City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (29 page)

Even after they got to the L station and delivered the ammunition, however, they were not out of danger. As Morton spoke with Majors Macey and Parker at the street-level entrance to the station, a car came careening around the corner and several shots were fired from inside. No one was hit, but Macey and Parker wisely decided that they should perhaps continue their discussion on the station platform at track level, well above the street.

It was to be all the action Morton saw that night. Though he and the other militiamen waited eagerly for the command to engage with the rioters, none ever came. Finally, he was ordered to collect the roughly one hundred men who had gathered at the L station, issue them ammunition, and then march them in columns to the Seventh Regiment Armory near the White Sox ballpark. It was a journey of about a mile, and it went off without incident, the men marching with fixed bayonets as the faithful Yellow Cab accompanied them (the driver’s meter running all the time). At the armory, there was no commissary or sleeping facilities, so the men were forced to simply bed down on the drill floor and hope that the order sending them into action would come tomorrow.
²³

It was a wrenching situation, for the violence in and around the Black Belt only got worse as the evening progressed. “The South Side is a seething cauldron of hate,” the
Evening Post
reported in its late edition. And the police, if anything, seemed to be making matters worse. Long-standing hostility between blacks and the largely Irish-American police force was manifesting itself in grisly confrontations throughout the riot districts. Horace Jennings, a black man lying wounded on a street after an encounter with a white mob, was approached by a patrolman who he thought was going to help him. “Where’s your gun, you black son of a bitch?” the officer allegedly snarled. “You damn niggers are raising hell.” The officer then hit Jennings over the head with a nightstick, knocking him unconscious.
²⁴

This was not an isolated event. According to many witnesses, police were often “grossly unfair” in their conduct toward the rioters, frequently arresting black victims while letting their white assailants go free. Some police stood by idly even as blacks were beaten by mobs a few yards away. Nor was this kind of blatant bias entirely one-sided. In the warlike atmosphere that had developed on the South Side, many blacks regarded any white person in uniform,
regardless of his actions, as an enemy and therefore a legitimate target for their bricks, stones, and bullets.
²⁵

As in any war situation, there was no such thing as an innocent bystander. In her diary, Emily Frankenstein wrote anxiously of her father’s near escape when, returning from a house call at the Vincennes Hotel on Monday evening, he found himself in the midst of the clashing mobs on Thirty-fifth Street. One man was shot in the stomach by a stray bullet while sitting at the dinner table in his Wentworth Avenue apartment. In one street brawl, a passing reporter for the
Defender
, Lucius C. Harper, had to dive to the ground and play dead while police bullets whizzed past his head and shattered glass fell all around him. A man behind him was shot in the neck and fell over the reporter’s prone body. “Blood from the fatal wound trickled down the pavement until it reached me,” Harper wrote, “but I dreaded making a move.”
²⁶

The anarchy on the South Side continued well past midnight and into the early-morning hours. By 3 a.m., the day’s death toll had reached 17, with an additional 172 wounded—far higher than the totals for the first day of the riot. But the worst chaos was yet to come. Contrary to all expectations, the late-night meeting of the transit workers, which had been held despite the widespread violence, had ended disastrously. Defying their leaders, union members had rejected the compromise wage plan that Governor Lowden had worked so hard to broker. Instead, the membership voted to declare an immediate system-wide strike. So at 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning, every streetcar and elevated train in Chicago ground to a stop, leaving the city paralyzed at its most vulnerable moment.
²⁷

T
HE EXODUS STARTED
before dawn. With all mass transit except the suburban steam lines idled by the strike, hundreds of thousands of Chicago workers had to get to work on Tuesday morning by whatever means they could find. Desperate for transportation, commuters were hitching rides on laundry vans, bicycles, produce trucks, ice wagons, furniture drays, specially chartered riverboats, and virtually anything else that moved. Long-disused surreys and buggies were brought out of storage; old cab horses were recalled from retirement; flatbed trucks were refitted with kitchen chairs to be reborn as jitneys. Price gouging was rampant. “I stood up in a truck all the way from Garfield Park and paid 15 cents for it,” a female clerk complained to a reporter, “but I’m here.” One boy on the West Side apparently mistook the motley procession of vehicles for a circus parade. “Oh mother, here comes the lion’s cage,” he allegedly cried, pointing to a department store truck carting a load of exasperated women to their jobs.

In the Loop, the traffic jams were epic. With no one to control the flow of vehicles, the result was chaos in the streets. “Never in the history of the city has such a condition prevailed,” one traffic official announced. “Every one of 175 crossing policemen and 75 mounted policemen are detailed to the South Side race riots. Even the Chicago police reserve has been pressed into riot duty. The situation is entirely in the hands of the public. The people must be tolerant.”
¹

At least half a million other commuters, afraid to venture into
the streets, just stayed home. Virtually no one—black or white—showed up for work at the stockyards. Twelve hundred black municipal employees were officially urged to stay off the job. This proved to be a wise move, for the night’s racial violence did not taper off at first light, as it had on Monday. The
Evening Post
described the mayhem: “Snipers, white as well as black; mobs armed with stones and bricks; arson gangs—all these have been active since daybreak in the face of the police department’s utmost efforts to maintain order.” Some workers who did decide to report to work paid with their lives. Edward W. Jackson, heading on foot to his morning shift at a South Side factory, was beaten to death at Fortieth and Halsted by a group of five white men. Walter Parejko and Josef Maminaki, laborers for the Grand Trunk Railway, were shot by three black youths in front of a Dearborn Street store. Thanks to the beefed-up police presence in the Black Belt, the huge mobs that had proven so unmanageable on Monday night were successfully dispersed on Tuesday, but smaller, more mobile groups were still on the rampage. One report cited a group of twelve armed black soldiers—all former members of the Old Eighth Division—prowling the South Side, shooting at any white faces they saw. The overall outlook was grim. “This is the most serious problem that has ever confronted the police department in Chicago,” Deputy Chief Alcock told his men at the Stanton Avenue station that morning. “We need all the determination we can muster.”
²

The most ominous development of the morning was the spread of the violence beyond the confines of the South Side. With over four-fifths of the police force on duty in and around the Black Belt, much of the rest of the city was virtually unprotected. According to one estimate, the entire Loop district on Tuesday morning was being patrolled by a total of three officers and one sergeant. Rioters were quick to take advantage of the situation. Early on Tuesday, several white mobs, turned back from the Black Belt by police, headed north
and began terrorizing the downtown business district, pulling black workers from railroad stations, restaurants, and factories and beating them on the streets. A group of five hundred, including many soldiers and sailors, stormed the Palmer House—one of the most luxurious hotels in the city—hoping to take its black kitchen employees. By noon, two black men had been killed—one shot, one stabbed—as they tried to escape the marauding mobs through traffic-choked streets, while hundreds of shocked bystanders looked on.
³

For many, these Loop raids were finally bringing home the extent to which the city was out of control. “The race riots are spreading,” Governor Lowden’s wife wrote in her diary that day, “and a situation of incredible horror may develop at any moment!” Many business owners in the Loop, appalled that the riot had come to their own doorsteps, were now calling for the imposition of martial law.
⁴

At midday, Mayor Thompson and Governor Lowden held a meeting at the Blackstone Hotel to discuss the situation. The governor had already been on his way to Nebraska when a telegram reached him en route, bearing news of the strike vote and the worsening of the riots. Taken by surprise, he had gotten off his train in Burlington, Iowa, and commandeered a special train back to Chicago, arriving at 5:30 a.m. Now he was urging cooperation “at all levels of government” to address the crisis. “I cannot say who is responsible for this situation,” he told reporters before the meeting, “[but] it is here.… If we all keep our heads and cooperate, we will handle the situation, as a large majority of the people stand for law and order.”
⁵

Exactly what occurred in the undoubtedly tense meeting between these two foes is unknown. According to newspaper reports, the mayor and the governor were given an upbeat assessment of the situation by Brigadier General Frank S. Dickson, head of the militia, and Charles Fitzmorris, Thompson’s private secretary, who together had toured the riot districts that morning. This report seemed to give both chief executives the excuse they needed to avoid a confrontation on
the issue of the National Guard. Thompson was clearly reluctant to cede control of the city by calling in the troops, and Lowden was just as clearly reluctant to clash with the man who would head the Illinois delegation at the upcoming Republican National Convention. And so they decided to hold off on any deployment of troops, at least for the moment. Four regiments of the militia thus remained idle at armories across the city as, just outside, the killing in the streets went on.
⁶

At a news conference after their meeting, both men expressed optimism that the worst of the crisis was over. “Mayor Thompson and I are cooperating heartily and shall continue to do so,” the governor announced. “We will keep in touch with each other in order that all forces of law and order may be brought to bear on this situation.”

Turning to General Dickson, the governor said, “Now, General, tell these gentlemen of the press what you found.”

“We found the situation much improved,” Dickson replied. “The commanding officers reported a great change in feeling since last night and an improved outlook and disposition on the part of the people generally. All the commanding officers we talked with felt they had the situation well in hand, and did not anticipate any recurrence of the deplorable events of last night.”

“Will you keep the troops under arms at the armories?” one reporter asked the governor.

“Certainly,” he replied. “We will take no chances and be prepared for any event.”

Mayor Thompson, apparently dismayed that Lowden was getting all of the attention, stepped in at this point. “There is one thought that I want,” he blurted. “I want to see that all the citizens of Chicago get thorough protection and a square deal all around—”

“That is absolutely right,” the governor said, interrupting him right back.

The conference broke up soon after, with the two “heartily cooperating” chief executives heading back to their separate command
posts at city hall and the Blackstone Hotel. As reporters prepared to leave, Chief Garrity told them that there was nothing to worry about. “Things are quieting down steadily,” he said. “The police have [the situation] as well in hand as it could possibly be.”
⁷

But the absurdity of this last statement became more and more obvious as the day progressed. At around noon, even as the city and state officials were uttering their reassurances, 150 black prisoners started a melee at the county jail. The prisoners had been exercising in the jail’s interior bull pen when a guard opened the door to allow two inmates to see their lawyers in the visiting room. Scores of prisoners instantly rushed the door, knocking over the guard and escaping into the corridor outside. They proceeded to run rampant through the jail. Some tried to force their way through doors leading to the street. Others ran to an older part of the jail where white prisoners were being held. They smashed cots and tables in the cell blocks and used the splintered debris as clubs to attack guards and other prisoners. Two hundred policemen, guards, deputy sheriffs, and detectives responded to an emergency call. They managed to round up the rioting inmates and force them back into the bull pen. Told to go back to their cells, the men refused, leading to a tense standoff. Detective Sergeant Edward Powers—who had been in the nearby office of the state’s attorney, discussing the Fitzgerald case—appealed to them to disperse quietly, but still they refused to go. Then jailer Will T. Davis appeared and took command. “Look here,” he said, “I’m not going to give you more than a minute or two to make up your minds. I’ve got 200 armed men behind me, and I can turn them loose on you—or you can go to your cells in peace. Use your own judgment, but you must make up your minds pretty quick.”