RAIN BEGAN TO FALL as five armed militia regiments fanned out across the South Side of Chicago, bayonets gleaming in the drizzle. Moving with perfect discipline and (unlike the city police) operating under clear instructions and a strict chain of command, the troops quickly took up their positions in the combat zone, dispersing any lingering crowds and setting up machine guns on key corners. By the early-morning hours of Thursday, over 1,500 soldiers had been deployed, more than doubling the number of active peacekeepers on the streets. Automobiles were stopped, pedestrians and loiterers were searched, weapons and alcohol were seized. In accordance with standing instructions, troops fired their weapons only as a last resort.¹

Sterling Morton, down at the Seventh Regiment Armory, was euphoric. All day he had been drilling his men in the parking lot adjacent to Comiskey Park, waiting impatiently for the call to action. When assembly was blown that evening, he and his men were hopeful but guarded; they cheered, but—remembering their previous false alarm—their cheers were not as loud as the night before. Then Major Macey, “in a voice you could hear all over the armory,” sang out for the squads to fall in, and they knew that their time had finally come. “[A] cheer went up that raised the roof off the place,” Morton later wrote, “and from that time until I pulled out with my company, about 10:30, the cheering was incessant.”

Moving out of the armory, they headed toward their assigned position at Forty-seventh and Wentworth in the Black Belt, clearing the streets as they went. “We met with no resistance,” Morton later wrote to his cousin, “but heard many unflattering comments on our appearance and [our] ancestors!” Per orders, they stopped all vehicles and relieved the drivers of any weapons and liquor found in their possession. But for the most part, he was surprised by how few people were on the streets. “The rioters are a white-livered lot of cowards,” he wrote. “They are all right when twenty of them jump one defenseless Negro, but when they saw the steel on the end of [our] rifles, they left P.D.Q. for parts unknown, and try as we would, we couldn’t get any fight out of them.”

Morton set up his company headquarters in a Greek restaurant on Wentworth Avenue and then took his men out on patrol into the surrounding neighborhoods. By his own admission, it was “a rather eerie experience.” All of the streetlights had been shot out, and since most blacks had left the neighborhood by then, the soldiers found themselves patrolling nearly deserted streets, maneuvering solely by the irregular light of burning wooden houses. The streets all around them were littered with clothes and broken furniture, shattered Victrolas, and coin-box telephones that had been smashed during the looting raids of the past few days. Morton may have missed seeing action in Europe, but here were scenes reminiscent of the Argonne, right in his own hometown.²

Other companies in other parts of the South Side encountered greater resistance from rioters, but the violence was generally sparse overnight, the combatants subdued as much by the rain as by the show of military force. By morning, as people emerged from houses seemingly unoccupied the night before, the relief in the Black Belt was palpable. “You soldiers don’t know how glad we all are you are here,” a black stockyards worker said to one of the patrolling doughboys. “We wish you had come on Monday. A lot of trouble might have been avoided.” Reacting to the sudden appearance of real authority in the district, members of the city’s wholesale grocers’ association began rushing truckloads of food into South Side neighborhoods that had been all but starved out for days. Even the police were relieved to see the troops, despite the fact that their presence constituted an admission of defeat for the local force. “Thank God!” one patrolman said when the troops appeared. “We can’t stand up under this much longer.” At the Cottage Grove station, another officer told a militiaman, “We are tickled to death to see you fellows come in; you have never looked so good to us before!” If nothing else, at least now there would be other targets besides policemen to draw the potshots of rooftop snipers.³

In fact, the soldiers did begin to draw some sniper fire. As the morning progressed, isolated skirmishes broke out between militia troops and scattered groups of rioters—in particular the white athletic clubs, which had enjoyed relatively free rein when the police were in charge. And in the stockyards district, where soldiers were attempting to escort black workers to their jobs, the mayhem erupted on Thursday morning with all of its previous intensity. In what resembled a wartime military action, scores of white stockyards workers tried to repulse the advancing legion of militiamen and black workers, engaging them in hand-to-hand combat. In the confusion, four black workers were separated from the troops, chased down, and beaten. One of them—William Dozier, an employee at Swift and Company—was struck by a white worker with a hammer. As he tried to run away, other workers bombarded him with a street broom, a shovel, and other missiles. Finally, he was hit with a brick, which killed him. His was the thirty-seventh fatality of the riot, but it was to be the last for several days. By Thursday afternoon, the militia troops had effectively restored order, and the South Side—for the first time in days—seemed genuinely under control. “Peace has been established,” General Dickson proclaimed that afternoon. “There is no longer any reason why anyone, black or white, should be afraid to enter or leave the Black Belt.”⁴

At city hall, Mayor Thompson—ever the master of manipulating public opinion—was busy with his own damage control efforts, forging a narrative that would satisfactorily explain his performance during the crisis. At a dramatic morning press conference, he tried to depict his reluctance to call for troops as concern for the welfare of the Black Belt. But that caution, he said, was finally outweighed by signs of an imminent threat he just couldn’t disregard—namely, evidence of a massive, widespread conspiracy to set the entire South Side aflame. Citing reports from an informal intelligence network set up by city hall in the first days of the riot, he claimed that immediate and decisive action had been necessary to foil the arson plot, which involved both black and white gangs allegedly determined to burn each other’s neighborhoods to the ground. “We had information last night,” Thompson said, “that there was to be a general effort to start fires.… The information was definite and authentic and required action. The condition of buildings was such that a great conflagration would have started in no time. There had been almost no rain during the month of July and everything was as dry as tinder.” According to the mayor, the threatened conflagration would have brought “death to thousands and the loss of millions in property,” and would have resulted in widespread chaos “because of the frightened hordes rushing pell-mell in every direction.”⁵

Big Bill, of course, was possibly exaggerating the arson threat as a way of excusing his sudden turnabout on the deployment of the militia, but the story at least seemed plausible. Numerous fires had indeed been set over the previous twenty-four hours, and in some cases arsonists had even stretched cables across streets to prevent fire engines from reaching them. But it was probably the timely rain that had done the most to keep the fires under control, and there is some evidence that pressure from the big meatpacking companies, which had been losing money every day that rioting prevented their workers from reporting for duty, may have been the truly decisive factor in Thompson’s decision to finally use the militia. In any case, the mayor’s emphatic justifications notwithstanding, the impression remained among many Chicagoans that Big Bill had, for political reasons, simply waited too long to solicit the governor’s help. Had the troops been deployed on Monday, when they were first mobilized, much of the violence would likely have been avoided.⁶

The mayor’s exculpatory maneuvering continued that afternoon at an emergency meeting of the city council. Pointing out that he had repeatedly asked the council in the past for “more policemen, more vehicle equipment, a modern signal system, and a modern police administrative system,” he lodged a formal request for a permanent expansion of the police department. “In view of the existing conditions of public disorder,” he intoned, “I now urge your honorable body to take steps immediately to provide for the permanent employment of 2,000 additional patrolmen.… The crisis through which our city has passed during the last few days has brought home to our people the fact that the 3,564 patrolmen from whom the public expects police protection in this city [are] woefully inadequate.”

In an attempt to defend themselves, several of the aldermen pinned the blame on the city’s reformist Bureau of Public Efficiency, whose insistence on reductions in government expenditures had tied their hands. “The finance committee has spent many nights trying to find the money for more policemen,” Alderman John Anthony Richert asserted, “but the civic organizations have blocked our efforts.” Alderman Anton Cermak, head of the anti-temperance United Societies, tried blaming the city’s drys: “It was claimed [that] Prohibition would reduce the need for police,” he said, “but we needed more police last month and last year, and we will need them next year.” But it was the great antireformer himself—Alderman “Bathhouse John” Coughlin—who put it most bluntly: “Five years ago we were a peaceable city. Reformers spoiled it. Those were happy days. Now we’re discontented and everybody knows it!” The city of Chicago, in other words, had gotten along just fine until progressive crusaders came along and started meddling in city business with their campaigns against government spending and the evils of vice, graft, and patronage.⁷

Those alleged good-government types were also doing their best to use the crisis for their own political advantage. State’s Attorney Hoyne, doubtless sensing weakness in city hall, now promised an energetic prosecution and a full investigation of the politicians who allowed lawlessness to flourish in the Black Belt. The anti-Thompson newspapers were not silent, either. In an editorial entitled simply “Why?,” the Chicago Daily Journal called for a full explanation of the decision to wait until day four of the riot to deploy the troops. In an even more caustic editorial (under the headline “War in a Great City’s Streets”), Victor Lawson’s Daily News complained: “Chicago never had a more terrible warning of the absolute necessity of setting its house in order.… The citizens have allowed politicians and incompetents to sow the wind, and the community is now reaping the whirlwind.”

The bitterest remarks came from the Tribune. “Chicago is disgraced and dishonored,” the World’s Greatest Newspaper declaimed. “Its head is bloodied and bowed, bloodied by crime and bowed in shame. Its reputation is besmirched. Its fame is tarnished for years.”⁸

At least one person, however, seemed to have come through the situation with his reputation unscathed. “[Frank] is receiving great commendation for the way in which he is meeting this crisis,” Mrs. Lowden preened in her diary on Thursday. And indeed, the sterling performance of the state militia, which was now drawing praise from all quarters, was turning the governor into the hero of the hour. In buoyant public remarks that commended virtually everyone except the mayor of Chicago, Lowden tried to credit the guard troops with dampening the violence even before they were deployed. “I shudder to think,” he said, “what might have happened Tuesday if the lawless element … had not known that 4,000 men armed and equipped to deal with them stood ready to act.”⁹

The imminent settlement of the transit strike also promised to burnish Lowden’s public image. Union chief Mahon had by afternoon successfully convinced union members to reconsider the governor’s hard-won compromise plan. A new vote was to be held on Friday, and early signs indicated that the plan would really be accepted this time, allowing streetcars and elevated trains to start running again by the weekend. Governor Lowden’s handling of the entire situation was being praised by no less a figure than former president William Howard Taft, who was just then visiting Chicago to give a speech. For someone preparing to make a run for the presidency, this was very good publicity indeed.¹⁰

Amid further signs of a reaffirmation of civic authority (including the introduction of a city ban on “promiscuous aviation” and a proposed conference to discuss the creation of “an institution for morons”), Mayor Thompson moved again to reclaim some of the political high ground. That day, he held a signing ceremony in his office for the Chicago Plan ordinances that the city council had passed on the day of the Wingfoot crash. In the presence of commission chairman Charles Wacker and other city notables, the mayor was careful to remind his traumatized constituents of the great vision of Chicago’s future embodied in the plan—the lakefront parks and boulevards, the electrified train lines, the new railroad terminals, the ultramodern harbor district—and of the leadership role that “Big Bill the Builder” had played, and would continue to play, in its realization. Much of the city may have been burning and in disarray on that July afternoon, but the bright dream of Chicago as “the Metropolis of the World” lived on undimmed.

Or so, at least, the floundering and somewhat desperate-sounding Thompson wanted everyone to believe. The reality of the situation, however, was that the city of Chicago was about to wake from its awful extended nightmare—a nightmare that had bared truths about the city that made a mockery of the high-minded ambitions of the Chicago Plan—and its citizens would soon be looking for someone to blame for it all. True, the rampant violence in the streets would taper off; the transit paralysis would lift; the city would even have the satisfaction of seeing its child predators punished and its downtown heart protected from technological daredevils streaking across the skies. But the horror of those two weeks in July would not soon be forgotten. Someone would have to be held accountable for the profound collapse of civil order that Chicago had just experienced; someone would have to pay. And there were many in the city determined to see that it would be Big Bill Thompson.¹¹