The Gangs of Chicago by Herbert Asbury

Author:Herbert Asbury [Asbury, Herbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime
Published: 2013-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VII

“A REIGN OF TERROR IS UPON THE CITY”

THE TWENTY years that elapsed between 1890 and 1910 formed one of the most spectacular periods of growth in the history of Chicago; it increased in area to almost two hundred square miles and in number of inhabitants to 2,185,283, a gain of more than a million in the two decades ; and it passed Philadelphia to become second only to New York in both population and commercial importance, with daily bank clearings of nearly forty million dollars and taxable property of an estimated value of two billions, five hundred million. “ Chicago,” said a magazine article in 1910, “ is noted for the greatness of its financial institutions, for the excellence of its parks and public playgrounds, for its universities, its efficient public-school system, and for other educational, artistic, and morally uplifting institutions that give to Chicago an enlightened, a cultured, and a progressive citizenship.”

But Chicago was also noted for other things — for the magnitude of its crime and sociological problems, for political corruption, for the inefficiency of its Police Department; for the laxity of its building laws, which had terrible consequences on December 30, 1903, when six hundred and two persons died in the Iroquois Theater fire; and for the polyglot character of its population. Unchecked and virtually unregulated, the stream of immigration that was little more than a trickle in the 1890’s reached flood proportions during the first ten years of the twentieth century. The good and the bad of Europe poured into Chicago by the thousands, bringing with them their historic customs and hatreds, their feuds and vendettas, their characteristic methods of revenge and reprisal, settling in national groups and in the main resisting the slight efforts which were made to Americanize them. By 1890, of all American cities Chicago had the largest number of Poles, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Bohemians, Dutch, Croatians, Slovakians, Lithuanians, and Greeks; it had become the second largest Bohemian city in the world, the third largest Swedish, the third Norwegian, the fourth Polish, and the fifth German.

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As in previous boom eras, the underworld more than kept pace with other phases of municipal expansion. The two decades into which Chicago crowded such extraordinary population growth and such cultural and commercial progress also saw the partitioning of the city among the powerful gambling syndicates, the perfecting of the unholy alliance between the open brothel and the politicians, a tremendous increase in the power of the saloon-keeper, widespread corruption in the Police Department, the appearance of the Black Hand extortionists and killers in the Italian and Sicilian quarters, and the development of criminal gangs of boys and young men, precursors of the great outlaw organizations of the prohibition epoch. It was these latter elements that were principally responsible for the great outbreak of crime and lawlessness which began in 1902 and continued, with brief periods of subsidence, for half a dozen years, during which conditions in Chicago were almost exactly as they had been in 1857 and immediately following the great fire of 1871, but on an infinitely larger scale.

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