Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

by Karen Abbott

  Phyllis and Nellie were both forgiven and welcomed back into the Club. The Everleighs had always believed in second chances, having benefited from a few themselves. Besides, a madam had to expect a whore to be seasoned with a dash of liar and a sprinkle of thief; the job, after all, required flattering a man until his money became hers. If they took a hard line on all Club rules all the time, the Everleigh butterfly would be an endangered species.

  Vic Shaw was another matter, however. The sisters knew she had concocted the scheme with Pony Moore; the Levee was already electric with talk of consequences. Again, Minna and Ada let their silence suffice. It occurred to them that Shaw’s rancor was provoked not only by the ways the sisters catered to their boys, but by how they pampered their girls.

  A prostitute in other houses, including Vic Shaw’s, never entertained celebrities and princes, but wrestled in the nude and was disciplined by a whipper. A girl at Madam Shaw’s did not always get an honest examination from an honest doctor, and could never forget that the body that earned her a living might one day cause her death. She did not get to move with grace and dignity from parlor to parlor, talking and flattering as if those were her sole obligations, but instead was ordered into line, told to stand straight and look pretty while the men sifted through them all, one by one, like secondhand suits on a rack.

  And Vic Shaw realized that no matter how fine her girls’ faces or trim their figures, how elaborate their gowns or skilled their technique, the harlots in her house would never have or be the best. Madam Shaw’s girls considered a slot on the Everleigh Club’s waiting list a superior position to the one they currently held, and right now, for Minna and Ada, that was revenge enough.

  The Custom House Place vice lords did not surrender their space quietly. Debts were forgiven, insults retracted, drinks poured on the house in every saloon. The Cadets’ Protective Association met with the Friendly Friends. The procurers sat down with thieves. Crooked real estate agents lunched with unscrupulous lawyers. Dive keepers chatted from their doorways with the gaming room bosses. Pickpockets sifted through their loot to see what they might contribute. During the daytime hours there was a terrifying calm.

  With $50,000 in hand, the vice lords approached Mayor Dunne and asked to stay in Custom House Place until September 1906, four months past the official deadline. Chief Collins unequivocally declined, and the strongest resorts of that district settled along the blocks around the Everleigh Club.

  These red-light refugees weren’t the only—or most troubling—new arrivals. Every night but Monday, a group marched slowly, deliberately, through the Levee, as if it could be uprooted, an inch at a time, by the movement of their feet. The sisters recognized the leader as the Reverend Ernest Albert Bell. They’d heard he cost madams in Custom House Place $250 per night, telling passersby that Chicago, with each passing day, exchanged a pint of morality for a quart of wicked.

  There he was now, Minna saw, making his way down Dearborn Street, his followers streaming behind him. She pressed her face against the parlor window to get a better look.

  Bell sliced the air with a hand, and the group halted as one in front of the Everleigh Club.

  His alpaca coat was a bit tattered at the hem, but his wide mustache was neatly groomed, its upturned ends like quotation marks framing his lips. He began waving his arms, as if he could gather and hold the air, and his mouth moved, wrapped itself around silent words.

  Minna wanted—needed—to know what they were.

  She opened one door just enough to let in a sliver of the night. Behind her the parlor was alive with the rush of bodies and music and innuendo, but she focused her ear toward the street and let the message come to her.

  “Throw out the lifeline to danger-fraught men,” Bell called, shouting above the clamor, “sinking in anguish where you’ve never been.”

  His voice circled and cornered. Men scattered or dropped to their knees, hiding behind splayed hands.

  After a long moment, Minna turned to greet another customer, another of her boys. Bell and his Bible brothers might have pressured the mayor and the police chief to close Custom House Place, but the Levee would never surrender and fall. Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John had too much invested in the district—especially in the Everleigh Club, now as famous as Chicago itself.

  PART TWO

  FLESH AND BONE, BODY AND SOUL

  1906–1909

  MIDNIGHT TOIL AND PERIL

  Ernest Bell, preaching in the Levee.

  The ministers thundered at them. Those Scarlet Sisters got more mention than the other 4,998 women of ill fame in the whole city.

  —RETIRED CHICAGO POLICE CAPTAIN, 1936

  The demise of the historic Custom House Place district seemed quick and decisive, a simple matter of God lowering a finger and extinguishing the district with one touch. But Ernest Bell knew that impression was a trick of time; since the Midnight Mission’s inception, they’d spent nearly every night kneeling before Custom House Place brothels, praying for darkest Chicago.

  Bell knew politics, too, had played a part in the fall of Custom House Place. Mayor Edward Dunne was well aware that his predecessor, fellow Democrat Carter Harrison II, had faltered during the 1905 election over allegations of bribes and graft. Chicagoans were still fuming over the deadly Iroquois Theater fire of December 30, 1903, caused by unenforced codes. Harrison appointed a special graft committee in an attempt to salvage his reputation, but when reports surfaced that the mayor had ordered the committee to whitewash the investigation, he was forced, after eight years in City Hall, to step aside for Dunne.

  Dunne, eager to avoid the same fate so early in his own administration, told his men to decline the brothel owners’ offer of $50,000 cash for permission to operate past May 1906.

  “Mr. Bell,” Chief Collins said later, looping a pale forearm around the reverend’s neck, “I told them, ‘If you had Marshall Field’s money you cannot stay here after the first of May, as I am Chief of Police, so help me God!’”

  If the Midnight Mission’s next goal was the destruction of the South Side Levee, it made sense to focus on its world-famous icon. Bell had heard plenty about the Everleigh Club’s bacchanalian parlors and perfumed fountains, its bitter, spinster-sister madams. Behind those grand mahogany doors women lost their husbands, mothers lost their sons, girls lost their innocence and freedom—and men lost their lives. Those rumors that spread across Chicago and beyond had passed, too, through Bell’s ears: Marshall Field Jr., the son of the city’s merchant prince, a family man and father of three, was shot dead there. A personal tragedy, an international disgrace. Bell could harness and diffuse that attention so that Chicago, the second largest city in America, no longer made room for the sinners who were destroying it.

  He himself had yet to step inside the Everleigh Club. But he knew for certain that his prayer vigils were not going unnoticed, that every night but Monday, Madam Minna broke away from her clientele long enough to peel back a heavy swag and stare directly at him, her lips pursed in a beguiling half smile that seemed at once a dare and a tacit suggestion that they were in on the same joke.

  Early one morning, on the train ride home, Bell fished his little leather diary from his pocket. At the top of page thirty-eight, in between scrawled addresses and entreaties to the Lord, he printed two words: “ADA, MINNA.”

  Donations were increasing. Victor Lawson, publisher of the Chicago Daily News and a godly man, gave $50 to the Midnight Mission, and Bell promptly sent a note. “Many thanks,” he wrote. “Nothing I saw in India so nauseated me as the abominations of that street. A repentant man told me that he had seen enough there to make the stones vomit.” Lawson contributed another $400.

  After their usual warm-up, reciting prayers and reading scripture, Bell and his saints gathered their Bibles and pamphlets. One, titled “Sin Gone to Seed,” featured a photograph of a man suffering from advanced syphilitic infection. His head—hairless, bearing footprint-shaped holes that sank deep into his skull—looked li
ke a well-traveled patch of wet sand. Such a jarring image might succeed where words and prayers failed. The study of social hygiene was advancing rapidly; recently, a German scientist had developed a test to detect Treponema pallidum, the bacterium that caused syphilis. Bell believed it was every reformer’s job to push beyond foolish Victorian conventions, to make sexual diseases an acceptable topic for polite society. Men must understand that harlots were responsible for more than 25 percent of surgical operations on good women, for the blindness of hundreds of babies.

  They set out for the walk, a mile and a half south, stepping around manure and vomit and urine and puddles of beer, singing hymns along the way. Bell listened for the cries of prostitutes, some of them younger than his own daughters, being whipped behind barred windows and doors.

  “Imagine yourself,” Bell wrote, “in this awful district with Satan and all his cohorts let loose, seemingly. The cursing of men and the screeching of dope-filled and half drunken women; the banging of electrical pianos; the honking of autos; the throngs of young men going like mad into these houses of horror, where the air is reeking with the fumes of dope and tobacco and millions of germs; where women are in their scanty attire with painted faces and colored and false hair, with their honeyed words and foolish prattling, calling and alluring men into their fearful clutches and then to awful sin and death perhaps!”

  When they arrived on South Dearborn Street, the Everleigh Club before them, he halted and thrust out his arm. The hot August wind kicked up scraps of trash. Music spilled from open windows. Swarms of men ducked behind the brims of their derbies, skittered into side alleys. Dozens more stopped and turned to Bell, faces open and curious.

  Bell placed his wooden box six feet from the curb and mounted it. Now he stood a foot taller than the mob. Reverend Boynton herded several saints closer to the resort’s front doors. A few feet away, Lucy Page Gaston lifted her arms skyward, the long full sleeves of her blouse drooping like wings.

  Bell cleared his throat. He was on.

  “Young men, where are your heads?” he bellowed. He touched his own head for emphasis.

  A laugh bubbled up in the crowd. Bell pressed on.

  “One night I dreamed that I saw a young man stepping carelessly on and off a railway track, near a curve around which the express would come thundering and screaming at any moment. Whether on the track or off it, the young man was indifferent to danger and wanton in his movements. But as I looked I saw in my dream that there was nothing whatever above his coat collar—he had no head.”

  Again laughter, longer this time. Bell paused, rolled the end of his mustache between two fingers, and took a breath. A difficult group, but he’d had them before.

  “That explained his recklessness,” he called. “He was void of understanding.”

  No laughs this time, but a low, gathering murmur. Bell raised his Bible, the pages facing the crowd.

  “The word of God which says, ‘Void of understanding they gather by troops at the harlots’ houses not knowing that the dead are there and her guests are in the depths of hell.’”

  There—there she was. A velvet curtain swept across a wide window and the Everleigh madam’s face appeared, tentative at first, feature by feature, forehead then nose and then that mouth, again pursed in an expression at once impish and imperious. The streetlights picked up glints from the knot of diamonds at her throat. Shadows and shapes moved behind her, bodies twirling in dance, glasses rising.

  And there he was again. Minna had grown used to the “visiting firemen,” as she called them privately to Ada. They’d been out there nearly every night since the Marshall Field debacle in November 1905, almost a year now, and she’d stopped telling herself their antics had nothing to do with the Club. But she and Ada didn’t understand the scrutiny—why single out the only madams on the line who wanted to make the profession as honorable as it could be?

  “Truthfully,” she said, “we were open to offers. We believed we could have adjusted an age-old problem if given half the chance to supervise its operation. We weren’t consulted. In fact, we were never consulted about anything constructive. It was a personal crusade against us. We were touted as the forces of evil invading a God-fearing community to lure the innocent to perdition. Give the weeds a chance and destroy the flowers seemed to be the hymn—hallelujah!”

  Still, no harm done—none yet, anyway. Persistence didn’t necessarily evolve into success, and who knew, they might soon tire of their hellfire hollering and go somewhere else. Everleigh Club customers politely ignored the entreaties, discarded those grotesque pamphlets. Sometimes, if the mob grew too thick and unruly, clients were ushered in, discreetly, through a back door. No complaints about slower traffic here, that night included.

  Behind her now, talking her ear off in between indulgent swallows of champagne, was one Vernon Shaw Kennedy, director of the Hammond, Whiting & East Chicago Electric Company and the South Chicago City Railway Company, and formerly “interested” in the Kennedy Biscuit Company. He enjoyed spending time in his office suite at the First National Bank Building or at the prestigious Chicago Athletic Club or playing in golf tournaments or trolling around California or vacationing in Africa (he just returned from a thirteen-month safari, in fact, had the madam ever been?)—anywhere, it seemed, but with his wife of seventeen years, Grace Cummings Shaw Kennedy, a “large holder” of First National Bank stock and proud owner of “one of the finest collections of gems in the city” (but surely not as fine as the madam’s, he must say).

  His wife would be filing for divorce soon, he was sure of it, and he felt bad about the four children. But really, they’d been “practically separated” for the past nine years and had always strained to be pleasant in front of the children and the servants, so it should be painless. Certainly Grace was aware of his, shall he say, indiscretions; a number of her friends even told her they no longer wanted to visit at the house because he’d made a few “improper proposals” to them. Tearfully at first, then matter-of-factly, she’d confronted him. In one case, deciding it was time, he’d admitted to an affair. Liberating. And when his wife invited a young woman to board at their Michigan Avenue mansion for a few weeks (perhaps as bait?), he seduced her—loudly—at 3:00 a.m., behind a tapestry hanging near the stairway. His wife, perched on the middle steps, listened the entire time….

  And so on and so forth. Edmund, would you be a dear and get Mr. Kennedy another champagne?

  It appeared Mr. Kennedy was right about one thing—his wife would likely be filing for divorce. The Reverend Bell wasn’t the only one peering into the Everleigh Club windows that night. After six years, a madam gets to know all her city’s detectives, even the private kind, and one, a Mr. J. G. Gunderloch, had been stationed outside the Club since at least 8:00 p.m. He might as well lie down and take a nap on Dearborn Street—at the rate Mr. Kennedy was going, he’d be at the Club until sunrise, at least. She had to laugh: Those visiting firemen might have stamina, but they never outlasted the customers.

  Bell kept the Bible aloft and reached with his right hand into the pocket of his trousers, fishing out a silver dollar.

  “You bring your money with the burning name of God upon it”—here Bell raised the coin—“to buy the abominations of Sodom.”

  He stood with each arm lifted and taut, like Christ nailed to the cross, and fell silent. Let his words sink in. He heard harsh whispering around him, voices that seemed to scratch the air. To one side, through a sliver of vision—he did not want to disturb his stance by turning his head—he saw a small commotion, a burst of energy, and then an arm pulling back like the band of a slingshot. A small object whizzed and spun, hurtling toward him, and made solid contact with the side of his head.

  An egg.

  The yolk and muck settled into his hair and trickled down. Streaks traced the curves of his ear, wet the stiff strands of his mustache. From behind, another egg slapped his neck, dripped inside his collar, sluiced through the hollow of his back.

  He tho
ught of Mary, staring out their front window, exhausted but sleepless, waiting for the sound of his steps, the shadow of his waving hand.

  Reciting any passage that came to him, out of order and unrelated, he crafted a patchwork sermon:

  “Thus saith the Lord, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but let the wicked turn from his evil way and live;

  “‘From all your filthiness I will cleanse you’

  “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

  Without warning, his sight went hazy. Bell stepped from his box, and the crowd divided to form a slim passageway. Entering the alley between Ed Weiss’s and the Everleigh Club, the reverend fell to his knees and let his face rest in his palms. He needed to pause a moment, to “tap the resources of God.”

  Rested, he pulled himself up and wiped the streaks of egg from his face. Hours of work still stretched before him—he had to pace himself to last until 3:00 a.m. He glanced back at 2131–2133 Dearborn Street, into the windows arched like half-moons, and this time they were empty.

  ULTRA DÉCOLLETÉ AND OTHER EVILS

  Ike Bloom.

  In Chicago our God lurks everywhere.

  In the elevated train’s husky roar…in the humid mists of summer by the lake.

  —FATHER ANDREW GREELEY

  The new Abraham Lincoln Center, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his uncle, a reverend, was a brown rectangle of a building on Oakwood Boulevard, boxy windows dotting its façade like rows of gritted teeth. Early in the afternoon on October 9, 1906, more than 150 purity workers from all over the country—Philadelphia and New York, St. Louis and California—streamed into the auditorium. Bell and his saints had been waiting for this, the National Purity Congress, for months, especially since Chicago was once again playing host. They wandered through the crowd, connecting names with faces, learning about the red-light districts in other cities and the work being done to stop them. In turn, the visitors asked about Chicago—they’d heard so much about the Levee—and observed that the Lincoln Center was the ideal venue for a discussion about white slavery.