Robert Nixon and Police Torture in Chicago, 1871–1971

Elizabeth Dale

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781609092009
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

In 2015, Chicago became the first city in the United States to create a reparations fund for victims of police torture, after investigations revealed that former Chicago police commander Jon Burge tortured numerous suspects in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. But claims of police torture have even deeper roots in Chicago. In the late 19th century, suspects maintained that Chicago police officers put them in sweatboxes or held them incommunicado until they confessed to crimes they had not committed. In the first decades of the 20th century, suspects and witnesses stated that they admitted guilt only because Chicago officers beat them, threatened them, and subjected them to "sweatbox methods." Those claims continued into the 1960s.

In Robert Nixon and Police Torture in Chicago, 1871–1971, Elizabeth Dale uncovers the lost history of police torture in Chicago between the Chicago Fire and 1971, tracing the types of torture claims made in cases across that period. To show why the criminal justice system failed to adequately deal with many of those allegations of police torture, Dale examines one case in particular, the 1938 trial of Robert Nixon for murder. Nixon's case is famous for being the basis for the novel Native Son, by Richard Wright. Dale considers the part of Nixon's account that Wright left out of his story: Nixon's claims that he confessed after being strung up by his wrists and beaten and the legal system's treatment of those claims. This original study will appeal to scholars and students interested in the history of criminal justice, and general readers interested in Midwest history, criminal cases, and the topic of police torture.

Chapter One

Police Torture in Chicago, 1871–1936

Long before Jon Burge joined the Chicago Police Department in March 1970, people complained of being tortured by the city’s police. In 1931, the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, popularly known as the Wickersham Commission, charged that the police in Chicago, and in several other major cities in the United States, often used torture, usually known as the third degree, when they interrogated suspects. That report defined the third degree as “the employment of methods which inflict suffering, physical or mental, upon a person in order to obtain information about a crime” and found that police officers in Chicago typically used one or more of three different approaches:

Physical abuse: Law enforcement officers beat suspects or witnesses with rubber hoses, belts, or other items; struck them with their fists or slapped them, kicked or kneed them; hung them by their wrists or neck; or exposed their victims to physical extremes such as rooms that were too cold or too hot (often known as “the sweatbox” or “sweating”).

Deprivation: Officers held victims in isolation from friends or family for days (also known as holding someone incommunicado); or deprived them of food, drink, sleep, or necessary medical treatment (or drugs, in the case of addicts).

Psychological pressure: Officers threatened suspects, witnesses, or a family member with violence, prosecution, increased punishment, or being turned over to a mob; or subjected witnesses or suspects to extensive and extended interrogation that was conducted over a period of days or late at night.1

Torture in Chicago in the Late Nineteenth Century

The Wickersham Commission’s report looked at claims of torture in Chicago in the 1920s, but there were complaints long before that. Charges that law enforcement personnel used torture to try to obtain confessions appear in Illinois court records and news accounts shortly after the Civil War. In 1869, William Stallings of Venice, Illinois sued, asserting that after he was arrested for larceny the arresting officers took him to a nearby wood, placed him under a tree, took out a rope, and told him he would be hanged if he did not confess. Around the same time, John Francis insisted that he confessed to a robbery in Clark County, Illinois only after being taken from his home by a mob of men and hanged from a tree until he was nearly senseless.2 Presumably to stop the practice, the Illinois General Assembly passed a law in 1874 that declared it a crime to use force or imprisonment to compel confessions.3

Beginning in the 1880s, several suspects taken into custody by Pinkerton agents in Chicago claimed the agents tortured them by putting them in a “sweatbox.” Sweatboxes, which had been used during the Civil War and by some slave owners before that war, were small, intensely hot, often smelly or airless rooms. Suspects and witnesses were held in the sweatbox until the discomfort made them willing to talk.4 In 1885, Frank Bernard claimed that after being arrested on a warrant by a Pinkerton agent he was detained for several days at the agency’s Chicago office, where he spent most of his time in the sweatbox. John B. Owens was taken to Chicago in 1887 and put in “the Pinkerton ‘sweat-box’” until he confessed to robbing a train. In 1893, Walter Martin said he was tricked into going to Chicago to meet a man who seized him and took him to the Pinkerton offices, where he was held for two weeks. At night he was chained to a bed; during the day he was locked in a small closet and threatened with the “sweat-box” if he did not confess to committing arson. While the sweatbox, usually in combination with being held incommunicado for several days and nights, seemed to be the Pinkertons’ preferred technique, some men claimed that private detectives in Chicago used other forms of torture: W. J. Gallagher, suspected of election fraud in 1884, complained he had been arrested and kept in the offices of a Chicago detective agency overnight, chained to an investigator. Gallagher said that whenever he fell asleep his companion jerked the chain to wake him up and began to question him, effectively subjecting him to sleep deprivation.5

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, news stories suggested that federal and state agencies in Chicago also used the sweatbox or held suspects incommunicado. News accounts in 1878 reported that special federal agent James Stuart, investigating a claim of mail theft in Chicago, put Carl August Namuth in the sweatbox to get him to confess. A year later, Henry Sloan, a witness questioned concerning a suspected confidence game, was put in the sweatbox by federal officials to try to get the story of the crime out of him. In 1895, agents in the United States Secret Service kept C. O. Jones, a local newspaper artist, in the sweatbox for five hours as they investigated stamp counterfeiting in Chicago. Two years before, state fire inspectors investigating arson cases held Otto Jirsa and other suspects incommunicado in a secret room at the Gault House, a local hotel.6

Claims that Chicago police officers were using similar forms of torture began after the city reorganized its police department between 1875 and 1885. Reorganization was prompted by a combination of elite and business fears of labor militancy and the expansion of the city with the incorporation of the suburbs in Lake View, Hyde Park, and Englewood. It brought with it a series of reforms designed to remake Chicago’s police into professional crime stoppers. The department grew dramatically between 1883 and 1884, from 637 men, a number that included officers and clerical staff, to 924 employees, of whom 576 were patrolmen.7 In 1884, the police department admitted that Lawrence Beatty, suspected leader in a burglary ring, had escaped from the sweatbox at the Central police station. Two other men who were suspected of being part of his gang were too big to slip out of the hole Beatty made in a window; they remained in the sweatbox as police tried to convince them to confess. During a murder investigation a year later, the police officers at the Desplaines station made little secret of the fact they were holding a number of Italian immigrants incommunicado as they tried to induce them to confess. Suspects in other cases said police officers used threats or other means to scare them into confessing: Frank Chapek, a suspected anarchist, claimed in 1888 that police officers threatened him with dynamite and held a knife to his neck to try to make him confess. Other efforts were more imaginative: the Milwaukee Journal reported that Chicago police at the Fifteenth Street station used a skull with eyes that lit up to try to frighten a confession out of one suspect in 1896.8

Police torture claims figured in the investigations into Chicago’s most notorious cases in the 1880s and 1890s. During the investigation into the Haymarket bombing in 1886, reports in the Chicago Tribune made it clear that police officers under the command of Inspector John Bonfield were holding suspects incommunicado and threatening them to make them confess. At least one witness questioned during the investigation, Vaclav Djemek, made more serious charges. He insisted that when he said that he knew nothing about the Haymarket bombing and would not turn state’s evidence, he was cursed at and kicked by officers, who threatened he would be hanged. One of the Haymarket defendants, George Engle, said that police officers held him incommunicado and put him in “the sweat-box.”9

Three years later, during the investigation into the murder of Dr. Patrick Cronin at the hands of the Clan-Na-Gael, an Irish Republican organization, Chicago police officers held Martin Burke, one of the suspects, incommunicado. When Burke’s lawyer filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus to try to get access to his client, the chief of police, George Hubbard, refused on the grounds that the Chicago police officer who had taken him to Chicago from Canada was serving the interests of the federal government and was thus outside the reach of the state court. The judge who heard the petition agreed, and Burke stayed under police control until the trial. Several years later, when one of Burke’s codefendants was retried for the Cronin murder, defense attorney W. R. Wing argued to the jury that Burke, who had died of tuberculosis in prison waiting for the appeal, had been subjected to physical tortures by the police as they tried to get him to confess in 1889. The judge in the second trial did not allow Wing to develop that argument, which meant that any attempt to establish what the Chicago police did to Martin Burke died with him.10 At the end of the century, during the investigation into the notorious workings of Dr. Holmes, the serial murderer immortalized in Devil in the White City, the police put Patrick Quinlan, Holmes’s handyman, through “the sweat-box” at the Harrison Street police station on several different days, at least once for five hours. Quinlan’s wife and her good friend Mrs. L. Doyle were both sweated by the police from 9:00 in the morning until 1:00 in the afternoon, and another witness, Joseph Owens, was sweated at the Harrison Street station for more than five hours by officers trying to find out what he knew about Dr. Holmes’s plans.11

By the 1890s, undergoing a “sweating” in Chicago referred either to being put in a special room or being subjected to “sweatbox methods,” which often meant an intensive and extensive interrogation conducted by relays of police officers. Whether a place or a practice, sweating was a coercive and physically difficult process.12 There is considerable evidence that across the 1890s it also became a well-established part of criminal investigations in the city. In 1893, George Craig, suspected of murdering a small child, was sweated at the West Chicago Avenue station. A year later, after two special police officers were killed, police officers at that same station put two suspects, Henry Griswold and William Lake, through the sweatbox for five hours each. In 1894, officers at the Attrill police station used the sweatbox on Joseph Shuppick, while their counterparts at the East Chicago station sweated eight suspects in another murder case. Laek Lindell, a young man accused of attempted murder, was put in the sweatbox at the Woodlawn station in 1896; and Red Sullivan, a suspected robber, “had to undergo the pumping process in the sweatbox” that same year. The next year, the technique flourished. Two murder suspects whom the police refused to name were sweated at the East Chicago station in April; Henry Dunker was sweated at the Hyde Park station in August; in October, officers put Nick Redmond through the sweatbox at the Maxwell Street station; Joe Keller was sweated at the Central station in November; and Mike Romelius and John Akacz were sweated at another station (perhaps Englewood) in December. Officers at Rawson Street put murder suspects Otto and Charles Brandt through the sweatbox for five straight days in 1898. That same year officers at the Harrison station sweated Thomas Rutledge and John Ransom for two hours. A year later, murder suspects were sweated at the stations at Warren Avenue, Englewood, Hyde Park, and the Stock Yards.13

Although many of the people sweated in the late nineteenth century were suspected of murder, newspapers reported that the police sweated those suspected of other crimes as well. A man named Smith, who was simply arrested on suspicion in 1888, was sweated at the Central station. Another, known only as Morgan, was given a sweating at the Harrison Street station in 1893 following his arrest for theft. That same year, police at the Harrison Street station sweated John Oliver, suspected of robbing a safe. “Samuel of Posen,” a suspected pickpocket, and Frank Dale, who had been implicated in an embezzlement case, were both sweated by officers at the Central station in 1894, while officers at the Woodlawn station gave William Haney, suspected of burglary, a sweating in 1895. In 1896, several men suspected of being part of a robbery gang were put through the sweatbox at the Maxwell Street station, members of a supposed stickup team were sweated at police headquarters, officers at the Central station sweated men they thought were part of a robbery ring, Thomas Higgins was given a sweating by officers at the Harrison Street station who were investigating a robbery, and Frank Harper and James Robinson, both suspected of attempted theft, got a sweating at the East Chicago station. A year later, William Wright was sweated at the Harrison Street station as part of an investigation into meter fraud, while officers at the Central station investigating a theft sweated Daniel Cronin and Edward Grant. That same year, the Chicago Tribune matter-of-factly reported that officers at the Cottage Grove police station held John Keller incommunicado for two weeks before they put him through a sweating. Keller had been implicated in a series of burglaries in the neighborhood.14

As that list suggests, most of those sweated by the Chicago police in the late nineteenth century were adult males. In the late nineteenth century, they were typically also white. Chicago’s police seemed, however, to be willing to use the sweatbox on anyone. Sometimes they sweated African ­Americans, like Smith, the man arrested on suspicion in 1888; Haney, arrested as a burglary suspect in 1895; or Edward McIntosh, accused of hiring another man to kill his w...