Sin in the Second City (37 page)

The judge appointed Rockefeller Jr. as foreman. But he’d never patronized the demimondes, Junior protested, and would be embarrassingly inept in the role. The judge was adamant. “You owe it as a duty to the city,” he insisted, “to do your part in crushing out the vile practices that are said to exist.”

The arrangement was a setup. Tammany Hall bosses knew Junior. For the first eight years of his life Rockefeller Sr. clothed his namesake in his sister’s hand-me-down dresses, frilly confections with doily collars and silk sashes, a Little Lord Fauntleroy in drag. Junior was shy and nervous and prone to debilitating breakdowns that lasted for years. He was as repressed as his father was libertine. Clearly, Junior was his mother’s son, and too squeamish to immerse himself in New York City’s underworld. The grand jury would go through the motions for a month or so and issue some benign, inconsequential report.

Tammany was wrong. Once Junior accepted the post, it became his clearest path to autonomy—the one task he could conquer without the burden of his father’s might. “I never worked harder in my life,” he said later. “I was on the job morning, noon, and night.” He declined to talk to the harlots himself, but spared no expense finding the best people to investigate for him.

So he called Clifford Roe.

Roe cut out several newspaper clippings about recent white slave trials and enclosed them with a letter to Rockefeller. He hoped the grand jury was making progress, he wrote, and that they might meet in New York in the very near future.

On Thursday night, March 7, immediately after exchanging vows, the new Mr. and Mrs. Roe boarded a train for New Orleans. Upon their arrival, they took a carriage (Roe refused to travel by automobile) to the exquisite Hotel Grunewald on Baronne Street. A marble staircase descended into a lobby cluttered with imported statues, and a parlor called the Gold Room hosted the most exclusive parties in town, just like its illicit counterpart nine hundred miles to the north, on South Dearborn Street.

A
nd so, for Americans, after three years of hearing about the perils of cities, after being asked by ads in
The Washington Post
if they “admired the ostrich” or preferred frank, “anti-ostrich” articles about “girls going wrong,” after witnessing Clifford Roe push successfully for new pandering laws in twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia, it all came down to the spring of 1910, when their fears were both officially validated and addressed.

Illinois congressman James Mann, wearing professorial wire glasses and a tidy white beard, stood before his colleagues and spoke about his bill. While the representative, admittedly, hadn’t traveled the Middle Passage, he felt justified in making a ludicrous comparison. “The white slave traffic,” he said, “while not so extensive, is much more horrible than any black-slave traffic ever was in the history of the world.”

Representative William E. Cox of Indiana agreed, declaring white slavery “a thousand times worse and more degrading in its consequences.” Virginia’s representative Edward Saunders spoke of white slavery’s “headquarters and distributing centers in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, and many other American cities.” Thetus Sims of Tennessee admitted that whenever he thought of “a beautiful girl taken from one State to another…and drugged, debauched, and ruined…[sold] to any brute who will pay the price, I cannot bring myself to vote against this bill.” And Gordon Russell of Texas counted among the bill’s supporters “every pure woman in the land…every priest and minister of the Living God…[and] men who reverence womanhood and who set a priceless value upon female purity. Upon the other side you would find all the whoremongers and the pimps and the procurers and the keepers of bawdy houses. Upon that other side you would find all those who hate God and scoff at innocence and laugh at female virtue.”

On June 25, 1910, the last day of the session, President William Howard Taft signed the White Slave Traffic Act into law. “Now let’s hope,” he told Congressman Mann, “they put some of the scoundrels in prison.”

B
ell was going on tour, a Progressive Era rock star who was no longer a mere opening act for Clifford Roe. The reverend’s book had educated millions of parents about the white slave evil, set sons on a righteous path, saved daughters from certain ruin and death. He would leave Chicago on September 29 and return the last day of October, hitting twelve American cities and parts of Canada, seven thousand miles in all. Other prominent reformers would be along for the ride, but Bell was singled out by the newspapers as “a tower of strength.”

On the eve of his departure, the Midnight Mission members threw a farewell party in the German Room of the Grand Pacific Hotel. Bell had confidence that work in the Levee would maintain momentum during his absence. Over the summer, they began printing pamphlets in thirty-four foreign languages and moved into new headquarters at 2136 Armour Avenue. Chronic plumbing problems aside, it was an ideal locale, with windows overlooking the hardest stretch of the Levee. His saints vowed to keep pressure on the Chicago Vice Commission, send a letter arguing that “segregation provides the best rendezvous for white slavers and other such criminals who are best maintained by a centralized and commercialized evil.”

Still, Bell was uneasy as his train pulled out of Union Station that night, plumes of smoke ghosting across a slate sky. Dean Sumner, so far, had kept his thoughts about the commission’s progress to himself, and Bell had to rely on newspaper reports and random scraps of gossip. He knew the Chicago City Council had officially recognized the commission and appropriated $5,000 for its investigative work—developments that, on the surface, should be construed as positive. But there was something that worried him even more than Sumner’s ambiguity, something that lodged like a ten-pound rock inside his chest: City council passed the ordinance without a single dissenting voice; even Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna voted with the ayes.

A
LOST SOUL

Hallway to the entrance of 2131, the Everleigh Club.

I do not mind mankind’s crimes, but I do mind its hypocrisy.

—M
INNA
E
VERLEIGH

D
on’t worry, was the word from Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink. Mayor Busse was confident that the Vice Commission was going to recommend segregation as usual. Besides, what sort of investigation were these fools going to conduct with a paltry $5,000 budget? One single block on South Dearborn Street earned more than that over a weekend. Hell, the Everleigh Club alone could pocket that amount in a single night!

Most significant, the aldermen confided, it looked as though Carter Harrison II planned to run for a fifth term, and if anyone recognized the lunacy of wiping out the Levee, it was Harrison, son of Chicago’s favorite son. The Busse administration had been tolerable, but a Democrat always set things working just right, made the machine hum and whir and click into place.

“A Republican is a man who wants you to go t’church every Sunday,” Bathhouse John pointed out. “A Democrat says if a man wants to have a glass of beer, he can have it.”

Minna had to admit that after a flurry of activity, the visiting firemen seemed a bit subdued—cowed, even. Reverend Bell, for one, took a leave of absence from his usual post outside their door. Roy Jones, Vic Shaw’s repulsive husband, was back in business, operating a full-fledged casino on State Street that fronted as a cigar store. And Clifford Roe had tried to implicate the Everleigh Club in a white slave case, suggesting that one Mr. Charles Herrick had forced his estranged wife, Sophia, to work there—a ludicrous charge that withered after a day of honest scrutiny.

Investigators and Vice Commission members would soon be making the rounds, Bathhouse and Hinky Dink warned. Let them in, answer their questions, and see them on their way.

A sensible enough edict, the Everleighs agreed. The sisters’ hope that reformers would consider their point of view endured, but such optimism was ailing and limp and scarcely worth the maintenance. Six years, now, of dispensing philosophy about uplift and decency the same way the visiting firemen did tracts about Jesus and disease, and still the lurid narrative about the “social evil” persisted without a postscript. Not even the occasional donation to the crusaders’ cause inspired a footnote or thoughtful addendum.

The Levee and the Everleigh Club had its own narrative, longer and infinitely more spectacular, and Minna decided it deserved an update of its own. Since the Club had nothing to hide and plenty to advertise, including a delectable new courtesan nicknamed Brick Top, she planned to issue a promotional brochure. Nothing crude, of course, just lush sepia photographs showcasing each parlor and a mild introduction. The Club hardly needed the publicity, but the cause of segregation could surely use a hand. Besides, if the reformers couldn’t be persuaded, let them at least be peeved.

L
ord, the things they’d seen. Throughout the summer, fall, and now winter of 1910, Graham Taylor, Dean Sumner, and their Vice Commission colleagues had interviewed hundreds of cadets, madams, saloon keepers, shyster physicians, morphine dealers, pimps, and every category of courtesan—white slaves, streetwalkers, resort inmates, harlots who flitted from appointment to appointment like doctors making house calls. Girls could buy a wad of opium tucked inside a folded playing card as if the drug were an ordinary piece of chewing gum. A madam on the West Side estimated that she and her lone boarder received up to four hundred men per week. One brothel employed eighteen inmates, twelve of whom had syphilis and continued to entertain—if one could call it that—with the full knowledge of the madam. Necrosis had set in on one girl’s hand, cells blackening beneath her palm, and still she put it to work. In one house, four harlots performed an exhibition with animals, a description of which was “too vile and disgusting to appear in print.”

On this day, though, they were visiting the “highest-grade resort,” the Everleigh Club. A raw wind sliced through South Dearborn Street, resisting them as they climbed the eleven steps to the landing. No electric signs blazed atop the door; the house was lighted only by the stark yellow spray of the arc lamps and the parlors within.

The head madam opened the door quickly, as if she’d been expecting them. Her silk gown was fitted, and a flock of butterflies made entirely of diamonds perched across its bodice. The other madam, her sister, lurked in the background. Two Negro maids scuttled about with dusters and rags. A Negro man dressed in bright silk livery stood guard nearby, arms clasped behind his back, face tilted toward an intricate tin ceiling. A fountain hissed in the corner, misting what smelled like liquid honeysuckle. From somewhere in the near distance a violin murmured Beethoven. Courtesans did not walk through the parlor so much as glide.

“I found the twenty or more inmates appearing so well in the early evening,” Taylor noted, “that it would have been difficult to distinguish them from high-school graduates or college students. They produced the pennants of several colleges, as though they used them to attract or amuse their patrons. The two middle-aged sisters who had long kept the place were intelligent and well-mannered. They extenuated their nefarious trade by saying that it had to be, and that they, as well as others, might profit by conducting it as decently as it could be managed.

“When asked how they procured inmates, they replied that they always had a waiting list, but insisted upon each one of them answering for herself. Dean Sumner and I were permitted to interview them…few of these inmates failed to claim that they were only there temporarily and would leave the life they were leading when they had earned a competence. Their ‘madame’ somewhat boastfully bade us to persuade, if we could, any of them to leave forthwith. Before leaving the handsomely furnished clubhouse, bearing a name that ranked it as aristocratic, I inquired of the madame how she dared to deal so destructively with both the body and the very life of each inmate. Her hollow, hysterical laughter fittingly accompanied her flippant reply.”