are rarely disturbed.

Every night detectives and policemen in uniform stroll past this saloon and salute the well known criminals lounging about.

Every day robberies, burglaries and holdups and the depredations of pickpockets are reported to the police. Rarely is stolen property recovered in comparison to the amounts taken.

But as an indication of the strength of the alliance between the police and the thieves, when some one demands justice in a strong voice that has powerful backing of a financial or political character, the police are always able to recover the property and restore it to its lawful owner.

A certain labor organization gathered through investigators, information sworn to, in affidavits, of the acceptance by policemen on the West side of protection money from well known crooks who have criminal records in every large city in the country.

THE FATE OF THE HONEST POLICEMAN.

It has been stated that this chapter is not an attack on the hundreds of honest policemen who day and[Pg 186] night at the risk of their own lives, battle for public welfare, clean morals and the eradication of the vicious elements of the community.

There are many honest policemen. But, we must say that these men, kept in the dark by the corrupt because they cannot be corrupted are usually “blackballed,” in some mysterious way by the powers that be, and the majority of them never achieve any rank in the department. Of course there have been a few exceptions to this condition.

The “transfer” system, which is nothing more than police railroading, is the most active medium of getting an honest and incorruptible policeman out of the way. If a man shows an inclination to balk at the commands of his superior who is but the agent of the great Vice Trust, he is speedily transferred to a harmless post where he is forgotten and remembered only when paid his monthly salary.

Six unsophisticated policemen, anxious to show their mettle and overzealous in the performance of their duty, discovered a hilarious and richly paying crap game running at Lake and Carpenter streets. They decided it was their duty to raid it. They did so. They thought they would be commended by their superior officers for their conduct.

Instead of commendation they were told they were inefficient and material that would never make good policemen.

[Pg 187]Two days later they were transferred to South Chicago. That meant that they were obliged to travel thirty-two miles each day from their homes on the West side to their posts on the far South side.

Simply because in doing their duty in raiding the crap game, they spoiled the profits of the Vice Trust. The game was run by a man who paid an enormous amount of monthly protection money to these men’s masters. They had “tread on somebody’s feet.”

Investigation of records of transfers in the department showed that thirty per cent of the transfers were caused for such reasons. The record sheets of men showed, in many instances, that a few days before their transfers they had antagonized the great Vice Trust by attempting to do their duty to the public which entrusted them to enforce the laws.

As an instance of how the “transfer game” may be worked with telling effect even on a police official who refuses to give his powers to the protection of gambling, the following suits the purpose.

A prominent political leader, anxious to gather spoils, went to a certain police lieutenant on the North side, and said to him:

“Not unless it’s on the order books and the captain stands for it,” answered the police officer carefully.

[Pg 188]The next day that lieutenant was transferred by the powers of the Vice Trust. One hour and a half after his successor took his place, the new commander was seen watching a street faro game in progress. He stood across from it and watched the gambling combine’s agent skin the “pikers” and he never moved to stop it.

Certain policemen in Chicago who are compelled to arrest certain well known criminal characters, cheat justice even after the arrests are made. They send the criminals to certain corrupt criminal lawyers. Then when the case comes to trial, the policemen lose their memories and do not remember the incriminating circumstances under which their prisoners were taken. These policemen receive a percentage, amounting to about fifty per cent, on the cases which they give to this class of shysters.

Could Chicago have a deeper blot of shame, dishonor and disgrace on her escutcheon than the present police department?

Is there hope that some day criminals may be locked behind barred doors that gold cannot pick?

There is always hope while honest men and women live and struggle to build up a city to rear their children unsullied. The police department is only one part of a great slave system. The evil is back at the ballot box. It is the old and only solution here as[Pg 189] elsewhere, in the conditions that make Chicago the “wickedest city in the world.”

That solution is the annihilation AT THE BALLOT BOX of the powers of vice, graft and sin,—the Vice Trust with its Directorate of Ten.

The civic conscience will arouse itself from its lethargy and some day purge out the evils that have thrived so prosperously for so many years.

CHAPTER X.

The Cause of the Great Evils—A Warning—The Duty of Parents—Conclusion.

Christ, prostrate at Gethsemane and hanging in his death agony upon the cross, prayed for a dying, decaying world’s redemption.

There is within the community a slowly awakening civic conscience. It shall arouse itself to deathless activity and wrest the Windy City from the forces that prey upon it. That is our prophecy.

The religious thought, the religious mind, the religious heart are ready to do battle for the God of righteousness.

Behind the telling of this story of Vice, Graft and Political Corruption has been but one predominating idea, the revelation of the truth about Chicago today.

[Pg 191]There has been but one hope:—the arousing of Chicagoans to the fight against corruption by revealing the terrible evils thriving about them and the delivering of a warning to those in and out of the great metropolis who, innocent and unsuspecting, might be trapped in the lures of sin, evil and shame.

On the great white, festering ulcer of Chicago’s world of crime and vice, we have turned the burning searchlight of truth. Into all the dark corners, the pitfalls, the covered abysses and the paths that lure and lead to Hell, has the light, blinding in its intensity, been thrown.

In the beginning we started out to demonstrate the theory that vice and crime as they exist and flourish today are so, because infamous and degraded men have commercialized them.

It has been shown that thousands of innocent girls and women are hurled into the bottomless pits of Hell annually, not because of a social viciousness that has no palliative, but because a coterie of Godless creatures value their bodies and souls at so many dollars and cents.

It has been shown that back of all the wickedness and evil of Chicago is the monumental and gigantic Vice Trust. The body, composed of a directorate of ten men who for years have fattened off the sins of fallen women and the crimes of inhuman men, has been vivisected and analyzed in all its component parts.

If the reading of this book turns the thousands of women who yearly stand on the brink of destruction, and saves them as an honor to the motherhood of the race, then this book will have been of infinite value.

CHICAGO—WICKEDEST CITY IN THE WORLD.

Its wickedness is the outgrowth of the terrible irreligious system of commercialism that has reduced the sacred things of life to a filthy gold and silver valuation.

As long as men whose consciences are stifled by gold dust, whose souls are Godless, and whose hearts are dry and hard as rock, control our ballot box, so long shall Chicago live under an infamous stigma.

When the ballot box is cleansed of fraud, then the forces of sin will be dissipated and the Vice Combine of today dissolved.

The “redlight” districts must stand as pesthouses where death feeds on the bodies of men and women until the political foundations of the Vice Trust are dynamited and destroyed. So, too, the saloons, the dance halls, the thousands of dens of infamy and hell-holes, where the seed of sin is sowed in the hearts of innocent girls.

The police department, as we have shown, is a[Pg 193] helpless, dependent, parasitic body. The Vice Trust has enslaved it. Just as long as the Vice Trust exists, so long will the police department do its bidding, while the laws are forgotten and disobeyed and a taxpaying public is left to the mercy of thieves and murderers.

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?

Rise up and in a body of Christian manhood and womanhood slay the monster of hellish iniquity.

But while the evil exists be prepared to fight against it for the sake of yourselves and your children.

We have told a horrifying story to save the pure souls and undefiled bodies of your sons and daughters.

Books have been written by the dozens on the question of White Slavery as a warning to young girls and their parents as to how the infamous agents of this soul and body traffic work.

But one third of the lost women today are the victims of the White Slave Traffic.

Two thirds of the girls who are dying slow deaths in the gilded dens of infamy drifted there because they knew not the hideous, paralyzing truth: because they dreamed not of the sorrow, shame, hunger, remorse and despair that was to be their bitter mouthful from the chalice of life.

To save the girls and women who in the future may form that two-thirds battalion of human slaves[Pg 194] has been our aim in treating of the scarlet woman and her tribute to, and reward from the Vice Trust.

Few girls who today are tottering drunkenly and uncleanly to a prostitute’s grave, ever dreamed of the fate in store as they sipped the first glass of wine or felt the burning lips of an agent of Satan upon their cheek.

We have set about to tell every woman what is the inevitable end of the life of shame and sin.

To the girl who dreams of fine clothes, glittering jewelry, wine suppers and association with men of brilliant character, down in the hell-holes of Chicago, we say:

It is the greatest lie Satan ever invented to wrest your souls from God and give your bodies to the unhallowed grave.

Over and over again on the rock of crime, the agents of that gigantic combine will break each woman’s body, taking flesh, pound by pound, and blood, drop by drop, until the last merciless toll has been exacted on the brink of the grave.

When the mask is torn off, there is nothing to lure in the life of the underworld.

It has been shown how the thousands of women in the segregated districts are robbed of even the last dollar of their immoral earnings.

[Pg 195]FOR GOD’S SAKE LET YOUR DAUGHTER KNOW THE TRUTH BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!

Tell her of the pitfalls that are ever about her; teach her the horror and ignominy of the life of sin that may be the consequence of one night in a cafe, or in an evil dance hall.

Put this book into her hands so that she may go forth to battle with the powers of evil and pass through the white fire unscathed.

FOREWARNED IS FOREARMED.

If your daughter in the future is to make her living in the big city, prepare her for the temptations that will beset her.

The truth may be an awful revelation to her, but the facts set forth in this book, showing the fate of the scarlet woman who dreamed of love, luxury and pleasure, and plunged into the lake of infamy, may save her from a similar fate.

If you will save yourself, mother and father, from sitting about the fireplace, wondering in the aching sorrow of your heart, as to where your rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed daughter is, teach her the facts as we have set them forth.

Teach her that it is not the White Slave Traffic she must dread alone. Teach her that it is the place of amusement that seems innocent, the drinking of pleasant drinks, the association with characterless men.

Once she tastes the fruit that is forbidden, the[Pg 196] rest is days and nights of drifting on and on until the whirlpool of vice swallows her.

For the sake of a glorious motherhood, for the sake of a new generation of men and women who shall make earth a picture of the eternal Paradise, let your daughter know the horrors of sin in a large city.

The boy here and the one who comes to Chicago must also know of the paths, luring and attractive, that lead direct to the gates of Hell.

To be great he must be honest. To be a leader he must be pure of heart. To be a true citizen he must be filled with the love of a true and chaste womanhood, a despiser of mercenary ideals, an advocate of good government and a supporter of inflexible and just laws.

He will carry on his struggle in the maelstrom of a large city, possibly Chicago.

Is it fair to hurl him into the midst of temptations without weapons to fight the demons of sin, crime, vice and corruption?

He should know of the great Vice Trust, of its system of slavery, of its power and scope of operation, of its daily bartering of flesh and blood, of its alliance with the dishonest gambling combine.

[Pg 197]Then he will be prepared to gain the ranks of those who will battle unwearyingly and ceaselessly against the monster.

Better that your daughter should sleep today underneath the green sward in the country church yard, in the city cemetery, than be the slave of a dastardly vice system, wearing her flesh away, damning her soul and eating out her heart for her vice masters.

Better that your boy should be taken from you in the flush of early manhood than that he should grow up to fall a hopeless victim to the curse of a great city.

God gave you your child. He gave you a terrible responsibility—the salvation of that child’s soul.

Therefore, prepare him or her for the battle “that goeth on unending to the tomb.”

We have told the story of a City Defiled, of a city given over to the powers of darkness. We have shown the existence of a Vice Body and how it protects and feeds its thousands of slaves, permitting them to live to turn more drops of blood into gold for them.

A PICTURE OF CHICAGO.

The story is a picture of Chicago, drawn only after the most thorough investigation, but we venture to say that investigation would reveal the same conditions in all the larger cities.

Sincerely we pray we have done good. Our[Pg 198] exposure was undertaken with a sense of duty to the 2,000,000 residents of Chicago and to the thousands that swarm into her gates daily.

Chicago needs civic leaders, civic martyrs,—men and women who will lead the army of Christian warriors to battle; men and women who will lay down their lives that their homes may be without peril from the terrible vice plague,—that their children may never know the face of sin and vice.

Chicago is full of latent good, religious enthusiasm, moral courage. It needs to be aroused.

One concerted blow struck at the head of the monster Vice would cause its death.

Let us engage in an honest rebellion with patriotism to our children, our country and our God, in our hearts.

Overthrow the Dynasty of Vice! Overthrow the corrupt political system that established and today sustains the Vice Trust!

Voice is without power adequately to describe the inferno that burns about us and daily offers to the god of the pagans as a propitiatory sacrifice the souls of men and women.

The human mind, if it could conceive the real horror of the meaning,—Vice Trust,—would be paralyzed by the revelation.

Human persistency, concerted effort, backed by unconquerable wills and hearts that hold God as a perpetual visitant, cannot fail.

That duty is the scourging of the Vice combine and the cleansing of Chicago. That duty devolves on the reform leaders and their thousands of Christian followers.

THE STORY IS CONCLUDED.

The story is concluded. The trail of graft has been followed from the ballot box to the dive, from the dive to the house of prostitution, from the house of prostitution to the gambling hole and on up to the houses of those debased public men and people-appointed guardians of the law, who are today weighted down with the gold, created by the melting of vice, sin and crime in the melting pot of the underworld.

As a mighty army let us go forth. As a mighty army, with God’s armor upon us, using all the means at our command, let us meet and conquer the enemy.

[Pg 200]With hearts thrilling with the horror of thousands of souls precipitated to endless darkness, with souls full of divine charity for our brothers and sisters, let us annihilate the Vice Trust and its minions.

In the place of dives let us have gardens; in the place of dens of infamy, playgrounds for a growing generation.

From the Wickedest City in the World, Chicago may become through persistent and systematic attack on its Vice Trust—

Containing the Picture, the Poem, “The Message of the Picture,” and the Motto, “Grit Wins.”

This poster contains these three simple statements:
“Saloons Defy Law, Saloons Encourage and Foster the White Slave Traffic, No Saloons Means Prosperity.”

Address all communications to
YOUNG PEOPLE’S CIVIC LEAGUE
301-305 Security Bldg., S.E. Cor. Madison St. & Fifth Ave.
Chicago—Illinois.

Preface	Page 9

CHAPTER I.
THE VICE TRUST, ITS KINGDOM AND POWER.
The Story of Chicago’s Subjugation to Political and Police Corruption.—The Corrupt Ballot Box.—The Mechanism of the Trust.—The Prices of Sin and Vice.—The Horror of Ruined and Purchased Lives.—The Remedy	15

CHAPTER II.
THE DEBAUCHERY OF THE BALLOT.
The Sacredness of the Ballot.—Its Corruption by the Vice Trust.—Methods of Corruption.—Affidavits Showing Corruption.—A Cleansed Ballot Box, A Cleansed City	47

CHAPTER III.
COME AND SEE. A City Defiled.
The First Step.—State Street and Its Pitfalls.—The Stages of Sin.—The Borderland of Hell.—The Cafe Evil.—The Rich Man’s Girl Trap.—Crimes that Thrive by Night	63
[Pg 6]
CHAPTER IV.
THE “REDLIGHT” DISTRICT.
Houses of Infamy.—The Feeders of the “Redlight” District.—The Life of a Prostitute.—The Big Palaces of Vice.—The Blood Price.—Hidden Tragedies.—The Polluted Grave	87

CHAPTER V.
WHAT WILL YOU BID FOR THIS WOMAN?
White Slavery.—The Trapping of the Prey.—Price of a Body and Soul.—Hell’s Bondage.—The “Cadet” Master.—Death the Penalty	100

CHAPTER VI.
VICE AND GRAFT.
Police Collectors.—The Triumvirate.—Figures that Freeze the Blood.—Graft that Feeds on Flesh and Blood.—The Prostitute’s Graft Price.—The Kimona Trust.—The Laundry Trust.—The Criminal Doctor.—The Prostitute and the Beer Graft.—The Woman and the “Cadet.”—Terrible Examples.—Lure of the Life.—The Pace that Kills.—To the Woman: Death.—How about Your Daughter?	108

CHAPTER VII.
SIDE GRAFTS OF THE SOCIAL EVIL.
The Rent Graft.—Saloon Graft.—Dance Halls and Protective Prices.—Graft from the Vice Palaces.—The Massage Parlor.—The Drug Crime.—The Vampire Trust	143
[Pg 7]
CHAPTER VIII.
GAMBLING AND ITS GRAFT.
The Gambler’s Fate.—The Handbook.—Other Games of Chance and Their Protection.—Police Profit.—All Gambling Crooked.—A Warning	156

CHAPTER IX.
TEARING OFF THE POLICE MASK.
A Story of the Hypocrisy of the Police Department.—Its Neglect of Duty.—Its Protection of Crime.—The Fate of One Police Official.—The Lost Child that is Never Found.—The Exposure of Big Crimes.—“Tipped Off” Raids.—Strange Ignorance of Police.—The Fate of the Honest Policeman.—Collusion of the Police and Thieves	174

CHAPTER X.
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?
The Cause of the Great Evils.—A Warning.—The Duty of Parents.—Young Girls and Boys Should Know the Truth.—Conclusion	190

		Tribute per month
Houses of Prostitution—
Those known as “dollar” houses		$20.00
“Two and three dollar” houses (for each inmate)		$25.00
“Five dollar” houses (for each inmate)		$35.00
“Ten dollar” houses (for each inmate)		$40.00
Fashionable “flats”		$25.00 to $500.00
Assignation hotels		$25.00 to $500.00
High class houses where rich old men bring young girls of virtue		$500.00 to $1,000.00
Dives of vice where whites and blacks mix		$200.00
Saloons with women “hustlers”		$100.00
Cafes with “hustlers” (of prosperous trade)		$100 to $300.00
Infamous dance halls		$50.00
Infamous dance halls, extra for immoral dances		$50.00
All-night saloons		$50.00
Obscene acting in houses of ill fame		$200.00 to $500.00
Handbooks and poolrooms		50 per cent
Faro games		50 per cent
Stuss (“Jewish poker”)		50 per cent
Poker and other games		50 per cent
Crap games		50 per cent
Gambling houses with all games		50 per cent
Chinese gambling of all sorts		50 per cent
Opium dens		$50.00
Cocaine and morphine selling		$100.00
Manicure and massage parlors where the women employes are really prostitutes		$100.00
Pickpockets and confidence men		not definite
Street walkers, or “hustlers”		$20.00 to $50.00
Professional bondsmen		50 per cent
Burglars and dynamiters		not obtainable
“Vampire” Trust, (members of which are women preying on patrons of fashionable hotels)		50 per cent
Professional beggars		not definite
Fake street hawkers		per day, $5.00
Kimona Trust (to be explained later)		66 per cent
Laundry Trust		50 per cent
“Cadets,” or “pimps”		not definite
Chop Suey restaurants in certain districts		$25.00

25 for	$0.05	Postage extra	1c
500 for	.75	Postage extra	2c
1000 for	1.25	Postage extra	4c

2 for	$0.05	Postage extra	1c
100 for	1.50	Postage extra	8c
500 for	4.50	Express extra
1000 for	7.50	Express extra

3 for	$0.05	Postage extra	2c
100 for	.75	Postage extra	16c
500 for	1.75	Express extra
1000 for	3.00	Express extra

1 for	$0.05	Postage extra	1c
3 for	.10	Postage extra	2c
25 for	.65	Postage extra	4c
100 for	2.00	Postage extra	15c

1 for	$0.10	Postage extra	2c
3 for	.25	Postage extra	3c
25 for	1.25	Postage extra	10c
100 for	4.00	Postage extra	40c

1 (in mailing tube)	$0.10	Postage extra	2c
25 for	.75	Postage extra	15c
100 for	2.50	Express extra
500 for	10.75	Express extra
1000 for	18.00	Express extra

THE VICE BONDAGE OF A GREAT CITY

CONTENTS.

Preface.

CHAPTER I.

CHICAGO—THE LIVING, BREATHING HELL.

THE SYSTEM AND ITS CAUSES.

THE COMPACT WRITTEN IN FLESH AND BLOOD.

THE DIRECTORATE OF GRAFT, CRIME AND CORRUPTION.

POLITICS, POLICE AND VICE.

FOR EACH CRIME A PRICE!

THE ATTACK UPON THE TRUST.

THE VICE-GRAFT CIRCLE:—WITHOUT BEGINNING, WITHOUT END.

THE BALLOT:—THE SECRET OF VICE POWER.

THE BALLOT-CONTROL OF VICE.

THE POLICE COLLECTORS.

THE PRICE OF CRIME:—$15,000,000 A YEAR!

A VICE CAPITAL OF FLESH AND BLOOD.

THE EVILS OF A WORLD IN A MELTING POT.

THE UNDERWORLD CONTRIBUTORS.

THE WHITE SLAVE TRAFFIC ANDS ITS LIFE-PRICE.

PROTECTION PRICES OF ALL VICES.

SIDE ISSUES IN THE VICE GRAFT.

THE QUACK DOCTORS OF CHICAGO.

THE KIMONA TRUST AND THE VAMPIRE TRUST.

WHEN AND WHERE WILL IT END?

THE MEAGER PURCHASE-PRICE OF POLICEMEN’S SOULS.

THE BATTLE OF GOODNESS WITH THE POWERS OF HELL.

CHICAGO!—TAKE WARNING, YOU WHO ENTER!

WHY THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN.

CHAPTER II.

40,000 ILLEGAL BALLOTS IN ONE YEAR.

CHARACTER OF THE VICE CORPS; ITS WORK.

PADDED ELECTION REGISTERS.

THE PROSTITUTE: A MASK FOR THE “FLOATER.”

THE LODGING HOUSE PERIL.

ILLEGAL VOTING COSTS MAYORALTY.

MR. FARWELL ON THE BALLOT CRIME.

THE LAW ABETS EVIL.

IN CONCLUSION.

CHAPTER III.

THE FIRST STEP.

STATE STREET AND ITS PITFALLS.

THE STAGES OF SIN.

THE RICH MAN’S GIRL TRAP.

THE BORDERLAND OF HELL.

ANTE ROOMS OF HELL.

CHAPTER IV.

THE QUESTIONS UNANSWERED.

THE FEEDERS OF THE “REDLIGHT” DISTRICTS.

THE DAILY LIFE OF A PROSTITUTE.

THE SLAVES OF THE “CADETS.”

BIG PALACES OF VICE.

THE HIDDEN TRAGEDIES.

WHAT BECOMES OF THEM?

CHAPTER V.

THE TRAPPING OF THE PREY.

PRICE OF ONE BODY, ONE HEART, ONE SOUL.

THE TRAFFIC OF WHITE SLAVERY!

$200,000 ANNUAL WHITE SLAVE PRICE.

THE SHACKLES OF THE WHITE SLAVE.

CHAPTER VI.

THE TRIUMVIRATE.

PRICE OF PROTECTING VICE.

FIGURES THAT FREEZE THE BLOOD.

POLICE PRICE FOR THE SCARLET WOMAN.

GRAFTS THAT FEED ON FLESH AND BLOOD.

THE KIMONA TRUST.

THE LAUNDRY TRUST.

THE CRIMINAL DOCTOR.

THE PROSTITUTE AND THE BEER GRAFT.

“SELL DRINKS OR STARVE.”

BEER GRAFT—$2,915,760.

THE INVESTED VICE CAPITAL.

THE PROSTITUTE AND THE “CADET.”

BRUTALITY OF THE “CADETS.”

“CADETS” AND POLICE GRAFT.

AND TO THE WOMAN?—DEATH!

“LEAVE ALL HOPE BEHIND.”

THE LURE OF THE “LIFE.”

THE PACE THAT KILLS.