Chicago, Satan's Sanctum

by L. O. Curon

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 reports to 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 most seductive 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 was severe, 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 be permitted 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 diabolical orgies. 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 hateful and 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 to pinched 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 no ray 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.’