Sin in the Second City

by Karen Abbott

  “I’ve got a feeling I’m in love with you,” he said.

  She kissed him “real good” and answered, “Just you don’t lose that feeling, sweetie.”

  He tightened his grip, the points of his fingers making a bracelet around her wrist.

  “Every time I’ve been here before,” he said, “I’ve seen you occupied with others downstairs, and whenever I inquired about you I was politely told you weren’t available. So tonight I brought along my magic bag to guarantee an evening with you.”

  He released her and placed his black bag, slowly, ceremoniously, on the dresser and pulled open its latch. The bag was crammed with a jumble of $5 coins made of solid gold.

  Doll, who thought she had seen everything, could only say, “Holy cow!” The Gold Coin Kid waited for her to recover, and after a moment she remembered where she was and what she was there for. She lifted her arms, shrugged her shoulders, and her gown fell. Her corset gave way with a few twists and tugs. Everleigh girls made undressing seem like a Houdini trick.

  The Gold Coin Kid shrugged off his suit and shirt and tie, everything except a pair of multicolored briefs, and Doll shot him a look that said Finish. He was sorry, he said, but he wanted to leave that last bit of clothing on for now. He dipped his hand into his bag and lifted a heap of gold coins, letting them fall in a slow stream from one palm to the other.

  “I know you’ll find this game extremely interesting,” he said, “and I’m sure I wouldn’t care to play it with any girl but you.”

  Get on the bed, he said. He remained six feet away, by the dresser, and confided that as a young man, his favorite game was pitching pennies, and now he had an inexplicable desire to resume this childhood pastime. He would pitch the coins, if it was all right with Doll, at the “most erogenic area” of her body. She could keep each piece that hit the bull’s-eye.

  It was, naturally, all right with Doll.

  Doll assumed a pose on the bed that provided the Kid with a can’t-miss target, “leaning back with a graceful swanlike arrangement of my hands while keeping my knees apart.” She called out her approval for each shot, counting score. He was such a darling, insisting on pitching until every coin hit its mark.

  After that night, Doll amassed quite a collection of gold coins.

  Minna ascended the stairs to Doll’s bedroom and knocked. The girl opened the door, a translucent swirl of incense climbing the air behind her.

  Minna explained the Suzy Poon Tang situation and wrapped her arm around Doll. Rubbing the girl’s back, she said, “If I pay you well, much more than you could make in several days, would you permit the Chinese girl to spend tomorrow evening in your room while you brief her on our routine? That would enable her to start working the parlors on the following day, and I’d feel much more confident about her performance.”

  Of course, Doll answered.

  Minna, still smoothing the harlot’s back, asked another favor. “And, of course, you’ll allow Suzy to sleep with you for the night?”

  Yes, Doll answered.

  Minna kissed her cheek. “Good girl. I feel you’ve solved my big problem.”

  Tomorrow, she would fetch Suzy Poon Tang, and Ada would help smuggle her upstairs. They’d have time later to explain to the rest of the harlots, to reassure them their own earnings wouldn’t suffer. She’d leave a menu in Doll’s room, tell her to order a feast for the Chinese girl. It was clear that Doll loved women, though Minna didn’t care to know the details, as long as the Asian girl was soon fluent in Balzac.

  On May 4, Roe and five colleagues with the Illinois Vigilance Association boarded the Chicago & Alton, heading two hundred miles southwest toward the state capital. The train rumbled through Joliet, Mazonia, Dwight, Bloomington, dozens of far-flung towns removed from the mayhem of the city. Roe gazed out the window, taking in a leisurely slide show of looming silos and waving spikes of prairie grass.

  His mind was on his career. Numerous successful prosecutions aside, he was frustrated by the “archaic” and “moss-covered” Illinois statutes that were “full of loopholes through which the slave traders crawled.” He had to prove each victim was unmarried, had been procured through deception, and was of previous “chaste life.” That last stipulation was most troubling. If the rape gangs attacked a girl right away, thereby robbing her of her chastity, the case was as good as lost.

  Most of his convictions were under the Disorderly Conduct Act, which carried only a $200 fine, but Roe hoped he could lobby the Illinois State Legislature to augment the white slavery laws. If his proposed bill passed, it would be the nation’s first law aimed at panders and a major professional coup.

  Beside him sat Adolph Kraus, president of the Chicago-based International Order of B’nai B’rith. Kraus was equally reflective, though his concerns were more global than personal. It was a year since the muckraker George Kibbe Turner alleged that most of Chicago’s white slavers were Russian Jews, and the sting was still sharp. Kraus, during the furor that followed, toured the West Side Levee and determined that his people constituted 20 percent of the traffickers. That figure would grow, he feared, along with the Jewish population. Between 1880 and 1900 alone, some two hundred thousand Jewish immigrants settled in Chicago, many of them refugees who fled Russia after the horrific pogroms and settled in the slums along 16th Street near Halsted. Even the American Hebrew was casting blame, noting it was “possible” that Jews had imported white slavery to America.

  “If Jews are the chief sinners,” the newspaper reasoned, “it is appropriate that Jews should be the chief avengers.”

  The social worker Frances Kellor had spoken the truth when she studied Jewish participation in vice the previous year. “The Jew,” she wrote, “has been taught early in life the value of morality and decency, and does not take up this business unless he is thoroughly vicious and bad”—unlike, say, the French, who did not, on the whole, find running a brothel an immoral or shameful practice, who considered it akin to operating a restaurant or department store. It was up to Kraus and every upstanding Jewish citizen to shape the perception of their people, before it was done for them.

  The House passed the white slave bill 102–0, and the unanimous vote carried an emergency clause. The Illinois Senate immediately sent it to Governor Charles Deneen to sign. The law decreed that anyone convicted of recruiting for disorderly houses would spend six months to one year in prison and pay a fine between $300 and $1,000. Also, a pander could no longer wed his victim and use the marriage as a defense. Roe was “elated” that Illinois became the “pioneer state to pass a pandering law, directed at the slave traffic in girls and women.” This battle, his battle, was at last stretching far beyond Chicago, and he couldn’t stop it now, even if he wanted to.

  THE

  ORGANIZER

  I know it is repugnant to our system of government

  to have any kind of espionage over our citizenship, but I

  would keep such people under a certain surveillance.

  —SPECIAL IMMIGRATION INSPECTOR MARCUS BRAUN

  It was time, Roe decided, to call a friend in the federal government, Edwin Sims. His fellow University of Michigan alumnus was admired for his ambition, encyclopedic memory, and pedantic attention to detail. Sims, he knew, would already be aware that foreign girls, with the complicity of Chicago’s police, were being sold into city brothels. What was considered typical Levee business was now a federal felony. The federal Immigration Act of 1907, set into effect shortly before undercover agents began infiltrating red-light districts, forbade importing women into the country for the purposes of prostitution, and mandated the deportation of any woman or girl found prostituting herself within three years of her arrival in America.

  To friends, Sims was “Ed,” but to the rest of the country he was a legal wunderkind, who at thirty-four served as assistant secretary at the 1904 Republican National Convention; who a year later was appointed solicitor for the Department of Commerce and Labor by President Roosevelt; and who, a year after th
at, became the United States district attorney in Chicago, charged with preparing the government’s antitrust case against John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company.

  “Curiously enough,” wrote the Tribune, “the reason of the success of Mr. Sims was identically the same as the reason for the success of John D. Rockefeller. It is expressed in just one word, ‘organize.’ There were 1,903 charges against the oil company and every one of these charges had to be verified by documentary and oral evidence…. It was a titanic task, but Mr. Sims set about it in his own way…. He had his facts marshaled in due order of their importance, each with its little budget of evidence ready to step out of the ranks at the precise moment when they should be needed. His opponents…did not know their man.”

  Sims, married and the father of four, vowed to work with Roe and his Illinois Vigilance Association to rid the city of these criminals.

  “I am determined to break up this traffic in foreign women,” he declared. “It is my sworn duty, and it should be done to protect the people of the country from contamination.”

  The announcement was a welcome one to most native-born Chicagoans. Their city was turning on itself, relinquishing its identity street by street; there were whole blocks drenched in odd smells, conversations built with peculiar words, hymns sung to false gods. “I am one of those who believe not only that our public schools should have moral and religious training in them, but that this training should be Christian,” a Presbyterian minister wrote to one of Clifford Roe’s supporters. “This land is a Christian land. The United States Supreme Court and many of our state supreme courts have unequivocally decided that it is…. I do not believe that we need to truckle or surrender our inheritance to infidels or Jews from Europe.”

  They were everywhere, these so-called new immigrants, arriving daily from Eastern and Southern Europe, most of them “undesirable” Italians, Poles, and Russians. Catholics were just as “unassimilable” as the Jews, what with their pagan customs and thirst for liquor, feeding their babies beer if the milk was delivered spoiled. Chicago’s Italian population was approaching forty-five thousand—almost three times what it was in 1900. They were overrunning Halsted and Taylor streets with their “Little Italy,” devising rackets for the gambling halls, killing in the name of the Black Hand.

  Mongrels, all of them, pulling America’s identity in dangerous directions, leaving her misshapen and newly strange.

  “We no longer draw from Northern Europe,” wrote one native-born observer in 1908. “This enormous influx hails from Russia, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and the southern countries about the eastern end of the Mediterranean—men of alien races, mixed in blood and of many tongues and often the last results of effete and decaying civilizations…. We no longer receive accessions from the best peoples but from the mediocre and the worst.”

  Sims sent for Secret Service agents from Washington and twenty-five deputy United States marshals and unleashed them into the Levee. They discovered, in mid-June, a “syndicate of Frenchmen” operating from the Dearborn Street resort of Emma “French Em” Duval and her husband, August. The French had introduced unthinkable perversions into American culture; even the word French was now slang for oral sex. The Duvals kept their girls in a barred breaking-in facility called the Retreat located on Blue Island, a small town sixteen miles south of the Loop, and worked in concert with another French couple, Alphonse and Eva Dufour, who ran a brothel at 2021 Armour Avenue, not far from the Shanghai.

  On a Tuesday night, June 23, a squad of marshals swarmed Madam Eva’s resort. For a moment, a swath of the Levee paused, craning to see the commotion. At the nearby Paris, whose proprietor, Maurice Van Bever, was the most powerful Frenchman in the district, harlots and johns sprang from beds to peer out the windows. Three young French girls were dragged from Madam Eva’s, a weeping triumvirate in gauzy robes and tattered tights, and locked in cells at the 22nd Street station. Sims questioned them, deciphered their broken English.

  “They show that they have been drilled remarkably well,” he said. “When I asked them separately how long they had been in the country, each said five years. Asked how they got here and into disorderly houses, they told stories of similar character. One said she came over to work in a corset factory in New York and was unable to get any more work. Another said she came over with a French family six years ago, and after the family went back to Paris she stayed in New York. The step from the Tenderloin to the Armour Avenue house in Chicago was easy.”

  Federal agents seized Eva Dufour’s books and gathered enough evidence to arrest two thousand additional Frenchwomen in Minneapolis, St. Louis, New York City, New Orleans, and Kansas City, all of whom had been sold into brothels via the Chicago headquarters. Sims—who before entering college worked briefly as a newspaper reporter—was adept at disclosing just enough information to maintain interest in his crusade without jeopardizing its progress. Further raids were in the works, he allowed, but he couldn’t elaborate owing to the possible presence of Levee spies in his office, eager to tip off his plans.

  It was positively surreal. Only three months earlier, Roe had traveled to Springfield to speak at the Capitol, and now that majestic domed structure was overrun with militia, encampments arranged in precise rows across the lawn. The city where Lincoln made his home had erupted in race riots on Friday, August 14, 1908, after a twenty-one-year-old white woman allegedly was snatched from her bed and assaulted by a Negro. In the days since, a mob of white residents, wielding guns and ropes, torched black-owned businesses and homes. William Donegan, an elderly Negro who had been a close friend of Lincoln’s, was strung up on a tree near his home and hanged to death. After an overwhelmed Mayor Roy Reece was forced into hiding, Governor Deneen called in 4,500 National Guardsmen, and finally, on August 17, Springfield was easing into a tentative peace.

  Roe, on the first day of a rare vacation, devoured the newspaper reports, paging through the late editions as he headed from Chicago to Elgin, a northwestern suburb. His sixty-nine-year-old mother, Henrietta, sat next to him, her body swaying with the motion of the train, suitcase bumping against her knees. She planned to spend the next two months with her daughter—Roe’s sister—who lived in Elgin with her husband, editor of the Elgin Daily News. She worried about leaving Roe home alone, but he told his mother not to worry, he’d be fine. He promised her that he would come out to Elgin every night to visit, even if just for an hour or two.

  After pulling into the station, Roe helped his mother onto the platform and down the stairs. He carried her luggage in one hand and held her steady with the other. It was unbearably hot, and if her palms were sweaty she could lose her grip on the railing and fall. His sister’s house was within walking distance, and at the corner of Chicago Avenue and State Street they paused for breath. After a moment, Henrietta stepped from the curb just as Roe turned to pick up her suitcase.

  Before he saw the automobile he heard its sounds, the grumble of motor vying with the shriek of brakes—uglier, almost, than the sight they accompanied, all four wheels passing over his mother’s body, legs and torso and arms and head, missing nothing. Roe ran to where she lay, flat and flattened halfway between the curb and the middle of the street. Henrietta’s left elbow was posed unnaturally, her eyes flipped back, unseeing pearls. Blood leaked from her ears. Off to the side a strange woman, the driver of the automobile, was screaming—high and low, closer and removed, the erratic cadence of church bells.

  An ambulance sped Roe’s mother to nearby Sherman Hospital. Henrietta didn’t regain consciousness during the ride, but her pulse still twitched under the thin skin of her neck, beneath her bony wrists. The doctors circled and rolled her away. Roe called his sister, who arrived within moments, and they sat together in the waiting room. The screaming woman appeared, too, accompanied by husband and friends. Roe comforted her, said the accident was “unavoidable.”

  Doctors doubted his mother would survive. A blood vessel inside her head had ruptured, and she had suffered severe internal i
njuries. No sign of Henrietta’s brain rousing itself by 2:00 a.m., no improvement at all. When the end came at 6:00 p.m. on August 20, Roe was by her side. For an entire month he didn’t pursue one court case or save one girl.

  He began work again in mid-September, timing his return with a lengthy feature in the Tribune that praised his war against the white slave traffic. Roe told the reporter that he enjoyed creative writing, loved his work, and still lived with his mother.

  Madam Eva Dufour and her husband posted $25,000 bail in October and escaped to France, a disappointing finale to Edwin Sims’s raids throughout the summer. But he had made considerable progress in spreading the word about white slavery, and in establishing himself as an authority on the subject. At Ernest Bell’s urging, Sims submitted an article to Woman’s World, a general interest magazine delivered to more than 2 million homes throughout rural America.

  Sims described his work in the Levee and concluded:

  It is only necessary to say that the legal evidence thus far collected establishes with complete moral certainty these awful facts: That the white slave traffic is a system operated by a syndicate which has its ramifications from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific ocean, with “clearing houses” or “distributing centers” in nearly all of the larger cities; that in this ghastly traffic the buying price of a young girl is from $15 up and that the selling price is from $200 to $600—if the girl is especially attractive the white slave dealer may be able to sell her for as much as $800 or $1,000; that it is a definite organization sending its hunters regularly to scour France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Canada for victims; that the man at the head of this unthinkable enterprise is known among his hunters as “The Big Chief.”

  The magazine arrived at homes in Peoria and Lincoln and Macon, Georgia. Housewives browsing for tips on needlework and recipes instead read Sims’s words by the flicker of gaslight, and passed on his warning to everyone they knew.