City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (33 page)

At city hall, Mayor Thompson—ever the master of manipulating public opinion—was busy with his own damage control efforts, forging a narrative that would satisfactorily explain his performance during the crisis. At a dramatic morning press conference, he tried to depict his reluctance to call for troops as concern for the welfare of the Black Belt. But that caution, he said, was finally outweighed by signs of an imminent threat he just couldn’t disregard—namely, evidence of a massive, widespread conspiracy to set the entire South Side aflame. Citing reports from an informal intelligence network set up by city hall in the first days of the riot, he claimed that immediate and decisive action had been necessary to foil the arson plot, which involved both black and white gangs allegedly determined to burn each other’s neighborhoods to the ground. “We had information last night,” Thompson said, “that there was to be a general effort to start fires.… The information was definite and authentic and required action. The condition of buildings was such that a great conflagration would have started in no time. There had been almost no rain during the month of July and everything was as dry as tinder.” According to the mayor, the threatened conflagration would have brought “death to thousands and the loss of millions in property,” and would have resulted in widespread chaos “because of the frightened hordes rushing pell-mell in every direction.”
⁵

Big Bill, of course, was possibly exaggerating the arson threat as a way of excusing his sudden turnabout on the deployment of the militia, but the story at least seemed plausible. Numerous fires had indeed been set over the previous twenty-four hours, and in some cases arsonists had even stretched cables across streets to prevent fire engines from reaching them. But it was probably the timely rain that had done the most to keep the fires under control, and there is some evidence that pressure from the big meatpacking companies, which had been losing money every day that rioting prevented their workers from reporting for duty, may have been the truly decisive
factor in Thompson’s decision to finally use the militia. In any case, the mayor’s emphatic justifications notwithstanding, the impression remained among many Chicagoans that Big Bill had, for political reasons, simply waited too long to solicit the governor’s help. Had the troops been deployed on Monday, when they were first mobilized, much of the violence would likely have been avoided.
⁶

The mayor’s exculpatory maneuvering continued that afternoon at an emergency meeting of the city council. Pointing out that he had repeatedly asked the council in the past for “more policemen, more vehicle equipment, a modern signal system, and a modern police administrative system,” he lodged a formal request for a permanent expansion of the police department. “In view of the existing conditions of public disorder,” he intoned, “I now urge your honorable body to take steps immediately to provide for the permanent employment of 2,000 additional patrolmen.… The crisis through which our city has passed during the last few days has brought home to our people the fact that the 3,564 patrolmen from whom the public expects police protection in this city [are] woefully inadequate.”

In an attempt to defend themselves, several of the aldermen pinned the blame on the city’s reformist Bureau of Public Efficiency, whose insistence on reductions in government expenditures had tied their hands. “The finance committee has spent many nights trying to find the money for more policemen,” Alderman John Anthony Richert asserted, “but the civic organizations have blocked our efforts.” Alderman Anton Cermak, head of the anti-temperance United Societies, tried blaming the city’s drys: “It was claimed [that] Prohibition would reduce the need for police,” he said, “but we needed
more
police last month and last year, and we will need them next year.” But it was the great antireformer himself—Alderman “Bathhouse John” Coughlin—who put it most bluntly: “Five years ago we were a peaceable city. Reformers spoiled it. Those were happy days. Now we’re discontented and everybody knows it!” The city of Chicago,
in other words, had gotten along just fine until progressive crusaders came along and started meddling in city business with their campaigns against government spending and the evils of vice, graft, and patronage.
⁷

Those alleged good-government types were also doing their best to use the crisis for their own political advantage. State’s Attorney Hoyne, doubtless sensing weakness in city hall, now promised an energetic prosecution and a full investigation of the politicians who allowed lawlessness to flourish in the Black Belt. The anti-Thompson newspapers were not silent, either. In an editorial entitled simply “Why?,” the
Chicago Daily Journal
called for a full explanation of the decision to wait until day four of the riot to deploy the troops. In an even more caustic editorial (under the headline “War in a Great City’s Streets”), Victor Lawson’s
Daily News
complained: “Chicago never had a more terrible warning of the absolute necessity of setting its house in order.… The citizens have allowed politicians and incompetents to sow the wind, and the community is now reaping the whirlwind.”

The bitterest remarks came from the
Tribune
. “Chicago is disgraced and dishonored,” the World’s Greatest Newspaper declaimed. “Its head is bloodied and bowed, bloodied by crime and bowed in shame. Its reputation is besmirched. Its fame is tarnished for years.”
⁸

At least one person, however, seemed to have come through the situation with his reputation unscathed. “[Frank] is receiving great commendation for the way in which he is meeting this crisis,” Mrs. Lowden preened in her diary on Thursday. And indeed, the sterling performance of the state militia, which was now drawing praise from all quarters, was turning the governor into the hero of the hour. In buoyant public remarks that commended virtually everyone except the mayor of Chicago, Lowden tried to credit the guard troops with dampening the violence even
before
they were deployed. “I shudder to think,” he said, “what might have happened Tuesday if the lawless
element … had not known that 4,000 men armed and equipped to deal with them stood ready to act.”
⁹

The imminent settlement of the transit strike also promised to burnish Lowden’s public image. Union chief Mahon had by afternoon successfully convinced union members to reconsider the governor’s hard-won compromise plan. A new vote was to be held on Friday, and early signs indicated that the plan would really be accepted this time, allowing streetcars and elevated trains to start running again by the weekend. Governor Lowden’s handling of the entire situation was being praised by no less a figure than former president William Howard Taft, who was just then visiting Chicago to give a speech. For someone preparing to make a run for the presidency, this was very good publicity indeed.
¹⁰

Amid further signs of a reaffirmation of civic authority (including the introduction of a city ban on “promiscuous aviation” and a proposed conference to discuss the creation of “an institution for morons”), Mayor Thompson moved again to reclaim some of the political high ground. That day, he held a signing ceremony in his office for the Chicago Plan ordinances that the city council had passed on the day of the
Wingfoot
crash. In the presence of commission chairman Charles Wacker and other city notables, the mayor was careful to remind his traumatized constituents of the great vision of Chicago’s future embodied in the plan—the lakefront parks and boulevards, the electrified train lines, the new railroad terminals, the ultramodern harbor district—and of the leadership role that “Big Bill the Builder” had played, and would continue to play, in its realization. Much of the city may have been burning and in disarray on that July afternoon, but the bright dream of Chicago as “the Metropolis of the World” lived on undimmed.

Or so, at least, the floundering and somewhat desperate-sounding Thompson wanted everyone to believe. The reality of the situation, however, was that the city of Chicago was about to wake from its
awful extended nightmare—a nightmare that had bared truths about the city that made a mockery of the high-minded ambitions of the Chicago Plan—and its citizens would soon be looking for someone to blame for it all. True, the rampant violence in the streets would taper off; the transit paralysis would lift; the city would even have the satisfaction of seeing its child predators punished and its downtown heart protected from technological daredevils streaking across the skies. But the horror of those two weeks in July would not soon be forgotten. Someone would have to be held accountable for the profound collapse of civil order that Chicago had just experienced; someone would have to pay. And there were many in the city determined to see that it would be Big Bill Thompson.
¹¹

S
HORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT
on Friday, August 1, a single streetcar on the Cottage Grove line left the barns at Eighty-eighth Street and headed northward toward the Loop. Other cars and elevated trains all around the city started soon after, to be met by large cheering crowds who had remained downtown to celebrate the end of the transit strike. As hoped, the unions had voted to accept the Lowden compromise plan, and the companies had acted quickly to get the system running again. By 5 a.m. on Saturday, all lines—except for a few that ran through the worst of the riot zones—would be on a normal schedule. After nearly four days of paralysis, the city of Chicago would finally be moving again.
¹

Down on the South Side, the uneasy peace enforced by the militia had persisted through most of the day on Friday. Scattered shots had been fired, but no one was killed and injuries were few. “There is a quieter feeling in Chicago today,” Mrs. Lowden wrote in her diary. “Frank has toured the riot zones several times and has visited the wounded militiamen in the hospital.” Even so, city officials were taking no chances. That afternoon, Chief Garrity ordered the temporary closing of all places in the riot district “where men congregate for other than religious purposes”—including poolrooms, cabarets, and (most significantly) athletic clubs. As a further precaution, Friday’s issue of the
Chicago Whip
, a radical black weekly, was suppressed when it was found to contain “sensational and alleged incendiary matter.” Riot patrols were reinforced, and one thousand new deputy
sheriffs—many of them recently demobilized soldiers—were sworn in to assist the militia and police in the Black Belt. “I am greatly impressed with the complete mastery of the situation … that the police and military authorities have obtained,” Governor Lowden announced late in the day. “I do not mean that the trouble is entirely over, but it appears that the situation is controlled at present.”
²

The governor’s caution proved wise, for the violence would still have one last eruption before it was over. In the early-morning hours of Saturday, just when authorities hoped that the worst had passed, a series of fires broke out in a mainly Lithuanian working-class neighborhood in the so-called Back of the Yards district. Sterling Morton’s company of militia, now stationed at a school at Fifty-fifth and Morgan about two miles away, got the call at four-fifteen in the morning. Morton had been on watch until four and had just been preparing to go to sleep when the alarm was sounded. “In twelve minutes I had the company loaded on the truck and [the] patrols in, sentries relieved by another company in the neighborhood, and was on the way to the fire,” he later wrote to his cousin. They were the first militia on the scene, and what they found was gruesome. Despite the recent rain, the fire had spread rapidly and catastrophically through the blocks of wood-frame houses, leveling a six-block swath of structures, injuring dozens of people, and leaving nearly 950 homeless. “The residents were very excited,” Morton wrote. Wild rumors about the cause of the fires were legion, and there was a “considerable amount of looting” going on. By midmorning, however, Morton and the troops had restored order and returned to their barracks at the school.