Free Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott Page B

girls came by the hour, bodies tilting from the weight of their bags, stepping from the platform into a world of unrelenting clamor and smoke and sin, knowing they’d just left a place they might never see again. Under the headline MISSING GIRLS , the Chicago Inter Ocean explored the mysterious disappearances of young women in the city and suggested an “agony column” listing all their names.
    Reform organizations reflected this progress. The New York Committee for the Prevention of the State Regulation of Vice went national, reinventing itself as the American Purity Alliance. They planned for their first National Purity Congress, to be held in Baltimore in October 1895.
    Two hundred delegates attended, representing philanthropic organizations from across the country. In subsequent months, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York hosted additional conferences. Subscription rolls for The Philanthropist, now the official journal of the American Purity Alliance, doubled in size by January 1896. One year later, they had circulated more than a million pages of literature—including a 472-page monograph of speeches from the inaugural Baltimore Purity Congress. One address, penned by a former journalist and WCTU missionary named Charlton Edholm, was titled “The Traffic in Girls.”
    In her first version of this address, Edholm spoke of “an organized, systematized traffic in girls,” basing her case solely on evidence proffered by Englishman William T. Stead. But in 1899 she issued a revised edition—one that revolutionized the white slavery debate in America just as the Everleigh sisters arrived in Chicago, preparing a revolution of their own.
    Edholm hails Stead in her prelude as “the deliverer and protector of little girls from human gorillas,” but this time the substance of the report is based on investigations in America. “We have used facts which have come under our own observation,” Edholm stresses. “There is a slave trade in this country, and it is not black folks this time, but little white girls—thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen and seventeen years of age—and they are snatched out of our arms, and from our Sabbath schools and from our communion tables.”
    She describes the “false employment snare,” in which rural girls are tricked by want ads in big-city newspapers. Once trapped in a “haunt of vice,” victims are held in debt slavery; the madam confiscates their clothes and charges an outlandish price for the scanty uniform of the brothel.
    Beware, also, the missionary warns, of the snare of mock marriage and seduction:
    “There are men,” she writes, “who in their clubs bet on the virtue of a girl as men would bet on the speed of a horse, and some villain deliberately wagers that in a given time he will have accomplished her ruin and then at the expiration of the months or weeks he returns to his club in high glee, and tells ‘the fellows’ all about it—the drugs used, the liquors employed, the vows of marriage sacredly promised, the blackest of lies told, the tenderest kisses and caresses bestowed and—at last, the girl basely deserted or turned over to the keeper of a house of shame for twenty-five dollars, there to undergo such atrocities as would make even devils weep.”
    And the snare of drugs:
    “When I was a bartender,” one “converted” man confessed to Edholm, “those procurers used to come there, and often I’ve seen one of these men bring a beautiful girl to the ladies’ entrance…. I would drop a little drug into whatever that girl had to eat or drink, and in a few moments she would be unconscious and that fellow would have a carriage drive to the door, that girl would be placed in it and driven right straight to a haunt of shame.”
    Procurers are nefarious, mostly foreign men, Edholm concludes, who scour dance halls for victims, stash chloroform-soaked rags in their pockets, pay slave wages, and prey on virgins as young as ten years old. She advocates