City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (32 page)

… If a colored person cannot enter a street car without this being the signal for shooting and furore, how long will it be before public policy and the protection of life and property makes necessary another system of transportation?

… If the races are always at swords’ points and individuals of each continually being sacrificed to the violent feeling which exists and which it is no use to deny, does it not follow that somewhere there must be a rule of conduct?

That the paper stopped just short of recommending a formal Jim Crow “rule of conduct” speaks volumes about the level of fear being felt by a large number of white Chicagoans. As in the Janet Wilkinson case, the response to a perceived threat from within the community was—for all too many in the city—a desire to indiscriminately quarantine any and all who might potentially do them harm. Never mind the rights guaranteed by the nation’s founding documents. As one alderman said when requesting the suspension of search-and-seizure laws in the Black Belt, “That may be unconstitutional, but we should not waste time over details.”
¹⁰

For his part, Mayor Thompson was finding it more expedient to downplay the severity of the discord rather than advocate any long-term solution to it. Now was not the time, Big Bill maintained, “to investigate the cause of the rioting or to appoint a committee to consider the question of preventing its recurrence.” Besides, the trouble on the South Side was, in his opinion, all but over now. “Yes, the situation is better,” he said to reporters that afternoon. “I am glad of it, too, and feel relieved that we have gotten through without having to call the troops. I am pleased with the way things are quieting down.” After a tour of the Loop with his commissioner of public service, the mayor was positively upbeat. “The rookie police are doing wonderfully well,” he said, “and only demonstrate my contention that Chicago people are the best on earth and Chicago spirit the greatest on earth.” According to the mayor, even the transit crisis wasn’t as hopeless as advertised. The international president of the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees, W. D. Mahon, had arrived in town that day and was now promising a second vote on the compromise wage offer—one that would not
be dominated by the “200 or 300 extremists” who had influenced the strike vote on Monday. City officials even hinted that the Ls and streetcars could be running again as early as Thursday.
¹¹

But the situation on the South Side remained critical, all sanguine utterances to the contrary. That afternoon, Coroner Hoffman, who had been forced to drop his
Wingfoot
inquest when the number of riot deaths became too overwhelming, impaneled a jury and took them to the riot district, stopping at morgues and hospitals to view the bodies of the latest victims. The jury’s marked automobiles attracted mobs at every stop, though no violence erupted. But they found a new problem festering in the Black Belt: “My people have no food,” one community leader complained. “Retailers in the district have run out of stocks, and outside grocery and butcher men will not send their wagons into the district.” Uncollected garbage was piling up in alleys and on sidewalks, and since the unions of the icemen and milk drivers had forbidden deliveries by their members, what little food there was in the district was rapidly spoiling in the summer heat. Since few blacks had been able to get to their jobs since Saturday, moreover, many families were running out of money to buy essentials.

And now there were rumors racing through the Black Belt that Ragen’s Colts and the other white clubs were preparing for an all-out confrontation that would dwarf the attacks of previous nights.
¹²

“This Is Chicago’s Crisis; Keep a Cool Head,” the
Chicago American
urged its readers that evening:

Chicago is facing its crisis today.

In one great section of the city, law and order for the time being seem to have been flung to the four winds. White men and colored men are shooting one another down in the streets for no earthly cause except that the color of their faces differ.

It is worse than a calamity, this race rioting. It is a deadly, ghastly scourge, a dire contagion that is sweeping through a community for no reason except that mob violence is contagious.

It is up to the cool-headed men of Chicago to settle the great difficulty. It is up to the serious-minded business men of the city to get together and find a
solution
to a problem which has become so serious.…

There is no time to be lost. Other matters must be put aside for the moment and a solution reached for Chicago’s greatest problem.

But cool heads seemed in short supply in Chicago just then. And as darkness approached, signs of brewing violence were multiplying once again. General Dickson, who made several trips through the South Side that day with Deputy Chief Alcock, returned in the late afternoon with an ominous assessment: “The condition is very grave,” he said. “I am afraid it is even more serious now than [on] Monday and Tuesday.”
¹³

And indeed, the riot calls began flooding in shortly before nightfall. Shootings and clashes were reported in rapid succession throughout the South Side, forcing police—most of them utterly exhausted by now—to race from one disturbance to the next before any of them could be entirely put down. As feared, roaming white mobs were raging through the Black Belt and contested neighborhoods adjacent to it, setting fire to houses and shooting residents as they fled for their lives. By ten-thirty, 112 fire alarms had been sounded, coming in at such a pace that dispatchers could barely keep track of them. And on Wells Street, the orgy of debasement reached its absolute nadir. Several hundred white gang members—having shot up, ransacked, and set fire to the black-occupied homes up and down the street—celebrated with a riotous bacchanal. To music provided by a player piano stolen from a black home and set up on the street, they danced
and sang in the flickering light of a dozen burning houses, drinking, firing their pistols in the air, and feeding broken furniture, toys, and clothing into the flames. It was a demonstration of mind-boggling barbarity—a spectacle from Hieronymus Bosch, played out on the streets of South Side Chicago, to the city’s lasting shame.

Mayor Thompson, closeted in his city hall office, had been receiving reports on the rioting all evening, but still he would not change his mind. It seemed that nothing could persuade him to give way on the issue of the militia. Insulated from the anarchy on the streets, in thrall to what now seemed like obviously misguided political instincts, he stubbornly refused to budge. The absurdity of the situation was blatant. In the greatest crisis Chicago had faced in decades, would the city’s fate be determined by the simple but profound hatred of two political enemies for each other?

But then one report came in that Thompson simply could not ignore. Although he would not go public with the specifics until the next day, the report was dire enough to convince the mayor—finally—that he had no choice. Assuming the report he had just received was accurate, if he didn’t act decisively now, the city could very well plunge into something like civil war.

At about 9 p.m., Big Bill called for his secretary to take a letter. In it, he officially requested that General Dickson immediately deploy the militia troops under his command “for the protection of life and property and the preservation of law and order.” At 9:15, he called the general into his office and handed him the letter. And by 10 p.m., hundreds of Illinois reserve militiamen were pouring out of armories all over the city and heading into the streets.
¹⁴

R
AIN BEGAN TO FALL
as five armed militia regiments fanned out across the South Side of Chicago, bayonets gleaming in the drizzle. Moving with perfect discipline and (unlike the city police) operating under clear instructions and a strict chain of command, the troops quickly took up their positions in the combat zone, dispersing any lingering crowds and setting up machine guns on key corners. By the early-morning hours of Thursday, over 1,500 soldiers had been deployed, more than doubling the number of active peacekeepers on the streets. Automobiles were stopped, pedestrians and loiterers were searched, weapons and alcohol were seized. In accordance with standing instructions, troops fired their weapons only as a last resort.
¹

Sterling Morton, down at the Seventh Regiment Armory, was euphoric. All day he had been drilling his men in the parking lot adjacent to Comiskey Park, waiting impatiently for the call to action. When assembly was blown that evening, he and his men were hopeful but guarded; they cheered, but—remembering their previous false alarm—their cheers were not as loud as the night before. Then Major Macey, “in a voice you could hear all over the armory,” sang out for the squads to fall in, and they knew that their time had finally come. “[A] cheer went up that raised the roof off the place,” Morton later wrote, “and from that time until I pulled out with my company, about 10:30, the cheering was incessant.”

Moving out of the armory, they headed toward their assigned
position at Forty-seventh and Wentworth in the Black Belt, clearing the streets as they went. “We met with no resistance,” Morton later wrote to his cousin, “but heard many unflattering comments on our appearance and [our] ancestors!” Per orders, they stopped all vehicles and relieved the drivers of any weapons and liquor found in their possession. But for the most part, he was surprised by how few people were on the streets. “The rioters are a white-livered lot of cowards,” he wrote. “They are all right when twenty of them jump one defenseless Negro, but when they saw the steel on the end of [our] rifles, they left P.D.Q. for parts unknown, and try as we would, we couldn’t get any fight out of them.”

Morton set up his company headquarters in a Greek restaurant on Wentworth Avenue and then took his men out on patrol into the surrounding neighborhoods. By his own admission, it was “a rather eerie experience.” All of the streetlights had been shot out, and since most blacks had left the neighborhood by then, the soldiers found themselves patrolling nearly deserted streets, maneuvering solely by the irregular light of burning wooden houses. The streets all around them were littered with clothes and broken furniture, shattered Victrolas, and coin-box telephones that had been smashed during the looting raids of the past few days. Morton may have missed seeing action in Europe, but here were scenes reminiscent of the Argonne, right in his own hometown.
²

Other companies in other parts of the South Side encountered greater resistance from rioters, but the violence was generally sparse overnight, the combatants subdued as much by the rain as by the show of military force. By morning, as people emerged from houses seemingly unoccupied the night before, the relief in the Black Belt was palpable. “You soldiers don’t know how glad we all are you are here,” a black stockyards worker said to one of the patrolling doughboys. “We wish you had come on Monday. A lot of trouble might have been avoided.” Reacting to the sudden appearance of
real authority in the district, members of the city’s wholesale grocers’ association began rushing truckloads of food into South Side neighborhoods that had been all but starved out for days. Even the police were relieved to see the troops, despite the fact that their presence constituted an admission of defeat for the local force. “Thank God!” one patrolman said when the troops appeared. “We can’t stand up under this much longer.” At the Cottage Grove station, another officer told a militiaman, “We are tickled to death to see you fellows come in; you have never looked so good to us before!” If nothing else, at least now there would be other targets besides policemen to draw the potshots of rooftop snipers.
³

In fact, the soldiers did begin to draw some sniper fire. As the morning progressed, isolated skirmishes broke out between militia troops and scattered groups of rioters—in particular the white athletic clubs, which had enjoyed relatively free rein when the police were in charge. And in the stockyards district, where soldiers were attempting to escort black workers to their jobs, the mayhem erupted on Thursday morning with all of its previous intensity. In what resembled a wartime military action, scores of white stockyards workers tried to repulse the advancing legion of militiamen and black workers, engaging them in hand-to-hand combat. In the confusion, four black workers were separated from the troops, chased down, and beaten. One of them—William Dozier, an employee at Swift and Company—was struck by a white worker with a hammer. As he tried to run away, other workers bombarded him with a street broom, a shovel, and other missiles. Finally, he was hit with a brick, which killed him. His was the thirty-seventh fatality of the riot, but it was to be the last for several days. By Thursday afternoon, the militia troops had effectively restored order, and the South Side—for the first time in days—seemed genuinely under control. “Peace has been established,” General Dickson proclaimed that afternoon. “There is no longer any reason why anyone, black or white, should be afraid to enter or leave the Black Belt.”
⁴