City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago
Page 19
But Kleinmark was hardly the only white casualty in Monday evening’s rioting. In the Black Belt, where violence broke out shortly after the disturbances in the stockyards district began, blacks were defending themselves—and, in some cases, attacking unprovoked—with a vehemence unheard of in any previous American race riot. In late afternoon, an armed mob of some three hundred to four hundred gathered at the intersection of Thirty-fifth and State Street, prepared to repulse a rumored invasion of the Black Belt by “an army of whites.” Any lone white man seen in the district was attacked mercilessly. Casmere Lazzeroni, a sixty-year-old Italian peddler, turned his banana wagon onto State Street at about 5 p.m. and found himself in the middle of an angry mob. As he tried to escape, four black youths chased him down the avenue, throwing stones until they managed to grab hold of the wagon, climb onto it, and stab the man to death with pocketknives. Shortly thereafter, Eugene Temple, the owner of a State Street laundry—a business that employed many blacks from the neighborhood—was jumped by three men while getting into an automobile with his wife and another young woman. His assailants robbed him and stabbed him to death before disappearing into the crowds, all while the two women watched in horror.14
As evening approached, carloads of armed whites began making forays into the Black Belt, speeding down the avenues and firing at random into crowds. In response, black gunmen took up positions on roofs, fire escapes, and upper-floor windows to shoot back. Sometimes the masses on the street were thick enough to stop the passing automobiles, so that their occupants could be pulled out of the vehicles and beaten or stabbed. Other cars were fired on by snipers—whether or not they had obvious hostile intent. Police were also targets. Journalist Edward Dean Sullivan, touring the area in a motorcycle sidecar for the Herald and Examiner, watched as a patrolman was shot right in front of him by a sniper. As the man fell to his knees on the sidewalk, Sullivan’s driver suddenly returned fire (the reporter didn’t even know he was armed) and then turned the motorcycle into an alley.
“Instantly [we] discovered it was the wrong alley,” Sullivan later wrote. “About twenty Negroes—waving, cursing, and obviously drunk—were to be seen about halfway down the alley-course before us. One, with his back toward us, fired a shot in the air. They discovered us even as my driver, swinging the car backwards, whirled out of the alley, turned abruptly, and started back up State Street.”
As they sped away from the trouble, Sullivan saw another sniper taking aim at them from a rooftop. Someone then hurled a shovel head at them, but the driver managed to veer around it as it clanged to the pavement in front of them. Finally, they reached a group of police at Twenty-fifth Street. Sullivan reported the downed patrolman, but officers claimed they already knew all about it. “Take my advice,” a police captain told him. “Get that machine out of here as fast as you can.”
Sullivan and his driver were more than willing to obey.15
The Thirty-fifth Street crowd had by 8 p.m. grown to number several thousand and now extended east to Wabash Avenue, where armed blacks were skirmishing with a contingent of sixty to one hundred policemen on foot and a dozen more on horseback. Rumors had been circulating for hours that a white man had shot a boy on the street from the fourth-story window of the Angelus, a mostly white apartment house on the corner. Police had searched the building and failed to produce either a weapon or a gunman, but the mob wasn’t satisfied and threatened to storm the building. The standoff grew increasingly antagonistic until, shortly after eight, a brick flew from somewhere in the crowd and hit a policeman. The badly outnumbered officers closed ranks and suddenly began shooting back with their revolvers. Chaos resulted as panicky rioters scrambled to get out of the intersection. The gunfire went on for almost ten minutes. Two men were shot and killed as they tried to escape into the entrance of the Angelus. More shots killed one man and wounded several others who tried to take shelter behind a trestle of the L tracks. Then gunfire erupted down the block at State Street. Rioters began shooting at a mounted policeman, who returned fire. Fleeing crowds left behind more wounded and a fourth man dead.16
Any semblance of law and order in the Black Belt had by now evaporated. Police headquarters at the Stanton Avenue station was flooded with riot calls from all points in the district and beyond. Ever-larger white gangs were reported to be marching into the contested border neighborhoods and beating any blacks they could find. Often police would rush to the scene of an incident only to find abandoned victims bleeding, unconscious, and/or dying in the streets.17
Back at city hall, Mayor Thompson was facing pressure from all sides to take extraordinary measures to control the mayhem. Several aldermen from the city council urged him to suspend search-and-seizure laws in the Black Belt so that police could confiscate rumored weapons caches. Thompson, always conscious of his black support base, refused. He did order the mandatory closing of all South Side pool halls, saloons (now serving only near beer, at least in theory), and other gathering places. But for most of the day on Monday, he and his administration tried to downplay the situation on the South Side. Comptroller George Harding, after touring the riot districts, insisted that accounts of rampant bloodshed had been exaggerated, and that no special action was required. “I think that if the police department does its duty, the outbreaks will not be serious.”18
As more and more reports of the evening’s escalating violence reached city hall, however, Thompson realized that police might soon be overwhelmed. Acceding only partially to calls from the newspapers and civic leaders to send in the militia, he reluctantly telegraphed Lieutenant Governor John G. Oglesby in Springfield, requesting that the troops be mobilized but only held “in readiness in one of our armories, to make them quickly available for the enforcement of the law when the necessity demands it.” Over the next few hours, 3,500 troops—from the Illinois National Guard and the Illinois Reserve Militia—were sent to the city. Even as the violence raged, however, the mayor refused to deploy them on the streets. Instead, they were forced to merely stand by, waiting for an order to act.19
Some of the militia troops had been eagerly awaiting the call since the beginning of the violence and were frustrated by the mayor’s decision. Sterling Morton, thirty-three-year-old scion of the Morton Salt family, was an officer with the First Regiment of the Illinois Reserve Militia. Refused on physical grounds for overseas service during the war, he had instead joined a militia training unit, part of a volunteer domestic security force set up by Governor Lowden after regular National Guard regiments were sent to fight abroad. Keen to do his part, Morton had trained hard, drilling with other volunteers (in donated uniforms and using rifles with no ammunition) at the Municipal Pier through the frigid winter of 1917–18. After the Armistice was signed in November 1918, many of the other troops quit, but Morton, realizing that the need for a reserve militia “was even greater now that the controls and restraints imposed by the war were lifted,” stayed on. Eventually, his diminished unit was combined with several others to become M Company of the First Regiment. Just a few weeks before the outbreak of the riot, they had been sent to nearby Camp Logan for a week of intensive training, and now the men were more than prepared to restore order on the streets.20
For Morton, a member of one of the city’s most prominent families, the spectacle of a Chicago at war with itself must have been particularly painful. Grandson of J. Sterling Morton (Grover Cleveland’s secretary of agriculture and the creator of Arbor Day) and son of Joy Morton (founder of the famous Chicago salt company), he had been born and raised in the city and had quickly become a young lion in its commercial and political elite. In 1910 he had married Sophia Preston Owsley—the granddaughter of Thompson’s Democratic predecessor as mayor, Carter H. Harrison—and began working for the family business. Four years later, when the company decided it needed a new logo, it was Sterling Morton who chose the now-ubiquitous drawing of the girl with an umbrella spilling salt (“When It Rains, It Pours”), because the girl made him think of his three-year-old daugh
ter, Suzette. Since then, he had left Morton Salt to become president of the Morkrum Company, a firm that made automatic printing telegraph machines. But while he might have been a chief executive in the office, in the Illinois Reserve Militia he was still a lowly adjutant, and so he had to wait for orders from his superiors just like any other militiaman.21
The waiting on Monday had been maddening. Morton had seen the crowds around the Twenty-ninth Street beach on Sunday evening, when he was returning by train from a company picnic south of the city, but he hadn’t known what it was all about until he saw the next morning’s papers. Shocked by what he read, he left the office immediately and reported to Colonel Lorenzen, his superior officer, for duty. By four-thirty in the afternoon, however, no call for the militia had come, so the colonel sent Morton and the rest of the men home. That was just two hours before Mayor Thompson sent out his request for the troops to be held “in readiness.” Contacted at home, Morton quickly bolted some dinner and drove back downtown to the mobilization point at Michigan Avenue and Van Buren Street in the Loop.
The scene there was hopelessly disorganized. Some of the militiamen had mistakenly been told to gather at the Old Eighth Regiment Armory, and so were heading unarmed and in small groups straight into the riot zone—a sure recipe for disaster. Even those troops who gathered at the correct place in the Loop, while equipped with rifles and bayonets, had no ammunition. Frustrated, Colonel Lorenzen instructed Morton to commandeer a Yellow Cab and retrieve some cases of ammunition that were being stored at a South Side office building. Then he was to proceed farther south to the L station at Fortieth Street and Indiana Avenue to deliver some of the ammunition to Major Macey, who was in charge of another force of men down there. On the way, Morton was to pick up or redirect any straying militiamen he encountered heading for the Old Eighth Armory.22
Finding a cab was a task in itself. Morton tried to get one outside the Chicago Club, but the taxi starter there told him that no cabs were being sent south of Twelfth Street because of the rioting. Finally, one driver came up to him. “Get in my cab,” he said. “It’s just around the corner and I will take you anywhere you want to go.”
They headed into the riot zone. Morton was armed with just a .45 (the driver also had a small pistol), and when he saw what was going on in the streets, he felt outgunned. “I saw sights that I never shall forget,” he later wrote to his cousin. Gunfights raged between rioters and police, and once, after seeing a man firing from a narrow passageway between two buildings, Morton shot back at him, though this was arguably against orders. On Thirty-fifth Street, they picked up a wandering militia private who at least had a rifle; Morton issued him some cartridges and felt a little safer.
Even after they got to the L station and delivered the ammunition, however, they were not out of danger. As Morton spoke with Majors Macey and Parker at the street-level entrance to the station, a car came careening around the corner and several shots were fired from inside. No one was hit, but Macey and Parker wisely decided that they should perhaps continue their discussion on the station platform at track level, well above the street.
It was to be all the action Morton saw that night. Though he and the other militiamen waited eagerly for the command to engage with the rioters, none ever came. Finally, he was ordered to collect the roughly one hundred men who had gathered at the L station, issue them ammunition, and then march them in columns to the Seventh Regiment Armory near the White Sox ballpark. It was a journey of about a mile, and it went off without incident, the men marching with fixed bayonets as the faithful Yellow Cab accompanied them (the driver’s meter running all the time). At the armory, there was no commissary or sleeping facilities, so the men were forced to simply bed down on the drill floor and hope that the order sending them into action would come tomorrow.23
It was a wrenching situation, for the violence in and around the Black Belt only got worse as the evening progressed. “The South Side is a seething cauldron of hate,” the Evening Post reported in its late edition. And the police, if anything, seemed to be making matters worse. Long-standing hostility between blacks and the largely Irish-American police force was manifesting itself in grisly confrontations throughout the riot districts. Horace Jennings, a black man lying wounded on a street after an encounter with a white mob, was approached by a patrolman who he thought was going to help him. “Where’s your gun, you black son of a bitch?” the officer allegedly snarled. “You damn niggers are raising hell.” The officer then hit Jennings over the head with a nightstick, knocking him unconscious.24
This was not an isolated event. According to many witnesses, police were often “grossly unfair” in their conduct toward the rioters, frequently arresting black victims while letting their white assailants go free. Some police stood by idly even as blacks were beaten by mobs a few yards away. Nor was this kind of blatant bias entirely one-sided. In the warlike atmosphere that had developed on the South Side, many blacks regarded any white person in uniform, regardless of his actions, as an enemy and therefore a legitimate target for their bricks, stones, and bullets.25
As in any war situation, there was no such thing as an innocent bystander. In her diary, Emily Frankenstein wrote anxiously of her father’s near escape when, returning from a house call at the Vincennes Hotel on Monday evening, he found himself in the midst of the clashing mobs on Thirty-fifth Street. One man was shot in the stomach by a stray bullet while sitting at the dinner table in his Wentworth Avenue apartment. In one street brawl, a passing reporter for the Defender, Lucius C. Harper, had to dive to the ground and play dead while police bullets whizzed past his head and shattered glass fell all around him. A man behind him was shot in the neck and fell over the reporter’s prone body. “Blood from the fatal wound trickled down the pavement until it reached me,” Harper wrote, “but I dreaded making a move.”26
The anarchy on the South Side continued well past midnight and into the early-morning hours. By 3 a.m., the day’s death toll had reached 17, with an additional 172 wounded—far higher than the totals for the first day of the riot. But the worst chaos was yet to come. Contrary to all expectations, the late-night meeting of the transit workers, which had been held despite the widespread violence, had ended disastrously. Defying their leaders, union members had rejected the compromise wage plan that Governor Lowden had worked so hard to broker. Instead, the membership voted to declare an immediate system-wide strike. So at 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning, every streetcar and elevated train in Chicago ground to a stop, leaving the city paralyzed at its most vulnerable moment.27
THE EXODUS STARTED before dawn. With all mass transit except the suburban steam lines idled by the strike, hundreds of thousands of Chicago workers had to get to work on Tuesday morning by whatever means they could find. Desperate for transportation, commuters were hitching rides on laundry vans, bicycles, produce trucks, ice wagons, furniture drays, specially chartered riverboats, and virtually anything else that moved. Long-disused surreys and buggies were brought out of storage; old cab horses were recalled from retirement; flatbed trucks were refitted with kitchen chairs to be reborn as jitneys. Price gouging was rampant. “I stood up in a truck all the way from Garfield Park and paid 15 cents for it,” a female clerk complained to a reporter, “but I’m here.” One boy on the West Side apparently mistook the motley procession of vehicles for a circus parade. “Oh mother, here comes the lion’s cage,” he allegedly cried, pointing to a department store truck carting a load of exasperated women to their jobs.
In the Loop, the traffic jams were epic. With no one to control the flow of vehicles, the result was chaos in the streets. “Never in the history of the city has such a condition prevailed,” one traffic official announced. “Every one of 175 crossing policemen and 75 mounted policemen are detailed to the South Side race riots. Even the Chicago police reserve has been pressed into riot duty. The situation is entirely in the hands of the public. The people must be tolerant.”1
At least half a million other commuters, afraid
to venture into the streets, just stayed home. Virtually no one—black or white—showed up for work at the stockyards. Twelve hundred black municipal employees were officially urged to stay off the job. This proved to be a wise move, for the night’s racial violence did not taper off at first light, as it had on Monday. The Evening Post described the mayhem: “Snipers, white as well as black; mobs armed with stones and bricks; arson gangs—all these have been active since daybreak in the face of the police department’s utmost efforts to maintain order.” Some workers who did decide to report to work paid with their lives. Edward W. Jackson, heading on foot to his morning shift at a South Side factory, was beaten to death at Fortieth and Halsted by a group of five white men. Walter Parejko and Josef Maminaki, laborers for the Grand Trunk Railway, were shot by three black youths in front of a Dearborn Street store. Thanks to the beefed-up police presence in the Black Belt, the huge mobs that had proven so unmanageable on Monday night were successfully dispersed on Tuesday, but smaller, more mobile groups were still on the rampage. One report cited a group of twelve armed black soldiers—all former members of the Old Eighth Division—prowling the South Side, shooting at any white faces they saw. The overall outlook was grim. “This is the most serious problem that has ever confronted the police department in Chicago,” Deputy Chief Alcock told his men at the Stanton Avenue station that morning. “We need all the determination we can muster.”2