Here is a partial list of the happenings of recent date in this one neighborhood, the first four named cases being within one business block:
GEORGE B. FERN, dry goods merchant, 1393 West Madison street; found in his store with bullet hole in his head, mask and revolver with one chamber empty at his side; police say hecommitted suicide; coroner’s jury returned a murder verdict; the grand jury also declares it was a case of murder.
CORA HENDERSON, blind woman, 1385 West Madison street; found dead in her house, hole in her skull; murder theory worked upon by police; later theory advanced that she might have met her death by a fall.
F. W., tailor, West Madison street; robbers drove up to his store in broad daylight while he was eating in a restaurant next door and intimidated clerk with revolver, loaded in tailor’s cloth, drove away.
W. H. D., West Madison street, grocer; hole drilled in his safe; burglars scared away when D. came to open store.
MRS. FRANK W., Washington boulevard, house entered; $200 stolen.
MRS. MARGARET D., Washington boulevard; house entered; $200 worth of property taken.
MRS. WARREN F. H., Warren avenue; house entered; $500 worth of property taken.
MRS. CHARLES C., Washington boulevard;hearing a noise at her front door, went onto the porch; a burglar who had been trying to force an entrance into the second story dropped at her side, revolver in hand; he escaped, frightening off pursuers with his revolver.
DR. F. F. S., West Monroe street and Homan avenue; two men attempted to hold him up in his office; frightened away by the arrival of a patient.
PROF. CHARLES E. W., Chicago Piano college; chased by mounted foot pad.
MRS. ELIZABETH H. T., M. D., Warren avenue; swindled out of $60 by men who had a ‘sure thing’ on the races.
JOHN V., West Monroe street; swindled by same game.
WILLIAM H. P., bookkeeper for C. S. & Co., West Monroe street; house robbed.
HERMAN W., West Monroe street; house robbed of diamonds, jewelry and silverware; Mrs. W. coming home, encounters robbers as they were leaving; they politely raised their hats and walked on.
H. S. B., real estate, West Adams street; candidate for president of M. club; house robbed.
ARTHUR W. C., Illinois Credit Company, West Adams street; house robbed.
JOHN G., grocer; attempt made to swindle him out of $100 by men with ‘tip’ on races.
The above list was obtained by a brief canvass of the neighborhood.
The house given as the abode of the “thieves” is situated right in this neighborhood, which is one of the best residence districts. It is a gray stone structure and is said to be owned by a well known West side politician. In this place lives at least one of the men who have swindled numerous West side residents of this district by means of the ‘tips’ on the races. These men, it is said, have operated successfully for a year, few of their victims making complaint on account of the unenviable publicity the affair would thus attain. This gang, too, has headquarters in a West Madison street block within a few doors of the Fern store.
This neighborhood is included in the Warren avenue police district. None of the officers atthis station, or any of the Central station detectives familiar with the case, believes that the ‘jockeys’ have anything to do with the ‘holdups’ and robberies of flats, and laugh at the idea advanced by the author of the letter to The J—.”
The names and addresses of these victims are printed in full in the newspaper referred to, but for obvious reasons they are not used in reproducing the article.
Immediately following the publication of this startling list of crimes, a grand jury submitted to the court the following report. The reader can harmonize, as best he may, this official statement, with that of a lighthearted and self satisfied Mayor who controls, or does not control, as one’s thought may elect, the Chicago police force.
“In closing our work the members of the jury desire to report to your honor some slight comment on the various matters which have been brought to our attention during our session, and to submit for recommendation to the proper authorities suggestions that may check the amount of crime which has been brought to our notice.
“Our city seems to be the asylum of habitual criminals of all classes, who have terrorized the people to an alarming degree. We would particularly call attention to several instances within our knowledge where persons have been found dead, investigation made by the proper authorities, verdicts rendered according to the evidence with recommendations by the coroner’s jury that the guilty be brought to justice. These deeds wherein the perpetrators in several instances have not been detected are largely due to the fact that this city is made an asylum for habitual criminals, and we strongly recommend that every measure be taken to close the gates of the city to such people.
“Were the statute of the state regarding the arrest of vagabonds more strictly enforced by the proper authorities the number of habitual criminals at large could be largely reduced and Chicago made a less attractive place of residence for this class. The law itself is broad and ample in its provisions. Places under the guise of saloons, duly licensed, are merely rendezvous for thieves, murderers and prostitutes, and notwithstanding the fact that such vile places are well known to the authorities they are permitted to continuewithout molestation. The defilement of our youths of both sexes should receive the severest penalty of the law. It is our duty to protect and guard the manhood and womanhood of the young.
“The continued violation of the ordinance fixing the closing hours of saloons is a great factor in the number of crimes committed in the city, and we earnestly recommend a strict enforcement of the ordinance.”
Apparently, a few of these criminal gentry regard Chicago as a safe field for their labors!
Boys in their teens, men and women, both black and white, the latter of the strong armed class, comprise this coterie of criminals. The strong armed women, generally negresses, have the developed muscles of the pugilist and the daring of the pirate. They entice the stranger into dark passage ways, that innocent stranger, so unfamiliar, but so willing to be made familiar with the wickedness of a great city, who seeks out its most disreputable quarters and scours its darkest byways, to report to his mates, on his return to his country home, the salacious things that he has heard of, and a few of which he witnessed. In thesedark and dangerous ways the strong armed women garrote and rob their victims, or they entice the innocent, but lustful, stranger to their rooms, and there, through the panel game, or by sheer strength or drugged potations, appropriate the innocent stranger’s valuables. Mortified and humiliated, the stranger usually has nothing to say to the police of the affair. Then the emboldened strong armed women go upon the street in couples, and rob in the most approved methods of the highwayman. Alone, one of these notorious characters is said to have pilfered to the extent of $60,000. She was, and is, a terror to the police force. Released from the penitentiary not long ago, she is now undergoing trial for a fresh offense. Approaching a commercial traveler from behind, she is charged with having nearly strangled him, and then robbed him of his money and jewelry.
“Only one man ever got the best of E. F.,” said detective Sergeant C. R. W., of Harrison street station, who had arrested E. F. frequently.
“Once she held up a cowboy and took $150 from him. He came up to the station hotfoot to report the robbery. We were busy and a little slow in sendingout after E., whereupon the cowboy allowed he’d start out after her on his own hook. He met her down by the Polk street depot, and the moment he spotted her he walked right up close to her and covered her with two six-shooters.
“You’ve got $150 of my money, now shell out nigger,” he said.
“Go and get a warrant and have me arrested then,” replied the big colored woman, who wanted time to plant the coin.
“These are good enough warrants for me,” returned the cowboy significantly, as he poked the revolvers a trifle closer to her face. “Now, I’m going to count twenty, and if I don’t see my money coming back before I reach twenty, I’ll go with both guns.”
“When he reached eighteen, E. weakened. She drew out a wad and held it out toward him. But the cowboy was wise and would not touch the roll till she had walked to the nearest lamplight under the escort of his two guns and counted out the $150. Then he let her go and came back to the station and treated.”
Conductors of street cars are often the victims of the hold up men. Here in Chicago they invented theplan of placing the saloonkeeper in the ice chest, while the looting of the place went on. In another instance a baker was imprisoned in a hot oven. Women in their homes are thrust into closets, gagged and bound, while their houses are ransacked and their property stolen.
The want of an energetic police is the cause of the prevalence of such abominable offenses as hair clipping, or the severing from the heads of young girls upon the public streets their braids of hair. One of these perverts was arrested and excused himself upon the ground that it was a mania with him, and that the temptation to cut off the braids of hair from every young girl he met, was almost irresistible. If detectives, instead of lounging around their daily haunts for drinking purposes, loafing in cigar stores, and playing the pool rooms, were mingling with the crowds upon the streets, offenses of this character would be nearly impossible, although this particular weakness seems to lead its impulsive perpetrators to less crowded thoroughfares, and selects the hours of going to and returning from school, as the most favorable parts of the day for its gratification. It may be prompted bya morbid desire, but it is none the less a serious offense, which, as yet, the criminal law has not defined, and has therefore not provided a proper penalty for its punishment. No evidence, so far as it is known, has yet been adduced to show that the braids of hair are ever sold to dealers in that article, such as wig manufacturers, etc. If such evidence should be forthcoming, the ingenuity of the average criminal for the discovery of new methods of despoliation will receive additional confirmation.
One peculiar method of protection to the criminal classes is in vogue. A new thief arrives in the city; his arrival is noticed by a detective and the fact reported to headquarters. The thief is invited to visit the Chief. Upon his appearance, permission is given him to remain, provided he “does not work his game” within the city. He can plunder all the neighboring towns he may select, but the price of his remaining in security in Chicago is, that he shall be good and gentlemanly to its people. The “Safe Blowers’ Union” has its home in Chicago, from which it radiates, as the spokes of a wheel, to the circumference of its limit of operations. It is a trust; a protective association. Itpays for the privilege. It attacks the country bank, blows it, in the silence of the night, to pieces with dynamite if necessary, and murders if interfered with. It returns with its loot to the city, makes its dividends among its membership, police included, and awaits the pressing necessity for a renewal of its suburban raids. It is under the king’s mighty shield, the king of the criminals, over whom he reigns with leniency, and whose gifts he accepts with condescension.
The fakes of a great city are beyond enumeration. There are fake information bureaus, fake advisory brokers, fake safe systems of speculation, fake music teachers, fake medical colleges, fake law schools, fake lawyers, fake “Old Charters for Sale,” fake corporations, fake relief and aid societies, fake preachers and fake detective agencies. The latter, and the street fakers, are friendly with the police. So are the fruit vendors, and the all night lunch counters on wheels. The latter stand where the officers say they shall stand, and the location once found, the officers at once become landlords.
As to private detective agencies, without reference to agencies of an established local and national reputation,they are principally constituted of thieves, pickpockets, blackmailers, and porch climbers.
In the trial of a case before the Criminal Court of Cook County, a few months ago, a witness acquainted with their inside history, swore that there were men connected with these fake organizations who would commit murder for $50. They enter into conspiracies to ruin the private character of men and women in divorce cases, and for blackmailing purposes. Three of these hounds were lately convicted of conspiracy in less than one hour, by a jury in the same court. These three worthies comprised the entire agency. Their punishment was fixed at imprisonment in the penitentiary. They were employed in getting revenge on a man, who was supposed, by their employer, to have been the cause of his discharge from his commercial position. In getting this revenge they fell upon their shadow, pummelled him with great severity, and badly injured him. So grievous was the offense, that the State’s Attorney demand no less a punishment than the jury awarded.
They manufacture testimony in divorce proceedings, at the suggestion and upon the request of theparties willing and desirous of cutting the matrimonial tie; or, upon the instigation of one of the parties, they will endeavor to entrap and compromise the other. They revel in the destruction of the character of a good woman, as the vulture revels in the foulness of a carrion. The man of wealth must be on his guard against their attacks, for they would as lief magnify his peccadillos into felonious crimes and attempt his plunder by blackmail, as they would accept the earnings of the Mistresses Overdone, the exhausted bawds, whose pimps they are.
Theirs is only another but a more vicious form of depravity than that practiced by the panel house keepers, who send their single workers upon the streets to entice men to their abodes, where they are met by the expert workers of the game. While thus entrapped, and indulging in the sensuality which aids so readily in his allurement, the adroit “creeper” enters the room through a movable panel, or by some other prearranged method of ingress, and takes the watch, the coin, or “any other old thing” of value, found about the removed and scattered clothing of the greenhorn. The police are as well acquainted with these “singleworkers” as they are with the street walkers. They know their haunts, and their fields of labor. The hotels, and places where crowds are gathered in the early evening, attract the “single workers” as the most promising ground for a successful capture.
“Badger games” are not infrequently played in Chicago. Such as are successful are generally kept from the police records, through the preference of the blackmailed subjects to say nothing about them, in dread of their personal exposure. A man, generally one of means and standing, is marked for conquest. The first class hotel is the scene of operations of the female in the case. Fashionably dressed, handsome, with jewels for adornment, she strikes up a flirtation with the selected person. Fool like, as most men are in the case of handsome and well gowned women, he responds to the invitation, an acquaintance is formed and an assignation made. The place is of the woman’s selection and known of course to her paramour, styled her husband. The room is entered, compromising situations reached, when, suddenly, the indignant husband appears, the woman screams in terror, and a storm rages. It is calmed by the paymentof the price demanded for concealment, and the “sucker” escapes with a load removed from both his pocketbook and his mind.
A noted instance of this kind happened to a wealthy and prominent merchant, whose indiscretions in the acceptance of inducements for sexual enjoyment held out to him by a stylish and beautiful woman, and his blindness in not observing his surroundings, enabled the fake husband to photograph him inflagrante delicto. Under threats to distribute the pictures it is reported he paid $10,000 for them and the negative. This is a fact easily susceptible of proof. One at least of these proofs did not accompany the package he received, which was supposed to contain all of the pictures.
Photographing from the nude is not the fad of the harlot alone. Women infatuated with their shapes begin with the exposure of a beautiful foot, arm or well rounded bust, then a leg, etc., etc., until they stand before the camera almost inpuris naturalibus. These pictures are taken for pure self admiration, the love of self study and comparison with the forms of celebrated actresses, or the paintings of the masters,famous in art for their conceptions of the perfect woman. They differ from those obscene pictures designed for sale, for which purpose the depraved couple are photographed in situations, attitudes and conditions, natural and unnatural, which appeal to the grossest instincts in man, and shock, also, the moral sense of every one not in himself a sexual pervert.
The latter are eagerly sought after, are quite salable, and are carried about the persons of fast young men about town, with intent, upon opportunity, to influence the passions of women. They are the solace of the aged sport, who, having lost all recollection of the ordinary affairs of his youth, still fondly retains the memory of the amours of his younger days, and of the orgies of his middle age. Then recalling with sadness the first appearance of the lamentable indications of his decline, he contentedly yields the passing of his power—“sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
These are the men, who, if they had lived in the early days of the Roman Empire at or about the date of the Floralian games, would have been the principal patrons, or, if at the time of the prevalence of theBacchanalian mysteries, the prominent members, of societies organized for the purpose of gratifying unnatural desires; or if they had been Romans in the declining days of that empire would have figured as the most frantic and most lustful of the worshippers of Priapus.
The methods of the vendors of obscene literature are innumerable, and all are formed along the lines of extreme caution and cunning. They are keen judges of human nature, quick to detect the inquisitive stranger, or the sporting gent of the town, and adroit in introducing their filthy stock. The purchaser is more than liable to be swindled in the deal, as the fakir requires immediate concealment of the purchase, which, when examined by the vendee in the quiet of his own room often turns out to be a harmless work resembling only in the binding the supposed purchase.
The confidence men, who invite the incoming visitor to view the scene of the great explosion on the lake front, and suggest trips to other places where startling events have not occurred, discover, by skillful questioning, the weaknesses of their dupe. They arouse his innate, but dormant, wish to take a chance at some game that seems to him certain of a rich return. Heis easily induced to play and allowed to win a small stake, merely to excite greater interest and establish the conviction that he can “beat the game.” Naturally he plunges ahead, until the moment comes, set by his trappers, when he is cheated, robbed and goes “flat broke.” The dupe may, or may not, report his loss to the police. If he does, and it happens to be one of consequence, detectives may be detailed to search for the swindlers; but if the loss is small in amount, however important to the loser, the dupe is more likely to be laughed at than aided by the officers of the law.
To this class belong cabmen who rob drunken men, and “divvy” with the police; commission houses, which secure consignments of goods for sale by false representations; grocery grafters, who solicit throughout the country orders for groceries, claiming to represent wholesale houses, ship an inferior grade and collect C. O. D. at the prices charged for the superior grade; Board of Trade sharks, who “welch” their clients’ money by charging up fictitious losses, when the figures will not appear to lie; the false claimants for personal injuries alleged to have been caused through thenegligence of wealthy corporations, such as street car lines, manufacturing companies and rolling mills, or by the city, from defective sidewalks, unguarded street excavations, etc., etc.; bakers who sell unlabeled and underweight bread; the gold brick and gold filings sharper; the electric and mining stock swindler, and the advertiser seeking a governess to accompany himself and family abroad. These men have “irresistible tendencies” to work their several games. They cannot help it, they say. Like kleptomaniacs, or “Jack the Hair Clipper,” they are impelled by nature to the commission of their crimes. In their own judgment they ought not to be punished, because they are the victims of defective brains. But they are just as cunning as the hair clipper, just as conscious that they are law breakers as he was when he mailed to the Chief of Police in his own words the following note, enclosing some of the braids of hair he had clipped from the head of a young girl, viz:
“A clue for J. K.’s cheap skates. Will send more when I get cheap stuff like this.Jack.”
“A clue for J. K.’s cheap skates. Will send more when I get cheap stuff like this.
Jack.”
Of this same class are men who conduct “diploma mills” and make doctors, especially in one day. They sell their parchments as freely as a saloonkeeper does his beer, and then claim that because a college confers distinctive degrees upon men of prominence, without a course of study and examination, they are justified in launching doctors by the score upon unsuspecting communities, “without study and examination,” to discredit the medical profession, and send men, women and children to premature graves. Like McTeague, who acquired his knowledge of dentistry from the seven volumes of “Allen’s Practical Dentist,” they obtain their knowledge of diseases from quack publications, newspapers and magazine articles. They use nothing but “the purest of the earth’s productions in their treatment, and no minerals or poisonous materials of any kind are ever permitted to enter your system.” Their prices range from “one dollar up.” “A positive guarantee is given in every case treated, so you have nothing to risk in any way. Your money back on demand if not satisfied.” They can wash kidneys so clean, thatif you are a woman and have not extended your arms in years, after taking the first box of kidney pills you “can raise them, and twist your hair,” and after the second, “dress yourself, perform your household duties,” and “life will again take on a bright hue” for you. Bald heads respond to the “remarkable effects” of their discoveries, with joyful alacrity. Gray hair goes into hiding, and “thick and lustrous eyebrows and eye lashes” blossom forth on one application, as lilac bushes do in the spring time at the first touch of the warmth of the sun’s rays. Their remedies are “no longer experiments, they are medical certainties.” They “create solid flesh, muscles and strength, clear the brain, and make the blood pure and rich.” For humanity’s sake, distinguished Mayors, ex-Mayors, city treasurers, scholars, soldiers, ex-state senators and senators, representatives, lawyers and judges, lend their beaming countenances, when fully restored to health, for the uses of these quacks, until the daily press has become a portrait gallery of rebuilt and revitalized men, who, if disease had the clutch upon them they so felicitously describe—in thestereotyped words of the quack—ought to have been dead, buried and mourned long ago. These distinguished men in American life, are merely selling their faces for promotion purposes, much as the titled Englishman sells his title.
Of all the sources of police graft, in addition to pool rooms and policy shops, gambling is the most prolific. There are in Chicago over 7,000 saloons and nearly 2,000 cigar stores. The number of gambling houses proper is unknown, but the list swells into the hundreds. The saloon and cigar stores have as a general rule a gambling annex. Gambling houses proper, as known some years ago, have no longer the permanency they then had. Roulette and faro, especially, are sleeping, and awaken only at infrequent intervals. The negro game of craps, and the national game of poker, particularly stud poker, have become the substitutes for the wheel and the lay out. In two-thirds of the saloons and cigar stores poker and stud poker are played, and in many of the saloons, especially the all night variety, the crap table is part of the necessary equipment. It is estimatedthat poker games are in progress in over eight thousand of the saloons, cigar stores, barber shops and bakeries, every night, while gambling houses with the roulette and faro barred, add over one thousand to the number. Craps are shot even at the doors of some of the theaters. All this is known to the police, tolerated by the police, and taxed by the police. Take the average cigar store for illustration. In the rear are rooms neatly fitted up and supplied with three or more poker tables. The rake off to the house goes on just as in the regularly equipped gambling house. The games are played by men of all classes in life below the society men and men of wealth, who get their amusement at the club. The clubs all forbid poker, but the tabooing order is “more honored in its breach than its observance.” In the cigar stores and saloons, workingmen, artisans, clerks, and the loafing skin gambler, participate in the game. The latter is quickly spotted, and placed under the ban. The proprietor requires the games to be square, in so far as he can control them. The losses of the cigar store players are more severe upon themthan are those of the gamblers who play for higher stakes. The wages of the workingman, clerks and artisans are their only gambling capital. They have no bank accounts to draw upon. The home suffers; wife and children are the indirect victims. Theirs is a cash game. When wages are exhausted, the unearned wage is mortgaged to the loan “sharks.” These greedy and heartless wretches lure the clerk earning a fair salary to borrow from them at reasonable rates, and upon a “strictly confidential” basis. The employer is not to know of the transaction. The clerk is soon in the shark’s strong jaws. He must pay what is demanded, or the employer, the rules of whose establishment forbid dealings with the “shark,” will be made aware of the violation of his rules, and the clerk’s embarrassment commences. Rather than risk discharge from his position, and to escape from the “shark” jaws, the frightened clerk pays in monthly installments double the amount of his loan, plus a sum for a fee to an attorney who was never retained. All this is so much blood money, flowing from the wounds made by the “shark’s” sharp teeth.
The minor is not prevented in the cigar store joints from gaming any more than he is prevented from drinking at the saloon bar. Nightly, over this vast city, young men are succumbing to the terrible fascination of gaming. Nightly, temptations, almost irresistible, are preying upon their minds. The honesty of their intentions is gradually undermined, and almost before they awaken to a realization of the truth, they have committed some theft and commenced a downward career. Men who filled high positions of trust and earned large salaries are today inmates of the state penitentiary, led away by the fascination and excitement of the gaming table. The evils of gambling, the intensity of the love of the average man for indulgence in its exhilaration, the wide spread use of it in the home, the club, the stag parties, and so on down to the lowest joints in the slums, have been the themes of every writer who attempts to depict the daily life of great cities.
It exists in the form of prizes in progressive euchre parties, in social gatherings, in the raffles of the church fairs, the voting for the mostpopular man or woman, as city or county stenographer, popular firemen or policemen; in guessing contests in the solution of puzzles; or wherever the element of chance enters into the affairs of life, from which amusement is sought to be drawn. Whether it is a wheat deal on the board of trade in which millions are involved, or the cast of the dice by newsboys and boot blacks in the alleys and upon the sidewalks of the city, the controlling passion is there—the passion for gain at the whim of chance. Judgment may prompt the wheat deal, but unless judgment promises large profits the incentive to engage in the manipulation of the markets is absent. The possible toil and mental worry is overlooked in the hope of great gain without correspondingly prolonged labor. Millions fly away in great gambling speculations as easily and as swiftly as the penny of the newsboy takes its flight from one to the other of the inveterate little gamblers, to be found among these sharp witted waifs of the street. It goes on in billiard halls, where “hap hazard” is openly played; at saloon bars where the loser at dice “pays for the drinks.”It is to be seen in beer halls, summer gardens, among well dressed people who carry the dice with them, of the usual size, or smaller, with fancy box-guard, and who “shake” for the drinks and dinners, not so much as a matter of gambling, as for the zest it gives to their party, or their outing. It controls political picnics in the fakers’ attractions that follow them, and in the prizes offered to the winner, of boys’ and girls’, women and fat men’s, races, or for which artistic cake walkers and ragtime dancers compete. Civil and criminal trials are even chosen as events upon which to place a wager. The frequency of elections, the daily horse racing contests throughout the world, base ball games in season, prize fights between professionals, club athletic contests, policy shops with their daily drawings, and lotteries, all arouse the cupidity of the seeker after quick gains without physical labor. “Bet you five” settles many a mathematical, historical, political or economic proposition, contrary to the truth.
Races, accompanied by the usual retinue of book makers, are conducted by a wealthy club, manyof whose members are leaders in civic bodies formed for the betterment of local government, and consequently for the suppression of vice. Grand juries report month after month their inability to obtain the co-operation of the police in gathering evidence against gamblers and landlords whereon to found indictments. Each grand jury when empanelled hears from the bench the monotonous song “Gentlemen, bucket shops exist, investigate them,” together with such musical accompaniment, as may be added by the judge, in the way of moralizing upon their wickedness.
Fashionable women have their down town clubs. There they meet, smoke cigarettes, take their drinks from the sideboard “just like men,” gamble for excitement, lose their pin-money and diamonds with the abandon of a virgin, “willing to be rid of her name.”
The vice and fascination of gambling are so well known and understood by great merchants that they employ a corps of detectives to keep watch over their confidential employes, whose movements are the subject matter of daily reportsto their employers. The bond companies, which insure the honesty of clerks and managers entrusted with the handling of money, receive from their spotters the earliest reports of the actions of employes indicative of living beyond the yearly salary paid them by the houses with which they are connected.
Gambling, although condemned by all moralists as a degrading vice, is recognized by some as aiding the development of certain qualities of immeasurable service in the intensity of the struggle for business existence prevailing in the aggressive commercialism of this age. Lecky asserts: “Even the gambling table fosters among its more skillful votaries a kind of moral nerve, a capacity for bearing losses with calmness, and controlling the force of the desires, which is scarcely exhibited in equal perfection in any other sphere.” Whatever may be the meaning of the phrase “controlling the force of the desires,” it is certain that among the young men of today, in all classes of society, the desires for intoxicants and sensuality are past control when associated with gambling. In its mostseductive forms its principal aids are the gilded saloon, and the harlot’s enslaving smile. The necessity for means with which to gratify aroused passion in both respects, comes through contact with the gaming table; hence, the houses of ill repute, assignation houses and the innocent looking “Hotel” nestling in the middle of the down town business blocks, are the direct allies of the gambling hells in the development of crime—in adding to, rather than in “controlling” the force of the desires. “Sensuality,” said a distinguished writer, “is the vice of young men and of old nations.” Another, tracing the effects of gaming on human passions, wisely observes, “the habit of gambling is very often allied with, and is even an incentive to, the practice of other vices, whose darkness is beyond dispute. The ordinary aspect of a return from a race meeting will fully confirm this. There we find that drunkenness, licentiousness and gambling go hand in hand, a well assorted trio whose ministry to separate passions is not inconsistent but consistent with mutual incitement and co-operation in the destruction of the honor and purity and strength of men.”
While gambling is not now conducted “openly,” a word which has reference only to the maintenance of down town establishments in which faro and roulette were formerly played, it is conducted under police protection all over this city in forms more inviting, more disastrous to the embryotic gamblers who patronize it, than if the large establishments were in full operation as of yore. The latter could not invite the younger class of gamblers to enter the play, because of their lack of capital; the smaller, widely scattered, and police guarded, cigar store and saloon games, accept smaller sums of money, parts of a dollar, for a stack of poker chips, from the anxious entrant to the game. Prior to the last election a leading evening newspaper accused the city executive with farming out the slum district to two aldermen of unsavory reputation, with leave to them to extort money from gaming houses, high and low, within its limits, for their personal benefit, in consideration of their opposing, in the council, the passage of ordinances relating to the extension of street car privileges. Its condemnation of this bargain wassevere, and yet, later on, it was the most persistent of that executive’s supporters for re-election.
The coon gamblers, thieves, thugs and pimps were all on the staffs of these aldermen. They followed these worthies into the campaign, under the leadership of the eminently respectable newspaper referred to. Inspired by such leadership “Spreader,” “Sawed Off,” “The Cuckoo,” “Book Agent,” “Deacon,” “Grab All,” “Duck,” “Shoestring,” “Scalper,” “Humpty,” “Hungry Sid,” “Seedy,” “Talky,” “Whiskers,” “Noisy,” “Fig,” “Old Hoss,” “Slick,” “Ruby,” “Sunday School,” and “Mushmouth,” captains in the corps of sports felt themselves respectable, led their followers from the barrel and lodging houses with a rush to the polls, and achieved a startling victory. Over all this horrible saturnalia of vice, the colors of the police force float in token of protection. The brave men of that force, morally degraded by the obedience they are compelled to yield to unworthy superiors want merely the opportunity to perform their full duty, not only as patrolmen but as patriotic American citizens. The time when they will bepermitted to do so seems far distant, unless an aroused public opinion shall speedily pronounce against the further continuation of a policy of protection to crime and debauchery supported by the men chosen to war unceasingly with both.
The dens of the sexual pervert of the male sex, found in the basements of buildings in the most crowded, but least respectable parts of certain streets, with immoral theaters, cheap museums, opium joints and vile concert saloons surrounding them, are the blackest holes of iniquity that ever existed in any country since the dawn of history. A phrase was recently coined in New York which conveys—in the absence of the possibility of describing them in decent language—the meaning of the brute practices indulged in these damnable resorts, and the terrible consequences to humanity as a result of unnatural habits—“Paresis Halls.”
No form of this indulgence described by writers on the history of morals, no species of sodomy the debased minds of these devils can devise, is missing from the programme of their diabolicalorgies. In divine history we read of the abominations of the strange women of Israel, with their male companions, in their worship of Moloch, Belphegor and Baal, and of the death penalties pronounced by Moses against the participants in them. To suppress the brutish immorality, and prevent the spread of disease arising from it, the Jewish law giver put to death all his Midianite female captives except the virgins. Profane history tells of the infamies of the Babylonian banquets, of the incestuous and “promiscuous combats of sensuality” of the Lydians and the Persians; of the Athenian Auletrides, or female flute players, who danced and furnished music at the banquets of the nobility and wallowed in the filth of every sensual indecency, and of the polluted condition of Roman life, prior to, and as the Christian era dawned, but in all the untranslatable literature of eroticism no description of the debaucheries of the ancients, if freely interpreted into English from the dead languages in which they are preserved, could depict the nastiness these yahoos are reported as having introduced into our midst, and rendered more hatefuland disgusting by the squalor of their underground abodes. The young are lured by them, ruined in health and seared in conscience. The very slang of the streets is surcharged with expressions, derived from, and directly traceable to, the names of these unmentionable acts of lechery.
Not content with the private and crafty pursuit of their calling, they must flaunt it in the faces of the public and under the very eyes of the police, in a series of annual balls held by the “fruits” and the “cabmen,” advertised by placards extensively all over the city. At these disreputable gatherings the pervert of the male persuasion displays his habits by aping everything feminine. In speech, walk, dress and adornment they are to all appearances women. The modern mysteries of the toilet, used to build up and round out the female figure, are applied in the make-up of the male pervert. Viewed from the galleries, it is impossible to distinguish them from the sex they are imitating. Theirs is no maid-marian costume; it is strictly in the line of the prevailing styles among fashionable women, from female hair topinched feet. The convenient bar supplies the liquid excitement, and when the women arrivals from the bagnios swarm into the hall, led in many instances by the landlady, white or black, and the streets and saloons have contributed their quotas, the dance begins and holds on until the morning hours approach. The acts are those mainly suggestive of indecency. Nothing, except the gross language and easy familiarity in deportment, coupled with the assumed falsetto voice and effeminate manners of the pervert, would reveal to the uninformed observer what a seething mass of human corruption he is witnessing. As the “encyclopedia of the art of making up” puts it, “the exposed parts of the human anatomy” usually displayed in fashionable society are counterfeited so perfectly, the wigs are selected and arranged with such nicety, the eyebrows and lashes so dexterously treated, and the features so artistically touched with cosmetics, as to make it very difficult, at first glance, to distinguish between the impostor and the real woman. The big hands and tawdry dresses, the large though pinched feet and the burly ankle, betray the sex of the imitating pervert.
No reason, except that the police are paid for non-interference with these vice pitted revels, can be given for their toleration. The city’s officials are either in collusion with their projectors, they are incompetent, or are the willing tools of these stinking body scavengers. These beasts look with disdain upon the votaries of natural pleasures, and have an insane pride in their hopeless degradation.
The opium joints are closely related sources of iniquity to the pervert’s haunts. Under one of the worst of the all night saloons, conducted by a politician of the first ward, who belongs to the party of the Bath House and Hinky Dink, and who “touched” the Hon. Richard Croker of New York for a small loan, the largest of these execrable cellars is protected. It is but a step from the wine rooms of the saloon to the solace of the pipe. The depraved of both sexes in those moments when despair seizes them, when some recollection of childhood, or of home, arouses in them the dormant good still remaining in their hearts, when, as they look into the future, they can discern noray of hope, but are appalled at the frightful end which must be theirs, shut out the horrors of their situation in life by seeking a paradise built upon “the baseless fabric of a vision.” In this joint, since reference to it was written, a man died from the effects of smoking the pipe. The woman who accompanied him, the bartender and the keeper of the joint were placed under arrest. The police expressed amazement at the revelation of the existence of the joint, as did the proprietor of the saloon. It was, of course, closed, and a number of other like resorts were then raided. Press comments upon this death appeared as follows:
“In spite of the fact that there are plenty of laws against them, opium dens and objectionable grogshops are among the hardest things in the world to exterminate. The only reasonable explanation for this is that their proprietors must have influence with officers who are employed by the people to execute the laws. ‘The police close these places,’ said an officer despairingly, referring to dens like that in which the man Adams died Sunday night, ‘but they spring up again in a day.’
“The police seem to be downcast over it. Yet the causes of the ‘springing up’ are as plain as the nose on one’s face, and the means of removing them as evident as one’s hand.
“Access to the den in which Adams died was had through the delectable O. saloon, operated by S. V. P., and the den itself was rented by V. P. The levee statesman says he had no idea his basement was used for an opium den. He thought the procession of drunken and dazed men and women who tottered through his saloon and went down his basement stairs all night were going for their laundry.
“V. P.’s statement is entitled to as much consideration as the guileless protestations of the gentleman who is caught with the chicken under his coat. V. P. is responsible for the opium den and as soon as the law lays a hand, in earnest, on the landlord the opium dens will cease ‘springing up.’
“The police knew that an opium den was running in V. P.’s basement. They had been amply warned of it. If they had raided the place a few times and sent the proprietor and inmates to the bridewell it would have stayed closed.
“There is a little virtue in sticking to one’s native vices. Western races come honestly by drunkenness and gambling. But why tolerate the deliberate importation and cultivation of this strange oriental bestiality? This ingrafted vice must make its own soil. Why should the police treat it so leniently? A hundred-dollar fine for every person found in an opium joint and a modicum of police activity, with the demanding of a strict account from the guilty landlord, will quickly put a damper on the opium dens. Every month that they are tolerated they get a firmer root.”
These resorts are patronized by others than the fallen women and the criminal classes. Like slumming, it is a fad “to hit the pipe just once” by some adventure seeking people in other walks of life. The habit of opium smoking is easily acquired, and, when acquired, the smoker becomes a slave to its use. There are between two and three hundred of these smoking rooms in Chicago. The number of persons addicted to smoking opium cannot be stated with accuracy. Estimates vary from ten to twenty thousand, the numberprobably lies between these two estimates. In the Chinese quarters the penetrating odor of opium smoke is plainly perceptible and is thrown off from the garments of passing Chinamen, or is detected as one enters a restaurant or laundry presided over by the oriental. The “dope” soon affects the complexion, and the features wear a dejected appearance. The movements of the victims are listless, almost lifeless. In the saloon referred to, a constant procession of men and women, old and young, come and go up and down the stairway to the region below. It is not guarded with any degree of care, because it is protected from the law’s aggression, except occasionally, when by way of diversion it is pulled. Then its patrons get a quiet tip to keep away, consequently few occupants are found. The old pipes and a small quantity of the dope are graciously permitted to be borne away in triumph by the officers. New supplies are provided, and the baleful business resumes its accustomed routine.