City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (21 page)

Mrs. Fitzgerald sobbed: “Is there anything in the world that I can do for you?”

The answer she got was a sad nod of the head.

The glance of the two women then fell on the chair and doll, and they became silent.
⁶

Such manipulative reporting did little to quell Chicagoans’ increasingly strident calls for a rapid solution to the “moron problem.” And when on Friday afternoon another molestation report came in—of an attack by a fifty-year-old man on a nine-year-old girl—Deputy Chief Alcock, under enormous pressure, decided to take action. “I have ordered the arrest of all half-wits and subnormals, because they are a danger to every woman and girl in the city,” he announced to reporters. “They are responsible for almost all of the attacks that are reported to the police, and they should have been rounded up long ago and sent to institutions where they can be cared for.”
⁷

Precisely how these “subnormals” were to be identified was not specified by the acting chief. The order, in fact, was almost certainly unconstitutional, and would probably have failed to stand up under even the permissive law enforcement standards of the day. But the citizens of Chicago, roused by the spectacle of little Janet, would not be restrained by such legal niceties. According to the
Herald and Examiner
, an aura of mistrust now hung over the entire North Side, turning every unusual occurrence into a source of suspicion. The danger to the city’s children was obviously very real, and it was imperative that something—no matter how drastic—be done about it.
⁸

*   *   *

At the
Wingfoot
inquest—which reconvened on Friday at 11 a.m., after its one-day recess—the shouting began even before the first witness was called. The coroner’s jury of experts had requested to hear Captain Benjamin B. Lipsner, first Chicago superintendent of the U.S. Air Mail Service. Lipsner had allegedly spoken to injured mechanic Harry Wacker in the hospital shortly after the crash. According to rumors that had been sweeping the city for days, Wacker had made some alarming admissions to Lipsner at the time. But Goodyear’s attorneys were determined that the jury would not hear this testimony until pilot Jack Boettner had given his version of events. “What this man [Lipsner] has to offer is hearsay,” attorney Elias Mayer objected. “It is our idea to let Boettner tell first how the blimp was conceived and built, and then exactly what happened before and during the fire.”

At this there was much squabbling among lawyers and jury members, but Coroner Hoffman was adamant. “My jury of engineers has elected to hear Lipsner,” he said firmly. “He will testify now.”

When Lipsner finally took the stand, it was immediately obvious why Goodyear wanted to delay his testimony. “Wacker told me that he was nervous and scared throughout the flight,” Lipsner claimed. “He said that the blimp acted up from the time they started on the first trip from White City to Grant Park, and that he was mighty glad when they made the first landing.… He said that the motors were working badly—that they were throwing oil and sparks and that there was no water ballast in the ship.”

This was damning enough, but then Lipsner went on to describe the airship’s final flight: “Wacker said that Carl Weaver, one of the victims, had control of the blimp at the time of the accident, and that just before the machine went down he was continually calling [to Weaver], ‘Too much gas! Too much air! This isn’t right!’ ”

“He [also] told me,” Lipsner went on, “that Boettner jumped first. He himself warned the others to jump, and after seeing Norton, the newspaper photographer, jump, Wacker slid over the side with his chute burning. He told me he reached up to extinguish the flames with his hand.…”

This last detail finally gave Goodyear’s attorneys something to pounce on. “Fabrication!” Mayer shouted, as arguments broke out among the spectators.

“That man is a perjurer,” Henry Berger interjected, “and I will personally take the burden of proving it!”

Even members of the jury lost their tempers. “Produce the evidence,” one juror shouted, “and don’t waste so much time!”

Amid this upset, John C. Lowery, an assistant to State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne, threatened to clear the inquest room unless everyone settled down.
⁹

Order was restored after a few minutes, but Mayer wasn’t finished. “Wacker isn’t dead yet—he will get well,” the attorney asserted. “We will have him testify to the coroner and then Lipsner will learn that Wacker calls him a liar and a crazy man!”

He turned to Major C. H. Maranville, another expert witness. “He [Lipsner] said Wacker reached up to put out the flames of his chute with his hands. Major Maranville, is that possible?”

The Major shook his head. “No, it is not. The man hangs 40 feet below the supporting surface [of the parachute].”

Thus caught in an obvious absurdity, Lipsner stood up and refused to answer any more questions. He pointed out that he was not testifying as an expert witness—that he was merely reporting what Wacker had told him. He also said that he resented the Goodyear attorneys’ attacks on him. Coroner Hoffman, pounding his desk for order, agreed to excuse Lipsner for the time being, but asked that he remain available for the rest of the hearing.
¹⁰

With the inquest room still buzzing from this dispute, Assistant
State’s Attorney James O’Brien demanded that Jack Boettner be questioned next. The pilot, dressed in a light-colored suit and carefully knotted tie (while most present were in their shirtsleeves), exuded an air of unruffled coolness as he came before the juries. Answering questions in a steady, dignified voice, he testified that he had been an aviator since February 1917, and that he had never experienced a mishap of any kind before this. Proceeding systematically, he related precisely how the airship had been assembled, and described each of the three trips made that day. “We had no trouble during our flights on Monday,” he said. “Everything went smoothly. The ship did not roll much on the first two trips, but it was very sensitive to control.” When asked if the flights were experimental, he insisted that only the first one was, and that this initial trip had taken place entirely along the unpopulated shoreline of the lake. “After that flight,” he said, “I believed the ship perfectly safe.… I know that the engines were working perfectly and that there were no sparks or flames thrown from them.”

“When did you discover the dirigible was in trouble?” he was asked.

“About three minutes to five,” he said. He described feeling a jerk on one of the suspension cables holding the gondola. That’s when he looked around and saw a flame on the back of the balloon near the equator line. “I knew we didn’t have a chance,” he said calmly. “I said, ‘Everybody jump; that’s our only chance.’ They went over and the gondola dove down.” He insisted again that he was the last person to leave the ship, and that he remembered seeing Wacker four hundred feet below before he himself finally jumped.

When asked to explain Lipsner’s contradictory testimony, Boettner said that he didn’t believe Wacker had really made the statements attributed to him.
¹¹

As if to confuse the coroner’s juries even more, the remainder of the session was devoted to an examination of several eyewitnesses
who seemed to agree on very little. Major Maranville, who claimed to have watched the entire flight from Grant Park, asserted that the fire had started “on the right side [of the balloon] near the rear fins.” But the next witness—Irwin A. Phillips—insisted that the fire had started near the front, just above the blimp’s nose. Several other witnesses corroborated Phillips’s account. Just about the only thing everyone agreed on was that the flame was yellow and not blue, indicating that it was the bag that was burning and not the hydrogen gas inside. Even so, by the end of the day’s session, the two juries still had no idea what to believe.
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*   *   *

Over at the transit parleys, negotiations were moving ever closer to a breakdown. Emerging from a two-hour morning session, all sides seemed grim. “I can’t see that we’ve done a thing,” surface line president Busby grumbled. Maurice Lynch, his opponent on the labor side, agreed. “We may have something to say after our next conference this afternoon,” Lynch said, “[but] just now everything is up in the air.” Even utilities commissioner Patrick J. Lucey refused to be upbeat: “All I can say is that we haven’t reached a dead wall yet.”

As before, the main sticking point was the issue of the eight-hour day. The companies and the unions disagreed vehemently on how much a shortened workday would cost the car lines. According to the unions, management was exaggerating the costs in order to force through a nine-hour compromise—something that the car-men still considered unacceptable. Talk of a possible strike vote, to be taken on Saturday, was becoming more insistent.
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Some hope was offered by a personal intervention in the talks by Governor Lowden himself. The governor, perhaps hoping to take advantage of his rival’s absence, had come up from Springfield on Thursday evening, determined to sit down with everyone involved and hammer out an agreement. Starting at 4 p.m. at the Blackstone
Hotel, he began a series of closed-door meetings with negotiators to hear all sides of the dispute. And although he refused to comment on the outcome of the talks, prospects were looking somewhat brighter by Friday evening. “It is understood,” the
Herald and Examiner
reported, “that some progress toward conciliation was made, and for the first time there appeared a chance that an agreement might possibly be reached.”

In his private communications, however, the governor was decidedly less sanguine. “Frank telephones [to say] that the streetcar situation is very bad,” Mrs. Lowden wrote in her diary. Apparently, the governor had hoped to make short work of the negotiations and get away to the family farm at Sinnissippi, west of the city, for some rest and relaxation. But now he was forced to cancel those plans: “He cannot possibly come out here for the weekend,” his wife lamented.
¹⁴

Still more disturbing news was emerging from the Black Belt, where the racial tensions of early summer were showing signs of coming to a head. Carl Sandburg’s reports on “the Negro Problem” had been appearing in the
Chicago Daily News
for ten days now, and the situation they described was hardly encouraging. White newspaper coverage of the Black Belt always tended to be anecdotal, focusing on individual instances of alleged black dysfunction. But Sandburg’s articles were showing the problem in a different light, hinting that the true root of the troubles might have more to do with white attitudes than anything else. Though the poet was careful to point to a few areas of hope, his emphasis was on the blatant injustices that Ida Wells-Barnett had been complaining about for months—the rampant discrimination in jobs and housing, the inequalities in access to services, and the inept police response to repeated incidents of bombing and other interracial violence.

Sandburg’s article in Friday’s paper—“Deplore Unfounded Negro Crime Tales”—was especially blunt. Writing about the race riots that had convulsed Washington, D.C., for several days that
summer, he attributed the violent outbreaks to the prevailing atmosphere of mutual racial suspicion, showing how specious accusations of black crime against white women often served as cover for the “ulterior purposes” of hostile white agitators. Another article published in that same day’s
Tribune
, on the other hand, focused on black defiance and served only to intensify white paranoia. “The American Negro encountered no color line in France,” the article claimed. “Returned to the United States, he is determined never again to submit to race segregation in either society, business, or politics.” The reporter cited analysis in two leading French newspapers, which maintained that “the Washington riots do not represent sporadic outbreaks,” but rather were “ ‘feelers’ to test the strength and determination of whites and blacks, and a possible forerunner to widespread revolt.”

“The attitude of the Negro movement in America,” one of the papers had ominously suggested, “leaves it supposable that a general Negro upheaval may develop.”
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Clearly, this analysis could not be entirely dismissed as typical
Tribune
race hysteria. Blacks across the country—especially former soldiers—were indeed showing a greater willingness to assert their rights, and by violent means if necessary. “[Black veterans] will never be the same again,” W. E. B. DuBois had said in a speech at Chicago’s Wendell Phillips High School in May. “They are not the same men anymore.” This so-called New Negro sensibility was marked by a rejection of the accommodationist stance espoused by old leaders like Booker T. Washington. Of course, talk of a premeditated insurrection was nonsense, but as the riots in Washington, D.C., demonstrated, blacks were no longer willing to cower in the face of lynchings, mob attacks, and other instances of white hostility. Aggressive resistance had become common. Just a few days earlier, in a poem published in the journal
Liberator
, Claude McKay expressed the essence of this new defiance:

Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;

Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave
,

And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?