Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  FIGURE 1. The Union Stockyards. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  Chicago’s dramatic industrial growth, however, was also propelled by its massive steel works along the lakefront in the southeastern corner of the city. In 1889, most of Chicago’s major steel mills merged to form Illinois Steel, making it, at the time, the world’s largest steel manufacturer. In 1902, another merger engineered by New York banker J.P. Morgan saw Illinois Steel (then called Federal Steel) absorbed into the industrial giant U.S. Steel, the world’s largest business enterprise. At that time the South Works site of steel production employed 3,500 men and covered some 260 acres; twelve years later, 11,000 people worked there. A number of other mills, such as Iroquois Steel, Wisconsin Steel, the Federal Furnace Company, and Interstate Iron and Steel Company, opened to the south of U.S. Steel around this time, and in 1906 U.S. Steel began operations in its massive Gary Works, which by the 1920s employed some 16,000. In the years to come, the steel corridor extending from the southern part of Chicago to Gary, Indiana, would make the region one of the world’s top steel producers.

  Moreover, a sizable amount of the millions of tons of steel being turned out in Chicago did not have to go very far. By the turn of the century the raw-materials needs of a number of Chicago’s heavy industries were rising sharply, creating corresponding labor demands. In 1902, International Harvester—the by-product of the merger of McCormick Harvesting Machine Company with four other Chicago farm equipment makers—launched Wisconsin Steel to assure its steel supply as it gathered an 80-percent share of the world market in grain harvesting equipment. Within eight years the company was grossing about $100 million in annual sales and employing more than 17,000 workers in the Chicago area. Around this time, the Pullman Company became another big purchaser of Chicago-made steel as its production shifted from wooden to steel sleeper cars in its company town of Pullman fourteen miles south of the Loop, where its workforce increased from 6,000 to 10,000 between 1900 and 1910. In addition, a significant and growing portion of the steel produced within the Chicago-Gary corridor was hauled up to the Loop to be used in the construction of the steel skeletons holding up the city’s many imposing skyscrapers.

  Beginning in the 1880s, Chicago, along with New York, had quickly emerged as a pioneer in the construction of skyscrapers, with Chicago School architects such as Burnham, Root, and Louis Sullivan designing many of the city’s landmark buildings. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, according to architectural historian Carol Willis, “the dominant aesthetic for office buildings in Chicago was to appear as big as possible by rising as a sheer wall above the sidewalks.”11 Often spanning a quarter of a city block and rising sixteen to twenty stories, these palazzo-style buildings typically contained ornate commercial courts with shops, services, and restaurants covered by glass canopies—signature features that sought to define the professionalism and class status of the white-collar workforce in the “City of Big Shoulders.”12 In fact, “big shoulders” by the tens of thousands were employed to construct these massive buildings, whose proliferation had, by the 1920s, moved Chicago into second place in the nation in number of headquarter offices.

  Similar designs, moreover, characterized the swanky department stores that so elegantly displayed the wares of retailers such as Marshall Field and Carson Pirie Scott. The brisk expansion of Chicago’s commercial, financial, insurance, real estate, and advertising sectors during this era created an enormous need for retail and office space. And leading the way were burgeoning mail-order retailers such as Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Co., which, by bringing the fashions and necessities of modern life to folks in the hinterlands, had grown into some of the nation’s largest business enterprises by the 1910s. Many of the fashions being mailed out, moreover, were produced right there in Chicago, which by the turn of the century had become the country’s second largest production center for men’s clothing. Making it possible to get all these workers and shoppers to the Loop was the rapid expansion of the city’s elevated railroad system, which grew from 35 miles of line in 1900 to 70 miles by 1914, establishing Chicago’s “L” as one of the longest metropolitan railways in the world.

  All this to say that Chicago’s economy and workforce expanded at breakneck speed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in comparison with most of the world’s major cities. The city’s phenomenal growth was due in part to its central location within the country’s railroad network, which made it the “gateway” between east and west, in part to its extraordinarily diversified economy, and in part to the Great Fire of 1871, which by razing more than 18,000 structures across some 2,000 acres downtown, created the conditions for a building boom that worked to modernize the young city at a breathtaking pace. Yet the commercial forces unleashed in this perfect storm of redevelopment after the Great Fire had devastating effects on the city’s infrastructure. They created a jumbled mess of railroad tracks, rail yards, and service buildings out of the lakefront; huddled poorly constructed wood-frame tenements around muddy, unpaved streets at the Loop’s periphery; cut up the city with railroad tracks; and cluttered the Chicago River’s banks with factories, smokestacks, and ramshackle warehouses. And this had all come to pass in a city that had shown it had the wherewithal to move mountains. Chicago, after all, had managed to put on the greatest spectacle in modern history when the city’s brass had marshaled the resources and know-how to hastily conjure the majestic White City—the neoclassical fantasyland setting for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893—out of some 600 acres of swamp and mud in Jackson Park. Over 27 million visitors had walked through the Beaux Arts pavilions of this city-within-a-city, marveling at wonders of modernity collected from the four corners of the world. Then, in 1900, the city had displayed its engineering prowess by permanently reversing the Chicago River’s flow with the completion of the Sanitary and Ship Canal, thus stopping the outbreaks of cholera and typhoid caused by sewage pouring into the city’s Lake Michigan drinking water. Yet, regardless of such technological feats, Chicago in the early 1900s nonetheless seemed like a city struggling in vain to make order out of the chaos that had taken it captive.

  In addition to the built environment, this sense of chaos permeated the social fabric. Profound social instabilities grew out of the massive wave of immigrants and migrants that washed over Chicago between 1890 and 1910, when the city’s foreign-born population increased from under half a million to almost 800,000. By 1910, the foreign born and their children made up almost 80 percent of the population. Moreover, the industrial juggernaut was pulling its immigrant laborers from other reaches of Europe than it had in the past. At the turn of the century, the Germans, the Irish, and the Poles had been the largest ethnic groups. By the 1910s, the Poles were on their way to becoming the most prominent white ethnic group; the Germans and the Irish were proportionally on the decline; and a range of new ethnic groups from points in southern and eastern Europe were exerting their presence in the streets and neighborhoods. While Chicago’s population roughly doubled between 1890 and 1910, for example, its Italian-born population jumped eightfold and its Jewish population rocketed almost sixteenfold. Greeks and Czechs also poured into the city, which became the central destination in the United States for these groups.13 Moreover, these decades also witnessed the arrival of an increasing number of African American migrants from the South. Between 1890 and 1910, Chicago’s black population more than tripled, jumping from 14,271 to 44,103, which at the time represented 2 percent of the overall population.

  The tendency for these new ethnic groups to form close-knit communities accentuated the great changes under way, as native-born Chicagoans saw whole neighborhoods being transformed before their eyes. In the late 1890s, for example, Swedes had dominated the Near North Side “Swede Town” neighborhood around Seward Park; just ten years later it would be commonly referred to as “Little Sicily.” But nowhere was this phenomenon more readily apparent than on the Near West Side, in the immediate vicinity of Hu
ll House, where a number of the city’s most distinctive ethnic neighborhoods sprung up seemingly overnight. A short stroll to the north took one into the “Greek Delta” (later known as Greektown) at the triangle of Halsted, Harrison, and Blue Island Avenue; just to the south lay the “Jew Town” neighborhood around Maxwell Street, with its bustling outdoor market and ramshackle storefront synagogues; and a quick jaunt to the west along Taylor Street took one straight into the heart of Little Italy. To the northwest of Greektown, at the triangle formed by Division, Ashland, and Milwaukee Avenue lay the heart of Polish Downtown. South of Maxwell Street, in the Pilsen area, was the city’s largest Czech community. To the east of Pilsen, Chicago’s largest African American neighborhood, referred to as the “Black Belt,” stretched from the Loop down to the Levee vice district between 18th and 22nd Streets and beyond to 39th Street, encompassing much of the 2nd and 3rd Wards. While such areas of the city came to be associated with a certain predominant group whose imprint appeared in the form of ethnically identifiable saloons, groceries, restaurants, retail shops, places of worship, and meeting spots, these neighborhoods were far from homogeneous. Jews, Italians, Greeks, and blacks collided on a daily basis on the Near West Side; Polish Downtown overlapped with well-defined enclaves of Jews, Italians, and Ukrainians; Czechs and Poles coexisted in Pilsen; and the Back of the Yards neighborhood adjacent to the stockyards mixed Germans, Irish, Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, and Czechs. Even African Americans were relatively well distributed throughout the city, settling among Italians and other white ethnics on the Near West and Near North Sides, as well as around the steel mills in the South Chicago community area. In fact, although the forces of segregation were gaining momentum by the early 1900s, as late as 1910 blacks remained less segregated from native-born whites than Italian immigrants.14

  Nonetheless, by the early 1900s the social fabric seemed to be coming apart at the seams. Youth gangs and athletic clubs patrolled neighborhood boundaries, engaging in turf battles that reflected both simmering tensions between rival ethnoracial communities and the increasing precariousness of masculinity in a labor market characterized by Taylorist deskilling strategies on the part of employers and downward wage pressures caused by all of the new immigrants ready and willing to fill unskilled jobs. Such circumstances contributed to the wave of lethal violence that made Chicago the nation’s leader in homicides by 1910, as well as to the rise of a new era in racially motivated aggression within the laboring class.15 Particularly emblematic of the new times were the rancorous and vicious labor conflicts that shook the city in the summers of 1904 and 1905.

  The first of these, the stockyards strike of 1904, began in the first week of July after the major meatpackers refused to guarantee the wage levels of unskilled packinghouse workers, whom unionists from the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen (AMCBW) believed were being used to undercut the pay and position of skilled butchers. The ensuing strike involved the immediate walkout of some 20,000 workers and lasted two months, with numerous violent clashes pitting strikers and their sympathizers against strikebreakers and the police. While the vast majority of the strikebreakers recruited by the packers were white, black strikebreakers occupied center stage in the drama from the outset. Antiblack violence associated with the strike quickly metastasized as white workers began referring to blacks in general as a “scab race.” Suggestive of the rancorous racial hatred circulating around the affair was a polemic in one labor newspaper that referred to the strikebreakers as “a horde of debased, bestialized blacks . . . brought in[to] the labor market and shipped into the yards as hogs are shipped for the killing floors.”16 Over the summer, African Americans, whether involved in the strike or not, became frequent targets of violence around the stockyards, being pulled off streetcars by mobs or pelted with rocks in the streets. Such injuries were compounded by the strike’s failure, which the butchers of course blamed on the black strikebreakers, who, for their part, lost their jobs as soon as the conflict ended.

  The teamsters strike of the following year further escalated the racial situation. Beginning in April as a sympathy strike by the Brotherhood of Teamsters in support of the United Garment Workers (UGW), several of whose members had been fired by Montgomery Ward for a strike months before, the campaign quickly garnered the participation of several thousand workers and turned destructive. Days after the teamsters stopped deliveries to Montgomery Ward, the Chicago Tribune alarmingly reported the outbreak of “riotous demonstrations, blockading of streets, and clashes with the police force.”17 Once again, employers resorted to bringing in black strikebreakers, and once again racial hatred eclipsed class struggle, as attacks on African Americans spilled out of the context of the labor dispute and into the streets and neighborhoods. According to historian David H. Bates, the savage violence that followed was partly due to the race-baiting tactics of the Chicago Employers Association, an antiunion cabal led by Marshall Field’s vice president John G. Shedd and Montgomery Ward executive Robert J. Thorne, which paraded black strikebreakers provocatively through the streets in broad daylight and circulated inflammatory pamphlets asserting that such events portended that blacks would soon “assume a responsible place in society . . . upon equal terms with the whites.”18 The reportage of the main Chicago dailies fanned the flames of race hatred, publishing stories that highlighted the immorality and licentiousness of the black strikebreakers. One Tribune article, for example, characterized them as “Southern ‘darkies,’ who had loafed all their lives along the cotton bales of the Mississippi docks.”19 Although blacks constituted but a small minority of the strikebreakers, white workers were yet again only too eager to take the bait. Strikers threw bricks from rooftops and took to the streets wielding axes, shovels, clubs, and revolvers on an almost daily basis between late April and mid July, a situation that led the strikebreakers to fight back with revolvers and razors. The violence spiraled out of control on April 29th, when thousands of strikers confronted the police in a battle that resulted in three shootings and two stabbings, and then again on May 4th, when mobs broke off from a crowd of more than five thousand and carried out indiscriminate attacks on any blacks in sight. By July, as the strike broke down amidst allegations of bribes exchanged between union leaders and employers, twenty-one people had been killed and over four hundred seriously injured. As in the stockyards strike of the previous summer, workers suffered a crushing defeat. Stained by bribery accusations and the unbridled violence that had shaken the city, the local labor movement limped out of the summer of 1905 towards an uncertain future in which employers would continue to exploit racial fears to break unions.

  And yet these tactics worked so effectively because such fears were, in the early 1900s, spreading like an epidemic through the city’s working-class districts. A good many of those venting their rage at blacks during the labor campaigns of 1904 and 1905 were immigrants whose place in the city began to seem increasingly tenuous around this time. This situation was certainly not specific to Chicago. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe encountered ethnoracial discrimination across the urban United States as they sought to claim their rightful place in their neighborhoods and workplaces during the early years of the twentieth century. Employers regularly refused to hire members of certain groups for higher-paying skilled jobs, both out of an effort to break the unity of the workforce and out of their own racialized sense of which groups were more suited to performing skilled tasks. In Chicago’s packinghouses, the Irish and the Germans were the so-called butcher aristocracy, with Poles and other eastern European groups filling a range of semiskilled and unskilled jobs below them, and blacks performing the dirtiest, lowest-paid work available. Similar arrangements increasingly characterized the workforces of the city’s steel mills and manufacturing plants. Such hierarchies were reproduced within the city’s residential geography, as native-born landlords and realtors commonly refused housing opportunities to blacks and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. An ethnoracial pecking order was also
taking shape out on the streets, where certain groups found themselves to be more susceptible to attacks by street gangs and athletic clubs defending their turf. Here again, the Irish constituted, in the words of sociologist Frederic Thrasher, “the aristocracy of gangland,” and their propensity to target Jews, blacks, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Poles and Italians conveyed to these groups that their status within the city was far from secure.20 As historians James Barrett and David Roediger have argued, all this constituted a process of “Americanization from the bottom up” in which the Irish served as the key “Americanizers.”21 The power of the Irish to perform this role came from their presence and influence in a range of institutions immigrants dealt with in their daily lives: the school system, the Catholic Church, labor unions, the police department, and the political world.

  By the second half of the 1910s, this process of Americanization at the grassroots was increasingly informing immigrants that their proximity to blacks on the job and in their neighborhood placed them in jeopardy. Such feelings would only intensify in the years to come, as a massive wave of African American migrants arrived in the city, and blacks emerged as a new force to be reckoned with at work, in the neighborhoods, and in municipal politics. Between 1910 and 1920, Chicago’s black population would more than double, and in the “red summer” of 1919, the city would witness the most violent and destructive race riot in the nation’s history. But, as the savagery and bloodshed of the stockyards and teamsters strikes revealed, such events should not be viewed as the mere consequences of demographic forces—the reflexes of a tipping point reached. African Americans, after all, constituted a rather inconsequential segment of the city’s turn-of-the-century workforce and a relatively small minority of the strikebreakers brought into the city in 1904 and 1905. And yet their presence aroused an unprecedented level of racial animosity—an animosity fed by the racial uncertainties faced by new immigrants during these years. But if the racial order of the city was evolving by the turn of the century, the events of 1904 and 1905 clearly worked to transform the role race would play in Chicago’s political culture in the years to come, and the fact that some of the city’s leading businessmen had pulled the strings should not be overlooked.