Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul
By Karen Abbott
Random House, 356 pages, $25.95
Despite its flaws, Karen Abbott’s “Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul” is the most engaging, thoroughly researched work to be published on its subject.
During the first decade of the 20th Century, Chicago’s red-light district — the so-called Levee south of the Loop in the 1st Ward, a bawdy enclave chockablock with saloons, dance halls, gambling dens and “disorderly houses” — was rife with flamboyantly outre characters, and “Sin in the Second City” seldom fails to make the gaudy most of them.
At the heart of Abbott’s story beats the protracted war between the city’s purveyors of sin and its hawkers of salvation, between the city’s on-the-take pols, cops and brothelkeepers, and its social reformers, crusaders and Bible-thumpers.
And at the heart of that war is the battle that pits the world-renowned, personally mysterious, fabulously wealthy sister-madams Minna and Ada Everleigh (whose patrons included Marshall Field Jr., Prince Henry of Prussia and heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, and whose annual revenue comfortably exceeded $100,000) against two strait-laced local men, one a minister, the other an attorney, both obsessed with running them and the practice of what it pleases them to sensationalize as white slavery — coerced prostitution — out of town.
In the affably capable hands of its author, the material makes not only for a rousingly racy yarn — one of the chapters is titled “It Don’t Never Get Good Until Three in the Morning” — but one that sheds overdue light on the culture wars of an earlier era in our nation’s history.
The problem with the book is not that it is not a diverting, gregarious and edifying read — it decidedly is all those things. Nor is it that it does not contain new and noteworthy revelations — it is fraught with them. (This is the first time both the pre- and post-Chicago facts about the Everleigh sisters have reposed between covers.) Nor is it that the arrangement of her material is ill-conceived or unfelicitous — the architecture of the book is commendable. Nor that her prose and the voice in which she expresses it are crude or clumsy, dull or bloodless — if anything they are several gusts too breezy.
The problem is that for a work that purports to be historical non-fiction, it too liberally employs the wholly problematic device of pretending to reconstruct novelistic, in medias res scenes, right down to the attribution of inflected dialogue, gesture, feeling and thought.
This flaw — sadly, a glaring one — does not detract from the work’s readability. In fact, coupled with the rather gushing narrative voice, it serves only to enhance it. What it does is detract from its reliability. It mars the internal soundness and undermines the overall credibility of the material. In consequence, we never quite trust the author’s version of people and events. It doesn’t ring quite true — or, perhaps, it rings too true. It strains credulity. To swallow what we are reading as the whole truth and nothing but requires several grains of salt.
The story itself is inherently spicy, featuring all the elements mentioned in the book’s subtitle and more. In this Abbott delivers on what she promises. She is at her most sure-footed when embedding her material in the dichotomous sin-versus-salvation zeitgeist of its time and in animating the roles played by the assorted colorful characters in her drama: Ald. Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse” John Coughlin, Levee denizens Ike Bloom and “Big Jim” Colosimo, notorious madam Vic Shaw, reformers Rev. Ernest Bell and State’s Atty. Clifford Roe.
And yet, as we are carried briskly along, we are left repeatedly to wonder how it is that fully 100 years after the fact, the author can know to a documentable certainty exactly what such and such a character was inwardly feeling or thinking at such and such a moment in such and such a situation, much less a sexual one.
How are we to respond when on page after page we are assailed with such assertions as, “Her mind was a tangle and she worked to unknot it, thought by thought.” Or, “Minna’s lips parted, her blood surged.” Or, “[T]he thought, temporarily dormant, roused itself and fluttered inside her mind.” Or, “A fist of panic curled inside her.” Or, “Minna accessed that pocket of her brain where her thoughts were calculated.” Or, “[S]he willed her mind to stand still, the knot to dislodge from her throat.” Is what we are reading really history? Literary reportage? Speculative journalism? A species of semiapocryphal non-fiction? Some incorrigible conflation, perhaps?
To Abbott’s credit, she has done primary research in archives across three states and the District of Columbia, tracked down and spoken with the Everleigh sisters’ 80-year-old great-niece, included more than three dozen photos and illustrations to help dimensionalize the story as well as two dozen pages of endnotes, and her bibliography is so extensive as to appear comprehensive.
Less wisely, she has relied overgenerously on a single source, one that might best be described as dubious, the 72-year-old book “Come Into My Parlor,” written by adman, public-relations flack and longstanding Everleigh partisan Charles Washburn. In an author’s note, Abbott admits that Washburn’s book is “flawed,” “compromised,” contains “misinformation” and serious omissions, and was written expressly to protect the sisters’ reputation and “perpetuate the myths.” And yet she cites it no fewer than 138 times in the endnotes, more than any other source.
At a moment when readers are with just cause increasingly wary of being hoodwinked, when they time and again have had their confidence shaken by editors and authors who seem unable to distinguish between memory and imagination, when they are painfully aware that the boundary between fact and fabrication, truth and opinion has been and continues to be blurred beyond recognition, one might think it would behoove any author to err on the side of playing it square rather than tarting it up.
The issue of literary license as it applies to works of non-fiction is controversial. In “Sin in the Second City,” Abbott regrettably takes that license several liberties too far. For the sake of furnishing the reader with a sense of novelistic immediacy and visceral involvement with her material, in the name of making history come alive, she has compromised the one quality in which every history must be steeped: its scrupulous, incontrovertible facticity.
Had she and her editor only troubled themselves to properly attribute and qualify her numberless surmises, suppositions and leaps of imagination with such perfectly useful words as “allegedly” or “reportedly” or “conceivably” or “according to” or “perhaps,” her story might have read somewhat less smoothly, but its veracity would have benefited immeasurably. And — no quibble, this — in works of non-fiction, veracity always trumps readability.
At last, while the reader can appreciate the considerable foundation of archival research upon which her story reposes — three years of it, according to the author — that same reader has difficulty sympathizing with her too-cavalier approach with respect to the unembellished presentation of its telling. The impressive homework too often is trivialized, where not undone, by its fast-and-loose handling.
In fairness, Abbott does not claim to be a historian, trained or otherwise, and this is her first book. Favored with more conscientious editing, there is no reason her next effort should not nimbly sidestep the pitfalls — the transparently fictionalized scenes foremost — of this one.
She already is possessed, as we say, of the research chops, she knows a promising subject when she sees one, she deftly tells a compelling story and writes a wellturned sentence couched in an appealing, even charming, if rather-too-urgent voice. Now she need only settle upon a narrative flight plan that does right justice by her talents.
Either that, or next time around, dispense with the narrative brocade and technical hijinks and — shudder! — write a novel.
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Bruce Olds, a Chicago resident and former newspaper reporter, is the author of three novels, the most recent of which is “The Moments Lost: A Midwest Pilgrim’s Progress.”
