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

by Karen Abbott

  For all the agitation over the First Ward Ball, the bomb throwing and threat slinging and churlish back-and-forth, the Levee showed no signs of submission. Business had been brisk despite the visiting firemen’s nightly vigils outside their doors. The most recent damage, in fact, had been wrought not by the Bible brothers but by the Weiss brothers, Ed and Louis.

  The Weisses’ old ploy of paying cabdrivers to drop off drunken revelers at their resorts instead of the Club was more lucrative than ever, owing to the advent of the automobile. Even worse, Ed married a former Everleigh Club girl, Aimee Leslie, who helped him run his place, using her impressive bordello pedigree to lure potential clients too foolish to distinguish an imitation from the original.

  “They have us in the middle,” Minna joked to Ada. “But they’ve yet to get us in a corner.”

  One night in April, a few weeks after Minna’s court date, two men appeared at the Club’s door knowing exactly where they were and what they wanted. For once, the madam yearned to escort clients—and wealthy clients at that—to the Weiss brothels herself.

  Jack Johnson and his manager, George Little.

  As his name implied, Little was short and squat, with a face that invariably looked as if it had just been slapped, flushed and tinged with shock. Once the stable manager at the Palmer House, Little had worked his way up, making the right connections and a few real estate acquisitions in the Levee. He now owned his own saloon, the Here It Is, on the West Side, and ran a combination bar and brothel called the Imperial on Armour Avenue, next to one of Maurice Van Bever’s dives.

  Most important, Little was the “Levee czar”—the man sent personally by Ike Bloom to collect protection payments for Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink. Minna and Ada gave Little nearly $800 a month, the most of any house on the line, which didn’t include occasional emergency contributions to thwart harmful legislation in Springfield.

  But that night, George Little wasn’t there to collect. By his side stood a man, six feet two and two hundred pounds, his frame overwhelming the doorway. A $1,500 diamond ring, a gift from Little, gleamed atop the knuckle of one long finger. He was a boxer—the new heavyweight champion of the world, no less—and he was famous not principally for his skill inside the ring but for the color of his skin.

  His name was Jack Johnson, and he wanted in.

  The sisters didn’t consider themselves prejudiced. Minna, after all, never forgot why she lost her religion—the day a Negro burned to death in her Virginia hometown and she watched, sickened, as white children lined the pews of the church to snicker at the sight of his charred bones.

  “Even if I am a Virginian,” Minna later explained, “I am not intolerant. But I do know that every colored woman hates every white woman…. I know colored women, and they would kill white women who took their men…. In his heart, every colored man hates white men. That’s a reality. I don’t believe in illusions…. And as for Desdemona kissing Paul Robeson in Othello, that I don’t wish to see.”

  But the sisters knew they had to be careful; any misstep or lapse in judgment could impugn their house. Inviting Scott Joplin to play ragtime for an evening alongside Vanderpool Vanderpool was one thing; inviting Joplin to climb the stairs with the choicest girls in Chicago was quite another. The Club’s clients appeared to agree. When they spotted Johnson in the doorway, the men’s raucous laughter diminished into a scuttle of whispers, and then a taut silence.

  Minna looked at Ada, noted the same understanding in her return gaze. She slipped through the crowd—Excuse me darling, pardon, I’ll be right back—and pulled George Little aside. With all due respect, Minna said, she couldn’t allow his friend into the Everleigh Club.

  George Little replied that, with all due respect, he was in charge of doling out protection.

  A look passed between them, each tracking the course of the other’s brain, a carousel of cause and effect. There was a slim, subtle difference between a request and a threat, and Minna, familiar with the nuances of each, nodded at George Little and let them both pass.

  What Minna didn’t know, what she couldn’t have known, was how charming the Everleigh girls would find the boxer. They marveled at his physique, the camel hump of his biceps. They giggled at his jokes, slipped their dainty hands in his. When Jack Johnson invited five of them—Belle Schreiber, Lillian St. Clair, Bessie Wallace, Virginia Bond, and “Jew Bertha” Morrison—to take a ride in his big shiny touring car, they pulled on their fur capes and piled in.

  The sisters were thankful the incident had passed, but the following afternoon, word spread through the Club that Jack Johnson would come by again to pick up the girls. He wanted one harlot in particular, Belle Schreiber, a twenty-three-year-old brunette who had joined the Club the previous year.

  Minna cautioned all five butterflies, one at a time, to refuse Johnson’s offer. If they were found in the company of the boxer, in direct violation of her and Ada’s wishes, they would lose the best job they ever had. A loyal lieutenant trailed the girls, spotted them cruising around town in Johnson’s car, and reported the bad news to the madam. Minna held firm—five of her best courtesans banished in one shot.

  But the waiting list for the Club, if unfurled, would reach clear across Dearborn Street. They would find new girls, good girls, ones who obeyed rules—or at least sought redemption if they happened to break them.

  Clifford Roe’s life seemed stark and empty with his mother no longer in it. He crammed work into every moment. There were so many cases streaming into the courts, so many laws to push and speeches to give, that deciding what to pursue took nearly as much time as the pursuits themselves. He traveled to Iowa to advise a Council Bluffs congressman who was sponsoring an antipandering law. The Pennsylvania State Legislature began planning one of its own. Presuming other states would follow suit, Roe, along with Ernest Bell, Arthur Burrage Farwell, and Harry Parkin, an assistant U.S. district attorney under Edwin Sims, expedited the process by appealing directly to every governor in the country.

  “That there is a systematic traffic in girls of American homes—a hunt, sale and ruin of our girls—has been established by federal prosecutors in enforcing federal laws which apply to alien girls, by state prosecutors and rescue workers,” they wrote. “It is beyond question a fact—a menace to all American homes, for the traffic is ruthless, insidious and national—even international. Approximately 100,000 girls per year are recruited, more from rural than urban homes…. Is there adequate law or punishment in your state?…Delays cost 180 daughters per day. Please telegraph your reply—at our expense.”

  Even if the states complied, and quickly, young girls would be at risk as long as the federal government remained uninvolved. In order to spur those politicians into action, Roe needed a sensational case, one that proved an underground network among states, one worthy of national headlines, with a victim more sympathetic—and credible—than Mona Marshall.

  At first, Ella Gingles appeared to fit those requirements nicely. Early on the morning of February 19, 1909, the janitor at Chicago’s Wellington Hotel unlocked the fifth-floor bathroom to uncover a ghastly sight. Gingles, eighteen, lay bloody and semiconscious on the floor, her arms tied over her head, her legs bound at the ankles. She was blindfolded and gagged with a towel. Patches of her hair had been ripped out. Next to her body lay a bottle of wine and a vial of laudanum, both half-empty. She was sprawled on her side, wearing only a thin nightgown with the name “A. Barrette” stitched on the collar. Thirty slash wounds crisscrossed her face, torso, arms, and legs.

  When Gingles came to, she said she was an Irish immigrant who worked in a lace shop in the lobby of the Wellington Hotel. Agnes Barrette, who owned the lace shop, had tried to send Gingles to French Lick Springs, Indiana, to become a white slave. Gingles refused, and Barrette retaliated by breaking into her room and stealing some of her lace and jewelry. Then Barrette forced her to sign a confession claiming that she, Gingles, was the thief, and that the shop owner was merely recovering her rightful possessi
ons. Shortly thereafter, Gingles was walking to her home on LaSalle Avenue when Barrette threw pepper in her eyes and bashed her on the forehead. The next thing she knew, the janitor at the Wellington was trying to rouse her as she lay battered and raped on the bathroom floor.

  The girl’s lawyer, naturally, hoped that Roe would take the case and nail Barrette with a pandering charge. But Barrette, a thirty-one-year-old respected businesswoman, had a solid alibi. The girl’s gaping wounds turned out to be minor scratches; the blood on her gown was red wine. The alienists were called in. While some continued to believe she was the victim of a white slavery plot, the press, in Chicago and across the country, ran wild with speculation that Gingles was an autohypnotist, a monomaniac (in which case she would have no memory of cutting herself and truly believed her story), or in a state of hysterical insanity. Roe examined the scene at the Wellington Hotel, visited Agnes Barrette’s lace shop, and concluded that “the whole thing looks queer.”

  He advocated publicity as a means of stopping the white slave traffic, but that approach clearly carried some unintended consequences. Gingles’s story, though strikingly detailed, sounded like an osmotic recitation of every white slave case he’d ever tried. As his reputation and clout spread—he was known now as the William Lloyd Garrison of the white slavery movement—he had to exercise caution, be precise in his judgments. The New York Times covered Ella Gingles daily, but Roe would have to find another girl—one who would make the case for a comprehensive federal law, to protect all of America.

  HAVE YOU A GIRL

  TO SPARE?

  The Paris, white slave headquarters for Maurice Van Bever.

  It is a conceded fact that woman has been reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex.

  —EMMA GOLDMAN

  Roe didn’t yet know it, but his girl—his most important white slave case yet—was about to find him.

  While the Everleigh sisters dealt with the aftermath of the Jack Johnson incident, interviewing and tutoring their five new harlots, a girl named Mollie Hart boarded the Nickel Plate Road in St. Louis, heading for Chicago. A man calling himself Bill accompanied her. Mollie’s husband, Mike, planned to join her within a few days. He scraped by doing carpenter work in Missouri, and heard there was better money to be made waiting tables and bartending in such a big city.

  Mollie, for her part, planned to “keep books.”

  She and Bill arrived at the LaSalle Street station in Chicago. They lingered over breakfast, celebrated their arrival with several glasses of wine, watched the city blur past them. In the early evening, Bill took her to the Paris, 2101 Armour Avenue, and Mollie insisted she didn’t “know what kind of a place it was.”

  She slipped from room to room, still tipsy. There was a piano and a settee on the first floor and a wide space where a door should have been, leading to an adjacent saloon. The lady of the house, Julia Van Bever—who preferred to be called “Madam Maurice”—found her and pointed in the direction of the dining room. Mollie was to go back there, where three other girls were waiting.

  With her husband standing nearby, Madam Maurice issued instructions. When the police come, the girls should say that they knew they were in a “bad place,” and that they’d been in such places before. She asked each girl her age.

  “Nineteen,” Mollie answered.

  The couple corrected her—better to say “twenty.” And from now on, her name was Fern.

  Mollie stood quietly and listened, not knowing what else to do. She realized, finally, that she was “supposed to be sporting,” and decided it was best to pretend she knew all along.

  The girls were fed supper and ushered upstairs. Maurice Van Bever came to visit Mollie by himself. He promised again that he would give her husband work as a bartender, better pay than anywhere else, $18 a week. She could even go to St. Louis and ride back to Chicago with him.

  “Now, when you go to St. Louis, get some girls and bring them back with you,” he said. “I will give you fifty dollars.”

  The day’s instructions and preparations finished, Minna took her stack of newspapers into the Gold Room to relax before clients arrived. She picked up the Chicago Daily Socialist and spotted an article about Ella Gingles, that strange Irish girl who had turned the nation’s eye toward Chicago with her salacious tale of white slavery.

  “It was discovered,” the article read, “that one of the protecting influences which was keeping the arm of the law off this white slave gang was Mayor Fred A. Busse, who is a habitué of the Everleigh Club, the notorious south side resort to which the Barrette woman who tortured the Gingles girl sells innocent and good looking girls for a price which varies from $50 to $200.”

  Minna’s lips parted, her blood surged. She read the sentence again, and then the next.

  “Both Busse and the Barrette woman are close friends of the Everleigh sisters who run the notorious resort. There is at this time in that resort a little Jewish girl less than 17 years of age who was sold to the Everleigh sisters by the Barrette woman for the sum of $200. There are now on the outside of the resort two other girls who declare that the Barrette woman tried to induce them to go to the Everleigh Club…. If further proof were needed of the connection of the Barrette woman with the Everleigh sisters the court room scene at the late trial of Minnie Everleigh”—if only her name were the only error in this piece—“for overstepping the bounds a bit, furnishes all that is desired. Agnes May Barrette came into court with Minnie Everleigh and sat by her side during the trial as a friend.”

  Before she could find Ada, the telephone rang. It was a Tribune reporter, a friend. He asked if Minna had seen the Socialist, and would she care to comment on the allegations?

  This was one time when she damn well would.

  “The story printed about Miss Barrette in the Socialist in this matter is a lie from beginning to end,” she said. “I do not know Miss Barrette and she never accompanied me to court in the trial of any case against me. I was in court alone with my two colored maids, and Miss Barrette was never with me. No girl ever came here on the direction of Miss Barrette as far as I know. And the statement that we have a 17-year-old girl here is a lie.”

  She hung up the phone, clutching the newspaper in her hand, and called for Ada. Obviously, the Socialist’s editors resented the Club because neither they nor their audience could afford to step through its doors.

  Ada appeared, her face tight with worry. She knew Minna’s voice, the subtle shifts and tone and tenor, the arbitrary nature of her reactions. Her anger could hide beneath a forced gaiety or, like now, demand to be recognized for what it was.

  Minna rattled the article in her sister’s face, suggested they leave town. Just for a few months, until the fall. They’d go to Europe, travel around the world. They had surrounded themselves with good people, not this Miss Barrette, whoever she was, and the Club would run smoothly in their absence.

  Ada agreed, and they set off in the yellow convertible, heading north on Dearborn Street to the Federal Building. United States Commissioner Mark A. Foote agreed to see them right away. The sisters, if they so desired, could leave the country immediately; he would expedite the process and just forward their passports along. They thanked Commissioner Foote and went home to pack.

  The sisters bade farewell to the girls, instructed the staff to mind them carefully, and took a cab to the LaSalle Street station. The 20th Century Limited would whisk them to New York, where a luxury liner awaited. It had been ten years since they’d arrived in Chicago—time to escape its smoke and noise, its unrelenting spotlight. They’d see the Apollo and Daphne in Rome, slip into the anonymity of London fog.

  Sarah Joseph worked as a “servant girl” in a house on Geyer Avenue in St. Louis. She’d met Mollie Hart a year prior, in the summer of 1908, in a downtown department store. They became fast friends, getting together after work at chop suey restaurants and dance halls, and then Mollie moved to Chicago. During a weekend visit
to St. Louis, she insisted Sarah meet with her. She had something very pressing to discuss.

  Sarah just had to move to Chicago, Mollie urged. The lights, the theater, the White City amusement park with its electric tower and water chutes and dance performances featuring, if Sarah could imagine, a fifteen-foot snake—there was nothing else quite like it. Sarah finally agreed; the big city wouldn’t be so overwhelming with a close friend by her side.

  As Mollie had promised, Sarah’s ticket was waiting for her, already paid in full. She boarded the train, coming over the Wabash line. In Chicago, Mollie greeted her at Union Station. The two friends clasped arms and kissed cheeks, and Mollie waved over a hansom. They traveled south for eighteen blocks, and Mollie asked to stop at 21st Street and Armour Avenue.

  Sarah had taken care that morning, selected a fine hat and dress, and now she stood on this horrid corner, breathing in the putrid perfume of varnish from a nearby factory, the faint scent of unwashed skin. A large brown building squatted before them, brick along the bottom half and clapboard along the top, with jutting awnings and curtains pulled tight across windows. Several men loitered by the curb, hands thrust inside pockets. It was 8:30 in the morning, and the metal doorknob was still cool inside her palm.

  A man sat on a settee in the front room. He was elegant, dressed in a suit and silk top hat. He seemed to be waiting for them.