Sin in the Second City (10 page)

There was nothing left for them there.

W
hile dives across the country specialized in the defloration of young virgins, beatings, bondage, and daisy chains—a continuous line of girls pleasuring one another with fingers and mouths—the Everleighs proved that madams could conduct business with decency and class. Some situations couldn’t be helped. Many courtesans suffered from chronic pelvic congestion, a dull, persistent pain caused by continuous sex without orgasm. The latest medical books described a woman’s most fertile period as during and after menstruation, but working girls knew better. Still, mistakes happened, and older women, usually retired madams, ran baby farms for prostitutes’ children. Girls died from all manner of horrid abortion procedures, and syphilis was a dreadful hazard.

“It is claimed that this disease originates in the underworld,” mused a madam named Josie Washburn, who worked in Omaha shortly before the sisters, “which is not wholly true, as it can be found scattered among all classes. The underworld is obliged to be on its guard all the time to elude it.”

There were precautions one could take, sheaths made of animal skin, but clients often balked—“wet, flabby sheep’s gut,” as one man put it. Leave it to the French to improve upon the idea, offering products supposedly pleasing to both parties, with fanciful names like “le Conquérant” and “le Porc-epic.” But even when harlots were appropriately vigilant, they often emphasized efficiency instead of fantasy—the “anti-Balzacs,” as the Everleighs might say.

One laborer’s experience in a modest brothel in New Orleans’s Storyville was typical:

“You wouldn’t believe how fast those girls could get their clothes off. Usually they’d leave on their stockings and earrings, things like that. A man usually took off his trousers and shoes. New girls didn’t give you a second to catch your breath before they’d be all over you trying to get you to heat up and go off as soon as possible…. When it came to the actual act, though, the routine was standard…. I think the girls could diagnose clap better than the doctors at that time. She’d have a way of squeezing it that, if there was anything in there, she’d find it. Then she’d wash it off with a clean washcloth. She’d lay on her back and get you on top of her so fast, you wouldn’t even know you’d come up there on your own power…. I’d say that the whole thing, from the time you got in the room until the time you came, didn’t take three minutes…. Most all the married women you run across are just a different kind of whore. But a man keeps looking for somebody he can just feel—well, like he isn’t always alone.”

T
he sisters packed their finest dresses, lists of influential clients, and collections of butterfly pins and set off, two country girls eager to return Chicago’s thrilling embrace. On the way, sitting face-to-face in their Pullman Palace car, they determined to enforce the same standards that elevated their Omaha resort—no wringing a client’s body as if it were a piece of wet laundry. Courtesans would be encouraged to perform orally as often as possible; there was less risk and more money involved. A man who came to their house would see everything he wanted to and nothing he didn’t, and he would never feel rushed or cheated, disillusioned or alone.

The sisters also edited the story of how they became madams and planned to redefine what it meant to be one. A rejection of their impeccable standards would mean nothing less than war—against both prostitution as it should be and the invented histories they longed to have.

THE STORIES EVERYONE KNEW

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

—H
AVELOCK
E
LLIS

A
s the century drew to a close, white slavery narratives began spreading beyond midwestern lumber camps. The sheer volume of stories bolstered the notion of a “traffic in girls”—especially in bustling urban centers like Chicago.

“Never before in civilization,” wrote Hull House founder Jane Addams, “have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.” The city’s status as a major rail center made it an ideal location for unscrupulous madams and procurers. How easy it was to feign a welcoming presence at the train stations, to talk of opportunities behind counters or desks, of stardom on stages. The girls came by the hour, bodies tilting from the weight of their bags, stepping from the platform into a world of unrelenting clamor and smoke and sin, knowing they’d just left a place they might never see again. Under the headline
MISSING GIRLS
, the
Chicago Inter Ocean
explored the mysterious disappearances of young women in the city and suggested an “agony column” listing all their names.

Reform organizations reflected this progress. The New York Committee for the Prevention of the State Regulation of Vice went national, reinventing itself as the American Purity Alliance. They planned for their first National Purity Congress, to be held in Baltimore in October 1895.

Two hundred delegates attended, representing philanthropic organizations from across the country. In subsequent months, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York hosted additional conferences. Subscription rolls for
The Philanthropist,
now the official journal of the American Purity Alliance, doubled in size by January 1896. One year later, they had circulated more than a million pages of literature—including a 472-page monograph of speeches from the inaugural Baltimore Purity Congress. One address, penned by a former journalist and WCTU missionary named Charlton Edholm, was titled “The Traffic in Girls.”

In her first version of this address, Edholm spoke of “an organized, systematized traffic in girls,” basing her case solely on evidence proffered by Englishman William T. Stead. But in 1899 she issued a revised edition—one that revolutionized the white slavery debate in America just as the Everleigh sisters arrived in Chicago, preparing a revolution of their own.

Edholm hails Stead in her prelude as “the deliverer and protector of little girls from human gorillas,” but this time the substance of the report is based on investigations in America. “We have used facts which have come under our own observation,” Edholm stresses. “There is a slave trade in this country, and it is not black folks this time, but little white girls—thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen and seventeen years of age—and they are snatched out of our arms, and from our Sabbath schools and from our communion tables.”

She describes the “false employment snare,” in which rural girls are tricked by want ads in big-city newspapers. Once trapped in a “haunt of vice,” victims are held in debt slavery; the madam confiscates their clothes and charges an outlandish price for the scanty uniform of the brothel.

Beware, also, the missionary warns, of the snare of mock marriage and seduction:

“There are men,” she writes, “who in their clubs bet on the virtue of a girl as men would bet on the speed of a horse, and some villain deliberately wagers that in a given time he will have accomplished her ruin and then at the expiration of the months or weeks he returns to his club in high glee, and tells ‘the fellows’ all about it—the drugs used, the liquors employed, the vows of marriage sacredly promised, the blackest of lies told, the tenderest kisses and caresses bestowed and—at last, the girl basely deserted or turned over to the keeper of a house of shame for twenty-five dollars, there to undergo such atrocities as would make even devils weep.”

And the snare of drugs:

“When I was a bartender,” one “converted” man confessed to Edholm, “those procurers used to come there, and often I’ve seen one of these men bring a beautiful girl to the ladies’ entrance…. I would drop a little drug into whatever that girl had to eat or drink, and in a few moments she would be unconscious and that fellow would have a carriage drive to the door, that girl would be placed in it and driven right straight to a haunt of shame.”

Procurers are nefarious, mostly foreign men, Edholm concludes, who scour dance halls for victims, stash chloroform-soaked rags in their pockets, pay slave wages, and prey on virgins as young as ten years old. She advocates temperance, women’s suffrage, censorship, passing anti-vice laws, and eliminating the double standard of morality—meaning, of course, that boys should aspire to the moral purity of girls. (What a disgraceful irony, from the reformers’ point of view, that women eventually adopted freedoms once reserved exclusively for men.)

With this updated “The Traffic in Girls,” the American white slavery crusade finally and fully branched off from its British roots and came into its own. Reformers across the country repeated and embellished Edholm’s narratives, panders used them as handy instruction manuals, and harlots memorized all the ways they might be tricked or trapped.

No one learned Edholm’s stories better than a girl named Mona Marshall, who in 1907 would emerge from a brothel in Chicago’s Levee district to change American history.

LORDS AND LADIES OF THE LEVEE

Hinky Dink Kenna