Chicago on the Make

by Andrew J. Diamond

  While the people never really took the cause to heart in the way Burnham and his cohorts had dreamed, the Chicago Plan Commission did manage to work closely and somewhat effectively with every mayoral administration between 1909 and 1931. Chicagoans approved numerous bond issues (some eighty-six between 1912 and 1931) that provided the city with more than $230 million during this era. Key thoroughfares like Michigan Avenue, Roosevelt Road, Western Avenue, and Ashland Avenue were widened; the double-level Wacker Drive was constructed so as to route traffic around the Loop; the new Union Station railroad terminal was built; a huge stretch of the lakeshore was filled and landscaped along with neighboring Grant Park; a recreational parkway was developed along the lakefront; numerous parks and playgrounds were added; and the Forest Preserve District of Cook County acquired several tens of thousands of acres of forest land around the outskirts of the city. Although most of these projects fell short of the plan’s vision, and the majestic civic center in the heart of the city never materialized, Burnham’s scheme had clearly served as a blueprint for these infrastructural changes. By the beginning of the 1930s, however, the role of the Chicago Plan Commission had diminished—in part because much of it had been taken over by the Zoning Commission after the enactment of the city’s first zoning ordinance in 1923—and in 1939 the Chicago Plan Commission was incorporated into the city government as a somewhat powerless advisory body.

  These changes corresponded with broader trends shaping municipal administrations across the urban United States, as city governments became active in the business of planning and zoning in the 1920s. According to geographer Robert Lewis, Chicago’s 1923 zoning ordinance was pivotal in transforming the role that city government would play in the local economy. Zoning in Chicago emerged at the outset as more of “an expansionary tool” than an instrument of social reform, with the zoning commission increasingly focusing on economic matters—the promotion of industrial growth and the preservation of real estate values—over social ones.36 Driving the decisions and policies of zoning officials from the outset were fears about competition from other cities. Such orientations reflected the Chicago plan’s priorities of keeping the city’s wealth and wealthy citizens from departing for greener pastures, and of boosting real estate values. Burnham, after all, was an architect, and the Commercial Club was, of course, propertied to the hilt. And yet, somewhat ironically, this private initiative to align the city’s planning priorities with the interests of capital—backed by men who had waged a bloody war against the labor movement—looked to the people in a way that would soon seem foolishly nostalgic. Somewhat paradoxically, as the planning apparatus passed from private to public hands—to zoning and planning officials who were either democratically elected or appointed by officials who were—all the concern with the people and the public interest that Burnham and his cohorts had displayed began to fade. And as the very notion of the people itself slipped into obsolescence, so did concerns with improving the quality of their lives. Burnham’s global vision of a “well-ordered, convenient, and unified city” could never survive within the piecemeal, fractured, political process that planning had become, and the unity and civic spirit he so cherished could never be achieved in the fragmented metropolis that Chicago was quickly becoming.

  RACIAL ORDER, MACHINE ORDER

  On a stiflingly hot Sunday at the end of July in 1919, the racial tensions that had been simmering since the stockyards strike of 1904 boiled over into a massive race riot that had people across the city throwing around the expression “race war.” Fittingly, the whole affair began at the lakefront, the very place whose blue watery vistas, Burnham had believed, would inspire “calm thoughts.” What transpired on the strip of sand between 25th and 29th Streets on July 27 was anything but serene. While differing accounts exist as to what sparked the week-long rampage of rage, violence, and arson, there is general agreement on three related events that occurred that day. The first concerned several African Americans daring to cross the imaginary color line in the sand to cool themselves in water fronted by a beach whites believed was reserved to them—an act that earned them a shower of rocks hurled by white beachgoers. The second, later in the day, involved a young white man in the breakwater around 26th Street lobbing rocks at three black teens on a makeshift raft, striking one of them, Eugene Williams, in the head and sending him to the bottom of the lake to his death. The third witnessed a mob of African Americans confronting police for refusing to arrest the man who had allegedly thrown the rock that had struck Williams, a situation that led to an exchange of gunshots that left a police officer wounded and the civilian shooter dead. These were the first two casualties of a frenzy of homicidal violence that, in the final toll, left thirty-eight people dead, some five hundred wounded, and thousands homeless. Some notable incidents were reported in the Near West and Near North Sides, but the area around the stockyards was ground zero.

  FIGURE 2. Homicidal violence around the stockyards during the 1919 riot. Photo by Jun Fujita. From The New York Public Library.

  While the magnitude and duration of the explosion shocked many, few were particularly surprised. Two years earlier Chicagoans had read about the horror and bloodshed of a similar race riot downstate, in East Saint Louis, Illinois, and the local press made sure that nobody missed the point that it could happen here. Appearing next to coverage of the aftermath of the East Saint Louis riot in the Chicago Tribune’s edition of July 8, 1917, for example, was one story with the provocative headline “Half a Million Darkies from Dixie Swarm the North to Better Themselves” and another reporting on former Illinois governor Charles Deneen’s suggestion that city authorities close the Black Belt’s “saloons, vicious cabarets, disorderly houses . . . as a safeguard against riots and mobs.” “Conditions in East Saint Louis,” the story made sure to point out, “were not unlike those prevailing in Chicago.”37 And there was certainly some truth to this. The series of events that had unraveled at the lakefront that scorching July day were perfectly consistent with general trends that had made Chicago into a tinderbox of racial conflict in the years leading up to the riot. In short, working-class white Chicagoans were becoming much more prone to lashing out against their African American neighbors and coworkers, and African Americans were becoming much more willing to resist and confront such aggression. In the past, collective acts of racial violence had crystallized mostly within the context of labor conflicts. But the scene at the lakefront revealed a new pattern of racial struggle over neighborhoods and recreational spaces that was becoming increasingly apparent as the city’s black population grew, and with it the determination of African American residents to assert their rights to the city’s spaces and resources. Further exacerbating the situation was the fact that the forces of order often refused to protect the rights of blacks, and, in some instances, actively aided white aggressors in their campaign to defend their neighborhoods against what they viewed as “black invasion.”

  This volatile mix of circumstances came together with the entrance of the United States into the First World War, which opened up unprecedented opportunities for blacks in the industrial workforce. In part due to the efforts of labor recruiters operating in the Deep South, over fifty thousand black migrants arrived in the city between 1916 and 1919, roughly doubling the city’s black population.38 Many of them had expected to find a friendlier racial climate up North, but such hopes were quickly dashed. Mingling with such frustrations, moreover, was a new sense of assertiveness and wounded pride on the part of black veterans returning to the city after risking their lives for their country in combat overseas. These conditions produced a new wave of racial violence around the boundaries of the South Side Black Belt, which in 1915 consisted of a quarter-mile-wide band running along State Street from 12th Street down to 39th Street and edging southward. Between July 1, 1917, and July 27, 1919—the first day of the riot—whites in neighborhoods bordering the Black Belt bombed twenty-four black homes and stoned or otherwise vandalized countless others.39 The main pe
rpetrators of such terror were young men organized into street gangs and so-called athletic clubs based in the Irish neighborhoods to the east of the stockyards. The most notorious of these organizations was Ragen’s Colts, a club that provided muscle for Democratic Cook County commissioner Frank Ragen and boasted of having some two thousand members. Such groups, according to a study of the riot’s causes by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations (CCRR), were instrumental in escalating the conflict and spreading it from the lakefront into the neighborhoods around the stockyards and the Black Belt. By the time of the riot, Irish gangs such as the Dukies and the Shielders claimed affiliates in a long stretch of city blocks from around 22nd Street all the way down to 59th Street, constituting a phalanx of hard-nosed street toughs bent on punishing any African American who dared cross the “dead line” of Wentworth Avenue and venture into the Irish neighborhoods of the Bridgeport area, Hamburg and Canaryville, which lay between the Black Belt and the stockyards. In the months preceding the riot, the antiblack intimidation carried out by these groups was so persistent and the sense of Irish pride motivating it so marked that, as historian James Grossman has noted, “many blacks mistakenly assumed that all the white gangs were Irish.”40

  MAP 2. Communities, gangs, and boundaries on the South Side, ca. 1919.

  Historians have generally agreed that Irish participation in the riot was strong, and more recent interpretations have put forward rather compelling evidence that some of the eastern European groups around the stockyards—Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, and Jews—were reluctant to join in the hostilities, even at times comparing the attacks on blacks to forms of discrimination visited upon them by the Irish and other “Americans.” For example, Arnold Hirsch’s survey of a range of foreign-language newspapers—Polish, Lithuanian, Jewish, and Italian—in the period following the riot turned up a number of editorials that viewed the violence against African Americans as another ploy by the bosses to break the unions.41 Such findings could be interpreted as running counter to the idea that the Irish served as Americanizers for southern and eastern Europeans occupying a racially in-between status during the interwar years. Why indeed would the aristocracy of the stockyards and streets feel the need to engage in such demonstrative and risky acts when they seemingly had little to prove, and why would the groups whose status in the racial order was most precarious refrain from following the example of their standard-bearers as a means to reaffirming their whiteness?

  As for the matter of antiblack aggression on the part of the Irish, the explanation has perhaps more to do with the injuries of class than with the circumstances of race, though the two factors were of course hard to disentangle in interwar Chicago. Certainly recent political events had stirred up racial animosities. Only four months prior to the riot, Republican mayor “Big Bill” Thompson had won his reelection bid in a tight race with strong support from black voters. “NEGROES ELECT BIG BILL” was the headline of the Democratic rag The Chicago Daily Journal on the eve of election day—a proclamation that elicited palpable outrage in Irish Bridgeport. That Thompson was a Republican was bad enough, but this particular Republican also displayed anti-Catholic tendencies in a moment when such tendencies were on the rise. Moreover, this slap in the face came at a time when working conditions around the stockyards were clearly deteriorating in the midst of the postwar recession everyone had feared. With the packinghouses laying off some fifteen thousand workers in the spring of 1919, employers looking to speed up the pace of production, and workers fearing competition from the tens of thousands of African Americans arriving in the city, tensions moved from the killing floors into the communities of Canaryville and Hamburg.

  Canaryville and Hamburg were, in fact, separate neighborhoods with somewhat distinct and at times even rival identities. While each was home to families of packinghouse workers and industrial laborers, Hamburg, which extended from 31st to 39th Street between Halsted Avenue and the Penn Central Railroad tracks, had a leg up over its southern rival, which, with its western edge along Halsted between 39th and 49th Streets, offered too little distance from the smoke and odor of the stockyards. Canaryville was also too close to the increasingly overcrowded Back of the Yards (or Packingtown) area to the west of the stockyards, with its decrepit two-story wood-frame tenements packed with the Polish and Lithuanian immigrants whom Irish Bridgeport’s experienced meat cutters and butcher workmen commonly accused of undercutting their wages. Such conditions produced a street subculture that turned teenagers into career criminals—the Canaryville School of Gunmen, as it was referred to.42

  Hamburg was also hard-boiled, but it was more akin to the Bridgeport that would produce three mayors and numerous other political, civic, and business leaders out of the generation of 1919. One of these was the future “Boss” of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, who used the strict guidance provided by the Our Lady of Nativity Parish School and then the commercial orientation of nearby De La Salle High School to help him ascend the ranks of the city’s political machine to the mayor’s office. Yet when not in the classroom or at his summer job in the stockyards, the young Richard Daley was running with the Hamburg Athletic Club, an organization which, as Mike Royko opined, “never had the Colts’ reputation for criminality, but [was] handy with a brick.”43 Like Ragen’s Colts, the Hamburgs furnished muscle for neighborhood bosses, and, as such, represented a quasi-legitimate opportunity structure. In 1914, for example, the president of the Hamburg Club, Tommy Doyle, used the club’s leverage to unseat an alderman who had held the position for over twenty years. Four years later, Doyle won a seat on the state legislature, and another Hamburg president, Joe McDonough, took over as alderman. Daley became the club’s president in 1924 and held the post for fifteen years while climbing the ranks of the Democratic Party machine.

  While Canaryville was much less capable of producing this kind of political clout, what it lacked in political and social capital it made up for with syndicate ties. Questioned by the CCRR about this particular neighborhood, the state’s attorney of Cook County claimed that “more bank robbers, pay-roll bandits, automobile bandits, highwaymen, and strong-arm crooks come from this particular district than from any other.”44 Canaryville was the breeding ground for some of the city’s most notorious beer-running gangsters—people like “Moss” Enright, “Sonny” Dunn, Eugene Geary, and the Gentleman brothers—who drew much of their manpower from the pool of ready labor provided by the athletic clubs. The Chicago Crime Commission well understood this vital link between the crime syndicates and Canaryville’s gangs, reporting in 1920: “It is in this district that ‘athletic clubs’ and other organizations of young toughs and gangsters flourish, and where disreputable poolrooms, hoodlum-infested saloons and other criminal hang-outs are plentiful.”45

  Criminal enterprises and machine politics thus offered some significant opportunities for young men in Canaryville and Hamburg, but there were not nearly enough to go around, and most of those coming of age in these neighborhoods were more proletarian than slick. Athletic club toughs were predominantly the sons of packinghouse workers and factory laborers, and the world they made on the streets was intimately linked to the affairs of the enormous meat-processing combine next door. Examining this world in the 1920s, sociologist John Landesco concluded that “the sons of Irish laborers in the packing houses and stockyards” joined gangs like the Ragen’s Colts because “Americanization made them averse to the plodding, seasonal, heavy and odoriferous labor of their parents, beset with the competition of wave upon wave of immigrants who poured into the area and bid for the jobs at lesser wages.”46 In reality, it was perhaps as much Taylorism as Americanism that made the Irish youths of these neighborhoods unwilling to cast their lots in a career in the stockyards and killing floors: as packers sought to keep up with increasing demand, they quickened the pace of work, maintained closer supervision, and introduced division of labor and continuous-flow production methods.47 Upton Sinclair’s description of a packinghouse perhaps conveyed it best: “a line of
dangling hogs a hundred yards in length; and for every yard there was a man, working as if a demon were after him.”48 Such was the nature of the work available to unskilled youths in this moment. Moreover, a job wrestling with hog carcasses in a room like the one Sinclair depicted would have meant working side by side with Poles, Lithuanians, or members of other new immigrant groups whose status, many of the Irish believed, was clearly below theirs.

  Conditions of this sort explain a great deal about why Irish youths coming of age around the stockyards district in the first few decades of the twentieth century were eager recruits for the race war that broke out in 1919. To be an aristocrat in the stockyards was not what it used to be, and the unwillingness of these youths to fill degraded jobs in the increasingly rationalized mass-production workplaces of the city ultimately stemmed from their understanding that other options were open to them—a situation that reflected the strong if embattled position of the Irish in the public sector. This was a large part of the “Americanization” that sociologists noted about them, and it was something that distinguished them from their immigrant neighbors, who had little choice in the matter of their employment in tedious, dangerous, low-wage labor. Yet for many working-class Irish youths, this perception of choice was something of an illusion. In fact, the Irish youths of the generation of 1919 were not so far removed from the American Protective Association’s “no Irish need apply” campaign of the 1900s, and they were now facing four more years under an anti-Catholic mayor who would certainly not be smothering this Democratic stronghold with patronage. Institutions like Daley’s alma mater De La Salle were beginning to show the sons of Irish packinghouse workers the way to the white-collar world, but those enrolled in such schools were still a rather select group. If Irish Bridgeport was in the process of producing an illustrious cohort of political and business leaders, few growing up in Canaryville and Hamburg were very aware of it.