by Gary Krist
It is worse than a calamity, this race rioting. It is a deadly, ghastly scourge, a dire contagion that is sweeping through a community for no reason except that mob violence is contagious.
It is up to the cool-headed men of Chicago to settle the great difficulty. It is up to the serious-minded business men of the city to get together and find a solution to a problem which has become so serious.…
There is no time to be lost. Other matters must be put aside for the moment and a solution reached for Chicago’s greatest problem.
But cool heads seemed in short supply in Chicago just then. And as darkness approached, signs of brewing violence were multiplying once again. General Dickson, who made several trips through the South Side that day with Deputy Chief Alcock, returned in the late afternoon with an ominous assessment: “The condition is very grave,” he said. “I am afraid it is even more serious now than [on] Monday and Tuesday.”13
And indeed, the riot calls began flooding in shortly before nightfall. Shootings and clashes were reported in rapid succession throughout the South Side, forcing police—most of them utterly exhausted by now—to race from one disturbance to the next before any of them could be entirely put down. As feared, roaming white mobs were raging through the Black Belt and contested neighborhoods adjacent to it, setting fire to houses and shooting residents as they fled for their lives. By ten-thirty, 112 fire alarms had been sounded, coming in at such a pace that dispatchers could barely keep track of them. And on Wells Street, the orgy of debasement reached its absolute nadir. Several hundred white gang members—having shot up, ransacked, and set fire to the black-occupied homes up and down the street—celebrated with a riotous bacchanal. To music provided by a player piano stolen from a black home and set up on the street, they danced and sang in the flickering light of a dozen burning houses, drinking, firing their pistols in the air, and feeding broken furniture, toys, and clothing into the flames. It was a demonstration of mind-boggling barbarity—a spectacle from Hieronymus Bosch, played out on the streets of South Side Chicago, to the city’s lasting shame.
Mayor Thompson, closeted in his city hall office, had been receiving reports on the rioting all evening, but still he would not change his mind. It seemed that nothing could persuade him to give way on the issue of the militia. Insulated from the anarchy on the streets, in thrall to what now seemed like obviously misguided political instincts, he stubbornly refused to budge. The absurdity of the situation was blatant. In the greatest crisis Chicago had faced in decades, would the city’s fate be determined by the simple but profound hatred of two political enemies for each other?
But then one report came in that Thompson simply could not ignore. Although he would not go public with the specifics until the next day, the report was dire enough to convince the mayor—finally—that he had no choice. Assuming the report he had just received was accurate, if he didn’t act decisively now, the city could very well plunge into something like civil war.
At about 9 p.m., Big Bill called for his secretary to take a letter. In it, he officially requested that General Dickson immediately deploy the militia troops under his command “for the protection of life and property and the preservation of law and order.” At 9:15, he called the general into his office and handed him the letter. And by 10 p.m., hundreds of Illinois reserve militiamen were pouring out of armories all over the city and heading into the streets.14
RAIN BEGAN TO FALL as five armed militia regiments fanned out across the South Side of Chicago, bayonets gleaming in the drizzle. Moving with perfect discipline and (unlike the city police) operating under clear instructions and a strict chain of command, the troops quickly took up their positions in the combat zone, dispersing any lingering crowds and setting up machine guns on key corners. By the early-morning hours of Thursday, over 1,500 soldiers had been deployed, more than doubling the number of active peacekeepers on the streets. Automobiles were stopped, pedestrians and loiterers were searched, weapons and alcohol were seized. In accordance with standing instructions, troops fired their weapons only as a last resort.1
Sterling Morton, down at the Seventh Regiment Armory, was euphoric. All day he had been drilling his men in the parking lot adjacent to Comiskey Park, waiting impatiently for the call to action. When assembly was blown that evening, he and his men were hopeful but guarded; they cheered, but—remembering their previous false alarm—their cheers were not as loud as the night before. Then Major Macey, “in a voice you could hear all over the armory,” sang out for the squads to fall in, and they knew that their time had finally come. “[A] cheer went up that raised the roof off the place,” Morton later wrote, “and from that time until I pulled out with my company, about 10:30, the cheering was incessant.”
Moving out of the armory, they headed toward their assigned position at Forty-seventh and Wentworth in the Black Belt, clearing the streets as they went. “We met with no resistance,” Morton later wrote to his cousin, “but heard many unflattering comments on our appearance and [our] ancestors!” Per orders, they stopped all vehicles and relieved the drivers of any weapons and liquor found in their possession. But for the most part, he was surprised by how few people were on the streets. “The rioters are a white-livered lot of cowards,” he wrote. “They are all right when twenty of them jump one defenseless Negro, but when they saw the steel on the end of [our] rifles, they left P.D.Q. for parts unknown, and try as we would, we couldn’t get any fight out of them.”
Morton set up his company headquarters in a Greek restaurant on Wentworth Avenue and then took his men out on patrol into the surrounding neighborhoods. By his own admission, it was “a rather eerie experience.” All of the streetlights had been shot out, and since most blacks had left the neighborhood by then, the soldiers found themselves patrolling nearly deserted streets, maneuvering solely by the irregular light of burning wooden houses. The streets all around them were littered with clothes and broken furniture, shattered Victrolas, and coin-box telephones that had been smashed during the looting raids of the past few days. Morton may have missed seeing action in Europe, but here were scenes reminiscent of the Argonne, right in his own hometown.2
Other companies in other parts of the South Side encountered greater resistance from rioters, but the violence was generally sparse overnight, the combatants subdued as much by the rain as by the show of military force. By morning, as people emerged from houses seemingly unoccupied the night before, the relief in the Black Belt was palpable. “You soldiers don’t know how glad we all are you are here,” a black stockyards worker said to one of the patrolling doughboys. “We wish you had come on Monday. A lot of trouble might have been avoided.” Reacting to the sudden appearance of real authority in the district, members of the city’s wholesale grocers’ association began rushing truckloads of food into South Side neighborhoods that had been all but starved out for days. Even the police were relieved to see the troops, despite the fact that their presence constituted an admission of defeat for the local force. “Thank God!” one patrolman said when the troops appeared. “We can’t stand up under this much longer.” At the Cottage Grove station, another officer told a militiaman, “We are tickled to death to see you fellows come in; you have never looked so good to us before!” If nothing else, at least now there would be other targets besides policemen to draw the potshots of rooftop snipers.3
In fact, the soldiers did begin to draw some sniper fire. As the morning progressed, isolated skirmishes broke out between militia troops and scattered groups of rioters—in particular the white athletic clubs, which had enjoyed relatively free rein when the police were in charge. And in the stockyards district, where soldiers were attempting to escort black workers to their jobs, the mayhem erupted on Thursday morning with all of its previous intensity. In what resembled a wartime military action, scores of white stockyards workers tried to repulse the advancing legion of militiamen and black workers, engaging them in hand-to-hand combat. In the confusion, four black workers were separated from the troops,
chased down, and beaten. One of them—William Dozier, an employee at Swift and Company—was struck by a white worker with a hammer. As he tried to run away, other workers bombarded him with a street broom, a shovel, and other missiles. Finally, he was hit with a brick, which killed him. His was the thirty-seventh fatality of the riot, but it was to be the last for several days. By Thursday afternoon, the militia troops had effectively restored order, and the South Side—for the first time in days—seemed genuinely under control. “Peace has been established,” General Dickson proclaimed that afternoon. “There is no longer any reason why anyone, black or white, should be afraid to enter or leave the Black Belt.”4
At city hall, Mayor Thompson—ever the master of manipulating public opinion—was busy with his own damage control efforts, forging a narrative that would satisfactorily explain his performance during the crisis. At a dramatic morning press conference, he tried to depict his reluctance to call for troops as concern for the welfare of the Black Belt. But that caution, he said, was finally outweighed by signs of an imminent threat he just couldn’t disregard—namely, evidence of a massive, widespread conspiracy to set the entire South Side aflame. Citing reports from an informal intelligence network set up by city hall in the first days of the riot, he claimed that immediate and decisive action had been necessary to foil the arson plot, which involved both black and white gangs allegedly determined to burn each other’s neighborhoods to the ground. “We had information last night,” Thompson said, “that there was to be a general effort to start fires.… The information was definite and authentic and required action. The condition of buildings was such that a great conflagration would have started in no time. There had been almost no rain during the month of July and everything was as dry as tinder.” According to the mayor, the threatened conflagration would have brought “death to thousands and the loss of millions in property,” and would have resulted in widespread chaos “because of the frightened hordes rushing pell-mell in every direction.”5
Big Bill, of course, was possibly exaggerating the arson threat as a way of excusing his sudden turnabout on the deployment of the militia, but the story at least seemed plausible. Numerous fires had indeed been set over the previous twenty-four hours, and in some cases arsonists had even stretched cables across streets to prevent fire engines from reaching them. But it was probably the timely rain that had done the most to keep the fires under control, and there is some evidence that pressure from the big meatpacking companies, which had been losing money every day that rioting prevented their workers from reporting for duty, may have been the truly decisive factor in Thompson’s decision to finally use the militia. In any case, the mayor’s emphatic justifications notwithstanding, the impression remained among many Chicagoans that Big Bill had, for political reasons, simply waited too long to solicit the governor’s help. Had the troops been deployed on Monday, when they were first mobilized, much of the violence would likely have been avoided.6
The mayor’s exculpatory maneuvering continued that afternoon at an emergency meeting of the city council. Pointing out that he had repeatedly asked the council in the past for “more policemen, more vehicle equipment, a modern signal system, and a modern police administrative system,” he lodged a formal request for a permanent expansion of the police department. “In view of the existing conditions of public disorder,” he intoned, “I now urge your honorable body to take steps immediately to provide for the permanent employment of 2,000 additional patrolmen.… The crisis through which our city has passed during the last few days has brought home to our people the fact that the 3,564 patrolmen from whom the public expects police protection in this city [are] woefully inadequate.”
In an attempt to defend themselves, several of the aldermen pinned the blame on the city’s reformist Bureau of Public Efficiency, whose insistence on reductions in government expenditures had tied their hands. “The finance committee has spent many nights trying to find the money for more policemen,” Alderman John Anthony Richert asserted, “but the civic organizations have blocked our efforts.” Alderman Anton Cermak, head of the anti-temperance United Societies, tried blaming the city’s drys: “It was claimed [that] Prohibition would reduce the need for police,” he said, “but we needed more police last month and last year, and we will need them next year.” But it was the great antireformer himself—Alderman “Bathhouse John” Coughlin—who put it most bluntly: “Five years ago we were a peaceable city. Reformers spoiled it. Those were happy days. Now we’re discontented and everybody knows it!” The city of Chicago, in other words, had gotten along just fine until progressive crusaders came along and started meddling in city business with their campaigns against government spending and the evils of vice, graft, and patronage.7
Those alleged good-government types were also doing their best to use the crisis for their own political advantage. State’s Attorney Hoyne, doubtless sensing weakness in city hall, now promised an energetic prosecution and a full investigation of the politicians who allowed lawlessness to flourish in the Black Belt. The anti-Thompson newspapers were not silent, either. In an editorial entitled simply “Why?,” the Chicago Daily Journal called for a full explanation of the decision to wait until day four of the riot to deploy the troops. In an even more caustic editorial (under the headline “War in a Great City’s Streets”), Victor Lawson’s Daily News complained: “Chicago never had a more terrible warning of the absolute necessity of setting its house in order.… The citizens have allowed politicians and incompetents to sow the wind, and the community is now reaping the whirlwind.”
The bitterest remarks came from the Tribune. “Chicago is disgraced and dishonored,” the World’s Greatest Newspaper declaimed. “Its head is bloodied and bowed, bloodied by crime and bowed in shame. Its reputation is besmirched. Its fame is tarnished for years.”8
At least one person, however, seemed to have come through the situation with his reputation unscathed. “[Frank] is receiving great commendation for the way in which he is meeting this crisis,” Mrs. Lowden preened in her diary on Thursday. And indeed, the sterling performance of the state militia, which was now drawing praise from all quarters, was turning the governor into the hero of the hour. In buoyant public remarks that commended virtually everyone except the mayor of Chicago, Lowden tried to credit the guard troops with dampening the violence even before they were deployed. “I shudder to think,” he said, “what might have happened Tuesday if the lawless element … had not known that 4,000 men armed and equipped to deal with them stood ready to act.”9
The imminent settlement of the transit strike also promised to burnish Lowden’s public image. Union chief Mahon had by afternoon successfully convinced union members to reconsider the governor’s hard-won compromise plan. A new vote was to be held on Friday, and early signs indicated that the plan would really be accepted this time, allowing streetcars and elevated trains to start running again by the weekend. Governor Lowden’s handling of the entire situation was being praised by no less a figure than former president William Howard Taft, who was just then visiting Chicago to give a speech. For someone preparing to make a run for the presidency, this was very good publicity indeed.10
Amid further signs of a reaffirmation of civic authority (including the introduction of a city ban on “promiscuous aviation” and a proposed conference to discuss the creation of “an institution for morons”), Mayor Thompson moved again to reclaim some of the political high ground. That day, he held a signing ceremony in his office for the Chicago Plan ordinances that the city council had passed on the day of the Wingfoot crash. In the presence of commission chairman Charles Wacker and other city notables, the mayor was careful to remind his traumatized constituents of the great vision of Chicago’s future embodied in the plan—the lakefront parks and boulevards, the electrified train lines, the new railroad terminals, the ultramodern harbor district—and of the leadership role that “Big Bill the Builder” had played, and would continue to play, in its realization. Much of the city may h
ave been burning and in disarray on that July afternoon, but the bright dream of Chicago as “the Metropolis of the World” lived on undimmed.
Or so, at least, the floundering and somewhat desperate-sounding Thompson wanted everyone to believe. The reality of the situation, however, was that the city of Chicago was about to wake from its awful extended nightmare—a nightmare that had bared truths about the city that made a mockery of the high-minded ambitions of the Chicago Plan—and its citizens would soon be looking for someone to blame for it all. True, the rampant violence in the streets would taper off; the transit paralysis would lift; the city would even have the satisfaction of seeing its child predators punished and its downtown heart protected from technological daredevils streaking across the skies. But the horror of those two weeks in July would not soon be forgotten. Someone would have to be held accountable for the profound collapse of civil order that Chicago had just experienced; someone would have to pay. And there were many in the city determined to see that it would be Big Bill Thompson.11
SHORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT on Friday, August 1, a single streetcar on the Cottage Grove line left the barns at Eighty-eighth Street and headed northward toward the Loop. Other cars and elevated trains all around the city started soon after, to be met by large cheering crowds who had remained downtown to celebrate the end of the transit strike. As hoped, the unions had voted to accept the Lowden compromise plan, and the companies had acted quickly to get the system running again. By 5 a.m. on Saturday, all lines—except for a few that ran through the worst of the riot zones—would be on a normal schedule. After nearly four days of paralysis, the city of Chicago would finally be moving again.1
Down on the South Side, the uneasy peace enforced by the militia had persisted through most of the day on Friday. Scattered shots had been fired, but no one was killed and injuries were few. “There is a quieter feeling in Chicago today,” Mrs. Lowden wrote in her diary. “Frank has toured the riot zones several times and has visited the wounded militiamen in the hospital.” Even so, city officials were taking no chances. That afternoon, Chief Garrity ordered the temporary closing of all places in the riot district “where men congregate for other than religious purposes”—including poolrooms, cabarets, and (most significantly) athletic clubs. As a further precaution, Friday’s issue of the Chicago Whip, a radical black weekly, was suppressed when it was found to contain “sensational and alleged incendiary matter.” Riot patrols were reinforced, and one thousand new deputy sheriffs—many of them recently demobilized soldiers—were sworn in to assist the militia and police in the Black Belt. “I am greatly impressed with the complete mastery of the situation … that the police and military authorities have obtained,” Governor Lowden announced late in the day. “I do not mean that the trouble is entirely over, but it appears that the situation is controlled at present.”2