City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (15 page)

Chicago’s ongoing labor unrest, meanwhile, also played into these rising fears of worker revolution, as the faltering national economy put pressure on employers and employees alike. With inflation eating into every worker’s paycheck (the cost of living had risen 75 percent since December 1914), unions were demanding hefty salary increases; but industry, scaling back production from wartime highs, refused to make any concessions at all. So, as spring ended, the number of unions threatening to strike was mounting precipitously. Not just the steel, meatpacking, and transit unions were restive; there were strike threats from Western Union telegraphers, municipal sweepers and garbagemen, members of the building trades, and even city engineers.

Closely observing this increasingly grave labor situation was a man whose name would eventually have very different associations in the national psyche. Carl Sandburg, a Chicago resident since 1906, had already earned a reputation as a poet by 1919 (his
Chicago Poems
had been published to some acclaim four years earlier), but he still needed a day job to support his wife and three children in their little house in suburban Maywood. Finding himself unemployed shortly after Mayor Thompson’s reelection, Sandburg decided to make a pitch to
Chicago Daily News
editor Henry Justin Smith to be taken on staff as a labor reporter. “I believe there are some big, live feature stories” to be covered in the labor field, he wrote to Smith on May 31, mentioning the looming troubles in the transit unions and employment problems of the newly repatriated doughboys. “How are the returned soldiers going to work,” he asked, “and what does life mean now to the steelworkers who went overseas?”
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Convinced by this argument, Smith hired the poet immediately and set him to work covering the national convention of the American Federation of Labor. The assignment proved to be a good fit. A former member of the Socialist Party (“I am with all rebels everywhere” is how the poet once described his political leanings), Sandburg had been active in left-wing politics for decades. Recently, upon returning from a journalism assignment in Sweden, he had even been interrogated by federal authorities for agreeing to deliver ten thousand dollars in bank drafts and some revolutionary literature to a Finnish agent in New York. Always sympathetic to the cause of labor, he was clearly moved by what he saw at the AFL convention—namely, the coming of “fundamental, seminal changes” in labor-management relations. Unions, he reported, were indeed becoming more radicalized, and if the current situation in Chicago was any indication, a major confrontation between workers and their employers across many industries was all but inevitable.
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Conflict also surfaced in the city’s patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods. Postwar Europe’s shifting currents of civil strife—“a sorry world,” as Colonel McCormick called it, “everywhere unrest, revolution, Bolshevism”—were having repercussions among Chicago’s foreign-born populations. On May 21, a mob of twenty-five thousand eastern European Jews stormed downtown Chicago to protest the pogroms in Poland, jamming streets and sidewalks and stopping traffic in the Loop. On June 8, fearing a pogrom on their own soil, eight thousand West Side Jews gathered at the corner of Twelfth and Kedzie to fend off a rumored “invasion” by a mob from an adjacent Polish neighborhood. The invasion never materialized, but incidents of Polish harassment of Jews continued to occur. Eventually, they grew so numerous that a delegation of Jewish peddlers demanded a meeting with police chief John Garrity to discuss special police protection. In a sense, the city’s collage of ethnic enclaves had become a small-scale version of the European continent, so that conflicts occurring there
were naturally being played out in miniature on the streets of Chicago’s neighborhoods.
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Ethnic dissonance of a kind was also being felt at the Frankenstein household down in Kenwood. In March, Emily’s parents had forbidden her from seeing any more of Jerry Lapiner, her still-secret fiancé. Part of the problem was Jerry’s background. The Frankensteins, members of Chicago’s long-established German-Jewish community, were wealthy, highly educated secular Jews—Victor a doctor, Irma a college-trained intellectual who (despite her rather cavalier attitude toward voting) wrote poetry and read widely. Jerry, who came from a working-class family of eastern European Jews, was not well spoken and had never gone to college. The cultural gulf separating them was starting to become an issue, especially for Emily’s parents. Like many of those belonging to Chicago’s assimilated old immigrant groups (which had come mainly from northern and western Europe), the Frankensteins tended to look down on less assimilated, less educated new immigrants (who were mostly from southern and eastern Europe). Worse, Jerry was still flirting with conversion to Christian Science. All in all, he was not considered by the Frankensteins to be marriageable material for their daughter.

The Christian Science issue troubled Emily as well. Sharing many of her parents’ values, she largely eschewed traditional religious observance but found spirituality “in literature, my schoolwork, reading and thinking for myself.” Christian Science seemed to her an alien and unhealthy system of belief. Still, characteristically eager to see things “in a new or different light because of the experiences I have,” she had made a secret visit in February to a Christian Science lecture to try to understand its appeal. But she had come away unimpressed. The lecture had seemed more like a sales pitch than anything else, and on looking around the audience she’d seen “so very, very few healthy, robust people.”

“Was madder than ever after leaving [the lecture],” Emily wrote in
her diary that night, “and more helpless.” Even so, she was determined to change Jerry, to get him interested in “things sensible—history, literature, even some kind of science. Just so he’ll see the difference.”
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Emily, of course, was still very young and subject to girlish romanticism, but she felt she really did love Jerry. The previous summer, at the height of their untroubled first months of courtship, they had sat together in the swing on the side porch of the Frankenstein home on Ellis Avenue, baring their souls to each other. “Isn’t it funny,” she’d written in her diary afterward, “a lovely June evening, on a vine-covered porch, makes it so easy to say what one has to say.” Emily felt it was important that they have no secrets from each other. So she told him about her past suitors, of which there had been no shortage—Lenny, the boy who had been cruel to her; Albert, the overeager one whose annual proposals she always turned down flat; and Harrison, the son of one of her father’s medical colleagues, who had tragically died in an army camp during the war. She wanted to make sure Jerry knew about all of them, especially since she and Jerry were already thinking about marriage. It wouldn’t happen immediately; Jerry, like many of the other former soldiers in Chicago, still could not find work, and he was resolved not to wed until he could support a wife properly. But Emily insisted that this didn’t matter. “I told Jerry I never wanted to marry a rich man,” she wrote. “In fact, I’ve always preferred a poor man, so I could help him. I felt that that was a true test of love.”

It had been an idyllic evening. After a time, Jerry asked if he could put his head on her lap. Nervously, Emily agreed. “I could hardly believe it was I on the swing—with Jerry’s head in my lap,” she wrote. “I looked down and saw his body clad in khaki—[and] I sort of sighed.” She began running her hand through his hair and patting his cheek. “No one ever taught me what to do,” she said, worrying about her inexperience with the physical side of courtship. But Jerry was reassuring. “ ‘That doesn’t need any teaching,’ ” he told her.

Later, he persuaded her to say aloud that she loved him, and they kissed. “God is good, all good,” he said happily.

A few days later, on a shopping excursion to Marshall Field’s, he gave her a ring that had belonged to his mother. “Wear it as long as you love me,” he said.

That had been ten months ago, and Emily was still wearing the ring—but on a chain around her neck, so that her disapproving parents wouldn’t see it. She would kiss the ring every night before going to bed. And despite her parents’ admonishments—and although she was publicly dating other boys, all of them from far more appropriate Jewish backgrounds—she still considered herself engaged to Jerry. Fretting about the situation was even causing her to lose weight. “I wish I’d stop worrying about this,” she wrote in her diary. “I try to, but it disturbs me.”
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*   *   *

On the early morning of April 7, a black-powder bomb exploded on the porch of a flat building at 4212 Ellis Avenue—just three blocks away from the Frankenstein home in Kenwood. Another device went off on April 20 at a black-owned realty office on Indiana Avenue. Two more, both targeting the same address on Grand Boulevard (the home of black Shakespearean actor Richard Harrison), followed on May 18 and May 28. On May 29, a flat on Wabash Avenue was hit.
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In 1919 Chicago, of course, one could never be sure of the motivation behind any individual bomb or bomb threat. For many disaffected groups in the city, dynamite and black powder had become the preferred means of communicating a message, and police were often hard put to determine whether a given incident was part of the political, ethnic, racial, or labor conversation in the city. But these five bombings, along with two more in June, were clearly connected to black incursions into white residential neighborhoods, and signaled an accelerating deterioration in the city’s racial situation. As
early as April, the
Broad Ax
, a black weekly, had proposed its own radical solution to the problem: “Well, Negroes,” the paper argued in an editorial on April 5, “you must get guns, guns I said! Then more guns and keep them loaded with buckshot. The awful day will surely come, and we might just as well die fighting in America as to die fighting in France.”
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Cooler heads chose less incendiary, but no less confrontational, approaches. After the second bombing on Grand Boulevard, Ida Wells-Barnett (who with her family had just moved into a handsome Queen Anne–style residence on that street) resolved to take her case to Mayor Thompson personally. Her attempt to turn black voters against him in the recent election had failed, but that didn’t mean she was ready to give up her campaign to spur the Thompson administration to action. So, after gathering together a committee of concerned citizens—including the mother of Ernestine Ellis, the girl who had died in the February 28 bombing—she marched them to city hall and demanded an audience with the mayor. Big Bill, perhaps hoping to punish Wells-Barnett for her support of Hoyne, refused to see the committee. Through his secretary, Charles Fitzmorris, he instructed them to take the matter to Chief Garrity. But they got no satisfaction there, either. Garrity, who at least agreed to speak with the committee, told Wells-Barnett that the department was doing its best, but that “he could not put all of the police in Chicago on the South Side to protect the homes of colored people.” The committee members could only walk away in frustration.
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Big Bill was, in any case, too busy playing politics to worry about a little unrest in the city he had just been reelected to run. Governor Lowden had been getting altogether too much favorable press lately. The success of Lowden’s sweeping reorganization of the state government was attracting nationwide attention, and now the governor was being mentioned for president by more and more Republican organizations. For Thompson, this was distinctly irksome. Some of
his own followers had hopes to boom Big Bill for the same office, and though the mayor himself professed to be more interested in booming Chicago these days, he did admit that “no man is big enough to refuse a nomination for President if it is offered him.”
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Given the lingering questions about Thompson’s loyalty during the war, any notions of his becoming president (at least in 1920) were probably far-fetched even to him. But that didn’t mean he wanted Lowden to get the nod. Indeed, the Thompson-Lundin organization’s designs on greater power increasingly hinged on getting rid of the troublesome governor. With more than a year still remaining in Lowden’s term, and with the governor’s popularity growing every day, they could not afford to wait. Whenever the inevitable confrontation between the two chief executives came, Thompson and Lundin needed to be ready for it.

The extent of the political estrangement between mayor and governor became painfully obvious in late May, as the city prepared its welcome for the Thirty-third “Prairie Division,” by far the largest group of returning Illinois soldiers to date. The planned celebration was to be vast, a ten-hour demonstration of “smiles, tears, hugs, [and] kisses,” culminating in “the greatest parade the old town ever saw.” Governor Lowden, the official host of the festivities, would preside over the parade from a reviewing stand set up on the east side of Michigan Avenue, right in front of the Art Institute. Joining him on the platform would be General Leonard Wood (another likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination) and a host of other military and political dignitaries. Kaiser Bill, who had been conspicuously absent from all previous homecoming parades (except, significantly, that of the all-black Old Eighth), was pointedly not invited to join them.
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On the day of the parade, however, a defiant Mayor Thompson had his own reviewing stand set up on the other side of Michigan Avenue, a few blocks north of the governor’s. To hear the
Tribune
tell
the story, spectators were surprised to see the mayor present. “Gee, he’s here!” a young boy allegedly remarked, within earshot of the Thompson party. “I been lookin’ for him a long, long time since the soldiers started comin’ home.”
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