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

by Gary Krist

  The very next day, six-year-old Janet Wilkinson went missing on Chicago’s North Side. For days, the city was consumed by the mystery of the child’s disappearance. When suspicion was cast on a seemingly innocuous friend of the family, Chicagoans were appalled, leading many to wonder whether their own neighbors could be trusted.

  But the real chaos set in a few days later, when a racial incident at a crowded South Side beach spiraled into one of the worst race riots in American history. The bloodshed intensified when, two days into the riot, a transit strike paralyzed the city, forcing hundreds of thousands of commuting workers onto the dangerous streets.

  Calls for the National Guard to restore order ultimately forced the mayor and the governor into a confrontation that would have far-reaching consequences for the city’s future.

  Caught up in the summer crisis were numerous Chicagoans of greater or lesser fame. Carl Sandburg (left) reported on the riot for the Chicago Daily News. Ring Lardner (right) was a columnist for the Tribune.

  Activist Ida Wells-Barnett (left) worked to help the victims of the rioting in the city’s Black Belt. And young Emily Frankenstein (right), seen here with her fiancé, Jerry Lapiner, recorded the unfolding events in her diary.

  The effect of the 1919 crisis was to leave Chicago a chastened but, in many ways, a stronger city. While dreams of implementing architect Daniel Burnham’s wildly ambitious Chicago Plan were never fully realized, the city did see remarkable urban improvements in the 1920s.

  Today, showpieces such as the Magnificent Mile of Michigan Avenue make Chicago perhaps the most architecturally distinguished city in the Americas—in large part thanks to the leadership, however corrupt, of Big Bill Thompson.

  I WAS SITTING in the window [at home] at 10 minutes after 12 on Tuesday,” Fitzgerald began, “when I saw Janet coming towards the building.”

  Howe listened in silence, alone with Fitzgerald in the hot, cramped jail cell. Later, the prisoner’s words would be recorded by an official police stenographer before a roomful of men. But Howe must have known that any sudden call for witnesses might cause the prisoner to balk yet again, and so he let him speak. For now, the lieutenant just needed to hear what had happened.

  “When she came up the stairs to the landing,” Fitzgerald continued. “[I was waiting] at my doorway. I said to her, ‘Dolly, would you like some candy?’ ”

  The child had paused on the landing then. Apparently, she was tempted. As hackneyed and transparent as the offer might sound to modern ears, it must have seemed enticing to Janet. But the girl would have remembered her parents’ warning not to go near this man.

  Fitzgerald, however, didn’t give her time to refuse. “I picked her up in my arms,” he said, “and carried her into my apartment.”

  He wasn’t prepared for what came next: “She started to scream. [And] before I knew it or realized what I was doing, I grabbed her by the throat and choked her to death.”

  It was over very quickly. When he understood what he had done, Fitzgerald, still in his bathrobe, put the child down on his bed and quickly dressed. Then he picked her up again and carried her to the door of his apartment. After checking to make sure no other tenant was in the stairwell, he took Janet’s body down the stairs to the basement—“where I buried it under a pile of coal.”1

  This was all Howe needed to hear. Any uncertainty was gone now. The child was dead, and he had the man who did it. He notified the other interrogators, sent word to Deputy Chief Alcock, and brought the prisoner upstairs to dictate his official sworn confession. The statement was written out in longhand and then signed by Fitzgerald and witnessed by Howe, Detective Sergeants Quinn and Powers, Tribune city editor Perley H. Boone, and W. C. Howey, managing editor of the Herald and Examiner.

  At 9:15, Deputy Chief Alcock arrived at the station. He examined the written confession and then he, Lieutenant Howe, and a guard of detectives and reporters took Fitzgerald over to the duplex building on East Superior Street. In the basement, sanitation workers and police were still sifting through the enormous pile of coal stored there. Fitzgerald walked over to one corner of the basement where a rusty iron chimney stuck out of the coal pile near the wall. “She’s over there,” he said, pointing to a narrow, coal-filled space between the chimney and the wall. Somehow, over days of searching, the workers hadn’t looked in this space, perhaps because they regarded it as too small to contain a body.

  “Do you want to lift her out?” Detective Sergeant Powers asked him.

  Fitzgerald acquiesced, but when he bent over, the pale, exhausted prisoner found he couldn’t do it. Two of the sanitation workers came up behind him. “The head is here,” he said, showing them where to dig. “And the feet are over there.”

  The two men started shoveling away the coal, but Deputy Chief Alcock told them to use their hands. Understanding, they threw aside their shovels and began gently pulling away the dusty black lumps. In a few minutes, they had uncovered a small figure wrapped in white cloth. It was wedged so tightly into the narrow space, however, that they finally had to use a two-by-four to pry the chimney away from the wall, exposing the small, blackened corpse of Janet Wilkinson.

  “I can’t stand it,” Fitzgerald said, turning away.

  They lifted the body from the coal pile and placed it on a stretcher they had brought over from the police station. Then they carried it up the stairs and out to the street, where a police ambulance was waiting to take it away.2

  An angry crowd was already gathering around the entrance to the building. The newspaper reporters assigned to the case—who had been given a level of access to the investigation unimaginable today—had sent word of the confession to their city desks the moment it was made, and the Tribune had managed to put an extra on the streets by 9:15. Now, at 10:05, most of Fitzgerald’s neighbors had already heard about his confession, and they were apparently ready to take action. When Fitzgerald was brought to the front vestibule, the crowd grew restive. “Lynch him!” a few men shouted. “String him up!”3

  Fitzgerald recoiled and cowered in the doorway. It seemed possible that members of the crowd might indeed take the law into their own hands. Because of some confusion in arrangements, no police vehicle was waiting to take Fitzgerald back to the police station. “The crowd seemed to sense this fact,” one reporter from the Herald and Examiner later wrote, describing the scene. “It surged toward the building’s entrance.… A dozen uniformed policemen appeared powerless to stem the tide of enraged humanity.”

  Fortunately, a number of plainclothes police arrived at that moment. “They elbowed their way through the crowd, knocking men, women, and even children right and left. With the reinforced guard now before the doorway, clubs and revolvers brandished menacingly, the crowd withdrew to the street.”

  One policeman had commandeered a taxicab and brought it around to the duplex apartment. When it got to within ten feet of the curb, Fitzgerald, surrounded by thirty policeman and detectives, was led from the entrance of the building.

  “The howls of the multitude burst forth anew as the slayer came down the two steps from the front doorway to the sidewalk,” the paper reported. “Fitzgerald made no attempt to conceal his fear. His body shook visibly. His eyes were shut tight, as though he feared being struck down by missiles. He held a handkerchief tightly against his mouth and nose.”

  What followed was a near riot. Fitzgerald was pushed into the back of the cab, but then the crowd swarmed the vehicle. Some reached in through the open windows on the opposite side to grab at the prisoner, who was now sprawled across the backseat. Detectives climbed over him and tried to beat away the arms and fists. One of the detectives barked an order to drive away. The cabbie sounded the horn. The crowd in front scattered as the taxi shot forward. “Amid parting hoots, shouts of dismay, and shrieks of women and children, Fitzgerald was borne away back to his cell.”4

  Another mob was waiting at the Chicago Avenue station when they arrived, but Fitzgerald’s police guard whisked him into the building
before any spontaneous outbreak of violence could develop. Even so, Captain Mueller called for a hundred reserves from the city’s corps of traffic policemen. Some members of the mob were carrying “ill-concealed weapons,” so Mueller had police cordon off the area around the station. When the time came for Fitzgerald to make his official statement to the state’s attorney, he was spirited through a rear entrance and rushed in a waiting automobile to the Criminal Court Building. There, Assistant State’s Attorney M. F. Sullivan questioned him at length. Little new information emerged in this interrogation, though a few inconsistencies in the evidence were cleared up. Fitzgerald was described as “cool” and “a picture of control” throughout the process, though he was apparently more nervous than he let on. “Don’t let them hang me, will you, Mr. Howe?” he asked nervously at the end of the interrogation. “Have them send me to some insane asylum?” The lieutenant didn’t answer.

  But State’s Attorney Hoyne had other plans for Fitzgerald. He promptly turned over principal responsibility for the case to prosecutor James O’Brien—a man known around the Criminal Court Building as “Ropes” O’Brien, for his enthusiastic (and usually successful) pursuit of the death penalty in homicide cases. Hoyne promised that once Coroner Hoffman had completed his inquest in the case, expected to happen tomorrow, the pace of justice would be swift.5

  Such reassurances, however, were not enough for many of those out on the streets. Cries for summary government action against Fitzgerald and other sexual predators went up throughout the city. “Acting Chief Alcock already has issued orders that defectives be rounded up and placed in custody,” the Evening Post reported, “[but] civic organizations and social workers are demanding action more comprehensive than that. The City Council and the state legislature will be asked to pass laws dealing with the subject.” Alcock himself underlined the urgency of the need for such legislation. “This case,” he announced at an afternoon press conference, “should cause the people of Chicago to demand a special session of the legislature. As long as there are morons running loose, such frightful crimes are bound to occur.”

  It was not an utterance designed to calm the crowds of angry and frightened parents gathering throughout the city, intent on revenge.6

  MIDAFTERNOON ON SUNDAY, as news of Fitzgerald’s confession filtered through the sweltering city, five teenage boys from the Black Belt decided to grab their bathing suits, hop a passing produce truck, and take a ride to the beach. Temperatures were already reaching ninety-six degrees, and the boys knew a special place on the lakeshore where they could escape the heat without their parents finding out about it. Just offshore near the foot of Twenty-sixth Street was a little island they called “the Hot and Cold”—named for the contrasting effluents of a brewery and an icehouse nearby. It was an ideal playground. Located roughly halfway between the crowded Twenty-fifth Street beach (touted by one black weekly as the race’s answer to Atlantic City) and the equally crowded white beach at Twenty-ninth, the island was private and unsupervised by adults.

  When the truck slowed to cross the streetcar tracks at Wabash and Twenty-sixth Street, the boys hopped off and headed straight east toward the lake. They didn’t linger, for this was the territory of an Irish gang that had thrown stones at them on several occasions in the past. Today, however, the boys were able to travel unmolested. Before long, they crossed the Illinois Central tracks and made their way around the Keeley Brewery to the shore. Quickly changing into their bathing suits, they waded across the shallows to the Hot and Cold. Here they’d hidden a large homemade raft built from logs and railroad ties scavenged in the area. According to one of the boys—a fourteen-year-old named John Harris—they liked to attach a rope to the raft and tow it out into the deep water, where they could practice diving and underwater swimming while having the makeshift lifeboat to hold on to if they got tired. Today their goal was to tie up at a post standing in the water several hundred feet offshore. And so, at about two o’clock, the boys pushed off from the island and began steering the raft eastward and southward into the lake.1

  What the boys did not know was that a fight was developing at this very moment at the Twenty-ninth Street beach a few blocks south. Beaches in Chicago were not officially segregated in 1919, but there was a tacit understanding that the area around Twenty-ninth Street, just south of a manmade breakwater, was for whites and whites only. So when two black couples appeared on the beach and attempted to enter the water, they were turned away by several angry white bathers. The couples left, but returned sometime later, accompanied by a number of friends. Again they were confronted by white bathers. Tempers flared in the searing afternoon heat, and the situation deteriorated rapidly. Curses and arguments soon led to shoving, fistfights, and rock throwing.2

  As this was going on, the raft bearing the five teenagers floated past the breakwater, crossing an invisible line marking the boundary of the white bathing area. A young man standing on the breakwater—later identified as George Stauber—saw them and began hurling stones at the raft. At first, the boys thought he was playing a game, and they joyfully dodged the incoming missiles. But then they realized that this was not intended as fun. According to John Harris, Stauber’s next rock struck his friend Eugene Williams on the forehead, and the boy slipped off the raft and into the water. When he didn’t resurface, Harris dived in after him. Eugene “grabbed my right ankle,” Harris later said, “and, hell, I got scared. I shook him off.” Gasping for air, Harris surfaced and swam out of his friend’s reach. “You could see blood coming up [in the water],” he said, “and the [other] fellows were all excited.” Harris returned to the raft just in time to see Stauber running from the breakwater back to the beach.

  Panicking, the boys realized they needed help. “Let’s get the lifeguard,” Harris shouted. He pushed off from the raft again and, though he wasn’t a strong swimmer, managed to dog-paddle the forty feet back to shore. He ran to the Twenty-fifth Street beach and found the head lifeguard, who “blew his whistle and sent a boat around” to look for the boy. But the rescue came too late. After about a half hour of searching, they found Eugene’s limp body in the shallows.

  In the meantime, Harris and the other boys had come back to the Twenty-ninth Street beach with a black policeman. Various groups were still fighting, but the boys managed to point out George Stauber, the man they claimed had thrown stones at their raft. When the policeman moved to take Stauber into custody, a white colleague—Officer Daniel Callahan—allegedly stepped in to prevent the arrest. The two officers argued, and then, to make matters worse, Callahan proceeded to arrest one of the black combatants. Incensed, the black crowd set upon Stauber, beating him severely, and, according to one report, also began menacing Officer Callahan, who ran to a nearby drugstore to phone for backup.3

  By now, a crowd of some one thousand people of both races had gathered at the foot of Twenty-ninth Street, roused by exaggerated rumors about what had just happened on the beach. One story held that a white swimmer had drowned after being hit by a rock thrown by a black man. Another claimed that Officer Callahan had actively prevented the rescue of Eugene Williams, even holding a gun on the black crowd to keep them from the water while the boy drowned. The fact that several white bathers had actually assisted in the search for Eugene Williams was lost in the swirl of ugly hearsay. Given the toxic racial atmosphere in the city after months of bombings and other incidents, each race was clearly willing to believe anything of the other, no matter how brutal, and so escalation of the conflict seemed inevitable.4

  Before long, two patrol wagons pulled up at the chaotic scene at the foot of Twenty-ninth Street. As police emerged from the vehicles, shots were fired from one of the black crowds. One bullet hit policeman John O’Brien in the left arm. The crowd scattered immediately, but a black policeman named Jesse Igoe returned fire, fatally wounding the shooter—James Crawford—in the abdomen. O’Brien also shot at the retreating crowd, hitting two more black men.

  From there, the battle spilled rapidly out in
to the streets of the South Side. Police followed rioters westward from Cottage Grove Avenue, and as the individual combatants fanned out through the neighborhoods ahead of their pursuers, they drew more and more people into the sunbaked streets, ready to do battle. There was more shooting, rock throwing, and several stabbings. A white fireman was pulled from a passing engine and beaten. A man leaning out his window to watch a street brawl was hit in the head by a stray bullet. After fifteen minutes, the original beach mob had been entirely dispersed, leaving forty rioters and several policemen injured. But now new skirmishes were erupting in other areas in and around the Black Belt. By 5 p.m., according to the Tribune, “Cottage Grove Avenue and State Street from 29th south to 35th were bubbling cauldrons of action.” Deputy Chief Alcock, hearing reports of the spreading violence, sent out a call to every station in the city to rush all available officers to the South Side.5

  News was spreading just as fast through the white neighborhoods farther inland from the lake. In the blocks west of Wentworth Avenue, just beyond the western boundary of the Black Belt, calls for retaliation were finding especially fertile ground. This area was the territory of many of the city’s so-called athletic clubs—the gangs of young white toughs who had been responsible for many of the racial attacks in the parks earlier in the summer. Still spoiling for a fight, these clubs—which bore names like “Our Flag,” “Ragen’s Colts,” and “The Hamburgs” (whose membership included a seventeen-year-old Irish boy named Richard J. Daley)—found in the beach incident just the excuse they needed to start a rampage. Arming themselves with baseball bats, knives, revolvers, iron bars, hammers, and bricks, they poured out of their homes and clubhouses in search of any black person who made the mistake of being seen beyond the borders of the Black Belt.6