Note: Anti-immigrant demagoguery
is nothing new in American politics.
Chicago’s Levi Boone was a spiritual and political Godfather to Donald
Trump and his ilk.
Dr.
Levi Boone was a mass of contradictions. A twig
of the expansive Boone family tree—he
was Daniel’s great-nephew—he overcame early poverty to become a university trained medical doctor and established a practice in Chicago just
as the former trading post village
was establishing itself as a city. He was admired for his skill, commitment to the community, and as a lay pillar of the Baptist
Church. Yet he was also an avowed racist and a nativist who
made keeping the city White, native born, and Protestant the hinge of
his political career which included
a tumultuous term as Mayor.
You can see how well that project turned out. When he died on January 24, 1882 it was in a
city where the “alien scum” he despised already outnumbered the “real Americans.”
Levi Day Boone was the seventh son
of Squire Boone, Daniel’s nephew, and was born on the family farm
near Lexington, Kentucky on December
8, 1808. In the tradition of the Boone
family Squire marched off to join General
Andrew Jackson in his war against the Creeks
in 1814. He was severely injured at the climactic Battle of Horseshoe Bend which crushed
the Red Sticks. Squire returned home a cripple and never really recovered. He
died of the lingering after effects of the wounds in 1818 when Levi was only
nine years old.
The family was left in dire poverty, but was still respectable. That helped young Levi gain admission Transylvania University, the first college west of the Appalachians and the training ground of the upper South’s political and social elite. While Levi was reading medicine there, Henry Clay was professor of law. He graduated in 1829. His medical degree made him one of only a
handful of college trained doctors in the West.
In the Boone family tradition, Levi looked
for opportunities yet further west.
By 1831 he established practice in Hillsboro, Illinois, a still rustic pioneer village southwest of Springfield. When the Black Hawk War broke out he enlisted in the Militia. He rode with the cavalry under the command of Major Isaiah Stillman and took part in
the humiliating defeat known as Stillman’s run. After his first enlistment expired, Boone
re-enlisted in the more appropriate role
of surgeon.
Back in Hillsboro, the young
Doctor’s prospects immensely improved
by the time honored method of marrying up and well. He wooed and won Louise M. Smith, daughter of Theophilus
W. Smith, a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court. The fertile
couple would go on to have 11 children.
The conclusion of the Black Hawk War
opened up previously closed territory
to the west and north of Chicago and the village began its rapid expansion as a
regional transportation hub. Chances
to advance in the world were much greater there than in a rural backwater like
Hillsboro. Boone relocated there and hung up his shingle in 1834. A year
later he was already a prominent citizen
and was a founder and first Secretary of the Cook County
Medical Board.
He was also an early and leading
member of the First Baptist Church which
was organized in 1833 just before
his arrival and was just the third church in the town. His tenure there as an Elder was not without
controversy. In 1843 he delivered a lecture at the church on the justification
of slavery in The
Bible which caused a schism in
the congregation. Outraged, thirty-two members resigned their
memberships and founded the rival Tabernacle
Baptist Church which resolved in
its Charter that “Slavery is a great sin in the sight of God, and while
we view it as such, we will not invite into our communion or pulpit those who
advocate or justify from civil policy or the Bible, the principle or practice
of slavery.” Boone and pro-slavery Southerners remained in
firm control of First Baptist. In an ironic modern twist, First Baptist is
now the Chicago anchor of the liberal American Baptist Convention (Northern
Baptists) and has been an overwhelmingly
Black church since the late 1960s.
Levi Boone was not the only member
of the sprawling Boone clan to settle in Northern Illinois in those years. Up north in western Lake County, soon to be split off as McHenry County, Levi’s cousins and Daniels grandsons George and John Boone became the first White settlers of McHenry Township
and established a grist mill on the Fox River.
Within a few years after a nasty spate of land claim lawsuits, the brothers pulled up stakes and moved
further west were they helped found Boone
County.
Meanwhile Chicago received it City Charter in 1837 and the
construction of the wagon roads and
work on the Illinois and Michigan Canal
began to attract large numbers of immigrant
laborers to the area. Although most settled south of the new city limits, some had begun to bleed
into the municipal boundaries alarming men like Boone. For them, the situation rose to a crisis when
the Canal was finally opened in 1848 causing an explosion in population. Even more immigrants poured into the region
spurred by the Potato famine in Ireland and the failed revolutions in the German states in 1848.
Bridgeport, at the head of the
canal fast became a transportation
hub and manufacturing center
where Germans refugees and more recent Irish immigrants crowded alongside the
families of the Irish laborers who had built the canal. When it was annexed into the City, the native
Protestant ascendency was suddenly threatened.
Levi Boone saw the threat clearly
and sprang into action. He hitched his star
to the rising American Party, the political face of the semi-secret Know Nothing anti-Catholic and anti-Immigrant
movement that was reaching its peak of national influence. In 1855 he swept to victory as the Mayor
of Chicago over incumbent Lawrence
Milliken with nearly 53% of the vote.
His coat tails were long enough to carry along with him 7 members of the Board of Aldermen.
On close examination, Boone’s election might have been the result of
the most massive voter fraud in
the city’s tainted political history. Somehow few
of the ballots from newly
annexed Bridgeport were collected or counted.
Despite the sputtering outrage of his new, but disenfranchised constituents, Boone pressed forward with a broad
and aggressive anti-immigrant agenda.
The first order of business
was banning the non-native born from
city employment regardless of citizenship status. Next up was a complete reorganization of the city’s multiple police forces. He combined the Day Police and the Night
Watch into a single police force
with 3 eight-hour shifts and required
the police to wear uniforms for the
first time.
Although this seems like a harmless, even progressive, step, the ouster
of foreign born officers of the
two original forces had disastrous
consequences. The Germans, who were
on those forces in large numbers, were culturally
attuned to order and discipline and made excellent, and by the standards of the time, largely incorruptible
servants of the local power
structure. The Irish provided the muscle needed in crime ridden slum neighborhoods. The American
born street toughs recruited by the city turned out to be, form the outset,
highly corruptible and undisciplined. That was overlooked since their main function was not preventing crime or capturing
offenders, but the intimidation of
immigrants in their communities and at their jobs.
They were an occupying army
out to harass and intimidate a despised minority. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.
Next on the agenda was a so-called Temperance campaign. Boone himself was not an abstainer. He indulged in the perfectly American beverage of choice—whiskey. But as a Baptist he
was pledged to temperance, which was understood
as a movement to prevent the lower classes from becoming burdens
on society from the abuse of alcohol and resulting crime,
idleness, and destruction of
families. It had been a current in Protestant Reformism since the late
18th Century but had taken off as
a social movement in tandem with the
rise of immigrant populations in big cities.
It was the respectable,
posing as beneficent, face of Know
Nothing bigotry. In Chicago respectable upper and middle class reformers who would not
publicly associate themselves with the crudities
of Know Nothingism had supported Boone’s slate because of his pledge to rid the city of saloons.
It seems that the main enemy was that alien drink, beer. Real Americans drank
whiskey. But Germans made their Beer Halls the social centers of their
communities—and a place where their radicals
could stir up trouble. The Irish congregated in their grubby
taverns and although traditional consumers of poteen and other liquors, had taken to beer as a cheaper way to get falling
down drunk.
A state-wide ban on liquor
sales and taverns backed by the
Know Nothings and powerful Protestant preachers, based on a recently enacted law in the state of Maine was widely expected to pass. Boone moved
first in anticipation of that.
He launched his assault by pushing
through new license fees which raised
the annual cost from $50 to
$300, well beyond the means of many small proprietors, but affordable
to the downtown Hotels, middle class resorts,
and private clubs frequented by the
better Protestant classes. Not only
that, but licenses had to be renewed every
three months with all of the attending bureaucratic
inconvenience, inspections, and opportunities to deny renewal for petty
offences. Almost immediately
hundreds of taverns and beerhalls were unable
to obtain or renew their licenses. Many,
probably most, defiantly remained open anyway
or moved to thinly disguise their operations as restaurants or grocery
stores.
Things really came to a head, however, when Boone ordered his new Police Force to
enforce a long ignored ordinance forbidding alcohol sales on the Sabbath.
Sunday was the only day of rest for workers who labored ten, twelve,
even fourteen hours the other six days at back-breaking jobs. In
working class neighborhoods men—and often their wives and whole families—adjourned directly from Sunday morning Mass to friendly watering holes for the only social conviviality they were apt
to enjoy all week. The attack on Sunday
drinking was, directly, an attack on immigrants and Catholics. The targets
understood that perfectly.
On April 21 several tavern owners were arrested in a police sweep. Outraged
patrons chased the police and their Paddy Wagons—guess how they got that name—downtown to near the Cook County Court House where street fighting erupted. As word spread across south side working
class neighborhoods more headed to the central
business district. Mayor Boone
ordered the swing bridges over the Chicago River pivoted to prevent access. Scores were trapped on the bridges and police opened fire on them with their pocket
revolvers. Some armed rioters returned scattered fire.
In the end the Lager Beer Riots resulted in tens of thousands of dollars of property damage in the business
district, at least one dead rioter and scores more injured, and one police officer shot in an arm that
required amputation. Even many of the cities hard drinking native workers lost
sympathy with the Know Nothings. And
the business classes who had supported the anti-saloon campaign were losing their enthusiasm for the project.
State wide the emerging new Republican
Party checked the American Party’s ambitions and by means of an alliance with the growing German
population largely engineered by a downstate lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, the state-wide alcohol sales ban was easily
defeated. Meanwhile the national American Party was deflating
almost as fast as it had blown up,
divided by the rising issue of slavery.
In Chicago, Boone realized that he
would not be able to disenfranchise
Bridgeport and other immigrant neighborhoods a second time. Armed
militias were being organized to guard
the polls and ballot boxes and make sure that votes would be delivered safely to the County Court House for counting.
Boone was licked and he knew it. He didn’t
even bother to run for a second one
year term. His aldermen also either
withdrew or were dumped by voters.
Boone’s short-lived political career may have been over, but not his brushes with controversy. After the
election of his old nemesis Lincoln
as President and the outbreak of the
Civil War the doctor swung his affiliations to the Copperhead
Democrats. His primary allegiance was to the South
and the preservation of slavery. In
1862 he was arrested on suspicion of
helping a rebel prisoner of war escape and being part of network of southern
sympathizers running a sort of reverse Underground
Railroad. He was held for several
weeks without being formally charged
at Camp Douglas on the South Side until his friends secured his release on the grounds of
his service to the community as a physician.
After that, Boone lived out his life
quietly, practicing medicine and presumably basking in the affection
of his large family and a few close friends.
The city practically forgot him
and little notice was taken when he died at the age 73. He was buried
safely among the Chicago Protestant elite at Rosehill Cemetery.
No comments:
Post a Comment