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

by Gary Krist

  In early September, Thompson revealed the outlines of his public-ownership plan, proposing the formation of yet another Chicago “government”—yet another independent taxing and bonding entity—to fund and run the transit lines according to the will of the people (that is, at five cents a ride). “It is futile for the people to expect representative government that represents them only through a so-called public utility commission, appointed by a power itself distant from the people immediately concerned [meaning, the governor],” he announced on September 9. “I suggest that a new local government be formed to be known as ‘The Transportation District of Chicago’ ”—said district, of course (with all of its patronage possibilities), to be controlled by the city and not by the state or any privately owned corporation.5

  To 1919 American ears, this was a radical proposal, an affront to all capitalist notions of free enterprise. Governor Lowden condemned the public-ownership plan as “state socialism.” Victor Lawson was nearly apoplectic. “The present proposal is simply a bald-headed fraud,” he fumed to one of his editors. “Public ownership is the demagogic politician’s meat.… It proposes to give people a five-cent fare when everybody knows that, under the present standards of cost of production, transportation in a city like Chicago cannot possibly be produced at five cents a ride.… What the country sorely needs is a renaissance of honesty.”6

  But such a renaissance was not in the immediate offing. And although the mayor’s grand transportation plan would eventually end up going nowhere—in fact, Chicago would not exercise meaningful control over its own transit system for decades to come, until the creation of the Chicago Transit Authority in 1947—the ultimate outcome of the fare battle was of less interest to Big Bill than was the battle’s effects. Win or lose, the mayor was once again able to go on the offensive and play the role of defender of the common man against the greed of big corporations and the politicians in their pockets. After suffering a severe blow for his performance in the July crisis, “the People’s David” was now on his way to a comeback.7

  At the same time, the aftermath of the race riot was also miraculously turning in his favor. Maclay Hoyne’s tendentious and one-sided prosecution of the riot cases was actively alienating large sections of the population, redirecting much of the public’s ire toward himself. The alleged rioters on the state’s attorney’s prosecution list, the Evening Post noted acidly, were “all the shades of black and chocolate and tan, but … no sign of white.” Even the all-white grand jury was soon denouncing the prosecutor. After hearing Hoyne present thirty-four consecutive riot cases—all with black defendants—the jurors staged a “strike,” refusing to hear any more cases until at least one white defendant was brought in. “What the [hell] is the matter with the State’s Attorney?” one juror complained. “Hasn’t he got any white cases to present?” Some jury members even vowed to go out into the streets on their own initiative to gather evidence against white rioters.8

  But Hoyne was defiant. “The State’s Attorney will do his duty and does not need any suggestions from anyone regarding the performance of that duty,” he lectured the rebellious jurors. In fact, so eager was Hoyne to tie the riots to Black Belt politics that he was soon broadcasting accusations that made even his earlier outrageous claims seem tame. Citing reports of “large quantities of firearms, deadly weapons, and ammunition” cached throughout the neighborhood, he charged that blacks had been “arming themselves for months” before the riot, and that a secret organization with ties to high city officials had been counseling blacks to “obtain what they regard as social equality, by force if necessary.” On August 23, while the mayor was conveniently away at Fred Lundin’s country house, Hoyne staged a high-profile raid on numerous homes and businesses in the Black Belt, confiscating arms and ammunition and making almost three dozen arrests. “These raids are the beginning of revelations which I believe will stir the City Hall from the roof to the basement,” he announced. “Neither the Mayor of Chicago, by his appointed officers, or the police can plead ignorance of these conditions.”9

  Such tactics, of course, were being met with considerable outrage in the city’s African American community. “State’s Attorney Runs Amok with Flimsy Evidence in Riot Probe,” the Defender charged in an August 30 headline. The NAACP was incredulous. Eager to elevate the profile of the riot cases, the organization had hoped to hire no less a lawyer than Clarence Darrow to represent the black defendants. Darrow had been eager to get involved—he wanted to make a sociological argument for his notion of “aggressive self-defense”—but ultimately his fee proved too expensive for the financially strapped NAACP and the plan fell through. But now Hoyne’s grandstanding was doing more to bring attention to the trials than Darrow’s philosophizing ever could have. In a heated public statement, the NAACP was harshly critical of the state’s attorney, declaring that “Chicago has outdone even Mississippi in its unjust treatment of colored people.”

  Local black organizations also united in protest. On the first of September, ten thousand blacks gathered at the Eighth Regiment Armory to protest Hoyne’s “vicious methods” and seek his dismissal from the investigation. Ida Wells-Barnett—who had been sending black riot witnesses to the prosecutor for weeks, only to find that he ignored them—was particularly galled by his resort to “storm-trooper” raids on the Black Belt. “[Hoyne] sends his hand-picked confederates to raid gambling houses and homes,” she said, “then rushes into print with a ‘discovery’ which he will not dare to submit to any grand jury in Cook County.” Depicting the raids as an act of desperation by a man “either woefully incapable or criminally derelict in his duty,” she demanded that he be replaced by a special prosecutor. At the same time, county officials such as Coroner Hoffman and Sheriff Charles W. Peters were also disputing Hoyne’s alleged findings, and even Attorney General Brundage admitted that the prosecutor was tracking down black perpetrators “more relentlessly than the equally guilty whites.”10

  The effect of Hoyne’s campaign was to widen divisions in an urban population that was already dangerously polarized. More and more references to some kind of “voluntary segregation” of the races began appearing in the press and in the statements of public officials and prominent citizens. “We cannot dodge the fact that whites and blacks will not mix any more than fire and tow,” the editors of the Evening Post argued in one editorial. “They cannot live peaceably as next-door neighbors, and any solution of the problem … must be built upon these basic facts.” In an open letter to Mayor Thompson, the Hyde Park–Kenwood Property Owners’ Association argued that “the prudent leaders of the Negroes of Chicago make no claim for social equality, but content themselves with asking for the right of opportunity, which should be accorded them. Some of the things that led up to the recent outburst of feeling can be attributed to the promiscuous scattering of Negroes throughout the white residential sections of our city.” A letter writer to the Chicago Daily News, meanwhile, was more direct: “The sooner the Negro realizes that the two races cannot enjoy the same privileges together, the better it will be for all concerned. The only solution of the colored question in this city, and [in] all other cities where they are in large numbers, is segregation.”11

  Then, at a special city council meeting on August 5, Alderman Terence F. Moran of the Thirty-first Ward introduced a resolution that carried black fears to a new level. “Resolved by the City Council,” it read, “that a commission composed of members of both races be formed … to ascertain if it is possible to equitably fix a zone or zones which shall be created for the purpose of limiting within its borders the residence of only colored or white persons.”

  Black alderman Louis B. Anderson immediately objected to the resolution, and Mayor Thompson himself, presiding over the meeting, managed to have it ruled out of order on a technicality. But Moran vowed to reintroduce the measure at the next regular council session. And for the black population of Chicago, the message was clear: A significant number of people in this white-dominated city were d
etermined to deny blacks their basic constitutional rights, and there was apparently only one man powerful enough and sympathetic enough to stop them.12

  Mayor Thompson did not fail to see the opportunity for redemption in all of this segregation talk. When James G. Cotter, Illinois’s black assistant attorney general, began accusing Governor Lowden’s riot commission of conspiring to bring about an official system of segregation, Big Bill eagerly took up the cry, accusing the governor himself of “prejudicial conduct against the Negroes.” The always-incendiary Chicago Whip was even more alarmist. “Segregation measures are in the air,” the paper warned. “Lowden’s forces are at work. BEWARE, BEWARE, BEWARE!”

  Such accusations were not entirely ungrounded; the governor’s race attitudes were not impeccable, and when a white Chicago clergyman had suggested that he broker “a common understanding” by which race-specific beaches and parks might be created, Lowden had actually reported the idea to the press with apparent approval. But Big Bill probably didn’t care much whether the governor and his commission truly did have a segregation agenda. For the mayor of Chicago, the controversy was another welcome distraction, another exploitable hullabaloo to transform the city’s summer crisis from a referendum on his own failed leadership into something quite different. As always, he and Lundin worked best in an environment of divisiveness and confusion. They took advantage of every opportunity to misrepresent facts and use them to attack their enemies and redeem themselves in the eyes of their supporters. And as in any street fight, it was the toughest brawlers, not the fairest fighters, who came out on top.13

  Meanwhile, amid all of this political jockeying, the last major battlefield of the riot—the stockyards district—had slowly been returning to normal. The passions aroused by the Back of the Yards fire had put off the planned return of black workers to the yards on Monday, August 4. But by the end of that week, things had settled down enough to allow them to go back to work, albeit with “heavy guards about the L stations at 31st and 35th Streets, squads to guard the trains, and large forces of militia, deputy sheriffs, and police within the yards as protection.” Thousands of unionized white workers responded by walking off the job, claiming that the soldiers were there not to protect the black workers, but rather to disrupt union activity in the yards. A threatened general strike was averted, however, when city officials agreed to withdraw the militia and the deputy sheriffs, though some police would remain in the district. On Friday, August 8, Mayor Thompson sent a letter to Governor Lowden formally requesting that the troops be demobilized and sent home. Lowden complied, and that night the last of the soldiers left the riot district. No hostilities were reported, and the riot was officially declared at an end.14

  The next day, Sterling Morton and his company of the Illinois Reserve Militia joined the other troops in a victorious march up Michigan Avenue before being demobilized. By this time, Morton had received a commission as captain (mainly, he thought, for the work his men did on the morning of the big fire) and had been given permanent command of the company. Though he was ready to return to the comforts of home, he was proud of the work he and his men had done. “The whole thing has been a wonderful demonstration of the spirit of the men,” he wrote some days later. “I shudder to think of what would have happened to Chicago had there been no reserve militia.”

  Governor Lowden and General Dickson were on hand to review the departing militiamen as they marched through the Loop. Afterward, the two men were driven to city hall to meet with Mayor Thompson in recognition of the passing of the crisis. An official in the mayor’s office informed the two distinguished guests that the mayor was already gone for the weekend, and inquired whether their business was urgent. “No,” Lowden replied acidly, “there is no significance in our visit. We just came to see the men with whom we have been cooperating.”

  Then the governor turned on his heel and marched out of city hall to his waiting automobile.15

  AND SO THE ORDEAL of Chicago’s summer of crisis passed. Fall arrived—always welcome after the sweltering prairie August—and with it came the usual sense of renewed possibility, of getting back to normal life, of making changes and starting over again.

  Carl Sandburg, for one, decided in September that it was time to upgrade his living situation. Safely reestablished now at the Daily News, he felt financially secure enough to move with his wife and daughters from the cramped Maywood cottage to a larger, more expensive house amid the pines and poplars of Elmhurst, Illinois, a few miles farther out of the city. “Why should I be the only poet of misery to be keeping out of debt?” he joked to a friend shortly after the move. Besides, he was making some money in publishing now. Alfred Harcourt had agreed to publish his race riot articles as a freestanding work, the first volume in Harcourt, Brace, and Howe’s new pamphlet series. And although work on that book and his reporting duties were interfering somewhat with his poetry production (Sandburg was covering both the riot trials and the continuing labor unrest for the Daily News), Harcourt told him not to worry. “We mustn’t let our anxiety to have a book of yours on our early list induce either of us to publish [prematurely],” he wrote. “You and Frost, anyway, are the longtime people, and a season more or less mustn’t count.”1

  Others were also moving on to new ventures. Ring Lardner, whose contract with the Tribune had ended in June, signed a deal with the Bell Syndicate lucrative enough to permit him to take his family east to live in Greenwich, Connecticut. Jane Addams embarked on a speaking tour to raise money for starving German children (much to the outrage of her jingoistic critics). And Clarence Darrow notched up yet another victory in yet another high-profile court case, successfully pleading insanity for an Emma Simpson, a jealous wife who had shot and killed her husband in court during their divorce proceedings. In his final statement to the all-male jury on September 25, Darrow argued that, in a case of this type, more consideration should be shown for a woman than for a man. Why? Because the female of the species doesn’t shrug off old loves as easily as her male counterpart does. “You’ve been asked to treat a man and a woman the same—but you can’t,” the lawyer maintained. “No manly man can.” In the end, the jury apparently agreed; they did the manly thing by saving Mrs. Simpson from the gallows.2

  Emily Frankenstein, turning to romance again after the violent distractions of midsummer, was also showing some reluctance to shrug off old loves. Despite her stern conviction to part with her soldier-lover (and notwithstanding her parents’ explicit command that they stop seeing each other), she and Jerry Lapiner had resumed their secret trysts again amid the chaos of late July. It was the race riot, in fact, that had indirectly brought them back together again. On the third day of the violence, Emily had begun to worry about Jerry: “I heard a rumor of a lot of people being killed downtown,” she later wrote in her diary, “[so] I called Jerry up to see how he was.” He wasn’t at home, so she kept telephoning until she finally reached him after supper, at which time she made him promise to stay in for the rest of the evening. He agreed, and before long they found themselves talking as in the old days. “Well,” Emily wrote, “the result was, we didn’t part.” That Sunday, they met secretly in Jackson Park. Emily was afraid of being seen by someone they knew, so they retired to the bridle path. “We found a grassy place along the path in the bushes—hidden from even the horseback riders. I sat down prepared to talk and try to reach some decision, but Jerry had suddenly lost his desire to talk—and, well, he never kissed me like that before or since.”

  By October, their broken engagement was back on—at least in Emily’s mind. “It’s dreadful and yet wonderful to be secretly engaged to be married and yet not to be able to tell a soul when you’re just bubbling over with happiness,” Emily wrote in her entry for October 18. “We know our love is not a fleeting fancy. We can’t do without each other.… It’s going to be a dreadful disappointment to the family. They’ve nothing against Jerry—his character, health, personality, all are O.K., but his lack of education isn’t. It doesn’t
bother me. I love him.”

  Even the religion issue was no longer a problem. To her delight, Jerry had more or less given up Christian Science, at least as a “medical aid,” though he still claimed an interest in the religion. For Emily, this was concession enough. “The Christian Science objection has been removed,” she concluded. “I’m sure the other things will turn out all right, too. Besides, I’m happy.”3

  * * *

  Chicago’s numerous conflicts, of course, did not simply disappear with the passing of the summer crisis. In fact, as autumn set in, the city’s labor unrest grew even worse, resulting in a series of railroad strikes and a nationwide steel strike that turned violent in the mills of Gary, Indiana, and South Chicago. The city crime rate also continued to climb, despite numerous “police shakeups” and “neighborhood crackdowns.” The passage in October of the Volstead Act, enabling the vigorous enforcement of the Prohibition amendment, did little to improve this situation, setting the stage for the great bootlegging wars that would plague Chicago in the coming 1920s.

  Nor was the city’s racial strife over, despite the end of the major violence. Bombs continued to go off in buildings occupied by blacks or by realtors who rented to blacks—six more in 1919 and over a dozen in 1920. As for the white athletic clubs, Mayor Thompson eventually revoked their charters, at least temporarily, but incidents of racial antagonism continued in the parks and on the beaches. There would even be rumors of more riots—on Labor Day, on Halloween—but fortunately none of them ever came to pass.4

  Selective prosecution of the riot cases continued to infuriate the black community, though State’s Attorney Hoyne did eventually bring some white perpetrators before the grand jury. Calls from the African American community for the removal of Hoyne came to nothing, and only ended up causing strife among the community’s leaders. When the Olivet Protective Association came out in support of Attorney General Brundage as a possible replacement for Hoyne as prosecutor of the riot cases, the organization’s cofounder, Ida Wells-Barnett, promptly resigned. Wells-Barnett had never forgiven Brundage for jailing innocent black men during the East St. Louis riot in 1917, and although she had little confidence in Hoyne, she feared that Brundage would be far worse. The association, however, wouldn’t listen to her, and so the activist found herself once again rejected by the leadership of her own race. “I rose and laid my membership card on the table and told the men that I would not be guilty of belonging to an organization that would do such a treacherous thing,” she later wrote of the episode. “As I passed out of the room, Rev. Williams said, ‘Good-bye,’ and Rev. Branham said, ‘Good riddance.’ I walked down South Parkway with tears streaming down my face … [and] never went back to a meeting of the so-called Protective Association.”