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

by Karen Abbott

  She opened the door, welcoming inside the officers and the smoky breeze of Dearborn Street.

  Without preamble, the men introduced themselves as detectives—no wonder they were unfamiliar—and explained the reason for their visit. Herbert Swift, son of the famous meatpacker and brother of Harold Swift (the latter a member of Clifford Roe’s Committee of Fifteen), had died the previous evening on a Chicago & Northwestern train en route to Milwaukee. The cause was yet unknown, and they’d heard that an Everleigh Club girl had planned an out-of-town excursion—perhaps she accompanied the heir. Would Madam Minna know anything about this?

  The panic rapped at her chest. A wealthy packer’s son had been a frequent guest of the Club, memorable not only for the size of his tab, but for the inanity of his conversation. “Women have no minds,” he’d said once, after alcohol had impaired his own. “All they can do is dance.” Whether the imbecilic patron was the dead man or his reformer brother, Minna would never say. And one of the Everleigh butterflies had left Chicago for a “visit,” as she called it, although no one outside of the Club knew of this sabbatical. Minna didn’t believe her girl had anything to do with this unfortunate circumstance, but the last thing they needed was the ghost of another dead millionaire traipsing through the parlors.

  Sorry, Minna said, but she knew nothing about this. It was both the proper—and truthful—response.

  “Did one of your girls hit a guest with a champagne bottle?” the detective persisted. “Had a certain patron promised to take one of your inmates away with him? What’s been going on here that we don’t know about?”

  Ada, summoned by a servant, now stood next to her.

  “We do not know,” Minna said, “what you are talking about.”

  His partner released a weary sigh. “Who were your prominent guests the last few nights?” he asked.

  Minna’s thoughts came in a rush, and she felt Ada next to her, rigid and cold. This was their last chance to just give up and talk, to tell the detectives everything they didn’t know. But a simple admission of ignorance amounted to a betrayal of discretion, one that would count against the Club. And after eleven years, there would be no stains on this house.

  “We do not know the names of our guests,” Minna said finally.

  A moment passed, bulging with unissued threats. The two visitors turned and let themselves out.

  On Sunday night, October 22, Ernest Bell boarded a train for Columbus, Ohio, host city for this year’s International Purity Congress. Already temperatures were plummeting, honeycombing the windows with frost. He was the lone delegate from the Midnight Mission, joining representatives from every temperance society, law and order league, and anti-vice group throughout the United States and Canada. Bell was slated to speak about the white slave traffic, as was his old comrade Clifford Roe. New York City’s underworld would have a few days’ respite from the prosecutor.

  The most sensational topic was certain to be Iowa’s recent legislation. The Hawkeye State had passed the Red Light Injunction and Abatement Law that so far disproved the arguments against ending segregation. A Des Moines reformer, slotted to address the purity congress, wrote an essay about the law for Roe’s second book. Steep penalties against deed holders—even if they were merely renting property to madams—were vital, as was sending the message that the city was no longer complicit.

  Bell had been arguing that same line of reasoning for years. Five years hence, most of the girls in Chicago brothels would be dead, and thousands more recruited to replace them. But if a law like Iowa’s passed in Illinois, if the Levee were closed and kept closed, then entire generations of girls would be saved to respectable lives. Bell was certain that the first mayor who took such a definitive stance against city-sponsored vice would be applauded by 90 percent of the voting population of Chicago.

  The train groaned into motion and pulled out of Union Station. Bell stared through the scrim of ice, watching his city’s slow retreat.

  Within twenty-four hours, another member of Chicago’s finest rang the Everleigh Club’s bell. The new police chief himself, John McWeeny, stood at their threshold, coarse ginger eyebrows arched into tepees. A thin film of frost covered his dark wool coat, and a pale, meaty hand emerged from its sleeve, coming to rest on the door frame.

  Minna elbowed her sister. Finally—the chief had dispensed with the bravado and bluster and sat down with Ike Bloom. He was making the rounds, letting madams and dive keepers know of any changes in graft fees or payment schedules. He would set things right, and the thrum of panic that was quavering through the Levee air would at last subside.

  Chief McWeeny cleared his throat. He had come to inquire, he said, about “an unpleasant happening,” bloating those last three words in a way that told Minna this was not yet over, that he needed to fill his pockets with power for just a bit longer before turning them out to Ike Bloom. Her own panic returned, restless inside her, but a slow anger pooled around it.

  Ada nudged her back, expressing agreement without saying a word, and then stepped forward.

  “Mind your own business,” she said, and Minna had to look, check if that arctic voice, that cocksure inflection, truly belonged to her sister.

  It did. Ada’s expression was at once wild and immobile.

  Minna remembered what this heartless louse had said about the five prostitutes he’d arrested on the West Side.

  “Jump into the river,” she told McWeeny, and closed the door in his face.

  The locks clicked into place. Minna turned to her sister, watched as Ada’s anger gave way to humor. It was a palpable switch, a weak light thrown on just behind her eyes.

  “Pretty flimsy threat, this one,” Ada said lightly, making it sound like a question.

  The whisper of the perfume fountain was deafening behind them. Minna knew it was up to her to voice the answer neither of them wanted to hear. She could craft the prettiest lies in the world, but never for Ada.

  “I’m afraid,” she said, “they mean business.”

  For weeks, Mayor Harrison had been hearing about this brochure. When visiting associates asked about the city’s greatest attractions, he mentioned the soaring mosaic Tiffany ceiling inside Marshall Field’s, the virtuosic performances of the Chicago Grand Opera Company, the mercurial blues of Lake Michigan. But he was forgetting something, they said, laughing—what about the Everleigh Club?

  Even when the mayor left town it followed him. At one recent banquet, a young man approached, pumped Harrison’s hand, and observed, “Pretty snappy town yours, isn’t it?,” a hard wink in his voice. The mayor heard that thousands of brochures had been mailed far and wide to every state in the Union, an ironic postscript following the delivery of 1,800 vice commission reports. Chief McWeeny had called upon “the terrible pair of sisters” two days ago in a halfhearted attempt to back them down, only to retreat himself. Now, finally, Harrison’s own copy of “The Everleigh Club, Illustrated” lay open on his desk.

  He couldn’t close the entire Levee district, despite the reformers’ constant rallies and phone calls, but he could no longer let inaction serve as official policy. Harrison decided to buy some time, using the brochure on his desk as currency. He was the first native of Chicago to be elected mayor, and during this, his fifth term, he would defend his city. Those “painted, peroxided, bedizened” sisters, he would announce, would not be permitted to raise its skirts, shame it for prurient thrills.

  Shortly before noon on October 24, 1911, Harrison took out a piece of paper and a pen. He wrote this “truly historic” order in longhand, unwilling to trust even his stenographer. After tucking it into an envelope, the mayor called for a special messenger, who carried it immediately to the armory station and delivered it into the police chief ’s hands.

  “Close the Everleigh Club,” the paper read. Effective immediately.

  YOU GET EVERYTHING

  IN A LIFETIME

  The Everleigh Club, 2131–2133 South Dearborn Street.

  How dear to my he
art is the old-fashioned harlot,

  When fond recollections present her to view;

  The madam, the whore house, the beer by the car lot,

  And e’en the delights of the old fashioned—

  Here a rhyme is needed to rhyme with the word “view.”

  —EDGAR LEE MASTERS

  Harrison’s order shouted itself across Chicago. Hinky Dink Kenna burst in, face grave atop his pipe cleaner of a neck. Out of breath, slight shoulders heaving, he did not so much speak his words as exhale them.

  “On the square, does this go? For keeps?”

  “As long as I am mayor,” Harrison said.

  “Okay!”

  And he rushed out.

  Murray Keller, champagne salesman and Vogelsang’s lunch companion, rang Harrison’s phone. Won’t the mayor reconsider? he asked. The Everleigh sisters were two of his best customers, and they would hold him in great favor if he convinced his friend in City Hall to change his mind.

  Harrison demurred—politely, at first—and finally used “rather sharp language” to silence Keller’s pleas.

  The tornado of rumors began its inevitable twist. How could this happen to the Everleigh Club, pillar of vice, immune from the law? This was Vic Shaw’s doing, no question; she had sent a copy of the Club’s advertising brochure to the mayor. Perhaps an Everleigh girl did end Herbert Swift’s life on a train outside of Milwaukee. Obviously, Marshall Field Jr. was still haunting South Dearborn Street. “The most persistent gossip,” Harrison said, “associated it with the death by gunshot wound of the only son of a famous millionaire merchant prince.” But the reason, the mayor insisted, was the Everleigh Club’s “infamy, the audacious advertising of it” “it was as well known as Chicago itself and therefore a disgrace to the city.”

  Now all Harrison had to do was wait.

  Inside the Everleigh Club, the phones pulsed and trilled. Reporters, clients new and old, wine and food suppliers, former harlots, friendly politicians, and madam acquaintances throughout the country all checked in. Minna answered each ring. It was only lunchtime but she was in full dress, a tangle of necklaces overlapping butterfly pins, ten fingers stacked with rings. Journalist friends were beginning to arrive. She appeared “cool and comical,” Charles Washburn noted, “though she must have been boiling over within.” Her laughter rose and fell but never quite died; her face refused to let go of its smile.

  “You mustn’t believe all you read in the papers,” Minna told each caller. The afternoon edition of the American had already printed news of the order. “Come on over tonight and see for yourself.”

  She slipped away to a back parlor, found a square of quiet. It was time to make a phone call of her own. If this were a tragic production, she would play the lead with dignity and aplomb. She dialed the familiar number of the 22nd Street police station and asked to speak with Captain P. J. Harding.

  “Is the report that my place is to be closed correct?” she asked.

  The command had not yet arrived from the chief of police, Harding told her, but he expected it “every minute.”

  Minna thanked him, ordered her lips back into a smile, and returned to the parlors.

  But minutes passed, then hours, and still the command didn’t come.

  Ada rounded up the butterflies, told them to bathe and dress, to report to the parlors as soon as possible—no questions asked. Minna lit a gold-tipped cigarette—somewhere in Chicago, Lucy Page Gaston was sniffing suspiciously—and stood at the door, asking after her boys, waving them all inside. Yes, yes, of course they were open, don’t mind those silly rumors—no one interfered with the Everleigh Club. Edmund brought her a glass of champagne; the buzz was even sweeter accompanied by daylight’s fading glow.

  Harlots crowded behind her. They wanted to stand at the door, mingle on the landing—it wasn’t proper protocol, but did Madam Minna mind? For once, she didn’t. Girls from the Weiss brothers’ houses on either side joined them, and within moments, as if heeding a silent alarm, Dearborn Street was alive with courtesans, the fall wind slapping bare shoulders, tugging at tightly coiled hair. They did the chicken scratch and the bunny hug—what did the character of their dancing matter, since the reformers believed they were all ruined anyway?—and kept on long after the sun traded places with the moon.

  If only Ernest Bell were at his usual post in front of the Everleigh Club, the “Gibraltar of the district,” to witness all those lost souls fleeing to the streets—heading toward him, for once. Every white slave for blocks could have received a pamphlet, whispered a prayer, sung a hymn. Instead he was in his room at the Hotel Vendome in Columbus, writing a note to Mary, entirely unaware that the brothel he’d targeted for the past six years was at last being struck.

  Journalist friends were begging Minna, the “speaking partner of the Everleigh sisters,” as they called her, for comment. She glanced at Ada, who nodded, one curt dip of her head.

  “I know the mayor’s order is on the square,” Minna began. “When my maid brought me the afternoon newspapers, I got Captain Harding of the Twenty-second Street station on the telephone…he said the order had not come to him from the chief of police, but he expected it every minute. Ordinarily, when orders affecting the Twenty-second Street district are issued from police headquarters in the afternoon they reach the Twenty-second Street station before 8 o’clock in the evening. It is after that hour now, so it may not come to me until morning.”

  The professors all started up again, sending torrents of music through the parlors and open doors. “They can play a bugle call like you never heard before,” the crowd sang, “so natural that you want to go to war….”

  “I don’t worry about anything,” she continued, waving a hand “literally coruscated with diamonds,” as reporters would note. “You get everything in a lifetime. Of course, if the mayor says we must close, that settles it. What the mayor says goes, so far as I am concerned. I’m not going to be sore about it, either. I never was a knocker, and nothing the police of this town can do to me will change my disposition. I’ll close up the shop and walk out of the place with a smile on my face. Nobody else around here is worrying, either. If the ship sinks we’re going down with a cheer and a good drink under our belts, anyway.”

  A voice rose up from the crowd—how could the sisters leave Chicago when, as the mayor said, they were as well-known as the city itself?

  “If they don’t want me in Chicago,” Minna responded, “there are other cities. But this is my home and I would rather continue to live here. Honestly, I hate to leave. But one must live.”

  She paused, considering her words, her face still held hostage by that smile.

  “Well, boys, we’ve had good times, haven’t we,” she said. “You have all been darlings. You’ve played square. And we thank you sincerely. Just think—our last night.”

  No one spoke for a moment. The jaunty tumble of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” seemed rude and out of place. Minna let her eyes wander, admiring every gilded surface, breathing the mingled scents of roasted duck and sweet perfume, her paradise almost lost. She raised her flute of champagne.

  A reporter kindly took the hint. “Happy days,” he toasted.

  “Happy nights,” Ada added.

  Glasses were drained, refilled, and drained again. A second wind gusted into the room. Crowds mothed around Ada’s piano to toast Vanderpool Vanderpool. Men passed a statue of a golden nymph on their way up the stairs, slapping her naked bottom for good luck.

  “It may be their last chance,” Ada said. “Let ’em go as far as they like.”

  An hour later they were still going far, and Minna felt a timid nudge of hope. She followed an old reporter friend to the telephone. He’d call the mayor to see if this closing order had been rescinded. A maid answered and said Mayor Harrison was in his bedroom.

  “It’s only 10 o’clock,” the reporter urged. “Perhaps the mayor has not gone to sleep yet.”

  She went to check. The moment stretched unnaturally, a chronolo
gical rubber band. Minna moved in closer, cupped her ear against the phone.

  “Mayor Harrison is sound asleep,” the maid said finally. “I don’t want to take the responsibility for waking him up.”

  They tried John McWeeny next, and again at 11:00, and again at midnight. Still no word from the chief. But toward the end of the next hour, 1:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning, October 25, the chime of the doorbell intruded into the parlors. Minna made her way to the 2131 entrance, a roaring quiet in her ears, the journey seeming at once interminable and brief. With each step the parlor, receding behind her, leaked a bit of color and noise.

  Four squads of police from the 22nd Street station stood on the other end of the threshold. The largest officer stepped forward; Minna recognized him. Obligatory sorrow tugged at his eyes and the corners of his lips, as if he had been sent to report a death. It was an appropriate expression, Minna thought; she knew the Everleigh Club longer than she had known her own mother.

  “Sorry, girls,” he said. “From downtown. Nothing we can do about it…. If it was us, you know how we’d be.”

  “We’ve been expecting it,” Minna said. “What would you advise us to do?”

  “Clear out the house. Get rid of all the guests.”

  Clients began their slow procession down the stairs and through the parlors. The piano chirped a final note. Pear salad was left to wilt on plates. Maids scrambled about, matching coats with their owners. A chorus of weeping rose from one corner, where harlots huddled together and clasped hands. Minna and Ada stood by the open door, proffering cheeks for chaste kisses.

  “You’ll be going strong within a week,” each boy said, tipping a high silk hat.

  Dearborn Street was a crush of elegant carriages and electric cabs, throngs of curious passersby filling the spaces between. They had read the newspapers, too, and came to protest the police order. One low, lusty boo emptied into another, like a sequence of lingering bass notes. Arc lamps dropped spotlights on a hundred private farewells.