Sin in the Second City

by Karen Abbott

  “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 the 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-a
ir 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 Frank 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.

  “It owed its passage,” The New York Times wrote of the Mann Act in 1916, “to a misapprehension or misrepresentation of its real language and inevitable result, and to a sort of moral panic in Congress, the reflection of the spasms of amateur sociologists and mythmakers of the magazines.” A. W. Elliot, president of the Southern Rescue Mission, an organization that worked with prostitutes, declared that “there never was a joke of more huge proportions perpetuated upon the American public than this white slave joke.” A former mayor of Toledo, Brand Whitlock, called white slavery and its ribald narratives “a sort of pornography to satisfy the American sense of news.”

  Sociologist Walter Reckless, in 1933, conducted a study of white slave cases prosecuted in Chicago from 1910 to 1913, all of them investigated by Roe’s detectives. Out of seventy-seven cases, he found sixty-three instances of pandering, twenty prostitutes who were minors, three girls held prisoner, fifteen abused, and fourteen who decided to enter the life of their “own free wills,” without prompting from any man at all. “Agnes,” the first white slave Ernest Bell brought to Roe’s attention, was not an innocent American girl drugged at a dance and whipped by a “Negress,” as the prosecutor would later write, but a Swedish immigrant who slept with a black man for $5 and a place to stay for the night.

  Even Roe, who devoted the “best years of his life” toward constructing the furor over prostitution, began sloughing off its layers and picking at its bones. He knew there was credible testimony from escaped prostitutes and white slavers. He knew that on Christmas Eve 1913, another young Chicago girl sat before a judge, her face a map of slash marks and scars, and testified that her pimp beat her and took everything she earned at a brothel on South Dearborn Street. He knew that Maurice Van Bever and Big Jim Colosimo lured girls with lies and kept them through means far more wicked. He knew there was a small truth tucked inside even his tallest tales, but also that it was no longer fashionable to tell them.

  So in January 1914, the William Lloyd Garrison of the white slavery movement stood in front of a Salt Lake City audience and fit new logic over familiar old themes. “There has been too much hysteria over white slavery,” he said. “Everything that pertains to
the social evil has been classed as white slavery. The idea that women are forced against their will to become inmates of immoral houses after being drugged and by coercion is preposterous. The real white slaver is the man who profits through commercialized vice or the women who run the houses in which commercialized vice is permitted…. I have prosecuted and convicted over 500 white slavers, and I know what I am talking about.”

  Roe died of heart disease in Illinois Central Hospital on June 28, 1934, two days after his fifty-ninth birthday, with Elsie and Marjorie at his side. Obituaries—printed in The New York Times and picked up by all the wire services—read like a high school yearbook entry for “Most Likely to Succeed”: assistant corporation counsel for the city of Chicago, 1915–1918; president of the American Bureau of Moral Education; three times delegate to the International Purity Congress; member of the Hamilton, Quadrangle, University, the South Shore Country, and City clubs of New York and Chicago.

  Perhaps Roe would have been most pleased, though, by the fact that he made news on June 25, 1985, more than a half century after his death. Only one major newspaper, The Boston Globe, marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Mann Act, but at least it was thorough in its coverage, mentioning Mona Marshall’s “I am a white slave” note, and the ambitious young prosecutor who knew precisely what to do with it.

  As glad as Vic Shaw was that the Everleigh sisters fell first, she was happier they didn’t linger in Chicago to witness her own long, hard fall. She changed along with the Levee, moving, after 1912, from her longtime house at 2014 South Dearborn to several flats and houses before finally settling at 2906 Prairie Avenue, a grand old mansion just beginning to tatter around its edges. That neighborhood was shifting, too, from the “street of the stately few” to one of the haggard multitudes, as Chicago society began migrating to the Gold Coast.