Sin in the Second City (21 page)

The visitors distributed leaflets to Minna and each courtesan. There was silence as they read:

IT IS A PENITENTIARY OFFENSE

TO DETAIN ANY WOMAN IN A HOUSE OF PROSTITUTION

AGAINST HER WILL

No “white slave” need remain in slavery in this State of Abraham Lincoln who made the black slaves free. “For freedom did Christ set us free. Be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage,” which is the yoke of sin and evil habit.

Minna scanned the page and waited for the girls’ reactions.

“Theologians in the inspiration of religious zeal appeared at the Everleigh Club there to kneel before the satin gowned inmates, and beg them in the name of the Saviour to abandon a life of shame,” wrote Edgar Lee Masters. “The girls laughed in their faces; or else stared at them if they chanced to have some comprehension of the vast hypocrisy that reigned in Chicago. For nearly everything was a lie in the life of the city.”

Now, at the first hiccup of laughter Minna turned, beamed a look. She would have none of that—not this first time, anyway. She explained graciously, patiently, that the Everleigh Club was free from disease, that Dr. Maurice Rosenberg examined the girls regularly, that neither she nor Ada would tolerate anything approaching violence, that drugs were forbidden and drunks tossed out, that guests were never robbed nor rolled, and that there was actually a waiting list of girls, spanning the continental United States, eager to join their house. No captives here, Reverends. Sure, they were permitted to come back anytime; she and Ada would be happy to talk further, even give them a grand tour.

“The girls may have been vulgar,” Minna allowed, “but they weren’t hypocrites. They knew what kind of lives they were leading. The visiting firemen never got our slant.”

She bade the crusaders good night, wondered if they would rearrange her words to create a story she’d never told.

B
ell told the story often: The white slavery problem wasn’t limited to the slums and dives and Bed Bug Row. No, it existed even in the Everleigh Club, the place that brought the Levee international fame, run by those “two sisters from Virginia, hard as steel,” who “had suffered at the hands of the world and vowed to get from the world all it would pay.” One night in February, right after Madam Panzy Williams was convicted of enslaving a girl named Agnes, he, Reverend Boynton, Deaconess Lucy Hall, and a detective visited the Club. There, finally, the madam of the house he’d preached in front of nearly every night for the past three years stood before him, with that unsettling smile that implied she knew Bell’s next thought before he even formed it. She and several of her white slaves accepted copies of the Criminal Code of Illinois, and Bell waited, nervous, as they read.

“It was in this canvass that we visited the most infamous and notorious house in the West,” Boynton wrote. “The madam of this particular house told us, in the presence of the policeman, that she had paid $160.00 each for two girls that had been sent her from the South. She also explained how safe her house was from violence and how free from disease, and yet, before our conversation ceased she admitted that she had placed 105 girls in a neighboring Christian hospital for treatment.”

Bell echoed Boynton’s version. “A Virginia woman,” he wrote, “keeper of a notorious resort, patronized by millionaires, told Pastor Boynton, Deaconess Hall and myself that she had bought two women from a woman in New Orleans for $160 each. She told this in ordinary conversation and spoke of the transaction as lightly as a man would speak of buying horses or cows.”

Bell’s tales about the Levee canvassing awakened a few of the sleeping. The nightly open-air sermons got a bit more crowded. Some saints brought their children, girls barely thirteen years old, little palms lifted skyward as they marched past cackling madams and leering pimps. “There’s enough of them little ones already on the road,” one madam protested, “without bringing them good girls into this hole.”

The British evangelist Gypsy Smith, who arrived in Chicago during the Panzy Williams trial, issued a final plea at February’s close to 1,200 Christians. Each one of them, Smith challenged, should “draw a chalk line about himself and have a revival inside the circle” and work to quell the city’s “immoral atmosphere that is growing into a whirlwind.”

“Yes, yes,” the crowd cried back, and Gypsy Smith vowed to return to Chicago in two years.

But these fitful bursts of progress weren’t enough. The First Ward, the heart of Chicago’s culture and commerce, was still run by the most crooked aldermen. The police department still favored segregating the Levee district rather than wiping it out altogether.

“As long as this evil must of necessity exist in every large city,” Police Inspector John Wheeler had said recently, much to Bell’s dismay, “I see no way to put a stop to it here except to get all of the women together in some large inclosure and apply the sulphur method of extermination, such as is adopted to destroy unclaimed and worthless dogs at the pound.”

And every day, more of America’s daughters were being tricked out of their own lives and lured into ruin. Bell found the numbers terrifying. In 1880, only 3,800 women found themselves adrift in Chicago, seeking work during the day and danger at night; now, there were nearly 31,500 collecting paychecks in the city—a growth rate more than three times that of the national average. Nothing was safe here for a girl on her own. Not the train stations or streetcars, the chop suey houses or ice-cream parlors, the dance halls or saloons or the streets that angled past them, the 10-cent vaudeville houses or late night boat rides on Lake Michigan, the department stores or wine rooms or penny arcades, the theatrical or employment agencies, the nickel theaters or amusement parks or automobile rides with a boy she thinks she knows.

Bell knew the battle needed to accelerate, to gain the urgency of an onrushing train, to overcome anyone who refused to climb on.

He thought often of Agnes’s rescue and the conviction of Madam Panzy Williams. Lord, he prayed, send another thunderbolt to alarm the people of Chicago.

The Lord would soon hear Bell and answer him, sending a thunderbolt in the shape of a lawyer.

THE TRAGEDY
OF MONA MARSHALL

Mona Marshall, 1907.

There is not a life that this social evil does not menace.
There is not a daughter, or a sister, who may not be in danger.

—C
LIFFORD
R
OE

O
n the evening of May 25, 1907, Clifford Griffith Roe sat alone in his office on the second floor of the Criminal Court Building, a steady drizzle pattering a Morse code against the windows behind him. The view overlooked the jail where, in 1887, two hundred spectators watched as four men were hanged in the aftermath of the Haymarket anarchists trial. Roe was twelve years old at the time, an obstreperous presence in his Chicago public school classroom, and had already determined that he would be either a preacher or a lawyer. Now, weeks shy of his thirty-second birthday, he was about to blend the two professions more successfully and sensationally than even his boundless imagination could have dreamed.

That it was a Saturday night did not distract him from the work at hand, scouring law books and scribbling notations of upcoming cases. A Cook County assistant state’s attorney for just five months, he was eager to impress his bosses. Let other young men of his age flit about town, escorting dates to the Chicago Opera House and showing off new $2,000 Cadillac Model G’s in the dense State Street traffic. “Mr. Roe,” noted one reporter, “takes life far too seriously to be a shirker.”

His telephone rang, breaking into his thoughts. (Later, in a customary flourish of language, he would recall it ringing “imperatively.”) He hurried to the receiver and said his name. A familiar voice barked over the line.

“This is Captain McCann,” it said. “There is a girl down here who claims she has been sold as a white slave.”

Edward McCann had Roe’s rapt attention. The prosecutor had scored a conviction against Madam Panzy Williams—the pandering case brought to court by the Reverend Ernest Bell—but there hadn’t been a single mention of that victory in the newspapers.

The captain, Roe knew, had just been named to his post. A graft investigation in April revealed that police, after taking out hundreds of warrants against brothel keepers, never made any arrests or returned the warrants to court. In reaction, reform-minded Chicagoans voted Mayor Edward Dunne out of office and elected Republican Fred Busse, who cleared out the police department as a show of good faith. Mayor Busse’s new police captain vowed to keep a hard eye on the Levee.

“Can you come down the first thing in the morning and investigate?” McCann asked.

“I shall be there.”

Chicago’s youngest assistant state’s attorney replaced the receiver, pulled on his black cutaway frock coat, and headed to the Drexel Avenue home he shared with Henrietta, his mother.

Henrietta and Roe’s father, George, were natives of Indiana and of mixed Scottish, English, Welsh, and Irish descent, a lineage Roe would boast of throughout his life. The family moved to Chicago when he was three, where George, a “useful and upright citizen,” dealt in real estate, joined the Disciples of Christ Church and the Republican Party, and instilled within his only son the idea that the world would one day need him. Roe grew up believing it, and as soon as he was able to talk he realized talking was his gift. Words were the only things he trusted; their logic was his currency.

“The day of Mr. Roe’s birth he made a speech on the wrongs of infants,” the
Tribune
wrote, “and he has continued talking on the rights or wrongs of some one or other ever since. He has ideas of his own and he has made up his mind that he is going to let the world know about them…he had one great ally—he was always sure of himself.”

After earning undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Michigan, Roe returned to Chicago in 1902, shortly after the death of his father. He made partner in a major law firm before he turned thirty. Arguing against the best trial lawyers in the city, Roe caught the attention of the head state’s attorney, who offered him a job in December 1906 and assigned him to the Harrison Street station.

“Not a marrying man,” Roe immersed himself in his new position. His few indulgences included the occasional baseball game—all of Chicago was baseball crazy these days, since the White Sox and Cubs faced off in the 1906 World Series—and creative writing. He would, in fact, soon begin work on a play titled
The Prosecutor.

The star of the play—the prosecutor—was named Clinton Randolph, and he was a “tall, broad-shouldered, powerful-looking man, clean-shaven, with a strong jaw, and dark hair slightly sprinkled with gray on the temples…not too young, and yet not even middle-aged, but with a face that shows experience and ripe judgment and great strength of character.”

Clinton Randolph, just like his real-life doppelgänger, always got his man.

O
n Monday morning, May 27, the prosecutor boarded a streetcar near his office and settled in for the ride, about a mile south, to the Harrison Street police station. Blocking out the rush-hour chaos—the grumpy putt-putting of automobiles, the refrains of the street peddlers, the ceaseless clopping of hooves—he replayed yesterday’s interview with Mona Marshall, the white slave who would make his career.