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

by Karen Abbott

  On September 26, the Cook County grand jury held a private executive session. After an hour, during which reporters waited with ears pressed against the closed door, the foreman emerged and motioned for the deputy county sheriff. Another interminable wait. When the sheriff finally reappeared, he wiped his brow and exhaled a long hiss of breath.

  “Wow!” he said. “They’re going to rip off the lid.”

  “What lid?” asked a voice in the crowd.

  “Graft, vice police, politics, white slaves.” He swept the horizon with his hand. “They’re going to tear the mask from the face of vice. If those fellows do what they say they’re going to do, they’ll make history…and they say we are about to be the busiest little office in Cook County if we get all the persons they are going to examine to find just how wicked a community this is…politicians, policemen, gamblers, resort keepers—all are fish for the grand jury net.”

  Before adjourning for the day, the grand jury issued subpoenas for a woman named Virginia Brooks, who had organized a hatchet brigade in West Hammond (a Cook County town just outside Chicago proper), threatening to pull a Carrie Nation; the mayor of West Hammond himself; Arthur Burrage Farwell, who was expected to provide information on dives that violated liquor laws; Clifford Roe, invaluable for his expertise on the white slave traffic; and the city editors of the Tribune and the Daily News.

  State’s Attorney John Wayman, Roe’s old boss, was the lone member of Cook County’s law enforcement body who seemed wary of the subpoenas. He was in an impossible position. When he ran for election at the end of 1908, he deftly played both sides, taking subtle aim at critics who denounced his ties to the United Societies—“The man who takes the holier-than-thou position and says he is going to keep clean of the whole nasty business,” he said, “washes his hands with invisible soap in imperceptible water”—while also vowing to jail every criminal in the county. At the same time, his relationship with First Ward politicians was relatively cordial; Bathhouse John even declared the forty-year-old “the handsomest man in Chicago.” Now, the state’s attorney was unsure whether to placate the reformers, align himself with the segregationists, or teeter along a fine line in between.

  “This grand jury did not consult with me,” Wayman said, “and I know practically nothing of the proposed investigation.” He didn’t know, either, that it was only the beginning of his trouble.

  The following afternoon, a Saturday, ten thousand men, women, and children gathered in the Loop, preparing for what one observer called “the most pretentious street parade of its kind.” A storm skulked between flattened clouds, dropping just as the procession began. Mounted policemen flanked the crowd, directing traffic. Clergymen, including Bell and his Midnight Mission, sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers” in a tribute to the legendary Gypsy Smith march. Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, students of the Moody Bible Institute, and members of every conceivable civic and religious group in Chicago fanned out in all directions, rippling and shifting, an entire Lake Michigan of reformers.

  The stated purpose of the parade was to “protest against the lawless saloon, the red-light district, the debauched ballot, and a hundred other powers of darkness,” but, as the Record Herald put it, “the aim of the crusaders seemed to be rather diffuse.” Virginia Brooks, the West Hammond ingenue who recently exported her crusading efforts to Chicago, had planned to lead the throng mounted on a white stallion and dressed as Joan of Arc, but at the last minute she decided that such attire would make her a “subject of ridicule.” Fifty floats advanced slowly amid the crowd, slathered with signs and strung with banners, a gaudy colony of mutant ants.

  There was Lucy Page Gaston and her entire Anti-Cigarette League, waving through dense curtains of rain, declaring CUBS MUST CUT OUT CIGARETTES. The Anti-Saloon League wasn’t far behind, boasting a similar sign: BOOZE BEAT THE CUBS. Another float, sponsored by the city’s Norwegian churches, carried twelve young men cap-a-pie in armor and a thirteenth clad in bright pink tights and a bearskin coat, representing the god Thor. He sliced through the rain with a hammer and bore a placard around his neck: THE GREAT GOD THOR WITH HIS HAMMER, THE NORWEGIANS WILL HELP SMITE THE SALOONS.

  Arthur Burrage Farwell and his Chicago Law and Order League lorded over a float designed to look like a “pure ballot.” One Boy Scout wore a Satan costume and warned, I’LL GET YOU IF YOU DON’T SWEAR OFF—leaving exactly what one should swear off up to the imagination. Another company of Scouts dragged a small cannon through the slick streets, festooned with a banner declaring, WE’VE TURNED THE GUNS AGAINST THE SALOONS. The Washington Park Church outdid everyone, its members riding atop a mini–morality play. The first float depicted Uncle Sam handing a proud dive keeper a liquor license next to a man guzzling beer on a bar stool; the second represented the drunkard’s squalid home, where his wife labored wearily at a washtub while he beat her about the head; and the lone, stark image for the final act was a vehicle dressed up to look like the county hearse.

  John Wayman, Shakespearean scholar and fan of farce, would have appreciated the sprawling lunacy of this spectacle—if only its participants hadn’t concluded the festivities with a postparade rally, where they violently assailed Chicago’s officials in general, and its state’s attorney in particular, for failing to close the Levee.

  Minna’s fingers shook as she dialed the number for Chief Justice Harry Olson of the municipal court. Never in her life could she have imagined volunteering information about the Levee district to an authentic arm of the law—a member of the Chicago Vice Commission, no less—but that was before certain men appeared on her doorstep, their faces half-shrouded by bowler hats, giving her a look that spiked her heart and iced her blood. Big Jim Colosimo had always used violence and evil to navigate his world the way other men used a compass, but she never thought he would steer those urges in her direction.

  The men identified themselves as representatives of the vice lord. They’d heard an unsettling rumor that Minna planned to release an “affidavit.” If she did—if one word of the laws of the Levee turned up in print—then she and that sister of hers were as good as dead, did Minna understand?

  Judge Olson was on the phone now, patiently deciphering her nervous jabber, assuring her he would accept Minna’s letters and keep them safe. He understood that he could not release them, or even tell anyone they existed, until the city’s foremost madams no longer called Chicago home.

  During the final days of September, the grand jury proceedings devolved into their own chaotic parade. State’s Attorney Wayman further enraged the reformers by throwing out several indictments, including one against a Democratic precinct captain and political henchman for Hinky Dink Kenna. Since they were based on evidence jurors heard outside of the courtroom, Wayman explained, “they aren’t worth the paper they are written on…the cases would not stand in court a minute.” Arthur Burrage Farwell called for Carter Harrison’s impeachment. The mayor was already in a bitter mood, since the Chicago Civil Service Commission, which he’d hoped would argue in favor of the Levee, instead complained about a mile stretch of “half-naked sirens” dangling from windows. The last thing he needed was more grief from Farwell, so Chicago’s chief executive retorted, “One might expect almost anything from a man of Mr. Farwell’s type. Why should I waste time shouting at a sparrow?”

  Roe’s Committee of Fifteen received an anonymous letter:

  The South Side Levee is rejoicing. The $50,000 fund which has been raised will soon be made back when the entire district will be wide open.

  —One Who Knows

  And on the last day of the month, Cook County sheriffs, with subpoenas in hand, began searching for Minna and Ada Everleigh.

  The county authorities had one problem: Where, exactly, were those Everleigh sisters? Not in the Dearborn Street resort, obviously, and a maid who cared for the place from time to time professed ignorance. The sisters’ friends in the press, too, were appropriately cagey, reporting that “it was not generally known that [the Everleigh Club
’s] former owners are in the city, but the grand jurors have been so informed…. As they are said to have retired altogether from the resort business some of the members of the grand jury, it is said, believe they will be willing to give some information to the body concerning Levee conditions, and especially the part played by politicians and police in the arrangement of protection for divekeepers.”

  On that Monday night, as the deputy sheriffs scuttled about, the sisters waited in their West Side home, aware they were being sought and that it wouldn’t be too long before they were found. A municipal judge knew they were in the city, after all, not to mention Big Jim and Ike Bloom and any number of madams who would gladly piggyback the authorities to the Everleighs’ front door. Minna and Ada agreed that they owed no one, now, except themselves, but they also couldn’t forget the visit by Colosimo’s thugs, and the fact that Big Jim did not believe in second warnings.

  The bell rang late in the evening, long past their new neighborhood’s bedtime. Ada nodded to Minna, who rose and walked her singular walk, that caterpillar bend and hump, and for once did not call the men who stood at the door her “boys” or profess how glad she was to see them. She and Ada were hereby served, and ordered to appear in the Criminal Court Building first thing in the morning.

  It was odd, being in the Loop for business again but without stopping at the First Dearborn Bank to deposit earnings, without a butterfly perched in the backseat, stretching out a leg, tugging at a boot, letting her hem glide up her thigh. The Criminal Court Building presided over Hubbard Street, all leaping columns and long windows, with a jail nestled at the rear. The sisters were escorted to the waiting area outside the grand jury room, and every eye turned on them, weighted stares that Minna acknowledged with her usual tight smile, and Ada with a haughty lift of her chin.

  They saw familiar faces—police officer friends who were also subpoenaed to talk about protection payments. Clifford Roe was milling about, as was State’s Attorney Wayman, who was being pummeled by the reformers—unfairly, the sisters knew, as he was one of the few who had never taken a cent of graft.

  They waited and waited, but no one called them to the jury room. The afternoon edition of the American offered a bit of insight into the jockeying behind the scenes. “Minnie and Ada Everleigh,” it reported, “were called to appear before the probe body as a result of evidence given by a witness that one of the women had told him of a collector of vice protection money. The woman was expected to divulge the name.”

  Minna didn’t appreciate the pressure, of course, but in red-light districts elsewhere, circumstances were considerably more grim. As the sisters sat in court, the police chief of Atlanta, Georgia, announced that the city’s brothels would all close within five days owing to the efforts of a group called Men and Religion Forward. The order left prominent Atlanta madam Nellie Bushee so bereft that she plunged a dagger, fatally, into her heart.

  State’s Attorney Wayman had had enough with the impromptu investigations and unorthodox handling of indictments and witnesses. Deriding the assemblage as a “runaway jury,” he decided to call their bluff.

  “Gentlemen,” he began, pacing the length of the box, “I am through with this grandstand attitude. You tell me what you want to do and I will see that it is done. Do you want to drive all the resorts out of Chicago? If you do, adjourn until tomorrow noon and I will present sufficient evidence to indict and convict every resort keeper in Chicago.”

  He paused, looked directly at each juror.

  “If that is what you want,” he continued, “I am with you. You vote the indictments and I will make the prosecutions. Is that what you want?”

  There was a clearing of throats and shifting in seats. One juror leaned forward. “No, not exactly that,” he said. “We want to investigate conditions so that we can tell which are the bad places.”

  “What do you want to do then?” Wayman asked. “Indict the keepers of ‘bad resorts’?”

  “Yes,” the juror said, and echoes of affirmation followed.

  The state’s attorney smiled. “Then this grand jury wants to go on record as censors of vicious resorts, does it? This body expects to indict and prosecute bad resort keepers and advertise those which it brands as good?”

  The jurors turned, looked at one another, trapped themselves in silence. No one knew how to answer. Finally, the foreman stood. Would Mr. Wayman retire and give them until five o’clock to decide their attitude toward the entire investigation?

  Sure, Wayman said.

  At the appointed hour, they called the state’s attorney back in and said that they were finished, leaving a roomful of uncalled witnesses, including the Everleigh sisters. The September grand jury adjourned officially, this time for good.

  Two days later, on October 3, Wayman conferred privately with Chief Justice Harry Olson of the municipal court, the judge to whom Minna had entrusted her letters about the Levee. When the state’s attorney reappeared, he was, witnesses said, in a state of “furious passion,” clenching fistfuls of air, his lips collapsed in a stern line. A chorus of questions arose, and Wayman raised one lanky arm, the cuffs of his suit coat sliding to reveal a knobby wrist.

  “There is an apparent effort to lay the blame for Chicago’s vice at my door,” he said. “Nobody is going to be able to say that I protected the social evil.”

  Without another word, the state’s attorney obtained warrants for 135 Levee pimps, panders, brothel keepers, and madams, including Big Jim Colosimo, Ed Weiss, Roy Jones, and his wife, Vic Shaw.

  The news moved, made itself known: “Wayman’s out to pinch the whole district.” It rattled across Chicago’s skyline on the El, climbed into streetcars, alighted into carriages, folded into automobiles, buzzed over telephone wires, electrified Midnight Mission headquarters, and infested the Levee. It reached the West Side and rapped on the stained-glass windows of a charming Prairie house on Washington Boulevard, where two former madams, retired for almost a year, raised glasses and toasted, feeling, at last, vindicated rather than vilified.

  “Looks like we saved $40,000,” Minna said, sounding happier than she felt, but not by much.

  FALLEN

  IS BABYLON

  State’s Attorney John Wayman, with one of his three children.

  Have patience, my friend, for sooner or later you, too, will get sore at everybody.

  —STATE’S ATTORNEY JOHN WAYMAN

  The sun had long since made its own escape as patrol wagons scythed through the Levee streets. Halfway around the world, the first Balkan war was imminent, but the battle in Chicago seemed, at the moment, just as merciless and bloody, terrified harlots slinking through back doors, jumping through windows, everything they owned bundled in tablecloths and slung over shoulders, wondering where to run, knowing as much trouble awaited them outside the district as in.

  “Another Johnstown flood, the approach of an invading army, or a plague,” one witness noted, “might have caused a similar scene.” Electric pianos stuttered to silence, abandoning songs in midverse. Thousands descended southward from the Loop, leaving steaks half-eaten and shows half-watched, such scripted entertainment bland in comparison. Pots boiled over on stoves, bottles of beer and whiskey toppled and slicked the floors, and men fled half-dressed through the streets—their trousers left, along with any dignity, beside a courtesan’s strange bed.

  Ernest Bell and his Midnight Mission members wandered out from their house on Armour Avenue and were joined by Salvation Army workers with blaring trumpets and throbbing drums. “Onward, Christian soldiers,” they sang, “marching as to war…,” the lyrics sounding like an antidote to the fleeing girls’ screams. A small dark man barreled forward, stopping when he saw the missionaries. Bell recognized him in turn: one of Big Jim Colosimo’s thugs.

  He braced himself—during the past month, his saints had been doused with valerianate of ammonia, asafoetida, and other drugs—but the “little swarthy” dive keeper flushed with excitement, not anger. “Brother Bell,” he said, �
��your prayers are being answered,” and the crowd propelled him on. The missionaries ventured into an abandoned brothel and prayed on the parlor floor, splinters of glass gnashing their knees. Gangs of looters interrupted the sermon, charging in and scurrying off, liquor bottles tucked inside jackets, cheap oil paintings balanced on heads.

  A patrol wagon rambled to a stop at 2014 South Dearborn Street, Vic Shaw’s brothel. Officers found twenty harlots and one man—but no madam—and piled them all into the back of the van, flailing and cursing. On to the resort of “Black Mag” Douglas, where the madam was arrested but permitted to drive in her own barge-size automobile to the police station, where she immediately posted bail. At the next dive, only a “Negress cook” was found inside, wiping dishes and humming as if it were any other night.

  Madam Julia Van Bever, too, was carted away and let go, after Hinky Dink’s bondsman paid her fine. At Annie DeMuncy’s, 2004 South Dearborn Street, sixteen women were arrested—most of them teenagers—and twenty-five men; from Marie Blanchey’s, twenty women and thirty men; from Phyllis Adams’s, twenty-four women and twenty men; and from the brothel of Madam Aimee, otherwise known as “Mrs. Ed Weiss,” ten harlots in various stages of packing and hysteria. Ed Weiss, Roy Jones, and Big Jim Colosimo played along, gallantly permitting the police to haul them away, and were released in less time than it took to arrest them in the first place. Back in the Levee, they called for an emergency meeting, to convene the following morning.

  One by one, they arrived at Colosimo’s Café, 2126 Wabash Avenue. Roy Jones, Blubber Bob Gray, Ed Weiss, and Ike Bloom found Big Jim waiting at a secluded table in the corner. Opened two years earlier, the nightclub had become one of the most popular in the Levee, luring Chicago’s elite, on both sides of the law, to marvel at its gaudy splendor—the splashes of gilded paint, the mahogany-and-glass bar, the green velvet walls, and the ceiling, with its mural of a naked cherub frolicking amid woolly clouds.