FOR SOME TIME, the city has been in a turmoil,” Emily Frankenstein reported in her diary for July 30. Writing for once without ever mentioning her troubles with Jerry Lapiner, Emily recounted the incredible series of events that had occurred in the city over the past ten days—the blimp crash, the Janet Wilkinson ordeal, and now the transit strike and “race war.” Although she had seen little of the violence herself, her Uncle Kurt, a volunteer on guard duty at Twenty-sixth and Wabash, had described to her “the hand-to-hand fights, shooting, sniping, chasing”—much of it taking place within a few blocks of her Kenwood home. “It seems as if the city [will] never settle down to peace,” she wrote. “According to rumors of undertakers’ reports, nearly 500 [have been] killed.”¹

That figure was a vast exaggeration (by Wednesday, the death toll had by some counts reached “just” thirty-three), but it hints at the magnitude of the horror and incredulity being felt citywide at the continuing slaughter in the streets. An aura of anarchy seemed to be hanging over Chicago, compounded by an overwhelming sense that local authorities were unable or unwilling to take charge of the situation. The newspapers were as incensed as everyone else. “Mayor Refuses Assent to Martial Law” read the banner headline in Wednesday’s Daily Journal, and in the Daily News: “Storm Mayor with Demand for Troops to Quell Race Riots.”²

Parts of the city had by now taken on the appearance of a war zone. On the South Side, charred houses stood empty on many streets, windows broken and occupants long gone; many other homes and businesses were shuttered or rudely boarded up, while streets and sidewalks were littered with bricks, stones, and, in some places, pools of drying blood. Police lined the main avenues of the Black Belt like an occupying army, refusing to let anyone in or out. Even the downtown Loop area seemed besieged. Traffic chaos reigned again—despite four hundred volunteer crossing guards—as the transit strike entered its second day, while many businesses, restaurants, and stores remained closed, unable to operate without their black employees.³

At his headquarters at the Blackstone Hotel, Governor Lowden tried to maintain a facade of optimism, but the crisis was taking a toll on him. “Frank is living through the most anxious days of his life so far,” his wife fretted to her diary that day. “No one knows what new trouble may develop hourly.” Certainly, with the eyes of the nation now trained on Chicago, the governor knew he had to proceed very warily. That morning, State’s Attorney Hoyne—doubtless to Lowden’s annoyance—had gone on the record as having formally asked the governor for a declaration of martial law. But Lowden wasn’t ready to hazard such a risky move. “The troops are to be had for the asking,” he announced in a carefully phrased public statement. “[But] I have certain pronounced ideas on the race situation in general, and I’ve had experience which makes my ideas on the use of troops equally emphatic.” Citing the example of East St. Louis in 1917, where the imposition of martial law seemed to exacerbate racial hostility, he said, “If we were to order out the militia for riot duty before there was vital need, we’d be aggravating matters that already are bad enough. It would mean that the day the troops were withdrawn, rioting would break out afresh.… I [don’t] want East St. Louis to be repeated in Chicago.”⁴

The logic behind this argument is elusive, but Lowden’s statement did have the virtue of inoculating him in advance against any bad outcome, should the mayor make a formal request for troops. Even so, it was clear that, despite upbeat reports in the predawn hours, the police were far from being in control of the situation. That reality became clear to the governor later in the morning, when his meeting with state officials was interrupted by shouts from the street below. The governor went to the window and watched as a crowd of a hundred white males came around the corner of Congress Street in pursuit of a lone African American man. “The black was cornered in a doorway,” the New York Times reported, “but before the mob could reach him a mounted policeman blocked the path. Using his horse as a shield, the policeman held off the mob until a patrol wagon arrived to rescue the Negro.”

Before the governor had turned away from the window, however, the mob caught sight of a second black man. “There’s another one,” someone shouted, and then the men began pursuing their new quarry toward the Congress Street L station.⁵

Several blocks north, at his separate command headquarters in city hall, Mayor Thompson was still refusing to commit himself to an intervention by the National Guard. To be sure, support for such a move had until now been anything but unanimous among the mayor’s African American supporters. Assistant corporation counsel Ed Wright, for instance, had advised Big Bill not to call in the troops, for fear that they would “line up with the lawless whites.” But the continuation of violence on Tuesday night had apparently changed some minds. A delegation of black leaders—including Ida Wells-Barnett’s husband, Ferdinand Barnett—visited the mayor’s office on Wednesday to formally request the troops as a means of ending “the carnival of murder and assault.” Thompson listened to them politely, as he did to another ad hoc committee of notables—this one consisting of Clarence Darrow, Sears president Julius Rosenwald, Carl Sandburg, and an assortment of judges and clergymen. But he insisted that the Chicago police could handle the unrest without state help.⁶

The city council, however, was more difficult to put off. At a fiery midday session that nearly devolved into a fistfight, the city’s aldermen voted overwhelmingly for the mayor to deploy the militia. Joseph McDonough, the three-hundred-pound alderman from the mostly Irish Fifth Ward (and an early mentor of future mayor Richard J. Daley), was especially vehement. “You aldermen would be amazed if you could see what is going on in our ward,” McDonough said. “Alderman [Thomas A.] Doyle and I were driving in my automobile … and were fired upon from a house at the corner. A block away were a lieutenant and 20 policemen. We told them what had happened and asked them to raid the house. The lieutenant told me to tell my troubles at the City Hall.…”

“At 38th Street and Steward Avenue,” McDonough continued, “a mob of Negroes assembled and threatened to march through the white districts and wipe them out. The police made no attempt to interfere.”

Doyle had an even more chilling (and probably overblown) tale, describing a car filled with black rioters who shot down a woman and a little boy standing right next to him on West Thirty-fifth Street. “I was lucky I didn’t get it too,” Doyle said. “As the guns spurted fire, the muzzles looked as if they were aimed straight at me!”

Alarmed by these anecdotes, the council demanded to see Chief Garrity, who was quickly found in his city hall office and brought before them. Trying to calm the unruly aldermen, the chief, “sitting in his coatsleeves, sweating profusely,” insisted again that the police had the situation well in hand, and that his morning tour of the riot districts had revealed that “everything was quiet.” Turning to Alderman McDonough, Garrity said, “I admit things in your district were in bad shape until last night. I transferred Captain Coughlin out and put Captain Hogan in to straighten things out, and he is getting results.… If you gentlemen think I can’t do it or that you can do it better than I can, I am willing to step out and let you do it.”⁷

No one took the chief up on this apparent offer to resign, but the aldermen were far from appeased. “The Chief says conditions are fine today,” McDonough remarked then. “I agree they are fine today. But they weren’t fine last night and they won’t be fine tonight.” He went on to describe—with increasing hyperbole—the mayhem in his district. “I saw bombs going off! I saw white men and women running through the streets dragging children by the hand and carrying babies in their arms.… The police are powerless to cope with the situation!”

“Don’t you believe the militia should supplement the police?” another alderman asked Chief Garrity.

“No,” the chief replied. “We would run the danger of having a lot of undependable men to work with.”

But the councilmen remained skeptical. Alderman Sheldon W. Gouler said, “I want to say on my own responsibility that I believe nothing except rotten politics is preventing the calling out of troops.”

More argument followed, but in the end Garrity convinced the assembled aldermen to vote funds for one thousand special temporary policemen instead of resorting to the militia. Even so, McDonough insisted that he would advise his constituents to arm themselves against a possible black invasion. “The Governor and the Mayor are not telling the public everything they know,” he maintained, and warned that the city’s black population was actively arming and preparing for all-out war.⁸

Such paranoia was not limited to the city council chamber. State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne, clearly not immune to the rising hysteria, was by afternoon pointing to a “secret order of Negroes” behind the unrest. “I am convinced that these riots are the result of a plan carefully laid by a certain vicious Negro element which has been encouraged by a group of City Hall politicians, both black and white.” Ignoring all reliable data to the contrary, the state’s attorney insisted that “from observations which I have made in the so-called Black Belt, I believe that the victims of the riot are chiefly innocent bystanders and that the fights are provoked by the colored people rather than the whites.” At their joint press conference, Hoyne and Illinois attorney general Edward Brundage, who had cut short a Michigan vacation in order to race to the city, disagreed on the question of martial law (Brundage opposed it), but they seemed in perfect accord on just what had caused the riot. “A number of politicians, whose aim was solely to get votes,” Brundage said, “fanned this feeling [of hostility] among the Negroes and encouraged them in their ideas of race equality.” According to Brundage, the alleged secret cabal of black agitators “has sworn to get three white men for every Negro who is killed.”⁹

With such wildly incendiary statements coming from their state and local officials, it was little wonder that many white Chicagoans were demonstrating their willingness to resort to desperate measures to solve what now seemed an intractable problem. And to its discredit, the Tribune took the opportunity to nurture the despair. “It is becoming more and more evident that the white and colored races are not living in harmony in Chicago and that the tendency toward conciliation is not sufficient to bridge the chasm,” the editors claimed in an editorial.

If the whites and colored cannot refrain from riots and bloodshed and interminable violence on the bathing beaches, how long will it be before this question is asked: Shall there be separate bathing beaches for the whites and colored?

… If a colored person cannot enter a street car without this being the signal for shooting and furore, how long will it be before public policy and the protection of life and property makes necessary another system of transportation?

… If the races are always at swords’ points and individuals of each continually being sacrificed to the violent feeling which exists and which it is no use to deny, does it not follow that somewhere there must be a rule of conduct?

That the paper stopped just short of recommending a formal Jim Crow “rule of conduct” speaks volumes about the level of fear being felt by a large number of white Chicagoans. As in the Janet Wilkinson case, the response to a perceived threat from within the community was—for all too many in the city—a desire to indiscriminately quarantine any and all who might potentially do them harm. Never mind the rights guaranteed by the nation’s founding documents. As one alderman said when requesting the suspension of search-and-seizure laws in the Black Belt, “That may be unconstitutional, but we should not waste time over details.”¹⁰

For his part, Mayor Thompson was finding it more expedient to downplay the severity of the discord rather than advocate any long-term solution to it. Now was not the time, Big Bill maintained, “to investigate the cause of the rioting or to appoint a committee to consider the question of preventing its recurrence.” Besides, the trouble on the South Side was, in his opinion, all but over now. “Yes, the situation is better,” he said to reporters that afternoon. “I am glad of it, too, and feel relieved that we have gotten through without having to call the troops. I am pleased with the way things are quieting down.” After a tour of the Loop with his commissioner of public service, the mayor was positively upbeat. “The rookie police are doing wonderfully well,” he said, “and only demonstrate my contention that Chicago people are the best on earth and Chicago spirit the greatest on earth.” According to the mayor, even the transit crisis wasn’t as hopeless as advertised. The international president of the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees, W. D. Mahon, had arrived in town that day and was now promising a second vote on the compromise wage offer—one that would not be dominated by the “200 or 300 extremists” who had influenced the strike vote on Monday. City officials even hinted that the Ls and streetcars could be running again as early as Thursday.¹¹

But the situation on the South Side remained critical, all sanguine utterances to the contrary. That afternoon, Coroner Hoffman, who had been forced to drop his Wingfoot inquest when the number of riot deaths became too overwhelming, impaneled a jury and took them to the riot district, stopping at morgues and hospitals to view the bodies of the latest victims. The jury’s marked automobiles attracted mobs at every stop, though no violence erupted. But they found a new problem festering in the Black Belt: “My people have no food,” one community leader complained. “Retailers in the district have run out of stocks, and outside grocery and butcher men will not send their wagons into the district.” Uncollected garbage was piling up in alleys and on sidewalks, and since the unions of the icemen and milk drivers had forbidden deliveries by their members, what little food there was in the district was rapidly spoiling in the summer heat. Since few blacks had been able to get to their jobs since Saturday, moreover, many families were running out of money to buy essentials.

And now there were rumors racing through the Black Belt that Ragen’s Colts and the other white clubs were preparing for an all-out confrontation that would dwarf the attacks of previous nights.¹²

“This Is Chicago’s Crisis; Keep a Cool Head,” the Chicago American urged its readers that evening:

Chicago is facing its crisis today.

In one great section of the city, law and order for the time being seem to have been flung to the four winds. White men and colored men are shooting one another down in the streets for no earthly cause except that the color of their faces differ.

It is worse than a calamity, this race rioting. It is a deadly, ghastly scourge, a dire contagion that is sweeping through a community for no reason except that mob violence is contagious.

It is up to the cool-headed men of Chicago to settle the great difficulty. It is up to the serious-minded business men of the city to get together and find a solution to a problem which has become so serious.…

There is no time to be lost. Other matters must be put aside for the moment and a solution reached for Chicago’s greatest problem.

But cool heads seemed in short supply in Chicago just then. And as darkness approached, signs of brewing violence were multiplying once again. General Dickson, who made several trips through the South Side that day with Deputy Chief Alcock, returned in the late afternoon with an ominous assessment: “The condition is very grave,” he said. “I am afraid it is even more serious now than [on] Monday and Tuesday.”¹³

And indeed, the riot calls began flooding in shortly before nightfall. Shootings and clashes were reported in rapid succession throughout the South Side, forcing police—most of them utterly exhausted by now—to race from one disturbance to the next before any of them could be entirely put down. As feared, roaming white mobs were raging through the Black Belt and contested neighborhoods adjacent to it, setting fire to houses and shooting residents as they fled for their lives. By ten-thirty, 112 fire alarms had been sounded, coming in at such a pace that dispatchers could barely keep track of them. And on Wells Street, the orgy of debasement reached its absolute nadir. Several hundred white gang members—having shot up, ransacked, and set fire to the black-occupied homes up and down the street—celebrated with a riotous bacchanal. To music provided by a player piano stolen from a black home and set up on the street, they danced and sang in the flickering light of a dozen burning houses, drinking, firing their pistols in the air, and feeding broken furniture, toys, and clothing into the flames. It was a demonstration of mind-boggling barbarity—a spectacle from Hieronymus Bosch, played out on the streets of South Side Chicago, to the city’s lasting shame.

Mayor Thompson, closeted in his city hall office, had been receiving reports on the rioting all evening, but still he would not change his mind. It seemed that nothing could persuade him to give way on the issue of the militia. Insulated from the anarchy on the streets, in thrall to what now seemed like obviously misguided political instincts, he stubbornly refused to budge. The absurdity of the situation was blatant. In the greatest crisis Chicago had faced in decades, would the city’s fate be determined by the simple but profound hatred of two political enemies for each other?

But then one report came in that Thompson simply could not ignore. Although he would not go public with the specifics until the next day, the report was dire enough to convince the mayor—finally—that he had no choice. Assuming the report he had just received was accurate, if he didn’t act decisively now, the city could very well plunge into something like civil war.

At about 9 p.m., Big Bill called for his secretary to take a letter. In it, he officially requested that General Dickson immediately deploy the militia troops under his command “for the protection of life and property and the preservation of law and order.” At 9:15, he called the general into his office and handed him the letter. And by 10 p.m., hundreds of Illinois reserve militiamen were pouring out of armories all over the city and heading into the streets.¹⁴