Sin in the Second City (33 page)

The one shining spot in his life, at the moment, was his book contract. Currier Publishing, the parent company of
Woman’s World,
asked him to edit an anthology of essays to be titled
War on the White Slave Trade: Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls.
They promised him a $400 advance, part of which, he told Mary, could be set aside for college expenses for daughter Clare and son Rex. Several prominent reformers, including Roe and Edwin Sims, agreed to contribute. Agents of the magazine planned to knock on doors all over the country and sell copies, one by one.

Bell toured the Levee during the day before his sermons, jotting down observations, listing the nationalities of the dive keepers. Two or three places owned by Italian men, most notably Big Jim Colosimo. A “score of resorts…all of them extremely flagrant,” managed by Jews. The French were the worst offenders; no fewer than fourteen resorts had blinking signs with “Paris” or “Parisian” in their names.

In early October, just when Bell needed it most, the Lord sent news that made him forget about McCann and every empty sermon, the sinners who slipped past his reach. Gypsy Smith, the British evangelist, kept the vow he’d made two years earlier and was returning to Chicago. He planned a march through the Levee district that would make the First Ward Ball seem like a quiet, intimate gathering.

D
etectives arrested Mollie Hart first, on October 8. The girl left the Paris without incident, her only defense an offense: It was all Maurice Van Bever’s fault; he used her as his tool, and she had to obey him or else. Sarah Joseph, the Jewish white slave, was rescued and sent to the Florence Crittenden Home for protection.

Mike Hart was more elusive. He never received his wife’s letter, but he heard of her arrest and avoided the traps detectives set for him. Roe’s cadre of sleuths posed as underworld figures and kept on Hart’s trail, finally spotting him on the corner of Wabash Avenue and Harrison Street.

Van Bever, however, was nowhere to be found.

“When Mollie and Mike were arrested,” Roe wrote, “the word spread through the underworld of Chicago like wild fire.”

And the underworld of Chicago spread their own word in return, releasing story after story, each one subsuming and erasing the last. Van Bever had fled to France. Van Bever had fled to Seattle. Van Bever was still in Chicago, hiding out in a downtown hotel.

This last lead was confirmed by Roe’s best sleuth—a man called, simply, “the Kid”—who summoned two city policemen. Too late—Van Bever was again invisible. Roe’s men were everywhere at once, watching all edges of the city, depots, streetcars, boats, carriages. There Van Bever was, climbing into a closed carriage on State Street, heading south. And there he went, disembarking from that carriage and jumping into another traveling north on Dearborn. His comrades were always prepared, closed carriages idling, ready to spirit him away at any hour. Detectives took a cue from this approach, paying off certain hansom drivers and express wagons to follow Van Bever and offer him rides, pretend they were on his side.

Still no luck.

On the afternoon of October 13, Roe was walking through the Loop, heading west on Washington Street. City Hall stood to his right and the Chamber of Commerce to his left, a magnificent building with an interior courtyard awash in natural light. There, parked nearby, was a closed carriage he’d seen before. Its coachman, also familiar, wore a high silk hat and maroon livery festooned with solid gold buttons.

Roe stepped into the shadow of the building. All around him the city roared. He hid inside its noise, waiting, heart pecking at his chest. Time lolled, lazy and oblivious, seconds into minutes, and then there he was, Maurice Van Bever, stepping out of the Chamber of Commerce. His coachman opened the carriage door.

Roe stepped forward, out of his chaotic cocoon, and touched the man once, softly, on the shoulder.

“Your name is Van Bever?” he asked.

“The man so bold as a slave owner turned deathly white,” Roe later recalled. “There seemed to be not a drop of blood left in him.”

Van Bever stuttered, then steadied his voice. “Yes,” he said, and that was that.

Roe motioned for a nearby policeman to make the arrest. The pander was permitted, per his request, to travel to the Desplaines Street station in his own carriage. Once there, Van Bever insisted he didn’t even know he was wanted. “If the Hart woman accused me of assisting her in any way in that work, it is not true,” he added. “I have always lived up to the orders of the police department in having all the girls registered at the stations. I never was arrested before, and I do not care to say anything more until I consult my attorney.”

Roe’s men captured Julia Van Bever next and began searching for panders in St. Louis. The press seized news of the “underground railway” between the two cities. At last, because of the Van Bever case, federal legislation seemed imminent. Ernest Bell, Arthur Burrage Farwell, and Edwin Sims were planning to consult with Congressman James R. Mann of Hyde Park.

“Chicago at last has waked up to a realization of the fact that actual slavery that deals in human flesh and blood as a marketable commodity exists in terrible magnitude in the city today,” Roe boasted. “It is slavery, real slavery, that we are fighting…. The white slave of Chicago is a slave as much as the Negro was before the civil war…as much as any people are slaves who are owned, flesh and bone, body and soul, by another person…. That is what slavery is, and that is the condition of hundreds, yes, thousands of girls in Chicago at present.”

He hunkered down to prepare for his upcoming trials. Maurice Van Bever, if convicted, would be his most important success to date.

The Frenchman’s longtime partner in the Levee, meanwhile, made some preparations of his own.

B
ell was distraught. All that excitement, all those prayers of thanks, and now the Gypsy Smith march might never happen.

Chicago’s chief of police, Leroy Steward, refused to grant a permit. Appointed by Mayor Busse during the McCann scandal, the new chief wanted to hone the department’s image, even imbue it with an air of refinement. He spoke of his interest in theosophy and “primal topics.” Delicate, wire-rimmed glasses sat low on a pointed nose, a pipe remained clenched perpetually between his lips. There would be no unseemly talk of graft payments during
his
tenure.

It wasn’t proper, Steward argued, for an evangelist to bring undue attention to the Levee district by leading a parade through its streets. It was “inherently vicious,” he added, “a huge slumming party” and “sensational advertising scheme.” But Gypsy Smith persisted. Sin must be exposed before it could be destroyed.

On October 16, two days before the parade’s scheduled date, Chief Steward finally relented. Prolonging the evangelist’s campaign to secure a permit would only ensure a larger crowd than had been expected in the first place.

He ordered a cavalcade of mounted policemen to escort the marchers, hoping to prevent any rioting.

T
he department also dispensed a secret order to the Levee:

If you show yourself tonight during the parade, if a light shows from your house or if there is any sign of life from it while the parade is passing, you might just as well go out of business.

Keep off the streets, in the houses and away from the windows tonight.

Every resort must comply, including the Everleigh Club.

Minna and Ada had returned to Chicago in the fall, relaxed and refreshed, talk of Agnes Barrette and seventeen-year-old Jewish girls duly forgotten. The Levee was a bit jumpy, what with the McCann trial and a new police chief eager to “decentize” the city, as he put it, but Hinky Dink made the necessary assurances. “The women have to be somewhere,” the alderman said, “and they might as well be where they bother the least people.”

The sisters decided they would heed part of the police department’s order. Vanderpool Vanderpool must sit on his hands, and no one could climb the stairs, but clients would be admitted and free to mingle, quietly, about the parlors. Minna unlocked her frustration, speaking words meant only for Ada’s ears.

“A girl in our establishment is not a commodity with a market-price, like a pound of butter or a leg of lamb,” she ranted, while her sister
mmmhmm
ed in all the right places. “She is much more on the same level with people belonging to professional classes, who accept fees for services rendered; she charges in accordance with the client’s means. She doesn’t ‘sell herself ’ as these egg-heads keep shouting. Such statements are unfair and unjust…. A saner and truer conception of womanhood and of the responsibilities of women is the only way I know of that we can expect to take the sting out of ‘slipping.’”

Ada let her sister finish. Minna fretted and fumed when they were alone, but never in front of the girls, her boys, or the visiting firemen
—especially
the visiting firemen. In fact, just as the Gypsy Smith cavalcade passed by 2131–2133 South Dearborn Street, Minna planned to gather everyone together and propose a raucous toast.

T
here were thousands, Bell thought, seven, eight at least, packed inside the Seventh Regiment Armory, a sprawling brick structure with a tower on each end, raised up like the arms of Jesus. He was the warm-up act to Gypsy Smith’s main event, having preached just moments before to his largest audience ever. And now the crowd belonged to the evangelist, this brilliant man who was born in a tent and never attended even one day of school. Smith stepped through the mass of bowed heads and clasped hands, waiting for a chorus of prayers to drift into a single “Amen.” Silence, now. He was humble, simply dressed, with worn loafers that rasped across the floor as he paced.

“A man who visits the red-light district at night has no right to associate with decent people in daylight,” he shouted, pointing. “No! Not even if he sits on the throne of a millionaire!”

Bodies turned toward the exit, and the rear of the crowd became its head. They spilled out onto 34th Street wordlessly, closed in on either side by a squad of mounted policemen. Lit torches lashed at the night sky. Three brass bands followed, quiet except for the drums, pounding a heartbeat rhythm that kept pace with footsteps. Children marched alongside parents, wearing long black gowns that rippled at their heels.

North on State, west on 22nd. Shouts from the sidelines seared the quiet. Bell watched as onlookers crowded the curbs, jeering and laughing, and good Lord, they were being followed now by thousands,
tens
of thousands, fringing out on all sides. On Dearborn Street, every window was shuttered, every curtain drawn, every door locked, every light darkened.

“To Evangelist Smith’s young crusaders,” wrote Charles Washburn, “it must have seemed that vice was a deadly dull trade.”

The missionaries knelt as one before the Everleigh Club.

Gypsy Smith raised an arm. The brass bands sputtered into song:

Where is my wandering boy tonight?

The boy of my tenderest care

The boy that was once my joy and light

The child of my love and prayer

Where is my boy tonight?

Where is my boy tonight?

Minna’s boys were being good sports about the diversion, packed together on the silk divans and lined along the hallways, Everleigh butterflies keeping them silent company. Even Colonel MacDuff, a prominent Chicago attorney who stayed at the Club for days at a time, played along. The colonel, weary from trying cases, usually stormed through the doors, slapped $500 in Minna’s palm, picked three girls, and headed upstairs. He ordered fried chicken and wine to be served in the boudoir and grew furious when clients tracked him down. Shooing them away, using a chicken leg for emphasis, the colonel explained he must be “thoroughly rested” before resuming work. But tonight the lawyer heeded Minna’s wishes, waiting downstairs, sans chicken leg, with everyone else.

Dim the lights, the madam reminded Edmund, and make sure champagne flutes are filled.

The hymns crept into the pristine quiet of the parlors, uninvited guests demanding attention. “Wandering Boy.” The Twenty-third Psalm. The Lord’s Prayer. “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” And then finally, thankfully, the procession moved nearer to Thee their God all the way out of the Levee.

Within ten minutes, the district was again ablaze, one light setting off the next, a contagious constellation. String bands and professors were released from quarantine. Corks launched into ceilings, dice somersaulted across tables. High heels clicked up stairs in a muted symphony of expectation.

Minna raised an arm, and a hundred glasses kissed in sweet mock tribute.

C
lifford Roe barely slept. The neat compartments of his life spilled into one another. White slave letters piled on his desk. “Dear Sir,” read one, “…I have not been out of the house for three months. I have not got any clothes to wear on the street because I owe a debt. I wish you would come and see me and I can tell you everything…. I am a White Slave for sure…. Please see to this at once.—VIOLA, Armour Avenue.”