Sin in the Second City (27 page)

Mongrels, all of them, pulling America’s identity in dangerous directions, leaving her misshapen and newly strange.

“We no longer draw from Northern Europe,” wrote one native-born observer in 1908. “This enormous influx hails from Russia, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and the southern countries about the eastern end of the Mediterranean—men of alien races, mixed in blood and of many tongues and often the last results of effete and decaying civilizations…. We no longer receive accessions from the best peoples but from the mediocre and the worst.”

Sims sent for Secret Service agents from Washington and twenty-five deputy United States marshals and unleashed them into the Levee. They discovered, in mid-June, a “syndicate of Frenchmen” operating from the Dearborn Street resort of Emma “French Em” Duval and her husband, August. The French had introduced unthinkable perversions into American culture; even the word
French
was now slang for oral sex. The Duvals kept their girls in a barred breaking-in facility called the Retreat located on Blue Island, a small town sixteen miles south of the Loop, and worked in concert with another French couple, Alphonse and Eva Dufour, who ran a brothel at 2021 Armour Avenue, not far from the Shanghai.

On a Tuesday night, June 23, a squad of marshals swarmed Madam Eva’s resort. For a moment, a swath of the Levee paused, craning to see the commotion. At the nearby Paris, whose proprietor, Maurice Van Bever, was the most powerful Frenchman in the district, harlots and johns sprang from beds to peer out the windows. Three young French girls were dragged from Madam Eva’s, a weeping triumvirate in gauzy robes and tattered tights, and locked in cells at the 22nd Street station. Sims questioned them, deciphered their broken English.

“They show that they have been drilled remarkably well,” he said. “When I asked them separately how long they had been in the country, each said five years. Asked how they got here and into disorderly houses, they told stories of similar character. One said she came over to work in a corset factory in New York and was unable to get any more work. Another said she came over with a French family six years ago, and after the family went back to Paris she stayed in New York. The step from the Tenderloin to the Armour Avenue house in Chicago was easy.”

Federal agents seized Eva Dufour’s books and gathered enough evidence to arrest two thousand additional Frenchwomen in Minneapolis, St. Louis, New York City, New Orleans, and Kansas City, all of whom had been sold into brothels via the Chicago headquarters. Sims—who before entering college worked briefly as a newspaper reporter—was adept at disclosing just enough information to maintain interest in his crusade without jeopardizing its progress. Further raids were in the works, he allowed, but he couldn’t elaborate owing to the possible presence of Levee spies in his office, eager to tip off his plans.

I
t was positively surreal. Only three months earlier, Roe had traveled to Springfield to speak at the Capitol, and now that majestic domed structure was overrun with militia, encampments arranged in precise rows across the lawn. The city where Lincoln made his home had erupted in race riots on Friday, August 14, 1908, after a twenty-one-year-old white woman allegedly was snatched from her bed and assaulted by a Negro. In the days since, a mob of white residents, wielding guns and ropes, torched black-owned businesses and homes. William Donegan, an elderly Negro who had been a close friend of Lincoln’s, was strung up on a tree near his home and hanged to death. After an overwhelmed Mayor Roy Reece was forced into hiding, Governor Deneen called in 4,500 National Guardsmen, and finally, on August 17, Springfield was easing into a tentative peace.

Roe, on the first day of a rare vacation, devoured the newspaper reports, paging through the late editions as he headed from Chicago to Elgin, a northwestern suburb. His sixty-nine-year-old mother, Henrietta, sat next to him, her body swaying with the motion of the train, suitcase bumping against her knees. She planned to spend the next two months with her daughter—Roe’s sister—who lived in Elgin with her husband, editor of the
Elgin Daily News.
She worried about leaving Roe home alone, but he told his mother not to worry, he’d be fine. He promised her that he would come out to Elgin every night to visit, even if just for an hour or two.

After pulling into the station, Roe helped his mother onto the platform and down the stairs. He carried her luggage in one hand and held her steady with the other. It was unbearably hot, and if her palms were sweaty she could lose her grip on the railing and fall. His sister’s house was within walking distance, and at the corner of Chicago Avenue and State Street they paused for breath. After a moment, Henrietta stepped from the curb just as Roe turned to pick up her suitcase.

Before he saw the automobile he heard its sounds, the grumble of motor vying with the shriek of brakes—uglier, almost, than the sight they accompanied, all four wheels passing over his mother’s body, legs and torso and arms and head, missing nothing. Roe ran to where she lay, flat and flattened halfway between the curb and the middle of the street. Henrietta’s left elbow was posed unnaturally, her eyes flipped back, unseeing pearls. Blood leaked from her ears. Off to the side a strange woman, the driver of the automobile, was screaming—high and low, closer and removed, the erratic cadence of church bells.

An ambulance sped Roe’s mother to nearby Sherman Hospital. Henrietta didn’t regain consciousness during the ride, but her pulse still twitched under the thin skin of her neck, beneath her bony wrists. The doctors circled and rolled her away. Roe called his sister, who arrived within moments, and they sat together in the waiting room. The screaming woman appeared, too, accompanied by husband and friends. Roe comforted her, said the accident was “unavoidable.”

Doctors doubted his mother would survive. A blood vessel inside her head had ruptured, and she had suffered severe internal injuries. No sign of Henrietta’s brain rousing itself by 2:00 a.m., no improvement at all. When the end came at 6:00 p.m. on August 20, Roe was by her side. For an entire month he didn’t pursue one court case or save one girl.

He began work again in mid-September, timing his return with a lengthy feature in the
Tribune
that praised his war against the white slave traffic. Roe told the reporter that he enjoyed creative writing, loved his work, and still lived with his mother.

M
adam Eva Dufour and her husband posted $25,000 bail in October and escaped to France, a disappointing finale to Edwin Sims’s raids throughout the summer. But he had made considerable progress in spreading the word about white slavery, and in establishing himself as an authority on the subject. At Ernest Bell’s urging, Sims submitted an article to
Woman’s World,
a general interest magazine delivered to more than 2 million homes throughout rural America.

Sims described his work in the Levee and concluded:

It is only necessary to say that the legal evidence thus far collected establishes with complete moral certainty these awful facts: That the white slave traffic is a system operated by a syndicate which has its ramifications from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific ocean, with “clearing houses” or “distributing centers” in nearly all of the larger cities; that in this ghastly traffic the buying price of a young girl is from $15 up and that the selling price is from $200 to $600—if the girl is especially attractive the white slave dealer may be able to sell her for as much as $800 or $1,000; that it is a definite organization sending its hunters regularly to scour France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Canada for victims; that the man at the head of this unthinkable enterprise is known among his hunters as “The Big Chief.”

The magazine arrived at homes in Peoria and Lincoln and Macon, Georgia. Housewives browsing for tips on needlework and recipes instead read Sims’s words by the flicker of gaslight, and passed on his warning to everyone they knew.

S
uzy Poon Tang lasted only one night at the Everleigh Club. The sisters’ millionaire client was so taken with “the roses he found blooming at the gateway to ecstasy,” as her courtesan tutor, Doll, later put it, that he whisked her away to his North Side mansion and married her within the week. The rest of the Everleigh butterflies, relieved to be rid of the competition, cornered Minna and Ada and assaulted them with kisses, thanking the madams for releasing her.

And a harlot they’d lost in unhappier circumstances was found again. Nellie, plotting, plundering Nellie, turned up in the river, her skin blanched and limbs ballooned, bumping up against the moorings along a stretch of water where the crew teams raced on Saturday afternoons. The police recovered her purse, too, inside which she had tucked a note:

“I’ve made mistakes all my life, and the only persons to forgive me were two sisters in a sporting house. Kindly tell, for me, all the psalm-singers to go to hell and stick the clergymen in an ash-can. That goes double for all the parasites who talk a lot but don’t do a damn thing to help a girl in trouble. Call Calumet 412. I’m sure of a decent burial if you do.”

Minna and Ada obliged, selecting for their fallen courtesan a gleaming, silk-lined casket and dozens of vivid bouquets, and took turns consoling all the girls who had known poor Nellie. Along with liars and thieves, madams inevitably hired harlots with the saddest tendencies of all.

IT DON’T NEVER GET GOOD
UNTIL THREE IN
THE MORNING

The annex of the Coliseum, on the eve of the 1908 First Ward Ball.

The
Tribune
has come out against syphilis.
Bet you
8–5
syphilis’ll win.

—
ANONYMOUS

A
s usual, Ada was ready first, her dark honey hair rolled and pinned, her quiet gray gown ribbed with jewels, her lips coated in a soft pink gloss. Reclining on a silk settee in her sister’s boudoir, she watched Minna pace across the length of the floor, ornamenting herself, one at a time, with rings and bracelets and necklaces and pins and brooches until her every inch shone and blinked. At last, fastening around her waist a thick stomacher of diamonds, emeralds, and rubies, Minna was satisfied.

Midnight approached, and the First Ward Ball could not properly start without them—Bathhouse John Coughlin called them the perennial queens of the event. The Everleigh butterflies were already milling about the downstairs parlors, just the right touch of daring with their mousseline waists, slouching plateau hats, and long strands of pearls dipping behind corsets. Katie, Ethel, Lillian St. Clair, “Jew Bertha” Morrison (not to be confused with “Diamond Bertha”), Virginia Bond, Bessie Wallace, Rose Harris, Belle Schreiber, Grace Monroe, and the rest all looked impossibly refreshed despite the recent visit from a client named Uncle Ned. Once a year, around the holidays, Uncle Ned took over the Music Room, thrust his bare feet into buckets of ice, downed a tall glass of sarsaparilla, and ordered the girls to circle him and sing “Jingle Bells.” Shaking a tambourine, Uncle Ned shouted again and again, “Let’s all go for an old-fashioned sleigh ride
…wheee!
”

The harlots insisted they didn’t mind Uncle Ned, but Minna knew his antics grew tedious. “Entertaining most men at dinner or in any one of our parlors,” she pointed out to Ada, “is more tiring than what the girls lose their social standing over.”

Stunners, all of them, but Minna chose only one, the current pick of the house, to ride beside her and Ada in the leading brougham, drawn by three pairs of matched bays, red tassels swishing by their ears (take
that,
Vic Shaw). The rest of the girls would follow in comparatively plain hansoms and hacks, and hurt feelings would be forgotten as soon as they pulled up to the Coliseum. They should be thankful, really, that the Levee’s annual fête was happening at all.