typewriter, she could count on someone leaning over her shoulder, perusing a line, and offering a suggestion for improvement.
The attention directed at Maurine couldn’t be entirely attributed to her beauty. She represented a rare challenge in the newsroom. The men dared not pinch her behind or make crude suggestions for assignations, as they would to Fanny Butcher or Forbes. She was different from the other young women on staff. Maurine had never even seen a poker game before joining the Tribune. She didn’t drink or smoke. She had trouble meeting a man’s eye. It brought out the romantic spirit—and good manners—in her male coworkers. Teddy Beck, the managing editor, became so frustrated at seeing his reporters crowded around Maurine all the time that he laid down a diktat: “There will be no more women in the local room.” One of the few other women with a desk in the room, Margery Currey, thought that meant she had been fired. She began cleaning out her desk, avoiding eye contact with other reporters to keep from crying, before being told the edict didn’t apply to her. Settled back in front of her Underwood, she noted, “This is one time when my face was my fortune.” Currey, Butcher pointed out, was an excellent journalist, “but ravishingly beautiful she was not.”
Forbes got to stay too. She had proven her value many times over, but there was also simply too much work to do for Beck’s order ever to be implemented: too many murderesses knocking off their boyfriends, too many girl pickpockets and pretty little con artists, too many young women snatched from respectable lives by white slavers or their own dark curiosity.
More than anything else, Forbes and Maurine could thank the Eighteenth Amendment for their burgeoning career opportunities. No one had foreseen that Prohibition would have such disastrous consequences. Chicago’s newspapers had all supported the constitutional amendment and its enforcement law, the Volstead Act, which went into effect in January 1920. But their support hardly convinced anyone that the law was right. Prohibition’s timing had simply been awful. The 1920s began, wrote Burton Rascoe, the Tribune ’s former literary editor, “in a general atmosphere of cynicism, disillusion and bitterness.” The unprecedented carnage of the World War had touched everyone in one way or another; now few people, especially those under forty, had any tolerance for the tin-eared moralizing of the temperance folks. After Prohibition got under way, alcohol consumption spiked—and continued to rise even as the quality of the spirits plummeted. For a whole generation, across class lines, defying the dry law became an act of self-definition—a necessary rebellion against a sordid, hypocritical ruling class. Illegal production and distribution of alcoholic beverages, centered in Chicago, became one of the biggest industries in the country, with beer sales in the city topping $30 million a month by one accounting.
The official corruption that came with this unprecedented criminal expansion was similarly outsize. Gangsters funneled a million dollars in bribes each month to Chicago’s police, prosecutors, and elected officials. It made the whole city—at least to Maurine’s suddenly jaded eye—a “grand and gory comedy.” When it came to bootleggers, those charged with enforcing the law, at every level, became blind and dumb. Reporters who didn’t overlook this rampant graft suffered. Fred Lovering, of the Daily Journal, foolishly broke a story about bribery at the Cook County Jail. The next time the reporter walked into the lockup, guards grabbed him and held him down while prisoners pummeled him. Lovering’s nose was reduced to a blob of flaccid flesh, leaving him with breathing problems, a severe speech impediment, and constant pain for the rest of his life. Maurine was stunned to learn that a warden at a smaller facility called in federal agents “to stop bootlegging in his jail so
The attention directed at Maurine couldn’t be entirely attributed to her beauty. She represented a rare challenge in the newsroom. The men dared not pinch her behind or make crude suggestions for assignations, as they would to Fanny Butcher or Forbes. She was different from the other young women on staff. Maurine had never even seen a poker game before joining the Tribune. She didn’t drink or smoke. She had trouble meeting a man’s eye. It brought out the romantic spirit—and good manners—in her male coworkers. Teddy Beck, the managing editor, became so frustrated at seeing his reporters crowded around Maurine all the time that he laid down a diktat: “There will be no more women in the local room.” One of the few other women with a desk in the room, Margery Currey, thought that meant she had been fired. She began cleaning out her desk, avoiding eye contact with other reporters to keep from crying, before being told the edict didn’t apply to her. Settled back in front of her Underwood, she noted, “This is one time when my face was my fortune.” Currey, Butcher pointed out, was an excellent journalist, “but ravishingly beautiful she was not.”
Forbes got to stay too. She had proven her value many times over, but there was also simply too much work to do for Beck’s order ever to be implemented: too many murderesses knocking off their boyfriends, too many girl pickpockets and pretty little con artists, too many young women snatched from respectable lives by white slavers or their own dark curiosity.
More than anything else, Forbes and Maurine could thank the Eighteenth Amendment for their burgeoning career opportunities. No one had foreseen that Prohibition would have such disastrous consequences. Chicago’s newspapers had all supported the constitutional amendment and its enforcement law, the Volstead Act, which went into effect in January 1920. But their support hardly convinced anyone that the law was right. Prohibition’s timing had simply been awful. The 1920s began, wrote Burton Rascoe, the Tribune ’s former literary editor, “in a general atmosphere of cynicism, disillusion and bitterness.” The unprecedented carnage of the World War had touched everyone in one way or another; now few people, especially those under forty, had any tolerance for the tin-eared moralizing of the temperance folks. After Prohibition got under way, alcohol consumption spiked—and continued to rise even as the quality of the spirits plummeted. For a whole generation, across class lines, defying the dry law became an act of self-definition—a necessary rebellion against a sordid, hypocritical ruling class. Illegal production and distribution of alcoholic beverages, centered in Chicago, became one of the biggest industries in the country, with beer sales in the city topping $30 million a month by one accounting.
The official corruption that came with this unprecedented criminal expansion was similarly outsize. Gangsters funneled a million dollars in bribes each month to Chicago’s police, prosecutors, and elected officials. It made the whole city—at least to Maurine’s suddenly jaded eye—a “grand and gory comedy.” When it came to bootleggers, those charged with enforcing the law, at every level, became blind and dumb. Reporters who didn’t overlook this rampant graft suffered. Fred Lovering, of the Daily Journal, foolishly broke a story about bribery at the Cook County Jail. The next time the reporter walked into the lockup, guards grabbed him and held him down while prisoners pummeled him. Lovering’s nose was reduced to a blob of flaccid flesh, leaving him with breathing problems, a severe speech impediment, and constant pain for the rest of his life. Maurine was stunned to learn that a warden at a smaller facility called in federal agents “to stop bootlegging in his jail so
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