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

by Karen Abbott

  “I realized that Van Bever’s place was a house of prostitution after I got there,” Sarah said, “but I did not come to Chicago for that purpose…. I had never been in a sporting house before.”

  Van Bever had told Mollie what to say in her telegram to Sarah and escorted her down to the Negro housekeeper to make sure it was mailed. He had instructed Mollie’s husband, Mike, to make sure they got “that Jew girl, Sarah Joseph, and bring her back.”

  Now, Mollie introduced her friend to her boss.

  “You’re a good-looking girl,” Van Bever said to Sarah, “and ought to make a good living.”

  “I want to go home,” Sarah said. She begged him for a train ticket.

  “You’ll like it,” Van Bever answered, “when you get used to it.”

  In the midst of giving speeches, trying cases, and lobbying governors, Roe found his office thrown into turmoil. His boss, State’s Attorney John Wayman, indicted Edward McCann, the respected police captain who had called in the Mona Marshall case. McCann was accused of accepting graft in the West Side Levee, ruled by the Frank brothers, Julius and Louis. Several reformers sided with McCann, including Jane Addams.

  “I believe Inspector McCann is one of the most honest and efficient police officials that has ever had charge of this district,” she said. “It hardly seems probable to me that a man who has done so much in the fight against the white slave traffic should be guilty of accepting money from these same people.”

  All told, Wayman’s graft investigation, from McCann to rank-and-file officers to underworld cretins, had resulted in 105 indictments involving more than three hundred people—the greatest mass of indictments ever returned in one day in Cook County. It was a mess, but at least it was timely.

  Roe was getting out.

  His friend Adolph Kraus of B’nai B’rith and the Commercial Club of Chicago had contacted him and requested a meeting. Would he, they asked, consider resigning so he could prosecute panders full-time? The former group was more troubled than ever about Jewish involvement in white slavery, especially with the Frank brothers further shaming their race in the McCann debacle. To add one more stab of insult, both men were members of Kalverier synagogue, a prominent congregation in Chicago. “The revelations made at the McCann trial gave the world the wrong impression of the Jews and their morality as a race,” said one of Kraus’s associates. “The world is apt to believe that the Jews condone such things.”

  The Commercial Club, for its part, had just commissioned Daniel Burnham’s “Plan of Chicago,” a visionary ideal of the architect’s City Beautiful movement: a permanent ribbon of green space around the city perimeter; a neoclassical museum for the center of Grant Park; a chain of Venetian-style canals and lagoons linking to the site of his 1893 World’s Fair. Chicago should be known for its ambition and indefatigable civic spirit, not as the national hub for the trade in white girls.

  Roe tendered his resignation letter to State’s Attorney Wayman on August 21, 1909, and spoke with the press eleven days later, lying about both his reasons for quitting and his future plans.

  “There is nothing political or personal about my resignation,” he said. “I simply believe I have served the public long enough, and as I can return to private practice and make a great deal more money, I believe I should do so…. In addition to this, I have recently been selected as dean of the Chicago Business Law School, and that will take some of my time lecturing at night.”

  That fib would have to suffice during the final preparations. Roe had an initial pledge of $50,000, a sizable portion of which came from the Tribune, to fund his organization. He decided on a slogan: “Protect the Girl!” He hired a private secretary to work with him at home—he could not bring himself to leave the one he’d shared with his mother—and assembled a personal staff of detectives to concentrate exclusively on white slavery.

  The detectives soon happened upon their first major break. One of them intercepted a letter written by a girl named Mollie Hart, intended for her husband, Mike, warning him to change his plans because he was being watched:

  Well, dear…if you get any girls coming up here you had better leave and send them a few days later or either get off at Hinsdale and put them in a hotel for a few days, or else don’t bother with the girls. Mr. M. Van Bever said so you had better do something and don’t fool too long and get the boss sore at you….

  Burn every letter and telegram you receive from here. Leave the girls behind…. The girls will have to wait a few days but you comeback at once alone.

  Roe’s detectives knew that Mike Hart would never read this warning, and the boy’s capture would expose Van Bever’s extensive white slavery ring. If girls were being sold and shipped across state lines, then President Taft would want to take immediate action.

  DISPATCH

  FROM THE U.S.

  IMMIGRATION COMMISSION

  Roe’s rogues’ gallery of panders.

  Doubtless the importers and pimps have a wide acquaintance among themselves, and doubtless in many instances they have rather close business relations with one another; and inasmuch as all are criminals anyone escaping arrest can naturally appeal to another anywhere in the country for protection. Even a pimp whom he has never seen will give him shelter if he comes with a proper introduction. There are two organizations of importance, one French, the other Jewish, although as organizations they do not import. Apparently they hate each other; but their members would naturally join forces against the common enemy.

  SO MANY

  NICE YOUNG MEN

  Gypsy Smith’s parade through the Levee.

  We have struck a blow for Jesus.

  —EVANGELIST GYPSY SMITH

  The summer of 1909 had been a mixed one for Bell. Edward McCann’s arrest and trial was a devastating blow to the battle against white slavery. He and Dean Sumner had both testified on the police captain’s behalf and were deeply saddened by his conviction. Perhaps Clifford Roe was right when he said that “it is not always the fault of the broom that it does not sweep clean, but sometimes the person who holds the broom is to blame.” How could Captain McCann remain honest within such a broken system?

  Mary had fallen ill, too, and was recuperating at Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. He missed her desperately but insisted that she stay put until she was well enough to travel. Late at night and in between meetings, he scribbled letters to his wife, equal parts update and endearment. “Now rest as long as you choose,” he wrote in his ornate, hurried script, “though we need your head here.” He tried for levity, suggesting he might address his letters to “Bitter Creek.”

  His wife’s absence became a roving presence in the other parts of his life, a persistent reminder of visions unfulfilled. He’d left India thirteen years ago, but the knowledge of what he couldn’t accomplish there remained a bruise too fresh to touch. His sermons felt listless and rote, hazy around the edges, words without a message. “Gracious God,” he scrawled on a Midnight Mission pamphlet, “Please put this work on its feet, or please lift me up out of it.”

  The one shining spot in his life, at the moment, was his book contract. Currier Publishing, the parent company of Woman’s World, asked him to edit an anthology of essays to be titled War on the White Slave Trade: Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls. They promised him a $400 advance, part of which, he told Mary, could be set aside for college expenses for daughter Clare and son Rex. Several prominent reformers, including Roe and Edwin Sims, agreed to contribute. Agents of the magazine planned to knock on doors all over the country and sell copies, one by one.

  Bell toured the Levee during the day before his sermons, jotting down observations, listing the nationalities of the dive keepers. Two or three places owned by Italian men, most notably Big Jim Colosimo. A “score of resorts…all of them extremely flagrant,” managed by Jews. The French were the worst offenders; no fewer than fourteen resorts had blinking signs with “Paris” or “Parisian” in their names.

  In early October, just when Bel
l needed it most, the Lord sent news that made him forget about McCann and every empty sermon, the sinners who slipped past his reach. Gypsy Smith, the British evangelist, kept the vow he’d made two years earlier and was returning to Chicago. He planned a march through the Levee district that would make the First Ward Ball seem like a quiet, intimate gathering.

  Detectives arrested Mollie Hart first, on October 8. The girl left the Paris without incident, her only defense an offense: It was all Maurice Van Bever’s fault; he used her as his tool, and she had to obey him or else. Sarah Joseph, the Jewish white slave, was rescued and sent to the Florence Crittenden Home for protection.

  Mike Hart was more elusive. He never received his wife’s letter, but he heard of her arrest and avoided the traps detectives set for him. Roe’s cadre of sleuths posed as underworld figures and kept on Hart’s trail, finally spotting him on the corner of Wabash Avenue and Harrison Street.

  Van Bever, however, was nowhere to be found.

  “When Mollie and Mike were arrested,” Roe wrote, “the word spread through the underworld of Chicago like wild fire.”

  And the underworld of Chicago spread their own word in return, releasing story after story, each one subsuming and erasing the last. Van Bever had fled to France. Van Bever had fled to Seattle. Van Bever was still in Chicago, hiding out in a downtown hotel.

  This last lead was confirmed by Roe’s best sleuth—a man called, simply, “the Kid”—who summoned two city policemen. Too late—Van Bever was again invisible. Roe’s men were everywhere at once, watching all edges of the city, depots, streetcars, boats, carriages. There Van Bever was, climbing into a closed carriage on State Street, heading south. And there he went, disembarking from that carriage and jumping into another traveling north on Dearborn. His comrades were always prepared, closed carriages idling, ready to spirit him away at any hour. Detectives took a cue from this approach, paying off certain hansom drivers and express wagons to follow Van Bever and offer him rides, pretend they were on his side.

  Still no luck.

  On the afternoon of October 13, Roe was walking through the Loop, heading west on Washington Street. City Hall stood to his right and the Chamber of Commerce to his left, a magnificent building with an interior courtyard awash in natural light. There, parked nearby, was a closed carriage he’d seen before. Its coachman, also familiar, wore a high silk hat and maroon livery festooned with solid gold buttons.

  Roe stepped into the shadow of the building. All around him the city roared. He hid inside its noise, waiting, heart pecking at his chest. Time lolled, lazy and oblivious, seconds into minutes, and then there he was, Maurice Van Bever, stepping out of the Chamber of Commerce. His coachman opened the carriage door.

  Roe stepped forward, out of his chaotic cocoon, and touched the man once, softly, on the shoulder.

  “Your name is Van Bever?” he asked.

  “The man so bold as a slave owner turned deathly white,” Roe later recalled. “There seemed to be not a drop of blood left in him.”

  Van Bever stuttered, then steadied his voice. “Yes,” he said, and that was that.

  Roe motioned for a nearby policeman to make the arrest. The pander was permitted, per his request, to travel to the Desplaines Street station in his own carriage. Once there, Van Bever insisted he didn’t even know he was wanted. “If the Hart woman accused me of assisting her in any way in that work, it is not true,” he added. “I have always lived up to the orders of the police department in having all the girls registered at the stations. I never was arrested before, and I do not care to say anything more until I consult my attorney.”

  Roe’s men captured Julia Van Bever next and began searching for panders in St. Louis. The press seized news of the “underground railway” between the two cities. At last, because of the Van Bever case, federal legislation seemed imminent. Ernest Bell, Arthur Burrage Farwell, and Edwin Sims were planning to consult with Congressman James R. Mann of Hyde Park.

  “Chicago at last has waked up to a realization of the fact that actual slavery that deals in human flesh and blood as a marketable commodity exists in terrible magnitude in the city today,” Roe boasted. “It is slavery, real slavery, that we are fighting…. The white slave of Chicago is a slave as much as the Negro was before the civil war…as much as any people are slaves who are owned, flesh and bone, body and soul, by another person…. That is what slavery is, and that is the condition of hundreds, yes, thousands of girls in Chicago at present.”

  He hunkered down to prepare for his upcoming trials. Maurice Van Bever, if convicted, would be his most important success to date.

  The Frenchman’s longtime partner in the Levee, meanwhile, made some preparations of his own.

  Bell was distraught. All that excitement, all those prayers of thanks, and now the Gypsy Smith march might never happen.

  Chicago’s chief of police, Leroy Steward, refused to grant a permit. Appointed by Mayor Busse during the McCann scandal, the new chief wanted to hone the department’s image, even imbue it with an air of refinement. He spoke of his interest in theosophy and “primal topics.” Delicate, wire-rimmed glasses sat low on a pointed nose, a pipe remained clenched perpetually between his lips. There would be no unseemly talk of graft payments during his tenure.

  It wasn’t proper, Steward argued, for an evangelist to bring undue attention to the Levee district by leading a parade through its streets. It was “inherently vicious,” he added, “a huge slumming party” and “sensational advertising scheme.” But Gypsy Smith persisted. Sin must be exposed before it could be destroyed.

  On October 16, two days before the parade’s scheduled date, Chief Steward finally relented. Prolonging the evangelist’s campaign to secure a permit would only ensure a larger crowd than had been expected in the first place.

  He ordered a cavalcade of mounted policemen to escort the marchers, hoping to prevent any rioting.

  The department also dispensed a secret order to the Levee:

  If you show yourself tonight during the parade, if a light shows from your house or if there is any sign of life from it while the parade is passing, you might just as well go out of business.

  Keep off the streets, in the houses and away from the windows tonight.

  Every resort must comply, including the Everleigh Club.

  Minna and Ada had returned to Chicago in the fall, relaxed and refreshed, talk of Agnes Barrette and seventeen-year-old Jewish girls duly forgotten. The Levee was a bit jumpy, what with the McCann trial and a new police chief eager to “decentize” the city, as he put it, but Hinky Dink made the necessary assurances. “The women have to be somewhere,” the alderman said, “and they might as well be where they bother the least people.”

  The sisters decided they would heed part of the police department’s order. Vanderpool Vanderpool must sit on his hands, and no one could climb the stairs, but clients would be admitted and free to mingle, quietly, about the parlors. Minna unlocked her frustration, speaking words meant only for Ada’s ears.

  “A girl in our establishment is not a commodity with a market-price, like a pound of butter or a leg of lamb,” she ranted, while her sister mmmhmmed in all the right places. “She is much more on the same level with people belonging to professional classes, who accept fees for services rendered; she charges in accordance with the client’s means. She doesn’t ‘sell herself ’ as these egg-heads keep shouting. Such statements are unfair and unjust…. A saner and truer conception of womanhood and of the responsibilities of women is the only way I know of that we can expect to take the sting out of ‘slipping.’”

  Ada let her sister finish. Minna fretted and fumed when they were alone, but never in front of the girls, her boys, or the visiting firemen—especially the visiting firemen. In fact, just as the Gypsy Smith cavalcade passed by 2131–2133 South Dearborn Street, Minna planned to gather everyone together and propose a raucous toast.

  There were thousands, Bell thought, seven, eight at least, packed inside the Seventh R
egiment Armory, a sprawling brick structure with a tower on each end, raised up like the arms of Jesus. He was the warm-up act to Gypsy Smith’s main event, having preached just moments before to his largest audience ever. And now the crowd belonged to the evangelist, this brilliant man who was born in a tent and never attended even one day of school. Smith stepped through the mass of bowed heads and clasped hands, waiting for a chorus of prayers to drift into a single “Amen.” Silence, now. He was humble, simply dressed, with worn loafers that rasped across the floor as he paced.

  “A man who visits the red-light district at night has no right to associate with decent people in daylight,” he shouted, pointing. “No! Not even if he sits on the throne of a millionaire!”

  Bodies turned toward the exit, and the rear of the crowd became its head. They spilled out onto 34th Street wordlessly, closed in on either side by a squad of mounted policemen. Lit torches lashed at the night sky. Three brass bands followed, quiet except for the drums, pounding a heartbeat rhythm that kept pace with footsteps. Children marched alongside parents, wearing long black gowns that rippled at their heels.

  North on State, west on 22nd. Shouts from the sidelines seared the quiet. Bell watched as onlookers crowded the curbs, jeering and laughing, and good Lord, they were being followed now by thousands, tens of thousands, fringing out on all sides. On Dearborn Street, every window was shuttered, every curtain drawn, every door locked, every light darkened.

  “To Evangelist Smith’s young crusaders,” wrote Charles Washburn, “it must have seemed that vice was a deadly dull trade.”