The Corn Latitudes

Unrestrained industrial capitalism wrought the wonder that was Chicago in its heyday, but profit-making took a fearful toll of its people. New ways of organizing work reduced even skilled workers to machines, or rather parts of machines. In times of chronic labor surplus, “the market” failed to provide decent housing, adequate wages, or humane working conditions.

 

The results were labor unrest, poverty, filth, and crime. All owed both to the industrialization of both the city and the economy, and of a political system that in every way adapted to rural realities and thus unable to adapt to the new conditions. The need for wholesale changes in Chicago’s political, economic, and social systems made Chicago—the part of Illinois where immigration and industrialization was most intense, and where their effects were most keenly felt—a center of movements meant to alter the rules by which society governed itself.

 

This brief history was compiled for my never-published guide to Illinois history and culture. Much has happened since this summary was written, including the suburbanization of the poor and the return to the city center of the well-off, and the disparities of wealth and opportunity that dogged the city in the latter 1800s remain. The piece lacks a what-it-all-means ending, but I no longer am as eager to pretend I know what it all means as I was then, so I did not write one.

 

Chicago was the first modern industrial city in the U.S. In 1939, the Federal Writers Project’s guide to Illinois talked of how the factory system “invaded” Illinois in the 1870’s. Industrialization as experienced in Illinois was violent if only because of its speed; by 1890, astonishingly, the farm state of Illinois was third among the states in manufacturing.

 

The class conflict that emerged in the latter 1800s was not a Chicago phenomenon, but a universal phenomenon that happened first and most dramatically in the U.S. in Chicago—the time when, as James Gilbert phrased it in Perfect Cities, “the Victorian moral economy and polity gave way to the brusque assault of the modern world.” From roughly the Civil War until the Great Depression, the city’s politics and social life would be shaped by the attempt of the working class to get more of what they thought they had earned, and by the affluent to hold on to what they thought they were owed.

 

The nation and the world watched Chicago in those days as one might watch an erupting volcano, as the city underwent a wrenching realignment of the city economic, social, and political order. Economic depression, immigration, and industrial consolidation and the reactions of working people to them spawned leftist politics and unionism on one side and government repression on the other. If there was not quite anarchy, there was gross injustice (repeatedly) and eruptions of communal and official violence.

 

The struggle to better their situation put workers and their families and their champions against the capitalists in the courts, in the streets, in the factories, and in the polling places. all agreed on what the problems were—unbridled greed by the ownership class, coupled with callousness, even cruelty—but as no one quite agreed whether the best alternative was socialism, trade unionism, or progressive-style regulation of capitalism. Because of that, workers fought each other and the middle class nearly as much as they fought the owners.

 

Extreme conditions excited talk of extreme remedies. The depth of suffering—and suffering not too big a word for the near-starvation in the working hoods in the latter years of the 1800s. Depression laid off thousands from 1873 to 1878, from 1882 to 1886, and again from 1892 to 1896.Unemployment can only be guessed at, but inferences from various data suggest that at worst third to half of even skilled workers out, while the unskilled barely worked at all—this in a world without unemployment compensation, welfare, or food stamps.

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Provoked battles

 

In the mid-1800s, capitalists stumbled upon new ways to organize labor: making the workers part of an assembly line that required treating him like a machine. The shift of production from the artisan in shop to the worker in the factory was not merely a new economic order but a new social order. As veteran writer on labor Dave Moberg summarized it in the Encyclopedia of Chicago, the revolution in work “provoked battles over the character and control of work that spilled over into broader political fights over democracy, citizenship, and the rights of workers.” The old arrangements—of labor to capital, of governed to governors—were strained, if not wholly undone. All Illinois cities were affected by the process, but none more so than Chicago—the “funnel” through which corn, wheat, and pork poured out to the rest of the nation and the world, and spit back farm machines, packed meat and a thousand other products. Chicago was not ready for what hit it, but no city could have been.

 

Industrialism’s rewards to the bosses were mind-boggling riches; the workers got degradation, danger, boredom, and economic vulnerability. They were left exploited and abused—and angry. In the 1880s and ‘90s, local labor unions fought to change contracts, socialists sought to change society, and anarchists sought to change (rather, to abolish) the economic system. Many landmark events in the history of labor in the industrial era occurred in Chicago—the railway strikes of 1877, the eight-hour-day movement of 1886 and the Pullman boycott of 1894,  the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, the massive strike by workers in the needle trades that led to the powerful Amalgamated Clothing Workers of Chicago. The list might also include too the painful protracted collapse of the industrial Chicago, with the loss of the tens of thousands of jobs and the concomitant erosion of the unions as a social and political force in both city and state.

 

These contest were epic and ugly. It was not the very poor, or the transient and socially marginalized bum that frightened Chicago, it was the working Chicagoan with ideas above his or her station. In the opinion of the owners, they were not fighting workers, they were fighting terrorists; at stake was not the wealth of the few but the safety of the majority. And like more recent wars of terrorism, used every means at disposal—used convicts to compete with free artisans at lower wages, recruited strikebreakers from outside the city, encouraged child labor and immigration to create wage-dampening surpluses of labor, hired goons to intimidate workers, blacklisted union sympathizers off the job and harassed them on it. this nearly century-long combat for once deserves the word that is usually applied to it by admirers—struggle.

 

Taking it to the streets: Labor and capital

 

The rise of industry in Chicago had been swift and brutal. “The Chicago system created almost every imaginable kind of goods,” notes Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic in 2002. “But the main thing it consumed was people.”

 

The standard work week in most industries in the early decades of the 20th century was 60 hours, but even after such Herculean labors many workers could afford to live only in housing that Illinoisans today would not house a pet in. “Wooden kennels, “sneered Lloyd Lewis, “a plague of wooden huts.” Houses crowded onto lots, rooms crowded into houses, tenants crowded into rooms. Some families kept guns by their beds—not against burglars but against rats. Tenants were cheated on coal, on rent, on food, on wages—thus was their tuition in capitalism.

 

Outside, conditions were not much better. Horse manure, privies under stairs in backyards, garbage left to rot in streets, offal dumped in turgid rivers—Bubbly Creek, a branch of the Chicago River that “ran” through stockyards district, earned its name because festering wastes generated gases that bubbled to the surface. The stench was terrific. The air was nearly as bad; coal smoke trains heated houses ran factory boilers, and greasy smoke that rain could not wash away; in the 1980s, visitors to the Loop were startled when cleaning revealed familiar landmark buildings they had always known as brown to be made of bright white limestone.

 

Observers agreed that a single woman could live in a city on no less than eight dollars per week, yet even the retailers who employed them conceded that tens of thousands of single women earned less than five dollars at a time when owners were taking home millions. Julius Rosenwald, a saint among philanthropists, sweated them as hard as anyone; he paid girls as young as fourteen wages that led to penury and malnutrition, if they didn’t drive some of them into part-time prostitution. Owners alleged that competition for jobs more or less obliged them to keep wages for shop girls low, lest their competitors take advantage, but at the turn of the century, real costs of living rose faster than wages in all but union jobs.

 

When work could only be done by hard-to-replace skilled craftsmen, such workers had clout with the owners. When work came to be done by interchangeable machines run by interchangeable workers, workers lost that clout. Only collectively could they compel the owners to provide better wages and work conditions. Employers on the other hand believed—and the courts usually agreed with them—that they had an absolute right to hire and fire at will and pay workers as little as the workers would tolerate and work them as long as they could stand. Competition was the only brake on exploitation; human labor was merely a raw ingredient in the industrial process, and that workers’ welfare was of no consequence to employer save to extent that it reduced efficiency.

 

Things were as they were because that was the ways things were. The owners justified their attitude variously by reference to God or Darwin or Adam Smith, but in any event saw their suzerainty as the inevitable outcome of a larger and inevitable forces order of which they were proprietors in every sense. Liberal Lake Forestans—the kind of people whose idea of reform is to oust the president of the garden club—resolved to treat workers well, but never for a moment considered that the question of how to treat their workers would not be theirs to answer. They gave handsomely to charitable institutions devoted (for example) to the victims of tuberculosis; what they would not consider was making substantive improvements in the city’s sanitation, housing, or working conditions, much of which its industrialists in particular either caused or had the power to cure.

 

Workers of Chicago, unite

 

Many workers accepted their fate under the factory system at first. Many members of  Chicago's working class lived life as  peasants in Europe and the American South; having just arrived from places where they had been accustomed to being treated like animals, they found that being treated like machine was not much worse. In time, however, many immigrants saw the factory bosses as corrupt kings of a sort familiar to them from their homelands in another guise.

 

Early unions often took the form of workers associations. They were organized along lines of skill; the roster of local unions in the 1870s included the wonderfully named Sons of Vulcan (iron-puddlers) and the shoemakers who banded together as the Knights of St. Crispin, after the third century saint who preached in the streets and made shoes by night.

           

Skilled workers still had some bargaining power in certain industries, were able to organize, and sustain strikes, the more as canny pols like Carter Harrison, who relied on labor votes, orders cops to keep hands off. Skilled workers were vain about their abilities and jealous of the prerogatives they enjoyed. Skilled workers in later decades also showed a preference for their own unions along the lines of the craft unions that made up the Chicago Trade and Labor Assembly (forerunner of the Chicago Federation of Labor). As the 20th century neared, craft unions came to dominate the building trades, janitors and maintenance men, and shipping.

 

Attempts to organize whole industries failed because class and ethnic divisions among the various workers than made up workforce were too hard to overcome, or rather too easy to exploit by bosses. A single factory, much less a single industry, might include workmen of a dozen trades or more, and getting them all to agree on united course of action against the owners was difficult. The railway “brotherhoods” — mutual benefit societies that morphed into unions—also refused to unite with other unions in cross-industry federations. Such parochialism helped killed the old Knights of Labors’ dream of a single workers union, and hampered unionization for decades.

 

The final hurrah of 19th century industrial unionism was Eugene V. Debs’ American Railway Union. The ARU in 1894 targeted George Pullman’s firm. When George Pullman slashed wages at his namesake railroad car plant during the production slowdown caused by the depression of 1893, he declined to reduce his workers' rents. After several members of a griev­ance committee were fired, their fellow workers walked out; Debs’ men refused to handle trains hauling Pullman-made cars, and the railroads owners backed Pullman by firing any employee who did so.

 

Carl Smith, a prominent historian of the event, has called the Pullman strike of 1894 “the most famous and far-reaching labor conflict in a period of severe economic depression and social unrest.” The nation’s rail system was practically shut down—this in an era when rail was the only way to move anything anywhere. Debs counseled peace; Pullman and the railroads hired thousands of strikebreakers, incited public opinion by sabotaging their own equipment and blaming strikers, and hired what Debs would later describe as “an army of detectives, thugs, and murderers . . . equipped with badge and bludgeon.” 

 

The railroad companies compelled the intervention of the federal government by attaching mail cars to trains pulling Pullmans, which stopped the movement of mails. Washington intervened, action taking the form of  court injunctions and four companies of infantry dispatched to Chicago by President Cleveland over the objections of Illinois’s governor, John Peter Altgeld. When troops began moving the trains, workers retaliated by destroying rails and rolling stock. Fights between strikers and troops and militia led to deaths and the effective end of the stoppage. So bitter was the feeling thus aroused that when George Pullman George Pullman died, three years after the strike, his remains were entombed in concrete and steel in Graceland Cemetery.

 

In the short run, the defeat was a blow to unionism, and no union would win a major victory in Chicago for another sixteen years. However, the Pullman strike laid the ground for future progress. As Smith notes, Pullman was chided by federal investigators for his refusal to arbitrate—heretofore it had always the workers who tended to be denounced as intransigent and unreasonable—and his high-handedness spurred the trend toward a stronger government regulatory hand in constraining the power of industry.

 

The workers had each other. The companies had the courts, the press, governors, and (most) mayors until the end of the 1800s. A few “progressive” or “enlightened” businessmen—such terms were not the ones used by their workers—opted to defuse the uprisings by giving the workers less reason to revolt. Many capitalists saw workers as unruly children, and it was perhaps inevitable that a few would discard their guide of disciplinarian for the role of wise and generous father. Such paternalism is sometimes misunderstood as humanitarian. In fact, it is the application of more sophisticated management notions, since the costs of better wages and working conditions are more than repaid to a company by lower turnover and higher output by workers.

 

Charity in the case of some industrialists began at the factory. “Welfare capitalism,” an early trial run of the welfare state in which companies volunteered such services as medical aid. The Pullman Co, for example, backed charities on the South Side near the plant such as Provident Hospital, the country’s first interracial hospital, which admitted black citizens (including Pullman’s porters and maids) on an equal basis with whites and cared for them with a staff that included black and white Chicagoans. Pullman Company executives also backed uplift organizations such as the Wabash Avenue Young Men’s Christian Asso­ciation (YMCA) and the Chicago Urban League, but only because both were dedicated to inculcating habits in their charges that made them more desirable employees.

 

Interestingly, the most extravagant experiment in this kind of enlightened business thinking was George Pullman’s model factory town. The town of Pullman was the railroad car maker’s remedy to the upsets of 1877. There workers would enjoy everything they might want—save, perhaps, freedom—although it was to be enjoyed of course on the boss’s terms.

 

Welfare capitalism in short aimed to improve capitalism, not enhance workers’ welfare. This was done for business reasons, to forestall workers uniting into unions to provide such essential services themselves. Such company aid came with conditions, and in any event was as unpredictable as each year’s profits.

 

Divide and conquer

 

Occupational snobbery was a minor obstacle to unionization compared to ethnic and racial antagonisms. Owners knew of and exploited workers’ race and ethnic antagonisms. Occupations tended to be staffed by race or ethnic group—partly because it made cooperation among workers of diverse backgrounds problematic, partly because of the owners'  crude Darwinism. In any event the owners' exploited these antagonisms in every way possible. Solidarity—as union members, and later as Democrats—was possible in the 1930s only because so many workers were by then second-generation Amer­icans on whom the ancient ethnic loyalties had a weaker grip.

 

One tried and true weapon against unions was the importation of workers from outside the city. Company agents harvested strikebreakers in the American South, for example, as if they were harvesting cotton. African Americans’ race left them at odds, of course, with the mostly European workers in the city (most unions excluded them) nor had they the long tutelage in unionism that workers received in Chicago. African American strikebreakers were used against white unions seven times between 1894 and 1921, in the packing houses and stockyards, the steel mills, and the rail yards. The tensions that fueled the open war against black Chicagoans in 1919 owed much to the collective ire that had smoldered in working class white districts because of this history of complicity in union-busting.

 

In the end it was not strikebreakers but industrialization that killed the craft unions. When factories were organized like artisans’ shops, workers’ skill was as crucial to enterprise as the bosses capital and management. The breaking down of manufacturing into simple steps that could be endlessly repeated by machines—the dumbing down of work—changed that. Over the next many years, the larger strategy of owners against the workers was to render the latter unnecessary—first by eliminating the need for skilled workers, later by eliminating the need for workers at all. 

 

Companies organized against their common foe too, that being the workers and the politicians who sympathized with them. Their "unions" were the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, the Chicago Employers’ Asso­ciation, the Newspaper Publishers’ Association, the Illinois Coal Operators, among many others. These associations provided aid to boycotted firms, blacklisted union organizers, and lobbied the General Assembly for new laws against unions. (More unions were broken on the floors on the legislature than in the streets.) The owners, acting collectively, also backed candidates running against labor sympathizers, set up rival company unions, hired “sluggers”—goons dignified as private security forces—to intimidate strikers and strikebreakers to take the strikers’ jobs.

 

Some firms tried to fight the unions by showing them an open hand rather than a fist. The United States Steel Corporation in 1902 initiated a profit-sharing plan whereby an employee could buy preferred company stock for a little less than market value. That was followed in the next few years by an innovative worker safety program, pensions, company-paid help with home-building and vocational training, and in-plant medical facilities. By preempting the benefits programs of the unions, U.S. Steel neatly undercut the appeal of union membership, with the result that the steelworkers stayed unorganized until the 1930s.

 

The struggle of the workers to get and the propertied to keep was long, bloody—and numbingly complicated. Unions were founded, died, renamed, entered into federation with others, then split up. We will here look only at one of the more significant of these stories, one that was unusual in that it resulted in victory of a fledgling union, but otherwise typical.

 

Workers in the men’s clothing industry in Chicago walked off their jobs in 1910 to begin what turned out to be an important strike. Workers in the needle trades were plagued by the evils of the sweatshop system. There had been a major strike in 1905 for example, against Montgomery Ward. A reduction in the piece rate in 1910 spurred a seamstress—Bessie Abramowitz—to lead sixteen of her coworkers out of the Hart, Schaffner & Marx Shop #5 on South Halsted Street in protest. (It might be noted that many of the key figures in Chicago labor history were women including Lucy Parsons, Bessie Abramowitz, and high school teacher and union activist Mary Herrick who was important in the organization during the Depression of the Chicago Teachers Union.)

 

Eventually some 45,000 workers joined them. In December, police killed a picketer; eventually seven persons died and 874 were arrested. It took another four years, but the strike resulted in the  Amal­gamated Clothing Workers of America under Abramovitz and Sidney Hillman, who were husband and wife. The union negotiated a contract whose provisions for 40-hour work week, and unemployment insurance were to become standard in labor-management relations; indeed, the union became a model for such organizations. The union opened a bank in Chicago in 1922; a re­lated agency, invested in worker housing.

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In one of those ironies that proves that time heals all wounds, or, alternatively, that History is nuts, the Chicago Tribune, for so long the strident voice of unbridled capitalism, honored Bessie Abramowitz and Sidney Hillman with a marker at 1922 S. Halsted Street commemorating their careers as labor activists.

 

Economics explained most of the union victories in the half-century or after the Civil War. However, workers’ political or economic gains usually lasted only until the next depression or the arrival of the next wave of immigrants eager to take their places on the line, after which the owners clawed back wages and benefits. Unions were indulged to an extent during the Civil War, when owners could afford it, but wages slid in real terms with slump in demand caused by the end of the civil war; unions entered a 40-year vale of tears until another war—World War I—caused the sun to shine on them again for a while. During World War I, factories ran at full capacity and their products sold at top prices. Stoppages really cost, and owners, feeling flush, could afford to (in effect) buy off workers to keep money flowing. examples. but as soon as normal resumed, workers lost that lever on owners. Writes Lizabeth Cohen in her 1990 book, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, “World War I, and then what workers managed to win during the war and its aftermath was mostly dissipated in the defeats of 1919–22.”

 

The Republic goes to war

 

Unionism regularized, indeed ritualized worker-owner relations, but did little to ease underlying antagonisms between capital and labor.  Sixty years after the great upheaval of the Pullman strike in 1877, Chicago workers were again shot down by company-paid thugs and cops.

 

Iron- and steelworkers in the Chicago area had been organizing for mutual benefit since the 1870s. They were up against some of the most obdurate owners of any industry. Union workers had little leverage against the owners, partly because the latter could always draw upon a steady supply of immigrant labor. (The substantial Mexican community in Hegewich, for instance, descended from families imported in 1919 to break a strike.)

 

A revivified union movement made a massive attempt to organize the steel industry in 1919. A walkout of some 90,000 workers closed down the Chicago area mills, and state and federal troops were sent it to force workers back to the jobs. It was not until 1937 that local unions were finally recognized by the biggest area steel maker, U.S. Steel. However, "Little Steel"—the industry’s smaller, independent companies—refused to sign the contract, so a strike was called by the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

 

As a show of support, hundreds of SWOC sympathizers from all around Chicago gathered on Memorial Day at Sam's Place, a tavern the SWOC used as its strike headquarters. A march staged two days before had seen 18 injured. After a round of speeches, the crowd began a march toward the Republic Steel mill. They were stopped midway by approximately 150 Chicago cops wielding clubs, tear gas, and guns. While demonstrators  were arguing their right to proceed, police fired into the crowd and pursued the those fleeing. Ten demonstrators were killed and at least sixty marchers were hurt or wounded, some of them shot from behind, making of the Republic Steel Memorial Day massacre one of the most violent such incidents in U.S. labor history.

 

In an echo of 1886, police said that strikers had opened fire first, but the police present suffered not one bullet wound. (A congressional investigation later con­demned the police for using excessive force.) In a foreshadowing of 1968, city and police officials denied charges of police brutality and blamed Communists and radicals for the violence.

 

The day became part of local lore. When journalist James fallows visited the South Side site nearly half a century later, steelworkers only in their 30s “made sure I saw the exact points where the shots were fired and the Republic Steel martyrs fell.”

 

In  the 1930s,  a national government put its power behind demands for union representation in the interests of recovery and of stifling social unrest. Only then did workers in basic industries win union recognition under the Congress of Industrial Organizations. By 1940, one in three workers in Chicago manufactur­ing would be a union member where ten years earlier hardly any had been.

 

Things changed in the 1950s. The Democratic Party came out of the war committed to using the powers of government to ensure economic growth. During  the war years,  wages had been regulated, and when workers across the nation struck to make up lost ground lost in the biggest strike wave ever,  the Truman administration intervened on the side of employers. In 1947. congressional Democrats cooperated in the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which deprived workers of many of the benefits they had gained under the New Deal. These and kindred measures made harder for workers and their unions to strike, to set up closed shops, to influence employers’ hiring and firing, and to use their weight in federal elections on behalf of pro-labor candidates.

 

Chicago and nearby parts of Indiana in early 1970s remained home to the densest concentration of steel mills in the world. The United Steelworkers counted some 130,000 members in Chicagoland and northwest Indiana; in the far South Side, the biggest buildings were the local Catholic church and the United Steelworkers union hall. But in 1979 there began a dispiriting round of plant closings and production cutbacks. This was no cyclical downturn, no chill caught by an otherwise healthy industry; Big Steel was in its death throes. By then, many of the Calumet’s region's once-state of the art factories were outmoded, its labor costs crippling, its markets no longer growing.

 

In the 1970s, labor again became a buyer’s market, and as happened so often in past, companies took opportunity of a labor surplus to undo many gains. Union contracts provisions traded away in negotiations with companies that threatened to close factories if labor costs not reduced; result has been a ebb of union influence. But as happened before too, it was basic shifts in ways work was done that really doomed the unions—mainly, in this generation, the shift from factory to nonunion service jobs. Even at the peak of union membership, only about one in three Chicago workers were union members and today union membership is only a fraction even of that. The only good news was that strikes ended with lawyers rather than guns, but the workers lost just the same.

 

Governing capitalism

Occasionally a mayor would admit union men to City Hall in return for political support—Carter Harrison is a good example of a mayor who made workers part of government coalition—but they were exceptions. Most government officials at all levels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were more likely to intervene in strikes through courts and cops and troops, on side of owners, citing variously threats to public safety to orderly movement of the mails, but in fact protecting the sanctity of private property.

 

The way to keep government from controlling the worker, obviously, was to control the government. The rise of specifically class politics began in Chicago in the 1850s, when German workers began to arrive who were fleeing the consequences of a failed revolution of 1848 in their home country. Unionization was hard going over the next half century. Worker agitation followed economic depressions as predictably as floods after a rainstorm, but every subsequent economic recovery stilled agitation for change to the system. 

 

The only social force capable of compelling mammoth corporations to tend to worker safety and fair wages was government. Socialism, for example, whould place the means of production into the hands of, or at least under the control of, the people's government.

 

One way to bring about this worker's paradise was to vote it into being. In the mid-1870s, a group of new and mostly German craft unionists formed the Workingmen's Party of Illinois. They organized street demonstrations for relief and jobs, and later turned their attention from pressuring government leaders to joining them. The Workingmen's Party became the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), a renaming that frankly announced its intentions but perhaps was not politic; socialism still bore the taint of the foreign and the dangerous, and the SLP was as terrifying to the middle and upper classes as it was inspiring to workers. In the city's working class wards it enjoyed a reputation as a protector of worker interests, and it drew enough support that it was sending representative to City Hall and Springfield by decade’s end.

 

The apogee of workers’ influence at the polls was the 1880s until the 1920s, when various workers or socialist parties fielded slates in city elections. According to Richard Schneirov, a historian of the period, the United Labor Party, the electoral arm of the Knights of Labor, won 31 percent of Chicago's mayoral vote in 1887, the highest percentage achieved by any labor party in the city's history.  Indeed, in the 1880s it appeared as if socialist parties might become to the city’s emerging working class culture what the Republicans have long been to business.

 

It never happened. Socialists inside and outside the SLP were active and articulate participants in public discussions of the days in Chicago, being specially prominent in labor union and progressive causes, but they never became an electoral force outside a few working-class wards.

 

The workers parties were outvoted and eventually outmaneuvered by the mainstream Democrats. A job today was worth more to a man with kids to feed than a future Utopia, and the Democrats were able to offer workers patronage instead of promises. 

 

The man who stole the working class for the Democrats was Carter Harrison I. Mayors heretofore had been lackeys of the owners but not Harrison. Schneirov notes that Harrison defended the working man’s saloon against the Prohibitionists and he not only named socialist and trade unionists as health inspectors but got passed ordinances authorizing factory and tenement inspection by the city. He appointed pro-labor police whose hands-off policies allowed workers, briefly, to prevail against some bosses (Schneirov notes that frustrated employers increasingly turned to private Pinkerton guards in place of the police.) “In sum," writes Schneirov, "Carter Harrison had temporarily reversed the class polarization of the 1870s by engineering a social compact between workingmen and the local political order at the expense of industrial employers.”

 

Not usually credited with being a social thinker, real estate developer Samuel Gross had his own program. Giving workers a stake in the government would not be half as effective in quelling worker unrest, he decided, than giving them a stake in the economy and in the city by making them members of the propertied class via mortgages they could  can afford No one will burn down a town that has his own house in it. 

 

Socialism enjoyed a brief resurgence in the polls in the years before World War I. A national Socialist Party of the United States was organized in 1901 in Chicago by Eugene Debs among others, cobbled together a party from the wreckage of the American Railway Union broken by the Pullman boycott and other organizations. Its program was to not only remake capitalism but, in the process, to ease the many social inequalities that it fostered.

 

By 1915, 44 Socialists held political offices in Illinois. (Chicago was not the only hotbed of leftist agitation in Illinois. Rockford was target of the Palmer raids, and the coal fields of central Illinois you couldn’t spit in any direction without hitting a socialist.) Most of them were in Chicago, predictably. In 1916 the Socialist candidate for state’s attor­ney was almost elected, losing only after a recount; in 1917, the Socialists drew nearly 40 percent of vote in that year’s municipal elections.

 

Socialism was a literary phenomenon as well as a political one in Chicago. Many a writer associated with the Chicago Renaissance, such as Sherwood Anderson and Margaret Anderson, professed themselves sympathetic with the workers’ movement. Carl Sandburg for a time was a paid worker for Eugene Debs’ and Victor Berger’s Social Democratic party.

 

Most of these writers sensibly kept their socialism out of their books. The late 1800s and early 1900s spawned innumerable socialist tracts by lesser writers, many of which took the form of novels. Chicago was a natural setting for suck works, it being the scene of the most protracted if not most bitter industrial disputes, where the exploitation by grasping capitalists was clear enough for even the left to see. Their titles—A Tramp in Society, The Other Side, The Iron Heel, By Bread Alone—suggest their themes. Their quality is suggested by the plot of the novel in which the hero is miraculously transported from 1892 to the Chicago of 1949, a utopian state in which poverty is non-existent and jails are unnecessary—less a work of imagination than of delirium.

 

An exception was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906). The novel chronicles the story of the stolid Lithuanian Jurgis Rudkis and his family, who live and work and die in Packingtown. The book has been widely compared to those of Dickens and Zola as an example of social realism in the novel, indeed as that sort of politically intended novel known as socialist realism. Sinclair's book was originally commissioned as a serial by a popular socialist paper, which got its money’s worth; as Christopher Hitchens has put it, his novel is the most successful attempt ever made to fictionalize the central passages of Marx's Das Kapital. But while Sinclair intended for The Jungle to horrify people about working conditions, it was his depiction of the meat packing process that shocked the middle class. As the author famously remarked, he "aimed for the public's heart but by accident hit it in the stomach."

 

The turn of the twentieth century was the apogee of Socialist power. Attempts to build a national party for farmers and urban workers foundered because economic interests of farmers and urban workers often were at odds. Worse, socialism’s association with communist Russia and its own German roots proved damning to patriotic, indeed paranoid Americans during World War I. A government crackdown on dissidents labeled as subversives killed both the party and the socialist ideal as political forces in Chicago and Illinois.

 

That did not mean that workers ceased to be political force. In recent years, unions and the ethnic working class formed the backbone of the coalition that Anton Cermak turned into a Machine in 1931. It was the working class that was the core of the support of Cermaks eventual successor, Dick Daley. By then, much of the white working class saw their enemy not as the bosses but as African American, and Daley’s policies of tolerating de facto segregation in housing, schools and hiring catered to them. (The poor of all colors, then and before and since, had no champion.)

 

In recent decades, the Democratic machine might be said to have been a workers’ party. But catering to the unions—one of the machine’s crucial constituencies—and catering to workers is not quite the same thing. In 2007 the unions—long stalwarts in the successful electoral coalition assembled by Richard M. Daley—rebelled against their long-time ally after Daley refused to support a union-backed ordinance that would have mandated that big-box retailers doing business in the city pay a “living wage.” The unions picked a slate of aldermanic candidates to run against the mayor’s allies in the city council and backed them with a substantial campaign war chest.

 

Panic among the elites

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The mainstream political parties were as adept at breaking workers’ political parties as the companies were at breaking unions. (Among other expedients, aldermen rigged elections in workers wards.) The failure of avowedly socialist parties to win more than token political power for workers had the predictable effect of discouraging those who were marginally committed to the cause and driving the real believers into more extreme measures. Many ordinary unionists became socialists, socialists became communists, communists became anarchists—the last two only by generous definition political movements.

 

Many of these converts to extreme opinion concluded that if the system couldn’t be reformed, then the option was to undo it. For instance, disenchanted members of the Socialist Labor Party in 1881 organized themselves as the International Working People's Association (IWPA), which was committed to direction action rather than electoral politics as the means to achieve their socialist revolution on behalf of the workers. Some of the more radical laborites disdained even this more energetic version of socialism. The new Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905 in Chicago, sneered at socialists as fuddy-duddies. The “wobblies” were avowedly revolutionary, and committed after 1908 to syndicalism, under which associations of workers (evolved from existing unions) owned and operated all means of production and controlled the government. 

 

The rhetoric that inspired followers of such groups alarmed everyone else. The elites after mid-1800s had lost control of the city’s politics, contenting themselves to running its economy and its cultural life; now, under pressure from the rising worker revolt, it risked losing control of the economy as well. The fear among the propertied class of revolution—a real revolution, not a metaphorical one—was real, if exaggerated, the threat, while distant, being, briefly, real.

 

Ordinary street violence was enough to alarm ordinary Chicagoans. The city was paralyzed by a citywide general strike in 1877 called in sympathy for the nationwide railroad strike then underway. “Strikes” by unskilled laborers like the lumbershovers—ill-educated men and women, often drunk—were more like street fights than formal protests. The wider public drew little distinction between the factions of the movements, seeing in all of them as dangerous ruffians who shared the same broad ends.

 

The popular newspapers reported that mobs of thieves and cut-throats were abroad—as indeed they had been for years. Some roamed the city’s board rooms and banks. Others, armed thugs who harassed citizens attempting to gather peaceably, wore the uniforms of the Chicago police. The 1877 "Turner Hall Raid" in which cops raided a meeting of the German Furniture Workers, killing one and wounding others, was unusual only in that a judge later found the police guilty of preventing the workers from exercising their right to freedom of speech and assembly.

 

There were sporadic outbreaks of street fighting. Thirty workers were left dead and 200 wounded in clashes with police that summer. The events gave polite society a foretaste of the future they had long feared—open class warfare, with bands played the “Marseillaise” in the streets while roving bands of armed men (and women) shut down businesses and took over shop floors and river docks.

 

Police (including vigilantes deputized by City Hall) and eventually the state militia were called out to quell all-out fighting on the factory districts. Among the encounters during the “Great Upheaval” was the "Battle of the Viaduct" on July 26 when U.S. troops and police attacked about 5,000 workers at Halsted and 16th Street. Over the course of three days, thirty were killed and 200 wounded. It was nothing like a fair fight; not one Chicago policeman was so much as seriously wounded.

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As so often happened, official overreaction to worker unrest helped create the very problem the ruling elites sought to quell. To protect themselves from the cops, working men formed military societies such as the Labor Guards, the Jaeger Verein, and the Bohemian Sharpshooters. Collectively, this ragtag workers’ army presented an unacceptable threat to public complacency, if not to public safety. In 1879 the Illinois General Assembly passed an Armed Workmen Law, requiring all military organizations other than the state militia to be licensed by the governor.

Mass arrests of protesters and their socialist leaders were authorized, and private militias were revived. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz caught the mood. “The nation within living memory had had one civil war, and the rich feared the outbreak of another,” she wrote in 1976. “The cause would again be against slavery, the slavery in which wage-earners were kept by the bosses. The rhetoric used to justify slavery and the wage system was remarkably similar to that used by the plantation owners to justify bondage of black Africans.“ The workers had noticed that too. Eugene Debs hoped to become, in his words, "the John Brown of the wage slaves."

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The Haymarket

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The radicals’ expectations that they could pull down capitalism were ludicrous, in fact they managed only to pull down labor unionism and socialism as a mainstream political movement. Consider that most important single event in Chicago labor history—Haymarket. What began as a demonstration for more humane rules in the workplace ended up in public alarm over anarchy in the streets.

 

In 1886 it seemed for a while as if that uprising was underway. The agitation for an 8-hour day had been going on for years. In 1886 the Knights of Labor, then the most potent labor organization, had brought skilled and unskilled workers together in support of the eight-hour day in a strike that had lasted several months. Some 40,000 local workers had been attacked by police at McCormick Reaper Works, whose workers had been locked out and replaced by scabs. Two had died, and a rally to protest the killings was set for May 4 at the Haymarket Square in the heart of the working-class West Side.

 

Trouble was expected, but the crowd turned out to be small and the speeches temperate. The crowd drifting away when 178 cops showed up. Someone—it is not known whom to this day—threw a bomb. A melee followed in which from twelve to eighteen people were killed and dozens wounded, including fifty-nine police, although police conceded later that most had been hit by wild shots fired by brother officers. A conspiracy to throw the bomb was deduced, since the anarchists who were active in the strike had long used violent rhetoric.

 

The Haymarket incident excited an anxious Chicago to something like a panic. Rumors of revolution bounced around the dinner tables of the rich—here was a servant problem indeed! George Pullman and Marshall Field were among those who pressed Washington to establish a permanent military presence in Chicago. During the winter of 1873–74, fear of immigrant mobs led Chicago’s wealthy businessmen to establish and equip the First Regiment of the Illinois National Guard, which by 1890 would be housed in a new armory at 16th and South Michigan—comfortingly close to the Prairie Avenue mansion district. (It was not the first time that federal troops had been used to protect local property owners from dark-skinned rebels. Federal troops were first quartered around Chicago to protect settlers from the Native Americans on whose land the Euro-Americans were (until 1833) squatting.)

 

At the suggestion of Marshall Field, the Chamber of Commerce and the Union League bought a 800-acre plot of land in Highwood, some thirty miles north of Chicago, which they offered to the U.S. government in 1887 as a site for the army base eventually known as Fort Sheridan. The fort was linked to the city via a military road, Sheridan Avenue, which would allow troops to intervene swiftly if riots or demonstrations or, worse, insurrections broke out in the city. Fort Sheridan was never needed for its original purpose, of course, the mansions of the North Shore proving to be more in danger from the bad habits of their heirs than from anarchists. The facility was formally decommissioned in 1993. Much of the base land was sold to the adjacent towns of Highwood and Highland Park for redevelopment with new housing and public play spaces.

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The elites also moved to put themselves out of harm’s way. The Near West Side was one of the city’s early posh districts, forerunner of the Gold Coast. Among the families that lived there were the John Glessners. Like many of their neighbors, the Glessners left the West Side after the Haymarket Riot of 1886 and headed for the newly fashionable Prairie Avenue along the south lakefront. There they built a house (still standing) whose resemblance to a fortress could not be more marked. 

 

Indeed, many of the houses of the day resembled the fortified castles of yore. Edna Ferber, puts a common complaint about the houses of the day of her artistic circle improbably, in the mouth of a south suburban farm wife in her novel So Big: “We don’t need turrets and towers [in Chicago] any more than we need draw­bridges and moats.” In fact, the elites must have found the resemblance comforting.

 

The anarchists induced the kind of panicky loathing stirred by Islamist terrorists since 9-11. Carl Sandburg, hardly a reactionary, grew up hearing stories about them that left him thinking of them as “slimy animals who prowl, sneak and kill in the dark." The press began Red-baiting, the government suspended civil liberties, the police hauled in for questioning anyone suspicious—trade union organizers, foreigners, those with inconvenient opinions. The Chicago Historical Society offers this balanced account:

 

Anyone with unpopular political ideas would be branded an anarchist, which was taken to mean a dangerously disaffected person who would seek to remedy his own baseless discontent by doing violence to public order and "American" values.

 

In a 2003 interview, Donald Miller, the noted historian of Chicago, said, “After Haymarket the city went crazy. This is a real red hunt, and it's the first American red hunt.” He added that the real aim of the crackdown was not the suppression of anarchists—the police had plenty of tools to do that—but to crush the labor movement by branding organizers as would-be terrorists. (Readers may draw parallels with the Black Lives Matter movement of the early 2020s as they wish.) 

 

Haymarket had profound consequences for Chicago and the country. The event “unleashed an enormous wave of employer repression and employee fear,” writes Lizabeth Cohen. As for labor itself, economist and historian Ernest L. Bogard noted that some persevered in their hopes to push the nation to the left, but many unions were “eager to prove their own skirts free from the contaminating touch of anarchism.” The split meant that unions, as a movement, never quite united. Labor on the whole turned away from improving the country toward improving their contracts, focusing on bread-and-butter issues such as wages, hours, and working conditions. Unionism survived, in other words, but arguably at the cost of a needed debate about the social premises of capitalism.

 

More specifically, the IWPA was destroyed and the Knights of Labor neutered as a national force. The national campaign for the eight-hour day was set back years, and unionization was stalled. And the free-floating xenophobia unleashed by the bombing, notes the Chicago Historical Society, was a major force behind restrictions on immigration from the foreign lands from which such deviltry had been spawned. That decision would in time remake Chicago’s population, as factories cut off from supplies of European workers began recruiting them from Mexico and the American South.

 

The final, fatal blow to the radical left, like the Socialists—many of whom were German-born— was their opposition to U.S. entry to World War I. They opposed the war because they were pacifist, having become convinced that wars were made by industrialists and paid for by the blood of the poor and working class. The national emergency allowed the government to brand such people as traitors, and to justify as a matter of national security a clampdown on agitation for change to the nation’s economic system.

 

A. Mitchell Palmer was Woodrow Wilson’s wartime attorney general. Palmer was convinced that a Communist conspiracy threatened the nation. Pleading that the national security was at stake, Palmer aimed at anyone argued for change. Disloyalty was the smear, and the brush was legislation aimed at spies—the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918)—to suppress radicals and left-wing organizations of all causes. Speaking or writing against Wilson policy was construed as attempts to obstruct the war, and those who agreed with such criticism were branded as conspirators. 

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In 1919 and 1920 more than 16,000 suspected communists and anarchists were arrested in what became known as the Palmer Raids. In Chicago, a headline-hungry Cook County state’s attorney tried to out-Palmer Palmer. His agents raided the Communist party headquarters, the Communist Labor Hall, the IWW Hall, the German IWW, the North Side Syndicalist Club, the headquarters of the Rus­sian Anarchists, and as many as 300 other meeting places, radical bookstores, and homes.

 

Chicago was a special target. For one thing, it was home to some 500,000 people of German descent—in the fevered imaginations of Washington a nest of real or at least potential traitors. The city also was a longtime center of what to the benighted Palmer looked like seditious thought (Chicago was the national headquarters of the U.S. Communist Party until 1927). In fact, many of the targets of the raids were perfectly patriotic if inconvenient immigrants, pacifists, and trade union militants, including members of the IWW. Hull House was investigated. Eugene Debs made a speech condemning the war and was sentenced to ten years in jail. Big Bill Haywood and one hundred members of the IWW were indicted. The headquarters of the Socialist Party was raided, too, its files ransacked and mailing privileges revoked.

 

In the opinion of the Chicago Federation of Labor’s newspaper, patriotism may have been Palmer’s official motivation, but his raids were in fact an employer-inspired retribution for the massive strikes that had paralyzed industry during 1919. Others saw the raids as politically inspired. One of the first victims was Chicago leaders of the Non-Partisan League, formed by agrarian socialists and which had backed one of Woodrow Wilson’s bitterest foes, U.S. Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin.

 

"Chicago will be ours!"

 

In a famous moment in The Jungle, Jurgis, the downtrodden working man/hero, is in a union hall listening to a workers’ party official announce returns in that day’s municipal elections. A speaker who seems to Jurgis "the very spirit of the revolution" exhorts the crowd to organize and build on the party's gains. With "outraged workingmen" on their side, says the orator, "Chicago will be ours!"

 

In the end however, Chicago never was theirs in the way it was, briefly, in places like Milwaukee and Rockford. The workers never got their Abraham Lincoln for their war against wage slavery. (Closest to him was Eugene Debs.) There was never to be a durable workers party of consequence in Chicago, and class struggle never found permanent political expression.

 

The city remained a hotbed of socialism yearning for a while. In only one neighborhood, Hyde Park,  did leftist parties such as the Socialists and Communists from the 30s into the 40s show promise of becoming mainstream politic force, at least at the ward level. However, the disease of economic exploitation spawned antibodies in form of Progressivism, which is most ways reached its apogee in the 1930s in the guise of modern social liberalism. Good for Americas, but bad for the workers movement.

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Perversely, many would-be revolutionaries who wanted to change America ended up being changed by America. Jones & holli argue that Jewish socialism, “once a heady and feisty idea in the ghetto,” was rendered unnecessary by Jews’ worldly success. “Jews created their own worldly utopias,” they wrote in their introduction to Ethnic Chicago, “not through Karl Marx, but through education, occupation, and high income.”

 

It would not be until the 1960s that Chicago thrilled again to the sight of anarchists at large in its streets. The spiritual descendants of the anarchists were the Weathermen. Bill Ayers, son of former Commonwealth Edison Chairman and Bernadine Dohrn were founding members of the Weathermen in 1969. That fall, they were among the leaders of the Days of Rage rampage through Chicago's Loop. Dohrn and Ayers went underground for more than ten years, during which they planned or carried out bombings at locations that included the U.S. Capitol, New York police headquarters and the Pentagon. No one was killed. The revolution that the Weathermen hoped to excite was no more likely in 1969 that it had been in 1889. The working class is less concerned with creating a new world than holding on to their old jobs.

 

Indignation, alarm, indifference, ignorance

 

The great industries are mostly gone, and the working man—and now the working woman—toil not in factories but in kitchens and stockrooms, in effect a new servant class. Leftist politics is an artifact of university campuses, where it survives as a subject and as an affectation. Unions thrive mainly in the congenial environment of the public sector. The old blue-collar worker is today a conservative member of the petit bourgeoisie. Chicago, once so terrified of its restless laborers, now regards them nostalgically as it does all else about its Golden Age between the 1860s and the 1960s.

 

The public’s attitude toward radical worker movements has followed the same—indignation, alarm, indifference, finally ignorance—that describes the evolution of public attitudes about most controversial historical events. It is a measure of the labor history that hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans—including many a descendant of working people—can tell you the year when the Cubs were last in a World Series but do not recall, if they have even heard of, the dates of some of the seminal events in the rather more significant contests for control between labor and capital.

 

In a way that is because labor ultimately won. Once-radical ideas such as the 8-hour day came to seem as normal as sweat in August. Labor unions, in general, not only creased to be perceived as a threat to public order but have become among the staunchest backers of law and order, their members having risen to the status of middle class. No politician shrinks from honoring them these days; when the City of Chicago noted the centennial of Haymarket in 1986, the ceremonies were billed as a "celebration of the history and culture of working people" as if the issues of the 1870s were no longer relevant in the post-industrial economy.