City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (30 page)

The ultimatum worked. The men—hesitantly at first—began throwing down their clubs and returning to their cells. The incident ended with no shots being fired.
⁸

The mayhem on the streets proved to be more intractable. Aside
from a slight lull in the hottest midafternoon hours, violence raged throughout the day, at one point leading police to cordon off city hall itself with a contingent of sixty armed detectives to protect against a rumored mob assault. Rumors, in fact, were now becoming a major engine of the continuing strife, and one of the main perpetrators was the so-called responsible press. No story was too outrageous or too far-fetched to be considered off base by the newspapers—that a black man had been hanged from a building on Madison Street; that anywhere from four to more than one hundred blacks had been slain and thrown into the Chicago River and “Bubbly Creek” (a heavily polluted tributary that ran near the stockyards); that a white woman had been attacked and mutilated on State Street; that a white child had been kidnapped and dismembered by a black mob. One of the worst stories was printed in the
Chicago Defender
, which reported as fact an incident in which a mob allegedly attacked and killed a black woman and her baby, cutting off the woman’s breasts and dashing the baby’s brains out against a telephone pole.
⁹

None of these stories was true—no women or young children were ever killed during the riot, and very few were even injured—but such reports had the effect of inflaming rioters of both races to ever greater acts of violence. Some newspapers took to listing casualties in the form of a two-column scorecard, one column labeled “
WHITE
” and the other “
NEGROES
,” inspiring attempts by rioters to “even the score.” The tallies themselves were often wildly inaccurate. Two major newspapers reported that 155 whites and 151 blacks had been injured by the third day of the rioting; the actual figures were 136 whites and 263 blacks. To read some newspaper reports—especially those in the
Tribune
—one would assume that 80 percent of the rioting was being perpetrated by blacks. The tenor of the reporting was also tailored to race. White bodies were “bullet-ridden” even when they had only a single bullet wound; black perpetrators were identified by race far more often than their white counterparts.
¹⁰

Police seemed only to be heightening the hysteria. One officer claimed on Tuesday that seventy-five of his fellow policemen had been killed—an absurdly inflated number. Several police captains reportedly ran down a South Side street warning residents that a massive black invasion was imminent: “For God’s sake, arm [yourselves]. They are coming; we can’t hold them!” Arrest rates for white and black rioters were grossly disproportionate to the actual numbers of perpetrators of each race. Roughly twice as many blacks as whites were being apprehended for violent assaults, yet only half as many whites as blacks were being killed and injured on the streets, suggesting that the arrest rate for black rioters was far higher than that for whites. In one incident, about a dozen men were arrested for carrying concealed weapons. The blacks were held in jail while the whites (including one black man fair-skinned enough to be mistaken for white) were released and given back their ammunition with the comment “You’ll probably need this before the night is over.”
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The rioting continued to spread throughout the city all day, with some of Tuesday’s worst incidents occurring well beyond the confines of the South Side. On the North Side, a gunfight broke out when a group of Sicilians besieged a Division Street apartment house filled with one hundred black men, women, and children (“pickaninnies,” as the
Tribune
called them). Several white crowds in the Gold Coast neighborhood were taking potshots at pedestrians and threatening violence against the black household staff of wealthy residents. In one West Side neighborhood, a black cyclist named Joseph Lovings was knocked from his bike and chased by a mob through the alleys around Taylor Street. He hid in a basement but was soon found and dragged out to the street. The mob then “riddled his body with bullets, stabbed him, and beat him.” Most newspapers reported that his body had then been saturated with gasoline and set aflame, though this was later proved false. Even so, it was perhaps the most savage
assault of the riot so far, and the fact that it occurred on the Italian West Side indicates that the racial animosity in Chicago was hardly confined to just a few neighborhoods or ethnic groups.
¹²

To Ida Wells-Barnett, the spectacle of violence in her adopted city had become horribly reminiscent of the southern lynchings she had crusaded against her entire life. Ever since the start of the riot on Sunday, she had been active in the streets of the Black Belt (“while all sensible people, including her husband and children, stayed indoors,” as one of her biographers put it). On Monday, she had met with a group of African American ministers to organize the Olivet Protective Association and demand action from the city; she had also been interviewing riot victims in her Grand Boulevard home, preparing for the inevitable investigation that would follow. In an article printed on the front page of the July 29
Daily Journal
, she excoriated the city and its leaders and called for the immediate creation of a biracial committee to address the violence. “Free Chicago stands today humble before the world,” she wrote. “Lawless mobs roam our streets. They kill inoffensive citizens and no notice is taken. They are Negroes—they are only Negroes—and it doesn’t matter.”

Chicago, she wrote, “is weak and helpless before the mob. Notwithstanding our boasted democracy, lynch law is king.”
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Wells-Barnett was not alone in her outrage. Similar cries were coming from all quarters, and much of the condemnation was centering—either explicitly or by implication—on Mayor Thompson. The
Broad Ax
, a black weekly, was blaming the current violence on the mayor’s refusal to deal with the racially motivated bombings that had plagued the city all year, citing his refusal to see Wells-Barnett and her committee back in June. Victor Lawson’s
Daily News
, finally finding an issue that might have some traction against the paper’s perpetual enemy, accused the Thompson administration of playing politics instead of addressing a grave situation that had long been foreseen. “Though the City Hall crowd intensively cultivates the colored vote,” the
News
editorialized in Tuesday’s edition, “it seems able to harvest only a crop of race riots.”
¹⁴

Many Chicagoans also found evidence of municipal failure in the Janet Wilkinson tragedy. According to several commentaries in the newspapers, the mayor and his police department, despite repeated warnings of trouble, had simply ignored the festering problem of sexual deviants, failing to lock up “known offenders” in their midst. The result was widespread predation on the weakest members of the urban population—its children. “The cruel and revolting murder which has stunned the city will repeat itself,” the
Evening Post
warned in an editorial. “We have other Fitzgeralds; we have other little Janet Wilkinsons.”
¹⁵

That afternoon, Janet herself was finally laid to rest. “Vast Throng Weeps at Slain Girl’s Bier” read the headline in the late edition of the
Daily News
. Thousands of sympathizers gathered in and around Holy Name Cathedral for the funeral, even as the North Side rioting raged nearby. “Let this child’s death be a lesson to all,” the Reverend Joseph Phelan told the packed cathedral in his eulogy. “We must be ever vigilant.” John Wilkinson also spoke. “If this great wave of anger at Janet’s murderer that has swept the city results in the cleaning out of these unspeakable scoundrels,” he said, “Janet’s mother and I will feel that our baby girl has not died in vain. I urge Chicago fathers to watch the men feeding their little girls candy and giving them pennies. If they are of Fitzgerald’s type, smash them on the spot.”
¹⁶

After the service and the singing of a “Mass of the Angels,” Janet’s coffin was carried out of the church by six of the girl’s schoolmates. As the cathedral bells tolled, the coffin was put into a hearse and then carried to Calvary Cemetery, overlooking the lake in suburban Evanston, north of the city. There, not far from the grave where Judge Harry Dolan had been buried just a few hours earlier, she was interred in the family plot before another vast crowd of mourners.
¹⁷

Just how so many people got to the funeral and burial sites was a mystery to the newspapers, since the transit strike was still creating all kinds of transportation havoc in the city and its suburbs. Rumors that the companies would try to run the cars with strikebreakers were vehemently denied by company officials, but neither side was backing down in the negotiations. “The fire will have to die out of the men before they will go back to work now,” said union leader W. S. McClenathan. “We will not make any move until somebody comes to us with a proposition that will satisfy the men.” The management of the transit companies was just as adamant. “The compromise was liberal and should have been accepted,” Leonard Busby of the surface lines insisted. “The majority of our employees do not endorse the walkout. The meeting last night, at which the strike was called without notice to the public, was dominated by irresponsibles. We believe the car-riding public prefers to endure the temporary inconvenience of a strike rather than submit to unreasonable and arbitrary demands.”
¹⁸

Mayor Thompson, undoubtedly relishing reports that Lowden’s proposal had been “hooted down” at the previous night’s union meeting, professed mock bewilderment at the deadlock. “From the afternoon newspapers, I had believed that Governor Lowden had succeeded in settling the streetcar and elevated situation,” he said at city hall. “I was therefore considerably surprised to learn that a strike had been called.” Asked by a reporter if he felt ignored in the negotiations, Big Bill reverted to the third person: “It makes no difference if they ignored the Mayor or not,” he said. “The Mayor intends to do everything he possibly can in the interests of the people.”
¹⁹

This last comment was particularly disingenuous, given the mayor’s blatant disregard of the public interest in his refusal to call in the militia. As dusk approached and the city prepared for another night of violence, even the transit strike was turning ugly, with strikers setting fire to an abandoned streetcar and jeering the firemen who
came to put it out. And yet the city’s elected officials seemed intent on playing politics just the same. Late in the day, Thompson’s constant nemesis, State’s Attorney Hoyne, a Democrat, tried to form an alliance with the Republican governor, going to the Blackstone Hotel to urge deployment of the militia even without a formal request from the mayor. But Lowden—despite the fact that he had done just that in the People’s Council incident in 1917—continued to claim that his hands were tied. He did ask General Dickson to put two more regiments on call—increasing the number of idle militia troops in the city to six thousand—but he insisted that this was as much as he could do.
²⁰

At the Seventh Regiment Armory near Comiskey Park, news of the order for more troops was apparently misinterpreted by the militiamen as the long-awaited call to action. According to Sterling Morton, “everyone cheered themselves hoarse” when they heard the rumors, elated at the prospect of finally being able to get out and do something to save the city from itself. But eventually the stories were quashed and disappointment set in again. “I did my best to put some pep into them [afterward],” Morton wrote bitterly to his cousin some days later. But his efforts apparently didn’t do much good. And certainly the frustration of the troops was understandable. “For political reasons,” Morton concluded, “we were kept in the armory.”
²¹

As night set in, the violence on the South Side reached another crescendo. Fewer people died than on Monday night, but the number of nonfatal shootings, particularly of police, spiked dramatically. Rioters had shot out many of the streetlights on the South Side, which meant that much of the fighting was occurring in near-total darkness. At Provident Hospital, a mainly black institution, rumors that two white victims were being treated inside led to an angry shootout on the street that left three police officers wounded. Another melee nearby, in which hundreds of shots were fired from dark houses up
and down State Street, left thirty people lying in the street. And for the first time since the start of the riot, widespread arson was being perpetrated, mainly in the Black Belt. Entire multifamily houses were set aflame, and when police and firefighters responded, they were met with a barrage of bullets, bricks, and stones.
²²

At city hall, something of a siege mentality had set in as the mayor and his advisers tried to figure out how to restore order without admitting political defeat. At nine o’clock, General Dickson went to city hall. “Our men are all ready and we are awaiting orders from Mayor Thompson and Chief Garrity,” the militia chief said. “We are ready to move the moment our aid is asked.” But no such request was made. At midnight, after a conference with some of his chief aides, Mayor Thompson decided to leave matters as they were for another night. “I am going to go home,” he said as he left his office. “I will not ask for the state troops before morning. I will await developments.” In a move clearly aimed at putting his enemy on the spot, however, he had his assistant corporation counsel, Frank Righeimer, make a statement to the press. It was the administration’s opinion, Righeimer said, that Governor Lowden need not wait for the city’s permission to call in the militia. “There are a half-dozen cases on record in which [a] governor, acting on his own initiative, has sent in troops to quell disturbances without the request of the mayor of the town in question,” he said. In other words, if Lowden wanted to take responsibility for a potentially bloody suppression of the riot, he was welcome to do so at his own risk.
²³