City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (28 page)

Streetcars provided no safety whatever. Cars would be stopped by the mobs, who would yank the trolley assemblies from the overhead wires, immobilizing the cars and allowing rioters to attack their trapped black passengers at will. One crowd of 300 to 400 whites, including some children, stopped a Forty-seventh Street car in just
this way after seeing several blacks inside. The white passengers got off, allowing several dozen rioters to climb aboard and start beating the five black men who remained. The five managed to get out of the car through the windows, but they were chased in all directions. One of them—John Mills—was hit in the back with a brick and knocked over. Before Mills could get up and continue running, a white youth overtook him and hit him in the head with a two-by-four, fracturing his skull. The other four black passengers were also brutally beaten, though none fatally.

Other similar incidents occurred on streetcars at Forty-seventh and Halsted, at Root Street and Wentworth Avenue, even as far away as Forty-sixth and Cottage Grove, east of the Black Belt. One car on the Thirty-ninth Street line was stopped when a stalled truck was discovered blocking the tracks. Several white men, who had apparently parked the truck there for this very purpose, forced their way into the car and began pummeling several black passengers with iron bars. Escaping from the car, the victims attempted to run east to Halsted, where several officers were stationed. Most managed to get away, but one, Henry Goodman, was tackled on the street and beaten so badly that he would die several days later.
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Just what the Chicago police were doing to prevent this mayhem is not entirely clear. With most of the force on duty in the Black Belt, police coverage in the white neighborhoods to the west was sparse. But even those officers who were present seemed remarkably ineffective. In some cases, their apparent passivity may have been intentional. The neighborhoods’ “athletic clubs,” widely regarded as the active instigators of most of the mob violence here on their own turf, were typically well connected with local politicians and enjoyed a kind of de facto police protection; much evidence exists that patrolmen from the Yards station “were all fixed and told to lay off on club members.” Whatever the explanation, gangs seemed able to operate with little danger of being arrested or even having their rampages
curtailed by police interference. Significantly, one of the few arrests made as a result of these Monday streetcar raids was of a black man, Joseph Scott, who defended himself on an Ashland Boulevard streetcar by fatally stabbing his white attacker, Nicholas Kleinmark, with a pocketknife.
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But Kleinmark was hardly the only white casualty in Monday evening’s rioting. In the Black Belt, where violence broke out shortly after the disturbances in the stockyards district began, blacks were defending themselves—and, in some cases, attacking unprovoked—with a vehemence unheard of in any previous American race riot. In late afternoon, an armed mob of some three hundred to four hundred gathered at the intersection of Thirty-fifth and State Street, prepared to repulse a rumored invasion of the Black Belt by “an army of whites.” Any lone white man seen in the district was attacked mercilessly. Casmere Lazzeroni, a sixty-year-old Italian peddler, turned his banana wagon onto State Street at about 5 p.m. and found himself in the middle of an angry mob. As he tried to escape, four black youths chased him down the avenue, throwing stones until they managed to grab hold of the wagon, climb onto it, and stab the man to death with pocketknives. Shortly thereafter, Eugene Temple, the owner of a State Street laundry—a business that employed many blacks from the neighborhood—was jumped by three men while getting into an automobile with his wife and another young woman. His assailants robbed him and stabbed him to death before disappearing into the crowds, all while the two women watched in horror.
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As evening approached, carloads of armed whites began making forays into the Black Belt, speeding down the avenues and firing at random into crowds. In response, black gunmen took up positions on roofs, fire escapes, and upper-floor windows to shoot back. Sometimes the masses on the street were thick enough to stop the passing automobiles, so that their occupants could be pulled out of the vehicles and beaten or stabbed. Other cars were fired on by
snipers—whether or not they had obvious hostile intent. Police were also targets. Journalist Edward Dean Sullivan, touring the area in a motorcycle sidecar for the
Herald and Examiner
, watched as a patrolman was shot right in front of him by a sniper. As the man fell to his knees on the sidewalk, Sullivan’s driver suddenly returned fire (the reporter didn’t even know he was armed) and then turned the motorcycle into an alley.

“Instantly [we] discovered it was the wrong alley,” Sullivan later wrote. “About twenty Negroes—waving, cursing, and obviously drunk—were to be seen about halfway down the alley-course before us. One, with his back toward us, fired a shot in the air. They discovered us even as my driver, swinging the car backwards, whirled out of the alley, turned abruptly, and started back up State Street.”

As they sped away from the trouble, Sullivan saw another sniper taking aim at them from a rooftop. Someone then hurled a shovel head at them, but the driver managed to veer around it as it clanged to the pavement in front of them. Finally, they reached a group of police at Twenty-fifth Street. Sullivan reported the downed patrolman, but officers claimed they already knew all about it. “Take my advice,” a police captain told him. “Get that machine out of here as fast as you can.”

Sullivan and his driver were more than willing to obey.
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The Thirty-fifth Street crowd had by 8 p.m. grown to number several thousand and now extended east to Wabash Avenue, where armed blacks were skirmishing with a contingent of sixty to one hundred policemen on foot and a dozen more on horseback. Rumors had been circulating for hours that a white man had shot a boy on the street from the fourth-story window of the Angelus, a mostly white apartment house on the corner. Police had searched the building and failed to produce either a weapon or a gunman, but the mob wasn’t satisfied and threatened to storm the building. The standoff grew increasingly antagonistic until, shortly after eight, a brick flew from
somewhere in the crowd and hit a policeman. The badly outnumbered officers closed ranks and suddenly began shooting back with their revolvers. Chaos resulted as panicky rioters scrambled to get out of the intersection. The gunfire went on for almost ten minutes. Two men were shot and killed as they tried to escape into the entrance of the Angelus. More shots killed one man and wounded several others who tried to take shelter behind a trestle of the L tracks. Then gunfire erupted down the block at State Street. Rioters began shooting at a mounted policeman, who returned fire. Fleeing crowds left behind more wounded and a fourth man dead.
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Any semblance of law and order in the Black Belt had by now evaporated. Police headquarters at the Stanton Avenue station was flooded with riot calls from all points in the district and beyond. Ever-larger white gangs were reported to be marching into the contested border neighborhoods and beating any blacks they could find. Often police would rush to the scene of an incident only to find abandoned victims bleeding, unconscious, and/or dying in the streets.
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Back at city hall, Mayor Thompson was facing pressure from all sides to take extraordinary measures to control the mayhem. Several aldermen from the city council urged him to suspend search-and-seizure laws in the Black Belt so that police could confiscate rumored weapons caches. Thompson, always conscious of his black support base, refused. He did order the mandatory closing of all South Side pool halls, saloons (now serving only near beer, at least in theory), and other gathering places. But for most of the day on Monday, he and his administration tried to downplay the situation on the South Side. Comptroller George Harding, after touring the riot districts, insisted that accounts of rampant bloodshed had been exaggerated, and that no special action was required. “I think that if the police department does its duty, the outbreaks will not be serious.”
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As more and more reports of the evening’s escalating violence
reached city hall, however, Thompson realized that police might soon be overwhelmed. Acceding only partially to calls from the newspapers and civic leaders to send in the militia, he reluctantly telegraphed Lieutenant Governor John G. Oglesby in Springfield, requesting that the troops be mobilized but only held “in readiness in one of our armories, to make them quickly available for the enforcement of the law when the necessity demands it.” Over the next few hours, 3,500 troops—from the Illinois National Guard and the Illinois Reserve Militia—were sent to the city. Even as the violence raged, however, the mayor refused to deploy them on the streets. Instead, they were forced to merely stand by, waiting for an order to act.
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Some of the militia troops had been eagerly awaiting the call since the beginning of the violence and were frustrated by the mayor’s decision. Sterling Morton, thirty-three-year-old scion of the Morton Salt family, was an officer with the First Regiment of the Illinois Reserve Militia. Refused on physical grounds for overseas service during the war, he had instead joined a militia training unit, part of a volunteer domestic security force set up by Governor Lowden after regular National Guard regiments were sent to fight abroad. Keen to do his part, Morton had trained hard, drilling with other volunteers (in donated uniforms and using rifles with no ammunition) at the Municipal Pier through the frigid winter of 1917–18. After the Armistice was signed in November 1918, many of the other troops quit, but Morton, realizing that the need for a reserve militia “was even greater now that the controls and restraints imposed by the war were lifted,” stayed on. Eventually, his diminished unit was combined with several others to become M Company of the First Regiment. Just a few weeks before the outbreak of the riot, they had been sent to nearby Camp Logan for a week of intensive training, and now the men were more than prepared to restore order on the streets.
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For Morton, a member of one of the city’s most prominent families, the spectacle of a Chicago at war with itself must have been
particularly painful. Grandson of J. Sterling Morton (Grover Cleveland’s secretary of agriculture and the creator of Arbor Day) and son of Joy Morton (founder of the famous Chicago salt company), he had been born and raised in the city and had quickly become a young lion in its commercial and political elite. In 1910 he had married Sophia Preston Owsley—the granddaughter of Thompson’s Democratic predecessor as mayor, Carter H. Harrison—and began working for the family business. Four years later, when the company decided it needed a new logo, it was Sterling Morton who chose the now-ubiquitous drawing of the girl with an umbrella spilling salt (“When It Rains, It Pours”), because the girl made him think of his three-year-old daughter, Suzette. Since then, he had left Morton Salt to become president of the Morkrum Company, a firm that made automatic printing telegraph machines. But while he might have been a chief executive in the office, in the Illinois Reserve Militia he was still a lowly adjutant, and so he had to wait for orders from his superiors just like any other militiaman.
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The waiting on Monday had been maddening. Morton had seen the crowds around the Twenty-ninth Street beach on Sunday evening, when he was returning by train from a company picnic south of the city, but he hadn’t known what it was all about until he saw the next morning’s papers. Shocked by what he read, he left the office immediately and reported to Colonel Lorenzen, his superior officer, for duty. By four-thirty in the afternoon, however, no call for the militia had come, so the colonel sent Morton and the rest of the men home. That was just two hours before Mayor Thompson sent out his request for the troops to be held “in readiness.” Contacted at home, Morton quickly bolted some dinner and drove back downtown to the mobilization point at Michigan Avenue and Van Buren Street in the Loop.

The scene there was hopelessly disorganized. Some of the militiamen had mistakenly been told to gather at the Old Eighth Regiment
Armory, and so were heading unarmed and in small groups straight into the riot zone—a sure recipe for disaster. Even those troops who gathered at the correct place in the Loop, while equipped with rifles and bayonets, had no ammunition. Frustrated, Colonel Lorenzen instructed Morton to commandeer a Yellow Cab and retrieve some cases of ammunition that were being stored at a South Side office building. Then he was to proceed farther south to the L station at Fortieth Street and Indiana Avenue to deliver some of the ammunition to Major Macey, who was in charge of another force of men down there. On the way, Morton was to pick up or redirect any straying militiamen he encountered heading for the Old Eighth Armory.
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Finding a cab was a task in itself. Morton tried to get one outside the Chicago Club, but the taxi starter there told him that no cabs were being sent south of Twelfth Street because of the rioting. Finally, one driver came up to him. “Get in my cab,” he said. “It’s just around the corner and I will take you anywhere you want to go.”

They headed into the riot zone. Morton was armed with just a .45 (the driver also had a small pistol), and when he saw what was going on in the streets, he felt outgunned. “I saw sights that I never shall forget,” he later wrote to his cousin. Gunfights raged between rioters and police, and once, after seeing a man firing from a narrow passageway between two buildings, Morton shot back at him, though this was arguably against orders. On Thirty-fifth Street, they picked up a wandering militia private who at least had a rifle; Morton issued him some cartridges and felt a little safer.