The title for this chapter about the 1904 World’s Fair is “The Babylon of the New World,” and the head quotation begins: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, and we wept, when we remembered Zion.” If St. Louis is Babylon, then the exiled Hebrew people who wept must be the nations of dispossessed people who surrounded and populated the Fair. As we learn, the Black citizens of the city are among many other unworthy peoples that populate the “human zoo” both as visitors and the exhibits.
Walter Johnson offers an intriguing portrait of a St. Louis newspaperman, the novelist Theodore Dreiser, in this chapter.
His chronicle of Gilded Age St. Louis provides an itinerary of the pleasures of impunity and empire, of the places a man like Dreiser could go and the things he could do–the things that money would buy and whiteness would allow–as well as a sense of the disquiet and moral decay at the heart of the city that W.C.Handy called “the Capital of the Sporting World” (182.
Dreiser did not only frequent the hot spots of the city, but the underbelly as well, where the postbellum immigrants had gravitated: the freed slaves, the Russian Jews, the poor whites from rural Missouri. He tells the story of a pedophile apprehended for paying an eight-year-old girl to “massage” him. The white man was released without charges, because he was an old man with a wholesale business, a wife and grown sons and daughters. Dreiser’s editor would not even print the story. Such were the considerations allowed a middle class white man.
Dreiser’s autobiography apparently details his own sexual fantasies and the indulgences of the merchant class in a neighborhood called “Deep Morgan.” This is the same neighborhood known in St.Louis today as the “Delmar Divide.” White men who could afford a second residence, invested in Morgan Street real estate as a place to entertain those who could give them pleasure.
The sexual insecurities of white men were inflamed by the novel The Awakening by Kate Chopin, who wrote it during the years she lived in St. Louis. She tells a story of Edna Pontellier, a society woman, wife and mother who has an affair with the younger Robert Lebrun. White men already suspected “that white women might have unfulfilled sexual desires and that those desires might lead them into the arms of darker men like the suggestively name Lebrun–was perhaps shared by some of the leading men of St. Louis who saw to it that The Awakening was removed from the shelves at the Mercantile Library and that Chopin would no longer be received in polite society” (185).
Dreiser eventually took up permanent residence on Morgan Street, where he could observe and participate in sexual fantasies unavailable in proper society. For example, he visited a brothel where dark women danced naked “in some weird savage way that took me instantly to the central wilds of Africa . . . so strange they were.” It inspired him to imagine a moral order beyond the conventional monogamous world he came from. In that world Black men were lynched for having illicit sexual relations with white women, but in the underbelly of St. Louis the same relationship between white men and black women was a thriving business.
Under the “Social Evil” laws passed in St. Louis between 1870 and 1874 sex workers were licensed by the board of health and brothel keepers paid fees that were put toward the care of “abandoned women.” For the following decades prostitution was officially outlawed, but it was thriving in a 72-block area bounded by Market, Washington, Jefferson, and Twelfth Street. In the least reputable section, Chestnut Valley and Deep Morgan, the police were on the take to permit the operation of the sex industry. They received free drinks, meals and sex for looking the other way and comparable benefits for allowing gambling on their beat. “St. Louis was a gangster city with a gangster police department, much of which operated as the uniformed wing of the Babylonian capitalists of he Big Cinch and the various smaller cinches that ran the demimonde in Deep Morgan and elsewhere” (194).
One of the most famous piano players in the bordellos of St. Louis was Scott Joplin, a significant contributor to “ragtime” as it emerged in the 1890’s. Joplin commuted between Sedalia and St. Louis on the MKT (Missouri-Kansas) and made a spectacular entrance with a parade down Market Street, when he returned. “Joplin wrote the soundtrack for desire and dread, for the inflated festivity of the night before and the pounding payback of the morning after, for the pleasure wrung out of pain, for the hard work that subtended the easy life. For the rumble and the bell of the streetcar that carried the wealthy white men of the West End downtown to Chestnut Valley and Deep Morgan” (198).
In 1901 the city passed it first segregation ordinance, forbidding Black citizens from residing on any block that was “seventy-five per cent white.”
The muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote of the depths of corruption in St. Louis in an early essay for McClure’s Magazine. Later he published his extended investigation in the book-length account The Shame of the Cities. Steffens also recognized a crusading district attorney named Joseph Folk, who indicted a infamous list of businessmen, bankers and political leaders en route to cleansing the City Council and vaulting himself to Governor of Missouri.
[For editorial purposes, the story of the World’s Fair follows in the next blog entry]