The viewers of Chicago's news and interview programs are well familiar with the Civic Federation of Chicago. If the issue is public sector pensions, Government debt and fiscal mismanagement, a Civic Federation spokesperson is always present and in recent years, these issues have been on the front burner. The Civic Federation is one of Chicago's oldest institutions with roots that go back to 1894; and yet it wasn't the prodigy of a movement about fiscal responsibility but rather civic morality. The driving issue at its inception was prostitution, the sex trade and local government's failure to even  address the problem. It was a source of civic embarrassment when so many of the City's most expensive carriages seemed to be often parked in front of suspected bordellos.

With the world invited to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition of 1893, several Progressive leaders saw an opportunity to expose and hopefully end the depravity. They invited William T. Stead, a noted Progressive journalist from England, to Chicago to investigate the state of rectitude in the Garden City. Stead had gained international celebrity for exposing the sex trade in his native country, for which the authorities were none to pleased. 

Stead hired a private detective, for they knew the City as well as the police and were less likely to be corrupt, and spent a month in the Levee, Chicago's red-light district. Stead presented his revelations to a huge congregation in the Central Music Hall in November of 1893. He excoriated the City for insouciance towards the poor, for the exploitation of woman and he named names. A few months later his investigations were published in a book by Laird & Lee entitled What Would Jesus Do in Chicago.  

A movement was born. The Civic Federation was founded and a decade later an erstwhile Chicago alderman and then Minority Leader in the United States House of Representatives, James Mann, passed an Act outlawing the transportation of women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution. Yet for the devotees of Chicago true detective stories. The nightmare of the sex trade was nothing new. It had been used in the plot of a novel the Runaway Wife several years earlier and it described one of the worst bordellos in the country, the Devil's Ranch Stockade in Michigan.