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

by Karen Abbott

  When Big Jim Colosimo lumbered over, trapped Bell’s shoulder between thick fingers, and claimed he’d once been an “honest man,” wasn’t it only natural to take a step back?

  Clifford Roe tallied his successes: an average of one conviction per week as the summer of 1907 gave way to fall. When fall came, he again approached those leading Chicago citizens at the City Club and Henrici’s and Vogelsang’s. He sat down inside the ghostly haze of cigar smoke, spoke to them as they cut their steaks and sipped their wine. With the country in financial panic and banks closing every day, the streets filled with unemployed men from Chicago and elsewhere; surely they had noticed that certain sections of the city were even more bedraggled than usual. Ben Reitman, the “clap doctor” who treated prostitutes and eventually became Emma Goldman’s lover, opened a “Brotherhood Welfare association” on State Street, outside of which congregated hundreds of hoboes, tramps, bums, drug fiends, and drunks, half of them stumbling about barefoot.

  Roe reminded them of Mona Marshall, the girl who had awakened Chicago to the scourge of white slavery—and who could do the same for America. He explained that the state’s attorney’s office had a slapdash detective force, comprising four borrowed and constantly harried officers from the Chicago Police Department. He asked if they, as prominent men who cared how Chicago looked to the rest of the world, would fund his fight against white slavers, those “arch-enemies to society, the lowest of the lowly creatures on this earth” who “stifle truth and trample upon innocence.”

  This time, the men knew who Roe was before he told them. This time, no one laughed at him.

  Another force was converging, too, yet unbeknownst to the prosecutor or Levee leaders. In November 1907, the United States government, concerned about immigration in general and its relationship to prostitution in particular, formed a commission to study how people came to America and what happened to them once they arrived. Federal agents infiltrated aid societies, bunked in steerage levels on ships. They visited the schools of immigrant children to measure the size and shape of their skulls.

  The government also dispatched a special team of inspectors to red-light districts across the country. Men posed as pimps and panders and common salesmen. Female “inspectresses”—a revolutionary notion in a time when municipal police departments still practiced exclusion—adopted the tawdry costumes and crude demeanor of inferior madams. Agents boarded trains for New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Ogden, Butte, Denver, Buffalo, Boston, New Orleans, and Chicago, determined to drag the darkest parts of the underworld into plain sight.

  DISPATCH

  FROM THE U.S.

  IMMIGRATION COMMISSION

  Pray, forgive me, Sir, for the seemingly out of place story I relate here, but it is so very characteristic that I cannot abstain from telling it here. I met a man at Seattle, I was told he had grown rich as a leading importer of “human flesh” and has now given up his vocation as a pimp. I entered into a conversation with him. I was, to him, a drummer for a neckwear house.

  “Yes, business is bad,” I said to him in the course of conversation. With flippant cynicism or cynical flippancy he said to me,

  “Why don’t you get a few battleships to work for you?”

  “Battleships? What is that?” I asked.

  “Why, girls, of course, girls,” he answered.

  “And why do you call them battleships?” I inquired, to which he answered, “Because they have port-holes.”

  —SPECIAL IMMIGRATION INSPECTOR MARCUS BRAUN

  MORE IMMORAL

  THAN HEATHEN CHINA

  The Oriental Music Room at the Everleigh Club.

  The Shanghai is nothing like this.

  Oh, how I’m going to love it here.

  —SUZY POON TANG

  There was that old biddy again, her spindly legs scampering across Dearborn Street, looking like a fledgling about to take off for the first time. Minna squinted through a slit in the front door and then quickly pulled it shut. Yes, it was definitely her. Lucy Page Gaston. Peripheral ally of the visiting firemen and, most vehemently, head crusader of the Anti-Cigarette League. “The weed,” as she called it, made one insane. It was ruining the city’s youth! Its smoke was akin to the devil’s breath! Gaston visited the Everleigh Club often to explain, ever so helpfully, why its inhabitants were doomed in the hereafter.

  While Ernest Bell and his blatant lies were irritating, Minna and Ada found Gaston both hilarious and pitiful, and they ordered their harlots not to embarrass the crusader. Under no circumstances, for example, were the girls to smoke in Gaston’s presence, tempting though the thought might be. And Ethel, an Everleigh butterfly who had a fondness for chewing tobacco—and spitting old plugs onto the Club’s Oriental carpeting—wasn’t permitted anywhere near the reformer.

  But today’s visit was bad timing. Minna was just about to step out for an appointment with Madam Julie at the Shanghai, a pleasure house that specialized in “sloe-eyed Oriental beauties,” and now she’d be late. Gaston came bounding up the eleven steps that led to the 2131 side landing. Minna quickly ushered her inside—no need to waste the heat. Gaston’s cheeks were slapped pink by the February wind, her eyes sunken and red rimmed. Up close, she looked less like an awkward hatchling than some mythological creature—maybe a Greek harpy, with the head and torso of a homely old woman flanked by wings and prehensile talons, a screeching beast that hauled victims off to the underworld for endless bouts of torture.

  The harpy was in Minna’s underworld now. The madam gave a polite hello, said it was a pleasure to see her again, and what might she do for Miss Gaston on this fine day?

  “There is something you must do,” Gaston shouted. Her words were stark, displaced chirps in the narrow space of the vestibule. “You alone can stop your girls from going straight to the devil.”

  “What is it?” Minna said, keeping her tone patient and sweet.

  “Make them stop smoking cigarettes.”

  Minna promised Gaston she’d do her best, thanked her, and showed her out.

  If she hurried, she could make her appointment with Madam Julie. Normally, Minna wouldn’t have fretted about being tardy with a madam of such dubious standards, but Madam Julie happened to have something the sisters, and the Everleigh Club, needed.

  For months now, one of their choicest clients—a multimillionaire businessman who spent a fortune in the Club each year, including a $5,000 Christmas bonus for both sisters—had been filling their ears with talk about a courtesan called Suzy Poon Tang. If the rumors were to be believed, she was, quite literally, a work of art.

  Suzy Poon Tang, the story went, began her courtesan career in Shanghai, China, by propositioning from doorways. She did well without the services of a pimp and traveled to Singapore and then Hong Kong, where she became known for finishing a dance by licking her partner’s cheek. One partner, dapper and fluent in English, enticed her to join his combination opium den/brothel in Macao. She’d be paid extra for learning how to prepare a customer’s pipe.

  Suzy did learn, and she learned well. Lay your man down and line up his utensils nearby: a bamboo pipe, a pot stuffed with opium, steel needles used to roast the drug over a lamp’s flame. Prepare him for what was to come. “We’ve just received a brand-new stock of dreams,” she’d whisper. “I hope, lover, some of them will please you.” Take the opium, now heated and waxy, and roll it slowly between thumb and forefinger until it was as swollen and round as a golf ball. Place it on the bowl of the bamboo pipe, hand it to “lover,” and encourage him as he inhaled.

  But—and this was most important—satisfy him before he succumbed completely to the drug.

  When Suzy heard a group of Asian girls were planning to sail to America, she decided to join them. A city called Chicago had a red-light district, including a brothel named the Shanghai, that rivaled anything in the Orient. They’d travel halfway around the world to work at a place designed to feel like home.

  Before setting sail, Suzy Poon
Tang journeyed to Tokyo and commissioned a tattoo artist to ink, just below her navel, a bouquet of roses so artfully authentic that one might be tempted to pluck it from her flesh. The artist suggested he might also decorate each cheek of her buttocks with a butterfly, but Suzy demurred, wanting just the elegant simplicity of the flowers. She told her customers at the Shanghai that renowned Hong Kong art critics paid handsome sums for the privilege of evaluating this masterpiece. For an extra $5, she would recline on a pillow, legs akimbo, offer a magnifying glass, and let them judge it for themselves. “It’s better than looking at the original of Mona Lisa in the Louvre, isn’t it, lover?” she’d coo, and count the minutes until the trick lifted his head.

  The only problem was that the Shanghai was too undignified for the likes of the sisters’ millionaire client. He implored Minna and Ada to hire the courtesan so he could sample her pleasures at the Everleigh Club.

  It was a tedious ordeal—Minna had a host of errands to attend to, including planning Ada’s upcoming “thirty-second” birthday celebration—but she took a cue from Marshall Field: Give the man what he wants, simple as that.

  Just before 10:00 a.m. on Monday, February 10, 1908, Clifford Roe strolled south on LaSalle Street, the air dense with the promise of snow. Inside the Central YMCA building, he made his way to the auditorium, where he was scheduled to give a speech titled “The White Slaves and the Law” before five hundred prominent city ministers.

  Since November, after convincing those Chicago businessmen to fund his white slave investigations, he’d lectured representatives from, among others, the Cook County Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Social Settlement League, the Cook County Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Chicago Purity League, the National Purity Association, and the Illinois Training School for Girls. He fed on the crowds, the way they latched on to his words, as if each successive syllable hoisted them higher above the city’s maelstroms of vice.

  Now he stood at the podium, waiting for the last rustle of movement to settle, the last throat to clear.

  “A great many persons are yet skeptical of the existence of an organized traffic in girls,” he began. “They seem to think that those advocating the abolition of this trade are either fanatics or notoriety seekers.”

  Always shoot with your critics’ weapons, a tactic used by every good lawyer.

  “They doubt the truth of the impossibility of escape, and content themselves with the thought that girls use the plea of slavery to right themselves with their parents and friends when their cases are made public.”

  That was for anyone—and he was certain they were out there—who still doubted Mona Marshall’s story.

  “However, if these same people could have been in the courts of Chicago during the past year”—as he was, remember—“their minds would be disabused of the idea that slavery does not exist in Chicago. The startling disclosures made in nearly a hundred cases ought to arouse not only the citizens of Chicago, but the whole country to the highest pitch of indignation.”

  On a roll now, Roe recounted the confession of Harry Balding, the main defendant in the Mona Marshall case. “All of the fellows around there—meaning the red-light district—were doing that,” Roe said, reading from notes he took during his interview with the pander. “We did nothing else but go out and look around town and see if we could take a girl and bring her out there. Whenever we got a girl out there, they would give us so much money and tell us that if we got arrested that they would get us out…we would go around to penny arcades and nickel theaters and if we saw a couple of girls, we could always tell what they were by looking at them.”

  What Roe didn’t mention, either in the aftermath of the case or now, standing before the ministers, were the niggling inconsistencies about Mona’s story. A report that she fled from the flat where she’d allegedly been gang-raped and decided, without explanation, to return. The allegation by Captain McCann that Mona Marshall’s own stepfather was a white slaver and may have had a hand in the girl’s downfall. A contradictory version of Mona’s escape—one that had her running, clad in a slinky gown, to the police station instead of scribbling a plea for help and dropping it from the brothel’s window.

  “There is a remedy, and it is this,” the prosecutor concluded. “Demand that the legislature of the state of Illinois change the laws to meet the requirements of modern times…. Up to the present time in most instances only the small fry have been arrested. To bring to bay the leaders, those who send these agents out, should be the next step toward eradicating this evil.”

  Five hundred chairs scraped backward, a thousand hands clapped. When the applause subsided, Roe and several clergymen, including Ernest Bell and Melbourne Boynton, cut away for a secret meeting in one of the YMCA’s private conference rooms. By day’s end, they formed a new group named the Illinois Vigilance Association, an offshoot of the National Vigilance Committee. Reverend Boynton was named president, Bell was secretary, and Roe would oversee legislative activity.

  The following day’s Tribune lauded the new group and its mission to destroy the Levee, calling the district “more openly vicious than any part of Paris and more immoral than heathen China.”

  Reverend Boynton issued the official statement.

  “We have come to the conclusion that the only way to stamp out the white slave traffic in Chicago is to wipe out the red-light district where it breeds,” he said. “We believe this can be done, and we mean to do it.”

  Boynton and Bell met on Tuesday, February 11, again, as it happened, at the Central YMCA. The Midnight Mission often discussed business over lunch in the building’s restaurant, and on this occasion seven other active members joined them.

  They bowed heads and prayed over their plates, then quickly sifted through their business. Rufus Simmons reported that he had sent letters requesting donations to pay off $600 worth of bills and outstanding debts. Deaconess Lucy Hall suggested that different churches send a band of workers to the Levee one night a month.

  Arthur Burrage Farwell, president of the Chicago Law and Order League, spoke last. It was imperative, he argued, that they send a letter to the mayor asking him to suppress the illegal sale of liquor in houses of ill fame.

  “Three times, committees have asked Mayor Busse to enforce the law in this respect,” he said, “but nothing has been done. Liquor alone is bad enough. A disorderly house is bad enough. But when the two are in conjunction, conditions much worse obtain.”

  Farwell didn’t say so directly, but he knew, in particular, of two prominent madams who had been operating for years without the proper license, who were so well protected by the police that they never even bothered to apply for one.

  The Shanghai was on Armour Avenue near 21st Street, next to a Japanese brothel and two doors down from Big Jim Colosimo’s Victoria. Certainly not on a par with the Everleigh Club, the Shanghai nevertheless was far superior to the $3 joints two blocks north on Bed Bug Row, charging a $1 entry fee and $10 for a girl’s services (though Madam Julie allowed tipping for extra “Chinese tricks”).

  A wide flight of stairs jutted from the plain three-story brownstone. On the second floor, Minna opened an unlocked door and pressed a button shaped like a miniature Buddha. She heard the faint hum of a buzzer. A portal inside the vestibule gave way, revealing another flight of stairs carpeted in bright, heavy fabric, twisting upward and ending at a glass door.

  Minna knew she was being watched. The door was actually a two-way mirror, forty-eight inches high and eighteen inches wide, and Madam Julie stood on the other side. A moment passed, and then the mirror erupted into a brilliant blaze of lights, fading into a pictorial of a Shanghai street at festival time. Images, projected through the other side, flickered across the glass: dragon heads bobbing in a lazy parade, gaudy banners slung across storefronts, dancers jumping and wheeling. If Minna were a customer, this would signal that Madam Julie had approved entry and was ready to collect her dollar.

  The festival slide show dimmed and the mir
rored door slid open. Madam Julie waved Minna forward, inviting her to enter the main parlor. She was American but had spent a number of years in the Far East, cultivating supply lines to whores in Hong Kong, Saigon, and Singapore. She spoke Chinese fluently. Straight black hair swept the middle of her back, and a perfect dimple, like a thumbprint, sank into one cheek. In her early forties, Minna guessed, but respectably preserved.

  If Minna were a customer, Madam Julie would now clap her hands twice. A girl would sashay in carrying a tray piled with tiny boxes, each holding a sprinkling of tea leaves, with “COMPLIMENTS OF THE SHANGHAI” printed across the lids. Each customer received one in his outstretched hand—Madam Julie’s idea of advertising. Then the harlot would soften the lights and roll up the Oriental rug, revealing a clear glass floor. Madam Julie would rear back and strike a gong, and her troupe of courtesans would march out, kimonos slit high on their thighs. One more strike on the gong and a spray of lights would illuminate the floor from below. The girls would commence a repertoire of poses, their skin catching the glint of the lights, waiting to be chosen.

  This time, though, Madam Julie left the Oriental rug unrolled and the gong unbanged, and she and Minna sat together in her parlor. Madam Julie was hesitant at first—Suzy Poon Tang brought in more than her share of $10 tricks. But later that afternoon, they struck a deal: Suzy Poon Tang would relocate temporarily to the Everleigh Club, and Minna would pay the Shanghai’s madam more than enough to cover the loss.

  Suzy Poon Tang would need a tutor, and neither Minna nor Ada had the time to teach the girl. The sisters decided that Doll could do it. Doll was a green-eyed redhead who eagerly offered her vitals: five feet five, 118 pounds, 36-24-35. “I’ve always found it fun being a redhead,” she said, “although I know that gentlemen usually prefer blondes because blondes know what gentlemen prefer.” Plus, she was honest, and not as catty as the rest.