George Kibbe Turner, The Daughters of the Poor: A Plain Story of the Development of New York City as a Leading Center of the White Slave Trade of the World, Under Tammany Hall. McClure’s, November 1909.
Excerpt from story:
There are now three principal centers of the so-called white slave trade–that is, the recruiting and sale of young girls of the poorer classes by procurers. The first is the group of cities in Austrian and Russian Poland, headed by Lemberg; the second is Paris; and the third is the city of New York. In the past ten years New York has become the leader of the world in this class of enterprise. The men engaged in it there have taken or shipped girls largely obtained from the tenement districts of New York, to every continent on the globe; they are now doing business with Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. They are driving all competitors before them in North America. And they have established, directly or indirectly, recruiting systems in every large city of the United States.
The story of the introduction of this European business into New York, under the protection of the Tammany Hall political organization, its extension from there through the United States, and its shipments of women to the four corners of the earth, is a strange one; it would seem incredible if it were not thoroughly substantiated by the records of recent municipal exposures in half a dozen great American cities, by two independent investigations by the United States Government during the past year, and by the common knowledge of the people of the East Side tenement district of New York, whose daughters and friends’ daughters have been chiefly exploited by it….