The Great Chicago Beer Riot

How Lager Struck a Blow for Liberty

John F Hogan, Judy E. Brady

• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781467118903
• eBook ISBN: 9781625856340
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la Guerra de Secesión

An "exhaustive" account of the pivotal incident between "native-born Protestant Chicagoans who founded the city and newer German and Irish immigrants" ( Bloomberg).

In 1855, when Chicago's recently elected mayor Levi Boone pushed through a law forbidding the sale of alcohol on Sunday, the city pushed back. To the German community, the move seemed a deliberate provocation from Boone's stridently anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party. Beer formed the centerpiece of German Sunday gatherings, and robbing them of it on their only day off was a slap in the face. On April 21, 1855, an armed mob poured across the Clark Street Bridge and advanced on city hall. The Chicago Lager Riot resulted in at least one death, nineteen injuries and sixty arrests. It also led to the creation of a modern police department and the political alliances that helped put Abraham Lincoln in the White House. Authors Judy E. Brady and John F. Hogan explore the riot and its aftermath, from pint glass to bully pulpit.

“PICK OUT THE STARS”

Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act created tremors across the national political landscape that rattled Chicago particularly hard. As the Democrats split over the slavery question, with most opposing Douglas, they also found other issues, such as banking policy, on which to disagree. To their right, the ultra-conservative Whig Party was drifting further toward impotence. The Know-Nothings were poised to move into the vacuum. “[T]he spread of Know Nothingism reflected the lack of harmony prevalent in Democratic and Whig circles,” Pierce maintained. The ranks of the newly hatched Know-Nothing organization in Chicago swelled with the addition of temperance and antislavery voters, disgruntled southern Whigs and, in Lloyd Lewis’s words, “even liberal men, who welcomed an opportunity to avoid the slavery controversy which was rising to dominate the old Democratic and newly [developing] Republican parties.” Among the more prominent of the early members was Levi Boone.

The Know-Nothings offered the perfect opportunity for Boone, allowing him to mask his proslavery views while aligning with other native-born Americans in advancing the party platform of protecting “American institutions from the insidious wiles of foreigners,” specifically Catholic foreigners. While the Irish remained the primary target of the Know-Nothings, the organization extended “its proscriptions outside the religious boundaries…and struck at the Chicago Germans, a majority of whom were Protestants,” according to historian Lewis. “Put none but Americans on guard,” the group proclaimed. Pierce noted that the strength of the Know-Nothings in Chicago became apparent when the Native American Party, as it was known officially, attempted to begin a national newspaper with headquarters in the city. The paper, the Native Citizen, lasted only about six months, but the party didn’t need its own publication when it had the Tribune.

Founded in 1847, the Chicago Daily Tribune underwent several ownership changes before 1852, when it became a Whig publication emphasizing temperance and nativism and criticizing, in the paper’s own words, “the anti-republican character of the Romish church.” This was a different platform than the one editor Joseph Medill, a future mayor, would pursue after taking over in June 1855. The pre-Medill Trib was angry, stridently anti-Irish and anti-Catholic and given to outrageously fabricated stories. For example, in the run-up to the 1852 mayoral election, it alleged that candidate Isaac Milliken would divert tax money to Catholic schools, and it published a list of Irishmen allegedly set to plunder the city. The Trib urged “solid men” to vote early because “by the close of the day there is no doubt that the polls in many wards will be blockaded by a bleary-eyed, drunken rabble who will try to prevent all ingress and egress by any decent persons.” The rhetoric grew worse as election day drew closer. The paper invented a story about rioters who shouted, “Death to Know Nothings” and beat native-born victims “until the snow was red with their blood.” Readers were told that Irish crowds routinely harassed Protestants leaving church services. Grog sellers were engaged in a conspiracy to “put down” native Americans “if they had to wade knee-deep in blood to do it.”

After the sale to Medill and his partners, the Tribune dropped its anti-Catholicism but continued to knock the Irish. Shortly before the change of ownership, the old regime got in one last lick at the church. The paper’s city editor found himself “challenged to a duel after he criticized a ship’s captain for transporting the papal nuncio, the future Cardinal Bendini, on his expedition into the American wilderness.” So wrote Richard Norton Smith, biographer of Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick. We may safely assume the showdown never occurred.

In those days, Chicago’s municipal elections were nonpartisan and devoid of campaigning. Typically, candidates didn’t announce themselves until a few days before the balloting and then only through paid notices in the press. The election of 1855 was even less contentious. For starters, it “mirrored, in general, the uncertainty attending old-time political attachments,” in Pierce’s view. Then there was a lack of paid announcements. “Ordinarily,” the Press commented, “the occasion is one of great interest from the issues involved— issues pertaining to the good government and substantial welfare of our city. Today, however, there is no such issue before the people.” Although the newspaper probably didn’t realize it, the condition it described was the vacuum awaiting the arrival of the Know-Nothings. The Tribune paved the way for the newcomers’ breakthrough two weeks before election day by denouncing the ticket headed by Mayor Milliken, running for reelection, as that of “the Irish, Jesuitical, Foreign Domination and American Proscription,” unofficially the longest if not the most slanderous political label of the day.

Two more papers, the Democrat and the Times, printed tickets that they thought the Know-Nothings would field, but it was not until election day, March 6, that the group used the Tribune to unveil a Law and Order ticket headed by Boone for mayor. The Law and Order Party ran a full slate of candidates, for all ten council seats at stake (some incumbents weren’t running because terms were staggered) plus the citywide offices of attorney, collector, treasurer, surveyor and three police court magistrates. Boone and his citywide running mates edged the Milliken ticket by winning 51 percent of the vote. In the council races, the Law and Order candidates captured seven of the ten seats. Apparently, Boone accepted his 51 percent as a mandate to attack the Catholic Church while drastically changing the way many Chicagoans chose to spend their leisure time.

Boone and his ticket mates, in essence, ran as stealth candidates in that they not only didn’t discuss their program in advance, but they also did not officially announce until election day. The doctor had resigned as Fourth Ward alderman before making the race. Supporters who weren’t Know-Nothings themselves most likely were swayed by two factors: a mayoral candidate who was the hero of the cholera epidemics and a party that stood for “law and order” in an untamed frontier town. The unusual quiet that preceded the election apparently produced a feeling of complacency. Irish and German voters surely would have turned out in greater numbers if they’d known what Boone had in mind for them.

Just a year earlier, Isaac Milliken, the blacksmith mayor, had offered generous words to the foreign-born in his inaugural address. Coming from different parts of Europe and speaking different languages, Milliken declared, the masses nevertheless “are law-abiding, peaceable and industrious, cheerfully submitting to good and wholesome laws…The absence of violent outbreaks and riots is the best evidence of the attachment of the masses to our institutions.” A lot could change in a year. The new mayor and his allies set the dynamics in motion one week after the election.

“I cannot be blind to the existence in our midst of a powerful politico-religious organization [the Catholic Church],” Boone stated in his inaugural remarks, “all its members owing, and its chief officers bound under oath of allegiance to…a foreign despot [the pope], [boldly] avowing the purpose of universal domination over this land, and asserting the monstrous doctrine, [whose end is] to be gained, if not by other means, by coercion and at the cost of blood itself.” Seeming to borrow perversely from the Declaration of Independence, the new mayor closed by pledging to stand against “such doctrines and such schemes…and to their defeat I must cheerfully consecrate my talents, my property, and if need be my life.”

In the body of his address, Boone offered the common council a double-edged sword for striking a blow against Demon Rum: the aldermen could prohibit its sale, the mayor’s preferred option, or they could raise the cost of a liquor license sixfold and prohibit sales on Sunday. With regard to the first choice, he said he found it incongruous for the city to “license a part of its inhabitants to make men drunkards, and at the same time enact penal ordinances, establish courts, and maintain at heavy expense a police to punish the poor drunkard for patronizing those establishments.” If the council chose to continue issuing licenses, Boone said, it should at least prevent the Sabbath from being “profaned” by those who “disregard the sacredness of that day” along with “the rights and feelings” of those who wish to observe it in the manner intended by the Almighty. Either way, Boone expected city action to be necessary only for a short duration. He confidently suggested that Illinois voters would support the upcoming June referendum on the Maine Law and make prohibition “the law of the land.” Boone believed the transition would be smoother if the tougher restrictions induced liquor sellers to go out of business before the law kicked in. The mayor further believed that the lower-class saloons would be the first to go under this scenario, leaving only the better establishments—until the new law put them out of business, too.

About this time, someone realized that both the city and state already had Sunday closing laws that had never been enforced. The Illinois statute had been on the books since 1843. Boone’s timing either was accidentally ironic or intended to pile insult on injury. He chose Saturday, March 17—St. Patrick’s Day—to issue a proclamation notifying saloonkeepers that Sunday closings would be strictly enforced, starting tomorrow. The next day, police made numerous arrests. Some owners who might have complied with the law complained that they had received insufficient notice. A week later, the number of closings rose sharply.

In his inaugural address, Boone recommended the hiring of more policemen with “strong physical powers, sober, regular habits and known moral integrity.” He neglected to mention that they also needed to be native-born Americans. The same caveat applied to other municipal hires. One of his first official acts was to add eighty native-born “special” officers to augment the existing ranks. Concurrently, he began a purge of foreign-born police and municipal employees. How ironic that if the first two officers killed in the line of duty, Irish Catholic James Quinn and German Catholic Kasper Lauer, had been around, they undoubtedly would have lost their jobs. Boone’s purge naturally incensed the Germans, Irish and other excluded nationalities while “doing nothing to abet the city’s notoriously flimsy law enforcement,” as James L. Merriner put it in Grafters and Goo Goos. Immigrant tavern owners had to be additionally angered when the new cops, who may or may not have had their own problems with foreigners, came calling to arrest them and prevent their customers from slaking their thirsts on Sunday.

With the Sunday crackdown underway, Boone and his forces turned their attention to the license fee hikes. On March 26, the council approved an increase from $50 to $300 but for a license lasting only three months, or the anticipated time before statewide prohibition presumably would begin. Liquor sellers ripped the increase as the most tyrannical measure since the Stamp Act that fueled the American Revolution. Some paid the higher fee and some opted to go out of business, as Boone had hoped, but most determined to challenge the boost in the twin courts of law and public opinion. Several historians have speculated that Boone was more interested in punishing the immigrant classes than in advancing the cause of temperance. If provocation was, indeed, his motive, he certainly got a rise from the Germans. They began a series of meetings on the North Side to map countermeasures and elected brewer John Huck as leader of an association to defend members prosecuted for violation of the law. As noted earlier, Huck was once the partner of former mayor William Ogden and owner of the city’s first beer garden. On April 4, three days after all the old liquor licenses expired, some six hundred Germans met at the North Side Market Hall to raise legal defense funds.

Temperance forces weren’t standing still either. Several large, enthusiastic meetings were held throughout the city. On April 13, Elder Watson of the North Western Christian Advocate delivered what was called “a very able and powerful argument in favor of prohibition” at the Clark Street Methodist Church. More such gatherings were planned, including one on the sixteenth at the Bethel Church. The Tribune urged readers to arrive early and secure a seat to help offset the campaign being waged by the liquor sellers, who had met that afternoon. “These land-sharks,” the paper cautioned, “feel that their craft is in danger and are quite furious in view of the passage of the Prohibitory Liquor Law.”

The Tribune got that right. One speaker in particular had fired up the audience that afternoon at North Market Hall. The turnout seemed to surprise the reporter who covered the event, as he noted the presence of “many men of really respectable appearance.” The great majority, he reassured readers, were “rum sellers or rum drinkers.” The rest of his account offered a curious exercise in journalism: a column and a half about a speech in which the speaker is never identified. There’s little doubt that the person was Eighth Ward alderman Stephen D. La Rue (misidentified in some histories as L.D. La Rue), newly elected to fill a vacancy in a part of the city well populated with Germans. That the paper would deliberately fail to mention La Rue by name can only be interpreted as a snub.

An auctioneer by trade, La Rue began by standing a Frederick Douglass analogy on its head. Where the abolitionist saw liquor making slaves of men, the alderman saw the men of Chicago enslaved by Mayor Boone and the council majority through the imposition of higher license fees. The mayor was pursuing this course, La Rue claimed, to goad anti-temperance people into doing something “dreadful or desperate.” “But don’t you go and do it now,” he warned, because “that scandalous…scurrilous paper, the Chicago Tribune, will go and get up a long article about a bloody riot, and they’ll say it was the whiskey men who did it.” Instead, he encouraged everyone to descend on the courthouse on Friday, April 20, when Justice Henry L. Rucker was due to hear numerous license cases. La Rue predicted a turnout of ten thousand.

The speech drew a quick reaction from the Tribune, which noted that it knew the crowd didn’t represent “the better class” of Germans in the city. After some additional pandering, the editorial inexplicably began referring to the Germans as Dutch, as in “Dutch grog sellers, Dutch and Irish advocates of Free Whiskey” and “Dutch and Irish” inmates of the poor house (driven there, of course, by Dutch and Irish rum sellers). A week later, no doubt following complaints from the city’s Hollanders, the Trib ran a clarification, explaining that its use of “Dutch” applied to the Germans, not the “good citizens” from Holland.

While the Sunday arrests began immediately after Boone assumed office, enforcement of the new license requirements couldn’t begin until the old permits expired on April 1. In short order, about two hundred owners and employees found themselves under arrest for either ignoring the Sunday closing law or refusing to pay the higher fee. Sunday cases were heard in the cramped police courts that occupied the basement of the county courthouse at Clark and Randolph Streets. Representing the accused was Pat Ballingal, one of the Tremont House bar regulars. The fate of a defendant depended largely on whether he appeared before Justice Rucker or ex-mayor Milliken, who continued to hold his second post of police magistrate. Former alderman Rucker issued convictions; Milliken dismissed a number of cases.

Court House Square about the time of the beer riot. The site—bounded by Clark, Randolph, La Salle and Washington Streets—was occupied by city hall and the Cook County Building. Courtesy of Chicago Public Library, Special Collections and Preservation Division, CCW 5.83.

This was not the stuff on which the fate of a municipality hung. For instance, a witness testified before Milliken that he had peered through a window of the Traveler’s Home on North Water Street and saw a man behind the bar produce a bottle of what appeared to be whiskey. The witness said a man standing at the bar poured some of the liquid into a tumbler and drank it. However, the witness could not swear that the liquid was liquor, that the man behind the bar was the owner or that the man who took the drink paid for it. Case dismissed.

The proprietor of the Blue Island House on Van Buren Street stood before Milliken accused of letting one of his boarders pour something from a bottle behind the bar and drink it. Defense attorney Ballingal argued that the substance contained medicinal roots soaked in whiskey that the boarder required for his health. Case dismissed.

In Rucker’s courtroom, a witness testified that he saw eight to ten persons drinking beer and playing cards on a number of Sundays in an unnamed lager beer saloon. The son of the defendant claimed that the individuals were all boarders and that the cost of the beer was included in their lodging tab. Therefore, Ballingal maintained, the saloon technically wasn’t selling beer on Sunday. Rucker ruled that the spirit of the law had been violated—that in order to get all the beer or liquor he wanted, all a person need do was become a boarder at such a place. The defendant was fined ten dollars. At the start of the Sunday prosecutions, Ballingal made it clear that his clients intended to appeal as high as the Illinois Supreme Court if necessary.

City hall and the Cook County Building, looking northwest, as the jointly connected buildings appear today, occupy the same site as their predecessors. Photo by John F. Hogan.

As these types of cases worked their way through the police courts, Sunday business continued much as usual at Chicago’s better drinking establishments—those that served refreshment more “refined” than beer. At some places, side or rear entrances were used to maintain appearances. One such gathering spot for the well-off was the Lake House, which “had one of the finest bars in the city, and mixed cocktails were all the rage,” wrote Ogden biographer J...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Coming to America
• What Else They Found
• Gemultlichtkelt und Politik
• The Little Giant Stands Tall
• “Pick Out the Stars”
• Lager’s Legacy
• Bibliography
• About the Authors