Sin in the Second City
Madams, Ministers, Playboys and the Battle for America's Soul

by Karen Abbott

This book ended up being the palate-cleanser for a week and a half of nonstop Harry Potter. After a few thousand pages of whimsy and life-or-death battle, I turned eagerly to fin de siecle hookers and Windy City squalor. The change of pace was...refreshing, and I'm always a sucker for a book set in Chicago. For all my love of and loyalty to the city, though, I know pretty much fuck all about its history, especially the seedier eras (CPS social studies played up Carl Sandburg, Mrs. O'Leary's cow and Hog Butcher to the World, but failed to educate me adequately on the subjects of serial murder and prostitution). Abbott's book is a history both of Chicago's Levee red light district and the reform movement that grew up around combating it, touching on Ward machine politics and the social luminaries of the time. It's an episodic and at times anecdotal story imbued with a (rare) sense of humor ("A lively place, New Orleans, but the district overall wasn't to their liking - did they really want to operate up the street from a hall called the Funky Butt?") and centered around two sisters who ran for nearly a decade the most famous brothel in the country.

The major narrative arc is the rise of the wing of the progressive movement focused on so-called "White Slavery"* - the abduction or seduction of naive young women into big-city prostitution - and the downfall of the Levee district as a result. The Levee is portrayed largely in the figures of Ada and Minna Everleigh (Simms), who had a $50 minimum for each guest (at a time when a prostitute could be had for a quarter), tutored their stable of impeccably-dressed and well-compensated prostitutes in Balzac, entertained local swells and international dignitaries and made millions. Though very much a part of the Levee's culture, plugged in to the same network of graft, bribery and political manipulation as all the rest of their neighbors, the Everleigh sisters were also miles ahead of their peers in terms of attitudes (it's funny to use the word 'progressive' to describe the people who'd shut the brothels down, given their rather narrow-minded ideas about women) and the way they went about their business. Though working conditions were so good at the Everleigh club that the sisters were never reduced (as many of the other Levee madams were) to coercing women into working for them, their prominence in the city and on the national scene was enough to make them a primary target and a symbol for the entire district. Having a stable of clients that included sons of some of the most well-known families in the city (some of whom were, clearly, not super upstanding young men)** led to even more notoriety, not to mention the resentment of other local procurers who'd be happy to see the club shut down, if not the entire district.

So: the first half of the book is all fanciful demimonde, with these bizarre unique characters flitting around in absurd amounts of jewelry and utterly invented personas (complete with birth dates moved up more than a decade), encouraging men to drink champagne out of their harlots' shoes and linger in tackily elegant rooms paneled entirely with mirrors or done up to resemble all the regions of the world or decorated entirely in monochrome (the book reproduces photographs taken, presumably, for a brochure the sisters distributed nationally when political action against the Levee seemed inevitable). There's a fair amount of seedy double-crossing and dishonest business practices, but for the most part, the Levee runs itself pretty smoothly, with plenty of bribe money to ensure its continued prosperity. It's fantastic. The second half, though, spends less time at the Everleigh club and more at national conventions of people with sticks up their butts, or the corridors of government offices and courthouses. I yawned a lot, and had a hard time getting through the last fifty pages or so, when the Everleigh Club had been closed by order of the Mayor and Ada and Minna sat around twiddling their thumbs. I appreciated knowing, though, that they twiddled their thumbs over more than a million dollars ($20 million in today's money) and were more than set for life. I doubt they were content, exactly, after shutting the club down and settling into a life as weirdo spinsters in New York, but I love the idea of them being rich enough to do whatever the hell they wanted.

Notes!
p. xxi A dab of gasoline - the newest fad in perfume, if you couldn't afford an automobile - behind the ears...
p. 4 Eight years before New York Sun editor Charles Dana popularized the [Windy City] nickname during the battle to host the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, it appeared in the Cleveland Gazette, headlining an article about Chicago politics.
p. 9 Chicago was a city of superlatives, at once both spectacular and foul. (My kind of town, Chicago is...)
p. 10 The Great Fire of 1871 left seventy-three miles of streets in charred ruins and almost one hundred thousand people homeless, but Chicago knew its priorities. During the first eight months of 1872, the city granted 2,218 saloon licenses - approximately 1 to every 150 citizens.
p. 30 The WCTU...protested alcohol partly because women, already disenfranchised, were also barred from saloons, where ward leaders mingled and men argued about politics.
p. 70 Regarding the Everleigh Club: "By comparison," wronte 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."
p. 79 He was found in a Levee alley, not far from the Everleigh club, his skull lopsided, his forehead frayed open like the petals of a flower. A few hard blows from a hammer.
No one paid much attention to the murder, but the cops came to the Club and sat in the parlor. Could the sisters offer any insights into the case? Minna shrugged. "I do not know," she said, "of any hardware dealers among our patrons."
p. 166 Madam Vic Shaw's special offer during the previous year's mayoral election - coupons featuring Busse's picture and these words stenciled beneath:
OUR PAL
IF HE WINS AND YOU
FIND THIS CARD IN
THE PARLOUR - BRING
IT TO MADAME
YOU GET $5.00 IN TRADE
-FREE-
ELECTION NIGHT
---ONLY---
p. 201 (A defense attorney questioning the testimony of an alleged white slave:) "Eleven o'clock at night on the street in St. Louis, this innocent little Jewish girl. God help us and God help the Jews. If they were all innocent as little Sarah, we would soon be able to pay off our mortgages."

Book website.
The Hack and the Economist's blog (which they do not write) has an interview with Abbott.
Dan Kelly, my fake internet friend wrote this piece about the book for the Chicago Reader. This version is better.

*Abbott gleefully quotes some of the more absurd rhetoric put forth by the moral crusaders: "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.'" (p. 223)
** As well as Edgar Lee Masters and Theodore Dreiser. 'Cause of the Balzac, see.