Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott Page A

by forces eager to solve them: the Moody Bible Institute; the Cook County Juvenile Court, the nation’s first; Jane Addams’s Hull House; the Anti-Saloon League; Graham Taylor’s Chicago Commons; and the Pacific Garden Mission, responsible for the very public salvation of Chicago White Stockings player Billy Sunday, who was one night so captivated by a sermon preached from the roving “Gospel Wagon” that he accepted Christ as his savior, declined a lucrative contract, and launched a new career as the “baseball evangelist,” traveling the world to preach God’s word.
    On October 8, a crisp Tuesday evening, delegates from nearly all fifty states and numerous foreign countries, including England, Holland, France, Canada, and India, filed into the First Methodist Church at Clark and Washington streets. The Reverend John P. Brushingham gave the opening address. England and America, he declared, are “one in language, one in God, but also one in sin, one in drunkenness, and one in the social evil.” He welcomed the visitors to “Chicago, great in population, great in commerce, great in religion, and great in sin.”
    For the next three days, the church would be filled to capacity to hear ministers and missionaries, doctors and housewives, professors and white slave crusaders all lecture on every facet of vice. A purity worker named William P. F. Ferguson kicked things off with a speech titled “Police Headquarters and the City Hall in Their Relation to Vice.”
    “Precisely the same conditions which exist in Manila may be found in the large cities,” he argued. “By a careful and exact system of fines and licenses and hush money the keepers of disorderly places hang the receipts for the payment of such exactions on the same hooks with their receipted grocery bills.” Dr. Mary Wood-Allen of Ann Arbor, Michigan, followed with a condemnation of the press—especially the comics—for “lowering the tone of the human race by ridiculing the sacred process of wooing.”
    Other addresses included:
     
“The Cure of the Social Evil”
    “How to Elevate the Home Life”
    “A Strange Silence; Its Cause and Cure” (a rumination on the double standard)
    “The Influence of Diet upon Character”
    “The Solidarity of Vice and Vicious Methods”
    “Divorce Not a Matter of Choice” and
    “The Relation Between Modern Social Vice and Ancient Sex Worship”
     
    Closing the conference on Thursday, October 10, 1901, the attendees deemed the event a great success, marred only by one unfortunate incident. While the final speakers advocated for “purity in thought, word, and deed,” Mrs. B. S. Steadwell, wife of the president of the Northwestern Purity Association, was approached by two well-dressed men. Might they, the men asked, see some of the literature she had for sale? Mrs. Steadwell became so engrossed in the discussion, and in the prospect of selling a few pamphlets, that she laid her purse on the table. After she’d sold 40 cents’ worth of literature, the men abruptly ran off, taking the purse with them.
    Despite this “active experience with vice,” which left Mrs. Steadwell $3 poorer, the delegates were so taken with Chicago, in all its stunning achievement and shameless decadence, that they decided to reconvene there in 1906, five years hence.

 

    KNOWING YOUR BALZAC

    The Japanese Throne Room at the Everleigh Club.

 

    If it weren’t for the married men we couldn’t have
carried on at all, and if it weren’t for the cheating
married women we would have earned another million.
    — THE E VERLEIGH SISTERS

    P ulled or prompted, men came to the Everleigh Club. They came to see the Room of 1,000 Mirrors, inspired by Madam Babe Connors’s place in St. Louis, with a floor made entirely of reflective glass. In Minna’s eyes, this parlor paid bawdy tribute to Honoré de Balzac’s The Magic Skin— a mirror with numerous facets, each depicting a world.
    They came to hear the Club’s string orchestras—the