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

by Karen Abbott

  Katie certainly wasn’t above rolling the young scion, dropping some poison into his glass. And after the Diamond Bertha tragedy, the sisters wanted to be especially vigilant, with clients and courtesans alike.

  The harlot named Diamond Bertha was equal parts lady and bruiser: She had no problem crashing a bottle of champagne over a man’s head if that’s what the moment called for. She draped diamonds on every available inch of her body, even outjeweling Minna. The sisters loved her dearly but had to let her go. They weren’t bothered by her use of bubbly as a weapon, but her necklaces and bracelets and rings were attracting a bad element—violent robbers.

  So Bertha packed up and set off not for Vic Shaw’s dive, thankfully, but for New Orleans. Within six months of her arrival in the Storyville district, she was killed, found in an alleyway, her hands, adorned with every bracelet and ring she owned, sliced off at the wrists. The sisters were questioned—the harlot had “Calumet 412” scribbled all over her notebook and calling cards—and they told the police the truth: They knew the thieves in Chicago, but not in the South. If only Bertha had called for help before whatever was threatening her touched down.

  Just to be safe, Minna decided to cut him off. If Nat couldn’t drink, he couldn’t be drugged.

  She gave word to Edmund: No more champagne for Nat Moore. Katie realized the edict had been issued as a preemptive measure on her behalf. Cheeks pinking, mouth pursed into a button, the girl stomped around the dancing couples and bowing servants. She clasped Minna’s arm, spinning the madam around.

  “So damned suspicious,” Katie spat. “You and your holy manners. Who the hell are you to tell any of us what is right and what is wrong?”

  Minna kept her voice low, her words smooth. “I want no stains on this house.”

  “As though it hasn’t got plenty already,” Katie said, moving in closer. “To hell with you and your lily white bunk.”

  Minna returned the girl’s stare, the two of them resolutely still inside the Saturday night chaos. Then Katie whirled on her heel and stormed out.

  The girl walked north, shivering, mounds of blackening snow crunching beneath her heels. She knocked on the door of 2014 South Dearborn Street, Vic Shaw’s place.

  A half hour later, at 1:00 in the morning, Minna bade good night to her boy and made sure Nat Moore was escorted to a cab. But he did not go home.

  Vic Shaw made it her business to know when any man of prominence stepped inside the Levee. Saloon keepers on her payroll called her with sightings, and drivers delivered them to her door. Nat Moore, as fallible as he was wealthy, always lurked on the periphery of her senses. She knew he was in the district ten days ago and nearly overdosed in a resort—whether it was hers, she’d never say—and that a team of doctors pounded his chest and drugged him back to life. She knew he was in the district four days before that, and collected from him a $1,500 check that he owed toward his account. And she knew he was in there tonight. Katie, the girl who’d stormed down from the Everleigh Club begging for a job, confirmed it.

  A saloon keeper friend of Vic Shaw’s found Nat Moore at a bar on Wabash Avenue and brought the playboy to her brothel at 1:30 a.m. Shaw’s friend was wearing Nat Moore like a cape, the playboy’s lifeless arms slung over his shoulders, hands clasped beneath his chin, the tips of his black loafers flung out behind him, grating along the ground. Vic Shaw welcomed them inside and took some of the burden from her friend, letting Nat Moore’s face come to rest on her pillowy bosom.

  Three of her best girls, including Pearl Dorset (yet another Everleigh Club defector), swarmed around Nat Moore, jockeying for position, whispering in his ears. Their attention revived him a bit. He straightened up, snapped his fingers, and ordered a round of champagne. When the Shaw housekeeper, Hattie Harris, came across him, his eyes were weighted, his lips slack.

  “Nat was the biggest baby who ever visited this place,” she said later. “He seemed to care more about being petted and talked to than anything else.”

  “I’m tired,” he told Hattie, “and I want to go to bed and rest.”

  He turned toward the three harlots. “Come, talk to me until I get to sleep.”

  The four of them climbed the stairs together and splayed out across a bed, limbs twining. Hours later, at 9:00 a.m., Hattie Harris walked by the room and still heard the murmur of disparate voices through the closed door. He called out for her, and she peeked in.

  “Hattie,” he said, “you’re tired and need rest, but before you go to sleep please bring me a cold glass of beer.”

  Hattie did as he asked, and by the time she came back upstairs the four of them were asleep. She left the beer on the nightstand, and shut the door behind her.

  At 3:00 in the afternoon, the velvet curtains backlit by a willful winter sun, Pearl Dorset stirred. The other two girls and Nat Moore were still. She leaned across the bed, fit her mouth by his ear, and asked the playboy if he wanted some coffee. No answer.

  She laid her hand on his face; his skin felt thick and chilled beneath her fingers. She shook him, then shook him again. She moved his head from side to side, something he couldn’t seem to do on his own, and spread open one empty eye.

  Pearl’s scream was louder than any ever induced by Vic Shaw’s disciplinarian, Lill the Whipper.

  One hour later, the phone rang inside the Everleigh Club. It took Minna a moment to distinguish the voice on the other end, words choppy with rage, each syllable an exclamation.

  Katie.

  “They’re framing you,” the harlot whisper-screamed. “They’ve got a dead body at Shaw’s and they’re going to plant it in your furnace. It’s Nat Moore. Yes, he’s the one. They’ve got it all fixed. You must stop ’em. It’s a dirty trick and I won’t let ’em do that to you.”

  The line went dead.

  Minna accessed that pocket of her brain where her thoughts were calculated and stripped of impulse, where she was most like Ada. This was Vic Shaw, she reminded herself—jealous, inept Vic Shaw, who had already tried to frame her for murder and failed. A pathetic, mediocre madam who couldn’t influence the mayor, or turn Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink against her and Ada, or whip the entire country into such a religious frenzy that it lost all ability to reason. A madam doomed to remain relevant only to herself.

  Minna would call a trusted lieutenant, walk down the street, and make sure Vic Shaw understood that this battle had been decided long ago, and it was the Everleighs who had won.

  Chez Shaw was half the size of the Everleigh Club; a double-decker bay window dominated its left side. One plane of glass on the bottom was broken out. An ornate basket-weave molding curved over the front entrance, dropping down into two Corinthian-style columns that flanked a mahogany door. A rectangular window on the second floor was topped by a long, arched one on the third that curved like a fingertip; at a distance, it appeared Vic Shaw’s brothel was flipping off Dearborn Street.

  Minna and her friend climbed the seven steps to the front door and barreled in. Shards of glass glittered across the wood floor; the window had just been broken. The front parlor was a vortex of waving arms and screeching voices, Vic Shaw positioned at its eye.

  “What’s going on here?” the Everleigh lieutenant called.

  Bodies unlocked, fists unclenched. A harlot released her grip on another’s hair. Two plump arms, sheathed in black silk, pushed forward through the mob, separating it, and the madam of the house emerged. A black feathered hat sat cockeyed atop dark hair. Balled fists disappeared into the folds of her waist.

  “None of your goddamn business,” Vic Shaw said, taking her time with each word.

  It had been a while since Minna had seen her rival up close. Vic Shaw had gained at least seventy pounds since the sisters came to town, the weight distributing itself cruelly around her midsection, its circumference now equaling that of her breasts. Three chins drooped over a neck as thick as a bear’s. Heavy powder settled in the deep lines around her mouth, and her eyes were two dead things lost amid streaks of paint
. She lied about her age, too, Minna knew, shaving off at least a decade, turning middle age into relative youth. But Shaw’s body, having earned her a living for most of her life, had tired of the ruse. It was claiming its due now, with interest.

  “Nix on that,” Minna’s friend said. “What’s up? Who’s the victim—murder, eh? I can see it written all over you.”

  The harlots, nervous and weeping, let the story come tumbling out. Vic Shaw announced that her place was closed for now. All the inmates should scram—“to China,” she suggested. There was nothing left for the madam to do but call the police, so she did, glaring at Minna while she dialed.

  Nat Moore’s body was collected and dressed, at the request of his young widow, in a long purple robe, then laid out in a darkened room of their apartment on Lake Shore Drive. Officers from the 22nd Street station arrived around 5:00 p.m. to question Vic Shaw. The madam, hysterical, at first denied the whole incident, rambling one flailing excuse after another.

  “I was at the Studebaker Theater last night,” she insisted. “I arrived home at 3 o’clock this morning, and I have been here ever since. I know Mr. Moore well. He was a fine fellow. The last time I saw him was the other night at the College Inn. He had not been at my house for over a month.

  “No body was taken from my house today or any other time. Nobody has died in my house.” She was crying now. “I have been trying to get out of this business for a month. I want to lead a better life.”

  Roy Jones corroborated her story.

  “I have been here since 4 o’clock this afternoon myself,” he said. “The police must have some wrong information. My wife doesn’t have to lie and I don’t believe she has lied. We have been wanting to quit this business. There is nothing doing anyhow under this administration.”

  The inquest was held Monday, January 10. An autopsy determined that the official cause of death was acute dilation of the heart, endocarditis, persistent thymus, chronic interstitial nephritis, and chronic gastritis. No morphine was found in his system.

  Vic Shaw also testified, speaking this time with more candor. “In the afternoon I was told Nat was dead,” she said. “I consulted my husband, Mr. Jones, and he advised me to call the police.” She didn’t mention the Everleigh sisters at all but threw a tacit barb in their direction, suggesting that Nat Moore was “apparently under the influence of more than a spree” by the time he arrived at her door.

  The papers kept the sisters’ name from the reports, too. But as with Marshall Field, rumors about the death rippled through the Levee, and the city, and beyond. The sisters were staying one step ahead of trouble but never quite outrunning it—“bound to be blamed sooner or later,” Charles Washburn wrote, “for almost anything.”

  GIRLS

  GOING WRONG

  Many a working girl at the end of the day is so hysterical and overwrought that her mental balance is plainly disturbed.

  —JANE ADDAMS

  On January 27, two weeks after Nathaniel Moore was buried, four hundred Chicago society women met at the corner of Monroe and LaSalle streets, ankle-deep in snowdrifts. Scarves looped over heads and beneath chins, holding hats in place. Mrs. Emily Hill, president of the Cook County chapter of the WCTU, reminded the ladies that they were to be quiet, not demonstrative, clapped her hands, and watched with approval as the crowd whittled into a long stream of pairs. Bookended by police officers, they marched along the sidewalk, stopping traffic at each corner, “determination,” one witness noted, “in every face.”

  Reaching City Hall, the women filed inside the building, still holding their silence. Mayor Busse received them with a mixture of amusement and dread. For the past two weeks there had been a number of preliminary meetings, newspaper reports, and general blather about women’s disgust with city officials and women taking charge of the anti-vice battle and how there would be no Levee district at all if only women could vote and be elected and so on and so forth.

  Politically, Busse knew, it was risky to disparage or dismiss them outright. The suffrage movement was gaining traction not only in Chicago, but throughout the state and country. Segregation was the most practical approach to vice, but one had to be cautious these days about expressing that opinion. Women could take his plain common sense and twist it into an “open endorsement of immorality” or something equally incendiary, and his Republican Party, never a popular ticket locally, would suffer at the polls. At the same time, it was difficult to listen to their ridiculous pronouncements—“Let the men take the children and care for them,” ranted one female, “and permit the women to go out and enforce the laws”—without wanting to, well, bolt to the nearest saloon for a stiff drink.

  The ladies packed tight into Busse’s office, breast to back, curving in crescents around his desk. The spillover had to wait in the hallways, where they clasped hands and prayed in fervent whispers.

  Mrs. Emily Hill faced the mayor, cleared her throat, and read from a prepared statement for two calm minutes. But toward the end of the third, her eyes moistened, her cheeks flushed, the studied composure abandoned her voice. She dropped her palms on Busse’s desk and leaned in, so close that he could feel the winter on her skin.

  “Mr. Busse,” she cried, “you are the mayor, and you must abide by the laws. There is a city law which forbids the operation of one of these—these houses of ill fame. Obey that law and carry it out!…Oh, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor, pray for divine guidance and you will conquer all!”

  Their police officer escorts stood off to the side, shaking in silent laughter.

  “I may pray,” Busse replied tartly, “but I’m not going to do it here…I’ll consult my advisers,” he added, waving them away, “and see what can be done.”

  Busse took slightly more than a month to “consult,” but on March 5, 1910, the mayor held a press conference. Stressing that Chicago’s “vice problem is exactly like that of any American city,” he announced the formation of the Chicago Vice Commission. Thirty members—among them such prominent citizens as Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck & Co.; Alexander Robinson, vice president of the Continental National Bank; Edward Skinner of the Association of Commerce; and Louis Kohtz of the Aetna Fire Insurance Company—would explore every facet of the social evil in Chicago.

  Bell and his inner circle didn’t expect to be appointed; they were too controversial. Edwin Sims was a fine choice for secretary, but Graham Taylor’s inclusion could be problematic; the head of the Chicago Commons adamantly endorsed segregation. Dean Sumner was elected chairman. With his cathedral near the West Side Levee and as a witness to past First Ward Balls, Sumner was well acquainted with the evils of vice. Still, he questioned the wisdom of ridding Chicago entirely of its districts.

  At night, while Mary slept, Bell knelt on the floor, his face pressed against their bed.

  “Now Lord,” he prayed, “make that commission work. Fill Dean Sumner full of facts till he vomits!”

  Clifford Roe was no longer “not a marrying man,” as he’d once told the Tribune. On March 7, he would wed Miss Elsie Martha Hercock of Chicago at Christ Reformed Episcopal Church and then depart for New Orleans. Roe recognized his good fortune—what other woman would understand her husband’s desire to tour the Storyville district and lecture on pandering during their honeymoon? They would return to the house that had been his mother’s and make it their own.

  The Tribune learned of Roe’s wedding, but the loquacious reformer was uncharacteristically quiet about the details. He did not discuss how he met Elsie, the circumstances of their courtship, who would serve as witnesses. The society pages printed nothing about the length of the bride’s train or the brilliance of her bouquet. It was as if the prosecutor who equated negotiating with failure had at last found a deal he was willing to make: He would keep life with Elsie private, and the world couldn’t take her away.

  In the weeks before the big event, Roe busied himself with work, finishing an article about white slavery for his college fraternity’s magazine. An accompanying
profile of Roe would mention the imminent publication of his first book, Panders and Their White Slaves. Hopefully, the advance notice would boost sales. So far, Roe knew, more than four hundred thousand people had bought Ernest Bell’s anthology, earning the reverend a small fortune.

  Most important, he needed to write to John D. Rockefeller Jr. The son of the Standard Oil baron was thrust into the white slavery debate last fall when George Kibbe Turner, the muckraking McClure’s writer who first exposed conditions in Chicago, similarly scrutinized New York. On the eve of the 1909 elections, Turner accused Tammany Hall of running the city’s prostitution business and exporting white slaves to urban centers across the country. City officials, pressured to act, convened a grand jury to investigate traffic in girls.

  The judge appointed Rockefeller Jr. as foreman. But he’d never patronized the demimondes, Junior protested, and would be embarrassingly inept in the role. The judge was adamant. “You owe it as a duty to the city,” he insisted, “to do your part in crushing out the vile practices that are said to exist.”

  The arrangement was a setup. Tammany Hall bosses knew Junior. For the first eight years of his life Rockefeller Sr. clothed his namesake in his sister’s hand-me-down dresses, frilly confections with doily collars and silk sashes, a Little Lord Fauntleroy in drag. Junior was shy and nervous and prone to debilitating breakdowns that lasted for years. He was as repressed as his father was libertine. Clearly, Junior was his mother’s son, and too squeamish to immerse himself in New York City’s underworld. The grand jury would go through the motions for a month or so and issue some benign, inconsequential report.