Sin in the Second City (13 page)

GREAT IN RELIGION, GREAT IN SIN

Members of the Purity Congress.

We discovered that the scrupulously strict were
correspondently keen to discern suggestions of sex
where nobody else would think of looking for them.

—M
INNA
E
VERLEIGH

C
hicago’s turn to host the National Purity Congress came in the fall of 1901. That its red-light district had long been the wickedest in the country—a distinction recently underscored by the opening of a certain Dearborn Street brothel said to eclipse anything in Paris—only made it a more fitting locale for the reformers’ convention. The city’s myriad woes were finally matched by forces eager to solve them: the Moody Bible Institute; the Cook County Juvenile Court, the nation’s first; Jane Addams’s Hull House; the Anti-Saloon League; Graham Taylor’s Chicago Commons; and the Pacific Garden Mission, responsible for the very public salvation of Chicago White Stockings player Billy Sunday, who was one night so captivated by a sermon preached from the roving “Gospel Wagon” that he accepted Christ as his savior, declined a lucrative contract, and launched a new career as the “baseball evangelist,” traveling the world to preach God’s word.

On October 8, a crisp Tuesday evening, delegates from nearly all fifty states and numerous foreign countries, including England, Holland, France, Canada, and India, filed into the First Methodist Church at Clark and Washington streets. The Reverend John P. Brushingham gave the opening address. England and America, he declared, are “one in language, one in God, but also one in sin, one in drunkenness, and one in the social evil.” He welcomed the visitors to “Chicago, great in population, great in commerce, great in religion, and great in sin.”

For the next three days, the church would be filled to capacity to hear ministers and missionaries, doctors and housewives, professors and white slave crusaders all lecture on every facet of vice. A purity worker named William P. F. Ferguson kicked things off with a speech titled “Police Headquarters and the City Hall in Their Relation to Vice.”

“Precisely the same conditions which exist in Manila may be found in the large cities,” he argued. “By a careful and exact system of fines and licenses and hush money the keepers of disorderly places hang the receipts for the payment of such exactions on the same hooks with their receipted grocery bills.” Dr. Mary Wood-Allen of Ann Arbor, Michigan, followed with a condemnation of the press—especially the comics—for “lowering the tone of the human race by ridiculing the sacred process of wooing.”

Other addresses included:

“The Cure of the Social Evil”

“How to Elevate the Home Life”

“A Strange Silence; Its Cause and Cure” (a rumination on the double standard)

“The Influence of Diet upon Character”

“The Solidarity of Vice and Vicious Methods”

“Divorce Not a Matter of Choice” and

“The Relation Between Modern Social Vice and Ancient Sex Worship”

Closing the conference on Thursday, October 10, 1901, the attendees deemed the event a great success, marred only by one unfortunate incident. While the final speakers advocated for “purity in thought, word, and deed,” Mrs. B. S. Steadwell, wife of the president of the Northwestern Purity Association, was approached by two well-dressed men. Might they, the men asked, see some of the literature she had for sale? Mrs. Steadwell became so engrossed in the discussion, and in the prospect of selling a few pamphlets, that she laid her purse on the table. After she’d sold 40 cents’ worth of literature, the men abruptly ran off, taking the purse with them.

Despite this “active experience with vice,” which left Mrs. Steadwell $3 poorer, the delegates were so taken with Chicago, in all its stunning achievement and shameless decadence, that they decided to reconvene there in 1906, five years hence.

KNOWING YOUR BALZAC

The Japanese Throne Room at the Everleigh Club.

If it weren’t for the married men we couldn’t have
carried on at all, and if it weren’t for the cheating
married women we would have earned another million.

—
THE
E
VERLEIGH SISTERS

P
ulled or prompted, men came to the Everleigh Club. They came to see the Room of 1,000 Mirrors, inspired by Madam Babe Connors’s place in St. Louis, with a floor made entirely of reflective glass. In Minna’s eyes, this parlor paid bawdy tribute to Honoré de Balzac’s
The Magic Skin—
a mirror with numerous facets, each depicting a world.

They came to hear the Club’s string orchestras—the only bordello in the Levee featuring three—and its professor, Vanderpool Vanderpool, whose repertoire included a chipper rendition of “Stay in Your Own Back Yard,” one of the most popular tunes of the era:

Now honey, yo’ stay in yo’ own back yard,

Doan min’ what dem white chiles do;

What show yo’ suppose dey’s a gwine to gib

     
A black little coon like yo’?

They came to see the thirty boudoirs, each with a mirrored ceiling and marble inlaid brass bed, a private bathroom with a tub laced in gold detailing, imported oil paintings, and hidden buttons that rang for champagne. They came to eat in the glorious Pullman Buffet, gorging on southern cuisine and the creations of the Club’s nationally renowned head chef. On any given night, the menu’s specials might offer

ENTREES

supreme of guinea-fowl

pheasant

capon

broiled squab

roasted turkey, duck and goose

SIDES

au gratin cauliflower

spinach cups with creamed peas

parmesan potato cubes

pear salad with sweet dressing

stuffed cucumber salad

carrots (candied or plain)

browned sweet potatoes

Minna’s favorite boys dined again after midnight on a feast of fried oysters, Welsh rarebit, deviled crabs, lobster, caviar—unadorned save for a dash of lemon juice—and scrambled eggs with bacon. For special occasions—a courtesan’s engagement, a birthday, the reappearance of a long-lost Everleigh Club client—Minna ordered the team of chefs to double the usual menu. The madam believed any event that diverted the course of a normal day was a valid excuse to host an epicurean free-for-all.

They came to see the library, filled floor to ceiling with classics in literature and poetry and philosophy, and the art room, housing a few bona fide masterworks and a reproduction of Bernini’s famous
Apollo and Daphne,
which the sisters had failed to find in America. After learning that the original statue was at the Villa Borghese in Rome, Minna sent an artist to capture its image. She was haunted by how the exquisite nymph’s hands flowered into the branches of a laurel tree just as the god of light reaches for her. A gorgeous piece, but she admired the statue mostly for the questions it posed about clients: Why did men who had everything worth having patronize the Everleigh Club? And what if the thing they desired most in this world simply vanished?

They came to see the ballroom, with its towering water fountain, parquet floor arranged in intricate mosaic patterns, and ceiling that dripped crystal chandeliers. They came to see the little oddities that made the Club like no place else in the world: gilded fishbowls, eighteen-karat-gold spittoons that cost $650 each, and the Everleighs’ signature trinket—a fountain that, at regular intervals, fired a jet of perfume into the thickly incensed air.

“By comparison,” wrote Herbert Asbury, “the celebrated Mahogany Hall of Washington, the famous Clark Street house of Carrie Watson, and the finest brothels in New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans were squalid hovels fit only for the amorous frolics of chimpanzees.”

They came to see the soundproof reception parlors, twelve in all. The Copper Room featured walls paneled with hammered brass; the Silver Room gleamed sterling; the Blue Room offered cerulean leather pillows stamped with images of Gibson girls; the furniture in the Gold Room was encrusted with gilt. And a visitor mustn’t forget the Red Room and Rose Room and Green Room, all done in monochromatic splendor.

They came to see the Moorish Room, featuring the obligatory Turkish corner, complete with overstuffed couches and rich, sweeping draperies; and the Japanese Parlor, with its ornately carved teakwood chair resting upon a dais, a gold silk canopy hovering above. (The
Tribune
noted that the Japanese Parlor was “a harlot’s dream of what a Japanese palace might look like inside.”) In the Egyptian Room, a full-size effigy of Cleopatra kept a solemn eye on the proceedings. The Chinese Room, entirely different from the ambiguously named Oriental Room, offered packages of tiny firecrackers and a huge brass beaker in which to shoot them—where else but at the Everleigh Club could a man indulge his adult
and
childish impulses?

“Next week,” Minna often joked, “we are contemplating putting in a box of sand for the kiddies.”

Ada, especially, grew obsessed with the Club’s maintenance. On the rare occasions when she joined Minna in the parlors, she spent half her time wiping smudges from the mirrors, straightening the oil paintings, checking the gold piano for unsightly water marks. “It was a happy day,” she said, “when we conceived the idea of using rubber washers from Mason jars on the bottoms of the glasses.”