The social menace of the orient : white or yellow, volume II

SOCIAL MENACE
OF THE ORIENT

WHITE OR YELLOW

VOLUME II

JEAN TURNER ZIMMERMANN, M.D.

SOCIAL MENACE
OF THE ORIENT

WHITE OR YELLOW

VOLUME II

JEAN TURNER ZIMMERMANN. M.D.

Copyright. 1916-1921

By
J. T. Zimmermann

/ earnestly thank every man and woman in
Chicago, the United States, the Orient and the
Islands of the Seas, who has aided me in my beloved
f°T women and children.

Jean Turner Zimmermann

The Author and three little Chicago Sisters. Their father is an invalid, their
mother supports the family by working in a restaurant.

The Social Menace of the Orient

CHICAGO and NEW YORK

"Good-by, Bertha, take care of yourself and be a good girl ; you'll get
on fine, I know. Good-by, daughter, wish you didn't have to go, but you're
going to a friend so pa and I won't worry and — Bertha, don't forget to say
your prayers," and a mother's gaunt, knotted hand waved and waved until
seventeen-year-old Bertha rounded the corner of the little green-hedged
white church — her mother's church and hers, and was gone, gone to Chi-

BERTHA

Mrs. Ross and ex-Policeman Dorsey Chambliss are now serving a five-year
sentence in Joliet Penitentiary for this crime. Through popular subscription,
Chicago paid the mortgage on the Kansas homestead.

Chicago Woman's Shelter cared for Bertha's mother during the long trial
following her death, and aided in caring for money subscribed in payment of
mortgage on farm.

cago with clean heart and strong arms, to earn money enough through the
coming winter to "keep up" the little left behind family out in Kansas.

On the porch of the shabby farmhouse sat the father, paralyzed, help-
less. Around him were his four younger children. Two years of suffer-
ing had almost wrecked his hopes, his life. Like a hunted animal his eyes
turned this way and that across the frontage of his little farm. Every
acre that met his gaze was mortgaged. Every small crib of grain licked

5

over by coming interest. Life looked dark to the father that morning, but
he was still a young man and hope, though feeble, wavered in his heart.
Then, too, Bertha was going to work this winter, was going to Chicago to
work with a girl friend they had all long known. Bertha was a careful girl,
a Sunday School and church girl. She would save her money and in the
spring, when planting time came around again, she would come home and
buy seed and clothing, shoes for mother and the boys, and then she and
mother would run the farm again next year. Yes, and there were the
cattle; ten of them. They at least were free from debt and their sale in
the spring would mean the saving of the home place and — and by that time
he would be well again — could walk, work. Had not the doctor promised?
He felt better right now — and had not mother prayed, believed? Question
after question miraged the brain of the sick man as he sat that morning
on the broken porch of the western Kansas farmhouse, the home place he
and mother had worked so hard to build and hold and each question was
answered by strengthening hope — yes, all would finally be well.

I saw her first in the shadows of Thirty-second Street, just east of
Wabash Avenue. She was walking hurriedly, evidently trying to avoid
attention, evidently though looking for someone. She was very young,
almost a child in appearance, not over seventeen. Her light curly hair
was clean, well combed, and the gloss of youth was upon it. Her form
was straight and trim, her eyes clear and steady.- A uniformed Negro
policeman sauntered down Wabash Avenue. The girl stepped out into
the light. "Beg pardon, but can you direct me to an express office? I
want to have my trunk sent down to Sixty-third Street ; I have work in a
restaurant down there." "Why, yessum," answered the officer. "I see you
are a stranger in Chicago, come this way and I will show you an express
office." "O, well, it was all right after all," I thought to myself as I passed
on. "The girl knows what she is about. She had common sense enough
to ask a policeman. This is a bad part of the city, but this girl knows how
to care for herself."

The rest of the story is public property — written in the records of a
hundred newspapers.

Christmas in Chicago. Over on Michigan Avenue a great cathedral
chime breathed out sweet bronze music. "Joy to the world, a Lord is
come, a Lord is come." The falling snowflakes caught up the night notes
and carried them restful, healing to ten thousand hearts, furred, jeweled
hearts trailing in the avenue traffic and on and on to cold, hungry hearts in
the sunken side streets of the vast, gray near-by city district. On crept the
notes of the music, on through snow crevices and up to an attic room, past
sickening odor, past filth, past long dead ash pile — "A Lord is come, a
Lord is come." A white face stirred, mirrored a moment's intelligence.
"The church, the church, home, mother !" A broken shadow form raised
itself. "A pencil, paper, quick, before it's dark." A thin hand touched a
filthy paper margin. A burnt-out ash — a note. "Help, I'm dying." Keep
ringing, church bell, keep ringing! One more effort little done-to-death
. girl of Kansas farmhouse, the wind-swept plains. "Brace up, push the note
through that snow crevice, quick, through the broken place, push hard,
chance it." Darkness, the darkness of the city, the darkness of the Ross
dive.

"Bring in the stretcher, men, this girl's done for, she'll never walk
again." The police officer's voice was gruff, but his eyes were full and
his hand was tender as he picked up the twisted, decaying body of the
seventeen-year-old girl — the girl of the Kansas farm country and carried
it out of the Negro dive and over to that vast place of hurt and sick
people, the Cook County Hospital.

"Go, mother, go quick, to-night! Bertha's dying, go, bring her back,
we'll nurse her and she'll get well again out here in the sunshine and the
love." The sick man's eyes stared stone. "O, I remember, no money —
mother, the cattle, ten of them, mortgage them, go !" A month later out
on the snow-wreathed Kansas plains, out by a little green-hedged white
church, a Sunday School class looked up into the star faces of the early
evening heavens, up toward God's eternal habitation and chanted to twenty-

old Chinese Den at 2130-32 Armour Ave., Chicago

five millions of American women a hope — a requiem, "Lead kindly light —
the night grows dark, lead, lead."

"What finally becomes of all this big army of borderline girls, officer,
these young 'cruisers,' who half naked from throat to breast-line and
from ankle to knee, walk until the early morning hours all the near-in cen-
tral streets of Chicago. Why, they count literally into the thousands on
State Street, West Madison and Clark Streets, Wabash Avenue. Every
street within and near the Loop has its quota and the congested outlying
neighborhoods are full of them. Where do they go, these little dark things ;
when twelve o'clock, one o'clock comes, is there no one to look after
them, have they no homes, no families?"

The police officer to whom I was speaking was himself a father and
after a moment's hesitation frankly he answered me. "O, most of them

7

are 'spoiled' as we police say, long before they have strolled the streets a
year. Do not talk to me, doctor, of the parents or homes of these girls.
Why, they do not know the meaning of these words. In the first place,
half, yes, two thirds of them come into the world utterly unwanted — hated.
A very large per cent of them come tainted from birth with transmissible
tendencies, transmissible disease. Early they learn to despise the weakness
of their parents, the uncertainty of their care, for a large per cent come
from homes so-called, where drink, drugs, desertion have played havoc.
To be sure, many of these girls have decent, hard-working mothers who
spend their days in factories, their nights scrubbing office buildings. Their
children are turned out to, in a great measure, shift for themselves. They
go to school or not as the truant officer compels. Anyhow, they spend

Chicago's First Real War Baby. Ward of Chicago Woman's Shelter

their evenings, their Saturdays, their Sundays in the alleys and ash-heaps
of their slum neighborhoods. At twelve years of age they know more
about licentiousness, can use as much vulgarity of speech as the hardened
criminal. At thirteen these girls are running around their own and other
neighborhoods until midnight, and at fifteen they are down in the Loop,
meanly yet flashily dressed, always hungry, always hoping, though, with
their vamped hair, naked breasts, and the thinnest of clothes to 'stick' some
'green one/ or, O, joy, some 'millionaire' for a meal or lunch and a movie
ticket. By the time they make sixteen they are known as 'cruisers' and are
soon allied to some 'pimp' or 'thieves' gang, Rapidly they drift to the very
worst. Every 'outlaw gang,' every murder guild in Chicago has its legion
of 'women' and these 'women' are rounded up by the dozen after every
startling crime but are quickly turned loose again. They are among the

8

most pathetic cases that come into the hands of the police. Most of this
great 'camp following' of the Chicago crime army are very young, a large
per cent under twenty-one years. They may be well dressed or not, accord-
ing to the success of their 'gang' in thievery, hold-ups, or to their own
success in general harlotry, and in court they are the 'alibi-alices' of their
men. They are the problem of the police, the menace of society, for prac-
tically all of them are diseased, a millstone around the city's neck, and
there are five thousand of them roaming the night streets. Say, why don't
you church and club women try to do something?"

My heart flashed as this veteran police officer talked on and on about
the girlhood of my city. "But, officer," I again questioned, "what finally
becomes of these girls ? Where do they drift to, tell me."

"O, as Chicago grows hotter and hotter for them, they go to other places,
to the border cities of Texas and the Pacific Coast. There they come in
direct contact with the 'international' dealers in women, the 'slavers' of all
the world."

Please bear in mind as you read that these girls are still very young.
The great majority of them never finished the grade schools, that they came

Tiny Somoliland (Africa) Girl. For nine weeks ward of Chicago Woman's Shelter

into the world ill-balanced in mind and body with the failings of inheritable
disease, that, through no fault of their own, they are impulsive, weak in
judgment, unstable, yet usually likable and ambitious. Many of them are
the daughters of immigrants, a few of them educated or have friends",
money. Speaking of them as a whole, they are the girls who never had a
chance.

Following the cue of thought the officer had given me, I began to
look the field over. For years I had known intimately of Chicago's vast
trade in crime of various kinds in women — known the men who ruled it —
who had ruled it for years, known the McGoverns, Colosimo, and his
former alleged wife "Madam" Rocco, Mike Heitler, "Mike the Greek," the
Everleighs. For years they had stood in the forefront of Chicago's sub-
merged world, where most of them stand to-day at the very toeline.
"And," continued the officer, "in the western coast cities these girls come
in direct touch with the vicious demands of all the Oriental world and are
easily induced to go on and on to Siberia, Japan, China, the sea islands
of all the south countries — raging death."

9

I have had some experience with the "trade" here in Chicago, and to one
who has lived for many years in the vast festering sinks of humanity that
lie smelly and submerged in such districts as those found in the West. Side
purlieus of Sangamon Street, Morgan and Monroe Streets, and all the
sunken lawless neighborhoods that raise their toad-stool heads in that great
underworld territory bounded on the north by Chicago Avenue and on the
south by Fortieth Street with long lines of side streets filled with the filthy
and underbred that lay splattered out from the river on the east to the
County Hospital on the west ; to one who has walked past the corner of
Halsted and Madison Streets at a late hour and faced the army of men,
seen there after theater hours, men living by hook or crook off of women,
men who slink out of their rooms or cellars, or from the back end of some

Japanese Geisha

sinister slimy saloon and join themselves together as the night grows old, to
buy and sell and deal in human blood ; to one who has lived among these, and
kept life and limb intact, the traverse of the far-stretching plains and moun-
tains, the graves, the heathenism of the interior of Asia holds little to make
afraid. 'For a number of years my work as superintendent .of one of Chi-
cago's large institutions for the protection and practical aid of stranded
women and girls has led me nightly into that city's most sordid quarters —
not always quarters of poverty, but many times tinseled and glittering, yet
always the same old slimy filth, filled with a million germs of frightful
disease that within a few years hands out its notice and takes its toll of
death from those who dabble in it. I had been pondering over and over
in my mind the question, "What finally becomes of the 'cruiser,' the street
woman just starting on her long walk of death? She is too strong to die

10

— yet — where does she go? She does not stay here long, she must go to
New York — to the North — the South." So one day Christine Kuppinger
(my partner and companion in travel in many a far-off corner of the world)
and I took a train to New York to see if we could find her there. We stayed
for days and weeks at an old-time hotel near the great street walking
grounds, grounds where men and women go every night to hunt innocent,
or "near innocent" blood, blood of girls and boys to stir and mix it, to
alloy it with frightful disease, and turn it finally into gold, gold for the slave
master, gold that one day will sink as completely the health and vitality of
this nation as was sunk the health and life of old Rome. We went around
everywhere, looked over the pavement crowd, visited the night court, the
woman's municipal lodging house. We went down into Chinatown and
through all its great surrounding slums, many times into the midnight
mission on Doyer Street, into all the homes for girls — spent days around

A Girls' School in our Samoan Islands

Ellis Island, walked the streets until our feet ached, but found few girls
we had known in Chicago.

"This is winter and they go South in winter," said a wise one. "All
right," we said, "we'll go South and find them." So South we went. We
stopped a week in Washington, perhaps some of these girls were there.
We were particularly looking for some of the six or eight hundred public
slave women held on Armour Avenue, Dearborn Street, Dearborn Alley,
Twenty-second Street, etc. (Chicago), up to the time of the Wayman raids.
We knew very many of these women well enough to speak to them. They
were the women held in such slaughter pens as those operated by "Jim"
Colosimo, the "Jew Kid," Madam Rocco, "Mike the Greek," the "Waup,"
"Black Mag," "Mike" Heitler, "Monkey Face Genker," the Friedmans, and
the Blooms. We knew the "ring," the "gang," the gunmen — we knew Roy
Jones and his infamous dive of murder, "Duffy the Goat," and decaying
Moresco. We knew them all, their blood-red hands, their evil, bulging
faces — and we knew their women. We were determined to somehow or
other find out what becomes of these women who have once been bartered
across the counter of Chicago's public slave auction block.

11

THE SOUTH

A block back of the rear of the Queen and Crescent Railroad passenger
station and running out and across to the old Saint Louis Number two
cemetery in one direction and down toward the old Absinthe house near
the French market in another direction, comprising blocks and streets of
territory, lies New Orleans' vast soul market. Two or three blocks away
stood the wreckage of the Hotel Royal. At the time of our visit there,
several years ago, this ancient relic of a past reign of "Far South" slavery
still held its head above the street. Shreds of wonderful tapestry and
exquisite carving still clung to its skeleton form. Picking our way across
the building under the guidance of an old Negro woman, we came at
last to the' immense ancient rotunda with its old auction block at the far
end of the room. It was dark and damp in there. There were puddles
of slimy water on the dirty floor. I saw the rafters covered with slime. I

A Marist Sister of the American Samoans. Eighteen years she has worked
alone in these islands.

saw spiders on the wall — we walked over to the "block." Lizards and
crawling things slunk away — it was the South's old slave auction. I
looked again at the block chipped and broken by a thousand tourists. My
mind and vision wandered up among the colonnades, and back again to that
block of black slavery. A great procession of sixty years ago seemed going
by. I saw a black baby snatched from the flabby breast of a whipped
black mother. I saw a girl in whose veins flowed the Aryan blood of old
Virginia forced out on the block under the knout of a brutal driver. I saw
her dress torn from her trembling limbs, I heard a voice that seemed
to come from Hades hiss that they were straight, well made — I heard
another hiss "and she's intact, what am I bid?" I saw a trembling woman
— a mother clutch — the girl? — no, the air — I staggered over to the window,
I looked across to the great white slave market of the beautiful Southern
city, a loved city, for my blood is Southern blood, the heavens seemed
brass over it all — I looked again, something seemed to glow, to hang

12

over New Orleans in hopeful shade — yes, it was a shadow — the shadow of
the Cross — and it fell again over a white market in my Southland and with
its shadow came healing, liberty — Salvation.

Out of the old Royal we went, glad to breathe the fresh air again.
We strolled down into Liberty Street, Liberty Street with its hundreds
of peculiar little Southern "cribs." Whites, blacks and breeds all mixed
together, reeked and smelled along the side streets and alleys. A girl sat
smoking inside a doorway. The "men" controlling the block were resting
in a shady corner saloon. "Let's go in," Mrs. Kuppinger said, "I believe
I know her." Sure enough we did know her and she knew us. "Where
did you use to work?" we asked. "Out of Madam Leo's in Chicago,"
answered the girl. "On Armour?" asked Mrs. Kuppinger. "Sure," an-
swered the girl. "I'm so glad to see a 'North' face again. I'm lonesome
down here among all these niggers." She was one of the girls so uncere-
moniously hustled out of Chicago when the city partially cleaned up its
vast segregated red light district a few years ago and in the course of a

Kamahamaha Palace, Honolulu, Headquarters Pacific Division Red Cross, 1917-18

ten days' stay in New Orleans we found and learned of quite a number of
girls forced into Southern cities by the great wave of action against public
vice in Illinois, Iowa and other Northern States. The women were filthy,
abject, while hundreds of greasy men lounged through the district drum-
ming up trade, bartering, guaranteeing their respective "houses" to be free
from disease and putting out all the allusions and inducements usually
offered by the "cadet" of such a district. Above and over all was the
master. He held no visible whip in his hand, but he held something a
hundred times more dreadful, for he held drink and drugs, absinthe,
mental terror, and he held them in a hand gloved in velvet. A whip is not
always necessary though it is many times used. One drug, morphine,
cocaine, even whisky — a few doses, a few drinks, a habit, the victim is
helpless.

Asked the girl from Madam Leo's: "Say, do you know if it's true^or
not that 'Big Kate' and 'Jew Rosie' went to China?" "No, I don't know,"
answered Mrs. Kuppinger, "I hadn't heard of it; did you girls hear they
had ?" "Sure ; you know Kate used to be in that house that was filled with
white girls for the use of Chinese — you know that house on Armour

13

Avenue back in Chicago ; well, somehow they got her to go over to
Shanghai and she's never been heard of since, nor has Rosie, and Rosie's
mother a widow, too, and lives in Russia somewhere, and Rosie use to
send home money to the old lady and the kids. I wonder if they did go?"

THE WEST

"Hey there, you! I mean you two women." Christine Kuppinger, niy
traveling companion, and I paused a moment and turned around to see where
the call came from. As we stopped, officer 789 of the San Francisco
(Cal.) police force came hurriedly over to where we were standing. It
seemed we were on either "historic" or "forbidden" ground. Anyhow,
we were at the corner of Commercial Avenue at the spot where Bartlett
Avenue debouches into it, about half way up the hill from old Barbary
Coast. We were surrounded on every side by hundreds, even thousands
of Orientals. From one direction came the shrill call of a street "hawker,"
from another the shriek of a woman in distress, from all sides came the
smirk of strange yellow ^aces. It was Saturday night in the Oriental
prostitution district of the city. "Did you mean us?" we asked as 789
caught up with us. "Yes," answered the officer. "I was afraid you ladies
might be going to walk through Bartlett Avenue and I wanted to stop you."
"Why did you want to stop us?" we asked. "O, you know the police do
not allow decent women to walk on some of these streets, it's dangerous,
you know," and 789 leaned against the lamp post (everybody walks in the
middle of the street in this section of San Francisco) and looked as official
as possible. "But we want to know why, why we cannot walk on Bartlett
Avenue or any other street in San Francisco," we kept asking.

Officer 789 looked puzzled, and officer 667 lounging on an opposite
corner, seeing the conversation unusually prolonged, came over to see what
was doing. "O, well," answered 789 finally, "there's a lot of white girls
in there and the Orientals and others interested do not like to have visitors,
that is, women visitors, around too much." Here 667 came to the rescue
of his brother officer. "I'll tell you what to do," said he, "you go down and
see the police commissioner of the district and see if you cannot obtain a
permit. If he says it is all right to walk through, why, you go through.
See?" "All right," we answered, "Only we've been through already."
"O !" and officer 789 looked still more disturbed. We asked him if he had
ever been out of San Francisco. "Well, no," he answered, halting, "I have
always lived here." "All right, we'll see you again," we answered, and
walked on down Commercial Avenue toward the car line and Barbary
Coast.

Away to the right, perhaps half a mile, Market Street was ablaze with
beautiful flowers and brightest lights. Women, the city's fairest, threw
flowers into the air and smiled a smile of welcome to the crowded street —
the stranger within the gate — the Golden Gate. Men trailed great auto-
mobiles up and down, machines that were loaded with a wealth of bloom
and beauty — for was it not the Portola Festival — the festival of the Gate?
But no sound of joy or music floated up to that other festival on the

14

reeking hillside that night, the festival of men's debauchery, only yellow
smirks as gold was exchanged for white flesh, only foreign damning oaths
— women's screams — it was the Festival of Death.

THE ORIENT

Japan practically controls the passenger shipping of the Pacific Ocean
and certainly she controls the Asian Pacific Coast line from Vladivostock
to Manila. In the fifty years she has been in contact with the Western
world she has planted her vast, government-taxed, government-upheld
yoshiwaras in every city in every country she has been allowed to enter.
Her young women, leased or sold — by the seke system, are to be found
in great hordes in every Oriental city. She rules the commercialized

Nectarine No. 9, Yokohama, Japan

prostitution of the Western oceans. Even in Honolulu and Manila; under
the very shadow of the Stars and Stripes, she has established great dis-
tricts and filled them with not only her own women, but with the women
of all the world. Coast line Siberia is overwhelmed with her geisha, her
harlots. Every Japanese passenger ship leaving our American coast is
supplied with her publicity propaganda, her advertisements of this great
"house" and that great yoshiwara. She is known the Western world over as
"The Island of Girls" for she everywhere from the "Picture Bride" of
California, west to "Nectarine No. 9" in Yokohama, from North Siberia
south to 55 Gardenia Street, Manila, legalizes and deifies the prostitution
of her own and other women. She is the social menace of the Orient, the
world, and for the benefit of those who shall read this, the writer, after
numerous journeys through Siberian waters, through Japan, China, the
Philippines, Australia, and the South Seas, gives out the following infor-
mation, gathered through six years of patient investigation as a warning
of existing conditions in the countries that wash their faces in the lap of
the Pacific Ocean — America's slowly but surely back door.

15

A great ocean-going steamer was backing away from her slip in the
wharves of San Francisco. Good-bys had been said, flowers, masses of
gorgeous bloom had been thrown on board, handkerchiefs were waving,
a mammoth ship, a passenger ship, had turned her nose toward Asia and
all beyond. On board of her were a little party of missionaries going out
to work in the "foreign fields," going out ardent, enthusiastic, to help
raise the standard of the Cross against Buddhism, Shintoism, against Con-
fucius and his world-old doctrines.

Among this party was a very fine looking young woman. Tall, light,
enthusiastic, verdant as the hills of her own central Western state, she
was at twenty-four years of age going to Asia to become a missionary.

There was a noticeable passenger on board the steamer as she slipped
out of the gate and into the sea. He was a kind and affable man, he was a
physician, Dr. Sargent of Seattle. Naturally on the ocean there are times
when medical advice is much sought after and Dr. Sargent was in demand.
As the days went by Dr. Sargent began to be seen much with the young

Yoshiwara, Yokohama, Japan
(Note regulation opaque lights that round the world advertise Japanese prostitution)

missionary. "Be careful, Miss Blank," warned an older woman in the
partv, "sea acquaintances and friendships sometimes prove burdens on
land?'

The time passed rapidly and as the ship neared the Japanese coast
Dr. Sargent ardently pressed the girl to go on down to Shanghai, China,
and there marry him. Waveringly she refused. The ship touched a
Japanese seaport, the girl's destination.

"I will return and visit you," whispered the doctor as she left the liner
for her field of work. This girl's older friends heaved sighs of relief.
"One ship flirtation abruptly ended," they declared.

Our little missionary entered the great compound of a sister faith to
await her transportation to a language school near by. This compound
situated within a rock-hewn entrance and on a hill overlooking the United
States consulate, the flag, would seem to any ordinary observer, a safe
place for any woman. Its corps of workers could not be surpassed — all
was well.

Two weeks after this time Dr. Sargent walked deliberately up the steps
of the Mission building, rang the bell and asked for Miss Blank. She

16

came downstairs to meet him. He insisted on taking a little walk. She
refused unless accompanied by a chaperon. Miss Blank called a friend
of the writer's to go with them on the proposed walk. Dr. Sargent, hear-
ing the conversation between Miss Blank and the resident missionary,
brought such pressure to bear on Miss Blank for a few minutes' private
conversation that they started to walk slowly to the entrance of the Mission
compound. In a minute almost the trap was sprung. The woman mis-
sionary in the compound came down with hat and gloves ready for the
walk. She missed the young woman. Immediately a search was started,
but Dr. Sargent had turned to the left instead of the right on leaving the
compound and instantly he and Miss Blank were swallowed up in a
crowded, jamming street. Thoroughly frightened now and entirely lost,
Miss Blank demanded that the doctor take her back to the Mission. A
ship lay at anchor in the bay, a ship for Shanghai, China. "Come on,"
said the doctor, "we will go and have some Japanese lunch and then be
married and leave this country this afternoon."

"I cannot, cannot," cried Miss Blank, "I still owe -my passage money
to my Board. I cannot leave." "Yes, you will leave," said Dr. Sargent.
They had wandered on and on. The girl in one way was helpless, but
physically she was a strong woman, a college girl. Dr. Sargent seized her
as they came into a secluded part of the street. She fought him \vjth stout
arms and a now thoroughly aroused stout heart. He threw a silken scarf
about her neck and tried to choke her. She snatched it away and throwing
all her strength into one mighty effort broke loose from him and dashed
away. After- an exciting run she escaped him and in the course of an
hour or so was able to find her way back to the Mission. Dr. Sargent
went down to Shanghai and afterward was cool enough to write to Miss
Blank, still asking her to join him in that city.

One would naturally think that surrounded by every protection a power-
ful Church could give and remembering the fact that all missionaries go
out in parties, each party accompanied by someone going out for a second
term of service, our girls going to Asia would be safe enough ; but when
one realizes the intricate thorough workings of the organized white slavers
of the Trans-Pacific business of commercialized dealings in our women,
one can only wonder and fight back in the best way possible and trust for
laws and legislation that will forever put a stop to these "sea wolves" and
their death trade of the Pacific.

No British woman is allowed to prostitute herself in any British colony
where flies the Union Jack. In all the great armies of white slaves in the
Orient, the American girl predominates. She is closely followed by the
Jewish and the French girl. Many Russian women, too, are noted in these
vast districts, for women, near the military camps in such cities as Peking,
Shanghai and Hongkong — in fact, women of all the nations are con-
gregated in these immense flesh markets, American leading all in exports
to them. We fall behind in many ways in our trade with the Orient, but
in the shipment of our young American girls by all the slimy traders in
womanhood from all the world, we at least lead the way, until the words
"American woman" have become by-words in many parts of Asia. I ask the
club-woman and the Church-woman of the United States to take this matter
up — to take it before their congressmen, and ask stricter legislation regard-

17

ing the leaving an American port for Asia by the woman who has little
proof of her object or the destination of her journey. A great commercial-
ized vice ring reaches around the world, it is systematized, its organization
is strength itself. A girl is missing to-day in Chicago or New York, a
month later she is found in some remote American city or in the dives of
the Orient, or worse yet, she is never found nor heard of again. We drag
our rivers, and our police forces are kept busy trying to find her body, while
on some trans-Pacific steamer, thousands of miles away, some swart, shrewd
man, born and bred leagues from our shores, treads the deck and congrat-
ulates himself that in the cabins are a few American girls going out as
actresses (?) or governesses (?) or companions (?), and for each one he
lands he will get a thousand dollars cash and all expenses paid. One of our

Christine M. Kuppinger and author leaving gate of old Royal Palace, Seoul, Korea

American girls taken to China is first placed in a high class house (see cut
of Zaza Van Buren's house in Shanghai, the House of the Golden Stair),
and is kept there about three months, that is, providing business is good.
If it is not good and girls are slow coming in, she may be kept longer,
but if things go right and trade is brisk, she will likely be sent to a lower
class house, as soon as it is known she is diseased. The prevailing venereal
disease of all the Orient, the Philippines and the South Seas is "yaws." It
is highly contagious and is greatly feared throughout Asia. It is, correctly
speaking, a species of syphilis, many times called Oriental syphilis. No
girl escapes it and beset as she is by other diseases usually is compelled to
leave a first-class "house" within a short time after entering. A girl enter-
ing China without a full knowledge of where she is going and with strong
earnest friends to meet and care for her, can be lost forever in one minute.
I remember well the afternoon Mrs. Kuppinger and I for the first time
entered from the cars the railway station at Peking. A thousand coolies
pressed us to the wall, dirty, filthy hands snatched at our luggage, half-
blinded eyes leered at us, close, a thousand struggling, fighting, coughing
men were screaming at the top of their voices. They could, as we found
out afterward, be heard two miles away from the station. Not a white face
was in sight. We knew not which way to turn — we could speak no word
of their language and there remained but one thing to do, simply beat off
the crowd with our walking sticks and defend as best we could our valuable

18

cases. They were determined to carry them away to our hotel. They were
reckless, starving, any one of them would have risked a perfect rain of
blows in the face to have gained one cent for the little job of work. We
stood our ground and slashed right and left. A moment more and Miss
Fearon of the American Methodist Mission had us by the arms. I touched
with my walking stick two men to carry our luggage, another minute we
were in rickshaws, out of the crowd and at our hotel.

A girl who once loses sight of a white face in the Orient, of a friendly,
strong hand, who for one single minute gets into the power of her destroyers,
is lost forever. She might stand in the middle of the station at Peking in a
crowd of a thousand and scream her head loose and not one soul would so
much as look around to see what the matter was, unless it chanced a white
man stood by. Interference in affairs between whites and yellows in Asia
is not common unless the case is very pronounced. The girl once off the
ship or, for the matter, even on it, is absolutely under the control of those
who have her in charge.

I was scarcely prepared for the sights I met at Tientsin, China. To the
woman sold into a life of shame in the seaports of the Orient only one fate
can come. A year or two in some dark hole, nothing to eat, vile, filthy sur-
roundings, vermin of every kind, opium, frightful disease, "yaws," (Oriental
syphilis), torturing, tearing into the vitals of life, gray dead leprosy, in-
sanity, the general (insane) hospital — death.

For every girl who reads this, I want to paint a real life picture of gir!
slavery in the Orient. I want to tell you of one sick, starving girl in Tien-
tsin, chained all day in the cellar of an Oriental dive, forced to the door of
the hut above as the evening shadows fell, to stand stripped to the waist
and beg the white, black and yellow faces of the world to come in. One
came at last. She shuddered, every nerve in her grew tense as hardened
steel. The one who came cared not that her eyes were half-blinded, that
her limbs bent this way and that. He was one of her kind. He was a leper
"Unclean," she shrieked, and tried to flee the foul embrace, only to be
forced forward by a dozen blood-yellow hands armed with hot metal chop-
sticks. Into all the torment behind her, the torment she knew so well, she
still shrank back, back from the gray lumpy leper — her hand flashed to her
bosom — a hidden knife — it reached her side — it entered it, and down against
the bamboo bars of that reeking Asiatic cellar, down at the feet of the
rotting leper fell a scarred, huddled white American body, and a tortured,
twisted soul — a soul of tears and blood — fluttered out past the Stars and
Stripes flying less than half a mile away, and with shrieks against its burn-
ing stain and wrong, went back to the God who gave it.

For real information regarding social conditions in Peking, China, we
were deeply indebted to Mrs. Dr. Chauncy B. Goodrich, National President
of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of China. It was through
Mrs. Goodrich that we were admitted to the Peking Rescue Home for
Chinese prostitutes, and it was surely a wonderful place. Now, the China-
man is nothing if not philanthropic. He gives to charity and believes in
his giving. So Peking has a real rescue home for fallen women or rather
slave prostitutes. When in or near foreign concessions, a Chinese slave
prostitute is so beaten or tortured that her screams become an annoyance to
the people living near, and people live very near each other in China, or,

19

when in these tortures a leg or arm may be broken or an eye destroyed and
these things become known, this girl may be taken (in Peking and Shang-
hai) before what is known as a "mixed" court, that is, a court where one
magistrate is an American or European and one a Chinese, and if this court
deems her as having been cruelly treated she may be taken legally from the
owner and placed in a rescue home. So, in company with Mrs. Goodrich we
"rickshawed" out to the Peking home. Visitors are not usually admitted to
this institution, but our friend's social standing, her elegant Chinese speech
and etiquette opened the barred door in the heavy wall and we were ad-
mitted. In the military guardhouse at the gate we must have tea and
cake, as is the inevitable (and I think it is a beautiful one) custom in both
Japan and China. We were ushered through two more gates and walls
and finally came to the matron's office and on beyond to the huts of the
girls themselves. On the morning we were there, there were about eighty
or ninety scarred, half-blinded, sick girls confined in the place. A few were
beautiful — a few well. They scattered like sheep as we entered the place,
most of them to their wretched cells. Many, many of these girls were half-
demented, many stunted. More were repulsive with venereal disease. All
were cold, wretched, for it was a zero day and the poor of Peking have no
fire. Very few Pekinese, even among the wealthier class, have any fire in
winter excepting a brazier of burning charcoal.

Well, on this morning in question we met and smiled at many of the
cold little prisoners of the rescue home. Their ages ranged from four
years up. Little, torn, hungry slaves — I might write the words "little dogs"
of humanity — scarred, lost, some of them, though sweet and lovable, some
like animals ruled by a slaver's knout. As we entered the walls of the
compound we noticed posted all over the stones and on sort of billboards
dozens of pictures resembling our old-fashioned wood cuts. Around these
pictures were hundreds of struggling, swearing, filthy coolies. We asked the
matron what these men were doing and what the pictures represented.
"Why," she answered, "those men are there to pick out concubines." Each
girl as she comes in here is photographed and numbered and the picture
and number posted on the wall, the men come and look the pictures over
until they find a girl they think they would like. For a small fee the girl
may be given over to this man as a wife, concubine or slave. He takes her
to his home, keeps her awhile. If he is satisfied with her, if she works well,
he keeps her, but if he does not happen to like her, he brings her back any
time within three months, bruised and bleeding and exchanges her for
another girl. Good-by, rescue home ; good-by, little bruised, scarred hope-
less girls. May the efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ in China be held
up on mighty wings of love and prayer and gold, as it stands in that vast
Oriental country and speed its arrows of a human-divine salvation into the
darkened lives and broken, cursed, tortured bodies of Chinese girlhood !

I do not want to particularize at all on China or Chinese customs in
this little volume, but I want to make understood the clear fact of woman's
position in China. The position of a woman in China is exactly that of a
chattel, a slave. I realize the fact, too, that through the wonderfully suc-
cessful efforts of the missionaries many, many women and girls are being
broadly educated, but these students and emancipated women number at a
maximum estimate one hundred thousand while China has one hundred and

20

fifty millions of women within her borders. All praise, all honor to the
step forward the girls of the newest Republic are making, the girls on the
shore-line of that great nation, yet the fact remains to the careful traveler
in the interior and to one who goes away from the European influences of
the large coast cities, that the women of China are slaves pure and simple.
Now to get at the question of the status of the white woman in China. The
white woman who marries a Chinese and goes back to China to live with her
husband utterly and forever loses her standing and caste both among whites
and Chinese. The Chinese will only receive and treat her as a Chinese
woman. If she rebels and her husband chooses to uphold her, he is at

In spite of Kipling, East and West meet in friendly fellowship

once boycotted, first by his family, who really in the eyes of the law own
her body and soul, then by the entire Chinese city or community in which
they live. They are cast absolutely adrift. As to the white element receiv-
ing the husband and wife of a "mixed marriage," this is as seldom done
as is the reception into our own white society of a mixed marriage couple of
black and white. The thing is utterly repellent, repulsive and impossible.
Now I get back to my subject — our white women in the Orient who have
been lured there through various promises and sold into a life of public
prostitution.

The white prostitute in China, aside from her money-making value, is
less thought of by the Chinese themselves than the dog that haunts the out-
lying graveyards of the country and lives by gnawing the body and bones
of the murdered baby left there for him. She is neither thought of nor is
she considered as a human being. In fact, for years China treated all Amer-
ican women coming into the empire with as much contempt as she dared,
because she judged all American women by the great hordes of American

21

prostitutes plying their trade along the coast of Asia and in the islands of
the seas. As we study this question, keep in mind one great fact: "No
British woman is allowed to ply the trade of prostitution in any of England's
colonial possessions or treaty ports over which fly the Union Jack." Why
not be able to say the same of the United States and the Stars and Stripes?
We left the rescue home that cold morning and drove away to the little
English Church in the British legation compound of Peking. There stood
the heavy walls protecting the half mile square of ground, backed by the
United States legation grounds, which include a part of the great wall of
Peking, forty feet broad on the top, sixty feet broad at the base and forming
the back wall of the American compound. The wall of Peking, which at
this point is near the water gate of the city, is considered a strategic portion
in case of trouble for the legations. A year's rations of food are stored in
bullet-proof structures on its summit, and it is constantly patrolled by the
United States and other troops at this place. Since the Boxer rebellion of

Chinese House of Prostitution, Hongkong

1900 the foreign legation grounds of the city of Peking have never been
out from under the eyes of the allied troops of all the nations. All buildings
within half a mile of the legations were burned away at the time of the
rebellion and this space is constantly covered with cannon, which also com-
mand the sites of the Hotel Peking, Hotel Wagon Lits, the Methodist mis-
sionary compound and the foreign business district. We climbed up on the
wall of Peking, looked across the United States compound, and beyond.
Yes, there it was, the British compound with its little Church inside. It
was the compound where, (when the mad, frothing Boxers in June, 1900,
took Peking) were gathered together for months all the ambassadors, lega-
tion employees, army guards and missionaries of practically all the countries
of the world, to withstand, as God should help them, fifty thousand raging
Chinese. It was here in this compound that men of every country on earth
fought and dug and bled and died to save white women and children — it
was here that women sobbed and prayed and raved with thirst and hunger
until death was a prize, a Godsend, an answer to prayer. It was here that
Frank Gamewell, a missionary who had been a civil engineer before he took
Church orders, demonstrated that a preacher in a pinch could do more than
preach, and scientifically fortified the strategic points of the compound walls

22

until five hundred men armed with modern guns held them against fifty
thousand cowards who clamored for their blood and wives and children.
It was here too, that when the rescue came, women with the best blood of
our nation in their veins, consecrated women of the Churches, women of
Britain, France, Germany, Chinese women, all women of all nations, after
they had kissed little babies' graves and washed the wounds of loved ones
with their tears, climbed up on the wall, and cried and sang together as
women sometimes can, "O ! come, let us sing unto the Lord, let us heartily
rejoice in the strength of our salvation." Sang as only women can sing
who have escaped the Great Curse, sang it up past Confucius, up past

Shelter Ward who now has the advantage of school, music and a beautiful home

Buddha, on up past the Cross, the clouds, until the music beat white against
the very throne of God and was caught up by angel voices and wafted
back again to earth to cap the great already laid foundations for the salva-
tion of China, and Chinese women for the Kingdom of Right.

We quietly and with thoughts and hearts melting with the Great Deliver-
ance of the women of the world from the hands of the Boxers of Peking,
turned and walked down toward the north end of the legation grounds. We
came to a heavy jutting corner of the wall. It was here that the troops were
massed, who night and day defended the weaker portions of the wall.
Away up high at the corner of the wall was the smooth surface of a rock.
Some soldier boy, perhaps he was a "Tommy Atkins," had climbed one day
high above all the others and with a paint brush scratched Kipling's words
"lest we forget" that all who walked might read. "Lest we forget." Forget
what? Why wives, children, woman's honor — forget to shoot — forget to
pray!

23

We walked slowly along, it was a glorious winter's day — we looked down
'Telegraph lane — the flags dimmed away into the backgrounds, the music of
parade grounds scarcely reached us — the psalm with its glory sounded
fainter — we looked again — yes, there they were, our own American girls —
dragging, diseased, prostituting among all the troops and gamblers and
hangers-on of all the nations of the earth to be found in this great Asiatic
center. They led — and after them came another vast death army of girls,
Jewish, French, Russian, Japanese, until in that army almost every flag on
earth was represented. We have to leave you there, girls, until we can go
home and do our share toward arousing the club women and Church
women of at least one of God's nations to help you. Leave you there on a
shoreless sea whose wreckage bumping into you is the awful beast-man of
the world, the eyeless leper, the blinded beggar, the hatchet-faced coolie,
the bloated, bulging, festering body of your owner — but we have read the

Little^ Christian Korean Girl on her way to Sunday School.
Hymn Books. (Methodist Mission, Girls' School, Seoul.)

Note Bible and

letter thirty-three of you wrote and sent to Mrs. Goodrich. "We are awash
on a sea without a shore, you can do nothing for us, we are lost — dead, but
won't you try to save our younger sisters?" Yes, we will try to save them,
try to save you. We will do all we can, God helping us to tell your story
and have at least a little part in bringing about your final rescue and salva-
tion.

It is in the city of Shanghai that we find the white slaver really in the
open, unalloyed trade in American girls. Great houses operating by the
dozens, little houses, dives and cellars — everyone not only a foul-smelling
market within itself, but an underground shipping point to all the interior
cities of Asia. The entire traffic in white girls as I have found it throughout
Asia is one of the most appalling things in the world. Certainly the girl
who sails away to a foreign country of any kind, anywhere, without fully
recording herself with her own government is a simpleton, and deserves
punishment, but not the kind she receives in Asia. Moving pictures are
beginning operation in Japan, China, the Philippines and for these hundreds
of girls will be sent out by men who "understand how to get them through"
and will be lost forever. I see a girl here to-day, to-morrow — next year I
look across into Asia — I see a little show window there, a parched face, a

24

bruised, scarred back, a lost body. I ask, "Where did she come from ? Why,
she's white." The answer comes from the nurse in the General (insane)
hospital, "O, she came from America last year." "Diseased?" we asked.
"Yes, it settled in her brain."

* I have the highest regard and love for the Chinese. I believe China to
be the coming nation of the Orient. China had opium thrust upon her,
consequently she smokes opium. China has public prostitution — commer-
cialized— thrust upon her, literally jammed down her national throat. Hence,
she has prostitution, opium smoking and of later years, tobacco and whisky,
until now a great coolie class, a class that never knew what a square meal
was, can be employed by the adventurers of Asia's shores — the "beach
combers" — to do anything on earth for a quarter.

The people of China do not want opium, do not want prostitution, but

Zaza Van Buren's great "house," 16 Soo-Chow Road, Shanghai

these things are utterly forced upon them. In their hearts they prefer
early marriage, a concubine added now and then, or a slave girl. The real
Chinese likes to go to bed at dark and get up at daybreak. But the great
white slave syndicate of Asia and deafers all over Europe and America are
forcing rapidly the open house of prostitution into China. She is helpless
and must swallow the whole thing bait and hook. Poverty is everywhere,
and then the Chinese themselves are overridden in every coast city and in
many of the cities of the interior by thousands of the vilest, bloated creatures
of all the nations of the world gathered to lie and steal and cheat and rape
until the Chinese underworld, the world around, falls in with these and the
harvest of cruelty and blood goes on and on always. I am writing from a
long experience in the Orient and after investigations that covered coast
cities of Japan, China, and the Ph'ilippines and that reached away into the
interior of all these countries.

In Yalu Road, Shanghai, we made very thorough investigations. This
old road was once known as Scott's Road, but it became so murderously
notorious that even in Shanghai it was deemed necessary to change the name
of the lane to Yalu Road. At the end of the Yalu Road on the east is a
bridge. I do not know the name of the bridge, but it is known to everyone
as suicide bridge. At high tide, say midnight, the water from the sea

25

reaches almost to the floor of the bridge. Alone and disguised at the middle
hour of the night, many and many a white girl has crept out of some Chinese
den, drunken with opium, rotting with filthy, incurable disease, insane,
though with thought enough yet left to want to die and slipped noiselessly
into the yellow, muddy water and — Eternity. Maybe she floated out to sea
with the tide, more likely she sank forever into the bottomless ooze of mud
to decay in the old canal.

God only knows how many white girls have been deceived and smuggled
into China. I don't know how many are there by actual count, but I do
know that there are hundreds and thousands of them — and I know by all
obtainable facts that the American girl leads in numbers those of any other

Yalu Road, Shanghai

race, barring always the Japanese, and I do also know that the great
majority of white girls who are sent to Asia for purposes of commercialized
vice never return to home or friends and that they are lost forever.

It is almost an endless task to write of Yalu Road, Shanghai. Each
"house," which is nothing really but a wretched hut and cellar, has its door
barred with heavy bamboo poles, while at the side of the door is a little
window about eight by ten inches in size." This window contains no glass,
no protection, and, chained to these windows, her face the drawing adver-
tisement and attraction of the "house," stands a white girl. Hundreds of
these girls are used for the purpose of securing patronage for the house.
Some of these girls standing at the windows are insane, some die there,
standing ; a few maniacal girls, a very few, escape. These girls standing in
the windows are known as "show women" or "actresses" and woe to the girl
in America who is ever led into the Orient for theatrical or show purposes.

26

It is the Yalu Road proposition which confronts her when she gets into
China, and from the Yalu Road there is no escape.

No British woman can prostitute in any English colonial or legation ter-
ritory over which floats the Union Jack !

You and I live beneath the only flag in all the world that has never
known defeat, and the very basic principle upon which that flag is builded is
human liberty and human protection, and so by personal work and co-
operation with every other reform and labor organization for the uplifting
of womanhood by work everywhere, by prayer and by the Power of the
Cross, let us set ourselves to help those helpless ones of ours until the angels
shall take up the story of shame and bitterness and wrong and bear to all
the world and to Heaven itself the swift acknowledgment that we are our
brother's keeper.

A Sister to Chinese Women and Girls. (American Church Mission)

27

Give Chicago's Helpless Woman and
Child a Chance

Cfjtcago Roman's Belter

It cares for Emergency cases brought in at any hour Day or Night
1356 W. Monroe Street

Open Day and Night

The Shelter is one of the City's greatest Practical Char-
ities. It gives instant Aid, Food, Lodging, Clothing to the
Widowed, Sick or Unfortunate Woman, to the Helpless
Baby and the Hungry, Half-frozen Public School Child.

The Shelter is in the center of Chicago's mighty surging
downtown district. It is within twenty minutes of all the
large railroad passenger stations, courts, police stations, and
is within six minutes of Cook County Hospital and the West
Side Medical Center.

What the Press and Public Say of the Shelter

W. B. Millard, Executive Secretary of the Church Federa-
tion Council of Chicago in a letter Feb. 4, 1919, to Dr. Jean
T. Zimmermann says:

"The directors in session peb. 4 desire me to express to
you the appreciation of the Church Federation and Night
Church for the many years of consecrated and effective serv-
ice you have rendered by which tens of thousands of people
have been reached and benefited.

"We feel that you deserve well of the Churches of Chicago
and wish you the utmost blessings of God as you continue to
serve Christ and the Nations here or wherever you may go."

The Tribune, December, 1919, says :

"One week's help at the right moment may save a woman or child
from eternal failure and despair.

"The Chicago Woman's Shelter, a temporary home for stranded out-
of-work girls and women, is located at 1356 W. Monroe Street. The
shelter, which is open day and night, has for the president of its execu-
tive board Mrs. Inez Rogers Deach, a well-known club and church
woman. It is said to be the only institution of its kind in Chicago and it
cooperates with existing charities. It is also affiliated with the League
of Cook County Clubs."

Dr. Jean Turner Zimmecmann, Founder and General Super-
intendent Chicago Woman's Shelter, is the daughter of the
late Wm. H. Turner, Surgeon of the old Second Iowa Infantry
Regiment of Civil War fame and a niece of Annie Witten-
myer, former National President of Woman's Relief Corps
of the G. A. R. and Regent of Pennsylvania for Daughters of
the American Revolution. She is a member of the governing
board of the American Asiatic Association, the Chicago Art
Institute, the Woman's City Club, and for two years was a
member of the Speaker's Committee Illinois Division Council
of National Defense.

No Woman or Child Is Ever Turned from the Shelter
Unheard or Unaided.

ONE WEEK'S HELP AT THE RIGHT MOMENT
MAY SAVE A WOMAN OR CHILD FROM ETERNAL
FAILURE AND DESPAIR.

Average Yearly Work of the Shelter during past Eight
Years has been :

No. Nights Lodging, Yearly Average 10,800

No. of Warm Meals, Yearly Average 35,850

No. of Pieces of Clean, Warm Clothing Distrib-
uted (Nothing Sold) 6,350

Cases Sent to State and City Institutions 96

Emergency, Charity, Carfare and Special Meals. . 158
No. of Calls (Court, Police Stations, and Various

Institutions) , 2,028

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of one of these,
ye have done it unto Me."

Christine M. Kuppinger is Assistant Superintendent of

the Shelter and in charge of its Social Work. Mrs.

Kuppinger is of Danish parentage and a member

of the Chicago Methodist Deaconess Home

WHY NOT GIVE CHI-
CAGO'S CHILDREN
A CHANCE?

A Dozen "Missions" in
Chicago feed without
question the "down and
out" man. The Chicago
Woman's Shelter feeds
the hungry woman and
child.

The Shelter is Feeding ONE HUNDRED Underfed, Thin
Clothed Public School Children EVERY NIGHT at Six
O'clock. These meals will continue until May 1. WE NEED
YOUR HELP and NEED IT NOW.

The Shelter cares for an aggregate average of over Twenty
Thousand Women and Children every year.

Open to Visitors every evening (except Sunday) at Six
O'clock. Come over and see our work.

Sincerely yours,
JEAN T. ZIMMERMANN, M.D., Superintendent.

MAIWA
From East Somoliland

In the past five years
the Shelter has cared for
Women and Children
from Every State in the
Union and from Europe,
Asia, Africa and South
America.

en

T87