The Race Riots of 1919--Chicago's Week of Hell

  

A Chicago Tribune cartoon published while the 1919 riots were still raging depicts the flashpoint at the 29th Street Beach.

It began over 100 years ago with what might, under other circumstances, have been passed off teenage rough house when a boy from another neighborhood wandered into the waters of a Lake Michigan beach and the local rascals pelted him with stones. By all accounts 24-year-old George Stauber threw the rock that ultimately caused 17-year-old Eugene Williams to drown.  When the Chicago Police arrived at the chaotic scene, they arrested a youth who pointed out the assailant. A melee erupted.  It spread over the afternoon and evening into the city streets.

Not much to see here, move on.  Except that the incident set off eight days of deadly rioting across the South Side that ultimately left at least 38 dead and more than 535 treated by local doctors and hospitals or held injured by the police.  Probably additional dead were uncounted and hundreds of the injured did not seek medical help for fear of arrest.  Did I mention that the original victim, Williams, was Black and his attackers were all White.  

 

 Violence spilled from the 29th Street Beach over this pedestrian overpass and rapidly spread through the South Side.

In the midst of one of the city’s suffocating heat waves on July 27 the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 was off and running.  That term can be confusing because to modern ears it evokes the bloody uprisings of despair of the 1960s and ‘70s when enraged Blacks in Chicago and other major cities fought police and often burned down their own neighborhoods.  But in 1919 the rioters were mostly White mobs roaming the streets and indiscriminately attacking Black men, women, and children they encountered; burning Black residences, schools, and churches; and looting not only Black businesses, but white-owned shops and stores that sold to them.  

 

The Chicago Defender, the city's Black newspaper of record reported more accurately on the events than the downtown dailies while trying to calm the situation. 

Here and there Blacks individually and in small groups fought back—notably ex-Doughboys back from France—sometimes with gunfire.  But the statistics of the known victims tell the tale.  Thirty-eight people were killed—23 Black and 15 white with some Whites likely the victims of their own indiscriminate fire. 537 were officially reported wounded, with 2/3 injured being Black.  The 1000 to 2000 who lost their homes to arson and frenzied demolition were virtually all Black.  Hundreds were arrested by the Police or held by the Illinois National Guard after it was finally mobilized.  The records are incomplete but the majority of those were also Black.  In fact, Police often turned a blind eye to racial attacks and sometimes joined them.

 

Stoning a Black victim to death.  The man with the raised arm is in what looks like a Chicago Fire Department uniform.  

1919 was another one of those pivotal years in American history, a paradigm shift.  World War I was over and “a million men in khaki suits” were returning home to a devastating post war recession and high unemployment.  Around the world revolution was in the air while at home a massive strike wave that included a national steel strike, coal mining wars, and the defiant radicalism of the energized Industrial Workers of the World actions out West in the lumber, metal mining, and agricultural industries.  War-time anti-labor actions pivoted into a full-blown Red Scare with nationwide raids, mass arrests, show trials, and incarcerations. Temporary war-time prohibition was becoming permanent under the 18th Amendment to the Constitution and the enabling Volstead Act. 

On the other hand, 19th Amendment for women’s suffrage passed both houses of Congress and was in the process of being ratified in the States and empowered women were ditching cumbersome, heavy garments for clothes they could move comfortably in.   And Black culture was beginning to go mainstream as jass or jazz escaped New Orleans to Chicago and the New York stage.

But things were particularly bleak for African-Americans.  Hope had been high that the service of Blacks in the War to End All Wars and on the home front would earn respect and gratitude which would improve their daily lives and prospects.  Hundreds of thousands had escaped the Jim Crow South to the major northern industrial cities to work in defense and other heavy industry in a movement known as the Great Migration.  Now, with unemployment raging white workers saw Blacks as job thieves who undercut wages.  Blacks had also been used as strikebreakers.  Tensions were on the rise.

Meanwhile in the South Black veterans were seen as threat to the Jim Crow system of White supremacy.  The new Ku Klux Klan that arose in the afterglow of the 1914 release of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and other secret night riders were spreading widely.  Lynchings surged including executions of Black veterans still in uniform. 

In what became known as the Red Summer, race riots erupted in more than 25 cities including Indianapolis, Indiana and Washington, DC.  While the Chicago riot lasted the longest and did by far the most property damage, Blacks in the South suffered even greater losses, often with scant attention by the press.

 

An Omaha lynch mob gleefully posed with the burning body of their victim in one of the many Red Summer riots. 

A mob led by White sailors in Charleston, South Carolina killed five blacks including a respected doctor who tried to defend himself with a handgun and another died later.  A White race riot in Longview, Texas led to the deaths of at least four men and destroyed the Black neighborhood in town. Local police in Bisbee, Arizona attacked Buffalo Soldier troops of 10th U.S. Cavalry in the Battle of Brewery Gulch. In Norfolk, Virginia a mob attacked a homecoming party for Black veterans.  In Knoxville, Tennessee a lynch mob stormed the courthouse then they attacked the African-American business district, where they fought business owners, leaving at least seven dead and wounding more than 20 people.  In Omaha, Nebraska another lynch mob attacked a jail, seized Will Brown, hanged him, and burned his body before attacking Black neighborhoods and stores on the north side.

Worst of all a meeting of Black sharecroppers trying to form a union near tiny Elain, Arkansas was attacked by armed mob of hundreds of whites who hunted and killed over 100 Black men and women over two days.  Then 79 surviving Blacks were tried and convicted by all-white juries, and 12 were sentenced to death for murder.  Only the Supreme Court’s ultimate reversal of the convictions for denial of due process saved their lives.  No White attacker was ever charged with anything.

Red Summer indeed.

 

 A Tribune map marked flashpoint of the riots.

In Chicago the White rampage was largely led by Irish gangs from Bridgeport including the politically clout-heavy Hamburg Athletic Club which included 19-year-old Richard J. Daley who was the group’s president.  Another gang, Ragen’s Colts, donned blackface and set fire to Lithuanian and Polish homes in the Back of the Yards neighborhood in a deliberate attempt to incite the immigrant community to join the riots.

Black-owned Providence Hospital, which was caring for many victims, was threatened by the mob but was turned aside by Chicago Police.  In other instances, the police stood aside as mobs prevented the Fire Department from responding to arson fires and some officers actually joined attacks on isolated individuals.  Street cars were targeted, and Black riders pulled off and beaten even in the Loop, miles north of the main unrest.

 

                            Chicago Mayor William Hale (Big Bill) Thompson let the rioting go on for days before he was forced to accept National Guard troops.

Republican Mayor William Hale Thompson engaged in a game of brinksmanship with Illinois Governor Frank Lowden.  Thompson refused to ask Lowden to send in the Illinois National Guard for four days and gave the impression that he generally supported White rioters as “defenders of their homes.” Lowden had already called up the 11th Illinois Infantry Regiment and its machine gun company, as well as the 1st, 2nd and 3rd reserve militia totaling 3,500 men and they were waiting in armories.  Lowden had to appeal to President Woodrow Wilson to put pressure on Thompson before he could finally put the troops on the streets.

 

A Black veteran sergeant outranked the young National Guardsman he confronted.  

The Cook County Sheriff also hastily deputized 3,000 recently discharged volunteer white veterans who were haphazardly deployed and undisciplined.  Guardsmen were deployed to protect Black property and lives and to keep the two sides separate.  It took four days to fully restore order.

In the wake of the unrest, Lowden launched a special blue-ribbon investigation and other inquiries were led by the Coroner’s office.  State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne only brought accused Black rioters to a Grand Jury which rebelled and refused to issue indictments until at least some White rioters were brought before it.  A Cook County judge scolded the Police Department for only bringing charges against Blacks, “I want to explain to you officers that these colored people could not have been rioting among themselves. Bring me some white prisoners.”

The ugly legacy of the riots was a hardening racial division in the city.  Both Blacks and Whites sought protection in segregated neighborhoods.  Over the years the South Side Black Belt expanded block-by-block resulting in White flight with real estate speculators roiling the pot to make fast killings.  Mayor Daley would use massive housing developments and expressways to isolate and contain the Black communities, including those which had spread to the West Side.  Poverty festered in those communities leading directly to the riots of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

For decades there was a semi-official policy of forgetting the 1919 riots.  Outside of the Black community, few whites ever encountered much more than a veiled mention of the events.  No monuments to the dead were erected, no municipal commemorations held.  The DuSable Museum of African American History and the Chicago History Museum (formerly the Chicago Historical Society Museum) have had exhibits, but people had to seek them out.

 

With a new Black Mayor, Lori Lightfoot official recognition of the 100th anniversary was finally undertaken in 2019.  Events included a special exhibition at the Newberry Library including photos captured by Japanese American photographer Jun Fujita during the riots along with a timeline of the violence, and an interactive map of the 38 known deaths. 

Native People and Culture Through White Eyes of George Catlin

 

George Catlin captured Native American culture just before it was wiped away like this council of Northern Plains Indians and tepee village.  Amazing detail in costume, decoration on the tepee, cultural symbols such as the central tribal staff and bundles, smoking, and the scalps hanging from the tripod.

When George Catlin was born on a farm near Wilkes-Barre in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania on July 26, 1796, the area was only a couple of generations removed from being on the frontier.  During the American Revolution it was a target of raids by native tribes allied with the British.  His own mother was taken hostage on such a foray, and she was held for a while in captivity.  Like many female captives she was apparently well treated and grew sympathetic to the tribe that held her until she was ransomed.  Her tales of that experience and the yarns of old timers set fire to the imagination of the young boy with an artistic bent.

As he roamed the woods, streams, and fields hunting and fishing he began to search for and collect arrowheads and other artifacts of the now vanished tribes that once roamed the same ground.  While visiting Philadelphia with his father he witnessed the colorful array of a large delegation of trans-Mississippi chiefs and warriors on their way to a meeting with President Thomas Jefferson in Washington.  After reading accounts of the Western explorations of Lewis and Clark, who he grew to idolize, young George became determined to somehow go West and see the tribes for himself.

Meanwhile, he set himself on becoming an artist.  The Peales of Philadelphia, the family of the foremost painters of the young republic, took an interest in the talented lad and mentored him. Charles Wilson Peale also shared his enthusiasm for Native culture and his collection of artifacts brought back by Lewis and Clark.  

Catlin's early work included this lithograph of the Buffalo Harbor.

Peale recognized the young artist’s sharp eye for detail and meticulous draftsmanship.  After Catlin began to specialize in quality engravings, Peale recommended him for a prestigious project—a documentary volume of the route of the Erie Canal, other New York water ways, the Niagara escarpment, and the fledgling city of Buffalo.  Several of his plates were included in the first American book to include lithography, Cadwallader D. Colden’s Memoir, Prepared at the Request of a Committee of the Common Council of the City of New York, and Presented to the Mayor of the City, at the Celebration of the Completion of the New York Canals, published in 1825.

Three years later while traveling in Upstate New York and preparing more of the landscape prints for which he was becoming known, Catlin met Clara Bartlett Gregory in Albany and married her the same year.  She was evidently devoted to her husband and became the mother to four of his children despite his frequent long absences. 

The first of those absences came with a dream opportunity—to accompany his hero General William Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the new Bureau of Indian Affairs of the War Department, as the official artist on a diplomatic mission up the Mississippi River into Native American territory in 1830.  On that trip into what is now Minnesota Catlin for the first time encountered tribes with little previous contact with Europeans other than trading in furs.  He began making the detailed sketches or cartoons which he would use later in his studio to execute oil paintings.  He found his life calling.

                

                     From the first trip with William Clark--Blood chief Buffalo Bull's Back Fat.

Catlin and his family based themselves in St. Louis for the next six years and he made a total of five extended expeditions during which time he visited and documented more than 50 tribes just before their way of life vanished forever and their cultures became corrupted where they were not destroyed.  On one of these trips the dutiful Clara accompanied him at least part way.

His most important and productive trip came in 1832 when ascended the Missouri River more than 1850 miles to the Fort Union Trading Post near what is now the North Dakota-Montana border.  He spent weeks among 18 tribes including the Pawnee, Omaha, and Ponca in the south and the Mandan, Hidatsa, Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine, and Blackfeet to the north.  He sketched portraits, costume studies, village life, hunting scenes, and rituals.  He captured the powerful Mandan, the most significant of the northern plains tribes and Lewis’ and Clark’s hosts during their first winter just before they were virtually wiped out by a smallpox epidemic caused by infected blankets traded to them.  That included a depiction of the sun dance in which warriors would hung from the ceremonial lodge poles with thongs attached to skewers piercing their chest muscles while they had visions.   

Mandan Sun Dance Lodge.

Catlin returned to the East with his wife in 1838 and completed hundreds of paintings which he assembled into the Indian Gallery and took on a tour of principle cities.  The paintings were displayed in the salon style of the day occupying walls floor to ceiling.  The artist also lectured on his adventures and on tribal customs and display objects from his extensive artifact collection.  The main source of revenue was the sale of a detailed illustrated catalogue from which visitors could identify each painting from the number attached to it and read details about the subject.

Despite strong notices in the press, the tour, which was Catlin’s only source of income, struggled from the expense of the tour, rental cost of exhibit space, and most of all the high cost of the catalogue which most viewers could not afford to purchase. Although he had numerous offers to buy individual works, Catlin was desperate to keep the collection together and to finance subsequent trips to the Arkansas, Red, and Mississippi Rivers; and to Florida and the Great Lakes region.  Eventually he had more than 500 paintings in the Indian Gallery.

                                George Catlin by William Fisk.  The artist often wore the shirts and other clothing from his collection of Native outfits and artifacts.

In 1839 he had better luck taking the Indian Gallery on a tour of European capitals where it was a sensation.  The pictures struck a chord with a population already enamored with the Romantic vision of the Noble Savage as an innocent creature of Nature and primed by the popularity of James Fennimore Cooper’s Leather Stocking Tales and other American books.  A French critic gushed, “He has brought back alive the proud and free characters of these chiefs, both their nobility and manliness.”

The European proved to be only a temporary respite from financial desperation.

To avoid selling the work piecemeal and to support his family Catlin tried repeatedly to sell the collection intact to Congress.  That then notoriously parsimonious body refused every plea to preserve the collection as an irreplaceable national treasure.  

                                        One of the most famous images--Chief Four Bears of the Mandan in all of his magnificence.

He derived some income from the publication of a series of books beginning with Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, in two volumes, with approximately 300 engravings, the source of the images the contemporary American public is most familiar with, in 1841.  Three years later he published Catlin’s North American Indian Portfolio with 25 plates suitable for framing. 

Through the 1840’s Catlin was based largely in Europe where wealthy patrons could afford his expensive books and plates.  But tragedy struck in 1845 in Paris when his wife Clara and youngest son died of some infectious disease.  On his return to the states Catlin unsuccessfully published a collection of pictures from those years, Eight Years’ Travels and Residence in Europe.  What interest the American buying public had in Catlin was limited to his work as an Indian iconographer.  Unfortunately, they were still not interested enough in that either to support him.

                    Clara Catlin circa 1840 by George Linen.

In 1852 in order to fend off clamoring creditors and finance further explorations and work, Catlin sold the now 607 paintings in the Indian Gallery to industrialist Joseph Harrison who promised not to break the collection up and to hold it in trust until Catlin could re-purchase it.  He stored the collection in one of his Philadelphia factories where they were removed from public view for years.   Unfortunately, the artist could never redeem his work.

Instead, he began to painstakingly duplicate as many of the paintings as possible using his original cartoon sketches, notes, and his own memory. Over 20 years he re-created more than 400 of them.  These paintings, known as the Cartoon Collection, are not as highly prized today as the originals but do sometimes turn up for private sale. 

 

 Dramatic action in Attacking the Grizzly.

Catlin also continued to travel and do new work when possible.  He toured the American Southwest, Central and South America as well as returning to the Great Plains where he captured the Sioux, Cheyenne, and the Arapaho and the environs of Fort Laramie as the Oregon Trail encroached on tribal lands.  All of this was documented in Last Rambles amongst the Indians of the Rocky Mountains and the Andes published in 1868.  Work on the Southwest tribes was issued separately.  A final posthumous volume, My Life among the Indians issued his unpublished material in 1908 edited by N. G. Humphreys.

During the final years of his life, Catlin was evidently progressively more eccentric.  While working in Brazil wrote and published Shut Your Mouth a lengthy essay suggesting that people who are slack jawed, mouth breathers or just talk too much are apt suffer to any number of physical ailments.  His prescription to “keep your mouth shut” somehow went through eight editions showing that American taste ran more to crack-pot quackery than anthropological art.

In 1872, sick and broke the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution invited Catlin to make use of studio space in the museum Castle in Washington.  It was there that the artist did his final work before dying in Jersey City, New Jersey on December 23, 1872 at the age of 76.

                                The Chief Osceola was the bane of Regular U.S. Army Dragoons in the Florida Seminole Wars.

The Smithsonian did end up with Catlin’s original Indian Gallery in 1879 when Joseph Harrison’s widow donated the whole collection to the museum.  The Gallery is now a centerpiece of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Other significant collections of Catlin’s vast output and associated material include the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, 700 sketches at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City;  artifacts in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology collections; and  239 of illustrations of  North and South American Indians and other illustrative and manuscript material in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Of course, no illustrated history of the American West, or study of Native Americans in books, articles, or TV documentaries is complete without illustrations from the prolific George Catlin.

George Stephenson and His Little Engine That Could Revolutionized an Industry and Transportation

                 

                                    The engine wright from the pits, young George Stephenson.

On July 25, 1814 George Stephenson put his first steam locomotive, a small engine for use hauling coal on the Killingworth Wagonway in England near his home and workshop.  He called the noisy little contraption Blucher after Prussian general Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher who helped the Duke of Wellington whip Napoleon.  It could haul 30 tons of coal up a hill at 4 mph and was the first successful flanged-wheel adhesion locomotive—gaining traction only from the wheels turning against the rail and not from a cog or winch rope. 

Steam had been applied to moving coal as early as 1804 by Richard Trevithick  at a colliery at nearby Tyneside and several other engines were built by various men for mines in the Newcastle area.  But none worked so well, so reliably, and so safely—boiler explosions were common—as did Stephenson’s.  The Blücher is now considered the first truly modern steam locomotive and Stephenson the father of an industry.  

Blucher, the first modern traction steam locomotive drawn from operations on the Killingworth Wagon Way in 1815.

Stephenson was born on June 9, 1781 at Wylam, Northumberland.  His father was a fireman on a steam pumping engine in a local colliery, and his son entered the mines in the same capacity at the age 17.  Although he had no formal education, he took to the mechanics of the crude engines and began to study at night to improve their condition.  He worked at various capacities in the mines, married, had children, and was left a widower. 

When he repaired a broken engine at Killingsworth in 1811 he was promoted to engine wright and was soon repairing—and improving—pump and winch engines for several pits in the area.  After the successful introduction of the Blucher, Stephenson is believed to have completed 16 other engines of various designs.  Not all worked.  At least two had to be withdrawn from service because of defects.  But with every experiment and every engine built, Stephenson learned. 

His new engines were too heavy to operate on traditional wooden rails, attached strips of iron were not durable, and solid cast iron rails were too brittle.  So, Stephenson improved the cast iron rails and went to the use of multiple wheels to better distribute the engine's weight. 

In 1820 be built an 8-mile-long railway from Hetton colliery to Sunderland.  Gravity was used on the down slope, but the steam engine provided power on the level and upgrade.  It was the first longer railroad employing no animal power at all.  

In 1825 he was hired by Edward Pease to construct the 25-mile-long Stockton & Darlington Railway to bring coal from the mines to market.  Pease also joined in forming the company of Robert Stephenson & Company to manufacture new, more powerful engines for the railroad.  The company built four engines, Locomotion, Hope, Diligence, and Black Diamond.  On September 25, 1825 the new line opened with Locomotion hauling 80 tons of coal and a specially built car for dignitaries, Experiment, the first ever built specifically for passengers.  The dignitaries found themselves hurtling along at an astonishing speed of 24 miles per hour in one stretch.  The road was built with wrought iron rails with a track gage of 4 feet 8½ inches, which became the standard in the British Empire, the United States, and most of the world.

Stephenson was soon also at work laying out the new Liverpool & Manchester Railway, the first line to connect major cities at some distance and to contemplate regular passenger service. 

He employed now accepted techniques like using grading, cutbacks and trestles to keep the roadbed as level as possible and crossing a bog by literally floating the track—something of an engineering marvel.  But he was not assured the contract to build locomotives for the line.  Instead, the railroad directors announced a competition.  

George Stephenson, standing, and Rocket.

Stephenson’s entry was Rocket, largely designed by his son Robert and the first to use the recent French innovation of a fire tube boiler.  The trial required engines to run 60 miles and weigh no more than 6 tons.  Rocket easily won the competition and Stephenson was a famous man overnight.  The railroad opened on September 30, 1830 with a raft of dignitaries led by the Duke of Wellington on hand.  A parade of trains powered by Stephenson built engines left Liverpool with open passenger cars.  The engines included Northumbrian driven by George Stephenson, Phoenix driven by Robert, North Star driven by his brother, and Rocket. 

The day was somewhat marred when a Member of Parliament foolishly dashed in front of Rocket and was crushed to death.   

The Stephensons--Robert , seated, was also a brilliant engineer and astute industrialist who followed in his father's footsteps.  With out them and their locomotives and innovations to trackage and civil engineering, the Industrial Revolution may have been impossible.

Stephenson went on to a lauded and distinguished career both as a civil engineer laying out new lines and as the manufacturer of ever more powerful and efficient engines.  His son Robert and others contributed to the success of the company. 

The first engines used commercially in America were built at Stephenson’s shops and American designers learned their craft there. 

Stephenson died on August 12, 1848 at his home in Chesterfield, Derbyshire a wealthy and honored man.  But despite his contributions to British wealth and power, he was never extended a Knighthood because of his humble origins.

Revisiting Time Machine—Murfin Verse for Matilda Four Years Later

                 

        Matilda and Mom Maureen Murfin.
 

Time Machine

For Matilda Motoko Holmes

July 25, 2021

 

If Millie had a time machine

            she might go all the way back

            to yesterday when she swam

            with her mother

            and danced in the living room

            eyes shining and squealing.

 

More likely she would just go back

            to cuddling with her mom

            and bottle a few minutes ago

            as dawn crept in the window.

 

She would not leap forward

            to check out her first kiss

            high school graduation

            or any other life landmark.

 

And certainly not to see if

            civilization survives. 

What need for a time machine for her

            when it’s always now? 

 

—Patrick Murfin

                

                                            Then--Matilda dancing.

                                            Now--Matilda dancing.