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Summary
Summary
Step into the perfumed parlors of the Everleigh Club, the most famous brothel in American history--and the catalyst for a culture war that rocked the nation. Operating in Chicago's notorious Levee district at the dawn of the last century, the Club's proprietors, two aristocratic sisters named Minna and Ada Everleigh, welcomed moguls and actors, senators and athletes, foreign dignitaries and literary icons, into their stately double mansion, where thirty stunning Everleigh "butterflies" awaited their arrival. Courtesans named Doll, Suzy Poon Tang, and Brick Top devoured raw meat to the delight of Prince Henry of Prussia and recited poetry for Theodore Dreiser. Whereas lesser madams pocketed most of a harlot's earnings and kept a "whipper" on staff to mete out discipline, the Everleighs made sure their girls dined on gourmet food, were examined by an honest physician, and even tutored in the literature of Balzac. Not everyone appreciated the sisters' attempts to elevate the industry. Rival Levee madams hatched numerous schemes to ruin the Everleighs, including an attempt to frame them for the death of department store heir Marshall Field, Jr. But the sisters' most daunting foes were the Progressive Era reformers, who sent the entire country into a frenzy with lurid tales of "white slavery"----the allegedly rampant practice of kidnapping young girls and forcing them into brothels. This furor shaped America's sexual culture and had repercussions all the way to the White House, including the formation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. With a cast of characters that includes Jack Johnson, John Barrymore, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., William Howard Taft, "Hinky Dink" Kenna, and Al Capone, Sin in the Second City is Karen Abbott's colorful, nuanced portrait of the iconic Everleigh sisters, their world-famous Club, and the perennial clash between our nation's hedonistic impulses and Puritanical roots. Culminating in a dramatic last stand between brothel keepers and crusading reformers,Sin in the Second Cityoffers a vivid snapshot of America's journey from Victorian-era propriety to twentieth-century modernity. Visit www.sininthesecondcity.com to learn more! Praise forSin in the Second City: "Assiduously researched… [Sin in the Second City] describes a popular culture awash in wild tales of sexual abuse, crusading reformers claiming God on their side, and deep suspicion of the threat posed by "foreigners" to the nation's Christian values." ----Janet Maslin,The New York Times "Lavish in her details, nicely detached in her point of view, [and with] scrupulous concern for historical accuracy, Ms. Abbott has written an immensely readable book.Sin in the Second Cityoffers much in the way of reflection for those interested in the unending puzzle that goes by the name of human nature." --The Wall Street Journal "Abbott's first book is meticulously researched and entertaining... a colorful history of old Chicago that reads like a novel." ----The Atlanta Journal Constitution "With gleaming prose and authoritative knowledge Abbott elucidates one of the most colorful periods in American history, and the result reads like the very best fiction. Sex, opulence, murder -- What's not to love?" ---- Sara Gruen, author ofWater for Elephants "A detailed and intimate portrait of the Ritz of brothels, the famed Everleigh Club of turn-of-the-century Chicago. Sisters Minna and Ada attracted the elites of
Author Notes
Karen Abbott was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She worked as a journalist for several years at Philadelphia magazine and Philadelphia Weekly. She also wrote for Salon.com and other publications. She has written several books including Sin in the Second City and American Rose.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Freelance journalist Abbott's vibrant first book probes the titillating milieu of the posh, world-famous Everleigh Club brothel that operated from 1900 to 1911 on Chicago's Near South Side. The madams, Ada and Minna Everleigh, were sisters whose shifting identities had them as traveling actors, Edgar Allan Poe's relatives, Kentucky debutantes fleeing violent husbands and daughters of a once-wealthy Virginia lawyer crushed by the Civil War. While lesser whorehouses specialized in deflowering virgins, beatings and bondage, the Everleighs spoiled their whores with couture gowns, gourmet meals and extraordinary salaries. The bordello-which boasted three stringed orchestras and a room of 1,000 mirrors-attracted such patrons as Theodore Dreiser, John Barrymore and Prussian Prince Henry. But the successful cathouse was implicated in the 1905 shooting of department store heir Marshall Field Jr. and inevitably became the target of rivals and reformers alike. Madam Vic Shaw tried to frame the Everleighs for a millionaire playboy's drug overdose, Rev. Ernest Bell preached nightly outside the club and ambitious Chicago state's attorney Clifford Roe built his career on the promise of obliterating white slavery. With colorful characters, this is an entertaining, well-researched slice of Windy City history. Photos. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
"Chicago, the saying goes, ain't ready for reform. It certainly wasn't in 1899, when sisters Ada and Minna Everleigh (real name: Simms) opened their brothel. As Abbott's jaunty history relates, their whorehouse was not a tawdry bang barn for johns with a nickel but a glitzy palace of paid pleasure for plutocrats. Ada and Minna's Everleigh Club prospered, protected by payoffs to Chicago's legendary political crooks Bathhouse Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna, but the bordello's brazenness mobilized moralists alarmed by vice, so-called white slavery in particular. An entertaining read, by turns bawdy and sad, as when a courtesan ends up dead, Abbott's account extends beyond local history because the campaign against Ada and Minna had lasting national effects: the closure of urban red-light districts and the passage of the federal Mann Act concerning prostitution. Abbott adroitly evokes the cathouse atmosphere, but it is the rapier-sharp character sketches of the cast that best show off her authorial skills and will keep readers continually bemused as they learn about the lives and times of two madams."--"Taylor, Gilbert" Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN the brutal red-light district of Chicago, at the dawn of the 20th century, most brothels emphasized "efficiency instead of fantasy." But at the Everleigh Club, a double mansion on South Dearborn Street, the "butterflies" wore evening gowns, ate bonbons and read Balzac. The house boasted three string orchestras, a perfume-spouting fountain, 18-karat-gold spittoons and 30 opulent, themed bedrooms decked out with extras like a full-size effigy of Cleopatra or a station for setting off firecrackers. The sister-madams, Ada and Minna Everleigh, insisted that here a man "would never feel rushed or cheated, disillusioned or alone." "Sin in the Second City," a delicious history by Karen Abbott, makes a case for the cultural importance of the Everleigh Club, which from 1900 to 1911 classed up the Levee district, the basest part of a town that rivaled Tammany Hall-era New York for corruption. The club played host to Theodore Dreiser, Prince Henry of Prussia and Jack Johnson, and served as a national example of decadence run amok. The elegant Everleigh Club was especially remarkable given its neighbors. Down the street, the House of All Nations offered $5 and $2 entrances (in a typical example of Levee duplicity, "the same girls worked both sides"). At houses like the California, operated by Blubber Bob Gray, girls slipped morphine into clients' drinks, the better to rob them. The brothel run by the Everleighs' inept nemesis, a woman named Vic Shaw, offered "strip-whip" matches in which girls, naked or just wearing boots and corsets, whipped each other bloody. Slumming parties, and the occasional millionaire playboy, whooped their way through the district. Abbott's description of the First Ward Ball, the underworld's annual party, reads like something out of Dante: "Thirty thousand people in a venue meant for half that number, lunging and thrashing, bodies colliding. ... Men tore at gowns and got stabbed with hatpins. A harlot swung a whip across the exposed buttocks of five drunks lined against the wall." A frequent cry: "Gangway, dame fainted!" A portrait of Minna Everleigh from her time as a madam in Omaha, 1895. Reformers were determined to put an end to all such activity. Leading the charge were Clifford Roe, a prosecutor with "one eye fixed on the virtue of innocent girls, the other on his legacy," and Ernest Bell, a preacher who marched on the Levee to save souls even as he was pelted with eggs and melons and gassed with sulfurated hydrogen. While Abbott gives the Holy Rollers their due, she clearly prefers the sphinxlike Everleigh madams. Ada and Minna were neither vicious criminals like William McNamara, who "lured girls and raped them, often several times, before selling them to brothels," nor hyper-reformists like Lucy Page Gaston, the antismoking crusader. The sisters merely tried to make prostitution as decent an endeavor as possible. They kept an honest doctor on staff, paid their girls well and enforced strict rules against violence, drugs and theft. And they made a fortune in the process, the equivalent of more than $20 million today. Abbott, a journalist who has worked at Philadelphia magazine and written for Salon and other publications, describes the Levee's characters - among them Ike Bloom, Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin (the city's self-proclaimed poet "lariat") - in such detail that it's easy to mistake this meticulously researched history for literary fiction. Like Luc Sante's "Low Life," "Sin in the Second City" is a lush love letter to the underworld. It's so poetic that at times one wonders how much liberty Abbott took fleshing out the facts of scenes like this: "Behind her now, talking her ear off in between indulgent swallows of Champagne, was one Vernon Shaw Kennedy." An endnote places Kennedy at the club that night but fails to confirm that he wasn't in front of his companion, that he wasn't taciturn that evening or that he wasn't primly sipping bourbon. Still, everything feels plausible. And thanks to the wealth of details, the Levee comes rattling to life, with a piano player "lustily crooning" a ragtime song, Minna "nervously fingering her butterfly pin" and Ada kicking her sister's shin under the table. On a larger scale, Abbott traces the evolution of the fight against white slavery, with reformers telling the public lurid tales of innocent girls seduced into a life of depravity "as soon as they wandered past the sanctioned boundaries of their lives." The resulting hysteria led to the Mann Act, which, she writes, "reinforced a national political ethos that, to this day, scares elected representatives from casting any vote that can be perceived as a strike against 'values.' " "Sin in the Second City" illustrates the interdependence of hedonism and puritanism in America. For example: One night, thousands of torch-waving, hymn-singing reformers (Minna always called them "visiting firemen") marched through the red-light district, shutting down every club in their path. The marchers declared the mission a triumph. But later that night, the brothels were packed; the Everleighs and their colleagues declared it the most profitable night in their history. The moral: Vice and virtue will always be at war, but the winner's a lock. As Abbott writes, "those visiting firemen might have stamina, but they never outlasted the customers." The Everleigh Club played host to Theodore Dreiser, Prince Henry of Prussia and Jack Johnson. Ada Calhoun is the editor in chief of Babble.com, a blogger for AOL News and a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Kirkus Review
Atlanta-based journalist Abbott debuts with a dispatch from the seething underbelly of old-time Chicago, where a pair of sisters ran the finest whorehouse in the land. The most famous madams of their day, Minna and Ada Everleigh originally came from money in the South--or so they said; their accounts of their background were laced with blarney and hokum. What is fact is that in 1899, after a short stint running a cathouse in Omaha that didn't have the high-flying clientele they wanted, the sisters found a spot with everything they were looking for: Chicago's Levee district. An iniquitous den of vice and ribaldry on the Near South Side, the Levee offered the Everleighs a wide-open red-light district in which to ply their trade and easy access to cash-flush customers looking for good times with just a touch more class. According to Abbott's highly engaging and personable account, the Everleigh Club was something to behold, especially in a neighborhood known for its 50-cent tricks and places called the Bucket of Blood or Why Not? It boasted a dining room paneled in mahogany, a fountain that sprayed perfume into the air, astronomic door fees and stunning women, cherry-picked from the city's thousands of Sister Carries. (The well-read sisters were chummy with Carrie's author, Theodore Dreiser, as well as Edgar Lee Masters.) As the Everleighs raked in money, bluenoses grew concerned about women being forced into prostitution, and local reformers pushed the (usually fictional) horrors of the supposedly widespread white slave trade, which more than one clueless do-gooder had the gall to claim was many times worse than the African slave trade. Abbott tells a reliably dramatic story, though it's clear early on that the odds were stacked against the sisters, no matter how many powerful politicians and gangsters they befriended. A rollicking tale from a more vibrant time: history to a ragtime beat. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Mining the sources of the "purity journal" Vigilance and its predecessor, Philanthropist, as well as Chicago newspapers, government reports, and other archival sources, journalist and first-time author Abbott chronicles the history of the Everleigh Club that operated on Chicago's Near South Side from 1900 to 1911. At this renowned high-class brothel, enterprising sisters Ada and Minna Everleigh challenged the stereotype of the victimized immature woman by hiring only willing adults whose comportment, education, meals, and health they closely monitored. Paradoxically, "scarlet sisters" in the club had to abide by stated rules, such as abstaining from drugs in order to remain at a house for which there was a wait list of job seekers. Protected for a while through its patronage by politicians, sports figures, businessmen, and writers, the club finally succumbed when a moral purity campaign closed it and the other bordellos in the Windy City's red light district. Abbott's character sketches of individuals such as "Bathhouse" John Coughlin, Michael "Hinky-Dink" Kenna, and James "Big Jim" Colosino make this engaging study read like a novel. A complement to similarly focused studies of New York City, e.g., Timothy Gilfoyle's City of Eros and Elizabeth Clement's Love for Sale; recommended for the general public and social historians alike.-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue ANGELS OF THE LINE 1905 As soon as the bullet pierced Marshall Field Jr.--the only son and heir of Marshall Field, founder of the splendorous department store, the man who famously said, "Give the lady what she wants"--Chicago made the story even bigger than it really was. Amplifying things, good or bad, was what Chicago did best. In the days following November 22, 1905, rumors about the shooting spun through the city's streets. The fruit cart vendors whispered to the newsboys who shouted to the hansom drivers who murmured to the society women who were overheard by servants who gossiped with bartenders who bantered with pimps and whores and drunks. Did they hear the wound was just like the one that killed President McKinley? Tore through his abdomen, caught a corner of the liver, grazed the stomach, and skidded to a halt outside the spinal cord--lucky for Marshall Junior. He was in his bedroom at the Prairie Avenue mansion, home alone with his son and the hired help, when a hollow boom split the air. A cry followed, thin and drawn out like taffy The family nurse and the butler scaled the stairs in flying jumps and found him slumped in a chair, wan face seeking cover in the curve of his shoulder. Goodness, the blood--it was everywhere. Veining across his shirt, fissuring down the wall. His automatic revolver came to rest on the tip of his shoe. He tried to straighten, treaded the air as if it were a lolling wave. "I shot myself," Marshall Junior said. "Accidentally." But it couldn't have been an accident. Who really believed that Field dropped his gun, and that the trigger could slam an armchair with sufficient force to explode a cartridge? A reporter at the Chicago Daily News said it was impossible--he took an identical, unloaded revolver and hurled it several times to the floor. Not once did the thing go off. Marshall Junior must have pointed the gun at himself; it was the only way. And a suicide attempt made sense. He had suffered a nervous breakdown the year prior, in 1904-- this act could be a decisive sequel. No, what really happened was sadder than suicide, more pitiful than a nervous breakdown: Field had sneaked off to the Levee district for a tryst at the Everleigh Club. So what if he was married, the father of three--he had money and status and power, and men with those things always went to the Everleigh Club. A prostitute shot him, maybe in the Gold Room or the Japanese Parlor or beneath the glass chandeliers suspended like stalactites from the ceiling. Later, as the sun deserted the sky and the streets gripped the fog, those Scarlet Sisters, Minna and Ada Everleigh, ordered his unconscious body smuggled out and planted in his home. Those Scarlet Sisters heard all about their alleged hand in the incident, how they stood idly by while one of their harlots blasted the poor man, then directed the covert removal of his bloody body. "We are a funeral parlor," Ada Everleigh said, "instead of a resort." Her younger sister, Minna, gave a blunt, trumpet-burst laugh. Ada parsed her words as if they were in limited supply, but damned if she didn't load each one before it left her mouth. The Chicago rumor mill operated as predictably as the Everleighs' regular clients; no matter how gossip began, or where it twisted and turned, it ended up, invariably, at the doorstep of 2131-2133 South Dearborn Street. Nonsense, every bit of it. The sisters had decided long ago to permit no stains, blood or otherwise, on their house. Neither would the Everleighs add their own voices to the din. Discretion paid--but also had its price. Even Chicago's newspapers kept their distance from the speculation for fear that Marshall Field Sr. would pull his advertising dollars. He certainly wouldn't appreciate reports that his son, currently lying in critical condition at Mercy Hospital, had visited a whorehouse, even one as dignified as the Everleigh Club. Still, journalists staked out the sisters all week, trying to score something--anything--that would be safe to print. Minna and Ada waited in the front parlor, expecting yet another newsman. All thirty Everleigh Club harlots remained upstairs in their boudoirs, preparing for the night ahead, running razors under their arms, down and xx prologue: angels of the line between their legs--clients didn't have a smooth woman at home. They packed themselves with sponges, made certain they had enough douche, checked cabinets for the little black pills that, along with three days of hot baths, usually "brought a girl around" from any unwanted condition. They yanked and tied one another's corsets, buttoned up gowns made of slippery silk, unrolled black stockings over long legs. Hair was wound tight with pins or left to fall in tousled waves, depending on the preference of their regulars. A dab of gasoline--the newest fad in perfume, if you couldn't afford an automobile--behind the ears, across the wrists and ankles, between the breasts. Eyes rimmed in black and lashes painted, standing stiffer than the prongs of a fork. Each courtesan had a name chosen by her peers. Once she entered this life-- the life--she discarded all remnants of the one she'd left behind. Minna navigated the silk couches, the easy chairs, and the grand piano, the statues of Greek goddesses peering through exotic palms, the bronze effigies of Cupid and Psyche, the imported rugs that swallowed footsteps. She had an odd walk, a sort of caterpillar bend and hump, pause and catch up, as the poet Edgar Lee Masters, a friend and frequent client, described it. She came to rest before a wide-paneled window and swallowed, her throat squeezing behind a brooch of diamonds thick as a clenched fist. Holding back the curtain, she surveyed Dearborn Street. Arc lamps stretched up and out, unfurling bold ribbons of light. The air was thick and yellow, as if the varnish manufacturer on the next block had slathered his product across the sky. Visibility was reduced to the next street, or the next corner, or sometimes just the next step. No matter: Minna didn't have to see the Levee district to know what it was up to. Panders, an underworld term that served as both verb and noun, were outfitted in dandy ties and jaunty hats, lurking in corners and alleys. Eugene Hustion and his wife, Lottie, the "King and Queen of the Cokies," weighed thirty pounds of cocaine and half as much morphine. Soon their salesmen would make the rounds. Funny thing was, Minna knew, Lottie was a college graduate who spoke five languages, and in her spare time composed music and painted portraits. Down the street, at the House of All Nations, johns lined up at the $2 and $5 entrances--too bad the suckers didn't know that the same girls worked both sides. Blind men cranked hurdy-gurdies, spinning tangled reams of melody. The air reeked of sweat and blood and swine entrails, prologue: angels of the line xxi drifting up from the Union Stock Yards just a few blocks southwest. Mickey Finn hawked his eponymous "Special" at his Dearborn Street bar. Merry Widdo Kiddo, the famous peep-show girl, warmed up her booth, breasts twirling like pinwheels behind the glass. Levee piano players-- "professors," they were called--cracked their knuckles before plucking out the hiccuped notes of ragtime. Minna watched a figure turn the corner of 21st Street onto Dearborn and waited for the solemn gong of the bell. She patted the dark, frizzed coil of hair at the nape of her neck and reached for the door. From knuckle to wrist to elbow, waist to bodice to neck, she was ablaze in jewels. Diamonds played with the parlor light, tossing tiny rainbows against the wall. "How is my boy?" she said, her customary greeting for every caller. The boy this time was Frank Carson of the Chicago Inter Ocean , a once respected newspaper that had declined in recent years. Minna invited him inside with a slow-motion sweep of her arm. He was no stranger to the Everleigh Club; every reporter in the city knew its phone number, Calumet 412, by heart. Carson saw precisely what the Everleighs wished him to see, and knew what they wished him to know. Both sisters had a prim, close-lipped smile, genuine but guarded, as if a full-on grin risked conveying complexities best left unmined. The younger one, Minna, was the talker. She spoke in clipped, staccato sentences, shooting words from her mouth--it was so good to see her boy, it had been far too long since his last visit, he should stop by more often. She broke occasionally for a frenetic drag of a goldtipped, perfumed cigarette. Ada stood next to her sister, quiet. Her eyes were darker, her hair lighter, her figure fuller. Her hands were wind-chill cold. Frank Carson knew they ran a clean place with clean girls; their house doctor never forged the reports. He knew that Sunday was "Beau Night" at the Everleigh Club, when girls were permitted to see their sweethearts, to accept flowers and hold hands, to experience all the thrills of dating as if they lived in homes. He knew there had been a shooting at the Club two years earlier, an unfortunate incident that was no fault of the sisters'. He knew the Everleighs brought a bit of decency to a profession rife with shame. Excerpted from Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul by Karen Abbott All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Author's Note: The Girls Who Disappeared | p. xi |
Cast of Characters | p. xv |
Prologue: Angels of the Line | p. xix |
Part 1 The Scarlet Sisters Everleigh | |
Striped Skunk and Wild Onions | p. 2 |
Another Uncle Tom's Cabin | p. 14 |
Getting Everleighed | p. 17 |
The Demon of Lust Lies in Wait | p. 28 |
Lovely Little Lies | p. 31 |
The Stories Everyone Knew | p. 47 |
Lords and Ladies of the Levee | p. 51 |
Great in Religion, Great in Sin | p. 64 |
Knowing Your Balzac | p. 67 |
Invocation | p. 83 |
Millionaire Playboy Shot-Accident or Murder? | p. 88 |
Part 2 Flesh and Bone, Body and Soul | |
Midnight Toil and Peril | p. 100 |
Ultra Decollete and Other Evils | p. 107 |
The Brilliant Entrance to Hell Itself | p. 114 |
The Tragedy of Mona Marshall | p. 119 |
Men and Their Baser Mischiefs | p. 128 |
Dispatch from the U.S. Immigration Commission | p. 139 |
More Immoral Than Heathen China | p. 141 |
The Organizer | p. 153 |
It Don't Never Get Good Until Three in the Morning | p. 160 |
Dispatch from the U.S. Immigration Commission | p. 175 |
Judgment Days | p. 177 |
Have You a Girl to Spare? | p. 184 |
Dispatch from the U.S. Immigration Commission | p. 191 |
So Many Nice Young Men | p. 193 |
Immoral Purposes, Whatever Those Are | p. 204 |
Part 3 Fighting for the Protection of Our Girls | |
Millionaire Playboy Dead-Morphine or Madam? | p. 210 |
Girls Going Wrong | p. 218 |
A Lost Soul | p. 225 |
The Social Evil in Chicago | p. 231 |
Painted, Peroxided, Bedizened | p. 239 |
You Get Everything in a Lifetime | p. 247 |
Dangerous Elements | p. 259 |
Just How Wicked | p. 270 |
Fallen Is Babylon | p. 279 |
Little Lost Sister | p. 285 |
Acknowledgments | p. 299 |
Notes and Sources | p. 303 |
Bibliography | p. 331 |
Index | p. 341 |
Illustration and Photograph Credits | p. 355 |