About book Sin In The Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, And The Battle For America's Soul (2007)
In “Sin in the Second City” Karen Abbott tells us in her subtitle that the book is ultimately about “the Battle for America's Soul.” Pretty heady! I suppose that the battle still persists to this day, so I shouldn’t have expected a victor in the book itself, yet was left feeling unsatisfied at not even having a side to root for. Abbott seemingly couldn’t decide if she was writing a slice-of-life about Chicago’s vice district at the turn of the century, a profile of two successful sisters running a posh brothel, or a narrative history of the battle between reformers and vice lords. Elements of all three different books come to the fore at different times in the relatively scant 300 pages of text, with no one tack prevailing. I never felt that I had a satisfying level of detail about “the Levee” – the infamous vice district – or a real grasp of the tale of Ada and Minna Everleigh – the sister-proprietors of the infamous “Everleigh Club” – OR a clear-cut understanding of the major players and sequence of events in the battle between the reform movement and the criminal element. Ultimately, Abbott gives a muddled portrait of a bunch of people at the turn of the century who, while colorful enough, aren’t well-enough detailed to be compelling, or motivated well enough to be understandable, dropped into a sequence of events that seems dramatic but is utterly without stakes or importance.This leads to the primary question I had with the book: who are we, the readers, supposed to root for (if anyone), and/or who does Abbott seem to prefer in this mini-epic “Battle”? I am also not so simple a reader as to require a “good guy” and a “bad guy” in the stories I read, but some person or people I could care about on more than a cursory level would have been sufficient. Seemingly, the Everleigh sisters, in trying to raise their whorehouse to a higher standard and cater to a more exclusive, monied clientele, are our heroes, as it were. But we know precious little about them, partially because they (presumably by necessity) obfuscate so much information about their lives, and partly because there are so many other outsize characters in the book that Abbott doesn’t have the time to invest them with anything other than the most limited amount of depth. The other characters in the Levee are mostly abominable: vicious pimps and madams, forcing their whores into disgusting and vile acts, while meting out healthy portions of abuse and disease. Nobody to sympathize with there… Abbott then treats the reformers of the time with disdain, portraying them as timorous moralizers, pedantic grandstanders, superficial busybodies. I suppose there is something postmodern in the idea that there are no heroes in this story, but one still gets the feeling that Abbott sides with the vice district, somehow wishing that prostitution, segregated from the mainstream of society, could entirely be elevated to the “classy” level of the Everleigh Club and allowed to continue on(?!). Certainly the reform-minded crusaders – religious and political – are not shown as heroic janitors of a social filth. Yet Chicago’s vice district IS clearly a rats’ nest of illness and misery – with the possible exception of the dubious accomplishments of the Everleigh Club in partially raising the brothel to a not-totally-disgusting-and-horrendous level.In this book, it would seem a shame that the Everleigh Club was shuttered by an apprehensive and capricious mayor. It may be that it is meant to be a shame simply because of the changing of the times – the passing of an epoch. But I had a hard time working up a great deal of emotional nostalgia for the closing of Chicago’s fanciest whorehouse out of a pack of awful whorehouses. Is this the sort of changing of the times that we should lament? The end of the good times? (We aren’t even to the Roaring ‘20s yet!) Were these times really so good in the first place?? Abbott is at pains to downplay much of the basis for the moral fervor over “white slavery.” She seems largely to dismiss the idea advocated by the reformers: that credulous women from out of town were lured off train platforms into houses of ill repute by (moustache-twirling) villains. Instead, she indicates that many of these women chose “the life” for themselves. I both have a hard time believing this, and have a hard time accepting it as a mitigating factor in the brutal turn-of-the-century sex industry. Is it proto-feminism? A woman’s right to do with her body as she pleases? Based on some of the nasty anecdotes in the book, one would imagine it was anything but. Is she really advocating for women to be allowed to be publicly whipped in S&M-style displays for male titillation? (Such were some of the entertainments at the less-classy brothels.) Does anyone really think women were willingly and rationally choosing this for themselves? Yet Abbott’s authorial loyalties do seem to lie with her unruly, anti-heroic whores and madams. (Obviously, I just don’t get it.)The book was interesting enough as a sketch of a wonderfully alien time and place, all taking place here in the city where I live and the streets where I walk. But beyond the curiosity factor, I did not find much of any substance – certainly nothing that would indicate this book was about the battle for America’s very soul! I would have appreciated Abbott tipping her hand more: why, aside from the vaguest modern-day resonances of religious people legislating morality, were the reformers so lame in her eyes? Conversely, Abbott would have been well served to detach herself and give us sympathetic characters on both sides of the battle: a compassionate reformer with the best interests of women and society at heart, clashing with a big-hearted madam just trying to make a living, to show the democratic conundrum between freedom and immorality. But the battle is inconsistently pitched, from an authorial perspective, and ultimately relegates the book into muddled, if interesting, purposelessness.
"In the winter of 1899, a train clattered toward Chicago, fat coils of smoke whipping the sky. Minna and Ada Everleigh sat together in a Pullman Palace car, sipping wine served by porters in white jackets and gloves. ...The air inside the car hung heavy and whisper-quiet, but the sisters were restless, giddy with plans: they would build upon what they had learned as madams in Omaha, Nebraska, and create the finest brothel in history."Man, who doesn't love a good old-timey hooker story? Karen Abbott's story of the Everleigh sisters' rise and fall in the vice district of early 20th-century Chicago is engrossing, well-researched, and fun. Minna and Ada Everleigh (not their real names, of course) came to Chicago with plans to start the best brothel in Chicago, and they were unique in that respect because they wanted to run a house where girls would want to work. Other brothels of the time got their girls by kidnapping, drugs, and rape, but the Everleigh sisters were different: "The Everleigh sisters vowed never to deal with pimps, desperate parents selling off children, panders, and white slavers. If you treated girls well, they would come begging for admittance. A prospective Everleigh courtesan must prove she's eighteen in order to earn an interview, understand exactly what the job entailed, and know she's free to leave anytime, for any reason, without penalty."Starting on this basis, the Everleigh sisters bought a house in Chicago's infamous Levee district, and soon created the most exclusive, beautiful, and famous brothel in Chicago. They entertained politicians, gangsters, playboys, and princes - they even, at one point, admitted a famous African-American boxer into the Everleigh Club, an act which was socially forbidden at the time (the girls all found the boxer delightful, and there was no trouble)."[Clients] came to see the Moorish Room, featuring the obligatory Turkish corner, complete with overstuffed couches and rich, sweeping draperies; and the Japanese Parlor, with its ornately carved teakwood chair resting upon a dais, a gold sold canopy hovering above. (The Tribune noted that the Japanese Parlor was 'a harlot's dream of what a Japanese palace might look like inside.') In the Egyptian Room, a full-sized effigy of Cleopatra kept a solemn eye on the proceedings. The Chinese Room, entirely different from the ambiguously named Oriental Room, offered packages of tiny firecrackers and a huge brass beaker in which to shoot them - where else but at the Everleigh Club could a man indulge his adult and childish impulses?"Running the brothel wasn't easy, though. In addition to bribing the authorities and dealing with the competing madams trying to put them out of business, the Everleigh sisters also had to deal with the anti-prostitution reformers who flocked to the city. Around the time the Everleigh Club was taking off, newspapers were starting to feature stories of innocent girls trapped by the "white slave trade" (because obviously it's only sad when it happens to white virgins): young girls would be taken to dance halls, plied with liquor, and then drugged by their escorts. They would wake up in a brothel, having been raped multiple times, and were told that they would have to work there from now on. Reformers caught onto these stories and set about destroying the vice district in Chicago and ironically, they focused their attentions on the one brothel in the city that had nothing to do with the white slave trade: the Everleigh Club.Abbott's book focuses mostly on the reformers and the efforts of the Everleigh sisters to keep their club open (along with several other key Levee players), and this is to the detriment of the book. I wanted to book to be about the Everleigh Club and have the reformers be a subplot, but often it's the other way around. We get brief little anecdotes about the prostitutes and what went on behind closed doors at the Club (like one client who enjoyed tossing gold coins at his favorite girl, the deal being that she could keep whatever she caught in her snatch), but they're few and far between as we spend too much time with the reformers. Also, Abbott's glasses are a little bit too rose-tinted when she's discussing the issue of prostitution in the early 20th century. She treats the stories of drugged girls being violated by "professional rapists" (which has to be one of the Top Five Most Horrifying Job Titles) with a little too much unconcern, as if we're supposed to believe that those things don't happen nowadays. First off, old-timey rapists are still rapists, and stories of kidnapping and sexual slavery aren't improved by the fact that they're sepia-toned (so I don't view it as a good thing that the New York Times Book Review blurb called this book "a lush love letter to the underworld"). Second, while I understand that the purpose of Abbott's book isn't to educate her readers on modern sex trafficking, it would have been nice if there was some acknowledgement that the horrifying practices she describes are still going on today, and didn't disappear along with the Jazz Age. All in a all, a fun romp through Chicago's seedy history and a cool glimpse into the underworld and its people. It's History Lite, but it's well-written, well-researched, good unclean fun.
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Oh I wanted this book to be so much more than it was. The story of the Everleigh sisters, along with Bathhouse John and Hinky Dick, is such a colorful one in the City of Chicago. Yet this book makes it almost (not quite) boring. Too much jumping around in time and storylines. It just didn't come together. If the data is so limited, this story could easily have been fictionalized and made really, really readable and exciting. Just because something is fiction does not mean it doesn't contain the truth.
—Donna
I absolutely loved this book. I found it in my local library by chance and I'm glad I did. I love historical books about Chicago. Sin in the Second City has much in common with Devil in the White City as it takes place roughly during the same time period in Chicago (around 1900). Although the subject matter may turn some people off, I loved learning about the history of prostitution in Chicago. It was surprising to discover that this is a true story. Maybe it is naive of me but I kept having to check if this stuff was for real while reading the book. The Everleigh sisters were true entrepreneurs to have created the pre-eminent brothel in the U.S. Even so, I couldn't help but be shocked by the so-called respectable men who frequented such places...from the scions of the wealthy Chicagoans like Marshall Field Jr. to politicians and even princes. And of course, the stories of murders, robberies, drinking, and other illicit activities were interesting. After reading this book, I feel like I have an understanding of what life was like in the vice district in Chicago. The author cleverly set the book amidst the reform movement that ushered out the brothels and other dens of iniquity. There were so many funny, interesting, and depressing moments in this book. It's hard not to fall in love with the Everleigh sisters. They did try to put a touch of class to the prostitution industry. They certainly stood above the white slavers and pimps who took advantage of young rural and foreign girls coming to Chicago. That's not saying much but at least they were one touch of respectability in an otherwise despicable place. So if you have ever lived in Chicago or have any interest in Chicago history, you'll love this story. But even if you don't have a connection Chicago, this book is a great opportunity to learn about the underbelly of American life in the early 1900's.
—Keri
This is a pretty entertaining, if somewhat shallow, slice of pop history which derives much of its verve from its vivid subject matter: the Everleigh Club, an exclusive, world-famous brothel founded in fin de siècle Chicago, populated by Balzac-quoting prostitutes and run by sisters Minna and Ada. Sin and the Second City covers the club's foundation, its rise to notoriety, its ongoing battle with reformers and religious campaigners, and its eventual closure, and it rattles along at a breezy pace. As a narrative, it's very readable, a sort of nonfiction equivalent of an airport thriller, though as history it's much less satisfying. There are things which Abbott claims are unknown which she could surely have made an attempt at verifying (though I'm sure that doing so would remove a little of the story's glamour and mystique), things which she states as fact which are surely invented (how on earth does she know what people were thinking or feeling at particular moments?), things which are not explored as thoroughly as they could be (race, gender; the fates of some of the prostitutes who passed through the Everleigh Club, because I'm sure some of them at least could be traced). Abbott's desire to romanticise the sisters—so much classier than those other madams! and of course she never even tries to question their assertions that they never engaged in the practice of buying women or coercing them into prostitution, though by her own account they barter with another madam over a prostitute at least once—is super problematic on a couple of levels, particularly a class one. Have sex with someone for 50 cents: Awful! Be referred to in the text as a whore! Have sex with someone for $500: Well, nothing inherently wrong with that! Be referred to in the text as a courtesan! Blergh. Great subject matter, but could probably be treated much more thoughtfully by another writer.
—Siria
