City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (5 page)

In 1919, the Chicago Plan would face some of its toughest hurdles to date. In July, the city council would have to pass a major ordinance allowing the plan’s lakefront projects to go forward. And to finance the major bulk of the anticipated public works, voters would have to pass a series of critical bond issues in November. Given the
shaky state of the city’s postwar finances, accomplishing these tasks would require enormous political will. In fact, it was argued that the realization of Burnham’s vision would call for an exercise of civic resolve unlike any the city had mustered in decades—at least since 1871, when Chicago rebuilt itself after its devastating fire.

Notwithstanding these challenges, however, enthusiasm for the effort was at an all-time high. “Chicago Plan Stirs Chicago Spirit to Realization” read the headline in the January 1
Tribune
. “Project Truly Fine and Great Enters New Year in Full Swing.” According to the paper, tangible progress was finally becoming evident to even the remaining doubters: “The visions that once seemed only heart-breaking images begin to settle into actualities. Great works are progressing day and night. Caissons are descending beneath the riverbed, skeleton structures arise on the banks, ragged glimpses are being knit up to make noble vistas, and at the end of them can be discerned faint outlines of visions that will endure.”
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Of course, to believe all of this hopeful rhetoric about the Chicago of the future, one had to look past one major thing—namely, the Chicago that existed right now. Having grown unfettered from a small prairie village to a colossus of almost three million people in the space of ninety years, the city was still in many respects an awkward, oversize adolescent, and one whose upbringing had been in the hands of “hurried, greedy, unfastidious folk” more concerned with making a quick dollar than creating a model city. The result was an urban environment of barely controlled chaos: a two-hundred-square-mile jumble of wood, brick, and masonry structures, crisscrossed by four thousand miles of road (much of it unpaved) and chopped up by the trackage of twenty-six different railroads. Fifteen hundred trains, more than 20,000 streetcars, and 130,000 individual vehicles entered this muddle every business day, creating traffic snarls that wasted an estimated 100,000 man/days every year. Much of the city’s housing stock, moreover, was substandard, ill-kept, unhygienic, and in short
supply; working conditions in factories were often brutal and unsafe; and opportunities for escaping the squalor (at beaches, parks, and recreation centers) were inadequate or too expensive for many to consider. To make matters worse, the smoke from hundreds of coal furnaces, smokestacks, and railroad locomotives left a residue of soot and grime on every surface in the city.

The year ahead would also put exceptional pressures on Chicago’s already stressed population. The war abroad may have been won, but many domestic conflicts seemed destined to erupt in the coming months. Labor problems—after a brief wartime truce between unions and employers—were on the rise again, soon to be exacerbated by high inflation, lagging wages, and the return of job-seeking soldiers just when the postwar economy was slowing. Racial strife was growing throughout the city, especially in border neighborhoods where African Americans were moving in ever greater numbers to escape overcrowding in the Black Belt. Friction was also rising among the city’s numerous ethnic groups—Poles, Germans, Irishmen, Italians, and Jews—stoked by the nationalist passions of the recent war.
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But as Illinois governor Frank O. Lowden proclaimed in his official New Year’s greeting: “The new year beholds a new world,” and so Chicagoans were trying to put aside their worries and focus on the positive. The new world of 1919, after all, promised the fulfillment of many individual hopes and expectations as well. For someone like Emily Frankenstein, daughter of a prominent Jewish doctor in Kenwood, the coming year held many bright possibilities. Though she confessed to her diary that she didn’t “dare even to dream” about the distant future, the ebullient twenty-year-old had an “enticing present” to contemplate—her recent graduation from the Kenwood-Loring High School, her exciting new course of study at the University of Chicago, and her budding romance with a young soldier named Jerry Lapiner, to whom she was secretly engaged to be married. Recently
released from duty at a Tennessee army base, Jerry would be looking for a job in January, with an eye to making enough money to support a wife and home—a daunting prospect even in less uncertain times. But tonight the pair was determined to be carefree, braving the “blizzardy, rainy night” to take in a vaudeville show on Wilson Avenue before heading to a friend’s North Side apartment for games and supper.
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Others were greeting the new year more quietly. Victor F. Lawson, owner of the
Chicago Daily News
, a paper that would go to great lengths in the coming months to reshape the city’s future, remained in bed at his luxurious manor on Lake Shore Drive, nursing a broken foot. Lilian Sandburg, wife of a promising young poet soon to return from a wartime journalism assignment in Scandinavia, also celebrated at home, spending a “lonesome day” at their Maywood cottage caring for the five-week-old daughter her husband had yet to meet.

And
Tribune
columnist and sportswriter Ring Lardner, for whom 1919 would prove to be a life-changing year, had his own way of commemorating the holiday. Shunning the boisterous party scenes at the Pompeian Room, the College Inn, and the Edgewater Beach Hotel, the thirty-three-year-old writer instead set out for the “Hotel du Paragon” (that is, his home at 748 Buena Avenue on the North Side), where he found his three young sons engaged in a bacchanal as wild as any in town: “Two young men were lying on the floor, kicking each other, while a third stood on the piano bench, giggling insanely,” Lardner reported in his next day’s column. “None of the revelers wore evening dress.… One of them kept kicking off his slippers and laughing as if he thought it the height of comedy. The other two were continually leaving their chairs and running around the table, shouting at the top of their voices.” Not surprisingly, the three young men soon exhausted themselves; by ten o’clock, they—and their long-suffering parents—were gratefully asleep in their beds.
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The snow continued to fall as midnight arrived, unleashing a citywide crescendo of noise, music, and merrymaking. “Hundreds of orchestras ushered in the new year with the strains of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ ” the
Tribune
reported, “and diners climbed on tables and cheered themselves hoarse.” A block-long parade of soldiers and sailors materialized on State Street and proceeded north, “shouting and hammering and singing, gathering girls and women into the revel as it moved.” Some of the carousing led to accidents. One young soldier home on furlough fell off a crowded streetcar into the path of an oncoming wagon. A distracted chauffeur crashed his employer’s automobile into the display window of a Thirteenth Street shop. Taking advantage of this mayhem, car thieves managed to drive away with no fewer than ten vehicles in the first three hours of the year.

At one o’clock, police insisted that the doors of all saloons and cafés be closed to newcomers, though they allowed those inside to continue their celebrations for a while longer. Early breakfasts were served in the clubs; last songs were sung. By three, the city was beginning to settle down. Exhausted revelers nodded as they rode the late-night “owl cars” to the suburbs. A straggler named John Foll—standing on a street corner, calling for comrades to accompany him to Holland to kill the Kaiser—was quietly arrested and carted off to jail to sleep it off. Emily Frankenstein and Jerry Lapiner left their friend’s soiree at two and—after a “cold-slippery-tired” ride on the L—got home at 4:30 a.m.
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It had been a grand night—the first New Year’s Eve of the postwar era, heralding what many were convinced would be a time of reconstruction and new beginnings. And over the following few days, as Chicago recovered from its collective debauch, the city started to see corroborative signs of the positive changes to come.
Police chief John J. Garrity announced the hiring of one thousand new policemen to patrol the city and make it even safer. Governor Lowden announced a welcome 15 percent reduction in state taxes. Even Chicago’s beloved White Sox got a new start. In a statement made public on New Year’s Day, owner Charles Comiskey announced the replacement of manager Clarence Rowland with William “Kid” Gleason to lead the team in the upcoming season. While the Old Roman would not say why he was making the switch, reporters pointed to the team’s sixth-place finish in the 1918 season, plus rumors that Rowland had lost control over several players disgruntled by salary issues. But the selection of Gleason—a former Sox coach with whom Comiskey was allegedly not even on speaking terms—came as a surprise to everyone. “The loyal patrons of the White Sox desired a change in manager,” Commy explained with bland noncommitment, “and I have exercised the prerogative that I considered mine and made the change.” The team’s performance in the 1919 season, of course, would be the ultimate proof of whether Comiskey had made a wise decision.

Then, on January 6—as if to underline the passing of the old to make way for the new—the city learned that former president Theodore Roosevelt had died unexpectedly at his Sagamore Hill home. Shocked, Chicago went into mourning. Local dignitaries such as Jane Addams and Clarence Darrow published encomiums to the great man in the newspapers. Two days later—at 1:45 p.m., the exact time of Roosevelt’s funeral—all business throughout the city stopped for five minutes. Streetcars and elevated trains shut down; schools and factories suspended operations; crowds gathered on street corners for a moment of silence. For three hundred seconds, the “mighty, roaring, sweltering, pushing, screaming, magnificent, hideous steel giant that was Chicago” came to a standstill.

And then it started up again as before, and moved on.
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Chicago was, in any case, more preoccupied with the future than
with the past. The “youngest great city in the world” had important business to attend to—in particular, the upcoming mayoral election. In April voters would have to decide who would lead the city through its “greatest year” ahead. And that decision would ultimately amount to a referendum on the incumbent, the controversial figure who, for better or worse, had come to represent Chicago in the public mind both in the United States and abroad. Though many different candidates would compete in the race, all eyes would be on the current occupant of city hall: the blustering, flamboyant, unscrupulous, but always entertaining political phenomenon known to all as “Big Bill”—Chicago’s mayor, William Hale Thompson.

T
HE STREETS AROUND
Arcadia Hall began to fill sometime after dusk on January 14. As evening fell, swarms of people began streaming from the North Side streetcars, joining pedestrians already on their way toward the large barrel-roofed structure at Broadway and Sunnyside in Uptown. By seven, large crowds—including many women, legal voters in Illinois municipal elections since 1913—had formed around the main entrance, spilling out into traffic on the street.

Once the doors opened, the cavernous auditorium quickly filled to capacity. Spectators crammed themselves into every available space, including the gallery at the back of the hall and the area behind the broad elevated stage. While some of these people were clearly Republican Party hacks and members of the campaign’s “portable audience” (hired to fill out rooms around the city), many others had come of their own accord, simply to witness what they knew would be the best free entertainment in the city: Tonight, the mayor of Chicago would announce his candidacy for a second term.
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At eight o’clock, Samuel Hamilton, vice president of the Twenty-fifth Ward William Hale Thompson Club, called the assembly to order. He introduced the Chicago Marine Band, which warmed up the audience with a varied program of music, including a sing-along of the anthem “America,” two violin solos by a young soldier named W. A. Dalpé, and “The Cycle of Life,” a soprano solo sung by Mrs. Milton Severinghaus, wife of the program’s musical director. Finally,
the audience joined the singers on stage in a rousing performance of “The Man of the Hour,” the latest Thompson campaign song, reading the newly minted lyrics from a signboard hoisted above the stage for all to see:

Over here we have a leader

Who’s been fighting for you and me
.

Ever since he’s been elected

He’s been square as man could be
.