by Gary Krist
The governor’s caution proved wise, for the violence would still have one last eruption before it was over. In the early-morning hours of Saturday, just when authorities hoped that the worst had passed, a series of fires broke out in a mainly Lithuanian working-class neighborhood in the so-called Back of the Yards district. Sterling Morton’s company of militia, now stationed at a school at Fifty-fifth and Morgan about two miles away, got the call at four-fifteen in the morning. Morton had been on watch until four and had just been preparing to go to sleep when the alarm was sounded. “In twelve minutes I had the company loaded on the truck and [the] patrols in, sentries relieved by another company in the neighborhood, and was on the way to the fire,” he later wrote to his cousin. They were the first militia on the scene, and what they found was gruesome. Despite the recent rain, the fire had spread rapidly and catastrophically through the blocks of wood-frame houses, leveling a six-block swath of structures, injuring dozens of people, and leaving nearly 950 homeless. “The residents were very excited,” Morton wrote. Wild rumors about the cause of the fires were legion, and there was a “considerable amount of looting” going on. By midmorning, however, Morton and the troops had restored order and returned to their barracks at the school.
Fire department investigators immediately determined the cause of the fire as arson. Rioters had apparently doused the small homes with gasoline and set them afire, with their occupants still sleeping inside. By morning, according to the Post, “hundreds of scantily clad persons, weeping for terror or grief, sat on the blackened sidewalks among the tumbled belongings they had been able to save.” The scenes described were pathetic: “One woman clutched a battered coffeepot. A dazed man wandered about the streets trying to find a cup that would match the nicked saucer he held in his hand. Another walked about holding a derby hat while he wore another [on his head].”3
Responsibility for the blaze would never be firmly established, though there was no shortage of suspects. A few witnesses claimed to have seen several groups of black men setting fires with railroad gas torches. Some attributed the fires to labor radicals from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), while others thought the culprits might be Poles hostile to their Lithuanian neighbors. The police and the grand jury, on the other hand, decided that the fires were probably the work of the white athletic clubs; the mostly Irish gang members, it was said, blackened their faces before setting the fires in order to incite the eastern European stockyards workers (until now largely uninvolved in the rioting) against their black coworkers.
Whoever the perpetrators were, the fire they set that night did not lead to a reprise of slaughter on the streets, and, in fact, would mark the end of the major outbreak of violence that summer. Though conflicts would continue at the stockyards for several days more, the city’s anger seemed to be spent. And so the crisis, which had begun in the Loop on July 21 with a firestorm at the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank, ended in the early hours of August 2 with another firestorm in the Back of the Yards.4
Over the next few days, the battered city began—gradually, unsteadily—to recover. Now it was time to make sense of what had occurred, to investigate the causes, punish the offenders, and take measures to ensure that nothing like it would ever happen again. Naturally, everyone had a different theory about what had caused the disorder, and each theory was shaped largely by the interests and obsessions of those doing the theorizing. Organized labor, for instance, insisted on seeing the riot as a manifestation of the ongoing class war, the same war that had caused the transit strike and the other labor unrest of the postwar environment. “The profiteering meat packers of Chicago are responsible for the race riots that have disgraced the city,” the Chicago Federation of Labor’s (CFL’s) New Majority maintained. “At every opportunity, the packers and their hirelings fanned the fires of race prejudice between strikebreakers [that is, union-leery black newcomers] and organized workers … until the spark came that ignited the tinder.” Others blamed wartime Prohibition, attributing the violence to the denial of beer and wine to the working class while “the wealthy have their cellars full.” Church groups, on the other hand, found the root of the conflict in the vice and depravity of modern urban life. Citing “desecration of the Holy Sabbath in all kinds of amusements instead of divine worship,” one black preacher attributed the violence to “the fact that the masses have forsaken God.” One southern judge, visiting Chicago from Mississippi, had a different take: “You Northern folks don’t know how to get along with [blacks],” he told listeners on the steps of the Blackstone Hotel. “Down South we don’t make any attempt to treat them as equals, and they don’t get that idea in their heads. We know how to handle them. And we don’t have riots.”5
The U.S. Department of Justice, which launched an independent investigation of the riot, seemed determined to lay blame on its own villain of the moment—the ubiquitous Reds. “U.S. Seeks Hand of Bolsheviki in Race Riots,” the Tribune reported in its edition of Sunday, August 3. As their first witness, investigators called Ida Wells-Barnett. The pugnacious Mrs. Barnett—who had been interviewing victims in the Black Belt for days—summarily dismissed all notions that Red agitators had been stirring up black workers. As if explaining an obvious point to a group of children, she informed the investigators that blacks were merely reacting to the poor treatment they’d received since defending their country during the war. “They have been angered by the studied determination of the whites to make the Negro feel inferior,” she insisted. “Everything the Negro did in these riots was in self-defense.” The Chicago Defender agreed: “America is known the world over as the land of the lyncher and of the mobocrat,” the paper observed in an August 2 editorial. “[But] the Black worm has turned. A Race that has furnished hundreds of thousands of the best soldiers that the world has ever seen is no longer content to turn the left cheek when smitten upon the right.”6
This, of course, was not what the Bolshevik-obsessed feds wanted to hear. Nor was it the preferred riot interpretation of certain state and local officials. State’s Attorney Hoyne, who impaneled a special grand jury to indict the riot’s perpetrators, persisted in seeing blacks as the main instigators, despite the evidence of the final casualty toll (23 blacks versus 15 whites dead; 342 blacks versus 195 whites injured). Hoyne was also rehearsing his blanket condemnation of Mayor Thompson, his city hall associates, and the Black Belt political machine they controlled. “City Hall organization leaders, black and white,” he proclaimed, “have catered to the vicious element of the Negro race for the last six years, teaching them that law is a joke and [that] the police car can be ignored if they have political backing.”
And now even the local ethnic press was picking up the anti-Thompson refrain. In an editorial under the title “Whose Fault?” Dziennik Chicagoski, a Polish Catholic newspaper, fixed responsibility for the riot firmly on the mayor of Chicago, complaining of his long-standing policy of favoring blacks over whites in his Republican organization. According to this increasingly widespread version of events, the Thompson-Lundin machine, by creating an ethos of politically sanctioned lawlessness in the Black Belt, had laid the groundwork for an eruption of violence that, under the circumstances, was all but inevitable.7
Governor Lowden, doubtless aware of the dangers of taking on Thompson and Lundin too directly, was letting others pursue this particular line of attack. In his own public statements, he avoided any semblance of petty finger-pointing. Instead he focused (in classic presidential manner) on the grander, big-picture issues behind the city’s unrest—the need for ample, high-quality housing for all, the imperative of enforcing laws with “equal impartiality” toward blacks and whites, and the importance of controlling the postwar inflation that was playing havoc with local economies across the nation. Responding to requests from several different citizen groups, he announced the formation of an independent biracial commission to study the causes of the riot, with an eye to making recommendations on avoiding future outbreaks. Called the Chicago Commission
on Race Relations, the body represented a typical Progressive Era response to a problem—whenever any trouble arose, public officials were always eager to create a commission to study it—and while the CCRR would for the most part remain admirably above partisan politics, Lowden was careful to name to its board allies including Victor Lawson and Sears president Julius Rosenwald—both of them ardent enemies of Mayor Thompson.8
At city hall, meanwhile, the mayor and Fred Lundin were scrambling to find some way to spin the situation in their favor. But for the first few days after the end of the crisis, they seemed uncharacteristically cowed by the criticisms coming at them from all sides. Papers nationwide were taking the opportunity to bash Chicago and its leaders. Southern newspapers in particular seemed almost gleeful about the city’s comeuppance. The Memphis Commercial Appeal, for instance, claimed that Chicago’s leaders would “better understand [the race problem] if they get the viewpoint of the South, which is based on no insane prejudice, but on an experience running through half a century.… Mobs in the South vent their revenge only upon the Negro who has been guilty of some foul crime. The innocent seldom if ever suffer.” The Springfield (MA) Republican, in an editorial entitled “Chicago’s Shame,” made the point most succinctly: “Where a firm hand was needed, none was shown.” Even President Wilson, in an article in the Nation, was blaming the riot on “a failure of the civic authorities to act promptly and so prevent the loss of life.”9
In the face of this torrent of criticism, Thompson tried to fall back on his customary tirades against “the greed and arrogance of organized wealth.” Acting through the Republican, his ever-reliable publicity organ, the mayor tried to lay the blame on the doorstep of his usual enemies. “The recent regrettable disorders in Chicago, [which were] fortunately nipped in the bud by the firm and prompt action of Mayor William Hale Thompson, were largely the logical and inevitable outcome of the encouragement given to violence and mob rule by newspapers like the Chicago Tribune. Those who sow dragon’s teeth must expect to see armed men spring up, and no faked-up show of injured innocence and virtuous indignation, after the damage has been done, can absolve them from their responsibility.” But these familiar broadsides, however colorfully expressed, must have seemed stale even to Thompson’s allies by now. The mayor clearly needed a new issue upon which to exercise his demagogic brilliance—something that would enable him to divert attention from the disgrace of the twelve-day crisis and focus criticism somewhere other than the mayor’s office.10
It wasn’t long before the perfect issue arose. Shortly after the end of the transit strike, the mayor and his associates were shocked, shocked to learn something that any attentive newspaper reader would have known for days—that is, that a likely consequence of Governor Lowden’s compromise wage plan would be a 40 percent hike in transit fares. The higher fares, Thompson “discovered,” had been promised to the transit companies in order to offset the cost of employee wage increases. If the state commission approved the increases, then, the governor of Illinois—despite his chiding rhetoric about the spiraling cost of living—would arguably be responsible for raising transit costs by almost half.
The mayor and Lundin quickly went into conference with corporation counsel Samuel Ettelson to determine what could be done to fight—or at least appear to fight—the fare hike. With the city out of immediate physical danger, pocketbook issues would again become urgent in the public mind. An issue like the fare hike could be just the thing to undermine the governor’s rising reputation and make the mayor once again look like the champion of the average, hardworking Chicagoan.11
Governor Lowden, seemingly unperturbed by hints of these backstage machinations, decided on Saturday to take advantage of the waning crisis to retreat to Sinnissippi, his country estate outside the city. Praising the people of Chicago for their “admirable patience throughout the entire strike ordeal,” and expressing his belief that the riot situation was “under control in the hands of the reserve troops and police,” he left the Blackstone Hotel in his chauffeur-driven car at six forty-five on Saturday evening. When he arrived at Sinnissippi four hours later, his wife found him “very tired, of course, but not as worn-out as I had feared.” But Lowden’s rest would last only a day. After spending most of Sunday in bed, he would drive back to Chicago on Monday morning “to resume his trying duties in these serious times.”12
It would be an even more trying week in Chicago than the governor or his wife could imagine.
ON THE MORNING of Monday, August 4—as Governor Lowden was being driven back to the city in the punishing ninety-degree heat—a city hall lawyer named Chester E. Cleveland appeared before the Illinois Public Utilities Commission and made a startling announcement. Mayor William Hale Thompson, Cleveland said, was officially putting the IPUC on notice: If they went ahead and approved transit fare increases in accordance with the Lowden plan, the City of Chicago would be forced to immediately terminate existing traction franchises and seize control of all streetcar and elevated train lines within its boundaries. Cleveland insisted that any fare hike enacted without the consent of city officials would clearly be in violation of a 1907 ordinance limiting fares to five cents a ride for a twenty-year period, making the governor’s deal with the traction chiefs both unethical and illegal. If necessary, moreover, the city would call for a full investigation of the process by which the increases were agreed to, and would pursue indictments against all of those responsible on charges of conspiracy.1
This was, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of a municipal insurrection. And it wasn’t long before the rebel general himself was on the attack. Firing off a telegram to the governor, Mayor Thompson demanded a full report containing the “secret record” of the commission’s closed-door deliberations in the days before the end of the strike. This request, of course, was pure bravado. As one of the commissioners later remarked, “The Mayor could have ascertained that no such written report had been made by the commission if he had seen fit to inquire here.” But the move, however disingenuous, did succeed in commandeering the public’s attention. And over the next few days—as the commission hearings went on—Big Bill rose to new heights of demagoguery. Calling the fare hike a “vicious public holdup,” he loudly insisted that the alleged report would show that “corporate cooties” had set out to rob the poor by breaking “solemn contracts with the people.” In alliance with the governor and his commission of “toadies,” they had schemed to pick the pockets “of shop girls, washerwomen, and scrub women” to preserve returns on their obscenely overvalued capital shares. “What do the people of Chicago think,” he asked, “when they pay their added fares and realize that they are contributing to dividends on over $75,000,000 in watered stock, and to the upkeep of traction officials drawing salaries from $40,000 to $60,000 a year and who hold utter disregard for the public welfare?” This outrage, however, would not be allowed to stand, because Big Bill would not give up on the five-cent fare. “The people of Chicago may rest assured that their mayor will fight to the last ditch this latest attempt to plunder the people.… I so promised in my mayoralty campaign, and my word is good.”2
Blindsided by the vehemence of these attacks, the governor could only respond with dry statistics and expert opinions showing that the fare hikes were both justified and legal. And when, in defiance of the mayor’s threats, the commission issued a temporary order allowing fares to rise on August 8, the battle was on. Thompson responded by filing a petition with the Circuit Court to reverse the commission’s order and return to the five-cent fare. To the governor’s consternation, the petition was granted, but then was almost immediately overturned by the Illinois Supreme Court, which held that the commission was legally entitled to alter the terms of the 1907 ordinance. To this the Thompson forces had an answer, too. If the transit companies had the right to break their long-standing contracts, Cleveland announced, then the court must logically agree that the city had the same right. Therefore, the Corporation of Chicago would scrap all existing t
ransit franchises, legally impound any fares collected above the five-cent limit, and seize control of the lines under a public-ownership scheme to be presented by the mayor at some future date.3
This, of course, was a recipe for fiscal disaster, given the state of the city’s finances, but the free-for-all was having the desired effect. “When you pay seven cents today for a surface line ride or eight cents for a ride on the ‘L,’ ” the Daily Journal advised in an August 8 editorial, “be sure to thank Governor Lowden and his public utilities commission for the ‘blessing’ thus conferred upon you. They are responsible, and you want to remember it.… A grievous wrong has been done to the rights and liberties of the city.” Outraged by the size and high-handedness of the fare hike, thousands of commuters began to boycott the transportation lines, walking to work rather than “digging up” the higher fares. “To blazes with your robbing system,” one passenger shouted when a streetcar conductor asked for the extra two cents. “Gimme back my nickel. I’ll walk.”4