City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (31 page)

The violence thus continued through a third long night. In his Maywood cottage, Carl Sandburg sat up late that night, pouring his disgust into a new poem. Earlier in the day, he had attended the daily meeting of Wells-Barnett’s newly formed Olivet Protective Association. Representatives of every African American congregation in the city had been present, reporting on events in their neighborhoods and trying to decide what to do next. “I saw seven wagonloads of
people arrested go past my place,” one speaker said, “and they were all colored people. One might judge by this that only colored people are rioting.” Sandburg had also interviewed Dr. George C. Hall of the National Urban League, who complained bitterly of the conduct of police in the riots.

The reporter had produced articles for the
Daily News
on both of these meetings, writing in the dispassionate, neutral style that was at least the ostensible goal of 1919 newspaper journalism. But tonight the poet in him wanted to express something else. The poem he wrote—“Hoodlums”—was a coarse, rhythmless outpouring of hostility, written from the perspective of a rioter. “Being a hoodlum now, you and I,” the poem ended, “being all of us a world of hoodlums, let us take up the cry when the mob sluffs by on a thousand shoe soles, let us too yammer, ‘Kill him! kill him!’ … / Let us do this now … for our mothers … for our sisters and wives … let us kill, kill, kill—for the torsos of the women are tireless and the loins of the men are strong.”

As poetry, what Sandburg wrote that night was formless, incoherent, without art or any semblance of grace. But it was a powerful indictment of the senseless anger he was seeing all around him. It was also one of the few poems in his career that he would ever mark with a date and place: “Chicago, July 29, 1919.”
²⁴

F
OR SOME TIME
, the city has been in a turmoil,” Emily Frankenstein reported in her diary for July 30. Writing for once without ever mentioning her troubles with Jerry Lapiner, Emily recounted the incredible series of events that had occurred in the city over the past ten days—the blimp crash, the Janet Wilkinson ordeal, and now the transit strike and “race war.” Although she had seen little of the violence herself, her Uncle Kurt, a volunteer on guard duty at Twenty-sixth and Wabash, had described to her “the hand-to-hand fights, shooting, sniping, chasing”—much of it taking place within a few blocks of her Kenwood home. “It seems as if the city [will] never settle down to peace,” she wrote. “According to rumors of undertakers’ reports, nearly 500 [have been] killed.”
¹

That figure was a vast exaggeration (by Wednesday, the death toll had by some counts reached “just” thirty-three), but it hints at the magnitude of the horror and incredulity being felt citywide at the continuing slaughter in the streets. An aura of anarchy seemed to be hanging over Chicago, compounded by an overwhelming sense that local authorities were unable or unwilling to take charge of the situation. The newspapers were as incensed as everyone else. “Mayor Refuses Assent to Martial Law” read the banner headline in Wednesday’s
Daily Journal
, and in the
Daily News
: “Storm Mayor with Demand for Troops to Quell Race Riots.”
²

Parts of the city had by now taken on the appearance of a war zone. On the South Side, charred houses stood empty on many streets,
windows broken and occupants long gone; many other homes and businesses were shuttered or rudely boarded up, while streets and sidewalks were littered with bricks, stones, and, in some places, pools of drying blood. Police lined the main avenues of the Black Belt like an occupying army, refusing to let anyone in or out. Even the downtown Loop area seemed besieged. Traffic chaos reigned again—despite four hundred volunteer crossing guards—as the transit strike entered its second day, while many businesses, restaurants, and stores remained closed, unable to operate without their black employees.
³

At his headquarters at the Blackstone Hotel, Governor Lowden tried to maintain a facade of optimism, but the crisis was taking a toll on him. “Frank is living through the most anxious days of his life so far,” his wife fretted to her diary that day. “No one knows what new trouble may develop hourly.” Certainly, with the eyes of the nation now trained on Chicago, the governor knew he had to proceed very warily. That morning, State’s Attorney Hoyne—doubtless to Lowden’s annoyance—had gone on the record as having formally asked the governor for a declaration of martial law. But Lowden wasn’t ready to hazard such a risky move. “The troops are to be had for the asking,” he announced in a carefully phrased public statement. “[But] I have certain pronounced ideas on the race situation in general, and I’ve had experience which makes my ideas on the use of troops equally emphatic.” Citing the example of East St. Louis in 1917, where the imposition of martial law seemed to exacerbate racial hostility, he said, “If we were to order out the militia for riot duty before there was vital need, we’d be aggravating matters that already are bad enough. It would mean that the day the troops were withdrawn, rioting would break out afresh.… I [don’t] want East St. Louis to be repeated in Chicago.”
⁴

The logic behind this argument is elusive, but Lowden’s statement did have the virtue of inoculating him in advance against any bad outcome, should the mayor make a formal request for troops. Even
so, it was clear that, despite upbeat reports in the predawn hours, the police were far from being in control of the situation. That reality became clear to the governor later in the morning, when his meeting with state officials was interrupted by shouts from the street below. The governor went to the window and watched as a crowd of a hundred white males came around the corner of Congress Street in pursuit of a lone African American man. “The black was cornered in a doorway,” the
New York Times
reported, “but before the mob could reach him a mounted policeman blocked the path. Using his horse as a shield, the policeman held off the mob until a patrol wagon arrived to rescue the Negro.”

Before the governor had turned away from the window, however, the mob caught sight of a second black man. “There’s another one,” someone shouted, and then the men began pursuing their new quarry toward the Congress Street L station.
⁵

Several blocks north, at his separate command headquarters in city hall, Mayor Thompson was still refusing to commit himself to an intervention by the National Guard. To be sure, support for such a move had until now been anything but unanimous among the mayor’s African American supporters. Assistant corporation counsel Ed Wright, for instance, had advised Big Bill not to call in the troops, for fear that they would “line up with the lawless whites.” But the continuation of violence on Tuesday night had apparently changed some minds. A delegation of black leaders—including Ida Wells-Barnett’s husband, Ferdinand Barnett—visited the mayor’s office on Wednesday to formally request the troops as a means of ending “the carnival of murder and assault.” Thompson listened to them politely, as he did to another ad hoc committee of notables—this one consisting of Clarence Darrow, Sears president Julius Rosenwald, Carl Sandburg, and an assortment of judges and clergymen. But he insisted that the Chicago police could handle the unrest without state help.
⁶

The city council, however, was more difficult to put off. At a fiery
midday session that nearly devolved into a fistfight, the city’s aldermen voted overwhelmingly for the mayor to deploy the militia. Joseph McDonough, the three-hundred-pound alderman from the mostly Irish Fifth Ward (and an early mentor of future mayor Richard J. Daley), was especially vehement. “You aldermen would be amazed if you could see what is going on in our ward,” McDonough said. “Alderman [Thomas A.] Doyle and I were driving in my automobile … and were fired upon from a house at the corner. A block away were a lieutenant and 20 policemen. We told them what had happened and asked them to raid the house. The lieutenant told me to tell my troubles at the City Hall.…”

“At 38th Street and Steward Avenue,” McDonough continued, “a mob of Negroes assembled and threatened to march through the white districts and wipe them out. The police made no attempt to interfere.”

Doyle had an even more chilling (and probably overblown) tale, describing a car filled with black rioters who shot down a woman and a little boy standing right next to him on West Thirty-fifth Street. “I was lucky I didn’t get it too,” Doyle said. “As the guns spurted fire, the muzzles looked as if they were aimed straight at me!”

Alarmed by these anecdotes, the council demanded to see Chief Garrity, who was quickly found in his city hall office and brought before them. Trying to calm the unruly aldermen, the chief, “sitting in his coatsleeves, sweating profusely,” insisted again that the police had the situation well in hand, and that his morning tour of the riot districts had revealed that “everything was quiet.” Turning to Alderman McDonough, Garrity said, “I admit things in your district were in bad shape until last night. I transferred Captain Coughlin out and put Captain Hogan in to straighten things out, and he is getting results.… If you gentlemen think I can’t do it or that you can do it better than I can, I am willing to step out and let you do it.”
⁷

No one took the chief up on this apparent offer to resign, but
the aldermen were far from appeased. “The Chief says conditions are fine today,” McDonough remarked then. “I agree they are fine today. But they weren’t fine last night and they won’t be fine tonight.” He went on to describe—with increasing hyperbole—the mayhem in his district. “I saw bombs going off! I saw white men and women running through the streets dragging children by the hand and carrying babies in their arms.… The police are powerless to cope with the situation!”

“Don’t you believe the militia should supplement the police?” another alderman asked Chief Garrity.

“No,” the chief replied. “We would run the danger of having a lot of undependable men to work with.”

But the councilmen remained skeptical. Alderman Sheldon W. Gouler said, “I want to say on my own responsibility that I believe nothing except rotten politics is preventing the calling out of troops.”

More argument followed, but in the end Garrity convinced the assembled aldermen to vote funds for one thousand special temporary policemen instead of resorting to the militia. Even so, McDonough insisted that he would advise his constituents to arm themselves against a possible black invasion. “The Governor and the Mayor are not telling the public everything they know,” he maintained, and warned that the city’s black population was actively arming and preparing for all-out war.
⁸

Such paranoia was not limited to the city council chamber. State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne, clearly not immune to the rising hysteria, was by afternoon pointing to a “secret order of Negroes” behind the unrest. “I am convinced that these riots are the result of a plan carefully laid by a certain vicious Negro element which has been encouraged by a group of City Hall politicians, both black and white.” Ignoring all reliable data to the contrary, the state’s attorney insisted that “from observations which I have made in the so-called Black Belt, I believe that the victims of the riot are chiefly innocent bystanders and that
the fights are provoked by the colored people rather than the whites.” At their joint press conference, Hoyne and Illinois attorney general Edward Brundage, who had cut short a Michigan vacation in order to race to the city, disagreed on the question of martial law (Brundage opposed it), but they seemed in perfect accord on just what had caused the riot. “A number of politicians, whose aim was solely to get votes,” Brundage said, “fanned this feeling [of hostility] among the Negroes and encouraged them in their ideas of race equality.” According to Brundage, the alleged secret cabal of black agitators “has sworn to get three white men for every Negro who is killed.”
⁹

With such wildly incendiary statements coming from their state and local officials, it was little wonder that many white Chicagoans were demonstrating their willingness to resort to desperate measures to solve what now seemed an intractable problem. And to its discredit, the
Tribune
took the opportunity to nurture the despair. “It is becoming more and more evident that the white and colored races are not living in harmony in Chicago and that the tendency toward conciliation is not sufficient to bridge the chasm,” the editors claimed in an editorial.

If the whites and colored cannot refrain from riots and bloodshed and interminable violence on the bathing beaches, how long will it be before this question is asked: Shall there be separate bathing beaches for the whites and colored?