Chicago, Satan's Sanctum

by L. O. Curon

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. He is 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 the negligence 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.”

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, that if 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 the stereotyped 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 estimated that 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 them than 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 most popular 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, many of 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.”