His first day on the job, Kaztauskis worked from six in the morning until seven in the evening and the next day from six to eight. His job was to push into a drain the gallons of animal blood that spilled out along the floor. The room was hot. The blood was hot. The foreman, whose pay depended on speed, walked up and down the line, pushing the men to work faster, faster. Or, as one packinghouse manager explained, “If you need to turn out a little more, you speed up the conveyors a little and the men speed up to keep pace.” One of Kaztauskis’s fellow workers had a different way of looking at it: “They get all the blood out of those cattle and all the work out of us men.”
A Swift & Company worker washing cattle carcasses on a disassembly line.
Gustavus Swift was pleased. With so much unskilled labor looking for work, he was no longer dependent on Johnny Joyce and his skilled butchers. But there were still a few tasks that required the skills of the master butcher. In recognition of this, Swift and his fellow meatpacking company owners kept them on as part of the expanded work force and even paid them at a higher rate than the unskilled men. But the skilled butchers were now a small part of a huge, mostly unskilled labor pool. The bosses controlled everything: hours, pace, and wages. Problem solved. As Chicago moved into the twentieth century, the golden days for Joyce and the other butcher aristocrats were over.
SEVEN
Parallel Universes
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the immigrants who worked for Swift and his fellow meatpackers lived in a group of neighborhoods that sat in a U shape surrounding the Union Stock Yard, together referred to as Packingtown. Blacks, most of whom did not work for Swift, coalesced in the narrow strip of land just east of the immigrants, forming the community that came to be known as the Black Belt.
Middle- and upper-class whites were happy to keep poor white immigrants out of sight, out of mind. One outsider said of the population: “Packingtown begins to seem like a little world in itself. You feel that here is a great mass of humanity, the kind that is hardest to manage, the easiest to inflame, the slowest to understand.” As for blacks, most whites preferred that all of them—the Barnetts and their fellow Refined as well as poorer folks—stayed among their own.
The western boundary of the Black Belt met the eastern boundary of Packingtown at Wentworth Avenue, presenting the opportunity for all sorts of cooperative interaction between the races: in stores, schools, parks, each other’s homes. Instead, the immigrants declared the border to be a “deadline” and treated any black person crossing over as an invader of their turf. Two worlds developed side by side, wholly separate.
The world of Packingtown was tough and poor, a collection of shanties and shops in the shadow of the Yard. The chimneys of Swift’s packing plant stood tall against the sky, belching thick smoke that spread over Packingtown like a blanket, smothering the community below in the stench of blood.
Most immigrant families successful enough to afford better—the doctors, lawyers, and businessmen—packed up and resettled in middle-class communities, usually with other families from the homeland.
Most of those who worked in the Yard, including the skilled butchers still employed by Swift and his fellow bosses, chose to stay put in Packingtown, a short walk from work. The quick commute was one of the small graces they could appreciate, as it gave them just that little bit of extra time after the quitting horn sounded. It also saved the pennies that would otherwise have paid their fare on the streetcar and instead could be used to buy a better cut of meat for Sunday dinner. Most important, it allowed them to get to work on a moment’s notice, should they suddenly be called up from one of the frequent temporary layoffs.
Foot traffic flowed through the main business arteries of Packingtown at all times of day: men disappearing into and emerging from one of the more than five hundred saloons on “Whiskey Row”; women visiting the grocer, the shoemaker, and the like; children chasing pigeons or rodents in the streets as they waited for their mothers to finish shopping.
Within the sanctuary of the saloons, white men of all ethnicities—including Irish, Poles, and Lithuanians—talked shop and made deals. The unemployed gathered to commiserate after an unsuccessful morning at the shapeup; the employed gathered on the way home after work, stopping to forget their cares for a little while at the end of a long day.
In the saloons, Democratic Irish “bosses,” many of them barkeeps, ruled as kings in their courts. Men of all backgrounds paid visits to these politicos, asking them for favors: to cut through red tape around a citizenship application, for instance, or to grease the wheels for approval of a pushcart license, or to cash their paychecks. In exchange, supplicants pledged their votes, helping the Democratic aldermen who filled the city council to fend off their Republican opponents. Riding to victory on these votes, the Irish politicians filled city jobs—policemen, firemen—with their fellow Irishmen, who in turn watched protectively over the Irish and eastern European communities. And so the cycle continued.
Street scene outside a Packingtown saloon.
Above the streets, the steeples of numerous Catholic churches jutted up across the Packingtown skyline. Each parish served a particular ethnic group. As one observer noted, “The Catholics of Chicago are ministered to in twelve different languages.” Mass at St. Bridget was in English, at St. Mary of Perpetual Help in Polish, at Holy Cross in Lithuanian. Each church had its own school and social clubs, affirming and maintaining the ways of the homeland, serving as the anchor for community in the new land. No-nonsense nuns ruled classrooms with an iron hand, passing on to the youngest girls and boys the discipline and knowledge they would need to get ahead in a prejudiced world.
Women were left out of the politics of the saloons and found their own roles as leaders under the watchful eye of the nuns or in the settlement houses that were not run by Catholics but provided much-needed social services and had the welfare of all immigrant families at heart.
The final authority for them all was vested in Chicago’s bishop. And, most years, that bishop was Irish, a circumstance that met with the general approval of all ethnicities. As one man remarked about the Irish bishop who led the Catholic church in Chicago from 1880 to 1902: “All are unanimous in proclaiming his wisdom and his fairness to each and every member of the Church.”
After a long day out in the world, families returned to their dilapidated homes. Johnny Joyce’s Irish compatriots dominated Bridgeport; the poorest crowded into the southern subsection of the neighborhood called Canaryville. Many of the newer immigrants from eastern European countries like Poland and Lithuania were relegated to the ramshackle houses just west of the Union Stock Yard in the neighborhood aptly called Back of the Yards. Bleak as the area was, there was no money for anything better; the low wages paid by Swift and his fellow packers kept the unskilled masses living in squalor.
The cramped interior of an immigrant home.
Men were worn down by the backbreaking grind of their work in the Yard. One longtime butcher described the emotional effects: “Generally when men are keyed up to the highest point of speed and endurance, something gives way and the remainder is characteristic and noticeable in all men who work in this manner. As a rule they are irritable, emotional and very sensitive . . . ever ready to resent an insult.”
Fathers were often too tired for much happy interaction with their families. One man lamented, “We punish our children until they become cowards and liars, and then we deplore their heartless ingratitude when we in turn become weak and helpless.” A drink with the guys was easier. “The presence of the saloons,” one observer commented, “may be largely accounted for by the absence of decent and cheerful home life.”
Children of Packingtown.
Men came home across the busy avenues to smaller dirt streets, through yards covered with rubbish, up broken steps, into dark, cramped rooms, usually no more than four rooms all told, shared by parents, several children, and a couple of boarders who were taken in to make ends meet. The day room was
usually furnished with a coal-heated stove, dining table, and chairs; the sleeping spaces, many without windows, included beds for family members if they could afford them, pallets lining the floor if they could not. Some people slept with guns under their beds to shoot the rats at night.
With so many people in such close quarters, when one person took sick, the rest fell like dominoes. Many children died of tuberculosis, bronchitis, or diphtheria. By 1909, one of every three babies in Packingtown died before age two.
In these dire circumstances, survival depended on specific, well-defined contributions from each member of the family. The men were the primary providers. In good times, when wages were up, the family might enjoy a little extra mutton on the table or a new pair of shoes. When wages were down or workers were laid off during slow seasons, the family was often not sure where the next meal was coming from.
Few married women worked outside the home, but their days were full of tasks every bit as necessary as their husbands’ to keep the family afloat. One female contributor to a journal reporting on issues important to laborers was unsparingly honest about these women: “They get up at 5 o’clock in the morning and never go to bed until 10 or 11 o’clock at night. They work without ceasing the whole of that time. . . . No sacrifice is deemed too great for them to make, and no incompetency in any branch of their work is excused.” Caring for the typical seven-person household of two parents, two children, and three boarders, there was oatmeal to boil, meat to roast; a table to set, clear, and clean; dishes to wash; mud- and blood-soaked clothing to scrub, hang to dry, mend, fold; groceries to bargain for; children to manage; sick patients to nurse; and “off the books” laundry and sewing taken in for a small fee. If time permitted, they might make their way to the local parish or a nearby settlement house to spend an hour sharing neighborhood news with other women. Worn and invisible, summed up by a Packingtown man as “bitter brooding mothers,” many women were angry at the world—their husbands, their children, but mostly Swift and his compatriots and anyone else they saw as making their lives more difficult.
A woman carrying wood. Women’s chores typically included heavy labor.
Since homes were too cramped for play space, children not in school found themselves shooed outdoors to join pickup play groups or scavenge the nearby dump. There they climbed up mountains of garbage, pulling out items their families might find useful—food, kindling, discarded furniture. The younger ones admired the older boys who strutted about so tough, and they jostled with their playmates for a chance to run errands for the gangs of young men they looked up to.
A pregnant woman rests her heavy sack against a barrel.
By the time they reached fourteen, many young people were pulled out of school and called upon to earn their keep as messenger boys, door openers, office girls, and seamstresses. Although it was understood that their earnings went into the family coffers, many pocketed a portion of their take, boys shelling out for an evening at the movies, girls treating themselves to indulgences such as fancy American hats, flat-out rejecting the old-country styles of their mothers.
Boys sometimes rebelled in darker ways. In the early 1900s, there were more than 1,300 known gangs with more than 25,000 members blanketing the city. The Murderers and the Blackspots were Polish; the Onions, the Torpedoes, and the So Sos were Italian; black gangs included the Wolves and the Twigglies; among the Jewish gangs were the Boundary Gang and the Black Hand Society; the Highbinders were among the Chinese gangs known as tongs. At the top of the pecking order, the Irish “social athletic clubs” were in a class by themselves, wielding a level of power that other gangs could only dream of.
Many of these Irish gangs were tied in with Irish politicians. The boys helped at election time, tearing down the Republican opponents’ campaign posters and standing over voters as they cast their ballots at the polls. In return, the sponsoring politicians provided the boys with a clubhouse and athletic equipment. Some clubs were all about sports and roughhousing. The Tri-Street Athletic Club played football, basketball, and baseball. Like all other gangs, they fought with their rivals, but as one member recalled, they were mostly “tomato fights, mud fights, and raids.”
Other clubs defended their territory with brutal force. Ragen’s Colts was one of the toughest of all. Organized in the first years of the 1900s, the club claimed a territory in the poverty-stricken Irish community of Canaryville, about one square mile in size, bounded on the west by the Union Stock Yard and on the east by the Black Belt. They guarded the deadline with deadly force. The local state’s attorney referred to the neighborhood as the training ground for “the Canaryville school of gunmen.”
The Colts were both admired and feared. Theirs was the Cadillac of clubhouses, sporting several parlors and a poolroom, a bounty of boxing gloves, baseball team jerseys, bats, and cleats, all paid for by their political patron, Frank Ragen. They were local sports heroes: knockout champions in the boxing ring, victors on the wrestling mat, conquerors on the football field and the baseball diamond, skilled enough to be matched up for an exhibition series of games against the professional Negro League’s American Giants in 1917. They were guardians of Irish community life: protectors of the poor and of young Irish girls who might be attacked by predators; defenders of the Catholic Church, throwing rotten food and folding chairs at those who spoke publicly against it. They sponsored social dances, Christmas parties, and Fourth of July picnics for thousands. As one man commented with admiration: “When the Ragens announce an entertainment it means an entertainment, and folks know it.”
This powerful gang also acted out a deadly mission to vanquish outsiders. Woe betide another gang or an oblivious youngster from a different neighborhood who happened to set foot in Ragen’s territory. Irish, Polish, Italian, Jewish, and most especially blacks—all were fair game. Ragens protected their turf—sometimes with fists, often with a barrage of bricks known as “Irish confetti,” sometimes with guns. They issued a warning to anyone who crossed their path: “We intend to run this district. Look out.”
Frank Ragen (left) sitting with the assistant state’s attorney Charles Case, and fellow Cook County commissioners John Maloney, Joseph Fitzgerald, and Albert Nowak.
The police of Packingtown, like the Colts, were protecting their community. Also like the Colts, the bread and butter of many Packingtown policemen was dependent on a good word from Frank Ragen or one of his cronies. Ragen made it clear that he thought of the Colts as “a force for good in the stockyards district.” The police got the message. Most of the time, when the Colts were at work protecting their turf, the local cops looked the other way.
Gang members, housewives, whiskey swillers, beat cops, politicians, and butchers: each had a role to play, an axe to grind, and a deep loyalty to their own in the community that was Packingtown.
Across the deadline, in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, the Black Belt community was growing. The black population that started as 3,691 people in 1870 stood at 44,103 in 1910, as a steady stream continued to arrive from the South. After a fire in 1874 wiped out the neighborhood where John Jones and many of the earliest black families had settled, most of the growing population had resettled a mile or so south in what came to be called the Black Belt. In the early twentieth century, many whites still lived in this area. But though a few blacks had their homes in various other neighborhoods of the city, by the early 1900s the Black Belt was the center of black community life.
On weekdays, most men and the working women dispersed in the early mornings to places of work that were too far from home to get to on foot. Almost all of the Respectables took the streetcar each day to the wealthy neighborhoods where they cooked and cleaned for the rich, or to the shiny new downtown buildings where they served as cleaning staff or waited tables.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the streetcar traveled up and down the Black Belt throughout the day, picking up passengers along the way, setting them down again at their destinations. Close
st to downtown, it passed through the vice district, home to the Riffraff and the Economically Dispossessed, where painted ladies walked the streets, unemployed men hung out on corners or gathered in bars, and wide-eyed, underfed children stared out of the cracked windows of dilapidated old buildings or played in the nearby garbage-strewn vacant lots, streets, and alleys.
Traveling south through the Black Belt, the streetcars passed by quiet streets where the Respectables lived in sturdy brick and stone structures mixed with a healthy sprinkling of frame houses and a few apartment buildings. Many of these homes had begun life as single-family dwellings and about half remained such, the others having been divided into doubles or triples. Though better equipped than the homes closer to downtown, many of these residences had few windows, so the rooms were dark and the air was stale. They were furnished with gas lamps instead of electric lights, and multiple families shared toilets located in hallways or even, in some cases, in backyards.
A Few Red Drops Page 4