Sin in the Second City (24 page)

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.

B
ell’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?

C
lifford 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 their 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.

A
nother 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.

The government also dispatched a special team of inspectors to red-light districts across the country. Men posed as pimps and panders and common salesmen. Female “inspectresses”—a revolutionary notion in a time when municipal police departments still practiced exclusion—adopted the tawdry costumes and crude demeanor of inferior madams. Agents boarded trains for New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Ogden, Butte, Denver, Buffalo, Boston, New Orleans, and Chicago, determined to drag the darkest parts of the underworld into plain sight.

DISPATCH
FROM THE U.S.
IMMIGRATION COMMISSION

Pray, forgive me, Sir, for the seemingly out of place story I relate here, but it is so very characteristic that I cannot abstain from telling it here. I met a man at Seattle, I was told he had grown rich as a leading importer of “human flesh” and has now given up his vocation as a pimp. I entered into a conversation with him. I was, to him, a drummer for a neckwear house.

“Yes, business is bad,” I said to him in the course of conversation. With flippant cynicism or cynical flippancy he said to me,

“Why don’t you get a few battleships to work for you?”

“Battleships? What is that?” I asked.

“Why, girls, of course, girls,” he answered.

“And why do you call them battleships?” I inquired, to which he answered, “Because they have port-holes.”

—S
PECIAL
I
MMIGRATION
I
NSPECTOR
M
ARCUS
B
RAUN

MORE IMMORAL
THAN HEATHEN CHINA

The Oriental Music Room at the Everleigh Club.

The Shanghai is nothing like this.
Oh, how I’m going to love it here.

—S
UZY
P
OON
T
ANG

T
here was that old biddy again, her spindly legs scampering across Dearborn Street, looking like a fledgling about to take off for the first time. Minna squinted through a slit in the front door and then quickly pulled it shut. Yes, it was definitely her. Lucy Page Gaston. Peripheral ally of the visiting firemen and, most vehemently, head crusader of the Anti-Cigarette League. “The weed,” as she called it, made one insane.
It was ruining the city’s youth! Its smoke was akin to the devil’s breath!
Gaston visited the Everleigh Club often to explain, ever so helpfully, why its inhabitants were doomed in the hereafter.

While Ernest Bell and his blatant lies were irritating, Minna and Ada found Gaston both hilarious and pitiful, and they ordered their harlots not to embarrass the crusader. Under no circumstances, for example, were the girls to smoke in Gaston’s presence, tempting though the thought might be. And Ethel, an Everleigh butterfly who had a fondness for chewing tobacco—and spitting old plugs onto the Club’s Oriental carpeting—wasn’t permitted anywhere near the reformer.