Books: Down the Cesspool

GEM OF THE PRAIRIE—Herbert Asbury—Knopf ($3.50).

Herbert Asbury has spent the last twelve years hobnobbing with the shades of shady characters. No. 1 shammer in the past of U. S. cities, he returns from each exploration with a rich scum of superlatives. The Gangs of New York (1928) found old Manhattan a gaslit Gomorrah without peer. The Barbary Coast (1933) offered pre-earthquake San Francisco as the most vicious spot in the U. S. The French Quarter (1936) revealed New Orleans unrivaled in vice on a sinful planet. This week, with Gem of the Prairie, Mr. Asbury peers down the cesspool of Chicago, convincingly awards it first place among U. S. cities for vices both elegant and depraved.

Chicago’s first known white settler, a French trader named Pierre Moreau, was a bootlegger as far back as 1675. Before Indians and bears had been driven from the log village in the 1830s, gamblers, harlots, pimps had arrived. Thieves preyed even on the dead: private detectives guarded Chicago’s early graveyards. Between Bull Run and the great fire of 1871 roared the first of Chicago’s incredible booms, in which everything but the police force expanded. Result was Chicago’s reputation in the Civil War decade as “the wickedest city in the U. S.”

The fire of 1871 let loose Chicago’s underworld for a brazen orgy of pillage, “the richest harvest of loot that had ever fallen to the lot of American criminals.” Three hundred and fifty prisoners were freed from the flaming jail, promptly broke into a jewelry store. Through the glare scurried whores, murderers, thieves, all “scolding, stealing, fighting; laughing at the beautiful and splendid crash of walls and falling roofs.”

Year after the fire crime was more blatant, the police more useless than ever. From 1871 to 1894 Chicago had one active patrolman for every 20,000 residents. The Chicago Times in 1877 looked upon the rebuilt city, saw “orgies held there that . . . indicate that ancient Sodom and Gomorrah had phoenixed themselves somewhere in the neighborhood.”

It was Chicago Swindler Mike McDonald (not P. T. Barnum), says Author Asbury, who observed, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” During the four terms of Mayor Carter Harrison Sr., McDonald’s casino was in effect the city hall, and Chicago’s politics well nigh outstank those of William Tweed’s New York. Mickey Finn dispensed his deadly cocktails. Fifty thousand men existed solely on free lunch provided by saloons. The mass-murderer H. H. Holmes destroyed from 30 to 300 victims in the torture chambers of his “castle” on 63rd Street.

Between 1890 and 1910 Chicago boomed again, gained 1,000,000 new citizens. “As in previous boom eras,” records Asbury, “the underworld more than kept pace. . . .”A reign of terror arose:

>A feud between schoolboy gangs at the Walsh School lasted 30 years. Several moppets were slain, a score shot or stabbed, occasionally in classrooms. “Many were so small that both hands were required to lift a revolver to firing position.”

>The Black Hand prospered by systematic extortion until Prohibition provided a new outlet for Sicilian genius.

With Prohibition came the era of “The Big Shots.” The Capone enterprises, which grossed $100,000,000 yearly, were organized by Johnny Torrio, whose fame has been unjustly eclipsed by his scar-faced successor. Says Asbury: “Johnny Torrio is unsurpassed in the annals of American crime; he was probably the nearest thing to a real mastermind that this country has yet produced.” Torrio boasted, “I own the police,” had uniformed officers guard his costlier liquor shipments. In five years of gang warfare 500 mobsters were assassinated. Sniffed Mayor Big Bill Thompson, “It’s all newspaper talk.”

Unwritten conclusions of Gem of the Prairie: 1) though the battle against sin always seems most hopeless at the present, the good old days were far worse; 2) the Capone era in Chicago was less a product of Prohibition than the natural flowering of a great heritage.