THE EXODUS STARTED before dawn. With all mass transit except the suburban steam lines idled by the strike, hundreds of thousands of Chicago workers had to get to work on Tuesday morning by whatever means they could find. Desperate for transportation, commuters were hitching rides on laundry vans, bicycles, produce trucks, ice wagons, furniture drays, specially chartered riverboats, and virtually anything else that moved. Long-disused surreys and buggies were brought out of storage; old cab horses were recalled from retirement; flatbed trucks were refitted with kitchen chairs to be reborn as jitneys. Price gouging was rampant. “I stood up in a truck all the way from Garfield Park and paid 15 cents for it,” a female clerk complained to a reporter, “but I’m here.” One boy on the West Side apparently mistook the motley procession of vehicles for a circus parade. “Oh mother, here comes the lion’s cage,” he allegedly cried, pointing to a department store truck carting a load of exasperated women to their jobs.

In the Loop, the traffic jams were epic. With no one to control the flow of vehicles, the result was chaos in the streets. “Never in the history of the city has such a condition prevailed,” one traffic official announced. “Every one of 175 crossing policemen and 75 mounted policemen are detailed to the South Side race riots. Even the Chicago police reserve has been pressed into riot duty. The situation is entirely in the hands of the public. The people must be tolerant.”¹

At least half a million other commuters, afraid to venture into the streets, just stayed home. Virtually no one—black or white—showed up for work at the stockyards. Twelve hundred black municipal employees were officially urged to stay off the job. This proved to be a wise move, for the night’s racial violence did not taper off at first light, as it had on Monday. The Evening Post described the mayhem: “Snipers, white as well as black; mobs armed with stones and bricks; arson gangs—all these have been active since daybreak in the face of the police department’s utmost efforts to maintain order.” Some workers who did decide to report to work paid with their lives. Edward W. Jackson, heading on foot to his morning shift at a South Side factory, was beaten to death at Fortieth and Halsted by a group of five white men. Walter Parejko and Josef Maminaki, laborers for the Grand Trunk Railway, were shot by three black youths in front of a Dearborn Street store. Thanks to the beefed-up police presence in the Black Belt, the huge mobs that had proven so unmanageable on Monday night were successfully dispersed on Tuesday, but smaller, more mobile groups were still on the rampage. One report cited a group of twelve armed black soldiers—all former members of the Old Eighth Division—prowling the South Side, shooting at any white faces they saw. The overall outlook was grim. “This is the most serious problem that has ever confronted the police department in Chicago,” Deputy Chief Alcock told his men at the Stanton Avenue station that morning. “We need all the determination we can muster.”²

The most ominous development of the morning was the spread of the violence beyond the confines of the South Side. With over four-fifths of the police force on duty in and around the Black Belt, much of the rest of the city was virtually unprotected. According to one estimate, the entire Loop district on Tuesday morning was being patrolled by a total of three officers and one sergeant. Rioters were quick to take advantage of the situation. Early on Tuesday, several white mobs, turned back from the Black Belt by police, headed north and began terrorizing the downtown business district, pulling black workers from railroad stations, restaurants, and factories and beating them on the streets. A group of five hundred, including many soldiers and sailors, stormed the Palmer House—one of the most luxurious hotels in the city—hoping to take its black kitchen employees. By noon, two black men had been killed—one shot, one stabbed—as they tried to escape the marauding mobs through traffic-choked streets, while hundreds of shocked bystanders looked on.³

For many, these Loop raids were finally bringing home the extent to which the city was out of control. “The race riots are spreading,” Governor Lowden’s wife wrote in her diary that day, “and a situation of incredible horror may develop at any moment!” Many business owners in the Loop, appalled that the riot had come to their own doorsteps, were now calling for the imposition of martial law.⁴

At midday, Mayor Thompson and Governor Lowden held a meeting at the Blackstone Hotel to discuss the situation. The governor had already been on his way to Nebraska when a telegram reached him en route, bearing news of the strike vote and the worsening of the riots. Taken by surprise, he had gotten off his train in Burlington, Iowa, and commandeered a special train back to Chicago, arriving at 5:30 a.m. Now he was urging cooperation “at all levels of government” to address the crisis. “I cannot say who is responsible for this situation,” he told reporters before the meeting, “[but] it is here.… If we all keep our heads and cooperate, we will handle the situation, as a large majority of the people stand for law and order.”⁵

Exactly what occurred in the undoubtedly tense meeting between these two foes is unknown. According to newspaper reports, the mayor and the governor were given an upbeat assessment of the situation by Brigadier General Frank S. Dickson, head of the militia, and Charles Fitzmorris, Thompson’s private secretary, who together had toured the riot districts that morning. This report seemed to give both chief executives the excuse they needed to avoid a confrontation on the issue of the National Guard. Thompson was clearly reluctant to cede control of the city by calling in the troops, and Lowden was just as clearly reluctant to clash with the man who would head the Illinois delegation at the upcoming Republican National Convention. And so they decided to hold off on any deployment of troops, at least for the moment. Four regiments of the militia thus remained idle at armories across the city as, just outside, the killing in the streets went on.⁶

At a news conference after their meeting, both men expressed optimism that the worst of the crisis was over. “Mayor Thompson and I are cooperating heartily and shall continue to do so,” the governor announced. “We will keep in touch with each other in order that all forces of law and order may be brought to bear on this situation.”

Turning to General Dickson, the governor said, “Now, General, tell these gentlemen of the press what you found.”

“We found the situation much improved,” Dickson replied. “The commanding officers reported a great change in feeling since last night and an improved outlook and disposition on the part of the people generally. All the commanding officers we talked with felt they had the situation well in hand, and did not anticipate any recurrence of the deplorable events of last night.”

“Will you keep the troops under arms at the armories?” one reporter asked the governor.

“Certainly,” he replied. “We will take no chances and be prepared for any event.”

Mayor Thompson, apparently dismayed that Lowden was getting all of the attention, stepped in at this point. “There is one thought that I want,” he blurted. “I want to see that all the citizens of Chicago get thorough protection and a square deal all around—”

“That is absolutely right,” the governor said, interrupting him right back.

The conference broke up soon after, with the two “heartily cooperating” chief executives heading back to their separate command posts at city hall and the Blackstone Hotel. As reporters prepared to leave, Chief Garrity told them that there was nothing to worry about. “Things are quieting down steadily,” he said. “The police have [the situation] as well in hand as it could possibly be.”⁷

But the absurdity of this last statement became more and more obvious as the day progressed. At around noon, even as the city and state officials were uttering their reassurances, 150 black prisoners started a melee at the county jail. The prisoners had been exercising in the jail’s interior bull pen when a guard opened the door to allow two inmates to see their lawyers in the visiting room. Scores of prisoners instantly rushed the door, knocking over the guard and escaping into the corridor outside. They proceeded to run rampant through the jail. Some tried to force their way through doors leading to the street. Others ran to an older part of the jail where white prisoners were being held. They smashed cots and tables in the cell blocks and used the splintered debris as clubs to attack guards and other prisoners. Two hundred policemen, guards, deputy sheriffs, and detectives responded to an emergency call. They managed to round up the rioting inmates and force them back into the bull pen. Told to go back to their cells, the men refused, leading to a tense standoff. Detective Sergeant Edward Powers—who had been in the nearby office of the state’s attorney, discussing the Fitzgerald case—appealed to them to disperse quietly, but still they refused to go. Then jailer Will T. Davis appeared and took command. “Look here,” he said, “I’m not going to give you more than a minute or two to make up your minds. I’ve got 200 armed men behind me, and I can turn them loose on you—or you can go to your cells in peace. Use your own judgment, but you must make up your minds pretty quick.”

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.”¹¹

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.”¹³

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

The violence thus continued through a third long night. In his Maywood cottage, Carl Sandburg sat up late that night, pouring his disgust into a new poem. Earlier in the day, he had attended the daily meeting of Wells-Barnett’s newly formed Olivet Protective Association. Representatives of every African American congregation in the city had been present, reporting on events in their neighborhoods and trying to decide what to do next. “I saw seven wagonloads of people arrested go past my place,” one speaker said, “and they were all colored people. One might judge by this that only colored people are rioting.” Sandburg had also interviewed Dr. George C. Hall of the National Urban League, who complained bitterly of the conduct of police in the riots.

The reporter had produced articles for the Daily News on both of these meetings, writing in the dispassionate, neutral style that was at least the ostensible goal of 1919 newspaper journalism. But tonight the poet in him wanted to express something else. The poem he wrote—“Hoodlums”—was a coarse, rhythmless outpouring of hostility, written from the perspective of a rioter. “Being a hoodlum now, you and I,” the poem ended, “being all of us a world of hoodlums, let us take up the cry when the mob sluffs by on a thousand shoe soles, let us too yammer, ‘Kill him! kill him!’ … / Let us do this now … for our mothers … for our sisters and wives … let us kill, kill, kill—for the torsos of the women are tireless and the loins of the men are strong.”

As poetry, what Sandburg wrote that night was formless, incoherent, without art or any semblance of grace. But it was a powerful indictment of the senseless anger he was seeing all around him. It was also one of the few poems in his career that he would ever mark with a date and place: “Chicago, July 29, 1919.”²⁴