Sin in the Second City

by Karen Abbott

  Ethel Rurey fell victim to the false employment snare. Sixteen years old, she was sweet-talked right out of her Wentworth Avenue home by a black man named H. J. Mitchell. He sold her to the owner of the New Paris at 2118 Dearborn Street for $10. Her father accompanied detectives during an all-night canvassing of the Levee and found Ethel in a second-floor bedroom, cowering inside a closet, peeking between a row of dress hems. “Don’t speak to me,” her father said. “Officers, lock her up.”

  “My mother ran away from home one year ago with a minister and went to New York City to live,” Ethel sobbed inside her cell. “My father…was away from home most of the time, and I got lonesome. Then I met the colored man. He promised to get me a place where I could make some money, and I went with him.”

  Country girls Hazel Williams and Catherine Craig, both seventeen and pretty, were ensnared by the city itself. Working, respectively, as a domestic and a clerk, the girls met Madam Pauline Greenman. Showing off her collection of silk gowns and jewels, the madam regaled them with stories of the “happy, care-free life of the Levee”—which they immediately felt compelled to experience for themselves.

  Accompanying editorials likened these cautionary tales of coercion and deceit to America’s shameful recent past.

  “There is undoubtedly more actual physical restraint imposed on these modern slaves of our cities,” opined the Chicago Record Herald, “than was ordinarily imposed on the black slaves of the old plantations.”

  The Levee leaders rebelled against the increased scrutiny, as Bell knew they would. He suffered the usual assaults—pelted with eggs, bombarded by melons—but they grew more inventive, more vicious. Someone paid a cabdriver to plow his vehicle through their meeting at high speed, sending deaconesses diving to the curb. A French slave trader threatened to break Bell “into pieces” and “send him to the hospital.” Someone hurled a rock at his head with such force it would have killed him had the Lord not guided it toward the brim of his hat. Mary lay awake all night, ghastly images galloping through her mind, listening for the door to creak open at 4:00 a.m., wondering if the night would come when she never heard it at all.

  And on June 16, 1907, a Sunday, the manager of the Casino sent word through the Levee that a pack of “toughs” would drive Ernest Bell and the Midnight Mission from the Levee for good.

  The only way to answer such a threat was to lay it in the path of his faith, and Bell did, two days later. In the midst of a heat wave so brutal that it took the lives of five men, the Midnight Missionaries bypassed the Everleigh Club for the first time to assemble before the Casino. Red lights bloomed over the group. Bell lifted his arms, giving the signal, and scores of voices fused as one, louder than the harlots’ laughter drifting out from open doors in calculated bursts, louder than the blare of a hundred pianos:

  Throw out the life-line to danger-fraught men

  Sinking in anguish where you’ve never been.

  The voices dropped off, then, one by one, thinning, cinching into knots. Choking, wheezing, gasping—and then it hit Bell, too, a wraith of fog that smelled “just like rotten eggs.”

  Sulphuretted hydrogen. Someone was gassing them.

  He closed his eyes, the insides of his lids spackled with red pinpricks of light, and willed his voice to stay with him, pulled it up from his throat. He began preaching, braiding scripture with hymns and prayers, anything to prevent the Levee’s sounds from overpowering his own. His saints rallied, too, putting one word in front of the other until their song regained its shape.

  A man stepped forward through the mist, his body blurry around the edges. His mouth began moving, and Bell quieted long enough to hear what it said. The man was calling him names—“vile names” that were not repeatable—and Bell walked forward, too, meeting the man halfway. The gas wafted and lingered. He could taste it on his breath.

  “Are you one of them?” Bell shouted, meaning the sort who lived off the women in the resorts. But there was no response.

  The man was at the curb now, a foot away, his form and features finally clear. He lunged, closing the distance, and his knuckles, lined in a tight, taut row, connected with Bell’s face.

  There was a quavering aftershock, like a bell tolling between his eyes, and everything in his line of vision vibrated and dimmed. Voices lapped at him. Hands cupped under his arms, lifting him. A sprinkle of someone’s sweat. Breath on his face, asking if he was all right, Reverend Bell, say something, anything.

  The picture seemed to steady itself then, shook out the wrinkles and creases. He saw that a police officer was dragging the Levee thug to the 22nd Street police station.

  Bell followed them there.

  As he stood in the dank station, filing a complaint, his assailant, still restrained, glowered at him.

  “I wish I had you in a closet,” he said, “where I could murder you.”

  If Minna were a lesser madam, she might murder Nellie, or at least whip the harlot senseless. The girl stood before her, fists screwed into hips, chin thrust forward, rosebud mouth pinched tight. Minna sighed. She should have released the girl back when she’d conspired with that pitiful mottle-faced dive keeper, Pony Moore, to blame her and Ada for the death of Marshall Field Jr. But no—she’d been too soft, taking the harlot’s teary apologies as genuine, settling the situation with a stern warning.

  So how did Nellie thank her? The little vixen nosed her way into Ada’s bookkeeping system, mucked with the numbers so that the inmates were getting paid more than they’d actually earned. This time when they caught her, Nellie was more defiant than sorry. Look at that expression—nearly daring Minna to dismiss her.

  The last time Minna had been this angry with a harlot was when Phyllis betrayed two of the Club’s sacred rules: No pimps and no drugs. This Phyllis—a different girl from the one who’d plotted with Nellie during the Marshall Field Jr. debacle—had come to the Club from Kansas City. Minna opened the door to find a petite blonde, nearly in tears. She leaned in to hear what the poor girl was saying.

  “I hope you like me,” Phyllis whispered. “The man to whom I was engaged died suddenly of heart failure—I just had to get away from unpleasant surroundings. I have no parents and here I am. It’s a strange adventure for me, but I am sure I could learn.”

  By this point, Minna was sold—whoever this creature was, she was flawless—but she let the girl continue.

  “My betrothed betrayed me,” Phyllis went on, voice trembling, “which brings no regrets. From what I heard on the train, a life of shame in this adorable house must be the most glorious existence imaginable. May I stay?”

  She stayed.

  Within a week, the Everleighs’ wealthiest clients were battling for her attentions. The sisters were stunned: This virginal nymph had instincts about the business that were lacking in some of their most seasoned courtesans. For one thing, the girl sure knew her Balzac. She blindfolded every man who had the good sense to choose her, leading him up to a boudoir laden with her personal flourishes—a genuine Turkish mattress covered with white cashmere; dimmed lights looming from the ceiling like dying stars; fresh-cut roses spilling from vases, petals scattered about the floor. The men knew such attention to detail wouldn’t be lost when the focus turned to the business at hand.

  But when the harlot ventured out one afternoon and didn’t report back come nightfall, the madams suspected a serious problem. Another day passed with no sign of Phyllis, and then three more. The sisters’ fears were confirmed through the Levee grapevine: One of their star girls was sacked out in an opium den on Bed Bug Row, high out of her tiny mind, cavorting with some Chinese pimp.

  “When Phyllis finally showed up on the fifth day,” recalled a fellow harlot, “looking like she had been drawn through a knothole, Minna told her to pack up and get the hell out and never show her face around there again. It wasn’t the opium alone. That Chinese lover-boy also complicated things. Minna and Ada didn’t want any pimps lousing up the telephone lines.”

  Even Vic Shaw woul
dn’t take this castoff, so Phyllis ventured first to Big Jim’s place, the Saratoga, and then to the $1 door at the House of All Nations, where a harlot at the $5 door snidely inquired about her “toboggan slide” since she’d left the Everleigh Club. The ensuing catfight was heard throughout the block. With three front teeth missing and no money for dental work, Phyllis returned permanently to Bed Bug Row, making 22 cents per trick. A sad case, but allowing girls to mix with pimps would prompt accusations that the Everleigh Club dealt in white slavery—the sort of stain that could never be masked or erased.

  Nellie’s transgression wasn’t as public or potentially dangerous, but a second offense could not go unpunished.

  “What are you going to do to me?” the harlot asked.

  Minna was silent for a moment, considering her words.

  “Nothing,” she answered, and sighed again. “If you had done to a church or to a bank what you’ve done to me they’d have you locked up—a horrible example. One of our girls had a father in St. Louis who went to jail for helping himself to a collection box in a church. They called it embezzlement and it was a terrible disgrace. And you, Nellie, have brought disgrace upon this house, but we won’t go into legal bosh. Please leave as quietly as possible.”

  Nellie left, and her cohorts in the fraudulent entries were forgiven—this time. Still, Minna had a feeling they hadn’t heard the last of the girl. Most likely she’d end up going to Vic Shaw, who always held the door open for Everleigh Club expats.

  At least the latest Levee scandal touched the rival madam, for once, instead of the sisters. As owner of the Casino, Vic Shaw’s husband, Roy Jones, had been entangled in the Mona Marshall spectacle, though his troubles likely would prove ephemeral. The price for stopping an indictment on a charge of pandering was $1,000, and twice that amount quashed a complaint of harboring a girl. Roy Jones could pay the graft fees and carry on as usual, no matter how aggressively Clifford Roe pursued him. The prosecutor was in over his head, battling a system they hadn’t taught him in law school.

  Minna waited a few moments by the front door, anticipating Nellie’s return, a timid tap or a furious hailstorm of fists or an insistent pressing of the bell. And…nothing. Just spurts of muted music, the distant rattle of trains. She moved a foot to her left, pulled back the curtain, peered around the endless procession of carriages and grubby errand boys darting from house to house. No Nellie loitering on Dearborn Street, as far as Minna could see. In fact, no one of much interest at all, though surely the visiting firemen would resume their usual post in just a few hours.

  She’d heard what Bell and his lemmings said after their Levee canvassing. She and Ada, apparently, not only paid top dollar for their girls and lined them up at the disease doctor’s door, but were foolish enough to admit such things before the very people endeavoring to shut them down. What nonsense—and not even inventive nonsense at that.

  Well, she had an alternate story of her own. And because she was not only the best madam on the line, but a lady, she upheld the Club’s rules of unyielding discretion whenever she repeated it.

  And she did repeat it.

  A prominent reformer visited again, Minna said, this time by himself. No, she wouldn’t divulge his name, but here’s one hint—it was always in the newspapers, and everyone knew his face. One night, in order to experience the very conditions he devoted his life to destroying, the man came into the parlor, farther than he’d ever ventured before. He gave a pseudonym that fooled no one and said he was looking for some special attention.

  “How much for a little party?” he whispered.

  One of the harlots leaned in close.

  “Special price of $25,” she breathed, tickling his reddening neck, “for you.”

  With shaking fingers, the man pulled $50 from his wallet. The girl accepted the money, told him to follow her upstairs—she’d give him change and plenty else. When they reached her room, the man told her he’d decided against a party after all. Would it be all right if they just sat and talked?

  “In that case,” said the Everleigh butterfly, “you don’t get any change.”

  Everyone who heard the story applied a layer before passing it on. Later, this mysterious visitor would be described as a “crusader…noted for his good works among the denizens of the Levee” and a “well-publicized muck-raker.” Edgar Lee Masters spoke of “flexible moralists” who found the Club’s back doors useful for “furtive exits.” Some intimated he was a lawyer; others, a preacher. The sisters never revealed the visitor’s identity or profession, but they did add a punch line: It was a lucky thing they didn’t change their ways, or the poor fellow would be out of a job.

  Bell’s encounter with the thug on Armour Avenue earned him both a black eye and considerable notoriety. The Daily News called him the “star actor” in “one of the worst riots in the history of the 22nd Street red-light district.” If the Levee thugs didn’t know his name before, they did now, and now his character, too, was battered and bruised.

  At the end of June, a group of Levee leaders accused both the Midnight Mission and reformers “who do not hide their motives under the cloak of piety” of blackmailing madams and dive keepers. After procuring a girl, they delivered her to any resort where her face and history were unknown. A week later, she was “discovered” by the same reformers who had placed her there. If the madam wanted to stop prosecution, she had to pay a hefty sum. If she refused, the reformers sent an anonymous note to the police.

  “Would it surprise you much to learn,” said one madam, “that so-called reformers placed girls in houses and then had the houses raided and ‘white slave’ cases fixed up?”

  The attorney for another madam joined in. “Of all the evil characters in the world,” he fumed, “a lying preacher is the worst…there are men parading the streets of Chicago at night in the garb of clergymen, and their hearts beneath are slimy.”

  Bell dignified the charge with four words: “It is a lie.”

  Even worse, they attacked the work he began long ago, before he’d even come to Chicago or heard of the Levee. Some scheming madam or pander circulated a rumor that the government was investigating Bell for fraud. The superintendent of the Midnight Mission accepted between $7,000 and $8,000 from people who believed they were donating to “vague” causes in India, and kept it for himself instead.

  Because Bell was off working in the Levee, Mary had to defend him.

  The allegations, she said, were the “work of enemies” and “without foundation.”

  The Lord blessed the persecuted, he reminded himself, and his thoughts were validated by a letter from his boyhood pastor back in Canada:

  We were glad to receive your letter, and to be assured that the heathen in Chicago have not yet made away with you. I expect to hear of your translation by the thug route, some of these days, if you still keep up the struggle against vice as you have done and are doing. You are braver than anybody ever thought you were. God must be holding you for a special work, in Babylon there.

  It was easy to tuck those words in a place where Bell could always reach them, easy to coat his own words with similar courage and bluster. “The market for white slaves, the illegal red-light district, must be abolished,” he wrote in the fall. “In Chicago, the Levee must go. Delenda est Carthago!”

  But when the manager of the Casino—the very scum who sent Levee thugs to kill him—approached and said he would “gladly quit the brothel business” if he could “sell out,” could one blame Bell for being wary?

  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 t
heir 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.