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

by Gary Krist

  As evening fell, Chicago’s South Side became a battlefield. Police and white and black mobs clashed at Prairie Avenue and Thirty-first Street, at State and Thirty-fifth, and at Thirty-seventh and Cottage Grove. On Thirty-ninth Street, crowds of whites took potshots at blacks on streetcars, wounding one man in the groin. Another black man was pummeled with clubs as he waited for a car on Halsted. Throughout the evening, hundreds of mounted police stormed up and down the avenues, attempting to disperse the warring mobs, but with only limited success. A confrontation quelled on one corner would only reignite on another two or three blocks away. Few arrests were made, as police concentrated on getting the wounded to hospitals, letting their attackers and any witnesses slip away to take up the fight elsewhere.

  The streets of the South Side echoed with shouts and gunfire for several hours more. But as Sunday night turned into Monday morning, the fighting waned, and relative calm returned. The mounted police remained on duty into the early-morning hours to prevent any further disturbances, while South Side hospitals worked overtime to care for the injured. Citizens throughout the city could even go to bed that night hoping that the worst was over, that the day’s rioting would turn out to be just a onetime spasm of violence, something brought on by the heat and by the city’s numerous recent stresses. Certainly the day’s toll was bad enough: two black men dead (including Eugene Williams), fifty whites and blacks seriously injured, and scores more suffering minor cuts and bruises. But with a new week beginning tomorrow, many hoped that the hostilities would somehow be put aside and Chicago would get back to work as usual.

  By 3 a.m. the streets of the South Side were quiet once more. The owl cars made their way unmolested up and down the deserted avenues. The usual skeleton crew of drunkards, streetwalkers, and homeless people resumed their stations on corners and in empty lots. Behind a million windows—open to catch any breath of a nighttime breeze—Chicago slept uneasily, waiting for morning.7

  AT EIGHT-FIFTEEN on an already sultry Monday morning, the special train carrying Mayor William Hale Thompson and his associates lumbered into Chicago’s Union Station on the city’s West Side. Dozens of officials and reporters were already milling around the train shed as the clanging, huffing engine came to a stop at the end of the platform. The mayor himself—looking fatigued and disheveled from the long journey—was the first to alight from the train, and he was immediately besieged by reporters.

  “What are you going to do about the South Side race riots?” one of them shouted out.

  The mayor, incommunicado since the train had left Omaha late the previous afternoon, seemed surprised. “I haven’t heard about them yet,” he admitted.

  Various reporters filled him in on the details.

  “Sounds serious,” Thompson said, clearly unprepared to deal with this unpleasant news. In answer, he resorted to political boilerplate: “Conditions in that district must be carefully studied,” he said, “to get at the cause of the trouble.”

  Another reporter asked, “What are you going to do about the Fitzgerald case?”

  On this topic the mayor was better informed. In fact, while in Cheyenne he had sent a telegram to Deputy Chief Alcock directing him to make the case the police department’s top priority. “My heart bleeds for the sorrowing parents,” Big Bill intoned, “[but] I must let the law take its course. I understand the man has confessed and has been booked on a murder charge, so I don’t see [that there’s] anything I can do. I’ll find out today, though.”1

  Arguably the worst development to greet the mayor, however—at least from a political perspective—concerned the transit situation. Thompson learned to his chagrin that Governor Lowden had been demonstrating consummate brinksmanship in the time since negotiations broke down on Saturday, furiously arranging separate Sunday meetings with company and union representatives to force both sides back to the bargaining table. “The general situation, gentlemen,” Lowden had told the negotiators late on Sunday, “is far too serious for a car strike to take place. We have a generally disturbed industrial condition; other strikes are threatened, while the race riots on the South Side make it imperative that transportation be continued. It is a matter of public safety.”

  The appeal seemed to work. Thanks to these tireless efforts by the governor—whose work, according to the Chicago Daily News, “cannot be too highly praised”—both sides had by late Sunday agreed to give ground on some of the crucial issues separating them. More meetings were scheduled for Monday, but it was believed that union representatives would have an acceptable compromise plan to present to their men at a mass meeting on Monday night. After days of on-again, off-again strike threats, all sides were now confident that at least this one crisis in the city would be averted. For the governor, such an outcome would be a distinct boon—the perfect public-relations coup with which to launch his nascent presidential bid. The fact that it all occurred while the mayor of Chicago was off roping steers and pretty ladies in Cheyenne could only make Lowden look that much better. In fact, the governor was so certain of success that he’d decided to leave town before the vote Monday evening to give a long-scheduled speech in Lincoln, Nebraska.2

  Awash in all of this bad news, the mayor and his men left the station and proceeded to city hall, hoping to reestablish some semblance of authority over the city. Reports coming in from the South Side all morning were mixed. By noon, only scattered violence had been reported in the riot areas, but those familiar with the situation were not optimistic. Captain Michael Gallery, an experienced South Side police officer, informed the mayor and Chief Garrity that the local force—numbering fewer than 3,500 men—would simply be overwhelmed by the violence and that the state militia should immediately be brought in. “Unless the militia is called and the entire South Side put under martial law,” Gallery told them, “the race riots in Chicago will make those of East St. Louis [in 1917] look inconsequential by comparison.” State’s Attorney Hoyne, speaking to the press, was also calling for deployment of the militia, which by law would require Mayor Thompson to make a formal request for troops from the governor of Illinois.3

  But Chief Garrity was not convinced. He warned the mayor that sending inexperienced militia troops into the fray could just add to the death and disorder (as it had in fact done in East St. Louis), and that the police didn’t need their help. Thompson proved receptive to this latter argument. With one eye as ever on the politics of the situation, he and Lundin were understandably reluctant to be perceived as needing outside assistance to control their city—especially if that help came from Governor Lowden.

  The issue of the state militia, moreover, was a particularly sore topic between the mayor and the governor. Once before—back in September 1917—the two men had clashed over the deployment of militia troops in the city, and the confrontation had come very close to ending in outright violence. The episode had started with a decision by Thompson to permit a public meeting of a controversial pacifist group called the People’s Council for Democracy and Peace. Big Bill, who was at the time hoping to win support among Chicago’s antiwar elements, claimed that he had no legal right to bar a peaceful assembly of law-abiding American citizens; the governor strenuously disagreed. “Win the War Lowden,” as Thompson’s enemy was being called, ordered then police chief Herman Schuettler to close down the meeting, which had just convened at the West Side Auditorium. The chief obeyed, but that night an angry Thompson countermanded the governor’s order, instructing Schuettler not to interfere with the council’s plans. From there, matters had deteriorated. Refusing to back down, Lowden ordered the state militia to Chicago by special train to enforce his original order. A contingent of 250 militiamen arrived at Union Station at 9:20 p.m. on Sunday, September 2. In the meantime, Chief Schuettler had mobilized a thousand Chicago police officers “in case rioting should break out between the Mayor’s backers and the supporters of the government.”

  Lowden himself arrived in Chicago on Monday morning. The People’s Council, he announced to a crowd of
supporters, was “a treasonable conspiracy.” “Freedom of speech will be respected,” he opined, “but will not be permitted in Illinois to be used as a cloak for treason.”

  Thompson was livid. The meeting would go forward, he announced, and it would be up to the courts to decide on the legality of the governor’s attempt to use militia troops to interfere in city affairs.

  In the end, there was no great battle between police and militiamen on the streets of Chicago. The People’s Council quickly met again on Monday and officially adjourned before anything more could be done to stop them. Lowden and his militia—without a meeting to shut down—eventually went back to Springfield, leaving Thompson with a rebellious city council, an enraged press, and yet another court case to challenge his political survival skills. But the episode had only deepened the already severe animus between the two chief executives. And now, less than two years later, the thought of asking the governor to send this same militia into the streets of Chicago was hardly one that Thompson was eager to entertain.

  So Big Bill decided to defy Captain Gallery’s advice and let the Chicago police continue handling the situation unaided. That afternoon, the mayor and his police chief announced that every officer in the city would be put on reserve for duty in the riot zone. Outlining a plan to physically surround and protect the Black Belt from any marauding mobs, Chief Garrity vowed that “every resource of the police force will be used to put an end to the violence—even if it becomes necessary to fill every jail in Chicago.”4

  On the city’s North Side, meanwhile, the ire of a different kind of mob was focused on one man—Thomas Fitzgerald, now on a suicide watch in his cell at the Chicago Avenue station. Because of the menacing crowds, the coroner’s inquest was being conducted at the police station. With ill-wishers thronging Chicago Avenue from Clark to LaSalle (and overflow crowds running up and down Clark Street for half a block), police didn’t want to hazard transporting Fitzgerald to the County Building in the Loop, where inquests were normally held. Even so, it took an entire cordon of police to keep the mobs back and allow city and county officials to enter the station. And as the inquest progressed, the scene on the street was turning increasingly ugly. “Send him out here and we’ll hang him for you!” one man shouted, loud enough to be heard by the prisoner inside. Several officers were sent into the crowd to check for guns and other weapons. “You can never tell what will happen,” one department veteran warned. “The people seem pretty sore.”5

  The session inside was fortunately brief. Deputy Chief Alcock, back to his subordinate role now that Chief Garrity had returned, laid before the jury the signed confession, which was read aloud by the deputy coroner while Fitzgerald listened, slumped in his chair. According to the Evening Post, the prisoner seemed overwrought and edgy. “The nonchalance with which he had gone through the arraignment earlier in the day was gone. He hung his head, and his hands and face twitched nervously.”

  After the reading of the confession, Coroner Hoffman ordered the prisoner to stand. “Is this your signature?” he asked, pointing to the scrawl at the bottom of the document.

  Fitzgerald mumbled a feeble yes.

  Hoffman asked him to explain the autopsy results, which showed that Janet’s jaw had been fractured, breaking several teeth.

  “I didn’t do anything to her teeth,” Fitzgerald insisted. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  It was a detail that would never be adequately explained, though the damage probably occurred after death, when Fitzgerald was disposing of the body in the coal pile. The injury was, in any event, immaterial to the prosecution of the case. The jury retired and within minutes returned with its verdict—that Janet Wilkinson had come to her death “through acts of violence committed by Thomas Fitzgerald.”

  The prisoner listened to the verdict in silence and then was led stumbling back to his cell.6

  “We shall place Fitzgerald on trial as speedily as possible,” State’s Attorney Hoyne told reporters afterward. Though the Criminal Court justices were all currently on vacation, it was hoped that the trial could take place within thirty days. Judge Robert E. Crowe, chief justice of the court, said that as soon as the state and defense had prepared their case, he would make sure that a judge was available to hear it, even if he had to act as trial judge himself.7

  As for a possible insanity plea, officials were quick to discourage any such attempt. “He certainly knew what he was about,” said prosecutor O’Brien, who had shown up at the proceedings wearing his red hanging tie. “He may be a degenerate, but he must pay for his crime.” Dr. W. A. Evans, the physician who had earlier identified the bones found in the Virginia Hotel sewer, concurred. “Fitzgerald may be a moron,” he wrote in an article for the Tribune, “but the fact that he is a pedophile or any other variety of sexual pervert or invert does not prove him feeble-minded. Some sexual perverts are feeble-minded but perhaps more are not.”8

  The call by Deputy Chief Alcock for the incarceration of all potential pedophiles was now finding widespread support in the city. An article in Monday’s Tribune revealed that no fewer than twenty-five child molestations had been reported in Chicago since the beginning of the year, including two that had occurred just in the days since Janet’s disappearance. The number of unreported incidents could only be guessed at. One official put the number as high as two hundred cases per year in Chicago alone. “There is but one solution to the whole problem,” said Judge Harry Olson, the Republican jurist who had run against Thompson in the February primary. “We must have national legislation based on scientific lines.… The reason that Fitzgerald killed that little girl is that he had no feeling. He is clearly a victim of dementia praecox and has through injury or heredity been injured in his emotional centers. It meant nothing to him to squeeze the life out of that tiny body.” To Olson, the solution was simple—incarceration of all such men in farm colonies before they had a chance to commit crimes against children.9

  That afternoon, the throngs around the Wilkinsons’ apartment house went suddenly quiet when a hearse turned onto the street and slowly pulled up at the curb. A way was cleared on the sidewalk as two men removed Janet’s casket from the back of the vehicle. While hundreds of grim-faced spectators looked on, the men carried the small white box up the stairs, through the crepe-hung doorway, and into the building for the wake.

  The closed casket would remain in the Wilkinsons’ apartment overnight, standing in a corner of the parlor, surrounded by flowers, with tall candles set at each end. Over the course of the afternoon and evening, dozens of relatives and friends—including many of Janet’s schoolmates—would come to pray with the grieving family and say their good-byes to the dead girl. The funeral would be held at the nearby Holy Name Cathedral at 10 a.m. on Tuesday. Some of the mourners—including many strangers standing in the street who had never even seen the girl when she was alive—would remain there all through the night.10

  * * *

  On the South Side, the serious violence began again in late afternoon, in the neighborhoods around the stockyards district. At around 3 p.m., gangs of white youths began patrolling the main thoroughfares just outside the yards and surrounding factories, waiting for the end-of-the-day shifts. The gangs knew that black workers would be easy prey here. In order to reach their homes due east in the Black Belt, departing workers would have to cross the intervening white neighborhoods. Whether they traveled by streetcar or on foot, they would be vulnerable.

  The attacks started the moment workers left the safety of their workplaces. Crowds of white men descended on them, beating them with clubs, bricks, and hammers. Some blacks escaped the initial assaults and were chased for blocks. Oscar Dozier, a laborer at the Great Western Smelting and Refining Company, was spotted climbing over a fence to avoid going out the main entrance to the factory. Soon he was being pursued by a mob of several hundred screaming white men. They followed him west on Thirty-ninth Street, throwing stones as they ran. Just before reaching Wallace Avenue, Dozier fell. The mob w
as instantly upon him. When discovered by police several minutes later, Dozier was dead, with massive contusions and a two-inch knife wound in his chest.11

  Streetcars provided no safety whatever. Cars would be stopped by the mobs, who would yank the trolley assemblies from the overhead wires, immobilizing the cars and allowing rioters to attack their trapped black passengers at will. One crowd of 300 to 400 whites, including some children, stopped a Forty-seventh Street car in just this way after seeing several blacks inside. The white passengers got off, allowing several dozen rioters to climb aboard and start beating the five black men who remained. The five managed to get out of the car through the windows, but they were chased in all directions. One of them—John Mills—was hit in the back with a brick and knocked over. Before Mills could get up and continue running, a white youth overtook him and hit him in the head with a two-by-four, fracturing his skull. The other four black passengers were also brutally beaten, though none fatally.

  Other similar incidents occurred on streetcars at Forty-seventh and Halsted, at Root Street and Wentworth Avenue, even as far away as Forty-sixth and Cottage Grove, east of the Black Belt. One car on the Thirty-ninth Street line was stopped when a stalled truck was discovered blocking the tracks. Several white men, who had apparently parked the truck there for this very purpose, forced their way into the car and began pummeling several black passengers with iron bars. Escaping from the car, the victims attempted to run east to Halsted, where several officers were stationed. Most managed to get away, but one, Henry Goodman, was tackled on the street and beaten so badly that he would die several days later.12

  Just what the Chicago police were doing to prevent this mayhem is not entirely clear. With most of the force on duty in the Black Belt, police coverage in the white neighborhoods to the west was sparse. But even those officers who were present seemed remarkably ineffective. In some cases, their apparent passivity may have been intentional. The neighborhoods’ “athletic clubs,” widely regarded as the active instigators of most of the mob violence here on their own turf, were typically well connected with local politicians and enjoyed a kind of de facto police protection; much evidence exists that patrolmen from the Yards station “were all fixed and told to lay off on club members.” Whatever the explanation, gangs seemed able to operate with little danger of being arrested or even having their rampages curtailed by police interference. Significantly, one of the few arrests made as a result of these Monday streetcar raids was of a black man, Joseph Scott, who defended himself on an Ashland Boulevard streetcar by fatally stabbing his white attacker, Nicholas Kleinmark, with a pocketknife.13