A CITY is built on desires: the mad lusts to rule and conquer, the heartfelt needs of community and companionship, the fevered drives for freedom and democracy. These were the desires that wrested Milwaukee from its native residents, flooded its spaces with a patchwork of new peoples and cultures, and built its mighty engines of business and industry. And in Milwaukee, with its raw and hard-worked citizenry just as eager to spend a buck as to earn it, an underground economy of desire grew both in plain sight and in the darkened corners of the city.
The desires displayed in these tales of vice are recognizable and relatable as achingly honest outgrowths of the human condition. Yet these indulgences, the thrills of flesh, chance, and intoxication, have often been seen as something like a trip too near to the sun. To partake in them openly and in wanton disregard for the ostensible standards of the community was to actively court censure. Moreover, behind each ripe pleasure were cases of sorrow and heartbreak that reformers quickly seized upon as reasons for action. Then, as now, the moral panics displayed in these tales of vice appear as reflexive attempts to pull the brakes on a place moving too fast for its own good.
Heels or sports, victims or crooks, sinners or survivors—whether they needed salvation or not, time has laid them all upon an equal plane. In the spirit of that old axiom that urges one to pray for the living and not the dead, these dark-cornered troubles of old Milwaukee are now ours. And while we are occasionally shocked by the goings-on in these dark places today, the city is never shocked. It has seen it all before.
May 1895
A GROUP of Milwaukee’s Methodist ministers assailed both Mayor John Koch and Chief of Police John Janssen for what they saw as a sinful laxity in enforcing the city laws that forbade the operation of gambling parlors. While none directly accused either man of operating in cahoots with gambling forces, they accused both of allowing the city police department to be infiltrated by gaming influences. Certain beat officers, Reverend George Ide claimed, were working as intermediaries for gambling dens, directing strangers in search of “the tiger” to saloons and halls that would later reward the officers with kickbacks. More still were deeply concerned by Chief Janssen’s unwillingness to execute raids on known gaming spots. Reverend Henry Coleman said this attitude was attracting rogues to Milwaukee and that other cities had developed a habit of dumping their criminals—he considered all gamblers, thieves, and grain speculators to be criminals of an unvaried lot—at its doorstep. “We have begun this warfare to win,” Reverend E. L. Eaton told the mayor and chief. “And from this [day] on, it shall be a fight to the finish.”
But the reverends came to Koch and Janssen with more than just complaints. They also brought firsthand knowledge of the city’s gaming scene. On three different evenings during early 1895, the three trusted men of the church headed out into the Badlands, the pocket of west-of-the-river Milwaukee—running roughly from the river to Sixth Street and from Wisconsin Avenue to State Street—where gambling, prostitution, and dive saloons operated openly and without fear of the law. Most of the spots they found offered faro, craps, roulette, and poker. The smallest was the backroom of Schofer’s Saloon on Second Street between Grand Avenue and Wells Street. Despite the tight confines, the men found more than forty gamblers crowded into the place, coaxed to the tables by a barker who called out, “Come along, boys! Everybody invited to throw.” At 417 East Water Street, in a den hidden in the upper floors of a building that housed a saloon, they found nearly seventy-five men crowded around various tables, all urged by a leather-lunged dealer to “try their luck.”
Four men stage a scene that was a regular sight in Milwaukee’s Badlands.
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Above Weber’s Saloon, just across the street at 410 East Water, the action was kept behind a door at the top of a long staircase. Five tables were found in the room, each manned by a keeper who was “very pressing” in his solicitations. A few blocks away, at 333 Broadway, the men came upon “the toniest den in town.” The parlor was kept above the Marble Hall saloon, hidden behind a maple door with a “small diamond hole.” Inside, a well-dressed and divinely polite individual greeted the men and directed them to the dual gaming rooms. On the other end of the spectrum, and the other side of the river, was 107 Wells Street. The group considered this place to be “primarily for colored men.” Of the thirty-four men found there, they reported that just “a few” were white and referred to the rest as “colored” or “Chinamen.”
The ministers insisted that these experiences represented only the tip of Milwaukee’s gambling den iceberg. They urged that the city’s laws be directed to “protect the individual who is weak against the criminal rapacity of the strong.” The gambling establishment of the city was to blame for “breaking up homes, crushing hearts, impoverishing the innocent, [and] producing embezzlement, robbery, murder, and suicide,” a statement from the reverends claimed. “And those who are sworn to execute the law against these criminals seem to have no thought for an instant of doing so.”
The Milwaukee Rescue Mission at the corner of Wells and Second Street. This house of charity was located within sight of dozens of gambling dens, dive saloons, and brothels.
Historic Photo Collection / Milwaukee Public Library
During their lambasting by the parsons, the mayor and chief stuck to their position that to act too aggressively against these houses would simply chase them from one dim part of the city to another. They said that when the police received a complaint of a man so badly “fleeced” by the dens that he could no longer afford to support his family, they would “generally” act in an attempt to get the establishment to repay the funds lost. After considering the case presented by the Methodists, Mayor Koch remained unmoved, telling the Milwaukee Journal that he had no intention of changing his policy on the matter. “Milwaukee is freer of the social evils of any other city of its size in the nation, as far as I know,” he said. “It seems to me there is no occasion for the clergymen making all this fuss.”
September 1883
A STAGE show closed at the Academy of Music theater on Broadway after a short and unprofitable run. The Milwaukee Sentinel noted both the lethargic performance of its New Orleans Minstrel acting troupe and the sparse population of the academy’s several thousand seats, writing that few cared to “witness the funeral performances of these alleged comedians.” But it was not acting, songs, or comedy that the show’s manager, Frank Dalzell, had expected to draw people into the house. Instead, it was the chance to openly participate in one of the city’s most popular illicit activities—the underground lottery known as policy. One of the show’s skits was an ostensible exposé of the policy game, during which a series of numbers was randomly selected. If an audience member could guess what these numbers would be, Dalzell vowed to present the person with a thousand dollars in cash.
The show was a last-ditch attempt by Dalzell to salvage the legality of policy in the state, where calls were growing thick for stricter laws against the practice. Dalzell was a policy pioneer in Wisconsin, founding the first such operation in the state in Milwaukee in 1870. The street version of the game was similar to that of the stage show. Policy players picked numbers from between 1 and 78. A player could either play a single number, a “saddle” of two numbers, or a “gig” of three. The more numbers in the sequence, the more the player could win if his or her series matched the winning numbers.
The winning numbers were drawn twice daily in the little town of Covington, Kentucky, where the syndicate to which Dalzell belonged was headquartered. After being drawn in Covington, the numbers were wired to all affiliated cities via a ciphered telegram. At noon and 6:00 p.m., the numbers hit Milwaukee. Here, they would be relayed to Dalzell’s several dozen “sub-agents”—neighborhood bookies who took bets for the central office and paid out cash to the winners. These men operated out of barbershops or bars, with at least one occupying nearly every corner of the city. Spots like Planthaber’s Saloon at 109 West Water Street or the S. J. Hunt Rookery on Second Street had their regular policy agents, taking bets from a steady stream of customers all day long and memorizing hundreds of number combinations. As policy operations were given to police harassment, Dalzell ordered his agents to keep an absolute minimum of physical evidence of their trade.
“The negroes are inveterate policy players,” wrote the Sentinel, “but in this city the game found its warmest and most liberal patrons among the stolid slow-going German workingmen and women.” Those who played regularly devoted various kinds of pseudoscience to the selection of their numbers. Many devoted players kept charts of the selected numbers, studying their patterns and hidden trends. Many players felt that their dreams held the secrets to cracking the policy code. Publishers printed “dream books,” which alleged to be able to translate the images of dreams into lucky number sequences. And still others played the same sequence endlessly, trusting that their patience would eventually pay off.
Shortly after the show at the Academy of Music closed, the state passed legislation that officially placed Dalzell on the wrong side of the law. But Dalzell had already built himself an empire, the most visible manifestation of which was his palatial home at Twenty-first Street and Grand Avenue. Despite his detractors, Dalzell never wavered in his insistence that his trade was legit. “My business . . . is carried on in deference to a demand,” he was quoted as saying. “[It is] more honorable than the board of trade.”
April 1894
ELECTION FEVER had overtaken Milwaukee when the Milwaukee Sentinel sent a man into the bowels of the Badlands to report on what was both one of the most prominent and one of the most secretive issues of the campaign—the dive bar. While the area’s brothels operated with little interference from police, its seedy, low-end, hardscrabble saloons had for several years been raising the ire of reformers. These were places where beer and whiskey ran all night long as gaudily attired musicians ground out jaunty and vulgar tunes and prostitutes, too unreliable or surly to find residence in a proper brothel, plied their trade among the rough characters of Milwaukee’s dark hours. There was also the alarming new development of the so-called stall saloon. Establishments with by-the-hour rooms on the upper floors had long been a regular feature of the area. But the stall saloon dropped such pretense and offered couples a quick kind of privacy in cheaply built, partitioned “stalls” located in back hallways or along the side walls of the bar.
Reformers had tried for years to eliminate the dive via licensing restrictions but with little success. A recent drive to close thirty-two “nests of infamy” resulted in the common council renewing the licenses of nearly all of them. The Sentinel cited the “powerful friends” of the dive keeper as a primary reason. Among those who opposed the dive was Mayor John Koch, winner of a special election in July 1893. Among those who felt the dive should be left alone was Alderman Herman Fehr. He had voted regularly to approve the license applications of places considered among the worst in the city. As the Sentinel man headed into the darkness of Milwaukee’s Badlands that mild April night, Koch and Fehr were just days away from squaring off in the spring election for mayor. The Badlands were undoubtedly Fehr country, but with Mayor Koch and his appointees still helming the city government, times in the district were very tight.
The reporter’s first stop was at the River Street hall of H. L. Dietrichs. Previously known as the “lowest and toughest dive in the city” and often populated by the “worst class of prostitutes and loafers,” it was one of the few denied a license renewal. The man found only soda water being served at the bar but still found it populated with various rough characters and working women. Along a long hallway behind the bar there had once been a series of stalls, but the reporter noticed that they had been removed, a nod to the tentative political climate of the city. The Sentinel man noticed “the soft drinks were not very much sought after” and that the female occupants of the place, with their “gauzy costumes and painted faces,” hardly carried the same enthusiasm as they had the year before.
From the dim situation at Dietrichs’s, the reporter visited a pair of troublesome stall saloons run by a local rounder named John Sheldon. He stopped first at Sheldon’s Wells Street spot, located near an alleyway so thick with dead-end rumholes it was occasionally referred to as the “Bucket of Blood.” The street entrance for this place led to a small, unfurnished room with a tiny bar and lunch counter. Eventually, the bartender asked the man if he would like to sit down. He replied that he would. The bartender pushed aside an icebox kept behind the bar to reveal a small doorway. The door led down a hallway to a larger room, where the action was concealed. The reporter took a seat and through another entrance “two robust female forms appeared.” They carried the same worn weariness as did the women of his previous stop. “They are fat,” the man wrote, “and once might have been fair.” The women sat with the reporter and took up his offer for drinks—hard liquor ordered by pressing a button connected to a bell at the outer bar. The bartender seemed to “know their drinks by intuition,” the man observed. The women said they had arrived in the city from Omaha and, thus far, did not like Milwaukee.
He headed next to Sheldon’s Third Street saloon, a far less covert place in which he found no females at all. A few of the men loafing around wore Fehr badges on their jackets. The bartender said that business had been slow ever since Holy Week, when police pulled five girls—presumably underage—from the place.
Al Schissler’s place, at 236 Fourth Street, was visited next. Police had taken young girls from here as well and, like many trouble spots in the Badlands, it had been under police surveillance for some time. Schissler’s featured a dozen stalls on the first and second floors, each connected to the main bar by a buzzer that was used to call for drinks. A few stalls were occupied during the reporter’s visit, the drunken voices and tough language of their occupants plainly heard over the wooden partitions that shielded them from public viewing. A portrait of Herman Fehr hung behind the bar, just above the drink buzzer.
A few more stops confirmed the sad and strained times of the Badlands’ dives. The bartender at Mulcahey’s saloon at 174 Fifth Street said business had been slow in the lead-up to the election. His stock of politically connected regulars was afraid to be seen there. The Columbia, at 134 Third Street, was lively when the reporter stopped in, but the mood quickly soured when a pair of plainclothes police officers showed up in search of two underage girls known to frequent the place. The girls managed to slip out a back door before being spotted.
Days later, Koch whipped Fehr at the polls by a plurality of more than five thousand votes. The sour mood in the Badlands was expected to lift after the vote, as politicians freed from the fear of pre-election scandal would return to their favorite dives and re-elected officials would loosen the squeeze they had been placing on the area.
July 1884
“ROSINA IS a small woman—a frail being of the inferior sex—but she is bigger than the city of Milwaukee.” Thus editorialized the Milwaukee Sentinel in the midst of one of Rosina Georg’s frequent tussles with city authorities. “She snaps her fingers in the face of the reformatory mayor who never succeeds at reforming anything; she holds the entire Common Council in contempt—and she makes a sidewalk of the city attorney, walking all over him as regular as she meets him.”
Rosina Georg, a slight, raven-haired woman of about forty years, inherited a dance hall and saloon at Eighth Street and Galena in 1878 after the death of her husband, William. Under her management, the place—known as Johannesburg—became one of the most notorious in the city. It was known as a spot that openly served alcohol to minors and allowed for the drunken social mixing of whites and blacks. Johannesburg also hosted raucous Sunday night dances, events that wantonly disregarded both the accepted custom and official law of the city. In October 1882, after a litany of complaints against the hall, the common council’s licensing committee denied Rosina a saloon permit.
And so began open warfare between Rosina and the city. During this time, she was arrested no fewer than ten times for operating a saloon without a license, nearly every time managing to skirt conviction with the careful lawyering of her personal attorney, R. N. Austin. After being hustled into court for selling a slug of whiskey to an undercover police officer in August 1883, Austin asked the court for an affidavit verifying that the saloon licensing ordinance had been published into the public record. When the court could produce no such documentation, he argued on technical grounds for the complete revocation of the ordinance. Indeed, the loophole he found—and the city’s failure to adhere to it—voided the city’s saloon licensing regulations under which Rosina had been arrested. In addition to tossing the permit law, Judge James Mallory stated that, in his opinion, Austin’s discovery essentially voided all legislation passed by the common council for the past six years. Once again, Rosina walked from the courthouse a free woman, city authorities scrambling in her wake to pass legislation to restore the rule of law to Milwaukee.
“Rosina is not in the habit of trying to establish her innocence of any alleged infractions of the law,” the Sentinel wrote. “She simply demonstrates the unconstitutionality of the law. She is becoming a howling terror to the legislative body.” After the city’s saloon ordinance was rewritten to meet with the requirements of the law, Rosina attempted to run her saloon as a stock company. Instead of drinks, she sold her patrons “shares” in a keg of beer, of which, the Sentinel wrote, “the festive lady acts as manager.”
Through it all, Rosina never stopped trying to secure her license. She was a regular visitor to Mayor Emil Wallber’s office, speaking with him in her native German and always carrying the $37.50 permit fee in her purse. “If they don’t give me a license, I will run without one,” she told a reporter. “I prefer to stop this trouble, though.” In early July 1884, almost two years after her license was initially revoked, Rosina announced that Johannesburg was now a private club. She no longer sold drinks at her bar—she “exchanged” them for special tickets that were sold from the small apartment adjacent to the hall in which she lived.
Shortly after the conversion, the newly installed chief of police, Lemuel Ellsworth, paid an undercover visit to Johannesburg. Dressed in a disguise of a rumpled suit and cheeky straw hat, Ellsworth bought a drink and faded into the mass of late-night revelers. What the chief saw confirmed to him that conditions at Rosina’s were as bad as ever. Young people danced in tight, drunken pairs as a sloppy house band tooted out jaunty songs. All around him, beer and vulgar discussion flowed freely.
Patrons drinking at a Milwaukee dance hall
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But most alarming was the diversity of the writhing crowd—young girls and boys, married women, professional mashers, dashing rakes, pimps, loafers, and prostitutes. And mixed among all of these were African American men, talking and dancing with white women, sitting at their tables and buying them drinks. That night, amidst the revelry, Chief Ellsworth vowed from beneath his worn-out hat to do what no other city official had yet been able to do—he would end the party at Rosina’s.
A week later, after yet another denial of a saloon permit for the place, Ellsworth struck. In the still of the hot summer night, he quietly trucked a small army of two dozen officers from the central station to Eighth and Galena. As the typical scene “of drunken debauchery and merriment” played out inside the hall, officers snuck into place, covering every door and window in the building. Just past midnight, Ellsworth’s men burst in through the main and side doors. The crowd of more than one hundred was set into a panic and a stampede soon ensued. For a few precious moments, revelers managed to stream through a window left unguarded by the police. But the gap was quickly sealed, and Ellsworth’s army aligned Rosina’s patrons into two long lines and marched them out into the street. A pair of patrol wagons were filled to capacity and sent to the south-side and central stations. Those left behind were marched under guard to the nearby west-side station. In total, eighty-four men, women, and teenagers were taken in, each booked on a charge of being an inmate of a disorderly house.
Lost in the tumult of the raid was Rosina Georg. Always one for dodging the law, she had somehow managed to elude capture during the raid. While her patrons were booked en masse, a pair of detectives returned to the hall to search for her. She was found quickly, hiding in the attic of the building. Handcuffed and hauled to the west-side station, she was charged, yet again, with being the keeper of a disorderly house and operating a saloon without a permit.
The morning after the raid, five hundred people crowded into Market Square to gawk at those pulled during what was being called the biggest raid in city history. Newspapers marveled at the makeup of the prisoners. The Sentinel noted that the men taken in ranged from boys to old men, with “really every condition and class of life . . . represented.” The paper described the women taken in as mostly between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five and consisting largely of the “daughters of the respectable German citizens of the north-western quarter of the city.” The Journal found a bit more variety, writing that “women known to police circles wore an indifferent look [in court],” while “working girls, caught away from home, bedewed their handkerchiefs with emotion.”
All but three of the arrested were convicted and fined five dollars. A pair of Irish women known as “professional rounders” and a young man with a bad reputation were each “sent to the works.” Rosina pled not guilty and was released on three hundred dollars’ bail, heading back home to continue running her dance hall. At her trial later that week, she presented her “private club” argument that supposedly freed Johannesburg from any city regulations. But the testimony by officers at the scene buried her. One claimed a majority of those in the place were under the age of fifteen. Another spoke of the young women and their dates—much older and with much darker complexions.
Just before the case went to the jury, attorney Austin made another attempt to have the licensing ordinance declared invalid, saying the language of the law in the official city books did not match the wording of the law the common council had passed. It turned out that Austin was right. For four days, city officials scrambled to determine if the mismatched law could still stand. During the delay, city attorney Robert Luscombe, long on the losing end of battles with Rosina, was heard to offer a bet of a box of cigars that his case was sunk. But, much to the chagrin of Rosina, the law was declared valid and Judge Mallory permitted the trial to continue. Rosina was found guilty and fined seventy-five dollars for the infraction—plus another seventy-five dollars for the charge of operating a saloon without a license that resulted from another arrest while she was out on bail.
The week after her conviction, Rosina made a show of renting her hall to a local temperance organization. A series of sparely attended meetings were held, with impassioned booze-fighters at the pulpit in the old dance room while her dedicated regulars sat secretly in the next-door barroom downing beer and whiskey. Shortly thereafter, a west-side brewery admitted to city officials that he had been supplying Rosina with two kegs of beer a week ever since her “conversion” to the cause of sobriety.
Worn weary by her battles with the city, Rosina sold her hall in August 1884 for four thousand two hundred dollars. The new owner said he intended on operating a saloon in the place, leading some to suspect the transaction was just another attempt by Rosina to get her permit. But she quickly made it clear that the deal was sincere. She had gotten married and was leaving the city, bound for Michigan to live nearer to family. Her husband, Conrad Stoll, had been a juror at her most recent trial. His was the last vote cast to convict. He “held out so long,” the Sentinel wrote, “that the others threatened to have him sent up for perjury.” Shortly after the wedding, she took Conrad to the courthouse to show him off to all the clerks and city officials with whom she had spent so much time. Asked if she wished to introduce him to city attorney Luscombe, she curtly declined. The happy couple left town a few days later.
April 1882
AT THE downtown central police station, police chief Robert Wasson organized his officers into ten six-man squads. All of the department’s active manpower was about to partake in one of the largest raids in city history. For the next two hours, Milwaukee would effectively be without police protection, as the efforts of the force would be dedicated exclusively to “pulling” the occupants and customers of some of the most prominent brothels in the city. Just before 9:00 p.m., the men marched out into the warm spring night, quickly covering the few short blocks between the central station and Milwaukee’s riverside red-light district.
Earlier in the day, a pair of undercover officers had made the rounds of the district, posing as out-of-towners in search of a high time. They did some quick bartering with the house madams and vowed to return that night. After their tour, the two officers went to a judge and swore out warrants against several houses of ill-fame. Wasson, who had been appointed to his post earlier in the month with the election of John Stowell as mayor, had planned the raid as the first in a series that would rid Milwaukee of the denizens of the district. First up to be pulled were the fine “sporting parlors” of River Street,1 the rough west-of-the-river flophouse saloons of Second Street, and the notorious mixed-race dens of “Brown Row,” located along the blocks of Wells Street nearest the river. As Wasson’s army marched out into the streets that night, they were armed with warrants on fifteen different houses—no small order to be sure, but a mere fraction of the estimated ninety-five houses of prostitution operating in the city.
A view from the alley behind the notorious “Brown Row” of Wells Street
Historic Photo Collection / Milwaukee Public Library
By 10:30, the raids had left the central station “packed to suffocation.” Outside, “the greatest confusion prevailed,” as dozens of carriages and foot messengers flocked to the building, rushing bail money to the arrested and trying to account for brothel inmates caught up in the pull. In total, eighty-three people were hauled in, a number split almost equally between prostitutes and their male patrons. Most of the men were younger, typical of the nighttime downtown reveler. Among those pulled in were an unnamed deacon from a west-side Presbyterian church and an off-duty Illinois sheriff. One man brought in was an agent for a Boston brothel, most likely in town to arrange some kind of “transfer” for a sporting woman between the two cities. So eager was he to escape from Milwaukee, he was observed shouting in the crowded booking room that he would sell his $125 gold watch for the $30 cash to make bail. A bystander took him up on the offer and was admiring his new timepiece as the Bostonian made for the door. As was usual in raids of this type, most of the men arrested gave false names, paid their bail, and were never seen again.
The female arrestees were almost exclusively residents of the district. More than a dozen of the area’s madams were pinched, including Miss Lizzie French, perhaps the city’s most prominent brothel keeper. Of the working girls, many were already familiar with the police station’s female quarters. Observing the scene, the Milwaukee Sentinel noted, “Some women cried, others laughed and made light of the matter, and still others uttered dire vengeance against the officers who arrested them.”
By midnight, as the night-shift officers finally returned to their beats, all but about thirty-five of the arrestees had paid their bail, which totaled nearly two thousand dollars. Of those who could not raise the thirty dollars’ bail, most were inmates of the bottom-rung Brown Row houses of Wells Street. By 2:00 a.m., the Sentinel reported, most of the houses pulled in the raid were back in operation, “although a little more careful in their admission.”
August 1884
PULLED IN during one of the increasingly commonplace raids on the brothels of Milwaukee’s downtown red-light district, Wells Street madam Fanny Seymour insisted to police that her arrest was a mistake. She presented chief of police Lemuel Ellsworth with a receipt that had been issued to her by John McCallum, a local furniture dealer. It read, in part, that McCallum had received ten dollars from Seymour, which was “to be placed where it will do the most good in aiding or helping to keep the two blocks on Wells Street from being pulled this year.” The slip, Seymour insisted, was proof that she had contributed to a pot of money that was to be split between Ellsworth and Mayor Emil Wallber to ensure that her part of the district was not disturbed.
Seymour was one of at least three Wells Street keepers from whom McCallum had solicited funds. He had come to them in July 1884, shortly after Ellsworth and Wallber assumed their offices. After a brief drive to clear out the district a few years prior, the administration of Mayor John Stowell had mostly left the brothels of Wells Street to their own devices. But Wallber and his appointees had campaigned on reform. The fear that they would make sport of the open brothel trade of the area hung heavy that summer as McCallum started up his collection. He claimed to have a contact in City Hall who would, in exchange for two hundred dollars that would be split between Ellsworth and Wallber, ensure that the women of Wells Street would not be pulled.
John McCallum was not a part of the regular scene in the district. It was his furnishing firm that had outfitted the brothels of the street with draperies, chairs, sofas, and beds. He had some twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth of furnishings in these houses, all being paid for in monthly installments. Should these houses get pulled, his furnishing could be seized and his debtors thrown out of work. Also in on the plan was Ben Weil, an agent for the property owners who rented to the madams. He represented a significant financial interest as well. At least six homes along Wells were leased from his client for purposes of prostitution, each bringing a monthly rent well above the going rate for the area. “Twice as much as the old shebangs are worth,” in the words of one Wells Street madam.
But somewhere between collecting the money and getting it to Ellsworth and Wallber, McCallum’s plan fell apart. He ended up using the cash to start a pot of funds to be held jointly by himself and Weir, an insurance fund on the monthly payments owed to each of them. And indeed, when the street got pulled, the two men dipped into the funds to keep their own ledgers current.
After the complaint made by Seymour, McCallum was arrested on a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses. Of the women who later came forward to admit they paid into his fund, most did not have much faith in the furniture man’s ability to deliver on his claims. “I thought there was something crooked about it,” Alice Fowler told the Milwaukee Sentinel. “If a couple hundred dollars were raised for McCallum’s friend, why, we would be alright, d’ya see? Now, you know that’s been [tried] before.”
The Sentinel also went to Gypsy Howard, another Wells Street madam, and asked if she believed McCallum’s claims. “Naw,” she said between plumes of cigarette smoke. “At first, I thought there might be a little truth to the scheme. But, as soon as I heard what kind of a man Ellsworth was, I knew that our promised protection didn’t amount to anything.” She had not even bothered to save the receipt that McCallum had given her. “I felt like this—if Mr. McCallum wanted that ten dollars from me bad enough to work a game to get it, he was welcome to it.”
Only Fanny Seymour seemed to have been a true believer in the plot. “Why, I thought we had a great snap when we paid our ten dollars,” she told the Sentinel. “[And] I thought Ellsworth had a pile of gall after getting his little one hundred dollars to go back on his promise.” She opined that she and her fellow Wells Streeters were targeted because the police “never got a smell” of the money McCallum raised. “Perhaps that’s what they were sour about,” she said with a laugh.
January 1922
THE MOST recent fashion accessory of the Milwaukee “flapper” was causing concern among school officials in the city. Flappers—a teenaged “army of pretty little girls with bobbed hair, short skirts, and rouged faces,” per the Milwaukee Journal—were known for their slinky sex appeal and alluring perfumes, but this new trend was drawing attention from more than just the eyes and nose. The most chic of the flapper set was now adorning her outfits with small, jingling bells “whose tinkle accommodates [her] promenade.”
By the time these jingling flappers were set loose on summer vacation, the Journal was already declaring that the year 1922 would go down as that of the “great flapper controversy.” “At 14, they look like grown women did before the war. At 17, they can pass for 24,” the paper wrote. “If you are a high school boy, you say they have snap and make keen dates and you are proud to walk down the street with one of them hanging to your arm.” Of course, it was not high school boys who were worrying so loudly about these girls and their “snap.” The mobility and independence of the flapper seemed to some a fast road bound to ruin. Milwaukee flappers found idols at the movies and dressed to mimic their favorite female stars. They went with boys who drove fast cars, went to dance halls and roadhouses, and spent the money of their companions—or even their own, as many worked—on cold drinks and hot jazz. The Journal talked to one young girl who had just the night before been out until 3:00 a.m. at a country roadhouse. The reporter asked if there was any adult supervision to her night out. “What did we want of a chaperone?” the flapper spat. “We knew the boys, and anyway, a girl can take care of herself.”
The reporter found another girl who was also familiar with the back roads. “Do boys take liberties with me? Not so you can notice,” she told the man. “If I like a boy pretty well I let him kiss me if he wants to and, of course, he always wants to. If I don’t like him, nothing doing.” Seeing that the Journal man was taken aback by her attitude toward what was once a fairly verboten subject, she continued, “Why not? If you like boys, why not let them know it? Why not have a good time as you go along? There’ll be trouble enough later on. Any movie will show you that.”
Despite the somewhat shocking behavior the Journal man uncovered, he was less alarmed by the flapper than others. “So, why not let the flappers flap, if they want to?” he asked his readers. “Their momentary eccentricities probably are far more harmless than we choose to believe.” As for the flappers’ jingling dresses, school officials said they would probably move to ban bells from acceptable student clothing. The accompaniment, it was said, had a tendency to “distract the boy’s attention from more serious matters.”
July 1943
IN THE summer of 1943, Milwaukee County district attorney James Kerwin announced that the city of Milwaukee was “absolutely rotten” with “prostitution and carousing” and that the conditions bred by legal laxity against the wartime misdeeds of the city’s youth were a “civic outrage.” Kerwin said he was under considerable pressure from the federal government to clean up the city. He wanted funds to hire eight investigators to help bring the situation under control. He currently had only two men dedicated to the cause, and each was working in excess of fifteen hours per day. “The situation,” he said, “is getting away from them.”
The disruptions of the war years seemed to some to be causing Milwaukee’s children to grow up much too quickly. A sharp increase in tobacco and alcohol use among teens was reported by city officials. District judge Harvey Neelsen said that he had seen more cases pertaining to underage drunkenness and smoking during the spring of 1943 than he had in several prewar years combined. “Many business operators are under the erroneous impression that they may legally sell cigarettes and liquor to minors if the latter bring in notes signed by their parents,” Neelsen said during the trial of a pharmacy clerk charged with selling cigarettes to a thirteen-year-old boy. The boy had provided the clerk with a note—written and signed by his thirteen-year-old friend—that granted “permission” for the transaction. The boys were later picked up by police puffing away in Washington Park. They were turned over to their parents, to whom the judge recommended a good “thrashing” for the boys.
Another recent case involved a thirteen-year-old girl who procured four quarts of beer and a quart of wine from a West Walnut Street tavern. The girl’s mother arrived home from work later in the day to find the girl and her three teenage siblings quite drunk. An unnamed north-side tavern was alleged to have served a sixteen-year-old boy so much liquor that he needed to be hospitalized. The previous March, a south-side dive turned loose a boy of the same age so drunk that he passed out in a snowbank, causing permanent damage to his arms and legs.
With parents pulled from their houses in service of the war effort, young people were often left to their own devices. It was the eagerness of some to mimic the actions of their hard-living elders that so alarmed Kerwin. But nothing was as startling as the emergence in the city of the “v-girl.” Shorthand for “victory girl,” the v-girl was a chaser of servicemen, a young woman or girl who was said to have gone “khaki-wacky” by showing no shame in making sexual advances toward soldiers and sailors. Some v-girls came with a price, stalking the downtown barrooms and dance halls in search of servicemen on liberty. A sample of women arrested for prostitution during the war years indicated as many as 60 percent of working v-girls were infected with venereal disease. Others were well practiced in the art of “rolling,” the act of getting a soldier drunk with liquor and promises of sex, only to take him back to a designated apartment or hotel and rob him blind.
A recently returned sailor and his admirers, ca. 1943
Library of Congress LC-USW3-038451-E, Lot 941
But even among the amateur v-girls, city officials found much reason for concern. The man in uniform often attracted the very young. Girls as young as thirteen were found by police in the company of soldiers in saloons and hotels. Lakefront parks were particularly attractive spots for conspicuous lovers. Over a single weekend in June 1945, police arrested eighteen girls between the ages of thirteen and seventeen in Juneau Park involved in some degree of intimacy with servicemen. Kerwin cited these cases as major reasons for the need for additional funds. He bemoaned the fact that many of the girls involved were let off with a mere “verbal spanking” and released to their parents.
Just days after Kerwin made his plea to the public, at least seven more underage girls were arrested for keeping company with soldiers and hauled to the juvenile detention center. A pair of sisters—identified in the Milwaukee Journal as Ruth, age fifteen, and Gladys, age thirteen (these were not their real names)—were taken by their mother to West Wells Street, paired off with two sailors, and dropped at Juneau Park. The only instruction their mother gave them was to “be home early.” Cops picked up Gladys around midnight, waiting outside of a Wisconsin Avenue bar for her date to finish a round of drinks. They found Ruth shortly afterward, all finished with her fellow and walking home.
On the same night, police “had to interfere with the romance” of a fifteen-year-old girl lying in the grass with a serviceman. They chased the pair off with a warning, but when they found the same girl with a different man during a sweep of the park just over an hour later, they hauled her in. The girl lived with foster parents, who were out of town for the weekend. About an hour later, police nabbed girls of fourteen and sixteen saying good-bye to their most recent naval companions at the Lakefront Depot. The older of the two had been in the city for only two months. She was said to be living with a twenty-three-year-old woman with a “suspiciously fancy name” and bringing dates back to her downtown apartment. The fancily named woman was quickly arrested and held on unnamed charges.
Despite the urgency insisted by Kerwin, the County Board of Supervisors took a dim view of his request for additional officers. Citing the nationwide shortage of workers brought on the by war, they encouraged the district attorney to make due with what he had.
September 1926
“AUTOMOBILES WITH their freedom of restraint offer too much in the way of temptation,” Reverend Harry Wise of the Milwaukee County Federation of Churches told the Milwaukee Journal. “If it’s right to do at all, it should be done out in the open.” The topic of the Journal’s inquiry was spooning—an act of youthful lovebirds that, according to the paper, involved “holding hands, an occasional hug, and perhaps one kiss each half hour.” City church and school officials were becoming alarmed by the tendency of young people to engage in spooning in areas beyond the watchful eye of adults. These hidden hugs and covert kisses, it was feared, would lead to acts unfit for print. “Park benches are all right for spooning in the daytime, but at night? Well, there is some doubt in my mind as to their proper usage then,” Wise continued. “If spooning, or courting, is done in the dark, sort of on the sly, away from the sight of anyone, I believe it is of doubtful propriety.”
Reverend H. T. Fletcher of Kansas City had recently made news by opening a “spooning parlor” in his church and inviting young couples to embrace under the supervision of a congregation elder. Captain Harry McCoy, a detective with the Milwaukee Police Department, saw the spooning habit as a troubling trend but did not wish to see the Fletcher plan in his city. “In my opinion, nothing should be done to encourage spooning,” McCoy told the Journal. “It is not the business of the church and it is certainly not up to the city to create cozy corners for courting.” He felt they would do better to encourage young people to use such libidinous energies on outdoor sports.
Reverend Gustav Stearns was no more eager than McCoy to see spooning parlors in Milwaukee. Stearns preferred to see a permanent city commission created to combat the problem. “We have fish, game, and forest conservation commissions because we are scared to death of losing these things we like so well,” he said. “I see no reason why we shouldn’t pay at least as much attention to public morals.” The Journal attempted to gauge the opinion of the city’s flapper population—the group seemingly so much at risk—but their reporter could not find a single bobheaded girl willing to talk on the record of her habits of love.
The city had previously taken action on the matter of spooning in 1919, when the act was outlawed in canoes, citing a rash of complaints on young lovers paddling lightly near the resort district of the upper Milwaukee River. The ordinance even led to the purchase of the first motorboat used by the city police department, most appropriately christened the Killjoy.
July 1912
“HOMES HAVE been wrecked, nations destroyed, thrones overturned, all because of that one thing,” G. R. Bowling was quoted as saying in the Milwaukee Sentinel. Bowling was at the forefront of a movement in Oklahoma that several Milwaukee physicians were hoping to jump-start in Wisconsin. They were trying to ban “promiscuous osculation”—more commonly known as the kiss.
The anti-kissing charge in Milwaukee was led by Dr. L. A. Kleise, who won the support of several of his colleagues with a stirring oration against the practice at a city medical convention. “The habit is known to spread disease, not only when practiced on babies but with older persons as well,” Kleise told the Sentinel. “I fear, however, that a law to this effect would be difficult to enforce.”
The drive against the kiss was because of the germs the act was alleged to spread. “The kiss is a malady, like the whooping cough or the measles,” said a physician opponent of the practice. “It is a blot on our civilization and should be dealt with drastically. I know of no better remedy than to have the proposed law passed and the policemen enforce it with a good hickory club if necessary.”
Backers of the ban managed to get a bill before the state legislature for consideration. In the meantime, they vowed to take their fight to the public and conduct an investigation as to the opinion of the citizenry on the matter. They wished to avoid undue publicity which, they felt, could build a fast tide against their movement. Backers of the bill planned “lectures and literature to show the actual horrors and disease spreading tendencies in the apparently harmless and admittedly felicitous kiss.” Despite the odds against them, Milwaukee’s anti-kiss crusaders felt confident about their cause. “In a few centuries, our grandchildren will look back and wonder how such a phase of insanity ever took hold of their progenitors,” Kleise said. “Why must affection be shown by a salute of the lips? Why not run ears or noses or foreheads as they do in Africa? The slogan of the medical societies of America should be ‘Kill the Kiss.”
December 1891
A WIDE-BODIED man of middle age, well dressed and adorned with a long, sweeping mustache, entered the Carl Caspar Antiquarian Bookstore at 437 East Water Street. The shop had a reputation as one of the city’s finest. Its stock of rare books had been built by Caspar into one of world renown. The man with the mustache had never met Caspar, but in recent months, the two had done some business through the US mail. The man, who called himself Stewart, wished to see the stock of volumes that Caspar kept under lock and key. He wanted something hot.
Caspar trusted Stewart. His trading with the man previously had included a number of explicit photographs, mailed from Milwaukee to Stewart’s home address in Chimney Point, Vermont. Stewart examined Caspar’s stock of illicit books and was impressed. He reasoned that they could be worth as much as a hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars a volume. But he was not there that day to make a purchase and left the shop in short order. As he walked off toward the police station, the man—whose real name was Anthony Comstock—could not get over the rare and filthy items he had just laid his hands on. He later said he was “mystified as to know how Caspar came into possession of [such rare books].”
Anthony Comstock was a native of Connecticut. He had an upbringing molded by the “fire and brimstone” religious fervor of his mother and swore off all impure thoughts from an early age. He fought for the Union in the Civil War and kept on fighting after the war ended. Gambling, tobacco, alcohol, and obscenity were among his targets. He gained a national reputation as the battling agent for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, championing the so-called Comstock Act of 1873 that forbade using the US mail to transport information on birth control or anything of an “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” nature. He was probably the nation’s most recognizable name in the war on vice when he set Carl Caspar in his sights.
Through methods never detailed, Comstock became aware that Caspar was dealing in what Comstock considered to be obscene material. As a volunteer inspector for the US Postal Service, Comstock often personally investigated individuals he believed to be violating his namesake law. To bust Caspar, he acquired a mailing address in the little town of Chimney Point, Vermont, and wrote the bookseller asking for a list of stock. After trading correspondence for a time to build a sense of trust, Comstock asked for a stock of his more “illicit” volumes. Caspar complied, sending a handwritten account of what he could offer. Sometime in the latter half of 1891, Comstock—writing as “Stewart”—ordered a small number of photographs of an explicit nature. Caspar wrote that he preferred to send them via a privately run express company, but Comstock wrote back that his little town had no express office, and travel to the nearest such office was prohibitive. Caspar relented and dropped the photos in the mail. A few months later, Comstock arrived in Milwaukee to finish the sting.
Caspar was arrested and charged in federal court with violation of the Comstock Act. The next month, he went to trial, with Comstock eager to testify against him. The newspapers viewed his methods in the case with a jaundiced eye. The Milwaukee Journal wrote that the “great apostle of morality . . . played a very sharp trick on the bookseller.” The judge in the case took a similar stance, saying that Comstock “may be able to reconcile such conduct to the laws of God and morality, but this court cannot.” Caspar, in his own defense, claimed to have not known what he did was a crime. He assumed the sale of such material—to be used by private individuals for no “immoral purposes”—was within the bounds of the law. The judge dismissed such a defense, but even in accepting Caspar’s eventual guilty plea, took another slap at Comstock. “There are some things worse than sending obscene materials through the mails,” he said. “Lying by a government official [is] worse.” The judge handed Caspar a five-hundred-dollar fine, which the bookseller paid on the spot. He told the court that he would destroy any obscene material that remained in his possession at the first opportunity.
April 1941
AT 6:30 on a Friday evening, a small squad of vice officers and assistant district attorneys rushed through the front door of the Hurwitz Bookstore at 2436 West Vliet Street. After securing the place, the officers rushed about two miles to 518 West State Street, where they similarly pulled the Century Bookstore. On Vliet, police placed sixty-one-year-old Leo Hurwitz under arrest. On State, they cuffed Harry Hurwitz, Leo’s twenty-four-year-old son. The charge was the possession and sale of obscene material: photos, magazines, and paperbacks containing images and illustrations of nudity, salacious stories, and vividly detailed content on sexual hygiene. Among the titles of the five thousand volumes seized were Sexology, Bedtime Tales, Real Tempting Tales, Parisienne, and Gay Life. Each of the seized items was kept hidden behind the counter and was not in open view of shoppers. To get these items, someone needed to know enough to ask for them specifically. Police noted that the typical cover price on the items was just twenty-five cents, “within the purchasing power of high school youth.”
Police executed the raids after a series of complaints from parents of children who attended schools near the stores. It was only the second such action ever undertaken by county officials, the first having occurred in 1938 against another bookstore operated by a son of Leo Hurwitz. Both actions occurred under the supervision of Milwaukee County district attorney Herbert Steffes. It was Steffes himself who led the raiders at both the Vliet and State locations. The day after the Hurwitzes’ arrests, Steffes and his assistant, Charles Kersten, appeared in a staged photo in the Milwaukee Sentinel. Among dozens of bundles of seized girlie books, Steffes was shown examining a copy of Lu-Lu Magazine as Kersten nervously looked on.
Eight weeks later, the Hurwitzes went on trial. Kersten, acting as prosecutor on the case, read aloud to the jury a story titled “Maizie Paid the Balance” from a paperback copy of Peppy Tales, one of the volumes seized in the raids. Defense attorney Arthur Richter countered by reading passages from Shakespeare, claiming the material contained in the “Maizie” tale and the other seized property was no more offensive than what he had just read. “We are not judging literature,” Kersten retorted. “What we are considering is this trash seized from a bookstore. Placing this in the hands of adolescents is dynamite. It will lead to sex crimes.”
With the emphasis of the prosecution’s case firmly planted in the alleged—yet unproven—availability of the material to minors, Richter aimed his closing statement directly at the young, wavy-haired Kersten. “Mr. Kersten would have you believe that you are here to protect the morals of some curly headed boy,” Richter said. “The only curly headed boy you are being asked to protect is a professional snooper from the district attorney’s office. The state has not proved a single sale to a minor.”
It took the jury of three men and three women less than an hour to bring back guilty verdicts for the Hurwitzes. Despite having the option to simply fine the two men, Judge A. J. Hedding handed each a four-month jail sentence. “We must send out a message,” Hedding said, “that will stop purveyors of obscene literature in their tracks.” Mayor Frank Zeidler strongly supported the verdict, saying publically after the trial, “If it were in my power to send a garbage truck up to some of these stands and then dump their loads into the incinerator, I would be glad to do so.”
March 1934
A COUNTY board investigation into graft, corruption, and cruelty at the Milwaukee County House of Corrections and Workhouse revealed a slate of wrongdoings at the facility. The place mostly held men and women convicted on minor state charges, but during Prohibition it also housed those convicted on federal bootlegging charges. Chief among the complaints was the allegation that the favor of authorities at the facility was readily available for purchase. Guards were known to sell whiskey and marijuana to prisoners who could get money from friends or family. Armin Kreutzer, a Milwaukee veterinarian convicted of performing abortions, was accused of having bribed his way into being allowed to leave the prison grounds to continue his illicit practice. One prisoner allegedly received a new suit of clothes from a guard in exchange for a tryst with the prisoner’s wife. Another was supposedly allowed to leave the grounds to host lavish all-night parties at the downtown Randolph Hotel—to which many prison officials were invited.
Most stunning among the allegations leveled during the investigation were those from Lillian Larson, sent twice to the house of corrections on charges of running a brothel. Larson detailed mistreatment and favoritism in the women’s wing of the facility. Some prisoners were given bare-bones rations while the “privileged girls” ate handsomely. According to Larson, privileges came at a steep price but allowed for incredible freedoms. “One girl, her name was Pauline, told me she paid twenty-five dollars a month for privileges,” Larson testified in an unusually full hearing room. “Her husband called Sunday and her sweetheart called in the evening. The girl told me she was allowed to stay three hours in a room alone with her sweetheart.” She spoke of other privileged women allowed morphine and needles to feed their addictions. She said that privileged girls were never punished, but those unable to make monthly payments were severely reprimanded, often physically, for slight infractions.
One item in Larson’s testimony managed to make national news. It was the story of a New Year’s Eve party held in the women’s wing in either 1928 or 1929. The privileged girls were allowed out of their cells and permitted to call in their husbands, boyfriends, or lovers for the evening’s festivities. The climax of the party, quickly dubbed an “orgy” by the press, resulted in one inmate dancing through the halls of the cell block stark naked, pouring drinks for the unprivileged girls, who remained locked in their cells, all while the matron of the wing slumped stone drunk in a chair. During Larson’s salacious story, several men, both civilian bystanders and county officials, were asked to leave the room as they could provide no reason why the young woman’s testimony was in any way related to their duties.
After several weeks of testimony, county officials relieved the facility’s superintendent, William Momson, of his duties and the Milwaukee County sheriff took control of the jail.
July 1872
THE MILWAUKEE SENTINEL reported on a man who, with “some old burgundy [in] the head,” enjoyed an early Independence Day celebration. After becoming quite drunk in a downtown saloon, the man found himself in a very generous mood. He loudly proposed purchasing the Franklin House hotel so that he might use it to entertain his friends—who were, no doubt, quite numerous at the moment. He said that he might also purchase the old city hall, officially known as Market Hall, at East Wells and North Water. Since the city had just transferred its offices into the county courthouse, he reasoned he could outfit the place with a bar and billiard tables. As these transactions could not be immediately secured, he started throwing about smaller sums of cash. He offered ten dollars for a “pint of pea nuts.” He wagered one hundred dollars with a man that Horace Greeley would win the upcoming presidential election (Greeley lost) and bet yet another stranger fifty dollars that he was not intoxicated (he was, quite). It was not reported if he secured the “pea nuts” or if he was called on to pay up for either of the two bets. Police finally interceded on the man’s spree when he smashed the lamps of a hack driver’s carriage. When the man was booked at the station, a wad of fifteen hundred dollars in cash was found in his pocket. “A night’s carousal in Milwaukee,” noted the Sentinel, “especially in his princely mood, might have dissipated his cash as overindulgence had his prudence.”
December 1932
HARRY MOORE might have been the only speakeasy keeper in Milwaukee who worked in his pajamas. He ran a small operation out of an apartment on the second floor of a building at 113 East Wells Street, along a stretch of downtown known as Gin Alley. The costuming was a safety mechanism against a possible raid by local dry agents. When Moore heard a knock at the door, he shuffled toward it and cracked it open. If he did not recognize the faces he saw, he yawned and said in his sleepiest of voices, “What do you mean by waking up an honest citizen at this time of night?” But when a pair of federal agents with a warrant on his place showed up one winter night, the just-out-of-bed act failed to convince them. They shoved past the pajama-clad keeper and quickly uncovered his small nightspot. The feds seized his stash and arrested Moore and his bartender. Both men faced a night in jail. Moore was already dressed for it.
January 1931
FROM ALL over the Midwest, sixty agents of the US Treasury Department’s Prohibition unit crept toward Milwaukee. They were about to help execute the biggest liquor raid in the history of one of the nation’s most alcohol-soaked cities. The next afternoon, the visiting feds—joined by fifteen local agents—congregated downtown. Led by Wisconsin’s Prohibition Office deputy administrator W. Frank Cunningham, the agents broke into squads of two or four, with each squad receiving the address of a known Milwaukee speakeasy. Each spot included in the raid had a corresponding federal warrant accusing its proprietors of violating the Volstead Act, the federal law that outlawed the sale and transportation of intoxicating beverages.
At 5:30 p.m., Cunningham’s army struck in unison, “like lightning out of a clear sky,” in the words of the Milwaukee Sentinel, rushing through inconspicuous, unmarked doorways and the backrooms of a score of front shops and offices. The synchronized strike disarmed the old “tip-off” system usually employed by such places, the phone chain between friendly saloon keepers to warn the next stop down the street about the impending raid. The Sentinel reported of one such call attempted to an alleged seafood restaurant at 437 West State Street. “Lemme talk to Jimmie,” said the man whose place was being raided.
“This is Jimmie,” answered the voice at the end of the line.
“Don’t sound like yer voice, Jim. But anyways, listen, there’s about a million feds workin.’ Close up the joint.”
“That’d been a swell idea about an hour ago,” replied the grinning Prohibition man on the line before hanging up.
It was all over in two hours, with twenty-six dens raided and thirty-eight men and women in custody on federal charges. “A terrific governmental punch at Milwaukee night life,” the Sentinel proclaimed. Of the twenty-six places hit, twenty-two were concentrated in a five-block-by-four-block pocket of downtown, running from Clybourn to State and between the Milwaukee River and Fifth Street. The arrestees were a familiar bunch and proved to be a “colorful and noisy” mass of prisoners. They quickly took up a chant, demanding “Bail! Bail! Bail!” but the Prohibition agents were not moved. The group remained in jail for the evening and, in the morning, was hauled en masse to the Wisconsin Avenue federal building for arraignment.
With so many of the pinched in such close quarters, it did not take long to surmise who was to blame for such a well-executed raid. For three months in late 1930, a man known as Brad Bradley was a regular visitor to many of the targeted nightspots. Presenting himself as a safety match salesman, Bradley was actually an undercover federal agent, tasked with collecting information and swearing out warrants against places where illegal liquor was being sold. Bradley arrived, in the words of the Sentinel, “a stranger in the city, with a suave, confident manner.” He quickly won the trust of Milwaukee operators, spending freely and drinking as one of the boys. The nature of his business—matches were something saloon proprietors typically supplied to their patrons—allowed him to embed himself with his targets, collecting names, addresses, and other information for potential sales leads. Among the same company where he was once “greeted as a Good Time Charlie,” he was now cursed in the most vile terms. But their “Bradley” was by then in a different city, using a different name and most likely winning the confidence of a new group of hard-luck barkeeps.
The Milwaukee County Jail at the corner of Broadway and Wells, where the men pulled in during a federal raid waited for bail
Historic Photo Collection / Milwaukee Public Library
In the wake of the raid, the typically pulsating heart of Milwaukee’s Badlands was dark and still. “Sadness will reign [tomorrow] in the hearts of Milwaukee’s tipplers,” the Sentinel wrote, “for many a haven for the weary is closed.” A reporter for the paper observed the quiet street, occasionally visited by “a few derby hatted customers” who had not gotten news of the raid. They would try the trick doors at their favorite spots, like “the [Wells Street] blanket shop that hasn’t sold a blanket since it opened,” and get no reply. These men would keep trying doors until they got the idea, or until a passerby told them about Cunningham’s raid. In a place with about twelve hundred “soft drink parlors” listed in the city directory, it was unlikely those put out in the Badlands needed to travel far to slake their thirst.
August 1881
A STORY was being circulated in the city of a well-to-do local farmer whose wife had become hopelessly addicted to opium. Unable to stop her from using the drug, the farmer locked her in a small room in their house, hoping time could cure her insatiable habit. After several days of confinement, the farmer finally allowed the poor woman to leave the room. She snuck away at the soonest chance and headed for the city, where she broke into several general stores, stealing items and reselling them to secondhand stores, before taking her cash to the nearest opium den. She was found sometime later and was, according the Milwaukee Sentinel, “stupefied by [opium] and in blissful ignorance of her surroundings.”
Milwaukee’s troubles with opium dated back to pioneer times, when its most regular users were the elderly. By 1880, when the Sentinel sent a reporter to investigate use of the drug in the city, they reported that most users had already died off. But rumors abounded of prominent and wealthy residents partaking of the drug. Opium use was most commonly associated with the Chinese, but the reporter found that use among that race in the city was limited. Overall, women were three times more likely to use opium than men and its use was most concentrated in the “pitiful class of abandoned women.” Few users smoked the stuff, the reporter learned, with men more likely to eat it and women preferring to dilute it in hot water and “sip it as they would tea.” Some turned to opium to ease physical pain or to soothe mental troubles, while others used it for “its stimulating and happy effect.”
A similar inquest the following year found the opium trade in the city to be centered in the Badlands of the Fourth Ward. A Sentinel man visited one such den in the basement of a bakery and candy shop at 276 Third Street. The Ring Shane Laundry provided a front for the den, which was run by a dope boss known only as Sam, who had arrived in the city from New Orleans four months earlier. The “forbidding and noisome” quarters of the place were filthy and hot, strewn with trash and dirty clothes. A room off of the main area was provided for those who wished to smoke their dose, which sold at wholesale values for between eight and ten dollars per pound. Unlike the assertions the paper had made the year before, it now reported the trade to be growing. The city health department was investigating several low-end pharmacies that also sold “vast” amounts of opium, along with an increasing volume of morphine. “The evil,” the Sentinel wrote, “is assuming vast and terrible proportions.”
September 1934
SHERIFF JOSEPH SHINNERS and two deputies hid in the shadows at the Chicago Road Inn in Milwaukee’s southwestern corner. A car approached and one of its three occupants exited. He carried a small tin of opium, a delivery for Joyce Elmore, the roadhouse’s twenty-seven-year-old proprietor and an admitted addict. Elmore had been arrested in downtown Milwaukee just days earlier. In exchange for leniency, she agreed to help the police pull down one of the several Chinese-run opium dens in the city. Out on bond, she called a contact at a Fourth Street Chinese boardinghouse and placed an order. Before the tin reached Elmore’s hands, Shinners and his men leapt from hiding spots and nabbed twenty-six-year-old George Moy, placing him under arrest on a narcotics possession charge. Also pinched were Toy Bong and Frank Sam, who waited in the car as Moy made the delivery.
All three gave a home address of 939 Fourth Street. Police quickly moved on the building, which had been operating ostensibly as a rooming house and laundry. Police discovered a large room equipped with gaming tables and gambling machines hidden behind a small lobby. They found a similar setup in the basement, where detectives arrested a large group of Chinese men playing cards. The upper floor was divided into small rooms, each containing a hard bed and a small table. These were the rooms, police alleged, where addicts would smoke, eat, or inject opium. At the rear of the upper floor was a kitchen, stocked with cartons of rice, noodles, and other Chinese foods. Police arrested forty-seven people and seized five jars of opium pills, three jars of opium prepared for smoking, and a variety of associated paraphernalia. The total value of the drugs found was about three hundred dollars. They also uncovered evidence of an extensive lottery operation. They found a large cache of ticket receipts, which they believed represented payouts made to gamblers, along with a poster of Chinese charters detailing how the ten-to fifty-cent buy-in could result in top prizes of a thousand dollars.
Elmore told police that operations like this were running from several locations in the Chinese district of the city. This was at least the second time Elmore had helped in the raid of an opium den. In 1928, busted under the assumed name of Cecilia Burlick, she tipped cops off on a Wells Street den that resulted in a raid and several arrests. Elmore herself had a long history with the drug. “I was fifteen years old when I ran away from my home here to Chicago with a boyfriend,” she told the Milwaukee Journal from her jail cell, locked away on the charge of being a habitual user of narcotics. “I obtained a job as a hostess in a night club. My friend used morphine. I started to use it because it kept my spirits high and my eyes bright. That was an asset in my work.”
By 1934, Elmore walked with a pronounced shuffle, and her face showed her years of hard living. Locked away from her typical doses, her hands trembled as she spoke. “Morphine became too expensive, so I turned to opium,” she said. “In Chicago, opium is easy to get and not very costly. At first I only needed one shot a day, but now I need at least four. I knew it was licking me, but I was powerless to fight it off. I tried the reduction cure several time, but it was no use. Now, I don’t care.”
After her 1928 arrest, Elmore was committed to the asylum at Waupun and held for five months. She was declared cured but quickly returned to her old ways. She used by pricking a hole in her skin, applying a drop of opium to the open wound, and then covering it with iodine. Matrons at the jail said that her legs resembled “corduroy cloth.” She complained of severe bone aches and feared reprisal from those whom she turned over. “You know what happens to stool pigeons,” she told the Journal. The newspaper reported that she was “on the verge of hysteria.”
Meanwhile, federal narcotics agents arrived in the city from Chicago to investigate the Fourth Street den and its operators on drug, gambling, and human trafficking charges. Agents reported that Milwaukee had become a hub for opium and marijuana distribution throughout the Midwest. They investigated claims that airplanes, stocked with drugs, had landed at Curtiss-Wright Airport1 and were met by leaders of a local Chinese narcotics ring. As the sensational claims of the feds made headlines, Jack King (sometimes referred to as Jack Hing), operator of a Chinese importing firm just a few doors from the Fourth Street den, pressed for those arrested in the raid to be released. King claimed that there was no organized gambling in the neighborhood and that those in the boardinghouse had no idea of the drugs on the premises. The community was too poor to gamble, King said. Those seen playing cards in the basement, he claimed, had been playing for buttons.
No charges came from the most sensational of the claims aimed at Milwaukee’s Chinese American community. In October 1934, Elmore was sentenced to six months to a year in jail but eventually agreed to undergo a voluntary treatment program at a federal prison in West Virginia. George Moy, the bagman lured into arrest at Elmore’s roadhouse, was given one to two years in jail, but the sentence was suspended due to his otherwise clean record. Of the forty-seven arrested during the raid, forty-three were charged with being inmates of a disorderly house, pled guilty, and were freed after paying a one-dollar fine.
May 1866
THOMAS RYAN, a young man with a pronounced physical disability and without the means to support himself, was brought before a judge on a charge of vagrancy. Asked how he happened to find himself in Milwaukee without a place to stay, a job to work, or business to conduct, he confirmed what many in the city had suspected for some time. He said that he had come from Chicago. He arrived in Milwaukee after being forced onto a northbound train by men acting on behalf of either the city or the railroads. Chicago, it seemed, was shipping its homeless to Milwaukee. Judge James Mallory pledged an investigation into the matter. “It would be well for the railroad men to bear in mind,” he said, “that the statutes impose a severe penalty for transporting vagrants into the state.”
The arrival of Chicago’s undesired had become a near-daily occurrence and would persist as an issue throughout the summer, causing the police department to take aggressive actions. The Sentinel reported on a man arrested a few weeks later for wandering near the Walker’s Point Bridge “with no apparent object in view.” When the arresting officer insisted the man come with him to the central station, the man refused, saying he would only go along if he was taken to a first-class hotel, as he stayed at no other kind. Finally, the officer “convinced” him to go along and charged the man with vagrancy. ANOTHER CONTRIBUTION FROM CHICAGO, the headline read.
While most of those arrested for vagrancy were transient men, the most prominent of the street dwellers of this time was likely Margaret Williams, who racked up some two dozen arrests during her short time in the city. In early July, she was picked up and given her usual sixty days under lock and key. “Another of the low vagrants who infest the city,” the Sentinel said of her.
Two Chicago men were arrested a few weeks later after being caught begging door-to-door. One of the men was missing a hand. Still, the Sentinel noted that “he might work if he tried with the other—he appeared too lazy to try.” The men were convicted and given ninety days in jail with the usual vagrancy caveat that their sentence would be waived if they left the city. It was not reported whether they entered the care of the county or left for the next town.
Some more of Chicago’s suspected deposits in the city were picked up a few weeks later when two teenaged girls were arrested early one morning rambling through the Third Ward, causing a “great annoyance to the peaceable conditions of the ward.” The girls could give no account of themselves and had been “insulting the passersby with the filthiest language.” The next day, a man named Foley, nabbed by police for begging, was given two months at the county poor farm. “His dress consists of a coat of many colors,” the Sentinel noted, “and an even greater number of holes.”
The most disturbing trend of the summer, however, proved to be a peculiar sport of the men who loafed about the downtown area. A small number of them had made a game out of “ejecting from their filthy mouths streams of tobacco juice upon the dresses of ladies who happen[ed] to be passing near them.” The spitters tried to perform the act without being detected, but police and the newspapers could only guess as to the aims of such action. The Sentinel expressed hope that “good fortune may favor some man to witness the performance of this insult and outrage and visit promptly upon the offender that justice which should be meted to so cowardly a villain.”
The outrage over northbound vagrants faded after 1866, suggesting Judge Mallory’s inquest had some success. Margaret Williams, however, remained a regular entry in court registers for the next two years before fading from the record. A notable arrest in 1867 found her “so drunk as to be unable to navigate the streets without frequently coming to a halt at full length on the pavement or in the gutter.” In August 1868, she was released from a jail stay only to be arrested again the next week and given ninety days in the house of corrections. She told the Sentinel that upon her next release, she hoped to leave the city and never return. The newspaper expressed the same hope.
August 1858
WILLIAM WARNKE was well known along the rugged dirt road known as Northeast Water Street.1 His mother, Catherine, ran one of the many brothel houses for which the eastern bank of the Milwaukee River was notorious. He was making his way back to the house one Sunday night, in his typical drunken state, when he grabbed the arm of a passing woman and tried to drag her into his mother’s den of ill-repute. It was never reported why Warnke grabbed her—the Milwaukee Sentinel described him as having committed an “insult” to the woman—but she was frightened enough to resist with a fury. She managed to pull away from him and was about to run off when he raised the glass pitcher he had for some reason been carrying and threatened to smash the item over her head. The sounds of the struggle and the screams of the woman alerted the neighbors, and a mob of local men and boys quickly surrounded the drunk and his glass weapon. The crowd administered a “sound drubbing” to the man before turning their rage toward “Old Mother” Warnke’s brothel.
The place had been a point of neighborhood consternation for some time. Police had raided the operation twice that month, handing Warnke convictions for keeping a house of ill-fame each time. But the Old Mother had built up a considerable fortune by trading in flesh. She paid her one-hundred-dollar fines almost without thought and, in the words of the Sentinel, “continued in her wicked course quite defiant of the law.”
Feeling no protection from the statute books, the residents of the block decided to take up matters for themselves. The crowd rushed into the house, smashing out its windows and doors as the Old Mother’s stable of young women fled into the street. The mob stripped the walls bare and reduced its fine furnishings to rubbish. They might have burned the place to the ground had the police not arrived on the scene and ordered them to disperse. The Old Mother and her son were arrested, as was another woman who helped run the place, identified in the Sentinel only as “Old Sib, wife of Spencer the Murderer.” The police claimed the arrests were made as much to protect the trio from the still-simmering mob as anything else.
The next day in court, it seemed that the entirety of Water Street had turned out to get a look at the Warnke gang. The Old Mother was the star attraction, described by the Sentinel as a “hoary old sinner, being between 50 and 60 years of age.” She was charged yet again with being the keeper of a house of ill-fame and had her bail set at the lofty sum of a thousand dollars—almost twice the average American’s yearly salary. The Sentinel reported much rejoicing within the courtroom when the Old Mother, unable to raise the cash, was led off to jail. Later that week, Old Sib and William Warnke were convicted on similar charges and ordered to pay a twenty-five-dollar fine or leave the city. The Old Mother was also convicted and fined an undisclosed amount. She opted to pay up, stay in the city, and continue on in her “wicked course.”
August 1875
“THE CONDUCT of the bawds of River Street has reached a state of notoriousness that deserves the immediate attention of the police,” wrote the Milwaukee Sentinel. The “River Street” the paper referred to was not just the little four-block road that ran along the east bank of the Milwaukee River but rather the half mile square around the street that had become home to dozens of brothels and was thick with “pimps, loafers, and prostitutes.” The Sentinel made this declaration after another one of the area’s many vicious rows. In this case, the combatants were Alice Jordan and Susan Fuller, madams who ran competing houses along the same block. A fistfight between the women drove Fuller to swear out a warrant on Jordan on battery charges. Jordan was arrested, and the next day, Fuller appeared before a judge to make her case. But the judge found the evidence lacking, tossed the charges, and ordered Fuller to pay all associated court costs.
But even as the law was finished with the matter, Jordan could not so easily forget. Enraged that Fuller had caused her arrest, she waited for the woman after the proceedings and thrashed her with a parasol in the hallway outside the courtroom. The attack sent Fuller flying back into the judge’s chambers, demanding that yet another warrant be taken out on Jordan for battery. The judge initially declined to act, but eventually complied at the insistence of Moses Fuller, Susan’s husband.
With her arrest now pending, Jordan returned home to River Street, still stewing over the matter. That night, she sought out Fuller and revealed to her that several times during the preceding months, she had accompanied Moses on long and intimate carriage rides through local “summer gardens.” Fuller flew into a fury and stormed to Jordan’s brothel house, where she took out her wrath on the glassware—destroying every window, lamp, drinking glass, and bottle of booze in the place. “The rage of the woman,” the Sentinel reported, “knew no bounds.” The next day, both Jordan and Fuller were arrested on the grounds that they were idle persons with no visible means of support, a catchall charge used to round up vagrants and others found undesirable by the police. Within hours, they were convicted and each sentenced to ninety days at the house of corrections. Both women, the Sentinel wrote, “resolve to enter upon honorable and useful courses upon the expiration of their imprisonment.”
May 1881
IN A story recounted in a letter to the Milwaukee Sentinel, two schoolgirls were walking through the downtown shopping district early one evening when they became aware they were being followed by a pair of young men. One of these “well-dressed scoundrels” approached the girls and, after an apology for intruding, asked if he and his friend might walk the girls home. He claimed to know something about the “reputation” of the girls. The girls became terrified and rushed home with quickened steps as the two young rakes trailed behind. The father of one of the girls, the letter said, was “perambulating the streets with vengeance depicted in his countenance and a rawhide in his coat sleeve.”
This insult upon the girls was the work of “mashers,” young male flirts who threw their affections at female passersby in the main commercial districts of the city. The look of the masher was one meant for an unmistakable indication of his intentions. “He wears a jaunty little hat on one side of his head,” the Sentinel wrote, “grasps a slender cane, and always carries the paraphernalia of his guild in the shape of showy handkerchiefs, buttonhole bouquets, and other fascinating and fancy trifles.” By early evening, the paper claimed, the streets were so thick with such “brutish-looking and fantastical apes” dressed in the “very latest agony” that women could not venture out unaccompanied without being subjected to their “insults.”
A flirt and two ladies near the Milwaukee River
WHi Image ID 105457
The typical habit of these “dainty darlings of the dive” was to “sally forth” beginning in the late afternoon along downtown’s Grand Avenue and Broadway. Finding a pretty girl, the masher would follow a few paces behind. Once he was confident she had no male companion nearby, he would quicken his pace and begin his pitch. But these lifted hats and blown kisses of the masher usually had no effect on the more respectable women of the city. “They do not reap much of a harvest,” the Sentinel claimed, “until after the supper is over, the dishes are cleared, and the housework done up—when the cooks, servants, and chamber maids come out to have flirtations with their social vis-à-vis.”
If one was caught on the mash, an arrest and fine could follow. The same day the letter to the Sentinel told of the angry father on the hunt for the insulters of his daughter, it was reported that a young Milwaukee man had been convicted of “professional mashing” for following a “respectable” girl to her house and throwing unwanted kisses in her direction. A fine of twenty dollars was assessed. He still may have fared better than the masher reported on a week earlier, who had the misfortune of approaching a woman outside a Broadway music store as her husband, an unnamed county official, was inside. Spying the young rascal through the door, he chased him from the scene, knocked him down, and gave him a sound thrashing.
Writing with a decidedly alarmist tone—one article was titled “KILL THE MASHER”—the Sentinel noted that summer was very near and that soon the mashers at the lakefront parks would be “as thick as gnats at a country cowyard.” The problem, the paper asserted, would get worse before it got better.
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1. Now Edison Street
1. Now Timmerman Field
1. Now East Water Street