City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago

by Gary Krist

  By now, police and firefighters were arriving on the scene. The intense heat of the fire, however, made it difficult for them to enter the caged rotunda. People were pouring out of the bank’s windows like bees escaping a burning hive. Half-naked, dazed, and bloodied, many were now wandering numbly through the streets of the financial district. “When I got to the street,” bank employee W. A. Woodward said, “I noticed that my face, head, and arms were covered with blood.… A man I had never seen before rushed up to me and said, ‘Man, don’t you know that you are badly hurt?’ There was no ambulance near, so this man hustled me into a taxicab and took me to St. Luke’s Hospital.”

  A crowd estimated at twenty thousand people had been drawn to the streets of the southern Loop to watch the disaster. Many were trying to help the victims. Several gathered around Milton Norton. The photographer lay in the street in front of the Board of Trade Building, still attached by rope to his smoldering parachute. By all appearances, the man seemed dead. But someone flagged down a passing automobile and ordered the driver to take the battered man to the hospital.16

  Meanwhile, Jack Boettner had made his way to the street. After detaching himself from his burning chute on the roof of the Board of Trade Building, the pilot had found a fire escape and started down. It took a long time for him to reach street level. Amazed to find himself only slightly injured, he set off amid the confusion to search for his men. He was intercepted on the street by two police detectives, and when he told them who he was, they immediately arrested him and took him away for questioning.

  Back at the Illinois Trust Building, firemen struggled to bring the blaze under control. Charred and bloody bodies were now being removed from the rotunda. Friends and relatives of bank employees ran frantically around the streets, looking for their loved ones. Bystanders were doing what they could, wrapping the injured in their own jackets and helping them to waiting automobiles. Even those people who had only witnessed the disaster were stunned, incredulous. No one could quite take in the reality of what had happened. How had this experimental blimp—this enormous, floating firebomb—been allowed to fly over one of the most densely populated square miles on Earth? Shouldn’t someone have recognized the potential disaster and prevented it?

  It was a question that would be asked numerous times over the next days, as the people of Chicago learned the details of what had happened that afternoon. The crash of the Wingfoot Express—the first major aviation disaster in the nation’s history—had taken the lives of more than a dozen people, while injuring dozens more, and had brought utter panic to the heart of the second largest city in the country. To many, it was unthinkable that such a thing could occur, that people quietly conducting their business in a downtown bank could suddenly find themselves in the midst of a hydrogen-fueled inferno. Chicago had recently come through a world war and an influenza epidemic relatively unscathed. But in the new age of twentieth-century technology, there were exotic new dangers to fear, new sources of turmoil to be reckoned with.17

  What no one could possibly realize at the time, however, was that the turmoil of the summer of 1919 had just begun. Over the next weeks, Chicago would plunge headlong into a crisis of almost unprecedented proportions, suffering an appalling series of trials that would push the entire city to the edge of civic disintegration. A population so recently preoccupied with fighting an enemy abroad would suddenly find no shortage of enemies within its own ranks, threatening residents’ homes, their jobs, even their children. The result would be widespread violence in the streets, turning neighbor against neighbor, white against black, worker against coworker, while rendering the city’s leaders helpless to maintain order. The Red Summer, as it would later be called, would leave Chicago a changed and chastened city, its greatest ambitions for the future suddenly threatened by the spectacle of a community hopelessly at war with itself.

  All of this would happen over just twelve days. In retrospect, the crash of the Wingfoot Express—as horrifying as it may have seemed on that warm July evening—would come to be regarded as the least of the city’s woes.

  WET SNOW PELTED the city all evening, glazing the traffic-choked streets and wrapping every arc light in a gauzy halo of mist. In the chill hour before midnight, noisy groups of revelers rushed along the slippery sidewalks of the Loop. Music spilled from cabaret doorways; patrolmen blew their whistles; taxicabs caromed along the avenues, their thin tires throwing sprays of half-frozen slush toward the curbs.

  Occasionally, the grimy trestles of the L would shudder as a crowded train rumbled past overhead.

  December 31, 1918—proclaimed by the Herald and Examiner as “the most epochal New Year’s Eve” in the city’s memory. Despite the snow and a stinging gale off the lake, Chicagoans were coming out in huge numbers to celebrate. Every theater in the Loop was playing to sold-out houses, while hotels, saloons, and restaurants did record business, turning away latecomers at their doors. There were raucous dances at the Soldiers and Sailors Club, the Randolph Hotel, and even the normally staid Women’s Club. At the Terrace Garden Restaurant, a skater dressed as Father Time performed a last turn on the ice while a little girl, representing the brand-new year to come, was lowered from the ceiling on a wire.

  There were festivities for everyone in town, whether young or old, rich or poor, “old settler” or newly arrived immigrant. At the elegant Casino Club, Chicago’s purest blue bloods watched Charlie Chaplin’s recent comedy Shoulder Arms before settling down to songs and champagne before midnight. More daring souls jammed the cafés on Wabash and Van Buren, where frantic jazz—that scandalous new import from New Orleans—promised to continue until well past the mandatory 1 a.m. closing time. The city’s destitute were also having their fun: At Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna’s tavern on Clark Street, where ten cents bought an evening’s warmth and plenty of cheer, a homeless man named Curly Tim sat for hours over a pot of beer, singing a song about a “lemonade tree” in a “paradise where bums and little children live at peace.”1

  Chicago, in short, was greeting the new year in a spirit of high optimism. And why not feel optimistic? As the Daily News noted just that afternoon: “This year, the holiday breathes peace and contentment. The year 1919 is seen as the greatest in the history of Chicago, of America, and of the world.” Long gone were the gloomy days of the German spring offensive of 1918. The Great War was over now. The Hun had been soundly defeated, and soldiers who had been leaving for combat in Europe a year ago would soon be returning home. Crime in the city was down, and the Spanish influenza, which in late 1918 had swelled the columns of death notices in the newspapers, seemed finally to be tapering off. Even the imminent arrival of Prohibition, almost certain to become law later in the year, had its hopeful aspects; though opposed by a large majority in the city, the abolition of alcohol held out the promise—in theory, at least—of significant reductions in vice, public drunkenness, domestic violence, and other urban ills.2

  But perhaps the greatest hopes of Chicagoans on this snowy New Year’s Eve were those stirred by the city’s bold and wildly ambitious program for its own civic future. The so-called Plan of Chicago—a multimillion-dollar scheme to transform the city into a model metropolis more beautiful than the great urban centers of Europe—had been in the making for more than ten years. First conceived by the late architect Daniel Burnham (the creative force behind Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair), the plan would expand, reshape, and modernize the entire city. It called for, among other things, redeveloping the Lake Michigan waterfront, widening dozens of roads, improving and expanding the park system, building major new bridges and highways, consolidating the city’s railroad terminals, and even straightening a portion of the Chicago River. Considered one of the most ambitious urban improvement programs ever proposed, the plan promised to rationalize the city from top to bottom, creating “a practical, beautiful piece of fabric out of Chicago’s crazy quilt.” Advocates hoped that a more orderly and attractive urban environment would, in turn, create a new sense of comm
unity in Chicago, reducing social conflict and bringing out the best in all of its residents.

  Naturally, there had been resistance to the plan at first. Many early skeptics had regarded the whole idea as too idealistic, too impractical, and altogether too expensive. But thanks to an all-out public relations campaign (which involved, among other things, distributing seventy thousand copies of a propaganda booklet to the city’s schoolchildren), the effort had gradually gained acceptance. In the years since the plan’s conception, numerous factions in the city had worked together to overcome a plethora of financial, legal, and technological obstacles. Property owners had been compensated for their land rights; railroads had been convinced to alter their rights-of-way; businesses had been compelled to move their factories and warehouses. None of this had been easy. For one project alone—the creation of a grand Michigan Avenue boulevard with a monumental bridge connecting the North and South Sides—the city had had to settle more than eight thousand lawsuits.

  In 1919, the Chicago Plan would face some of its toughest hurdles to date. In July, the city council would have to pass a major ordinance allowing the plan’s lakefront projects to go forward. And to finance the major bulk of the anticipated public works, voters would have to pass a series of critical bond issues in November. Given the shaky state of the city’s postwar finances, accomplishing these tasks would require enormous political will. In fact, it was argued that the realization of Burnham’s vision would call for an exercise of civic resolve unlike any the city had mustered in decades—at least since 1871, when Chicago rebuilt itself after its devastating fire.

  Notwithstanding these challenges, however, enthusiasm for the effort was at an all-time high. “Chicago Plan Stirs Chicago Spirit to Realization” read the headline in the January 1 Tribune. “Project Truly Fine and Great Enters New Year in Full Swing.” According to the paper, tangible progress was finally becoming evident to even the remaining doubters: “The visions that once seemed only heart-breaking images begin to settle into actualities. Great works are progressing day and night. Caissons are descending beneath the riverbed, skeleton structures arise on the banks, ragged glimpses are being knit up to make noble vistas, and at the end of them can be discerned faint outlines of visions that will endure.”3

  Of course, to believe all of this hopeful rhetoric about the Chicago of the future, one had to look past one major thing—namely, the Chicago that existed right now. Having grown unfettered from a small prairie village to a colossus of almost three million people in the space of ninety years, the city was still in many respects an awkward, oversize adolescent, and one whose upbringing had been in the hands of “hurried, greedy, unfastidious folk” more concerned with making a quick dollar than creating a model city. The result was an urban environment of barely controlled chaos: a two-hundred-square-mile jumble of wood, brick, and masonry structures, crisscrossed by four thousand miles of road (much of it unpaved) and chopped up by the trackage of twenty-six different railroads. Fifteen hundred trains, more than 20,000 streetcars, and 130,000 individual vehicles entered this muddle every business day, creating traffic snarls that wasted an estimated 100,000 man/days every year. Much of the city’s housing stock, moreover, was substandard, ill-kept, unhygienic, and in short supply; working conditions in factories were often brutal and unsafe; and opportunities for escaping the squalor (at beaches, parks, and recreation centers) were inadequate or too expensive for many to consider. To make matters worse, the smoke from hundreds of coal furnaces, smokestacks, and railroad locomotives left a residue of soot and grime on every surface in the city.

  The year ahead would also put exceptional pressures on Chicago’s already stressed population. The war abroad may have been won, but many domestic conflicts seemed destined to erupt in the coming months. Labor problems—after a brief wartime truce between unions and employers—were on the rise again, soon to be exacerbated by high inflation, lagging wages, and the return of job-seeking soldiers just when the postwar economy was slowing. Racial strife was growing throughout the city, especially in border neighborhoods where African Americans were moving in ever greater numbers to escape overcrowding in the Black Belt. Friction was also rising among the city’s numerous ethnic groups—Poles, Germans, Irishmen, Italians, and Jews—stoked by the nationalist passions of the recent war.4

  But as Illinois governor Frank O. Lowden proclaimed in his official New Year’s greeting: “The new year beholds a new world,” and so Chicagoans were trying to put aside their worries and focus on the positive. The new world of 1919, after all, promised the fulfillment of many individual hopes and expectations as well. For someone like Emily Frankenstein, daughter of a prominent Jewish doctor in Kenwood, the coming year held many bright possibilities. Though she confessed to her diary that she didn’t “dare even to dream” about the distant future, the ebullient twenty-year-old had an “enticing present” to contemplate—her recent graduation from the Kenwood-Loring High School, her exciting new course of study at the University of Chicago, and her budding romance with a young soldier named Jerry Lapiner, to whom she was secretly engaged to be married. Recently released from duty at a Tennessee army base, Jerry would be looking for a job in January, with an eye to making enough money to support a wife and home—a daunting prospect even in less uncertain times. But tonight the pair was determined to be carefree, braving the “blizzardy, rainy night” to take in a vaudeville show on Wilson Avenue before heading to a friend’s North Side apartment for games and supper.5

  Others were greeting the new year more quietly. Victor F. Lawson, owner of the Chicago Daily News, a paper that would go to great lengths in the coming months to reshape the city’s future, remained in bed at his luxurious manor on Lake Shore Drive, nursing a broken foot. Lilian Sandburg, wife of a promising young poet soon to return from a wartime journalism assignment in Scandinavia, also celebrated at home, spending a “lonesome day” at their Maywood cottage caring for the five-week-old daughter her husband had yet to meet.

  And Tribune columnist and sportswriter Ring Lardner, for whom 1919 would prove to be a life-changing year, had his own way of commemorating the holiday. Shunning the boisterous party scenes at the Pompeian Room, the College Inn, and the Edgewater Beach Hotel, the thirty-three-year-old writer instead set out for the “Hotel du Paragon” (that is, his home at 748 Buena Avenue on the North Side), where he found his three young sons engaged in a bacchanal as wild as any in town: “Two young men were lying on the floor, kicking each other, while a third stood on the piano bench, giggling insanely,” Lardner reported in his next day’s column. “None of the revelers wore evening dress.… One of them kept kicking off his slippers and laughing as if he thought it the height of comedy. The other two were continually leaving their chairs and running around the table, shouting at the top of their voices.” Not surprisingly, the three young men soon exhausted themselves; by ten o’clock, they—and their long-suffering parents—were gratefully asleep in their beds.6

  * * *

  The snow continued to fall as midnight arrived, unleashing a citywide crescendo of noise, music, and merrymaking. “Hundreds of orchestras ushered in the new year with the strains of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ ” the Tribune reported, “and diners climbed on tables and cheered themselves hoarse.” A block-long parade of soldiers and sailors materialized on State Street and proceeded north, “shouting and hammering and singing, gathering girls and women into the revel as it moved.” Some of the carousing led to accidents. One young soldier home on furlough fell off a crowded streetcar into the path of an oncoming wagon. A distracted chauffeur crashed his employer’s automobile into the display window of a Thirteenth Street shop. Taking advantage of this mayhem, car thieves managed to drive away with no fewer than ten vehicles in the first three hours of the year.

  At one o’clock, police insisted that the doors of all saloons and cafés be closed to newcomers, though they allowed those inside to continue their celebrations for a while longer. Early breakfasts were served in the
clubs; last songs were sung. By three, the city was beginning to settle down. Exhausted revelers nodded as they rode the late-night “owl cars” to the suburbs. A straggler named John Foll—standing on a street corner, calling for comrades to accompany him to Holland to kill the Kaiser—was quietly arrested and carted off to jail to sleep it off. Emily Frankenstein and Jerry Lapiner left their friend’s soiree at two and—after a “cold-slippery-tired” ride on the L—got home at 4:30 a.m.7

  It had been a grand night—the first New Year’s Eve of the postwar era, heralding what many were convinced would be a time of reconstruction and new beginnings. And over the following few days, as Chicago recovered from its collective debauch, the city started to see corroborative signs of the positive changes to come. Police chief John J. Garrity announced the hiring of one thousand new policemen to patrol the city and make it even safer. Governor Lowden announced a welcome 15 percent reduction in state taxes. Even Chicago’s beloved White Sox got a new start. In a statement made public on New Year’s Day, owner Charles Comiskey announced the replacement of manager Clarence Rowland with William “Kid” Gleason to lead the team in the upcoming season. While the Old Roman would not say why he was making the switch, reporters pointed to the team’s sixth-place finish in the 1918 season, plus rumors that Rowland had lost control over several players disgruntled by salary issues. But the selection of Gleason—a former Sox coach with whom Comiskey was allegedly not even on speaking terms—came as a surprise to everyone. “The loyal patrons of the White Sox desired a change in manager,” Commy explained with bland noncommitment, “and I have exercised the prerogative that I considered mine and made the change.” The team’s performance in the 1919 season, of course, would be the ultimate proof of whether Comiskey had made a wise decision.