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

by Karen Abbott

  “It is rather extraordinary,” wrote one Chicago historian, “that a murderer, a white slaver, Black Hand blackmailer such as Jim Colosimo could attract the best people in Chicago, famous visitors to the city, to his Colosimo’s Café. Not only the Potter Palmers, the Marshall Fields, but a late-supper group might have Al Jolson, John Barrymore, and Sophie Tucker.”

  That morning, though, the Levee leaders had the café to themselves as they sipped coffee and debated strategy. They needed $40,000 more for their coffers, they decided, to augment the $50,000 slush fund that “One Who Knows” had leaked to the Committee of Fifteen. With enough cash, they could tip some of the state legislators in their favor and secure passage of some decent laws at Springfield. It wouldn’t be a bad idea, either, to get all of their respective whores in on this counterattack. Calling themselves the Committee of Fifteen in mock homage to Roe’s group, the vice lords disbanded, ready to implement their plan.

  After rounding up their harlots, the men issued the following orders:

  Get on your loudest clothes and more paint than usual and parade.

  Go to residence districts. Ring doorbells and apply for lodgings.

  Get rooms only in respectable neighborhoods.

  Don’t accost men on the streets, but be out as much as possible.

  Frequent respectable cafés and make a splash.

  The invasion of the harlots began on October 5, 1912, at four in the afternoon. Two thousand of them formed a tawdry procession down Michigan Avenue, wearing high feathered hats and plummeting gowns, faces streaked in crimson rouge, bare legs goose-bumped in the cool fall air. They sidled up to society women and winked at their husbands, sweeping long painted nails along the blushing men’s backs.

  At 35th and Michigan, six prostitutes coordinated the lighting of cigarettes with theatrical aplomb, moving one terrified passerby to call the police. Hers wasn’t the only complaint; scores of other respectable women reported being insulted by “undesirables.” Refugees from the lower dives, who had not glimpsed sunlight in months, wore bedraggled kimonos that showcased the track marks vining up their arms. Knocking on doors, they explained they had been driven from their homes. Were there any rooms available?

  Invariably, there weren’t, so the Beulah Home, the Life Boat Home, the Florence Crittenden Home, and the American Vigilance Association all offered lodgings and help. “I’ll take care of any of them who come to me,” one missionary woman said, “or see that they are cared for in some way.”

  But not one harlot applied. They didn’t want to go anywhere, except back to the Levee.

  The ersatz Committee of Fifteen enjoyed unequivocal success. Mayor Harrison, who was still recommending segregation when anyone bothered to ask his opinion, distanced himself from Wayman’s actions, opening a tense schism between state and municipal forces. As soon as Chicago’s police drove prostitutes back into the Levee, the state’s attorney ordered raids and sent apologetic officers to toss them out again. The harlots climbed into the backs of the patrol cars, waving handkerchiefs at the same crowds of men who would be waiting in the district, cheering, upon their return.

  This chaotic whiplash continued for a day and a half until both sides were weary and exhausted, and the dive keepers decided they could better see where the standoff was heading if they dimmed their lights for a while. The harlots—quietly, this time—said farewell to the Levee. They found private flats or left Chicago altogether, planning to reinvent themselves in Bloomington or Springfield or Peoria, the same small, bored towns they’d fled long ago. On October 7, the Levee, for the first time since the Great Fire, hushed its music and froze every movement.

  “Fallen is Babylon!” Ernest Bell wrote the following day. “Or at least the vice district at Twenty-second is greatly shattered…. Within a week Chicago has ceased, at least in a substantial degree, to be a vice-protecting city…we must look earnestly to God to make plain His will and His way to continue to uphold the Cross in the night life of our city.”

  Minna and Ada, too, monitored the Levee’s final, exhausting week, its tossing and turning, like a fitful child, before finally drifting to sleep. The sisters wondered how many of their former butterflies were among the Michigan Avenue invaders—girls who had left the Club years ago and forgotten, sadly, that they once looked choicer than the society women they were ordered to intimidate, that they could have moved into those elite neighborhoods without anyone raising a question. They wondered if Grace Monroe had healed, if those wrists, delicate as a swan’s neck, were now unbroken, if her back was free from scars. They wondered how the others, scattered across the country, were faring in their new lives, if they remembered Minna’s advice and stayed respectable by all means.

  They began preparing for their own next act, telling Etta Wright, momentarily displaced from 2131–2133 South Dearborn Street, not to worry, that they would reinstate her as caretaker before too long. They debated where to live, just as they had during that winter after leaving Omaha, and decided on New York, somewhere on the Upper West Side, maybe, near Central Park. And they vowed to return to the Levee only in their minds, where their boys were always satisfied and foes kept their distance, and where soft light kissed Minna’s jewels each time she opened the mahogany door.

  LITTLE

  LOST SISTER

  The Everleigh sisters at rest.

  I suppose we all want to leave something behind.

  —MINNA EVERLEIGH

  But the Levee soon awakened from its nap.

  When November came, despite Clifford Roe’s determination to “fight to the death against segregation” and the continuing agitation between State’s Attorney Wayman and Mayor Harrison, Ike Bloom showed up at the sisters’ West Side door. Luckily, he reminded the Everleighs, they had nothing to do with the current imbroglio—it was an ideal time for them to reenter the scene. C’mon, they could do it. Freiberg’s was enjoying brisk business, and so were the dives of Big Jim, Roy Jones, and Ed Weiss.

  “We’ll make everything clean and respectable,” Bloom insisted. “We’ll give the whole line your treatment. How’s that?”

  He reminded them that one Chicago reverend, a Dr. Frederick Hopkins, had come out strong against the “scattering of evil” across the city.

  “Who is that guy, O, yes, Dr. Hopkins, the preacher?” he continued. “He’s on our side. We’re a necessary evil. We’ll line up a few more ministers. It’s a cinch.”

  A thin sheen of sweat glossed Bloom’s face; it seemed he was trying, equally, to convince himself. The sisters shrugged.

  “It can’t be done,” Minna said.

  “The hell it can’t. We’ll give generously to the churches. We’ll make all the gals say their prayers and sit in them goddamn pews. Don’t tell me it can’t be done. Preachers got to be greased the same as bulls. What d’ya say? What the hell—you and I will go to church ourselves.”

  Minna couldn’t help it—Bloom always made her laugh.

  “Ike, you’re getting hot, but not hot enough,” she said. “To square the Bible brothers will take more cash than you’ll ever be able to subscribe. The idea is gorgeous, but the cost is prohibitive.”

  Bloom sighed and turned to go. His gangly legs strode halfway across the lawn, then he turned around. It was worth one more shot.

  “You sure you won’t fight it out?” he called.

  “I’m through,” Minna hollered back, and Ada nodded. “I want trees in the backyard and sunshine—mostly sunshine. S’long, Ike.”

  It was the last time the sisters ever saw him.

  They were wise, as it turned out, to ignore his pleas. The pressure became so unbearable that even Mayor Harrison relented, and on November 20, more than a month after Wayman’s initial raids, he ordered his officers to cooperate with the state’s attorney and close every resort, no exceptions.

  “Five minutes of real police activity, which gives a rough idea of how such matters can be handled when they want them handled,” the Record Herald reported, “wiped out t
he South Side Levee district in Chicago. It ceased to exist as if by magic, not because of the enforcement of the law, but because of the apprehension of it. A few minutes before six o’clock last evening policemen began nailing the doors of Tommy Owens’ café at 2033–35 Armour Avenue. They were acting on the orders of Mayor Harrison, delivered at last in an unmistakable manner. Echoes of the blows of their hammers had hardly died away before the entire district was deserted. By six o’clock not a woman was to be found in it.”

  But the Levee limped on for two more years. Not until 1914 was Ike Bloom’s picture finally removed from its position of honor, on the wall of the 22nd Street police station. That year, too, Chief Justice Harry Olson called a reporter for the Chicago Examiner. He had a series of letters, he said, written some time ago by Minna Everleigh, the “former queen of Chicago’s underworld,” and it was time to release them “in the interest of public policy.”

  Freiberg’s Dance Hall celebrated its last night on August 24, 1914, and hundreds of devotees—including two women who said they’d spent every evening there for the past ten years—came to pay their respects. Late in 1915, after Carter Harrison’s successor, “Big Bill” Thompson, declared that Chicago was once again a wide-open town, Bloom resumed his business, and the resort operated for several more years, calling itself the Midnight Frolics.

  He fell from prominence during Prohibition and died on December 15, 1930, literally half the man he once was; diabetes had necessitated the amputation of both legs.

  The Everleighs never again saw Big Jim Colosimo, either, but after leaving Chicago—moved either by forgiveness or a pragmatic appreciation for Levee etiquette—they once again considered him a friend. His power rose in proportion to Bloom’s decline, and by 1915, he was the indisputable overlord of prostitution on the South Side. Five years later, he divorced his longtime wife, Victoria Moresco, and married a showgirl named Dale Winters. Meanwhile, his bodyguard since 1908, Terrible Johnny Torrio, had been imploring his boss to export dives and roadhouses to several suburban communities. Colosimo balked, distracted by his new love, and on May 11, 1920, after entering his famous café, he was shot, once, in the back of his head.

  Ike Bloom gave a eulogy, and Bathhouse John Coughlin knelt by the big guy’s casket and recited a series of Hail Marys. The murder officially went unsolved, although Torrio was suspected of ordering the hit, and after the funeral he took on a new partner, Al Capone. The sisters were questioned, but reminded the police they’d been out of Chicago for eight years and knew nothing. “It surely wasn’t a disappointed spaghetti eater,” Minna added.

  State’s Attorney John Wayman never caught a break. In October 1912, even as he was ordering raid after raid on the Levee, ministers, including Ernest Bell, derided his actions as a “death bed confession” and passed a resolution declaring that he should receive no personal credit for closing the vice district. After a failed run for governor, he returned to private law practice. He slept little, retreated deep into his own mind, began muttering to himself. On April 18, 1913, with his wife downstairs and three young children playing in the front yard, he shot himself twice below the heart.

  “I am sorry,” he told his wife. “I hope I will live.”

  He died at 1:30 in the morning, after hours of consciousness.

  “He was an outcast the same as the Everleighs were outcasts,” Charles Washburn wrote. “The reformers knifed him; the police knifed him. He sat on a keg of dynamite.”

  After the Levee fell, Ernest Bell moved his Midnight Mission to the Loop, renaming it the Midnight Church and appointing himself pastor. He still took to the streets occasionally, holding open-air meetings and keeping tabs on brothels, and after the advent of radio he broadcast sermons from the Chicago Temple. The financial windfall from War on the White Slave Trade dwindled, and by 1916, he was forced to ask his brother, Chauncey, for help. “Dear Ernest,” his brother responded, “I am sorry that the apples are not falling into your basket at the Midnight Mission. So far as I can help in agreed contributions to the education of your boy and girl I shall be pleased to do so…I hope the way will brighten up for you soon.”

  His one perceived failure stalked him for the rest of his life: As late as 1919, Bell was still despondent about the Oxford in India. In November of that year, he composed a handwritten letter to “Our Father Who Art in Heaven,” confessing “how convinced I have been about it, as though a volcano were scorching my very soul; and how almost utterly thwarted I am and nearly in despair about it till I would rather die than live this baffled in an enterprise that seemed, by so many evidences, to be from God.”

  Eight years later, though there still was no Oxford in India, Bell at least received validation from an old colleague and advocate of segregation, Graham Taylor. “The song you sung at me eight years ago,” Taylor wrote, “sings on still soaring overhead of all I was, am, or may be—except your fighting me hard & fighting me strong—when I was wrong—and that friendly criticism expresses the truest friendship.”

  Bell died the following year, on October 27, 1928, at Suburban West Hospital in Oak Park, of a brain tumor.

  White slavery, and its various repercussions, far outlasted the Levee and the rest of America’s red-light districts. Popular culture embraced the same lurid narratives that, ironically, were constructed to police it. Hollywood developed an entire new genre of films, the “white slave picture,” churning out titles like The House of Bondage (based on the book Roe resented most), The Inside of the White Slave Traffic, The Exposé of the White Slave Traffic, and A Victim of Sin.

  By far the most popular—and successful—white slave picture was Universal Studios’ 1913 release, The Traffic in Souls, which earned a remarkable $450,000 and was based on John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s grand jury inquiry. The protagonist is the head of New York’s “Citizens League,” who happens to bear a striking resemblance to Junior. In a plot twist that pleased everyone but the reformers, the character turns out to be a white slaver himself. Theatrical productions flourished, too. The verbosely titled The Black Traffic in White Girls and Why Girls Go Wrong was a hit in Defiance, Ohio. Little Lost Sister, based on Chicago’s Levee district, sold out the Lyceum Theater in Detroit, and five companies toured it during the 1913–1914 season. The success enabled one of its producers to purchase an exquisite home on Washington Boulevard, where the queens of the Levee once lived.

  “A wave of sex hysteria and sex discussion seems to have invaded this country,” one popular journal opined in 1913. “Our former reticence on matters of sex is giving way to a frankness that would even startle Paris.”

  The white slavery panic prompted one unequivocally positive result. In the spring of 1913, the Illinois State Legislature created a Senate Vice Committee to investigate the link between prostitution and wages. The presidents and proprietors of every major Chicago department store were subpoenaed and forced to submit to a rigorous interrogation: How many women did they employ? How much were they paid? What were the company profits? Would it be a hardship on the company to raise women’s salaries? Would they support minimum wage legislation? For some, like Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck—one of Roe’s staunchest supporters—the experience was acutely embarrassing. Although a minimum wage bill failed in Chicago, the actions of the Senate Vice Committee prompted the passage of eight other minimum wage bills, and the state legislatures of Minnesota, Michigan, California, Missouri, Iowa, and Pennsylvania launched inquiries modeled after the one in Illinois.

  But America’s long, strange moral panic also wrought shameful consequences. Federal authorities used the Mann Act to persecute black men who dared to consort with white women; boxer Jack Johnson, the only black patron ever permitted inside the Everleigh Club parlors, was arrested in the fall of 1912, as the battle against the Levee raged. Former Everleigh Club butterfly Belle Schreiber, Johnson’s scorned lover, testified against the boxer, who ultimately served a year in prison. Blackmailing escapades were rampant, most notably in the divorce proceedings of F
rank Lloyd Wright, whose estranged wife alerted FBI agents when the architect and his girlfriend left their home and crossed state lines to go into hiding together.

  “We now went,” Wright said bitterly, “before this august limb of the Federal law on the charge of having violated that malign instrument of revenge diverted from its original purpose to serve just such purposes as this: the Mann Act. Mr. Mann and his wife used to sit across the aisle from me at my uncle’s church.”

  The Mann Act continued to shape many aspects of American life. It spurred the development of the FBI during Prohibition and beyond. In 1944, J. Edgar Hoover, disturbed by Charlie Chaplin’s radical politics, began monitoring the actor’s sex life and had him booked on a Mann Act violation (Chaplin was acquitted at his trial). The Mann Act remained a familiar pop culture reference throughout the 1960s, when Frank Sinatra made bawdy jokes about the law, and reinforced a national political ethos that, to this day, scares elected representatives from casting any vote that can be perceived as a strike against “values.”

  But as World War I drew near, white slavery suffered a backlash nearly as frenetic as its ascent. Reformers began shifting their focus from sexual slavery to social hygiene and, in the process, retooled the way they thought about prostitutes. They weren’t victims, but feebleminded, maladjusted girls who threatened America’s physical and moral health. Prominent newspapers and pundits scrambled to distance themselves from the very hysteria they nurtured.