The Rise of the Chicago Police Department

Class and Conflict, 1850-1894

Sam Mitrani

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780252095337
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Class turmoil, labor, and law and order in Chicago

In this book, Sam Mitrani cogently examines the making of the police department in Chicago, which by the late 1800s had grown into the most violent, turbulent city in America. Chicago was roiling with political and economic conflict, much of it rooted in class tensions, and the city's lawmakers and business elite fostered the growth of a professional municipal police force to protect capitalism, its assets, and their own positions in society. Together with city policymakers, the business elite united behind an ideology of order that would simultaneously justify the police force's existence and dictate its functions.

Tracing the Chicago police department's growth through events such as the 1855 Lager Beer riot, the Civil War, the May Day strikes, the 1877 railroad workers strike and riot, and the Haymarket violence in 1886, Mitrani demonstrates that this ideology of order both succeeded and failed in its aims. Recasting late nineteenth-century Chicago in terms of the struggle over order, this insightful history uncovers the modern police department's role in reconciling democracy with industrial capitalism.

CHAPTER 1

Drunken Immigrants, Businessmen’s Order, and the Founding of the Chicago Police Department

On April 21, 1855, an angry crowd of German immigrants assembled at Chicago’s court house on Clark Street between Randolph and Washington. They loudly demanded that the court release nineteen imprisoned saloonkeepers. Ten had been arrested for refusing to pay the new $300 liquor license fee, up from $50, and nine had been arrested for serving alcohol on Sundays.¹ Operating taverns on Sunday violated an old, never-before-enforced municipal ordinance, but it was the only day off for most workmen. This crowd of immigrants confronted Kentucky-born, anti-Catholic Mayor Levi Boone. Boone headed a Law and Order ticket that had swept the city elections the month before with a temperance platform. He had immediately raised the liquor license fee and began enforcing the Sunday laws—earning him the wrath of drinkers throughout the city.²

Thus began the first major clash between “disorderly” immigrants and Chicago’s proponents of law and order. This clash was part of the wave of nativism that swept the country in the 1850s and led to the brief rise of the Know Nothing or American Party. On the most basic level, this nativist upsurge was made possible by the development of a wage labor economy in northern cities, among them Chicago. The demand for wage workers attracted immigrants particularly from Ireland and Germany, who stood out culturally and religiously from their Anglo predecessors. This difference manifested itself most forcefully in the realm of public drinking. Just as mid-nineteenth-century Protestant moral reformers were gaining in influence, new groups of immigrants arrived in the country with social drinking habits they were loath to surrender. To the German and Irish immigrants, drinking beer on Sundays was an orderly and habitual way to spend their one day off. To many native-born Chicagoans, Sunday drinking was a disorderly and wasteful use of God’s holiday. Yet on a deeper level, this clash over drinking marked the opening salvo in a struggle over how the new class of wage workers would spend their time. Employers sought to control the time that workers spent on the job, of course, but they were also increasingly critical of workers’ leisure activities. Workers sought to acquire as much free time as possible, along with the right to make use of that time however they saw fit. This struggle lay at the heart of the conflicts that eventually gave rise to the Chicago Police Department.³

The proponents of anti-drinking law and order had a problem. In March 1855, when Boone was elected, Chicago lacked a force capable of enforcing his temperance policy or of dispersing crowds like the angry Germans who would soon assemble in front of the courthouse, as the city only employed seventy part-time watchmen for an estimated population of eighty thousand.⁴ Realizing this, Boone and his Law and Order Party colleagues proposed to reorganize and enlarge the police department with native-born officers in order to enforce their anti-liquor program. Immediately upon taking office, Boone hired eighty special policemen, all native born, and put them under his control as mayor.⁵

Mayor Boone ordered these new police to break up the crowd that surrounded the courthouse. They accomplished this with no injuries and only arrested a few of the demonstrators. But another contingent of armed demonstrators assembled in the city’s North Side German neighborhood and decided to rescue the imprisoned tavern keepers. Boone immediately deputized an additional 150 special policemen to reinforce the 80 he had hired immediately after his inauguration. While these special policemen assembled, the bridge tender raised the Clark Street drawbridge to cut off the crowd. Once the police were ready, Boone ordered the drawbridge lowered, allowing the rioters to confront a solid mass of 270 deputies and police. Boone also declared martial law and called in the volunteer state militia companies: the Chicago Light Guards, the National Guards, and the Chicago Light Artillery.⁶ When the North Side Germans came across the drawbridge, the armed forces of the state met them with overwhelming force. In what came to be known as the Lager Beer Riot, at least one rioter was killed according to official accounts, although records of North Side funerals indicated that the number was probably higher. One police officer lost his arm, and 60 rioters were arrested.⁷

The Lager Beer Riot was a founding moment for the Chicago Police Department. On April 23, just two days after the riot, respectable Chicago citizens held a “Law and Order” public meeting at South Market Hall in order to push for a larger, stronger, and more stable police force. Participants in this meeting appointed a committee to work with the city government and to ensure that their demands for a strong police department were met.⁸ This committee succeeded: the city council passed a series of modernizing reforms just one week later. In a pattern that would be repeated time and again, a crisis of order prompted a major reform of policing in the city. These reforms amounted to the founding of the Chicago Police Department.

This Lager Beer Riot was one example of the disorder engendered by the growth of a wage labor economy and the beginnings of urban industrial capitalism. As a result of these economic developments, mid-nineteenth-century northern cities became increasingly polyglot and ceased to be bound by traditional social, economic, or political ties. They were beset by divisions and conflicts operating on many different levels: between workers and their employers, between immigrants and the native born, between Catholics and Protestants, between drinkers and temperance advocates, between vice operators and moral reformers, and among Democrats, Know Nothings, Whigs, and Republicans. These conflicts did not line up neatly. For instance, most immigrants were working-class Catholic Democrats who opposed temperance, but the Democratic Party also attracted southern Protestant businessmen such as the agricultural equipment magnate Cyrus McCormick. Many German immigrants, meanwhile, were Protestant artisans who strongly opposed temperance, but who eventually supported the new Republican Party because of its free-labor ideology. But the Republican Party also attracted the staunchest temperance reformers. These multifaceted divisions broke the old personal, paternalistic system of social control and created a smoldering crisis of order that occasionally flared up in events like the Lager Beer Riot. This disorder prompted businessmen in cities across the country to push for the creation of new public institutions that could protect urban order: the police.⁹

Chicago’s municipal armed forces had already undergone nearly twenty years of evolution by 1855, but they did not yet constitute anything recognizable as a police department. Before 1853, Chicago possessed a small force of armed municipal officials, but the Cook County sheriff was the main official responsible for policing the city. As in other cities and towns in the first half of the nineteenth century, Chicago had a constable system that was modeled on the colonial and English systems. The town elected constables and night watchmen along with its other municipal officials, but these constables and night watchmen held other jobs to supplement their paltry public salaries, and they lacked uniforms or other markers to separate themselves from the population as a whole. The original city charter of 1837 called for the establishment of a municipal court with constables attached to it. This charter established one constable for each of the six wards, acting under a high constable, but these men were officers of the court, rather than officers of the municipal government.¹⁰ In fact, throughout the 1830s, the city did not even employ all seven constables required under the charter. In 1839, the Daily American complained that Chicago employed only two constables. As late as 1850, Chicago employed only nine constables and watchmen for a city of almost thirty thousand people.¹¹

Over the first half of the 1850s, elite Chicagoans confronted two interrelated problems of order that prompted them to create a police force: the need to protect their property and the property of visiting businessmen, and the need to enforce order more generally among a largely immigrant class of wage workers who were not bound by earlier forms of social control. As with other cities in the United States and England, the broader issue of riots and strikes played a much larger role than crimes committed by individuals.¹²

It was not so easy, however, to see how elite Chicagoans could create such a system. While the development of the modern police seems inevitable in hindsight, a curious document from December 8, 1851, offers a glimpse of an alternative possibility. On that date, Edward Bonney sent a letter to the city council requesting authorization to establish an “independent”—by which he meant private—police force. He proposed that such a force be “clothed with the same power to do criminal business, that the regular police constables now are,” but that “such an independent police … should depend solely and at all times upon their employers for compensation for services rendered.” Bonney proposed that Chicago hire him to provide these police services. He would make a profit by collecting fines from those arrested and by collecting fees from the victims of crime who engaged his services. This was not a novel idea—private security firms played a large role throughout the nineteenth century, and the profession of “thief takers,” who were hired by individuals to track down stolen property, dated to eighteenth-century London.¹³ The city council’s Committee on Police recommended that the council reject Bonney’s proposal not because it was a bad idea, but because Bonney was not a resident of Chicago. But the city council never pursued the idea with a Chicago businessman or security firm, either.¹⁴

Bonney’s letter indicates the inadequacy of public forces in the early 1850s.¹⁵ He claimed that Chicago was “considered about the safest place of refuge for rogues in the Union,” largely because the system of constables and watchmen that preceded the establishment of the police proved ineffective.¹⁶ Indeed, the watches of all nineteenth-century cities were undermanned, especially given the part-time nature of police employment.¹⁷ The limited scope of the early police is demonstrated by their budget: for fiscal 1852, the estimated expenses for the police and the city bridewell (jail) were just $8,009.20, excluding the costs of the police court. The wages of fourteen watchmen at $8 per week plus one constable at $10 per week constituted the single largest expense. In 1852, the population of Chicago was about forty thousand. The fourteen-man, part-time watch did not even pretend to patrol the whole city, instead mostly watching for fires.¹⁸ A large part of the problem was that the municipal government had almost no resources for citywide institutions like the police. As Robin Einhorn has explained, local residents paid for street and sidewalk construction through a system of special assessments, rather than through a general municipal fund. The city levied few general taxes, and its citizens were loath to pay any. The city thus had little money to deal with larger municipal problems by creating institutions such as a police department.¹⁹ As a result, the bulk of the city’s population, already primarily immigrant workingmen, lived almost entirely outside the direct control or supervision of the government in their day-to-day lives.

Because of this deficiency, private security firms played a large role in nineteenth-century Chicago, as throughout the country. Private warehouses, railroads, and other companies hired night watchmen to guard their property, and these watchmen received official authorization but no pay from the city. Allen Pinkerton moved to Chicago in 1850 and soon thereafter opened his private detective agency. His business expanded rapidly, and by the end of the 1850s he had a large staff who served some of the city’s most important businesses. Notable among Pinkerton’s clients were the railroads, with whom he contracted in 1855. Pinkerton men guarded railroad property across the nation, mostly away from big cities where there was no public law enforcement whatsoever, but they also guarded railroad property within city limits.²⁰ While private police like the Pinkertons never took on the primary role of law enforcement as Bonney envisioned, the two types of police worked closely together in the 1850s, and the differentiation between detectives hired by private agencies and those hired by the city was not yet as clearly defined as it would become in subsequent years.²¹ Still, private police could not solve the problem of order that worsened during the 1850s and beyond. Private police could protect property, but private individuals would never pay to extend the power of the municipal government over the entire city unless taxation compelled them to do so. As Chicago attracted increasing numbers of immigrant wage workers, the municipal government felt increasingly compelled to do just that.

Chicago could look to eastern and southern precedents for solutions to its burgeoning problem of order. In fact, the first military-style police departments in the United States were founded in the South in order to control large concentrations of slaves. These police departments evolved from a very different colonial heritage, notably the tradition of slave patrols that organized white men in militia-like organizations to track down runaways and prevent any possible slave revolts.²² New Orleans was probably the first U.S. city to develop a military-style police department in the early nineteenth century in order to control that city’s slaves.²³ However, Chicago looked more to eastern examples than southern ones. New York founded its police department in 1845, which was in turn modeled after the London Metropolitan Police Service that dated to 1829.²⁴ These departments were distinct from the older system of constables and night watchmen because they consolidated their respective cities’ municipal forces in one military-style organization. New York and London did not create their police departments to control slaves—rather, they created them to deal with the same kinds of threats to order increasingly facing Chicago in the 1850s.²⁵

In reaction to the inadequacy of the constable system, the city government decided to formally found a police department distinct from the municipal court in 1853. This action did not fundamentally change the shape of the constable system or even strengthen the municipal government’s ability to control the city, but it did create the original legal framework for the department. The newly created Chicago Police Department formalized the rights and powers of constables and consolidated them under the control of a police marshal. The city council gave policemen an extraordinary amount of discretionary authority. It ordered them to “devote their attention to the preservation of the peace, quiet and good order of the city and the enforcing of the ordinances thereof, more especially in their respective wards and districts.” The council did not yet make the position of constable a full-time job, but it did instruct these men to carry out only police business while on duty, and assured them that they would be paid accordingly.²⁶

From the beginning, the city government ordered police officers to enforce “order” and “quiet” as well as city ordinances. It also granted them the right to “arrest all persons in the city found under suspicious circumstances and who cannot give a good account of themselves.” In addition, officers had “the power and authority in a peaceable manner or if refused admittance after demand made, with force, to enter into any house, store, shop, grocery, or other building whatever, in the city, in which any person or persons may reasonably be suspected to be for unlawful purposes.” They had the right to arrest anyone suspected of committing a crime, or the “violation of any ordinance for the preservation of the peace and good order of the city.” Thus, the city government gave the police very broad powers to enforce a vaguely defined peace and order. They could enter any home, question any citizen, and arrest anyone who coul...