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

by Karen Abbott

  The mayor-elect prepared to move into the brand-new City Hall, a mammoth structure comprising one hundred thousand cubic feet of granite and 4 million bricks, its classical columns and soaring archways more suggestive of a Roman bath than municipal drudgery. But a pertinent issue would soon demand his attention: The Chicago Vice Commission was ready to submit its report.

  On April 5, 1911, the day after the election, the thirty members of the commission gave a somber presentation to the city council and Mayor Fred Busse. The Social Evil in Chicago was a sociological marvel, a four-hundred-page tome that rivaled William Sanger’s groundbreaking 1858 work, The History of Prostitution, in the scope of its investigation. (To Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink’s dismay, the Vice Commission received another $5,000 to continue work in the first months of 1911.)

  Divided into ten parts, with numerous subset categories and tangents, the report detailed every facet of prostitution in Chicago: cadets, the “fake marriage situation,” and obscene shows; “kept” women and unseemly couplings in manicure parlors; problems with whiskey, morphine, cocaine, murder, and theft; whether or not brothels prevented the rape of innocent women; and the “question of defectives, especially degenerates and sexual perverts.” Each finding was presented in the driest language possible, as if to emphasize that this was science, not porn for puritans.

  All in all, the commission concluded, there were no fewer than 1,020 brothels in Chicago and five thousand full-time prostitutes—a “conservative but fair” estimate that didn’t account for the thousands of streetwalkers, part-timers, or girls who hustled on the side. The Levee’s annual profits from vice were calculated, “ultra” conservatively, at nearly $16 million per year ($328 million today). Harlots’ and madams’ names were changed, and an elaborate code replaced specific brothel addresses.

  “The (X523), at (X524), (X524a) Dearborn Street,” read one entry about the Everleigh Club. “This is probably the most famous and luxurious house of prostitution in the country. The list received from the General Superintendent of Police on August 16, 1910, did not give the address of this house…the gilded palaces of sin patronized by the wealthy are immune from punishment, even to the extent of being saved the humiliation of appearing upon a police list.”

  The report commented on “gregarious” men:

  …there is a large number of men who are thoroughly gregarious in habit; who mostly affect the carriage, mannerisms, and speech of women…who are often people of a good deal of talent; who lean to the fantastic in dress…. In one of the large music halls recently, a much applauded act was that of a man who by facial expression and bodily contortion represented sex perversion, a most disgusting performance. It was evidently not at all understood by many of the audience….

  On harlots in the Everleigh Club and other respected houses:

  These women are the heavy money earners of some of the “best” houses in Chicago. The majority of them are apparently in robust health…[they] hold the lead in professional prostitution and earn weekly from $50 to $400. This would seem to largely disprove…the solemn statement…that “in five years these girls will all be dead.”

  And on what Minna would call “wear and tear”:

  It is undoubtedly true that the women in houses are longer lived and better off than the street walker or possibly than the clandestine prostitute—with her, service is largely mechanical—not an act appealing to sentiment or affection—while with the latter type especially, the physical stress upon her body and nerves and strength caused by expression of “love” as they understand it, makes demands upon endurance that are unknown to the professional prostitute.

  On causes, during one particular survey, for entering the life:

  Nine were seduced; three could not earn enough to live on in any other way; two were enticed by other women into the life; two were too ignorant to do any ordinary work; two lost their husbands by death and two by desertion; two said they were naturally bad, one said she wanted to, was “born with the devil in her,” the other that she “was bad with boys before she was 15” two for dress; two ruined by drink and one each on account of trouble with family, poverty, money and because she was tired of drudgery (this girl said dance halls ruined her).

  On the lower houses:

  One madame testified before the Commission that in a 50-cent house on the West Side, she with one girl took in $175 to $200 per week. She also testified that she herself entertained 60 men in one night at 50 cents each. This madame is supporting members of her family, and has $7,000 in the bank.

  And again on the Everleigh Club:

  A Dearborn Street resort distributes a very elaborate booklet which describes in glowing terms the comforts to be found within the walls of that “sumptuous” house. In fact no one need “feel the chill of winter nor the heat of summer” in this place….

  Pervert methods are on the increase in the higher priced houses. The inmates who perform these services earn from two to three times as much money as the so-called “regular girls.” In one notorious place known all over the country and which caters to a so-called high class trade, these methods are used almost exclusively. The inmates gave testimony before the Commission that they do this on the advice of their physician, who says it prevents disease and other troubles.

  Chicago, the commission declared, should waste no time in establishing a morals court and appointing a morals commission.

  But their final—and most shocking—recommendation called for the “absolute annihilation” of the Levee district.

  Ernest Bell had awaited the Vice Commission’s report as if for the birth of his own child, and the idea that the Levee might one day be darkened and desolate was every bit as miraculous. He gathered his saints around him in the Armour Avenue house, their tears vying with laughter. “Praise God,” they sang, eyes shut, throats knotted, “from whom all blessings flow.”

  But a disconcerting story shadowed their celebration, stripped a layer of joy from their prayers. When Edwin Sims and Dean Sumner delivered the report to Mayor Harrison after his inauguration, he ceremoniously tossed it into the trash.

  Clifford Roe left for New York on April 1, 1911, “enthusiastically looking forward with much hope” to fighting white slavery full-time in a new city. His best sleuth, the Kid, was accompanying him, and they would be aided by men from the New York District Attorney’s Office. Rockefeller had warned Roe that things were done differently in New York, that hysteria and hyperbole had to make room for rational discourse. The oil scion was especially troubled by an upcoming East Coast tour planned by Ernest Bell. “If the methods employed in this tour,” he wrote, “are to be the kind which I assume Doctor Bell usually employs, it seems to me that, particularly in the East, more harm may result than good.”

  Roe made it clear that he understood.

  His benefactors in Chicago—Julius Rosenwald, Adolph Kraus, Harold Swift of the famous meatpacking family, and twelve others—incorporated as the Committee of Fifteen and promised to continue the battle against vice. They had an ingenious idea, printing out little square flyers, like baseball cards, featuring the names, physical descriptions, and photographs of white slaves. One featured a young woman wearing a long, filmy white dress. She held an open parasol behind slim shoulders, as if drawing an arrow, and the text beneath her image read:

  MISS GOLDIE MYERS

  Believed to be held in some disorderly resort, Nineteen years old.

  About five and a half feet tall, weighs one hundred and twenty-five or thirty pounds. Very light complexion, light natural blonde, wavy hair. Report to the Committee of Fifteen, 10 So. LaSalle St.

  Roe rented an apartment on Broadway. Rockefeller’s personal secretary, Charles Heydt, took Roe to select office furniture, sponsored his membership at New York’s City Club, and provided a car for his investigators. “[Roe] himself does not care for automobiles,” Heydt told Rockefeller, “and has an aversion to them on account of his mother’s death in one.”

  Soon after he settl
ed, Roe set out for the “dollar houses” on the East Side, one eye fixed on the virtue of innocent girls, the other on his legacy.

  Ada preferred to bat away threats with humor, switching to denial when jokes began to sound emptier than silence. Denial triumphed in the weeks after the Vice Commission report; Ada limited her conversation to banal talk of business matters and the thickening July heat. She kept to routine, selecting a harlot to accompany her on afternoon errands to the Loop, calling for their elegant carriage instead of the automobile, a Luddite at heart. Each woman lifted a vivid parasol above her pale face. The courtesan’s highlighted her figure, made it look like the curving stem of a flower. Ada, her true forty-seven years at last betraying her fabricated age, seemed to wilt, ever so slightly, beneath her own.

  Minna, too, adhered to routine, working through her stack of newspapers every afternoon in the Gold Room. She read about the vice commission report, scoured for references to the Club. They mentioned their “perversions” and protection from the police. They estimated the Club’s annual revenue to be $100,000, although $120,000 was more accurate. Good—they were appropriately perturbed by the advertising brochure. One investigator was gratuitously nasty. “They had little fountains squirting perfume in the various rooms,” he sniffed, “but the aroma isn’t sufficient to remove the moral stench from the nostrils of a law-abiding citizen.”

  She kept tabs on Carter Harrison. The mayor had posture like Big Jim Colosimo’s pasta, bending just enough to placate the visiting firemen without breaking to their side. He insisted that “all of the rules issued under the last administration will be enforced”—no soliciting from doors or windows, no vulgar exhibitions, no swinging doors, no women in saloons without male escorts. His new police chief, John McWeeny, was doing what they all did immediately after being appointed, making a few splashy arrests, just to attract attention, before finalizing graft arrangements with Ike Bloom. After collaring five prostitutes on the West Side, McWeeny, with one cruel comment, illustrated exactly why the Everleigh Club was necessary.

  “Those women have got to get off those streets,” he said. “Let them jump in the lake if they want.”

  McWeeny would soon fall in line, but Minna didn’t expect the visiting firemen to retreat. They’d been out there for six years now, as much a part of the Levee landscape as unconscious bodies and Negro professors and girls who would feel old far longer than they ever felt young. It was maddeningly predictable, the usual insults and allegations spouting from familiar mouths. Ada might force laughter or retreat into silence, but she, Minna, would step forward and beckon them even closer. She would once again take what they loathed most and highlight it, string it up for all the world to see. Time to update the brochure, she decided, and declare the two attractions a visitor to Chicago mustn’t miss: the Union Stock Yards and the Everleigh Club. Beneath the reformers’ stiff collars and pious expressions were men, Minna reminded herself—the flies to her spider.

  PAINTED,

  PEROXIDED, BEDIZENED

  Police Chief John McWeeny, 1911.

  Girls will be girls, but they should be restrained.

  —LUCY PAGE GASTON

  One afternoon in early October 1911, Mayor Carter Harrison II opened the door to Vogelsang’s. The cursive V in the restaurant’s sign resembled a seagull in distant flight, wingspan stretching along the odd side of West Madison Street. He headed for his table, shaking hands with men as he passed, cigar smoke burrowing in his throat. A waiter hovered, slid out his chair. Charlie Plamondon, hot dog king Oscar Mayer, and Murray Keller—the last a western representative of a prestigious French champagne house—had already arrived, and they raised wineglasses in greeting.

  Courses were devoured and toasts proposed, glasses refilled for thirds and fourths, and the mayor felt a “sudden longing” for champagne. An idea struck him. German cities, he pointed out, had more than one mayor. Berlin alone had an Ober-Bürgermeister and at least two ordinary Bürgermeisters. Why not elevate Chicago to the same class? He issued a challenge to his friends: The first one to find a bottle of Pommery 1904 would be named to a special post, night mayor of Chicago, “with all attendant privileges, perquisites, and prerogatives.”

  Striking the air with a finger, Charlie Plamondon summoned the head-waiter and made the request. Yes, Vogelsang’s had the brand and the year. They downed the first glass in honor of Plamondon, Chicago’s newest official, who sniggered through his impromptu oath of office.

  The following Monday, the night mayor and his wife set out in their electric brougham for a show and dinner at the Congress. On the way home, Plamondon suggested a detour through the Levee district—what better way to launch his duties than a quick investigation of the underworld? At the very least, the sojourn would make for interesting conversation at the next Vogelsang’s luncheon. His wife, a good sport, played along.

  After cruising down Dearborn and Armour, his wife’s grip on his hand tightening with each passing block, Plamondon turned on 22nd, then swung north on Michigan Avenue. At 18th Street, an electric automobile puttered onto Michigan from the west. It was remarkably similar to his own, Plamondon noted, but “lit up like a prairie fire.” The car cast a blinding haze, as if the sun were rising behind its dashboard, and a cascade of exotic flowers trailed across the hood. In the backseat, propped up on plump cushions, sat an even plumper woman, hair twisted and tucked beneath what looked like a dead peacock. Diamonds dripped from ears and winked from fingers. Her neckline descended to midtorso, revealing stupendous half-moons of breasts. Plamondon’s wife squeezed harder. The automobile tripped over a sunken patch of street, tossing the woman so that one breast escaped from its thin silk confines. Laughing, shoulders shaking and head reared back, the woman took her time tucking the breast back where it belonged, waiting until every passenger and pedestrian on this elegant boulevard had gotten a good look.

  Plamondon’s wife was hyperventilating.

  He noticed a policeman on the corner and pulled over. Who, he asked the cop, is that flashy individual?

  The officer looked at the car, trailing a comet of light, and shrugged. “Vic Shaw,” he said.

  The next morning, Plamondon filed his night mayor report to the real mayor. Harrison surmised that the “notorious brothel keeper” left her resort on Dearborn, stopped by her husband’s saloon at 18th and Wabash, and then headed home to her new Michigan Avenue apartment. Embarrassed that such a flagrant display was spotted outside the Levee parameters—and by a friend, no less—he thanked Plamondon and sent a sleuth to investigate.

  The mayor recognized his tricky position, moderating a delicate tug-of-war between the First Ward aldermen, who backed him politically, and the reformers, who could no longer be dismissed as crackpots or prudes. The anti-vice crusade that had been launched to clear Chicago’s reputation had itself wrought the most damage.

  Once again, the nation was focused on the Levee district; even Theodore Roosevelt recognized The Social Evil in Chicago as a central document of the age, deserving of careful study and effusive praise. It did not “serve merely to gratify emotions that are foul and base,” the former president reasoned, but was a “contribution to the cause of morality and decency.” The young journalist Walter Lippmann, meanwhile, declared the investigators’ approach flawed, their conclusions futile, and their views on sexuality puerile. The idea that “sex must be confined to procreation by a healthy, intelligent and strictly monogamous couple,” Lippmann would soon write, summing up the commission’s position, “forced the Commission to ignore the sexual impulse in discussing a sexual problem…yet who that has read the report itself and put himself in any imaginative understanding of conditions can escape seeing that prostitution today is organic to our industrial life, our marriage sanctions, and our social customs?” Plus Dean Sumner was at it again, trying to convince the U.S. postmaster general to permit 1,800 copies of The Social Evil in Chicago to pass through the mails so that other cities might again follow Chicago’s example and appoint vice
commissions of their own.

  Call girls had always worked Michigan Avenue from 12th Street to 35th Street, taking clients to designated houses and disorderly hotels, but Harrison knew that this thoroughfare could not, under any circumstances, flower into another segregated district, a Little Levee. “It was far from my ideas,” he wrote, “that the more notorious, the more luxurious of the houses should conduct branch institutions, succor sales, in decent neighborhoods.”

  So when his investigator discovered that a number of the older residences along Michigan Avenue had been purchased recently and converted into resorts, the mayor issued an order: Move all disreputable women from Michigan Avenue at once and close all disorderly flats. Brazen taunting of the respectable citizenry would not be tolerated, Harrison added, and solicitation by pimps must cease.

  The Michigan Avenue offenders dutifully departed, and Harrison hoped the Levee madams would, from now on, stay in their own backyard.

  Minna didn’t recognize the policemen who appeared at her door on October 21. It wasn’t Bryant, who helped her thwart the Marshall Field Jr. plot, or the trusted officer who accompanied her to Vic Shaw’s during the Nathaniel Moore mess, or any of the number of rank-and-file cops she tipped now and again. A fist of panic curled inside her. Perhaps McWeeny had dispatched two new underlings to discuss graft payments? Or maybe another symbolic raid was planned, like the attack on Michigan Avenue, and these men had come to warn the sisters? Best to remain calm, avoid jumping to conclusions. Peculiar behavior only invited unwarranted suspicion.