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

by Karen Abbott

  Tammany was wrong. Once Junior accepted the post, it became his clearest path to autonomy—the one task he could conquer without the burden of his father’s might. “I never worked harder in my life,” he said later. “I was on the job morning, noon, and night.” He declined to talk to the harlots himself, but spared no expense finding the best people to investigate for him.

  So he called Clifford Roe.

  Roe cut out several newspaper clippings about recent white slave trials and enclosed them with a letter to Rockefeller. He hoped the grand jury was making progress, he wrote, and that they might meet in New York in the very near future.

  On Thursday night, March 7, immediately after exchanging vows, the new Mr. and Mrs. Roe boarded a train for New Orleans. Upon their arrival, they took a carriage (Roe refused to travel by automobile) to the exquisite Hotel Grunewald on Baronne Street. A marble staircase descended into a lobby cluttered with imported statues, and a parlor called the Gold Room hosted the most exclusive parties in town, just like its illicit counterpart nine hundred miles to the north, on South Dearborn Street.

  And so, for Americans, after three years of hearing about the perils of cities, after being asked by ads in The Washington Post if they “admired the ostrich” or preferred frank, “anti-ostrich” articles about “girls going wrong,” after witnessing Clifford Roe push successfully for new pandering laws in twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia, it all came down to the spring of 1910, when their fears were both officially validated and addressed.

  Illinois congressman James Mann, wearing professorial wire glasses and a tidy white beard, stood before his colleagues and spoke about his bill. While the representative, admittedly, hadn’t traveled the Middle Passage, he felt justified in making a ludicrous comparison. “The white slave traffic,” he said, “while not so extensive, is much more horrible than any black-slave traffic ever was in the history of the world.”

  Representative William E. Cox of Indiana agreed, declaring white slavery “a thousand times worse and more degrading in its consequences.” Virginia’s representative Edward Saunders spoke of white slavery’s “headquarters and distributing centers in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, and many other American cities.” Thetus Sims of Tennessee admitted that whenever he thought of “a beautiful girl taken from one State to another…and drugged, debauched, and ruined…[sold] to any brute who will pay the price, I cannot bring myself to vote against this bill.” And Gordon Russell of Texas counted among the bill’s supporters “every pure woman in the land…every priest and minister of the Living God…[and] men who reverence womanhood and who set a priceless value upon female purity. Upon the other side you would find all the whoremongers and the pimps and the procurers and the keepers of bawdy houses. Upon that other side you would find all those who hate God and scoff at innocence and laugh at female virtue.”

  On June 25, 1910, the last day of the session, President William Howard Taft signed the White Slave Traffic Act into law. “Now let’s hope,” he told Congressman Mann, “they put some of the scoundrels in prison.”

  Bell was going on tour, a Progressive Era rock star who was no longer a mere opening act for Clifford Roe. The reverend’s book had educated millions of parents about the white slave evil, set sons on a righteous path, saved daughters from certain ruin and death. He would leave Chicago on September 29 and return the last day of October, hitting twelve American cities and parts of Canada, seven thousand miles in all. Other prominent reformers would be along for the ride, but Bell was singled out by the newspapers as “a tower of strength.”

  On the eve of his departure, the Midnight Mission members threw a farewell party in the German Room of the Grand Pacific Hotel. Bell had confidence that work in the Levee would maintain momentum during his absence. Over the summer, they began printing pamphlets in thirty-four foreign languages and moved into new headquarters at 2136 Armour Avenue. Chronic plumbing problems aside, it was an ideal locale, with windows overlooking the hardest stretch of the Levee. His saints vowed to keep pressure on the Chicago Vice Commission, send a letter arguing that “segregation provides the best rendezvous for white slavers and other such criminals who are best maintained by a centralized and commercialized evil.”

  Still, Bell was uneasy as his train pulled out of Union Station that night, plumes of smoke ghosting across a slate sky. Dean Sumner, so far, had kept his thoughts about the commission’s progress to himself, and Bell had to rely on newspaper reports and random scraps of gossip. He knew the Chicago City Council had officially recognized the commission and appropriated $5,000 for its investigative work—developments that, on the surface, should be construed as positive. But there was something that worried him even more than Sumner’s ambiguity, something that lodged like a ten-pound rock inside his chest: City council passed the ordinance without a single dissenting voice; even Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna voted with the ayes.

  A

  LOST SOUL

  Hallway to the entrance of 2131, the Everleigh Club.

  I do not mind mankind’s crimes, but I do mind its hypocrisy.

  —MINNA EVERLEIGH

  Don’t worry, was the word from Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink. Mayor Busse was confident that the Vice Commission was going to recommend segregation as usual. Besides, what sort of investigation were these fools going to conduct with a paltry $5,000 budget? One single block on South Dearborn Street earned more than that over a weekend. Hell, the Everleigh Club alone could pocket that amount in a single night!

  Most significant, the aldermen confided, it looked as though Carter Harrison II planned to run for a fifth term, and if anyone recognized the lunacy of wiping out the Levee, it was Harrison, son of Chicago’s favorite son. The Busse administration had been tolerable, but a Democrat always set things working just right, made the machine hum and whir and click into place.

  “A Republican is a man who wants you to go t’church every Sunday,” Bathhouse John pointed out. “A Democrat says if a man wants to have a glass of beer, he can have it.”

  Minna had to admit that after a flurry of activity, the visiting firemen seemed a bit subdued—cowed, even. Reverend Bell, for one, took a leave of absence from his usual post outside their door. Roy Jones, Vic Shaw’s repulsive husband, was back in business, operating a full-fledged casino on State Street that fronted as a cigar store. And Clifford Roe had tried to implicate the Everleigh Club in a white slave case, suggesting that one Mr. Charles Herrick had forced his estranged wife, Sophia, to work there—a ludicrous charge that withered after a day of honest scrutiny.

  Investigators and Vice Commission members would soon be making the rounds, Bathhouse and Hinky Dink warned. Let them in, answer their questions, and see them on their way.

  A sensible enough edict, the Everleighs agreed. The sisters’ hope that reformers would consider their point of view endured, but such optimism was ailing and limp and scarcely worth the maintenance. Six years, now, of dispensing philosophy about uplift and decency the same way the visiting firemen did tracts about Jesus and disease, and still the lurid narrative about the “social evil” persisted without a postscript. Not even the occasional donation to the crusaders’ cause inspired a footnote or thoughtful addendum.

  The Levee and the Everleigh Club had its own narrative, longer and infinitely more spectacular, and Minna decided it deserved an update of its own. Since the Club had nothing to hide and plenty to advertise, including a delectable new courtesan nicknamed Brick Top, she planned to issue a promotional brochure. Nothing crude, of course, just lush sepia photographs showcasing each parlor and a mild introduction. The Club hardly needed the publicity, but the cause of segregation could surely use a hand. Besides, if the reformers couldn’t be persuaded, let them at least be peeved.

  Lord, the things they’d seen. Throughout the summer, fall, and now winter of 1910, Graham Taylor, Dean Sumner, and their Vice Commission colleagues had interviewed hundreds of cadets, madams, saloon keepers, shyster physicia
ns, morphine dealers, pimps, and every category of courtesan—white slaves, streetwalkers, resort inmates, harlots who flitted from appointment to appointment like doctors making house calls. Girls could buy a wad of opium tucked inside a folded playing card as if the drug were an ordinary piece of chewing gum. A madam on the West Side estimated that she and her lone boarder received up to four hundred men per week. One brothel employed eighteen inmates, twelve of whom had syphilis and continued to entertain—if one could call it that—with the full knowledge of the madam. Necrosis had set in on one girl’s hand, cells blackening beneath her palm, and still she put it to work. In one house, four harlots performed an exhibition with animals, a description of which was “too vile and disgusting to appear in print.”

  On this day, though, they were visiting the “highest-grade resort,” the Everleigh Club. A raw wind sliced through South Dearborn Street, resisting them as they climbed the eleven steps to the landing. No electric signs blazed atop the door; the house was lighted only by the stark yellow spray of the arc lamps and the parlors within.

  The head madam opened the door quickly, as if she’d been expecting them. Her silk gown was fitted, and a flock of butterflies made entirely of diamonds perched across its bodice. The other madam, her sister, lurked in the background. Two Negro maids scuttled about with dusters and rags. A Negro man dressed in bright silk livery stood guard nearby, arms clasped behind his back, face tilted toward an intricate tin ceiling. A fountain hissed in the corner, misting what smelled like liquid honeysuckle. From somewhere in the near distance a violin murmured Beethoven. Courtesans did not walk through the parlor so much as glide.

  “I found the twenty or more inmates appearing so well in the early evening,” Taylor noted, “that it would have been difficult to distinguish them from high-school graduates or college students. They produced the pennants of several colleges, as though they used them to attract or amuse their patrons. The two middle-aged sisters who had long kept the place were intelligent and well-mannered. They extenuated their nefarious trade by saying that it had to be, and that they, as well as others, might profit by conducting it as decently as it could be managed.

  “When asked how they procured inmates, they replied that they always had a waiting list, but insisted upon each one of them answering for herself. Dean Sumner and I were permitted to interview them…few of these inmates failed to claim that they were only there temporarily and would leave the life they were leading when they had earned a competence. Their ‘madame’ somewhat boastfully bade us to persuade, if we could, any of them to leave forthwith. Before leaving the handsomely furnished clubhouse, bearing a name that ranked it as aristocratic, I inquired of the madame how she dared to deal so destructively with both the body and the very life of each inmate. Her hollow, hysterical laughter fittingly accompanied her flippant reply.”

  “I am writing,” Minna said when she could speak again, “what I will call The Biography of a Lost Soul.”

  The other madam, the quiet one, let the prim line of her lips soften into a smile.

  The call from one of Roe’s private sleuths came on the evening of November 19. Maurice and Julia Van Bever, the detective said, were about to sell the Paris, the one on 2101 Armour Avenue, and flee to Paris—the one in France. If Roe hurried, he could stop them.

  The prosecutor phoned the police, who raided the Paris, arrested both Van Bevers, and charged them with trafficking in women. The Frenchman and his madam were shipped off to the Bridewell for one year, their appeal from the state supreme court finally denied.

  Van Bever’s partner, Big Jim Colosimo, still could not be reached.

  But the arrest at last cleared the part of Roe’s brain where the case had lingered for a year, making room for tasks undone. There was his book promotion, for one thing. Presses across the country were churning out as many white slavery narratives as copies of the Bible. One, Reginald Wright Kauffman’s The House of Bondage, would go through eleven printings in less than nine months. And here was Roe, with his superior legal credentials and impressive analysis of the white slave evil, selling a fraction of that amount. Most insulting, Kauffman’s book was a novel.

  When, shortly after the turn of the new year, Roe received a letter from John D. Rockefeller Jr., he hoped the New Yorker had changed his mind about issuing praise for Panders and Their White Slaves. “I am sorry not to comply with your request for a statement regarding the book which could be used publicly,” Rockefeller had written previously. “I have been asked many times to make criticisms of books but have never done so except in the case of the book by Mr. Kauffman which deals with the problem of the social evil in New York.”

  Rockefeller’s latest letter, however, didn’t mention Roe’s book. This time, in fact, it was the New Yorker who wanted something. “I propose,” the missive read, “that you come to New York as soon as you can close up matters in Chicago and undertake here just such a campaign as you have carried on in Chicago.” Rockefeller was offering $5,000 per year, and the public would be told that the prosecutor moved east to practice law, not to hunt white slavers. “The matter,” Rockefeller promised, “will be kept entirely among ourselves in the little group at this end.” If Roe agreed, he could start as soon as possible.

  Minna hired a professional photographer to capture all fifty rooms of the Everleigh Club. No pictures of the girls, she reminded him. This was a tasteful brochure, nothing like the crass calling cards that littered the Levee streets. Following him from parlor to parlor, boudoir to boudoir, she determined which angles and corners would best capture the whole, her only source of passion and point of pride—her entire world—framed between her hands. Don’t get just the beds and dressing areas, she ordered, but the alcoves, too, and several views of the ballroom, a close-up of the gilded throne in the Japanese Room, a shot of the Mosque Room leading into the Moorish Room, the puddle-deep rugs and gilded spittoons, the everleigh sign, each letter in exquisite scrolling cursive, suspended above the entry to the Pullman Buffet, the graceful turn of each hallway as it met the stairs.

  Finished, he bound the best images between a rich leather cover. Minna called it “The Everleigh Club, Illustrated” and composed a simple introduction. “Fortunate indeed,” she wrote, “with all the comforts of life surrounding them, are the members of the Everleigh Club. This little booklet will convey but a faint idea of the magnificence of the club and its appointments.”

  She mailed nearly two hundred brochures to regular and prospective clients, and gave a few to her most trusted courtesans to distribute at their discretion. To the outside world, the gesture would be seen as a classy reminder of a place that was already a household name. But in Chicago and throughout the Levee, the brochure was a deliberate challenge issued to those vying to shut the Everleigh Club down: Here it was, and here it would stay.

  THE SOCIAL EVIL

  IN CHICAGO

  Mayor Carter Harrison II.

  Here’s the difference between us and Dante: He wrote a lot about Hell and never saw the place. We’re writing about Chicago after looking the town over.

  —CARL SANDBURG

  The First Ward aldermen were right. Like his father before him, fifty-year-old Carter Harrison II was seeking a fifth term as mayor of Chicago. The elder Harrison, assassinated by a mentally disturbed Irish immigrant at the close of the World’s Fair, was a Yale alumnus and Shakespearean scholar, but Chicago’s working class adored him nonetheless. “Our Carter” had been one of their own, at ease with any crowd or conversation, a popularity that transferred to his son.

  The son, too, was handsome and charismatic, his mass of untamed black hair tempered by a dapper mustache. His campaign flyer for the 1911 election blared: THE STREETS OF CHICAGO BELONG TO THE PEOPLE * PERSONAL LIBERTY * EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL * SPECIAL PRIVILEGES TO NONE * NO BLUE LAWS FOR CHICAGO—an egalitarian message embraced by the city’s immigrant beer drinkers and saloon keepers. His policy regarding the Levee was similarly relaxed. “I have never been afflicted with Pur
itan leanings,” he wrote. “I have also recognized the apparent necessity of prostitution in such social organizations as have been so far perfected in this world of ours.”

  Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink were thrilled to have their old comrade in the race, especially with the whiff of reform fouling the air. For the February 28 primary election, in which Harrison faced former Democratic mayor Edward Dunne, the First Ward bards hauled men in from flop-houses and the local insane asylum (prompting Hinky Dink to remark that the mentally ill were more politically astute than even the most erudite Republican). Scores of black voters, who had migrated north to Chicago pledging allegiance to the party of Lincoln, were rightfully converted by complimentary food and beer at Kenna’s saloon. When the machines were closed and votes tallied, Harrison emerged as the Democratic nominee, his margin of victory in the First Ward double that throughout the rest of the city.

  The Republican opponent, Hyde Park reformer Charles Merriam, began lobbing personal insults against the aldermen. “Hinky Dink has put aside his mask of humility and buffoonery,” Merriam said, “and has come out to name Chicago’s mayor.” Publicly, Hinky Dink feigned shock and hurt, but privately he accelerated his efforts, raising the price of votes and assembling a venerable First Ward army to strategize. Ike Bloom, Solly Friedman, and Levee collector George Little reported right away. Suddenly, Big Jim Colosimo could be reached.

  The Tribune treated Harrison’s victory with ho-hum indifference. CARTER HARRISON ELECTED, read the headline. SAME OLD FRAUD IN RIVER WARDS.