SIN IN THE SECOND CITY

Sinful Second City

A ‘Business doing Pleasure’ in Chicago

Karen Abbott’s Sin in the Second City is a lascivious chronicle of legalized prostitution in Chicago and nearly every other metropolitan area in the first decade of 20th Century America. If one were to turn the clock forward about 100 years you would be mindful of the recent scandals involving disgraced former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and current Louisiana Senator David Vitter.
Abbott’s story centers around two sisters who by every measure challenged the traditional job description of the oldest profession by opening a respectable brothel in the otherwise contemptible Levee district of Chicago’s lower south side. Born Minna and Ada Lester in 1870’s Virginia, the sisters used their $35,000 inheritance to open up what would become a lucrative brothel in Omaha, Nebraska. Their fortunes would be more than doubled with “adventure” seekers making their way through the town’s Trans-Mississippi Exposition in 1898, however, as the show left the town, so did the high paying customers.
When it was time for a move, what greater place was there to relocate than in Chicago? It was a place with many wealthy men, most of whom had gained their fortunes through less than noble means. Abbott writes that, “The newspapers printed scoreboards that tabulated murders and muggings, as if such crimes were scheduled like baseball games and horse races.” The Tribune Newspaper wrote, “Chicago, has come to be known over the country as a bad town for men of good character and a good town for men of bad character.” Chicago would be the sisters’ new town and they would rattle the customary way of operating the flesh-for-sale industry by opening a “high-class brothel,” if such words could somehow be compatible. The sisters would exploit the closing signature of a beloved grandmother who would sign her letters as, “Everly Yours,” which would be transferred to their new adopted last name “Everleigh.” The Everleigh Club would become both a noun and an action verb to describe their new enterprise and its activities. All gratifications would commence in surroundings that spared no expenses such as gourmet foods, fine champagne, and music from a $15,000 gold leafed piano.
Certainly there could be no such business without stately “courtesans” to attract big spenders to the “sporting life,” which was curious vernacular for whoredom and its seekers. As sister Ada would explain, “To get in a girl must have a pretty face and figure, must be in perfect health, must look well in evening clothes. If she is addicted to drugs or to drink, we do not want her.” Of course there would be other requirements, such as developing the ability to carry on an intelligent conversation with a wealthy whoremonger envisioning the conquest of a high society woman. If a girl could make the cut to become a “butterfly,” she could expect to earn at least $100 per-week (with tips) which was remarkable considering a factory girl brought home about $6 weekly.
Of course there were many darker sides of the story regarding the social and economic status of women in the time period. As far as the alleged sporting life was concerned, not every girl in the industry measured up to butterfly status. As Abbott writes, most worked in “gambling parlors and opium dens and brothels where inmates dangled bare breasts from windows.” Some dives had names like, “Bucket of Blood” along a street called “Bed Bug Row.” Most houses had “whippers” who would flog prostitutes for not meeting an expected quota of tricks. Under the best conditions, girls were fortunate to pocket 15-dollars a week. Disease, addiction, and short life spans were all expectations for harlots along the Levee.
Above all was the fear of “white slavery,” where young girls could be coaxed by predatory agents with promises of marriage or employment, only to be “drugged, robbed of their virtue by professional rapists, sold to Levee madams, and dead within five years.” Hull House founder Jane Addams lamented, “Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.” Sadly, there was little opportunity for women who were widows, orphans, immigrants, or otherwise not connected to wealthy families.
One tragic account is of a little girl who learned the trade by washing her mother’s clients and learning to prepare opium before her fifth birthday. At seven she began her career by auctioning off her virginity. Recounting her descent into the family business, she said, “I ain’t ashamed of what I did…it seems just like anything else—like a kid whose father owns a grocery store. He helps him in the store. Well my mother didn’t sell groceries.”
If prostitution is the oldest profession, then professional zealotry in the cause of “purity” would come in second. Missions full of “saints” would slum their way in protests through the Levee District, while prosecutors and attorneys would obsess about legal maneuvers intended to bring an end to the “sin” profession. Eventually the crusaders would focus on political maneuvers leading to legislation called the “Mann Act,” which was to limit the extent of white slave trafficking. In later years, the whole “white slavery” issue would prove to have been more about hysteria than about young girls being forced into debauchery. As it turned out, most girls entered the vocation through their own choice, although most certainly as a last resort in times of desperation.
The Mann Act did have one extremely positive result in that it emboldened the Illinois State Legislature to investigate the link between low wages and prostitution. The effect was that eight minimum wage bills passed through Illinois, and would serve as a model for other states to follow.

DEATH IN THE HAYMARKET

DEATH!

In The Haymarket

We want to feel the sunshine;
We want to smell the flowers;
We’re sure God has willed it.
And we mean to have eight hours.

On May 1, 1865, the body of Abraham Lincoln arrived in Chicago on its way back to Springfield for burial. Fifty-thousand mourners came to pay their last respects to the Great Emancipator on his final visit to the city. Carl Sandburg wrote that amid the gloomy procession were, “native-born Yankees and foreign born Catholics, blacks and whites, German Lutherans and German Jews—all for once in common front.” The city was unified in their grief over the dead president; however, the next couple decades would see many challenges to that solidarity. On another May 1st, twenty-one-years later, a worker’s protest demanding and eight-hour workday would escalate into a disastrous affair that would deal a blow to social advancement in the midst of Gilded Age America.

In his book, “Death In The Haymarket,” historian James Green reveals the rise of the first great labor movement in post Civil War America, and a bloody event at Haymarket Square, in Chicago, on May 4, 1886. A subsequent trial culminating in executions of working-class agitators would distance the business class from wage earners, both foreign and native born. The setbacks that followed would take the worker’s movement decades to recover.

Chicago was a bustling city enjoying a decisive competitive edge over all other industrial rivals because of its access to eastern markets via the Great Lakes, and to the Midwest farms and forests through the Illinois & Michigan Canal to the Mississippi River. During the Civil War the city’s slaughterhouse and packing industry boomed after securing many lucrative military contracts. As Saul Bellow wrote, progress was written, “in the blood of the yards.” By the end of the Civil War, it was the destination of every railroad system west of the Mississippi all the way to the Pacific. The never ending need for wage workers would lead to the influx of European immigrants with Chicago’s population doubling in the 1860’s. In the 1880’s nearly 250,000 souls migrated to the city looking for work and were no doubt part of the 800 freight and passenger trains leaving and entering the city daily.

Green explains that Chicago’s population grew 118 percent in the 1880’s which was a rate of growth five times faster than that of New York City. The city’s foreign-born population reached 450,000 which was larger than the total population of St. Louis, or any other city in the Midwest. As could be expected the new arrivals were overwhelmingly represented by impoverished peasants, or refugees fleeing foreign oppressors. With the supply of available labor at a premium, profiteers would see their net value increase far faster than the average yearly wage. This would undoubtedly lead to class tension, with animosity revealing its ugly side in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. In that year, Mayor Carter H. Harrison, found the spark that would ignite a fire of class hatred that would envelop the city for the ensuing decade. His name was John Bonfield, and as police captain he would write the text on how to use “disciplined brutality” in suppressing worker rebellions.

In his call to action against the railroad strikers, Bonfield led the assault with one observer noting, their “clubs descending right and left like flails.” During the melee, the captain personally beat down an elderly man who did not respond to his order to fall back. Two men were clubbed unconscious, with one suffering permanent brain damage. The following day Socialist militant, August Spies, spoke to a crowd of several thousand workers, denouncing Bonfield’s “vicious attack” on the citizenry and according to one report, “advised streetcar men and all other workingmen to buy guns and fight for their rights like men.” When leading citizens called for Bonfield’s dismissal he was retained, “on account of his political influence.” To the fury of organized labor, a few months later the ill-tempered captain was promoted by Mayor Harrison to be chief inspector. The battle lines had been drawn for years to come, and as Green explains, “During the fall of 1885 a cloud of class hatred hung over Chicago; it seemed as thick as the smoke that darkened its streets.”

We’re summoning our forces
Shipyard, shop and mill;
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest,
Eight hours for what we will.

May 1, 1886, was the beginning of several days of peaceful protests and demonstrations at the McCormick Reaper Works, until a small group of unarmed picketers were shot and killed by Chicago police. The next day, May 4, a mass protest led by anarchists was held at Haymarket Square on the city’s West Side. Again police entered the scene to disperse the crowd as the meeting began to wind down. Out of the night, an unknown individual (and today we still do not know who it was) threw a dynamite bomb in the direction of the police, killing one immediately and fatally wounding six others. The police fired their handguns in a wild frenzy killing at least three protesters and wounding many others.

The Chicago Tribune published an exaggerated and unfounded account of the events in the following day’s edition with other newspapers and magazines nationwide following its lead. Mass hysteria would result in police taking extraordinary measures in a reign of terror that would arrest the rights of all “alien” workers throughout the country, but especially in Chicago. As Green puts it, “the first Red Scare was in effect,” and hostility toward Chicago’s immigrant population came from every possible demographic. The eight hour movement lost all momentum and labor reform came to a screeching halt. A sensational trial followed that summer, and a stacked jury found seven anarchists guilty, resulting in their condemnation for their part in “assisting” the still unknown bomber. The labor movement and social reform would be put on hold.

DID LINCOLN OWN SLAVES?

First Log Cabin Republican?

Everything You Always
Wanted To Know About Abe

But Were Afraid To Ask!

Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the most iconic individual in American History and folklore. His image is adorned by monuments from Mt. Rushmore to Washington, D.C.; and one can hardly ignore his continued presence in everyday situations such as purchasing a product with a five-dollar-bill and getting back change with “Lincoln head” pennies. He is considered by most to be our greatest president who saved the Union, ended slavery, and wrote two of our most cherished speeches in the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural. With all these reminders, “Honest Abe” in ingrained in our minds and in our hearts, yet most of what we know about him is based more on legend than on fact. What we sincerely know best about him we really don’t know at all. Or it is exaggerated, or based on what others with an agenda would like us to think.

With such a legacy, it’s no wonder that people are curious, and occasionally anxious about the truth regarding our sixteenth president. Gerald Prokopowicz’s book, Did Lincoln Own Slaves?, is a careful catalogue of the thousands of questions he was asked over the course of nine years as resident scholar of the Lincoln Museum at Fort Wayne, Indiana. Some the questions are shocking, some are thought provoking, and some are just plain stupid. Equally, some of the answers are surprising, but most could probably be deduced by using common sense.

The litany of inquiries include just about everything from, “Was Abraham Lincoln’s last name really Lincoln?” to “Was Lincoln’s corpse ever stolen?” So what does the book really tell us about Lincoln? First off, he was a hard guy to understand, even by his closest friends, which may account for so many interpretations. Secondly, there are things we can never really know because the answers would all be based on conjecture. So in reality, Prokopowicz’s book may provoke more questions than answers.

Some of the most enjoyable answers came from questions about Lincoln’s athletic ability. Aside from the author’s belief that he possibly could have been the first white guy before steroids able to dunk a basketball, Lincoln’s storied reputation as a wrestler is fascinating. Ironically, his only known match happened in 1831 as a new arrival to his adopted hometown of New Salem. Much is revealed about Lincoln’s character in that event in that he was unafraid to take on the town’s known bully Jack Armstrong. No one is really sure who won the match, but he did manage to earn the respect of Armstrong and his gang of thugs, the “Clary’s Grove Boys.” Honest Abe was versatile enough to be competitive in just about every activity he tried, including “town ball,” which was an early form of baseball only with bases laid out in a square and not in the form of a diamond. Lincoln’s strength was revealed early in his youth when he worked as a rail splitter, which involved pounding a sledge hammer on an iron wedge to split logs into four equal sized fence posts. During the Civil War, he would “show off” his incredible strength by holding an axe horizontally, gripping only the very end of the handle, a feat no soldier could duplicate.

Since Lincoln has been baptized posthumously by so many so many modern revivalists, it was refreshing to read from an expert that evidence of his religiosity is mostly unsubstantiated. Although he may have used the words, “God” or “Almighty” in many of his addresses, this may have been politically motivated to appease the audience of his day. Certainly, he was fluent in biblical terminology, but the same can be said of his verse for Shakespeare. Both can probably be attributed to his voracious appetite for reading, especially literature that could explain difficult situations with poetic articulation. Without question Lincoln was a spiritual man, but his belief system was that of a deist who believed in “Providence” as a product and not as the guidance of a higher power. According to Prokopowicz, in New Salem, “Lincoln associated with freethinkers who doubted the divinity of Jesus, and he wrote an essay mocking the idea that Jesus was the son of God.” Of course this manuscript was tossed into the fire by his friends to “protect his budding political career.” According to Mary Todd Lincoln, “who ought to have known, he was not even a Christian.” Of course, it is only coincidence that he was born on the same exact day as Charles Darwin.

The most intriguing questions and answers were those concerning Lincoln’s sexuality; basically, “Was Lincoln gay?” This is no small matter since according to Prokopowicz; this is the number one Lincoln question of the twenty-first century! Surprisingly, the author skirts around the question by suggesting that there was no such definition identifying one as “gay” in the course of Lincoln’s era, although he admits that Lincoln may have engaged in “homoerotic” activities. Historians have never denied the “emotional intimacy” between Lincoln and his lifelong companion Josh Speed based on their many revealing letters to one another. But let’s be serious, Lincoln and Speed lived together and shared the same bed for four years! The rail splitter also had a close personal relationship with Captain David V. Derickson, who was assigned as his bodyguard on his frequent retreats to the Soldier’s Home during the Civil War. The two spent so much time together, and were so reclusive, that rumors were rampant within soldier’s camp. Many claimed that when Mrs. Lincoln was away, the two slept in the same bed chamber with Derickson often seen wearing the president’s nightshirt. So based on the known evidence, and the lack of outright denials from reputable historians, Honest Abe probably was at least partially gay by today’s definitions. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

THE JUNGLE

Everything But The Squeal

It was a Jungle out there!

Ever since Upton Sinclair’s, “The Jungle” first came into print in 1906, it has been has been used by generations as a tool to illustrate the corruption of the beef industry in turn-of-the-20th-Century Chicago. No doubt readers of every genre have cringed at the torturous descriptions of wailing animals and the spectacle of filthy, disease ridden disassembly lines producing every product imaginable including lard, sausage, glue, and fertilizer. Even President Theodore Roosevelt was shaken by this story and questioned whether-or-not tainted meat products were responsible for deaths in the Spanish American War. The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 were the result of The Jungle. And although, the book’s notoriety may have made Sinclair famous, the resulting healthier meat products and increase in the number of vegetarians were unintended consequences.

Sinclair’s goal in the novel was to create an awareness of the greater human tragedy of urban slums and the factory systems throughout the world. He once wrote, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” For this reason the book’s effectiveness as a work of propaganda may not have been completely realized.

Sinclair was an ardent Socialist, and his goal from the beginning was to bring attention to the plight of workers. The book was commissioned by the largely circulated Socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason, with the goal of bringing attention to working-class liberation. He made his intentions clear when he first arrived in Chicago to research for the book 1904 and declared, “Hello! I’m Upton Sinclair, and I have come to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the labor movement.” And although the book is a work of fiction, its content was based on indisputable facts about the ubiquitous graft and corruption dominating Chicago at the time. Only the names were changed to protect the innocent.

Sinclair used as his prop, an unfortunate and misguided group of Lithuanian immigrants to showcase the inequities of capitalism or the “wage slave” system. The story is seen through the eyes and mind of Jurgis Rudkus, a boldly ambitious young man, who despite his incredible strength and work ethic becomes a casualty of greed and avarice at a place called “Packingtown.” The villains of the story are the American Beef Trust, the corrupt political machine of Chicago, and capitalism altogether.

Rudkus brings with him to America, his aging father Antanas, his young fiancé Ona, and members of her family including her mother Elzbieta. When they arrive in Chicago Jurgis seeks employment in Packingtown, and because of his brawn, immediately finds work to the chagrin of the hordes of onlookers who fruitlessly wait daily for the opportunity of employment within the slaughterhouses and processing factory. Before long the realities of many desperate situations set in, and despite Jurgis’ pledge to “work harder,” the family goes deeper into a cycle of debt and poverty until every capable member of the family is forced to work in deplorable and dangerous conditions for paltry wages. The biggest contributor to their demise was being conned into purchasing a home they could not afford.

Before long, Ona dies in childbirth because they cannot afford a doctor and eventually their only surviving son drowns in a mud hole in a street near their tenement boarding house. In exhausted frustration, Jurgis abandons the family entirely and leaves for life as a hobo in the heartland. Eventually he returns to Chicago where he takes up every means of employment available; from being a criminal to a political operative, which in most cases by Sinclair’s description, are one and the same. His political shenanigans lead him back to Packingtown, where many betrayals leave him unemployed and eventually imprisoned. Ultimately, he ends up as a high risk beggar on the streets where nightly he faces death from freezing or starvation.

One particular evening he went indoors to join an audience listening to a speech, something he did frequently as a way of seeking refuge from the cold. This time, however, he was spellbound by a charismatic Socialist orator whose words seemed to be describing the agony of Rudkis’ travails on a personal level. From that point on, he became a Socialist “Comrade” with his life finally taking a positive turn and becoming all he had hoped for in coming to America. This is the part of the story that was supposed to be the epiphany of Sinclair’s book, that Socialism was the answer to all societal evils. Unfortunately for Sinclair, most reader’s minds were already more fixated about not eating Tubercular beef than on the plights of exploited workers. So, based on Sinclair’s original intent of promoting Socialism, his work of fiction was less effective as a work of propaganda.