by Karen Abbott
Mayor Dunne gave a welcoming address, and delegates debated resolutions against numerous “evils,” including “any form of state, local, or police regulation of vice which may be in any way regarded as a permit” and “ultra décolleté.” There was a scheduled debate between renowned anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock and his archnemesis, Theodore Schroeder of the Free Speech League of New York, but the former fell ill and never showed. Schroeder took full advantage of the empty podium beside him, ridiculing Comstock’s “hobbies” and arguing that “what is deemed objectionable is always a personal matter.”
The Reverend John Halcom Shaw, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, illuminated the troubling conditions in Chicago.
“If there is one person to be pitied more than another in this great city,” Shaw thundered, “it is the boarding house young woman. She comes from Dakota or Oklahoma to make her living. If she is fortunate she gets into a big shop at $8 or $9 a week. If less fortunate, she gets less.”
Shaw paused, wiped his brow. Bell leaned forward. The auditorium was silent as the reverend closed in on a dreadful truth.
“No young woman,” Shaw continued, “can live in this city as she ought on that amount of money. She takes a hall bedroom in an inferior house and eats at cheap cafes. Instantly she is assaulted by fierce temptations—one financial and the other social. She must have the money and she craves the society of the other sex to which she is justly entitled. Many times she is doomed.”
But the most powerful speaker, in Bell’s opinion, was the Reverend Sidney C. Kendall, who was terminally ill and would die within the year.
“[Kendall’s] whole soul was torn and bleeding over the shame of making commerce of women,” Bell wrote. “He told us of the crimes of the French traders…. Some of his spirit remained with a few of us in Chicago and we could not rest until some effort was made here to rid us of the shame of slavery in the twentieth century under the flag of the free.”
B. S. Steadwell, whose wife had been mugged in Chicago five years earlier, agreed. Kendall, he wrote, “so aroused the friends of the Federation in Chicago that they immediately organized for active warfare against the traffic, and since that time the real activities against the White Slave Trade in America have centered in Chicago.”
After the third and final day of the conference, Bell, Sidney Kendall, and about two dozen fellow delegates journeyed to the Levee district, stopping at the 22nd Street station to persuade two officers to accompany them. The entire group wandered into a dive on Armour Avenue, coughing in the smoky-dank air.
A group of Japanese courtesans lounged at a table in the front room, bare legs tucked into high heels, dainty fingers curled around glasses of beer. The missionary women huddled behind their hoods, clutching Bibles and prayer tracts to their chests.
For a long, clear moment, the two groups of women exchanged stares.
One missionary stepped forward and tapped a harlot’s shoulder. “Are you a Christian?” she asked.
Behind her, another purity worker swayed, her face pale, eyes roving and unfocused.
The harlot turned, confused. “Why—er—wot you want to know?” she stuttered.
“I mean, do you know God?” the missionary persisted.
The harlot’s face crumpled. “O, you mean that,” she spat. “How’d you get in here?”
The missionary was poised to answer when there was a loud thunk from behind.
Her colleague, poor thing, had fainted.
One of the cops suggested they venture around the corner to an adjacent, cramped room awash in a sickly bright light. A professor slapped piano keys. The air strummed and vibrated, glasses hopped on tables. A madam appeared at the doorway, skirt skimming the tops of her thighs.
“Come on in, boys,” she called, and the purity workers crept forward.
A harlot appeared and leaned against the wall, rolling a cigarette between two fingers.
Bell watched as the Reverend S. H. Flower approached the girl with tiptoed caution, as if trying to coax a cornered animal. He offered a flyer emblazoned with biblical quotations and facts about venereal disease.
“Don’t you think,” he said, not unkindly, “that you could do better than this?”
Fixing her eyes on the reverend, the harlot dipped a hand into the short, frilly sleeve of her dress and produced a match. She lit her cigarette and sucked on the end for three exaggerated breaths, lips clenching and releasing. Leaning forward, she blew a fragrant cloud of smoke directly into the reverend’s face.
The revelers howled.
One reverend hurried over to the piano professor.
“Would there be any objection,” he shouted over the music, “to our conducting a meeting in here?”
The professor lifted his face but kept playing. “I don’t own the ranch,” he said, not missing a note, “but I’m afraid it might hurt business. You see, they like ragtime and light talk better here.”
He turned back to his piano and struck up “Her Locks Were Like the Raven’s.” Retreating out the door, the missionaries began a warbled rendition of “At the Cross.” One tune overtook the other, a discordant tumble of notes and words trailing them down the street.
They ended up at Freiberg’s Dance Hall at 22nd and Wabash, run by that Levee leader Bell had heard so much about, Ike Bloom. The visiting reverend, eager to save face, stepped forward and rang the bell. Flower would handle this Bloom.
Bloom himself appeared, resplendent in a bright suit, wispy scraps of hair sprouting from his damp forehead. It was twenty-seven degrees outside, accented by a stubborn wind, but blistering inside the resort. He kept a hand stuffed deep in his pocket, jiggling what sounded like coins.
Reverend Flower begged entry several times and Bloom finally relented, swinging open the door and laughing, to himself, at their wide eyes and funereal dress. Thirty couples sat at wood tables, guzzling mugs of beer. The orchestra, gathered to the side of the bar, played a deafening waltz. Bell and his group pushed forward, stepping over outstretched legs. A hush spread slowly, snuffing one voice at a time, until the room was utterly silent.
The missionaries dispersed, dropping leaflets on tables and reciting statistics about dance halls. Didn’t they hear about Mabel Wright, who had died in a place like this? About countless girls who sipped drugged champagne and woke up not knowing who they were?
The orchestra jumped to life again, cymbals smashing, trumpets belching. Reverend Flower found Ike Bloom. When the orchestra finished this tune, he asked, might his party sing a hymn, just one brief paean to the Lord?
The Levee leader shrugged. “Go ahead,” he said. “Do what you like, but don’t sing more than one.”
Reverend Flower nodded. When the room quieted again, he began to sing “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb”:
Are you washed in the blood?
In the soul-cleansing blood of the lamb?
Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow?
Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?
The orchestra immediately offered a musical retort:
When you hear that the preachin’ does begin
Bend down low for to drive away your sin
And when you get religion, you want to shout and sing
There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight, my baby….
Bloom held up a hand. “None of that,” he said. “Play the hymn for them!”
The musicians obeyed, dragging reluctant fingers across instruments, and the tune hovered over the crowd, quieting it down. Bell took the temperature of the moment, felt its power hot inside him, and believed that at least one person would walk out of Freiberg’s anew with the spirit of the Lord.
He overheard E. M. Whittemore of the Door of Hope mission in New York call for Bloom’s attention.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, clasping her hands. “I wish you had more of this.”
Bloom smiled, patted her on the shoulder. “My good woman,” he said, “we don’t agree in some things,
but you do lots of good, sure.”
He paused, and the workers leaned in to listen.
“You could,” he added, “do a whole lot more somewhere else, though.”
With a violent jangle of his pocket change, Bloom showed his visitors out.
At last, just as Bell trusted he would, God sent him a sign that the Christian University in India remained darkened and locked inside him for good reason—the tragedy of a girl named Agnes. As Bell would later recount, Agnes’s story found him on the morning of January 30, 1907, when he was visiting Mr. Richards, head of Beulah Home.
“We have an interesting case,” Richards said. “I had to get the police to rescue a girl from a resort because the madam refused to surrender the girl to her own mother and stepfather. The madam said the girl owed twenty dollars for clothes.”
“To whom did she say that?” Bell asked.
“To all of us, the mother and father and to me.”
Bell spoke slowly, ironing the excitement from his voice—this might turn out to be nothing. “Did the girl want to leave?”
Richards nodded. “She had tried every way to escape and finally got a letter out to her parents. They went for her and were refused. They came for me. We finally had to get the police.”
“Richards,” Bell said, jumping up from his seat, “that’s a case we can take into court with three good witnesses if the parents will testify. Where are they?”
The following afternoon, at the Harrison Street court of Judge John Newcomer, Bell watched Agnes tell her story and name her white slavers. The prosecutor was brilliant, cornering witnesses with his questions, laying them down one at a time, like slabs of stone, higher and thicker until there was no room to move.
Madam Panzy Williams was convicted, her picture taken and measurements recorded. Bell visited her in her cell.
“God loves your soul,” he said, “but hates your devilish business.”
He hung a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in his Midnight Mission office. Like the great president, Bell could be an emancipator, saving white slaves in both body and soul. All madams in the Levee, he decided, should hear the message he spoke to Panzy Williams. Next week, he and Boynton and Lucy Hall would knock on the door of every brothel, including the Everleigh Club.
THE BRILLIANT ENTRANCE TO HELL ITSELF
Hallway to the entrance of 2133, the Everleigh Club.
The next worst thing to being a fanatic is to be afraid of being one.
—REVEREND ERNEST ALBERT BELL
Minna was not at all surprised when, during the first week of February 1907, the Reverend Ernest Bell, another preacher, a deaconess, and a detective from the 22nd Street station appeared on the doorstep of the Everleigh Club. Scornful talk about the pious convoy (the captain notwithstanding) had swirled through the Levee district, how they came armed with pamphlets and gory statistics about babies born blind from syphilis and innocent wives rotting away from within. Many of the madams and dive keepers humored the missionaries, some shut the door in their faces, others shooed them away. Minna tried a different approach—why not take a page from the book they claimed to live by? Do unto others and all that. Perhaps they might purge their brains of the Sodom and Gomorrah platitudes long enough to see that the sisters, too, stood for decency and uplift.
So she was polite and gracious, inviting them in as if they were long-lost friends or paying customers, looking past the slush and muck that seeped from their shoes into the Oriental rug. Up close, the Reverend Bell was all twitching nerves, his hand fluttering as he introduced the group and stated their purpose. The policeman stood behind, winking and shrugging at Minna in silent empathy, as if to apologize that his job required him to lock arms, even loosely, with the law.
It was late in the afternoon, the sun just beginning its descent, and the girls were in various stages of preparation. Some lingered upstairs, fastening clasps on chokers, applying Newbro’s Herpicide to bring out the gloss in their hair. The rest, dressed and ready, mingled in the front parlor. Curious, they crowded closer to get a look at these somber men in frosted wool, this woman with her face tucked, like the center of a daisy, deep inside a flared bonnet.
Minna didn’t mind letting them listen in. See if they could be persuaded to give up their $100-plus weekly earnings and gourmet meals in exchange for the glory of Jesus. “These [mission workers] were permitted to visit the brothel in the afternoon,” Herbert Asbury wrote, “distribute their tracts, pray for the souls of the harlots, and endeavor to reform them. There is no record that any ever succeeded.”
The visitors distributed leaflets to Minna and each courtesan. There was silence as they read:
IT IS A PENITENTIARY OFFENSE
TO DETAIN ANY WOMAN IN A HOUSE OF PROSTITUTION
AGAINST HER WILL
No “white slave” need remain in slavery in this State of Abraham Lincoln who made the black slaves free. “For freedom did Christ set us free. Be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage,” which is the yoke of sin and evil habit.
Minna scanned the page and waited for the girls’ reactions.
“Theologians in the inspiration of religious zeal appeared at the Everleigh Club there to kneel before the satin gowned inmates, and beg them in the name of the Saviour to abandon a life of shame,” wrote Edgar Lee Masters. “The girls laughed in their faces; or else stared at them if they chanced to have some comprehension of the vast hypocrisy that reigned in Chicago. For nearly everything was a lie in the life of the city.”
Now, at the first hiccup of laughter Minna turned, beamed a look. She would have none of that—not this first time, anyway. She explained graciously, patiently, that the Everleigh Club was free from disease, that Dr. Maurice Rosenberg examined the girls regularly, that neither she nor Ada would tolerate anything approaching violence, that drugs were forbidden and drunks tossed out, that guests were never robbed nor rolled, and that there was actually a waiting list of girls, spanning the continental United States, eager to join their house. No captives here, Reverends. Sure, they were permitted to come back anytime; she and Ada would be happy to talk further, even give them a grand tour.
“The girls may have been vulgar,” Minna allowed, “but they weren’t hypocrites. They knew what kind of lives they were leading. The visiting firemen never got our slant.”
She bade the crusaders good night, wondered if they would rearrange her words to create a story she’d never told.
Bell told the story often: The white slavery problem wasn’t limited to the slums and dives and Bed Bug Row. No, it existed even in the Everleigh Club, the place that brought the Levee international fame, run by those “two sisters from Virginia, hard as steel,” who “had suffered at the hands of the world and vowed to get from the world all it would pay.” One night in February, right after Madam Panzy Williams was convicted of enslaving a girl named Agnes, he, Reverend Boynton, Deaconess Lucy Hall, and a detective visited the Club. There, finally, the madam of the house he’d preached in front of nearly every night for the past three years stood before him, with that unsettling smile that implied she knew Bell’s next thought before he even formed it. She and several of her white slaves accepted copies of the Criminal Code of Illinois, and Bell waited, nervous, as they read.
“It was in this canvass that we visited the most infamous and notorious house in the West,” Boynton wrote. “The madam of this particular house told us, in the presence of the policeman, that she had paid $160.00 each for two girls that had been sent her from the South. She also explained how safe her house was from violence and how free from disease, and yet, before our conversation ceased she admitted that she had placed 105 girls in a neighboring Christian hospital for treatment.”
Bell echoed Boynton’s version. “A Virginia woman,” he wrote, “keeper of a notorious resort, patronized by millionaires, told Pastor Boynton, Deaconess Hall and myself that she had bought two women from a woman in New Orleans for $160 each. She told this in ordinary conversation and spoke of the transaction as
lightly as a man would speak of buying horses or cows.”
Bell’s tales about the Levee canvassing awakened a few of the sleeping. The nightly open-air sermons got a bit more crowded. Some saints brought their children, girls barely thirteen years old, little palms lifted skyward as they marched past cackling madams and leering pimps. “There’s enough of them little ones already on the road,” one madam protested, “without bringing them good girls into this hole.”
The British evangelist Gypsy Smith, who arrived in Chicago during the Panzy Williams trial, issued a final plea at February’s close to 1,200 Christians. Each one of them, Smith challenged, should “draw a chalk line about himself and have a revival inside the circle” and work to quell the city’s “immoral atmosphere that is growing into a whirlwind.”
“Yes, yes,” the crowd cried back, and Gypsy Smith vowed to return to Chicago in two years.
But these fitful bursts of progress weren’t enough. The First Ward, the heart of Chicago’s culture and commerce, was still run by the most crooked aldermen. The police department still favored segregating the Levee district rather than wiping it out altogether.
“As long as this evil must of necessity exist in every large city,” Police Inspector John Wheeler had said recently, much to Bell’s dismay, “I see no way to put a stop to it here except to get all of the women together in some large inclosure and apply the sulphur method of extermination, such as is adopted to destroy unclaimed and worthless dogs at the pound.”