20

Day of Blood

Eugene Debs had a mind nourished by action. Throughout his life, he was constantly on the move, meeting people, talking, organizing, delivering speeches. He was rarely contemplative. Things always needed to be done.

Like a man sprinting on a tightrope, he had traveled the country for a year preaching the gospel of the American Railway Union, leading the strike on the Great Northern, and overseeing the ARU convention. He had taken charge of the greatest labor action in the nation’s history, plotted strategy, sent hundreds of telegrams, talked repeatedly to reporters, and addressed rallies around Chicago and across the Middle West.

Now he sensed that the situation was approaching a turning point and he struggled to make sense of the mixed messages. In Cleveland, switchmen were staying out and no trains were moving. In Van Buren, Arkansas, “not a wheel on the Missouri Pacific” was turning. In Birmingham, telegraph operators had joined the tie-up.

Yet some trains were beginning to roll, guarded by soldiers’ guns. The first mail trains had left Los Angeles. The U.S. Ninth Cavalry Regiment was riding out to open the Union Pacific from Cheyenne to Ogden.

What to make of it all? The union had set up a bicycle intelligence service to report on events around Chicago and to carry messages into the field, a useful innovation with many local trains frozen in place. He learned that three-quarters of the factories in Chicago would soon close for lack of fuel, supplies, or business. A hundred thousand in the city would be thrown out of work. The Illinois Steel Company was banking nineteen furnaces for lack of coke and would be laying off 5,750 men. The Great Western Refining Co. had fuel for only two more days.

In these early years of electric power, towns, factories, and some private homes depended on their own generating facilities. The steam engines that powered them now thirsted for coal. Lack of power knocked out lights, streetcar lines, water plants.

Would the distress translate into public rage against the intransigence of George Pullman and the devious tactics of the rail companies? Or would it swing against the union? Debs could do nothing but urge the men to keep up the pressure as they waited to see.

“Capital has combined to enslave labor,” he wrote. “We must all stand together or go down in hopeless defeat.”

That Saturday, July 7, George Pullman, also sensing a climax, wired orders that company officials were to remove all servants from his Prairie Avenue mansion and see that they were taken to places of safety. It was whispered that his silver plate had already been transferred to vaults at the Pullman Building downtown. More armed guards were sent to patrol his home.

To some, the violence and disorder suggested divine retribution. Mormon elder John H. Smith, a cousin of the sect’s founder, wrote in his diary: “Blood has been spilled at several places and Millions of property has been destroyed at Chicago. Said Joseph the Prophet, you will have mob[b]ings to your hearts content. Are his words being fullfilled?”

*   *   *

The burning, shooting, and widespread chaos that had gripped the city on Friday, July 6, prompted a conference between General Miles and Mayor Hopkins. The general said he had talked to the president over a long-distance telephone line. Cleveland hoped to soothe the hard feelings that his ignoring of local authorities had created. Now he said he wanted “unity of action.” The federal soldiers would be deployed to move the mails and facilitate interstate commerce. Miles said they would also be available to charge crowds and restore order, but only at the request of the mayor.

Hopkins still resented the intrusion. He made it clear to Miles that he now had four thousand National Guard militiamen, along with more than three thousand police officers, under his command. Both men agreed that they needed to give their forces more backbone. Orders were changed. Now federal troops would be allowed to shoot at anyone setting fires, destroying property, throwing objects, or attacking marshals or trainmen. State soldiers and police would be issued similar instructions. Crowds would no longer be allowed to jeer and threaten troops with impunity.

After meeting the mayor, Miles sat down with U.S. Attorney Edwin Walker, John Egan of the GMA, and other railroad men. They wanted troops to back up the armed marshals, many of them railroad employees, who were guarding the trains. Miles, still unconvinced of the need to concentrate his forces, sent his men out by companies to depots and key crossings. He ordered each soldier to carry a hundred rounds of ammunition and five days’ rations.

*   *   *

The critical action on Saturday was to be undertaken by state, not federal, troops. Before dawn, the forty men of Company C of the Second Illinois National Guard Regiment, under the command of Captain Thomas I. Mair, rose early, ate a quick breakfast, and headed out at 4:00 a.m. The pearly light of a summer dawn was just brightening the sky. Their assignment was to back up a squadron of police and to guard a wrecking train that was clearing an east-west section of rail line that ran the length of Forty-Seventh Street along the southern edge of the Union Stock Yard.

The wrecking train consisted of an engine and a tender pushing a flatcar mounted with a heavy wooden derrick. Maintenance workers used a block and tackle, wedges, jacks, and muscle power to right capsized and burnt boxcars and get them back onto the rails.

It was tedious work, punctuated by catcalls and jeers from the residents of nearby houses, most of them Polish and Bohemian immigrants. Children turned out in numbers to watch the intriguing process. Men and women grumbled in foreign tongues.

Around three in the afternoon, after eleven hours on the job with no break for dinner, the crew was working on an overturned car near Loomis Street. By this time, several thousand spectators had gathered. A publishing company employee named J. R. George had the afternoon off and was watching from the steps of a nearby saloon. He reported that hoodlums, mostly teenage boys, started the trouble. One of them “shied a stone at the soldiers.” Half a dozen others followed suit.

The troops and trainmen found themselves under a hail of stones and pieces of iron. An exasperated Captain Mair ordered the onlookers to disperse and told his men to load their rifles. Some spectators, especially the women and children, drifted back toward the stables and alleys that lined the tracks. Others, curious about what was happening, pushed forward. The disturbance attracted more onlookers, swelling the crowd to several thousand.

Tension thickened the air of the overcast afternoon. The barrage of thrown objects increased. A stone ricocheted off the engine and struck a policeman. He fired his revolver into the crowd. The onlookers surged backward. A return shot sounded from one of the sheds. More police officers fired, some into the crowd, some over the heads of the watchers. A great roar of rage poured from the citizenry. More missiles. The electric crackle of gunfire sounded back and forth. A baseball-size stone struck National Guard lieutenant Harry Reed on the temple and knocked him to the ground bleeding and unconscious.

Captain Mair shouted his orders to the militiamen.

“Make ready.” A clatter of arms.

“Take aim.” A single beat of silence.

“Fire!” The rifles blasted in unison with an intimidating, ear-numbing crash far louder than the snap of the revolvers. It was the first coordinated volley fired during the boycott.

The crowd flinched. Half a dozen men fell. A cloud of white smoke wafted over the onlookers.

A young man standing on the saloon steps beside J. R. George grabbed his arm and announced, “I’m shot!” George panicked and began to run. He saw a woman who was hit by a bullet sink to the ground.

“Then ensued the real rioting,” George noted. Joining a stampede up Loomis Street, he darted down an alley, leaped over a fence, tore across a vacant lot, stumbled over a man’s body, and came upon a white-faced woman, her leg a mass of blood. He ran on.

Back along the tracks, the enraged members of the crowd were bellowing and pushing forward. More volleys rang out from the militia. Captain Mair ordered his men to deploy bayonets and charge.

The soldiers’ Springfield rifles were equipped with an innovation in the form of a built-in, round, spring-loaded bayonet similar to a ramrod. The flick of a catch snapped the weapon into position. The men drove the crowd with these pig stickers, pushing them north along Loomis Street, then east on Forty-Ninth Street. Rioters fought back with stones and clubs. A dozen men in the front lines were stabbed by soldiers.

While this battle was in progress, a separate mob approached the wrecking train from the south. The terrified engineer opened the throttle and the train began a clanking retreat down the right-of-way. The soldiers hurried back to the tracks and marched along behind it. The crowd, sensing a victory, surged toward them. The company of militiamen wheeled and charged again.

By this time, chaos gripped the entire neighborhood, one of the slums that surrounded the Union Stock Yard. The police had called for reinforcements. A patrol wagon filled with officers came stampeding toward the scene. The driver whipped the horses and charged full speed into the menacing crowd. The police began firing point-blank into the mass of people. The rioters wavered, then retreated. A barbed wire fence that ran parallel to the tracks slowed them, giving the officers, who were “not inclined to be merciful,” a chance to wade in swinging clubs.

Another militia company, called in as reinforcements, came running up the tracks at a brisk trot. When they were welcomed by a barrage of stones, their captain, too, ordered a bayonet charge. The fight again moved away from the rail line and into the streets and alleys of the neighborhood, a mixture of three-story tenements and small bungalows interspersed with storefronts. Residents fired rifles and pistols from houses. Police and soldiers shot back. A group of men fled up the avenue and took refuge in a saloon. Police officers smashed in the door. They were met by a barrage of billiard balls.

When it was over, the ground “was like a battlefield,” with hats knocked off, jackets shed, men lying bleeding. In an alley, a neighborhood ruffian named John “Engine” Burke lay shot through the torso. Police carried him to a nearby drugstore, where he expired. Thomas Jackman had been shot in the stomach—he too would die. At least four persons were killed in the skirmish, probably more. Some of those killed and wounded were spirited away into houses and tenements and never reported by residents of the insular immigrant communities.

News of the shooting began to blare from extra editions of newspapers. IS A DAY OF BLOOD, cried the Chicago Tribune.

National anxiety soared. William Steinway, New York City businessman and scion of the piano-making firm, had, like George Pullman, established a company town near his factory to discourage union organizing. On Saturday, July 7, he recorded in his diary: “Terrible scenes at Chicago and the West, murder and destruction of property, RR Cars by the strikers and the mob, adding to the general business depression, and raising prices of meat, also preventing shipment of goods.”

Although strikers were enraged by the violence, many of their sympathizers were sobered. The sharp danger made those who were out to have fun or to loot think twice about venturing into the rail yards. The battle at Loomis Street delivered just the type of shock that some had hoped would quell the disorder.

Others had been killed during the day, including Richard Zepp, a detective hired by Baltimore & Ohio officials to protect their property. He was shot through a window of the Union Depot at Adams and Canal Streets in downtown Chicago. He left a widow and nine children. Joseph Warzowski, a Polish laborer, was shot in the back by either a marshal or a federal soldier at Twenty-Second Street just north of the industrial district that lined the South Branch of the Chicago River.

In the opinion of former Union Army general Lew Wallace, “Civil war is imminent if the great strike is not promptly subdued.”

*   *   *

The killing was not over. Hammond, Indiana, was a choke point for trains from the East, and the people there overwhelmingly supported the strike. Adjacent to Chicago’s South Side, the town had seen serious disturbances since the beginning of the boycott eleven days earlier. Sheriff deputies, federal marshals, and Indiana militiamen had all tried their hand at keeping trains moving. Eugene Debs and local union officials had cautioned strikers and sympathizers against illegal acts. On that Saturday night, July 7, crowds again invaded the Hammond rail yards.

In the darkness, rioters turned over fifteen freight cars, blocking the Michigan Central and Nickel Plate lines. The rioting went on all night. The protesters, many armed with revolvers, stopped another train and ordered the engineer and fireman out. Indiana National Guard troops returned. Railroad officials wired General Miles for federal military assistance. He ordered Company D of the Fifteenth Infantry to speed south by train from their Lake Front Park camp early on Sunday.

About eleven thirty that morning, the forty-nine men of the company climbed down into Hammond’s maze of tracks. Jeering citizens turned the scene into a “veritable bedlam.” The crowd quickly swelled to more than two thousand.

Captain Wilson T. Hartz ordered his men to clear the tracks so that a mail train could move through. They walked the onlookers back to the sidewalks at bayonet point. Then Hartz took a squad aboard an engine and headed up the tracks to assure they were clear. After they traveled a short distance, they received word that the rioters were in the process of overturning a Pullman car onto the tracks to block their retreat. Hartz ordered the engineer to reverse and told his men to load their weapons.

The Springfield was a single-shot rifle. After the men slid a cartridge into the chamber, they customarily held a few rounds in their mouths to be ready for additional shots. An observer that day said the men appeared to have “steel tusks.”

As the soldiers arrived at the scene, the rioters remained oblivious of the danger. A reporter judged them to be “roughs from Chicago who had been brought there by the excitement.” They were intent on using a rope and tackle to upset the heavy Pullman car.

Without warning and without orders, the soldiers began to fire before the locomotive came to a halt. The explosion of the first volley caught the crowd of forty rioters by surprise.

“They were firing directly at us,” a witness reported. “Instantly there was a panic, men and women screaming.” By the third crash of the rifles, the vandals were in full retreat.

“About thirty shots were fired,” Captain Hartz estimated, “before I could get the engine to a standstill and get control.”

Half a dozen people were shot. Victor Seitor’s knee was shattered; an amputation would be needed to save his life. W. H. Campbell received a fatal bullet wound to his thigh. Annie Flemming was not even a spectator. She had been crossing the tracks four blocks away to visit a neighbor. When a bullet grazed her leg above the knee, she fainted. She was carried bleeding to a nearby house.

Charles Fleischer likewise played no part in the riot. A thirty-five-year-old carpenter, he had come down to the yards to search for his son, who had been attracted by the excitement. Fleischer had climbed onto a freight car to see if he could spot the lad. A bullet tore open his abdomen and killed him outright. His frantic wife, waiting anxiously for her son to return, instead watched as neighbors approached carrying her husband’s body.

The shooting inspired many in the crowd to rush home and return with revolvers and shotguns, intent on slaughtering the soldiers. Hammond’s mayor, Patrick Reilly, who was already on the scene, climbed onto a boxcar and pleaded for calm. He ordered the people to go home. He encouraged a local priest to intercede with his parishioners. But it was the arrival of three more companies of regulars that finally convinced the rioters to retreat.

Reilly bitterly denounced the shooting. The troops, he said, should have used their bayonets to manage the crowd rather than fire indiscriminately. “I would like to know by what authority United States Troops come in here and shoot our citizens without the slightest warning,” he demanded of Indiana governor Claude Matthews. The head of the ARU local in Hammond also contacted the governor. “Federal troops shooting citizens down promiscuously without provocation,” he wired. “Act quickly.” Governor Matthews said that if authority was resisted and inoffensive citizens suffered as a result, it was a source of “extreme regret.”

Hammond residents convinced a justice of the peace to issue murder charges against the troops involved in the shooting. But the soldiers were already on their way back to Chicago and the warrants were never served. Mayor Reilly ordered all saloons in town closed for the duration.

In Ohio, federal judge William Howard Taft wrote to his wife: “It will be necessary for the military to kill some of the mob before the trouble can be stayed.” They had only killed six so far, he said, and “this is hardly enough to make an impression.”

*   *   *

The killing was not over. That same Saturday night, July 7, Bohemian and Italian rioters burned cars in the Burlington Railroad yard at Ashland Avenue just north of the port facilities on the Chicago River. A seventeen-year-old girl named Martea Bach went to the roof of her tenement building at Nineteenth Street and Ashland to watch the excitement. Police arrived to break up the mob. They fired over the heads of the crowd. One of the bullets struck Martea in the heart and she fell down dead.