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. 

The Bonus March—When MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Patton Did Hoover’s Dirty Work

 

Bonus Marchers in the St. Louis rail yards in late May 1932 ready to hop B & O freights to Washington.  Marchers clogged the freight trains for weeks from all over the country.

Note—On January 6, 2017 the highest echelons of the Trump maladministration did everything they could to prevent National Guardsmen or Army troops from defending the Capitol from a violent insurrection.  It was a different story in 1932 when the full force of the Army was unleashed on veterans who never posed any threat to the Capitol or government.

Today is the anniversary of one of the most important mass protests in American history being crushed by military force.  This is a bit of historical trivia that was never more relevant.

On July 28, 1932 Washington, D.C. became a battle zone when President Herbert Hoover ordered the Army to clear out veterans, their families, and supporters who had been camped since June to press demands for an early payment of a bonus promised to World War I soldiers and sailors. 

It was nearly four years into the Great Depression with no relief from an almost total economic collapse in sight.  True unemployment was estimated to be nearing 25% with no safety net other than voluntary soup kitchens.  Tens of thousands of small businesses failed dropping once solid citizens into poverty.  Farm income collapsed.  Across the board, conditions were bleak. 

Veterans of the Great War were still relatively young men, most in their early 30s.  They had been welcomed home as heroes.  Despite the inevitable post-traumatic stresses of any war’s aftermath, most had married and were raising families when disaster struck.  Largely able bodied and well disciplined, they were perhaps the most employable men in America.  But many, very many, were in desperate shape that summer. 

In 1924 under pressure from veterans’ organizations, especially the American Legion, Congress had passed the Adjusted Service Certificate Law over the strenuous objections of President Calvin Coolidge.  Vets were issued 3,662,374 bonus certificates, the face amount determined by a formula of how many days each soldier served with a greater payment for each day overseas.  The maximum amount due was $500 for domestic service up to $650 payable when the certificates matured in twenty years—1945. 

Although veterans were allowed to borrow against a percentage of that sum—eventually raised to 50%, the money had to be repaid with interest. 

Congress financed the scheme with annual appropriations of more than $12 million to fund the 1945 payments which were expected to total more than $3.5 billion.  Loans paid out against the certificates had already placed the fund in the red. 

None-the-less, in face of the dire emergency leading figures like popular retired Marine Corps General Smedley Butler began advocating for an immediate early payment of the bonus certificates.  

 

Texas Congressman Wright Patman, with hat in hand, is shown receiving a petitions from Veteran representatives in front of the Capital..  Patman sponsored legislation for an early payment of a promised bonus to World War I veterans.

Democratic Congressman Wright Patman of Texas, then in the second term of his long career, introduced a bill to authorize the payments.  It was ardently opposed by the President and Republicans in Congress. 

Hoover, a Quaker, had risen politically largely on his reputation as The Great Humanitarian for his work feeding starving European civilians in the wake of the war.  He was the only engineer until Jimmy Carter to be elected President, a man of meticulous attention to detail, a deep attachment to Republican laissez faire economic philosophy, and a practically physical revulsion to “disorder.”  He responded to the Depression with cheerleading, rosy predictions for recovery, expressed sympathy for those affected but a firm belief that they were on their own and that the Federal Government had no Constitutional responsibility to them.  More concerned with the holy writ of a balanced budget, he urged spending be slashed—a policy that not only did not help but actually deepened the Depression.  Naturally Hoover and unified Republicans railed against the proposed Patman Act as a budget buster.

The Bonus Expeditionary Force was organized by Walter W. Waters, a former sergeant in the AEF—American Expeditionary Force—in World War I, to descend en masse on Washington to pressure Congress to pass the Patman Act.  Veterans and their families from all over the country, but mostly from the East, responded to the call arriving in the city on June 17 as the Senate took up the bill, which had already cleared the House.  

 

Bonus Army camps may have had ramshackle huts and tents, but they were neatly organized with streets and maintained with military discipline, men assigned to clean-up, cooking, and security duties in addition to regular drilling.

Senate Republicans blocked action on the bill and the Bonus Marchers settled into makeshift camps, nicknamed Hoovervilles.  Although the shabby camps were assembled from what tents could be obtained and junk scavenged from scrap yards, the veteran leaders exercised military discipline.  They were laid out in orderly streets, sanitation facilities were dug and maintained, common kitchens established, and camps patrolled by volunteer M.P.s.  Men had to register producing evidence of honorable discharge to be admitted and were each expected to do duty keeping the camps clean, orderly, and secure.  The men responded to daily reveille and held regular parades.  American flags were prominent.

The veterans were very concerned that the public see them as loyal patriots.  And by in large, despite being denounced as dangerous Communists in the most conservative press, the public was at least sympathetic to them. 

Over 17,000 men enrolled. Their wives and children plus some approved volunteer supporters—especially nurses and medical personnel—swelled the camps to a total population of over 40,000.  The main camp was laid out on the mud flats and boggy ground by the Anacostia River across from the core of the city.  

 

Days before he ordered the Bonus Army dispersed and drive from Washington President Herbert Hoover was lampooned in the professional quality camp newspaper,  He was depicted as the Kaiser with a waxed mustache and wearing the Capital Dome asa a German spiked helmet.  Men of every trade and level of education were in the camps, including the experienced journalists, artists, typographers, and printers who produced the paper.

Marchers gathered daily for orderly demonstrations near the Capitol.  By late July it was evident that the Republicans in the Senate would not budge and that the Patman Act was doomed.  Acting on direction of the President, Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered District Police to “evacuate the city” of bonus marchers on the morning of July 28. 

Veteran leaders were taken by surprise by a police charge and the men resisted.  Ill trained police responded by emptying their revolvers into the crowd killing two men outright and injuring dozens.  Enraged, the veterans fought back, pelting police with rocks, bricks, and anything else they could lay their hands on.  A few may have had handguns and fired back or fired with weapons taken from disarmed officers.  Police were forced to withdraw with nearly 70 men injured.  The veterans remained on Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Learning of the failure of the police, Hoover ordered the Army to take action.  Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, in dress uniform and festooned with every decoration he ever received, decided to take personal command.  As commander of the famed Rainbow Division made up of National Guard units, many of the veterans in the streets had served under him. 

 

Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur in full dress uniform consults with his cavalry commander Major George S. Patton.  MacArthurs aide-de-camp Major Dwight Eisenhower is the officer at right with his hands on his hips. 

MacArthur deployed two full regiments, the 12th Infantry, and the 3rd Cavalry supported by six battle tanks commanded by Maj. George S. Patton.  The Army arrived on the scene about 4:30 p.m. as Federal employees were leaving their offices.  MacArthur, with his aide Major Dwight Eisenhower at his side, ordered his troops to advance. 

At first many of the veterans were glad to see their brother soldiers.  Some believed that they had arrived to protect them from the police, others said they thought the advance at first was a parade in their honor.  Then Patton ordered his cavalry to charge, sabers drawn.  As the horrified witnesses from surrounding office buildings screamed “Shame, Shame!” the cavalry crashed into the thick mass of veterans.  As the veterans reeled back toward their camps, the infantry came up with bayonets fixed.  Using adamsite gas, an arsenic based gas inducing violent vomiting, the troops began to clear the camps.  Women, children, and civilian volunteers alike were swept up.  

 

Patton's Light Tanks attacked Marchers on Pennsylvania Ave. as did his mounted cavalrymen behind them with sabers drawn and used. 

Against the President’s explicit order, MacArthur crossed the Anacostia into the vast main camp.  Tents and huts were put to the torch, destroying all of the personal possessions of the veterans and their families.  Survivors, including many injured, were scattered into the countryside where local law enforcement personnel hectored them for days as they tried to find ways to get home.

In the end at least four veterans, including two of their leaders, William Hushka and Eric Carlson were killed and an estimated 1,017 injured.  Most historians agree that both of those figures are low because many of the injured were either unable to get medical treatment or afraid to seek it.  In addition, one woman suffered a miscarriage and an infant was killed.  Again historians, believe, based on eyewitness accounts, that other children, especially infants were killed or died later as result of the gas.  

 

The smoldering ruins of the main camp on the Anacostia mud flap.  Marchers and their families lost all of their personal belongings as they fled for their lives and were hectored and harassed for weeks by local authorities and sometimes vigilante mobs as they tried to make their way home.  Here and there local citizens organized aid and comfort.

Within a week newsreel footage of the attack was being played in every movie theater in the country.  Public outrage played a big part in the defeat of Hoover for re-election that November. 

But if veterans thought that Franklin D. Roosevelt would support payment of the Bonus, they were wrong.  Roosevelt wanted to use money for other projects and for direct relief.  But F.D.R. was not about to make the same mistake as Hoover when a smaller Bonus Army appeared in the summer of 1933.  Instead of sending in the Army, he sent Eleanor, who brought tea to the veterans and urged them to instead enlist in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). 

Hundreds took her up on the proposal and were put to work building the causeway road to Key West, Florida.  When the Labor Day hurricane on September 2, 1935 killed 258 veterans working on the Highway, public sentiment again swung behind the veterans’ demand. 

In 1936 Congress over-rode Roosevelt’s veto to finally authorize the early payment of the promised bonus. 

After World War II the G.I. Bill with its promises of immediate money for education or a home purchase was enacted specifically in response to the plight of World War I vets. 

 

In 1968 Resurrection City, the camp of the Poor People's Campaign was unmolested by troops.  President Lyndon Johnson remembered the Bonus March. 

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom called by Martin Luther King, Jr. and his allies was inspired by the Bonus Marchers.  His 1968 plans for the Poor People’s Campaign, which included a camp of protesters, were even more evocative.  The Campaign, conducted after King’s murder, was not dispersed by troops.