Sin in the Second City

by Karen Abbott

  That it was a Saturday night did not distract him from the work at hand, scouring law books and scribbling notations of upcoming cases. A Cook County assistant state’s attorney for just five months, he was eager to impress his bosses. Let other young men of his age flit about town, escorting dates to the Chicago Opera House and showing off new $2,000 Cadillac Model G’s in the dense State Street traffic. “Mr. Roe,” noted one reporter, “takes life far too seriously to be a shirker.”

  His telephone rang, breaking into his thoughts. (Later, in a customary flourish of language, he would recall it ringing “imperatively.”) He hurried to the receiver and said his name. A familiar voice barked over the line.

  “This is Captain McCann,” it said. “There is a girl down here who claims she has been sold as a white slave.”

  Edward McCann had Roe’s rapt attention. The prosecutor had scored a conviction against Madam Panzy Williams—the pandering case brought to court by the Reverend Ernest Bell—but there hadn’t been a single mention of that victory in the newspapers.

  The captain, Roe knew, had just been named to his post. A graft investigation in April revealed that police, after taking out hundreds of warrants against brothel keepers, never made any arrests or returned the warrants to court. In reaction, reform-minded Chicagoans voted Mayor Edward Dunne out of office and elected Republican Fred Busse, who cleared out the police department as a show of good faith. Mayor Busse’s new police captain vowed to keep a hard eye on the Levee.

  “Can you come down the first thing in the morning and investigate?” McCann asked.

  “I shall be there.”

  Chicago’s youngest assistant state’s attorney replaced the receiver, pulled on his black cutaway frock coat, and headed to the Drexel Avenue home he shared with Henrietta, his mother.

  Henrietta and Roe’s father, George, were natives of Indiana and of mixed Scottish, English, Welsh, and Irish descent, a lineage Roe would boast of throughout his life. The family moved to Chicago when he was three, where George, a “useful and upright citizen,” dealt in real estate, joined the Disciples of Christ Church and the Republican Party, and instilled within his only son the idea that the world would one day need him. Roe grew up believing it, and as soon as he was able to talk he realized talking was his gift. Words were the only things he trusted; their logic was his currency.

  “The day of Mr. Roe’s birth he made a speech on the wrongs of infants,” the Tribune wrote, “and he has continued talking on the rights or wrongs of some one or other ever since. He has ideas of his own and he has made up his mind that he is going to let the world know about them…he had one great ally—he was always sure of himself.”

  After earning undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Michigan, Roe returned to Chicago in 1902, shortly after the death of his father. He made partner in a major law firm before he turned thirty. Arguing against the best trial lawyers in the city, Roe caught the attention of the head state’s attorney, who offered him a job in December 1906 and assigned him to the Harrison Street station.

  “Not a marrying man,” Roe immersed himself in his new position. His few indulgences included the occasional baseball game—all of Chicago was baseball crazy these days, since the White Sox and Cubs faced off in the 1906 World Series—and creative writing. He would, in fact, soon begin work on a play titled The Prosecutor.

  The star of the play—the prosecutor—was named Clinton Randolph, and he was a “tall, broad-shouldered, powerful-looking man, clean-shaven, with a strong jaw, and dark hair slightly sprinkled with gray on the temples…not too young, and yet not even middle-aged, but with a face that shows experience and ripe judgment and great strength of character.”

  Clinton Randolph, just like his real-life doppelgänger, always got his man.

  On Monday morning, May 27, the prosecutor boarded a streetcar near his office and settled in for the ride, about a mile south, to the Harrison Street police station. Blocking out the rush-hour chaos—the grumpy putt-putting of automobiles, the refrains of the street peddlers, the ceaseless clopping of hooves—he replayed yesterday’s interview with Mona Marshall, the white slave who would make his career.

  Mona told Roe she worked behind the ribbon counter at Marshall Field’s department store. One day in March, a tall young blond man approached her. He touched Mona’s hand, regarded her with a direct blue gaze, asked her if she would accompany him to a play. His name was Harry Balding, and he seemed, Mona said, the “best and dearest fellow in the world.” Until the following night, that is, when he took her to the Prima Dance Hall. Her wine tasted bitter, but she sipped it anyway. Her speech slurred, the room spun, her eyes lost hold of the light.

  Mona awakened in the Follansbee flats on Wabash Avenue, surrounded by Harry and several strange men. She knew, from the way they looked at her, that nothing was what it had been before.

  How could she return home after being away all night, her honor ruined? She began to cry, but Harry promised to marry her straightaway. Yet instead of taking her to church, he drove her in a closed carriage to the Levee district, dropping her off at a brothel called the Casino. There the owner, Roy Jones, ordered her to remove her clothes. He tossed her a flimsy gown and told her she had to pay him for it. Harry collected every dime of the $30 per week she made whoring. He said he’d kill her if she tried to run away.

  One night in late May, feeling brave, she scrawled, “I am a white slave,” on a scrap of paper and tossed it from her window. A kind passerby brought it to the police. Captain McCann arrested Harry, six other men, and one woman, charging them with disorderly conduct and keeping a disorderly house. Then he called Roe.

  It was clear to Roe that this problem with Chicago’s Levee district—with its entire unholy underworld—was bigger than Mona Marshall, and he wasn’t the only one who thought so. His job required a bit of socializing, usually down at the City Club or Henrici’s or Vogelsang’s. Beneath swirls of cigar smoke and the soft din of silver scraping china, he found Chicago’s leading citizens ruminating on the scourge that was afflicting their beloved city.

  What could be done about the plethora of nickel theaters showing lurid films like The Thaw-White Case and A Husband Murdering His Wife? There were children congregating at these places! No wonder Chicago was in the throes of an unprecedented crime wave. The newspapers printed scoreboards that tabulated murders and muggings, as if such crimes were scheduled like baseball games and horse races: a burglary every three hours, a holdup every six hours, and a suicide and murder every day. Women bashed on the head with pieces of gas pipe, coils of copper strung around their necks, a cloth wet with chloroform swathed over their nostrils. Easier prey than kicking a stray dog or beating a heaving horse.

  “Chicago,” the Tribune opined, “has come to be known over the country as a bad town for men of good character and a good town for men of bad character.”

  Last month’s McClure’s Magazine, the April 1907 issue, was even more troubling. Its lead story, “The City of Chicago,” investigated the city’s prostitution trade, and the results were spread out over eighteen sickening pages for all the country to see. Twenty million dollars’ worth of business done per year, at least ten thousand professional harlots, countless criminal hotels, dives, saloons, and dance halls where women are snared and forced into the trade. The writer, George Kibbe Turner, discovered that “a company of men, largely composed of Russian Jews,” operates between Chicago and New York and Boston and New Orleans and other cities, unloading each girl for $50 and then charging her with the debt—the victim, in effect, pays for her own sale. She’s plied with alcohol and cocaine until her age trumps her market value and then drugged out of existence. As in the stockyards, not one shred of flesh is wasted.

  “The effect of this single article was indescribable,” wrote Louis Filler in his history of the muckrakers. “Coming as it did four years after [Lincoln] Steffens began his investigations into municipal crime, it found a national audience ready and able to appreciate it
and apply its lessons at home.”

  Roe heard all of this chatter, filed it neatly in his mind. In the winter, immediately following the Panzy Williams case, he had approached these same men, told them stories of girls who came to Chicago from Peoria and Sioux City and Springfield, never to be heard from again.

  “Instead of receiving their support,” Roe said, “I generally received rebuffs and jests at the expense of my attitude toward the white slave traffickers.”

  He would go back to them when the time came—and the time would come. Now that this talk had started, he knew—this being Chicago—that it would only continue to bubble and froth, like so much waste in the river. If they were upon some strange and dire era, he would beckon it forward and give it a name.

  As far as Roe was concerned, Chicago was lucky it had him.

  Roe opened the door to the courtroom, housed inside the same building as the Harrison Street police station. He despised the place as much as he loved the work he did there.

  “The walls of this musty old room,” he wrote, “if they could speak, would tell many stories of how for years more criminals have been tried there than perhaps in any other place in the United States. It is the most dismal place imaginable, with scarcely any light except the artificial light, and teeming with more odours than could possibly be concocted by the ingenuity of man.

  “Each day it is filled with the garlic and tube-rose of the Italians; the mysterious opium scent of the Chinaman; the highly perfumed sport is there, and the lodging-house bum, reeking with tobacco and whiskey; all this is mixed with the gases from the open sewage in the underground cells, which are worse than any of those of the dark ages. Then there are the fumes from the stables next door and adjacent, and stifling smoke from the ever-present puffing engines across the narrow street which separates it from the LaSalle Street Station. To top it all off comes the steam from the corned beef and cabbage and the frying of the odoriferous onion, which the cook in the cellar below is going to dish up to the prisoners for their noonday meal.”

  Roe breathed through his mouth and strode over to the section reserved for witnesses. He greeted Mona, who was accompanied by her mother. The poor woman had been bereft during the time her daughter was missing, believing she had eloped—and here the reality was so much worse. The defendants—Harry Balding chief among them—sat off to one side, wearing suits and ties and stoic expressions. Roe was gratified to see that reporters from every Chicago newspaper filled the spectator benches. Reverend Bell sat in the front row, visibly nervous, threading and unthreading his fingers.

  Mona took the stand first, and Roe approached. He had the effortlessly assured manner of someone used to being watched, and in a loud, calm voice, he asked his witness to begin.

  “I was working in a downtown department store when Harry B. Balding first made himself known to me,” Mona said. “I was attracted by him. He is handsome and well dressed. I learned to trust him, he treated me so nice. I went around with him a bit, and he always was talking of automobiles and fine clothes. Finally he declared he loved me and wanted me to become his wife. I believed he was honest, and I thought I loved him. After a time he took me to the Casino at 2101 Dearborn Street. That was in February. Then, March 1, he took me out to get chop suey. On March 2 he took me to the Prima Dance Hall, Thirty-fifth Street and Indiana Avenue. There I met some other men.”

  Mona paused, and for a moment Roe’s focus slackened, his brain stuck a few beats behind. Balding took the girl to the Casino in February? And then she went out with him again? This wasn’t what she’d said during their interview at the police station. He cleared his throat and pressed on.

  “Then what happened to you?”

  Roe fixed his eyes on his witness, willed her answer to be familiar.

  “Harry then took me to that flat at Twenty-third Street and Wabash Avenue. He got me there through his smooth talk. There were several men there. That was on a Saturday night. That night Harry coaxed me into going to the Grand Eastern Hotel. He made me stay there a week. I was ashamed to go home. Then he took me to the resort at 2101 Dearborn Street, where Roy Jones is proprietor.”

  The girl had said nothing, either, of any week spent at the Grand Eastern Hotel. And why had she skimped on the details about the Prima? The drugged wine, the spinning room, the waking up in a “clearinghouse” facing the men who’d raped her? Roe stole a look at Judge Newcomer. He was a good man, sympathetic to the cause. From his expression, it seemed Mona’s succumbing to “smooth talk” and her sense of shame were enough. Fine, then, he’d just pick up where the girl left off.

  “What happened to you there?” Roe asked.

  “I was held there,” Mona said. Her hat sat askew, shadowing half of her face. “They took my jewelry from me and refused to let me out without Harry’s permission.”

  Good, back on track.

  “Did Harry come to see you?”

  “Yes, once in a while.” Her voice sounded small, far away. “He used to come when they paid me. I got from twenty-five to forty dollars sometimes, but either they gave it to Harry or he took it from me. If I resisted, he knocked me down and took it.”

  Roe let his eyes shift again toward Judge Newcomer, who looked ready to leap over his desk and pummel Balding with his gavel.

  “How long were you in that place?” Roe asked.

  “I was there from March 10 until last Friday. Harry kept telling me he would take me out and we would go to St. Louis and be married. He didn’t do it, however, and kept taking my money from me. I had no street clothes and could not get out…. They told me I was in debt to them and would have to stay unless Harry said otherwise.”

  Roe softened his voice, looked at Mona as if he knew her personally. “Did they keep you in the house all the time from March 20 to May 25?” he asked.

  “No, they took me out one night and took me to the flat on Wabash Avenue near Twenty-third Street again. This is Willie McNamara’s place, where they take all the girls.”

  “Did you know any of the other girls there?”

  “Not well,” Mona said. “There was one named Gilette, who was later sold to a place. Another, named Burns, was sold to the same place I was in, for twenty-five dollars, and she is there now. There was another one, Hazel Daily, whose husband put her in this house also. Then there is another little girl, named Gladys, out there still.”

  Roe paused and let those statements settle in the room. Mona or Burns or Gilette or Hazel or Gladys—and who knew how many other girls—could be their daughter. Their sister or niece or neighbor. Behind him, the crowd rustled and whispered.

  He turned and called one of Harry’s co-defendants, William McNamara, to the stand.

  McNamara was broad and burly, a former boxing champion and reputed ringleader among the procurers. The sleeves of his suit coat stretched taut around his biceps. Roe launched a “severe cross-fire of questions,” plucking confessions from the boy as if it were as easy as uprooting a bed of weeds.

  McNamara admitted that he and his “associates in the procuring business,” as Roe put it, lured girls and raped them, often several times, before selling them to brothels.

  “I do not know why I did it,” the boy said, speaking into his collar.

  Judge Newcomer’s voice came hurtling from the bench.

  “Don’t you think you ought to be taken out and shot dead for this?”

  Roe fought a smile. He couldn’t have written a better line himself.

  The prizewinning pugilist slunk lower in his chair.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Since the reverend gentleman”—he pointed to Ernest Bell, who bolted upright in his seat—“talked to me of my sins last evening, I feel that I should be punished.”

  Bodies swiveled in Bell’s direction. Roe paused his questioning, let the reverend have his moment.

  MEN AND THEIR

  BASER MISCHIEFS

  Clifford Roe.

  Upon what meat did the crusaders feed that they could call us insurgents and witches?<
br />
  —MINNA EVERLEIGH

  Ernest Bell could feel a tangible shift in the city’s mood. The battle against the Levee was a ball of kinetic energy that had been waiting for a push. This Mona Marshall case was it; she could do for the Levee district what The Jungle had done for the Union Stock Yards.

  Judge Newcomer found every single one of those degenerate panders guilty, with Harry Balding receiving the stiffest sentence, $100 and a year in the Chicago House of Correction. Police Chief George Shippy closed that white slave hunting ground, the Prima Dance Hall. Captain McCann announced that every person connected with the downfall of innocent girls would be photographed and measured by the Bertillon system, and declared a crackdown on Levee interlopers.

  “Half the disorder that is seen on the street at night is due to slumming parties,” McCann said. “Young men and girls of highly respectable families come into this district to see the sights, and while here they do many things that hardened denizens of the Levee district would never do in public.”

  Newspapers, from the venerable Tribune to William Randolph Hearst’s sensationalistic Chicago American, devoted about half a million pages, in Bell’s estimation, to the war on white slavery after Mona Marshall told her story. Suddenly there were hundreds just like her, girls who turned victim as soon as they wandered past the sanctioned boundaries of their lives.

  Adeline MacDonald, twenty, was snared by mock marriage and seduction. The daughter of a wealthy contractor, she moved to the city from the small town of Davis, Illinois, because some snake had tricked her, written letters declaring, “I have learned to love you as I never loved a girl before and probably never will again” and “I am willing to take you to Chicago, support you, and if you desire, secure employment for you at Marshall Field & Co.’s, besides taking you to dances, theaters, automobiling and yachting.” He induced her to drink and escorted her to a brothel at 2106 Armour Avenue.