Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  Such circumstances shaped the youth subculture of gangs and athletic clubs that served as the training ground for the white foot soldiers of the 1919 race riot. Politicians and syndicate kingpins circulated in this milieu, drawing upon neighborhood muscle to rally votes and intimidate rivals, but the brutal rituals of street violence that were so central to this world served other needs. The culture of physical combat that defined the athletic clubs of Hamburg and Canaryville represented a collective strategy of the disempowered to create a compensatory system of empowerment. As in nearly all male-dominated, fighting gang cultures that have been studied by historians and sociologists before and after this historical conjuncture, claims to vital manhood and the sense of honor or status it bestowed constituted the stakes of the street brawls in this area. “Status as a gang among gangs, as well as in the neighborhood and the community,” Frederic Thrasher observed after surveying more than 1,300 Chicago gangs, “must . . . be maintained, usually through its prowess in a fight.”49 No other neighborhood area personified this idea more than the blocks of Hamburg and Canaryville, where demonstrations of “prowess in a fight” had been integral to the street culture since at least the 1880s. According to one resident, youths from these communities “thirsted for a fight,” and Saturday night turf battles between “Canaryvillains” and “Hamburg lads” often produced “broken noses and black eyes that were . . . too numerous to count.”50 And in a period when handguns were rarely used in such street fights, the not infrequent fatalities came the hard way: from skull fractures and stab wounds. The fact that gangs arriving at designated fights during these years expected to see their enemies holding clubs, bats, blackjacks, and knives that they were not afraid to use suggests that the drive for manly prowess was anything but trivial—rather, it was something worth risking one’s life for.

  Although lads from Hamburg and Canaryville were perfectly willing to crack each other’s skulls for the sake of honor and respect, they preferred the skulls of the outsiders who seemed to be closing in on them from all sides—namely, blacks from across the color line and Poles and Lithuanians from the Back of the Yards. In the years leading up to the riot, social workers associated with the University of Chicago Settlement directed by Mary McDowell recorded a pattern of violence between Polish and Irish gangs in this area. One Polish gang in particular, the Murderers, engaged in recurrent brawls with a nearby Irish gang named the Aberdeens, whose members, according to one of the Murderers, “was always punching our kids.” A similar rivalry existed between another Polish gang of this vicinity, the Wigwams, and Ragen’s Colts, who on more than one occasion destroyed the Wigwams’ clubhouse at 51st and Racine, in the midst of a predominantly Polish area around Sherman Park. Apparently, when the Wigwams were unavailable for a beating, any Polish gang would do for the Colts, who, according to Polish residents in the area, cruised the area around Sherman Park, which lay right between Canaryville and Packingtown, looking for fights.51

  Such battles, to be sure, were enmeshed within a process of Americanization in the streets that taught Poles and also Lithuanians the meaning of their “Polishness” within the city’s racial order. While Lithuanians represented about 29 percent of the population of the Back of the Yards, their Irish aggressors tended to lump them with Poles, who, with a 43 percent share of Packingtown’s population, dominated the neighborhood. And yet this process of Americanization did not have the effect—at least not yet—of bringing Poles and Lithuanians into a pact of whiteness with the Irish. While University of Chicago Settlement workers did observe the Murderers joining the offensive against African Americans during the riot and then later boasting about it, many Poles chose a place on the sidelines and some criticized the Irish for their actions.52 When an arson fire during the riot left about a thousand Polish, Lithuanian, Czech, and Slovak residents homeless, many in the Back of the Yards claimed the Irish had set the fire in order to rouse Poles and Lithuanians to action. Although we will never know the verity of the rumor that whites in blackface were seen running from the scene as the flames grew, that many believed the story to be true is nonetheless suggestive. And yet, if many southern and eastern Europeans largely refrained from joining the white mob, they showed no signs of actively defending blacks or of engaging in any form of meaningful cooperation with them. If their visceral contempt for the Irish and an awareness of their own injuries of race kept them somewhat neutral during the riot, the injustices imposed from above turned them against rather than towards those below them—as has so often been the case in the American experience.

  As Arnold Hirsch has convincingly argued, substantial evidence from the 1919 race riot reveals how new immigrant groups—Poles, Lithuanians, Italians, and Jews, among others—occupied a “third (or middle) tier” within Chicago’s racial order at this time.53 But the riot itself was also a watershed event in the undoing of this very same racial order—a spectacular demonstration of the new centrality of the ghetto in the city’s political culture. The “third tier” did not disintegrate immediately, however. In the early 1920s, pop eugenicist Madison Grant’s theories about “Nordic” (northern European) racial superiority were orienting the national debate on immigration policy, and Prohibitionists across the country were decrying the wayward social habits of new immigrants.

  However, a different story was unfolding at the grassroots in Chicago, where the anxious activities taking shape in the “white” neighborhoods surrounding the rapidly expanding black ghetto pointed the way towards a more binary racial future. To be sure, new immigrants would still have to defend their Americanness in the years to come against those who would restrict further immigration from their homelands, prohibit them from a drink, and place a range of social ills on their shoulders, but a new racial order was in the process of being embedded within Chicago’s social and physical geography. Providing the catalyst for this shift was the continuing flow of southern black migrants into the city during the 1920s. By the end of the decade the city’s black population had more than doubled once again, with African Americans now constituting almost 7 percent of the city’s residents. In 1917 the Chicago Real Estate Board had declared a block-by-block policy of racial separation, and now it engaged in an aggressive campaign in white neighborhoods to promote the formation of homeowners associations and the use of racially restrictive covenants to prevent residents from renting or selling their homes to blacks. By 1940, these legally binding agreements covered some 80 percent of Chicago’s property—a “marvelous delicately woven chain of armor,” as one official from the Chicago Real Estate Board referred to it in 1928.54 When legal means were lacking, street gangs and thugs affiliated with local “improvement associations” used terror tactics—bombings and beatings—to police the color line throughout the first half of the 1920s.

  The bonds of whiteness that were created from this project of black exclusion within the housing market were further solidified within the burgeoning sphere of mainstream commercial leisure—in movie theaters, dance halls, and sporting arenas—where different ethnic groups mixed in whites-only spaces. In the early 1910s, the boxing world had buzzed with anticipation about the “great white hope” who would manage to take the heavyweight crown away from Chicago resident Jack Johnson, the first black boxer ever to hold the title. By 1920, with interest in baseball at a peak following three consecutive years in which one of the city’s two major league teams had won a championship pennant, Chicago was fielding two black baseball teams—the Chicago American Giants and Chicago Giants—in the country’s first black professional baseball league. Moreover, religion played a part in this story. Catholic Church policies ushered in by Archbishop George Cardinal Mundelein contributed to breaking down ethnic rivalries and reinforcing a sense of shared destiny among different Catholic groups. By promoting territorial over ethnic parishes and the use of the English language in parochial schools, for example, the Church helped to pave the way towards a more universalizing sense of whiteness among Europeans. And many of those moving into t
hese new territorial parishes were doing so as homeowners with a new sense of “investment” in the preservation of their neighborhoods.

  Moreover, forces of upward social mobility during this era created new kinds of neighborhoods strongly identified by the middle-class aspirations rather than the ethnic solidarities of their residents. The 1920s witnessed the rapid growth of the “Bungalow Belt,” a ring of white middle-class neighborhoods in the outlying neighborhoods and suburbs distinguished by the single-family detached homes neatly lining their streets. During this decade, for example, the population of the Gage Park area southwest of the stockyards more than doubled to over 31,000 residents, and that of nearby Chicago Lawn grew over 300 percent to 47,462 residents.55 With designs inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School Architecture, the modern homes built in these neighborhoods attracted a range of strivers—Irish, German, Polish, Lithuanian, Bohemian, and Italian—looking to put some distance between themselves and the stink, grit, and angst of the stockyards. The strong sense of shared destiny that evolved out of these circumstances would make these neighborhoods into bastions of “white power” politics by the late 1960s, when marches into the fiercely defended neighborhoods of the Bungalow Belt led by the Reverend Martin Luther King transformed places like Gage Park and Chicago Lawn into the living embodiments of racial exclusion. But such sensibilities were long in the making. Even as early as 1927, an ad linked to the mayoral campaign of Democrat William Dever was urging residents of the West Side Bungalow Belt neighborhood of Austin to “protect” their “families” and “beautiful homes” by making sure that “no harmful influences invade them”—a message that, in the context of the incessant race-baiting of this mayoral race, could have had only one meaning.56 Ethnicity was far from done as a force in Chicago politics, but as different ethnic groups increasingly lined up together as “whites” struggling to hold off the ghetto from their doorsteps, the problem of the ghetto moved to the center of the city’s political system, and politics became yet another force creating a black-and-white world.

  Hence, by the mid-1920s Chicago’s political scene had become seemingly saturated with race. Racism ran rampant in aldermanic and mayoral elections as candidates sought to woo the city’s emerging middle class by promising to “preserve” and “protect” their neighborhoods, and the substance of political discourse gravitated inexorably towards the problems of vice, gambling, criminality, and racial mixing in the Black Belt. Under the aegis of party boss George Brennan—a man whose determination was steeled by having lost his right leg at the age of thirteen while working as a rail switchman—Democrats continued to use race-baiting tactics to counter Mayor Big Bill Thompson’s appeal in the Black Belt. While the incumbent Thompson’s withdrawal from the 1923 mayoral election made for a particularly low-key race that saw the straitlaced Democrat reformer William Dever triumphing with relative ease, a much more vitriolic form of racism exploded during the hard-fought mayoral campaign of 1927, when Thompson jumped back into the fray. “There is just one issue in this campaign,” Illinois State representative Michael Igoe notoriously claimed during a speech in support of Dever in the run-up to the election. “There is a south side issue; if you folks want to keep the south side white, you go out and vote election day.”57 Democrats plastered this Manichean vision of the election’s stakes on walls throughout the city with posters bearing such provocations as “Is the Negro or the White Man to Rule Chicago?” and “Negroes First—William Hale Thompson for Mayor.” They took out ads in the city’s newspapers evoking the oft-repeated tale that Thompson had kissed a black child at a rally, and they engaged in a range of vaudevillian gags, like driving trucks around the city mounted with calliopes playing “Bye Bye Blackbird” over and over again. If, in the end, these antics failed to keep Dever in office, Thompson’s victory by no means signified any kind of broad renunciation of antiblack racism. In fact, Dever’s loss had more to do with his determination to stand between a Chicagoan and a beer, and Thompson’s ability to use Dever’s moral pretensions—“Dever and Decency” was his campaign slogan—to paint him as an aristocrat opposed to the common people. He proclaimed himself to be “wetter than the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,” told his supporters that “we low-brows have got to stick together,” and accused Dever’s superintendent of schools, William McAndrew, of a plot to disseminate a pro-British, royalist view of American history through the textbooks used in the city’s school system.

  Yet somewhat ironically, if the election of 1927 would go down in history for its vicious race-baiting, perhaps even more striking, in the final analysis, was the extent to which it displayed the vitality of class pride and the edginess of class resentment within the city’s political culture. Thompson was able to tap into such feelings, in part, because he had already made inroads into the city’s laboring class during his first two terms. In Thompson’s Chicago, the politics of school reform collided with the labor struggle, with the antilabor dogma of the Commercial Club crowd swaying businessmen and much of the professional class towards the view that the Chicago Teachers Federation (CTF) was all that prevented the city from reforming the school system to cost efficiently serve the interests of business. It was within this context that Thompson defended the right of teachers to join unions in the face of an antiunion campaign spearheaded by school board member Jacob Loeb in 1917, and the following year he created a stir by nominating (unsuccessfully) Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) President John Fitzpatrick to the school board. By 1921, Mayor Thompson had substantially raised the salaries of teachers (as well as policemen) and his superintendent, Peter Mortenson, had created local councils to give teachers a greater say in school affairs. Moreover, he complemented such redistributive and democratizing policies with gestures intended to demonstrate to the city’s laborers that his heart was in the right place. In 1922, for example, he stood up to reformer Louise DeKoven Bowen after she had publicly attacked the city’s policy of sponsoring school field trips to the Riverview Amusement Park—a popular working-class leisure venue that DeKoven Bowen characterized as “filthy and indecent.”58

  Dever, on the other hand, committed a series of miscues to alienate the city’s working-class base during his four years in the mayor’s office. In fact, Dever had inherited a rancorous labor dispute that had begun in 1921, during his predecessor’s second term, when the Chicago Building Trades Council had accepted arbitration after refusing deep wage cuts proposed by builders. The result was catastrophic for labor. The arbitrator in the dispute, Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, issued a decision that not only granted builders the wage reductions they had demanded but also established a number of principles that virtually banned strikes and permitted employers to more easily hire nonunion labor. The decision, which was applauded by the Tribune and the Daily News, provoked an angry reaction among the more than seventy thousand members of the Chicago Building Trades Council and unleashed the full wrath of the city’s open-shop movement. The Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry quickly rallied business leaders around the project of forcing the unions to comply with the terms of the arbitration. Spearheading the organization that grew out of this effort, the Citizens’ Committee to Enforce the Landis Award, were a number of Commercial Club notables, such as printing executive Thomas Donnelley, steel executive Joseph Ryerson, Commonwealth Edison’s Samuel Insull, and Daily News editor Victor Lawson. With such supporters and donors, the Citizens’ Committee was able to raise some $2 million to fund a range of activities to undermine the labor movement, which included running a trade school and employment bureau, as well as maintaining its own police force. Dever thus made few friends in the labor movement when he appointed Citizens’ Committee (and Commercial Club) member A.A. Sprague to be his public works commissioner. The committee was trying to accomplish nothing short of excluding union labor from its construction sites, and Sprague was certainly in a position to help make this happen. Landis Award contractors would go on to build $400 million worth of projects, including the med
ical and theology buildings at the University of Chicago, which, with “progressives” like Julius Rosenwald and Charles Hutchinson on its board of trustees, approved a $5,000 donation to the Citizens’ Committee.59

  Dever’s next series of gaffes was dealt to him by his superintendent of schools, who alienated the CTF by disbanding the popular teachers’ councils as a cost-cutting measure and then wrangled with the teachers over the use of stigmatizing IQ tests and the imposition of a “platoon” system that created junior high schools and shifted students between classrooms (more cost-cutting measures that allowed the city to avoid constructing new facilities to deal with its school overcrowding problem). While such moves rankled the sensibilities of even the conservative Chicago Tribune, which in a 1924 editorial asserted that “schools are not steel mills,” Superintendent McAndrew remained steadfast in his campaign to bring a hard business rationale to the administration of the city’s school system.60 “The purpose of a school system is not to please us who are in it,” he proclaimed, “but as with all public service corporations, to satisfy the customers.”61 The key customer he had in mind was the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry, whose help McAndrew enlisted in order to assess the school system’s performance. McAndrew’s words and the agenda they articulated were strikingly ahead of their time; they would not have seemed the least bit out of place more than eighty years later, when school superintendents were being called “CEOs” and school officials appointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley were taking aim at the Chicago Teachers’ Union and the Local School Councils (LSC) created by Mayor Harold Washington to democratize the school system.