LABOR DAY Chapter Two

 

It was nearing 10:00pm, on Tuesday, 25 June, 1894, when the number seven Illinois Central overnight train to St. Louis approached the Grand Crossing. After heavy thunderstorms earlier, the evening skies were partly cloudy, warm and humid. The Number seven had paused at 39^th street to pick up a few additional passengers. Then, at Hyde Park station on 53^rd street, the train switched to express tracks and angled southwest for seven miles until the headlamp illuminated the boom barriers at the Grand Crossing (below).

All trains, passenger and freight, were required to stop a the Grand Crossing (above). The engineers would sound the locomotive's whistles to request clearance. The switchmen would confirm the crossing was clear and then release the gates, to allow the train to proceed. It had happened hundreds of times every day over the last 30 years. But tonight a crowd of perhaps 5,000 had gathered to witness the opening of those gates. The expectation was that, this time, something dramatic was about to happen.

Chicago newspapers had been reporting on the miserliness of George Pullman for the last decade, until even the New York Times was forced to admit,, “It has been the policy of the Pullman Palace Car Company to reduce the salaries of its employees until the starvation point is reached”.  In 1884 Pullman managers showed up unannounced at the front door of the widow of a Pullman mechanic and her three daughters, and tossed “...their belongings out onto the street”.

A Pullman seamstress reported her father had the misfortune to survive a few weeks after being injured on his Pullman job. After his death, Pullman had docked her pay until his back rent had been paid.  Complained another Pullman worker, “One fine morning a number of men will knock on your door...” The company decided when to paint your home, and when to fix your roof or your plumbing, And “....all charges for repairs will be deducted from your wages next pay day...” 

As early as 1892 almost half of Pullman residents had been forced to take in a boarder at $3 to $5 a week, just to make ends meet. All of this while things were still “normal”.

After the pay reduction, another worker testified under oath he had seen men crying over their paychecks, because, “...they only got 3 or 4 cents after paying their rent.” By the strike, rents in Pullman were $70,000 in arrears, and workers had begun to collapse on the job, “...for want of food.” Upon hearing such complaints a Pullman foreman told his workers, “If you cannot live...go out and hustle for more.” 

And there can be little doubt some woman were forced to sell their bodies, although Victorian morality forbid admitting wives and mothers would do such things to feed their children. Besides, the Pullman company would consider such behavior grounds for instant expulsion. This was why the workers struck. With the resulting lock-out, the poverty and starvation got only worse.

Chicago Mayor and ex-railroad man Roswell B. Mason – not exactly a bleeding heart - had written George Pullman, “...sixteen hundred families including women and children, are starving...they cannot get work and have not the means to go elsewhere...Some of them worked for your company for many years. They must be people of industry and character or you would not have kept them. Many of them have practically given their lives to you....” The railroad man turned politician explained, “The relief committee on last Saturday gave out two pounds of oat meal and two pounds of corn meal to each family.” But that effort had exhausted the committee's resources. 

Pullman vice-president Thomas Wickes responded with the empty platitude, “...it is a man’s privilege to go to work somewhere else.” Of course, during the austerity program, the officers, managers and superintendents of the Pullman Palace Sleeping Car Company had not suffered any pay reductions, nor had the stockholders been denied their dividends.

The public anger at the arrogance of George Pullman explained the crowd at the Grand Crossing (above).  No public announcement had been made. No manifesto had been issued. But rumors in Chicago's environs had whispered that five Switchmen had visited the offices of the American Railway Workers. By the estimate of one journalist, there were perhaps 1,500 railroad men in the crowd. But the remaining 3,500 or so were wives and children of workers, and the curious, and, it must be assumed, a scattering of railroad company spies. And when the number seven train sounded it's short whistle, anticipation reached it's peak.

A reporter noted, “The mob began to gather at Grand Crossing at 7:00 o'clock, and by 8:00 0'clock became strong enough to interrupt traffic...Everything, whether it carried a Pullman or not was halted by the mob... Another attempt was made to get an Illinois Central train through, but a man in the crowd threw himself down on the rails in front of the engine and the engineer refused to move the train. The aid of police was requested and the blockade was continued until a detachment of blue coats prevented any further interference with the raising of the gates.” 

The term “mob” was a gross exaggeration, since no railroad equipment was damaged, and no workers physically assaulted. And there were no arrests by the police on the ground.   But there was never any doubt was to where the sympathies of the crowd lay. The small Grand Crossing police force had even donated $44 to feed the Pullman children.

Watching over the Grand Crossing  (above) this night was the ultimate company man, Superintendent Thomas Collins. He had started as an office boy in the late 1860's, then worked 3 years as a telegrapher in Peotone, Illinois, then a supply agent, a dispatcher in Champaign, and then an assistant to the Superintendent building the 40 mile spur line to Dodgerville, Wisconsin. Since 1889 he had been in command of the Grand Crossing. His eldest son Walter worked as the ticket agent in the station there, and his son youngest son Howard expected to also work for the Illinois Central Railroad as soon as he had reached 12 years old.

Seeing the Switchmen were not moving the booms in response to the Number Seven's whistle, Collins walked over to the Switchman. We do not know what Collins said, but reports say “...he expostulated with him but it was of no avail”.   As long as the train carried Pullman cars, the booms would not move.   And if Collins had moved the booms himself, he would have personally been responsible for any accident which resulted. So the booms remained blocking the rails, and the number seven train did not move one inch closer to St. Louis. In fact no further trains passed through the Grand Crossing that night. It was the beginning of the complete shutdown of the American rail system.

Ray Baker, of the Chicago Record testified under oath, “At the Grand Crossing there was never much disturbance...The strikers and their sympathizers...did not exactly stop the trains, but the gate men had struck, and the engineers refused to cross over until the gates were open, and there was no one to open them, and for that reason the trains were blocked for the evening. There was no physical obstruction at all. No destruction of property took place at all.”

About ninety-minutes later the tower man who controlled the switches at 43^rd street simply walked away from his position, leaving two suburban trains without Pullman cars stranded. Shortly thereafter, a freight train, the Michigan Central Fast Mail Train and another Illinois Central passenger train were caught, unable to cross the same unmanned switches. Finally, about 1:00am, a supervisor occupied the 42^nd street tower and threw the switches, but that emergency fix was not going to solve the problem George Pullman had created.

By dawn, on Wednesday, 26 June, 1894, all 24 rail lines into and out of Chicago were at a stand still. The Chicago Times praised the strikers for their “...rapidity of conception and execution...”, and noted the action was “...carried on with strict conformity to law and order. With the exception of a crowd attracted out of a curiosity...there was no boisterous talking, no threats were made, and the few squads of police officers sent there to preserve order, had nothing to do”. Four railroads immediately took themselves out of the fight – the Chicago Great Western, the Baltimore & Ohio, the Chicago and Northern Pacific and the Wisconsin Central all agreed to drop Pullman cars from their trains.

The ball, as they say, was again in George Pullman's court.

- 30 

LAST CALL FOR THE LEVEE

 

I doubt any one recognized the significance when, just after five on Monday afternoon, 27 November, 1905, 38 year old Marshall Field  Jr,  died in Chicago’s Mercy hospital. He had been admitted five days earlier with a gunshot wound to the abdomen, and now he was dead. The problem was, there was no good explanation as to just how, or why or even where he had been shot.

The official story was that while in his bedroom Marshall (above) had been cleaning his gun, dropped it and the gun had gone off. 

The butler and a nurse said they had immediately rushed to his aide. But a reporter for the Chicago Daily News tried to replicate the accident with an identical weapon, and no matter how many times or ways they dropped the gun it refused to discharge. 

The newspapers were afraid of losing advertising from the Marshall Field Department Stores (above), which was then the largest retail chain in America, so the public questions stopped there. Around town the often unstated assumption was the heir to one of the largest fortunes in America  had shot himself. And then there were rumors, which appear to have originated with the local cab drivers, that Field had actually been shot in one of the houses of ill-repute in The Levee and rushed in a cab back to his own home. The next afternoon, it was from there he had been rushed to the hospital. 

The twin Fields' mansions, father’s and son’s (above), stood next to each other along what was called “Millionaires Row” -  Prairie Avenue on Chicago’s south side, surrounded by mansions occupied by 70 of the richest families in America, the last time millionaires paid no taxes. Moral reformer Lincoln Steffens described Chicago at the time as, "...first in violence, deepest in dirt...a spectacle for the nation".   

After the funeral Marshall Junior’s widow and her three children moved in with his father. But it stood no chance of being a happy home. The very next year the elder Field died of pneumonia, and the widow returned to her native England, leaving behind an open wound - primarily caused, many believed, by a section of Chicago called the Levee, which had somehow, killed her husband.

The Levee District was home to sin and vice of unsurpassed depravity and popularity. It was bordered by 18th street on the north, 23rd street on the south, South Clark on the west and South Wabash Avenue on the east. And at its immoral center was the Everleigh Club. 

For eight years Ada and Minna Everleigh (above) were the unofficial “Queens of the Levee”, running one of the most popular upper class brothels in the Chicago. Minna (right) famously greeted each customer with a delightfully wicked, “How’s my boy?” 

Their thirty working women catered to an upscale clientele, charging $50 just to get in the front door of 2131-2133 South Dearborn (above). 

It was common knowledge that for years Marshall Field Jr. had been a regular at the Everleigh Club (above, entrance hall), and the rumor was that Marshall had actually been shot at the club by one of the working ladies, or had shot himself there because he was being blackmailed by one of the "ladies". Those kinds of things often happened on The Levee. 

South of the Everleigh Club was Ed Weiss’s bawdy house, "The Capital", and to the north was "The Sapphro", run by his brother Lou Weiss.  All houses of prostitution. 

In fact, jammed into the Levee were dozens of houses of prostitution, catering to whatever sin the customers could afford; Dago Franks, French Em’s, the Old 92....

...and in direct cutthroat competition with the Everleigh sisters was Madam Vic Shaw (above), whose house sat at Dearborn and Cullerton. In between the whore houses were opium dens, cocaine factories, gambling joints, peep shows and bars - lots and lots of bars. 

Ringmasters of this sin circus, the Princes of the Levee, were two Aldermen who represented the district;  the big, blustery John J. Coughlin (right), and his diminutive doppelganger, Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna (left). 

The gimlet eyed “Hinky Dink” (above) received his nickname because he stood just 5 feet tall. He was normally “…glum and quietly dressed”, and usually chewing on a cigar.  He was a teetotaler, and his wife was a temperance worker. 

Hinky Dink Kenna not only had the political connections to protect the Levee, he also owned and operated several bars and gambling houses in the district, the most famous of which was The Workingman’s Exchange on Clark Street, home of "The Big Beer".. 

Here barflies, bums, tramps and the homeless could buy a "Big" (20oz) Beer for a nickel, pick up a free lunch and, according to the Republican legend,  get a job as a “repeater”.

According to the mythology, customers at the Working Men's Exchange" were given pre-marked ballots by Democratic Ward Heelers, so called because they walked the voting districts. It was claimed these "repeaters" were then transported to various polling places, where they would trade their pre-marked ballots for blanks. 

Supposedly after committing voter fraud they would then return to "The Exchange" where they handed in their blanks for a payment of fifty cents each. While they drank a free beer, their new ballots would be marked and the game would go another round.  But for all the Republican mythology for such a complicated and convoluted system, no solid evidence of of it has ever surfaced.  And it is doubtful the residence of The Levee would have voted against the men who protected the primary industry - sin.  Over twenty years neither "Bathhouse" nor Hinky Dink ever even came close to losing an election.

“Bathhouse” John Joseph Coughlin earned his nickname because at one time he had worked as an masseur at a bath house, which was also a Levee euphemism for a gambling joint.  Bathhouse claimed "Why, money didn't mean anything to me....I might have been a rich man's son and gone to Yale, and never amounted to nothing!"

Alderman Coughlin (above) was over sized, usually overdressed and prone to outbursts of bad poetry he had written himself, such as his infamous “She sleeps by the Drainage Canal” or “Why did they build the lovely lake so close to the horrible shore?”  

Bathouse's  typical “Signs of Spring “concluded, “There are many other signs of spring which come by wireless wire; One of which is Yours Sincerely, who is tuning up his lyre. Just to twang a song to nature 'bout the brooks and fields of green; O, I wonder if I'm understood; I wonder, yes, I ween.”  

It was said that one of Chicago’s mayors once asked Michael Kenna (above) if Bathhouse was just crazy or a drug addict. Hinky Dink replied, “To tell you the god’s truth, Mayor, they ain’t found a name for it yet.”  As for himself,  Hinky Dink  could not stand to listen to Coughlin's poems unless he was pretty drunk, and he never drank.

These two Aldermen had a genius for skimming protection money from the Levee. Their enforcement arm was the Chicago Police, and in addition to their weekly take of thousands of dollars per establishment, which they used to pay the crooked cops, they sold tickets to the annual First Ward Ball. 

In the words of one web site, “Every employee of a house of ill-repute or gambling den, every robber, pickpocket, safe-cracker, and streetwalker, and every bartender, bawdy house entertainer, and low groggery proprietor, all were required to buy tickets…”

The Ball was held each December, and Ike Bloom, owner of “Freiberg’s Dance Hall”, was responsible for selling the tickets. Ike himself was half clown and half cold blooded killer, whose club was “the most notorious place in Chicago”, which was quite a charge, considering Chicago. Nobody declined to buy tickets from Ike.  

The ball was billed as a charity, and in 1906, the year after Marshall Field's accidental death/suicide, a reporter from the Tribune asked Hinky Dink where all money went. Hinky Dink replied, “Charity, education, burying the dead, and general ward benefits for the people” 

Asked what he meant by ‘education’, Hinky got a little testy. “It consists", he snapped, "of hiring good halls and good speakers to teach the people of the First ward to vote the straight Democratic ticket.” And that was the end of that interview. 

Each December the First Ward Ball grew in size and sank in reputation. The 1908 festivity attracted “20,000 drunken, yelling, brawling revelers” who spilled out onto the streets around the Coliseum.  

When the Law And Order League tried to stop the orgy, they inspired Bathhouse to write, “Strike up the march, professor, and I will lead the way; We'll trip the light fantastic too, until the break of day. Who knows that ere another ball, we'll be outside the city hall; Be gay, but not too gay.” 

And Hinky Dink  (above, right) groused, “Whenever you hear one of them fellows shouting that Hinky Dink is a menace to society and that he has horns, just keep your hand on your watch. Savvy?” 

One newspaper  attempted to describe the scene inside the Coliseum. “The crowd was so enormous that when women fainted – a common occurrence – they had to be passed overhead from hand to hand towards the exits. Cigar smoke settled...in such thick fogs that visibility was no greater than 30 feet in any direction. The noise of shuffling feet and murmuring overpowered the sound of the dance band, and fist-fights and shoving erupted in all quarters." 

When Lyman Atwell, photographer for the Tribune…began setting up his flash and tripod, security notified (Bathhouse) who…personally jumped on Atwell, breaking his camera and knocking him to the ground…"

"As usual, things started to get interesting at midnight, when the regiments of madams and their inmates showed up, led by the Everleigh Sisters. This caused another influx of thousands of men to attempt to enter the building…”  Hinky Dink lorded over the affair from a table off the main floor. Then, at midnight, Bathhouse, wearing a green jacket, a mauve vest, lavender pants and a stove pipe silk hat led a winding Conga Line called The Grand March. Said the newspaper, “The most infamous party in Chicago history lasted until 5 a.m., when the last drunken revelers staggered out…” 

But, after the death of the Marshall Field Jr., the millionaires began speaking with their feet, trading  their row homes along Prairie Avenue for even larger mansions with extensive grounds along the "Gold Coast" in the northern suburbs along the lake.  One newspaper observed that Prairie  Avenue had become undesirable to those for whom it was affordable, and unaffordable to those for whom it was desirable.

The conservatives Republicans now abandoned Millionaires Row, convinced it was the debauched Democratic Ward Heelers who had ruined the morals of  their city. In fact, the 1908 First Ward Ball would be the last.  Not that the drugs, gambling and prostitution were dying out. It was more that the Republican solutions having failed to stamp them out, they gave up and moved away. 

The mayor finally ordered the Everleigh club (above) closed in October of 1911. 

The sisters said they walked away with $1,000,000 in cash, and their post Levee lifestyle in New York City seemed to support that retirement fund.  Minna took the change philosophically. “If it weren't for married men”, she admitted, “we couldn't have carried on at all, and if it weren't for cheating married women we could have made another million.” Minna died in 1948, Ada died in 1960. She was 93.

Then in 1913, in far off Los Angeles, California, a woman appeared who claimed to know the truth concerning the  death of Marshall Field Junior. Her name was Mrs. Ver Scott Prosser (above), and she was awaiting trial for having murdered Mister Prosser. But while behind bars she confessed to having used the names Vera Leroy, Viola Gilmore, and Vera Scott.  But during her time working at the opulent Everleigh Club, she was known simply as "Vera the French Girl".  Except she was from Cleveland.

Said one of the men who worked at the club, "Vera was a wonder at getting the money when she wanted to be, but she was a little devil when she had been drinking. The Everleigh sisters used to have to threaten to throw her out. But...they wouldn’t throw her out because she had too many suckers come there to buy wine." ( above, ballroom in Everleigh Club)   She was described as impulsive, neurotic , hot-tempered, jealous, winsome. coquettish and fanciful." To modern ears it sounds as if she was an undiagnosed manic depressive.

Vera said that Marshall Field was well known at the Everleigh Club (above, music room).  "Everybody called him by name, and...Emma Everleigh, gave him the courtesy of a private room. We went there...with a girl named Alice." During the sex, the volatile Vera suddenly felt slighted and claimed that Marshall had injured her.  "I jumped up," said Vera, "and I remembered he had a gun in his trousers.. I was inflamed with drink and crazy mad. I told him that I would teach him never to do that kind of trick again." 

Although Alice tried to talk Vera down, "I aimed the gun at Field and told him to stand aside. He was without clothes. The trigger must have been very finely set, for it pulled before I intended." At the sound of the shot Emma Everleigh rushed into the room (above). According to Vera, even the wounded Field told her, "Don't get excited. I won't tell. Call me a cab, quick, and get me out of this, and don't say anything."

According to Vera, Field’s father gave her $26,000 to leave the country.  The man who worked at the Everleigh Club noted that "After the Field affair she disappeared completely. I heard a lot of rumors concerning her."  In fact she traveled to China, had an affair with a blue blood, returned to the states, married Mr. Prossser  whom she later admitted shooting. However the jury found she had acted in self defense, and after being released she returned to Cleveland, where she died in obscurity.  

Bathhouse John Coughlin (above) served 46 years as a Chicago Alderman. 

He died in 1938, $50,000 in debt.  Evidently, poetry never paid very well.

“Hinky Dink” Kenna spent his last years (above) alienated from his family, living in a suite in the Blackstone Hotel and cared for only by a male nurse.  He died in 1946 and left behind a million dollars…in cash. 

His will stipulated that $33,000 of it should be set aside to construct a mausoleum for his grave. His survivors had Hinky’s will set aside. Instead they marked his passing with an $85.00 wooden tombstone, which was later replaced by a simple marble ground level marker, just as if he had been nobody special at all. 

At Hinky’s funeral, half the pews were empty, and few sent flowers. As one old First Ward lobbygog (Ward Heeler) put it, “If you don't go to other people's funerals, they won't go to yours.”  

In truth it was not the reformers or the Law and Order League that put the Levee out of business, but rather the arrival of Prohibition in 1920, which freed the Levee from its confinement, and let it spread out and multiply. 

The new Prince of Chicago sin was “Big Jim” Colosimo (above),  who married Madam Victoria Shaw. Big Jim plowed the profits from the whore house into a spectacular nightclub. Then, in 1919 Colosimo opened a new brothel at 2222 Wabash avenue, which he called "The Four Duces".  As a bartender and bouncer for the club he brought a young thug out from New York. His name was Al Capone.

The following year, 1920, Big Jim was gunned down leaving his own night club. And it was rumored the man who pulled the trigger was Al Capone. As Hinky Dink explained, “Chicago ain't no sissy town.” And Marshall Field Jr. would have certainly agreed.

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