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

by Gary Krist

  In any case, the vast majority of soldiers certainly wouldn’t be registered in time for the primary, and so in the final days of the campaign for the nomination, both papers intensified their attacks on Big Bill. The Daily News printed a withering “Case Against Thompson” on its editorial page, enumerating the many “counts in Chicago’s indictment” against its mayor. The Tribune followed with a forceful endorsement of Olson as the only Republican with any hope of unseating the pernicious incumbent. The editorial was blunt: “[Thompson] has failed in everything that could be hoped for him.… It will be a good thing for the city of Chicago if he is not returned to office.”7

  Big Bill was unperturbed. “Actions speak louder than words,” he declared at the dedication of the Monroe Street Bridge, a Chicago Plan improvement whose opening was carefully timed to coincide with the culmination of the primary campaign. For Thompson, this kind of event was pure political gold. Early in his first year in office, when Charles Wacker, chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission, had come to the mayor’s office to lobby for Burnham’s grand scheme, he’d found a receptive audience. As George F. Harding would later say, “Bill grabbed the Chicago Plan and raced away with it like a gridiron star tearing down the field … for a touchdown.” After all, the plan promised something for everyone—jobs, pride-inducing public works, rising real estate values, and photo ops galore. It also offered a virtually inexhaustible source of patronage and graft, all in the name of creating “a city finer than any the world had ever seen.”

  And now, with just a few days left before the primary, Thompson was playing his role as Big Bill the Builder for all it was worth. Flashing a union card identifying himself as a member of Local 182 of the Bridge Operators’ Union, he personally pulled the lever that lowered the brand-new drawbridge into place. “This latest addition to our traffic facilities,” he announced, as fireworks boomed above a fluttering American flag, “emphasizes the ‘I Will’ spirit of Chicago, which rises superior to all obstacles!”8

  On the eve of the primary, all three Republican candidates employed contingents of soldiers to lead street-corner demonstrations and pass out campaign flyers. At Thompson’s final rally at Cohan’s Grand Opera House, one soldier—a Lieutenant L. M. Thorpe, allegedly wounded at the Battle of the Argonne—announced himself from the audience as a Merriam supporter. He was roundly booed, but the mayor was gracious. “Bill Thompson is glad to have any soldier of the nation talk in this meeting,” he said, helping the lieutenant climb to the stage.

  “Why are you in politics?” someone in the hall shouted.

  “I’m in politics,” Lieutenant Thorpe said, turning to face the crowd, “because I don’t want to be a citizen of a German city.… I’m in politics to have an American put into office!”

  Taken by surprise, Thompson grabbed the soldier by his Sam Browne belt and tried to shove him back into the crowd. Declaring the meeting adjourned, the mayor promptly stalked off the stage and found the nearest exit. According to a reporter for the Daily News: “Pandemonium reigned in the audience for several minutes before order was restored.”9

  Such embarrassments aside, the Thompson-Lundin forces were supremely confident going into the primary the next day. Most of the newspaper straw polls were in his favor, and Lundin’s get-out-the-vote machine was primed and ready. And sure enough, when the polls closed on February 25—amid allegations from Olson about a “citywide plot among the crooks and vice element to steal the election”—Thompson cruised to an easy victory, defeating Olson 124,194 votes to 84,254. As for Captain Merriam, although he had qualifications that, according to one observer, should have attracted every Chicago voter “who had eyes to see and ears to hear,” only 17,690 turned out to be so qualified. The reformist professor hadn’t even been able to carry his own Hyde Park district.10

  Thompson and Lundin were jubilant. “Our cause is crowned with victory,” the mayor proclaimed in a brief statement to the voters. “I highly resolve to dedicate myself to carry out your mandate.” Granted, a second term was not yet secured, but as Thompson crowed on primary night: “We beat them today and we’ll beat them on April 1!”11

  Certainly the prospects looked good. The winner of the Democratic primary, Robert Sweitzer, was the same man Thompson had defeated in 1915, and there were rumors that several other candidates would make third-party or independent runs. As usual, in other words, the Chicago electorate was likely to be split many ways—and that was exactly the kind of environment in which the Thompson-Lundin machine worked best.

  The city hall crew and their supporters were able to celebrate their primary victory for a day or two. But then, in the early-morning hours of February 28, something happened that could potentially change the entire complexion of the upcoming election. At about 2 a.m., a bomb went off in the downstairs hallway of a South Side rooming house. The explosion knocked thirty people out of their beds and killed a young girl sleeping with her grandmother. Significantly, all of the residents affected were black, and the rooming house was one that had been newly purchased by a black man from its white former owner.

  The city’s response to this tragedy was going to be closely watched. Chicago’s black population—a key element in virtually all of Big Bill’s election victories to date—would be looking to Thompson to take the lead in addressing this outrage and punishing the perpetrators. No matter who proved to be responsible for the bombing, it was clear that the Black Belt’s unwavering support of the mayor was about to be tested.12

  THE FORCE OF THE explosion at 3365 Indiana Avenue shook the neighborhood for blocks around, shattering windows up and down the street. Within minutes, crowds of neighbors—most of them white—were gathered outside the brick row house to assess the damage. Debris littered the pavement in front of the building, and from the broken windows on the first and second floors, torn curtains billowed in and out of the cold night air.

  Police arrived shortly thereafter to investigate the blast. In a front room on the second floor, they found Ernestine Ellis, a six-year-old child who had been sleeping in her grandmother’s apartment. The girl had been blown vertically out of her bed. The impact of her body against the ceiling above had fractured her skull. She died while being transported to nearby Provident Hospital.

  At first, investigators assumed that the explosion had been caused by a leaky gas pipe. But no trace of fumes lingered in the wreckage, and the building’s owner, Charles Thomas, claimed that all of the fixtures in the house were electric. The only gas on the premises, he said, was in canisters used for cooking purposes. Those canisters were still intact. Thus, only one conclusion was possible: The house had been intentionally bombed—“the violent result,” according to detectives, “of prejudice against the Negro inhabitants.”1

  This was not the first racially motivated bombing to occur in Chicago in the past several months. In fact, the Indiana Avenue explosion was only the latest in an apparently systematic bombing campaign dating back to July 1917, when the home of Mrs. S. P. Motley, an African American woman who had moved her family into a formerly all-white block of Maryland Avenue, was damaged by explosives. Eleven other bombings occurred in 1918, followed by several more in the new year 1919—most of them targeting black-inhabited dwellings or properties held by black real estate agents, and mostly on blocks where families from the Black Belt were moving into formerly all-white neighborhoods. Numerous protests had been lodged by the black community, especially since Chicago police had yet to make a single arrest in any of these cases. But the February 28 incident was the first to cause an actual fatality, so it was certain to intensify pressure on city officials to do something about the bombings and about the rising racial tensions they manifested. The death of Ernestine Ellis could not be ignored.2

  * * *

  Throughout its history, Chicago, though hardly a bastion of interracial harmony, had earned a reputation as a relatively tolerant city. The area’s first permanent resident, in fact, had been a black man—a Caribbean-born entrepreneur named Jean B
aptiste Point du Sable, who established a trading post near the mouth of the Chicago River in 1779. In the years following the establishment of an actual town in 1833, Illinois state law prevented many blacks from settling in the area. Even so, Chicago was a center of abolitionist sentiment during the Civil War, and after the war, a steady stream of blacks began moving in, most often taking work as domestic servants in households newly prosperous from the city’s rapid economic development. The number of black Chicagoans increased significantly in the rebuilding period after the Great Fire of 1871, but the city’s overall population was growing so fast that African Americans remained just a small proportion of inhabitants. Black neighborhoods were scattered widely throughout the city, with a large concentration developing on the South Side, just below the Loop.

  All of this began changing in the decades after the end of Reconstruction and the striking down of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875. The resulting rise of lynchings and Jim Crow discrimination made life ever more difficult for blacks in the former slave states. Many began to regard a move north as the only path to economic betterment, especially once a boll weevil infestation began destroying agricultural prospects in the Cotton Belt. The steadily growing exodus increased markedly, moreover, once the United States entered the Great War in 1917. The loss of thousands of workers to the armed forces, combined with a marked wartime contraction in immigration, created an acute labor shortage in Chicago’s meatpacking, steel, railroad, and other industries. Private labor agents began to go south to recruit workers for Chicago factories, while some widely circulated black newspapers—most notably, the Chicago Defender—exhorted southern blacks to leave “the land of suffering” and come to the new Canaan in the North. Not just Chicago, but Detroit, Cleveland, and many other cities saw sudden and massive influxes from the South. “Anywhere north will do [for] us,” wrote one would-be southern migrant. “I suppose the worst place there is better than the best place here.”3

  The result was what came to be known as “the Great Migration.” In the three years after 1916, half a million southern blacks flocked to the large industrial cities of the North. In some cases, ministers transplanted entire congregations at once, chartering special train cars for the trip. Chicago alone saw more than fifty thousand new arrivals in the years from 1916 to 1919, doubling the city’s black population in less than three years. Southern business interests tried to stop the hemorrhage of cheap labor by publicizing tales of frigid winters and difficult lives up north, but to no avail. “Every time a lynching takes place in a community down south,” observed one city official, “colored people will arrive in Chicago within two weeks.”4

  For some this sudden increase in the black population was unambiguously a boon. The Defender saw its circulation balloon from ten thousand to over ninety-three thousand by the end of the war. Banks, retail outlets, and other “race” businesses in the Black Belt flourished, while attendance at Schorling Park, home of the all-black American Giants baseball team, soon exceeded that at Comiskey or Cubs Park on many afternoons. But although Chicago may have become, as one observer suggested, “the greatest experiment-station in the mingling of races and nationalities … rich with the noblest possibilities for the future,” many people soon began to regard the influx as a source of concern. “Half a Million Darkies from Dixie Swarm to the North to Better Themselves” ran an all-too-typical headline in the Tribune. McCormick’s newspaper had seen trouble brewing as early as the spring of 1917. “Black Man, Stay South!” the Trib pleaded in May of that year, arguing that the migration was “a huge mistake” that would soon be regretted by whites and blacks. By summer, the paper was even offering financial aid to blacks who would agree to leave Chicago and head back south.5

  To be sure, problems did begin to appear soon after the migration’s wartime crest. Numerous factors, some of them purely racist in origin, sparked white resentment of the newcomers. Egged on by the ever-helpful Tribune—which consistently overreported black crime and tended to depict the migrants as lazy, banjo-plucking idlers—many white Chicagoans soon found confirmation of their ugliest prejudices wherever they looked in the Black Belt. Places like “the Stroll,” the main commercial stretch of State Street from Twenty-sixth to Thirty-ninth Street, were indeed hotbeds of gambling and vice—but mainly because police, responding to pressure from whites, kept forcing vice establishments to move from white residential and commercial districts to African American neighborhoods. Black-occupied houses were indeed overcrowded and dilapidated—but mainly because black tenants were compelled to take in boarders to help pay inflated rents, and could not persuade their landlords to make necessary repairs. And South Side streetcars were indeed full of black laborers in dirty, threadbare work clothes—but mainly because African Americans were the only major group of industrial workers forced to live beyond walking distance from their workplaces. Since most of the migrants came from rural areas, moreover, they were often not attuned to city living conventions, and thus appeared on the streets in housecoats, dust caps, and other casual attire—a perfectly acceptable practice where they came from but a sign of dissipation and turpitude to many “respectable” urban whites.6

  In the workplace, too, blacks were soon causing friction. Since strikebreaking had long been the only route for African Americans into many industries, the words “Negro” and “scab” were often seen as synonymous by many labor groups. At the Union Stockyards, where the number of black workers increased by a factor of twelve in the years from 1915 to 1918, efforts were made to recruit the new workers into existing unions. But many of the migrants, relegated to subordinate, all-black locals and denied access to high-paying jobs, were rightfully suspicious of organized labor and refused to join. (As one black stockyard worker said of the unions, “You pay money and get nothing.”) These workplace conflicts just intensified as many white soldiers returned from the war only to find their old positions filled by black interlopers from the South.7

  But it was in the area of housing that racial strains were most keenly felt. New residential construction had all but stopped in Chicago during the war, and so the new arrivals faced an acute housing shortage. The South Side Black Belt, already home to almost 90 percent of the city’s blacks, simply could house no more within its existing boundaries. With Lake Michigan to the east and largely industrial and commercial zones to the north and west, the neighborhood could feasibly grow only to the south and southwest, into previously all-white sections of Kenwood, Hyde Park, and other nearby areas—setting off an “invasion” that longtime residents regarded with increasing resentment.8

  At first, efforts to halt the integration were peaceful. Neighborhood organizations such as the Hyde Park–Kenwood Property Owners’ Association launched initiatives—often under the cover of promoting cleaner, safer streets—to keep their districts “clear of undesirables.” Real estate agents were discouraged from renting or selling to African Americans, and propaganda campaigns urged residents to protect property values by preserving the “lily white” character of the area. When these efforts failed, however, the tactics turned uglier. Mobs armed with brickbats and other weapons gathered around black-occupied dwellings. Intimidating handbills were circulated: “Look out; you’re next for hell,” read one. Another, addressed to black tenants of a building on Vincennes Avenue, was more explicit: “We are going to BLOW these FLATS TO HELL and if you don’t want to go with them you had better move at once.”

  And then the bombs started going off for real. Although the Defender, at least, was convinced that these acts of “attempted assault and murder” were committed by members of the Hyde Park–Kenwood Association, no conclusive evidence was ever found to link the organization to the incidents. In any case, the bombing effort was doomed to fail. By the end of the war, Chicago’s black population was still on the rise and still on the move into white neighborhoods, and there was little that anyone in the city could do to stop it.9

  * * *

  One of the major beneficiaries of this m
ushrooming of Chicago’s black population was William Hale Thompson. Where the Tribune and other bastions of the white establishment could see only problems, Big Bill and Fred Lundin saw opportunity. Blacks were still overwhelmingly Republican at this time; they would not begin abandoning the party of Lincoln until the 1930s, when FDR’s New Deal lured them to the Democratic side. African Americans in Chicago, eager to embrace the franchise they were denied down south, also voted in higher percentages than their white counterparts. And for the first time, blacks made up a significant portion of a northern city’s population. Recognizing these facts, Thompson and Lundin were among the first Chicago politicians to see the voters of the Black Belt for what they had now become—what Carl Sandburg would later call “the strongest effective unit of political power, good or bad, in America.”

  Thompson, whose father fought the slave-owning rebels at Mobile Bay, had actually been attentive to black concerns since the beginning of his political career. One of his few accomplishments as an alderman had been sponsoring an ordinance to build a playground in a black section of his ward—allegedly the first municipal playground in the nation. “White people from nearby came over and said they wanted it in their neighborhood,” he would later boast in speeches. “I said to this, ‘I see you have a fine house and yard with fences around it and nice dogs but no children; I’ll build a playground for children and not [for] poodle dogs.’ ” Later, at a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, he threw away his prepared speech and spoke plainly to his audience of fifteen thousand African Americans: “My task is not easy,” he said. “Prejudices do exist against Negroes.… But to deny equal opportunity to the Negro in this land would be out of harmony with American history, untrue to sacred history, untrue to the sacred principles of liberty and equal rights, and would make a mockery of our boasted civilization.”10