Flutterby™! : Sin in the Second City

Joseph Epstein reviews Karen Abbot's Sin in the Second City, a history of brothels in Chicago in the early 1900s.

When a blue-ribbon commission on vice published a report called "The Social Evil in Chicago," which also argued for getting rid of prostitution completely, it was roundly greeted as "a contribution to the cause of morality and decency," according to the local press. But not by the young journalist Walter Lippmann, who noted that those who composed the report were naïve in thinking that "sex must be confined to procreation by a healthy, intelligent and strictly monogamous couple." The commission, Lippmann wrote, ignored "the sexual impulse in discussing a sexual problem . . . yet who that has read the report itself and put himself in any imaginative understanding of conditions can escape seeing that prostitution today is organic to our industrial life, our marriage sanctions, and our social customs?"