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

by Gary Krist

  It had been an idyllic evening. After a time, Jerry asked if he could put his head on her lap. Nervously, Emily agreed. “I could hardly believe it was I on the swing—with Jerry’s head in my lap,” she wrote. “I looked down and saw his body clad in khaki—[and] I sort of sighed.” She began running her hand through his hair and patting his cheek. “No one ever taught me what to do,” she said, worrying about her inexperience with the physical side of courtship. But Jerry was reassuring. “ ‘That doesn’t need any teaching,’ ” he told her.

  Later, he persuaded her to say aloud that she loved him, and they kissed. “God is good, all good,” he said happily.

  A few days later, on a shopping excursion to Marshall Field’s, he gave her a ring that had belonged to his mother. “Wear it as long as you love me,” he said.

  That had been ten months ago, and Emily was still wearing the ring—but on a chain around her neck, so that her disapproving parents wouldn’t see it. She would kiss the ring every night before going to bed. And despite her parents’ admonishments—and although she was publicly dating other boys, all of them from far more appropriate Jewish backgrounds—she still considered herself engaged to Jerry. Fretting about the situation was even causing her to lose weight. “I wish I’d stop worrying about this,” she wrote in her diary. “I try to, but it disturbs me.”12

  * * *

  On the early morning of April 7, a black-powder bomb exploded on the porch of a flat building at 4212 Ellis Avenue—just three blocks away from the Frankenstein home in Kenwood. Another device went off on April 20 at a black-owned realty office on Indiana Avenue. Two more, both targeting the same address on Grand Boulevard (the home of black Shakespearean actor Richard Harrison), followed on May 18 and May 28. On May 29, a flat on Wabash Avenue was hit.13

  In 1919 Chicago, of course, one could never be sure of the motivation behind any individual bomb or bomb threat. For many disaffected groups in the city, dynamite and black powder had become the preferred means of communicating a message, and police were often hard put to determine whether a given incident was part of the political, ethnic, racial, or labor conversation in the city. But these five bombings, along with two more in June, were clearly connected to black incursions into white residential neighborhoods, and signaled an accelerating deterioration in the city’s racial situation. As early as April, the Broad Ax, a black weekly, had proposed its own radical solution to the problem: “Well, Negroes,” the paper argued in an editorial on April 5, “you must get guns, guns I said! Then more guns and keep them loaded with buckshot. The awful day will surely come, and we might just as well die fighting in America as to die fighting in France.”14

  Cooler heads chose less incendiary, but no less confrontational, approaches. After the second bombing on Grand Boulevard, Ida Wells-Barnett (who with her family had just moved into a handsome Queen Anne–style residence on that street) resolved to take her case to Mayor Thompson personally. Her attempt to turn black voters against him in the recent election had failed, but that didn’t mean she was ready to give up her campaign to spur the Thompson administration to action. So, after gathering together a committee of concerned citizens—including the mother of Ernestine Ellis, the girl who had died in the February 28 bombing—she marched them to city hall and demanded an audience with the mayor. Big Bill, perhaps hoping to punish Wells-Barnett for her support of Hoyne, refused to see the committee. Through his secretary, Charles Fitzmorris, he instructed them to take the matter to Chief Garrity. But they got no satisfaction there, either. Garrity, who at least agreed to speak with the committee, told Wells-Barnett that the department was doing its best, but that “he could not put all of the police in Chicago on the South Side to protect the homes of colored people.” The committee members could only walk away in frustration.15

  Big Bill was, in any case, too busy playing politics to worry about a little unrest in the city he had just been reelected to run. Governor Lowden had been getting altogether too much favorable press lately. The success of Lowden’s sweeping reorganization of the state government was attracting nationwide attention, and now the governor was being mentioned for president by more and more Republican organizations. For Thompson, this was distinctly irksome. Some of his own followers had hopes to boom Big Bill for the same office, and though the mayor himself professed to be more interested in booming Chicago these days, he did admit that “no man is big enough to refuse a nomination for President if it is offered him.”16

  Given the lingering questions about Thompson’s loyalty during the war, any notions of his becoming president (at least in 1920) were probably far-fetched even to him. But that didn’t mean he wanted Lowden to get the nod. Indeed, the Thompson-Lundin organization’s designs on greater power increasingly hinged on getting rid of the troublesome governor. With more than a year still remaining in Lowden’s term, and with the governor’s popularity growing every day, they could not afford to wait. Whenever the inevitable confrontation between the two chief executives came, Thompson and Lundin needed to be ready for it.

  The extent of the political estrangement between mayor and governor became painfully obvious in late May, as the city prepared its welcome for the Thirty-third “Prairie Division,” by far the largest group of returning Illinois soldiers to date. The planned celebration was to be vast, a ten-hour demonstration of “smiles, tears, hugs, [and] kisses,” culminating in “the greatest parade the old town ever saw.” Governor Lowden, the official host of the festivities, would preside over the parade from a reviewing stand set up on the east side of Michigan Avenue, right in front of the Art Institute. Joining him on the platform would be General Leonard Wood (another likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination) and a host of other military and political dignitaries. Kaiser Bill, who had been conspicuously absent from all previous homecoming parades (except, significantly, that of the all-black Old Eighth), was pointedly not invited to join them.17

  On the day of the parade, however, a defiant Mayor Thompson had his own reviewing stand set up on the other side of Michigan Avenue, a few blocks north of the governor’s. To hear the Tribune tell the story, spectators were surprised to see the mayor present. “Gee, he’s here!” a young boy allegedly remarked, within earshot of the Thompson party. “I been lookin’ for him a long, long time since the soldiers started comin’ home.”18

  The boy—or at least his quote—was probably an invention of the Trib’s reporter, but the scorn felt for Mayor Thompson by many at the event was undoubtedly real. As the parade progressed—amid the cheers of thousands who had gathered on its route—many soldiers walked right past the mayor without even a salute, pretending not to be aware of the second group of dignitaries. “I failed to see the Mayor’s stand,” Colonel Abel Davis of the 132nd Infantry told a reporter afterward, with barely disguised irony. “Somehow missed it altogether, but [I] found the Governor, General Bell, and General Wood in a splendid position. It’s impossible to see everything in a parade of this sort.”

  It was, perhaps, the first time anyone ever claimed that Chicago’s monumental mayor was inconspicuous in a crowd.19

  One month later, the mayor and the governor crossed paths again at a convention of the Loyal Order of Moose in Aurora, Illinois, where both men had been invited to speak. By accident, they and their entourages ran into each other on the platform before the convention opened. It was an uncomfortable meeting—one that both men had probably hoped to avoid—but they made the best of it. “Why, hello,” the mayor said with easy geniality. “Won’t you have something to eat with me?”

  “Just had my luncheon,” the governor curtly replied.

  They shook hands, and then the governor was hurried away by a convention delegate.

  It would be the last time for years that the two men would even pretend to be friendly to each other.20

  AT 11:59 P.M. on Monday, June 30, every saloon, tavern, and beer hall in Chicago was filled to bursting. Men—and more than a few women—were packed three to ten deep at
every bar, with long lines of would-be patrons snaking out into the beer-soaked streets. Rowdiness prevailed across the city. People sang songs and danced on tables; tipsy wags held mock funerals for John Barleycorn on street corners; two drunken men “bowing to the Board of Trade Building” were struck by an automobile on LaSalle Street and knocked unconscious. It was Chicago’s farewell party for Demon Rum. At midnight, wartime Prohibition would go into effect, and the entire city would be dry.

  Police tried their best to keep order on the streets. Chief Garrity had earlier sworn “dire vengeance” on any proprietor who served a drink after midnight, but enforcement proved to be problematic. When the Fountain Inn closed its doors at the appointed hour, furious patrons tried to kick them down, and when detectives attempted to arrest the ringleaders, a small riot ensued, forcing the officers to call in reinforcements. At a saloon on Van Buren Street, a group of young men stole a barrel of whiskey just before closing. With a crowd of five hundred trailing behind them, they rolled it east along Van Buren to State Street. There they tried to tap it, blocking traffic on the city’s main shopping avenue. A patrolman moved in to disperse the gathering, but he was driven back by the unruly mob until he was cornered in a cigar store, where he had to draw his revolver to defend himself. The store clerk telephoned the Central Police Station for backup, but when reserves arrived, the troublemakers—and the barrel of whiskey—had disappeared.1

  It went on like this all night, and by the time “the biggest carnival night in the history of Chicago” was over, the jails were full, several people were dead, and the rest of the city was suffering from hangovers of both the literal and figurative variety. One paper estimated that more than $2 million had been spent on liquor on that one night alone. For the city’s overwhelming majority of wets, it had been a night to remember, but now the era of the legal drink had passed. Over the next few days, as saloons reopened in their new guise as soft drink emporiums (to decidedly smaller crowds of customers), the city’s drys were ecstatic. Billy Sunday, for one, expressed the highest hopes for the new alcohol-free society. “The slums will soon only be a memory,” the reverend predicted. “We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corn-cribs.”2

  Well, not exactly. Although Prohibition would indeed make it more difficult for a poor Chicago laborer to enjoy a glass of beer after his hard day’s work, most of those with a little money and/or foresight would have little trouble finding a drink. Robert McCormick, for instance, had allegedly stocked the cellar of his country estate with so much scotch that he would still have plenty left when the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed thirteen years later. And for the non-millionaires in the population, there were other options as well. Sales of raisin cakes soared (each one came with explicit instructions on how not to “mistakenly” allow it to ferment). Fifteen thousand doctors and fifty-seven thousand retail druggists applied for licenses to sell “medicinal” alcohol to customers who demonstrated the need. Ring Lardner tried to be helpful by printing a recipe for homemade champagne in his Tribune column. (“Take a glass of sweet cider, drink it, and knock your head against the wall until it aches.”) And for the truly desperate, there would always be embalming fluid, antifreeze solution, and rubbing alcohol.

  Such expedients, however, would prove necessary only for a brief time. Before long, the ingenuity of the city’s criminal class would come to the rescue, putting in place a bootlegging infrastructure more than adequate to supply as many speakeasies and backroom taverns as the city could support. Alcohol, in short, would soon be readily available to any citizen willing to flout the laws of the land. In Chicago that would prove to be just about everyone.3

  * * *

  As the summer progressed, this spirit of lawlessness, whether alcohol fueled or not, seemed to be as contagious as the Spanish influenza. On June 17, a gang of white teenagers—allegedly members of a South Side “athletic club” called Ragen’s Colts—attacked a black man who had entered a de facto white saloon. Around the same time, a melee broke out on a State Street trolley when a white sailor slapped a black woman who had asked him not to step on her children’s toes. In the parks, interracial violence was becoming a daily event. A black parent at the boathouse in Washington Park struck a white principal for failing to protect her children from stone-throwing white boys; the resulting conflict led to twenty arrests. Eight days later, fights erupted again in the same park. “A race war, threatening for weeks, assumed sinister proportions on Chicago’s South Side last night, when 200 extra police were rushed to the Washington Park District,” the Herald and Examiner reported on June 23. According to the paper, a “small army” of white men had run wild in the park with the avowed intention of “cleaning out the blacks.” By the end of the evening, one black man was dead and another lay dying. Then, on June 30, a black former soldier named Charles W. Jackson fired his service revolver at a group of whites who had beaten his brother, this time on the West Side; he managed to wound five of them before being chased down an embankment and killed.4

  As July 4 approached, many law enforcement officials feared large-scale mayhem. Notices were posted along the Garfield Boulevard boundary of the Black Belt urging neighbors to “get all the niggers” on the holiday. Friendly whites told black residents to “prepare for the worst.” Just as ugly as these racial threats, moreover, were rumors sweeping the Polish neighborhoods that a Jewish grocer had killed a Polish boy for his blood; three thousand Poles took to the streets around Eighty-fourth and Buffalo on the Southeast Side over the weekend, leading to eighteen arrests. Meanwhile, persistent fears of an Independence Day anarchist bombing plot kept the entire city on edge.5

  The holiday ended up passing without serious incident—to the palpable relief of the newspapers and most residents—but the tensions did not subside. Many worried that the inevitable eruption had merely been postponed. Carl Sandburg, now working on a series of Daily News articles about the Black Belt, could see evidence of the coming conflagration all around him. He was spending days roaming the South Side, “interviewing shopkeepers, housewives, factory workers, preachers, gamblers, pimps,” and it was obvious to him that resentment was seething. “We made the supreme sacrifice,” one black soldier told him, “[and] now we want to see our country live up to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”6

  Ida Wells-Barnett was more blunt. Two years earlier, she had seen the portents of disaster in the weeks before the East St. Louis race riot of 1917. “There had been a half-dozen outbreaks against the colored people by whites,” she wrote in an open letter to the Tribune published on July 7. “Two different committees waited upon Governor Lowden and asked him to investigate the outrages against Negroes before the riot took place. Nobody paid any attention.” The result had been one of the worst outbreaks of racial violence in American history.

  And now the signs of another, perhaps even worse outbreak were proliferating. Just that week, several days of rioting had broken out in Washington, D.C. How long would it be before the same thing happened in Chicago, where bombings and violent attacks had become commonplace? “It looks very much like Chicago is trying to rival the South in its race hatred against the Negro,” Wells-Barnett wrote in her letter. “Will the legal, moral, and civic forces of this town stand idly by and take no notice of these preliminary outbreaks? Will no action be taken to prevent these lawbreakers until further disaster has occurred?… I implore Chicago to set the wheels of justice in motion before it is too late.”7

  City officials, though, seemed more concerned about the worsening labor situation. “Labor unrest to an extent never before known in the city’s history has gripped Chicago,” the New York Times warned on July 19. By that time more than 250,000 Chicago workers were either on strike, threatening to strike, or locked out. Most government war contracts had expired, meaning that many employers could now ignore federal requirements for union recognition, collective bargaining, and nondiscrimination. As a result, there were confrontations—often violent
—at International Harvester, the stockyards, the American Car and Foundry Company, the city building trades, several garment factories, and the steel-rolling mills. One analyst estimated that more than one out of every four industrial wage earners in the city was involved in a labor dispute of some kind that summer.8

  Of most concern was a threatened strike by transit workers that could potentially disrupt the functioning of the entire city. Wage negotiations between the streetcar lines and the unions had been deadlocked since July 11. Workers were demanding a massive pay hike from forty-eight to eighty-five cents an hour, with time and a half for overtime; the companies were arguing that any such raise, without a concomitant doubling of transit fares, would bankrupt the lines; city officials, however, insisted that a fare hike of any size would violate long-standing traction ordinances. “The traction volcano,” wrote the Chicago Evening Post, “which has been rumbling these many months, has blown its cap off, and the straphanger is anxiously estimating the prospective depth of the lava.” On Friday, July 18, the threatened eruption seemed imminent. With no settlement even remotely in sight, the unions voted by a 50-to-1 margin to walk out the next day.9

  Governor Lowden, hoping to stop the chaos before it started, ordered the Illinois Public Utilities Commission to step in and avert a strike. “Frank is much concerned over strikes and threatened ones,” a nervous Mrs. Lowden wrote in her diary for that date. The governor had reason for concern. His presidential run had just been officially launched in Washington the week before. A major profile about the new candidate (a puff piece under the headline “LOWDEN OF ILLINOIS: Blacksmith’s Son, a School Teacher at 15, Takes Field for Presidential Nomination”) was to run in the New York Times on July 20. The governor’s handling of the transit crisis would be one of the first things that potential voters in the East, where he was as yet little known, would hear about him.10