Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  This rush of production activity set Chicago in continuous and fast-paced motion, causing far-reaching changes in the usual arrangements and rhythms of family life. Companies that had laid off thousands of workers in the 1930s were now desperate for new hires to operate assembly lines around the clock. With the departure of so many fathers to battlefields overseas, the federal government looked to mothers to help fill the gap in the labor supply. Winning the “good war” was going to take the participation of even middle-aged mothers who had long given up on aspirations for a career, let alone one in the manufacturing sector. Exhorted by government-sponsored posters picturing a sturdy but comely Rosie the Riveter rolling up her blue denim shirt sleeve to expose a flexed bicep beneath the phrase “We Can Do It!,” nearly four million homemakers entered the labor force during the war. For many of these women, the decision to start punching the clock reflected a sense of patriotic duty. For many more, however, it was an act of economic necessity. The Great Depression had ravaged savings accounts and living standards, and the allotment checks that were supposed to sustain the families of servicemen did not go nearly far enough. Yet even though working mothers were vital to the war mobilization and a boon to employers, who paid them 65 percent of what they paid male employees doing comparable work, social conservatives saw them as threatening cherished values of motherhood and female domesticity and ultimately placing the nation’s youth in grave danger. One of the most strident critics of working mothers was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation J. Edgar Hoover. Having rallied in the 1930s against the nefarious effects of gangster movies on the minds of youths, Hoover now turned to the problem of neglected children on the home front, arguing that “boys and girls” were the nation’s “most priceless . . . asset,” and “their preservation [was] as important as any objective in this war.”5

  Concerns voiced by social conservatives about the sanctity of traditional gender roles quickly became subsumed by a more generalized sense of anxiety about the state of the nation’s youth. With so many fathers away fighting the war and mothers increasingly entering the workforce, Americans worried about who was watching the children after school. A range of problems arising from this lack of supervision materialized in the mainstream press—from “latchkey children” locked alone in their homes to “victory girls” engaging in casual sexual adventures with soldiers out of a misplaced sense of patriotic duty, to juvenile delinquents carousing all night with street gangs. As a vital war producer and key stopover for servicemen travelling between the coasts, Chicago was touched by these trends as much as any city, and the local press reported on such issues as if they were, as Hoover believed, matters of national security. Criminologists urged police to crack down on the immoral activities of victory girls, who threatened to spread an epidemic of venereal disease through the ranks of servicemen, and to impose curfews in order to keep wild youths off the streets. One article on the “alarming” increase in the juvenile delinquency rate in the Chicago Tribune went so far as to claim that divorce and delinquency were “breaking up Chicago homes far faster than battle front casualties.”6

  Such hyperbole in one of Chicago’s more sober newspapers suggests that the various incarnations of the youth problem taking the stage during World War II were more symbolic than real. Despite the public outcry about latchkey children, wild youths, and victory girls, the citywide juvenile delinquency epidemic that experts kept predicting never really materialized. Even the moderate rises in juvenile delinquency rates that were recorded in wartime Chicago could have merely reflected changes in law enforcement practices and data collection methods that occurred in response to the increasing perception of a juvenile delinquency problem.7 Moreover, all the attention paid to the mothers who heeded Rosie the Riveter’s call was somewhat exaggerated. In fact, while the labor force participation of women between the ages of 35 to 44 showed significant gains, the change was relatively minimal for women in the prime childbearing years of 20 to 34.

  Rather than indicating actual behavioral changes among youths, the wartime delinquency crisis reflected uncertainties and anxieties linked to the realities of everyday life on the home front. Chicagoans, it should be remembered, received daily reminders of the sacrifices being made by soldiers. By the second half of 1943, as death tolls rose precipitously, hundreds of memorial plaques were hanging on street sign poles, and residents across the city were assembling in parks and on street corners to pay their tributes to fallen soldiers. Around this same time, moreover, the draft began to draw even more fathers and sons into service, creating more and more agonized mothers and guilt-plagued brothers. While such circumstances characterized cities across the nation, the intensity of Chicago’s war mobilization campaign seemed particularly effective in reaching into communities and turning the force of neighborly scrutiny upon those failing to carry their load. How else to explain the city’s national leadership in enlistments and war bond purchases? Mayor Kelly’s management of Chicago’s wartime labor force was so extensive that in January 1943 he organized a Noise Abatement Commission to ensure that war production workers were not awakened by unnecessary noises.

  Yet as successful as Chicago’s OCD had been in the first few years of the war, it could not prevent the malaise that spread throughout the city beginning around the summer of 1943. With factories running at full throttle day and night and a sizable segment of the labor force trying to adjust to eight-hour night shifts starting at 11:00 P.M., Chicago newspapers began to report on poorly attended civil defense meetings and waning interest in war bond and salvage drives. In addition, the class tensions that had been subsumed by civic boosterism and patriotism in the initial years of the war began to resurface—not at work but in the sphere of consumption, as working-class Chicagoans began to complain that their more wealthy neighbors were buying restricted commodities on the black market and hoarding them. Once again, much like the delinquency crisis of this same moment, it is difficult to know the extent to which the circumstances being reported by the press actually reflected shifts in consciousness and behavior. Such stories could have been placed on the desks of editors by a mayor’s office worried about indiscipline and apathy in the ranks. That the OCD was thinking along these lines was revealed in February 1944, when it created the Committee for Patriotic Action to help pick up morale around the city, a move suggesting that the malaise being covered by the local media was palpable. In view of the physical and psychological conditions characterizing daily life on the home front—the gut-wrenching concern over loved ones overseas, the disruptions in lifestyles and household routines, the grinding work regimen, and the heightened sense of patriotic duty owed in view of those risking their lives for the country—it would have been surprising if Chicagoans had reacted in any other manner.

  BLACK MIGRATION AND WHITE RESPONSE

  Chicago was surely not alone in translating this social upheaval into concerns over its children. The wartime juvenile delinquency crisis was national in scope—a matter taken up by a U.S. Senate subcommittee chaired by Florida senator Claude Pepper in November 1943. That many of the testimonies before this subcommittee tended to place the blame for wayward youths on working mothers revealed the extent to which anxieties about children intermingled with uncertainties surrounding the new place of women in the workforce. Yet working women and wild children were not the only forces turning the world upside down during the war years. In fact, the hearings of the Pepper Committee were prompted, at least in part, by another situation that was threatening public safety and unity on the home front. The summer of 1943 had witnessed the explosion of major race riots in three key war production centers—Los Angeles, Detroit, and New York—and the outbreak of near riots in numerous other cities where the higher wages offered by war production employers had drawn hundreds of thousands of African American migrants from the rural South. Once again America’s youths moved to the center of discussions about another wartime social problem. However, in the case of America’s race problem, as it prese
nted itself to the country in 1943, the correlation with youths was not so abstract. The riots in Los Angeles, commonly referred to as the “Zoot Suit Riots,” featured mobs of young white servicemen hunting down and beating Mexican and black youths clad in stylish, baggy zoot suits, which flaunted rationing restrictions on textiles and emblematized the affiliation of their wearers to a nightlife scene that valorized “kicks” over patriotic duty. In Detroit, zoot suiters and white teens clashed for weeks around the city before a skirmish between black and white youths in a crowded park ignited a three-day riot that resulted in thirty-four fatalities. And in New York, rumors surrounding a police bust gone wrong in a Harlem flophouse brought thousands of young blacks into the streets, with zoot suiters, according to many eyewitnesses, leading the way.8

  The riots of the hot summer of 1943 were among the first spasms of a much broader and longer-lasting movement of white resistance to the massive flow of Southern black migrants to the urban North and West. Pushed from the South by the mechanization of cotton farming and the collapse of cotton prices on the world market in the 1930s, black migrants packed all they could carry and boarded trains heading to big war production cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York. Believing they would find good jobs, better schools, and a friendlier racial climate, many migrants viewed such destinations as the “promised land.” Referred to by historians as the “Second Great Migration,” this demographic shift began in the early 1940s and continued through the 1960s, dramatically reconfiguring the landscape of American politics in the process. The estimated five million blacks relocating from the South to the North and West between 1940 and 1970 accomplished nothing short of urbanizing the vast majority of the black population, nationalizing the problem of race, transforming the cultural landscape of the urban North, and redefining party politics throughout the country.

  In the postwar decades the Democratic Party would begin staking its electoral hopes on strategies that sought to align blacks, the white working class, and liberals behind federal programs that promised solutions to racial and social inequalities, and its Republican Party foe would increasingly rally its base behind values of individualism, color blindness, small government, and the free market in order to fend off the challenges of racial liberalism. On the local level, moreover, metropolitan politics would never be the same again. Big city mayors—those of Chicago perhaps most of all—would have to figure out the calculus of attracting black votes and losing white ones, and middle-class suburban residents would turn towards the politics of erecting barriers between themselves and inner-city blacks. The geographical and demographic swelling of black ghettos in the urban North between the 1940s and the 1970s paralleled their expansion in the American psyche. Blues, jazz, funk, soul, disco, hip hop, rap, gangs, drugs, prostitutes, riots, poverty, unemployment, welfare, immorality, fear, and hate circulated through dark ghettos that most Americans would increasingly view only through the prism of the mass media or through the windows of cars speeding safely above them on highway overpasses such as Chicago’s Skyway, constructed between 1956 and 1958 to swiftly convey automobiles over communities like Greater Grand Crossing, whose black population would increase from 6 to 86 percent in a single decade as whites fled the advancing ghetto.

  Edward Kelly was one of several Chicago mayors to tangle with the prickly politics of race within this shifting landscape, and his downfall would come, in part, because he underestimated just how intensely many white Chicagoans loathed the idea of having blacks as neighbors. In a somewhat ironic twist, while the city of Chicago would go on to have one of the more tumultuous and eventful histories of race relations in the two decades following the Second World War, it was spared a spectacular explosion of racial violence in the spring and summer of 1943—even though there was no lack of sparks to ignite the fuse. In May 1943, for instance, just about three weeks before the Los Angeles riots, two white police officers shot a sixteen-year-old black student several times in the back after he allegedly hurled rocks at them. If that was not enough, shortly after the incident the boy’s father received a note threatening the same fate for him if he did not “keep his mouth shut” and move from his home in the South Side’s Morgan Park neighborhood.9 Days later, hundreds of angry citizens gathered to protest the boy’s slaying but ended up heeding the pleas of a local black minister to refrain from violence. Then, just hours after the stories of race warfare in the Motor City had hit the streets of Chicago, police responded to a call from Hyde Park, where a mob of white youths armed with shovels, pick handles, and other weapons had taken to the streets in search of some blacks who had allegedly threatened them on their way to the beach.10 A few days later, Horace Cayton observed that African Americans were “arming” themselves in case of rioting, and two social workers on the Near West Side reported that Mexican adolescents were discussing the riots and “waiting” for something to happen. Another community worker, a representative of the Hyde Park Neighborhood House, remarked on the “changing attitude of white boys,” noting that several of those he was in contact with had taken to carrying large knives on the streets and “expressing themselves as preparing for fights against Negroes.”11 Seemingly overnight, Chicago had a racial crisis on its hands. Mayor Kelly hastily moved to establish a high-level commission—the Mayor’s Committee on Race Relations—to monitor racial flare-ups and advise ways of keeping the peace. The situation appeared so grave, in fact, that community leaders in several racially mixed areas urged their aldermen to make provisions for first aid stations and safety shelters.12

  Such panicked responses stemmed in part from the dramatic, even anarchic way in which the Chicago press had depicted the situation in Detroit. To begin with, as news of the violence spread, Detroit officials could offer no explanation for its origins, other than a vague report of an interracial incident in a crowded recreation area on Belle Isle, a park on a patch of land in the middle of the Detroit River. The absence of a sense of causality contributed to the spread of a perception that what was being witnessed was the outbreak of race war, pure and simple: “a frenzy of homicidal mania, without rhyme or reason,” as one writer for the Detroit Free Press referred to it.13 This was the conclusion many Chicagoans most likely came to when they read in their own city’s leading paper the quotes of riot victims, white and black, expressing shock at having been attacked by mobs for no apparent reason other than the color of their skin. Adding to the unease about the circumstances of the riot was the fact that it was by no means clear from the coverage which race had acted as provocateur. The following description is typical of the reportage Chicagoans received: “Groups of Negroes and of whites milled about on street corners in a wide section bordering the northeastern side of downtown Detroit and hurled bricks and stones at passing automobiles bearing members of the opposite race.”14 Such treatment left intact the perception that the aggression might have been initiated by members of Detroit’s African American community, perhaps even in an organized fashion, an idea that had much deeper implications for racial attitudes in Chicago than if the riot were merely another case of white aggression and black response.15

  In the end, however, the bomb planted in the summer of 1943 never blew, even if its ticking continued to be heard in the city for months, if not years. But if Kelly had managed to dodge a bullet in the summer of 1943, his troubles were just beginning. The events of the spring and summer of 1943 were revealing that, after more than a decade of relative calm along the color line, parks, schoolyards, beaches, streets, and neighborhoods were once again becoming battlegrounds in a war of attrition over the city’s limited resources. The immediate cause of this renewal of hostilities was the arrival of some seventy thousand black migrants between 1940 and 1943—a roughly 25 percent increase in the city’s black population. Further aggravating the situation was the halt on construction during the Great Depression, which left the city woefully lacking in proper housing for these new workers and their families. By the end of 1943 an acute
housing shortage gripped the city, particularly within the Black Belt, where one study estimated that 375,000 inhabited an area suited for no more than 110,000. Addressing a meeting of realtors in July 1943, Chicago Housing Authority chairman Robert Taylor cited statistics indicating that the Second and Third Wards—the heart of the South Side black ghetto—were more densely populated than the slums of Calcutta.16 And of course it did not take long for slumlords to recognize the opportunity a tight and racially stratified housing market offered them. Ensuing rent gouging practices left black migrants with few alternatives but to pay far too much for poorly maintained apartments within the Black Belt and a number of other pockets of black residence scattered around the West and South Sides. Faced with such conditions, migrants began seeking more affordable housing at the edges of neighborhoods where they were less than welcome, if not openly detested.