The Ordeal of the Jungle by David Bates;

Author:David Bates; [Bates, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780809337453
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

These efforts were largely successful: for the most part, SLC members refrained from the riot’s brutality.48 Beyond the union’s push for unity and peace, geography provided the simplest explanation for union members’ lack of participation in the rioting. The SLC had an immense contingent of Polish, Lithuanian, and Slovak workers, nearly all of whom lived south and west of the stockyards in the Back of the Yards neighborhood—areas in which interracial contact was rare. On the other hand, the Irish neighborhoods of Bridgeport and Canaryville, which lay east of the yards (and which African Americans were forced to cross to get to work) saw the most brutal violence of the riot. Indeed, while roughly one-third of the clashes recorded by the CCRR occurred in the Black Belt itself, a greater number (around 41 percent) took place along thoroughfares in the Irish neighborhoods.49 Blue-collar gangs, such as the infamous Ragen’s Colts, cheered by “vocal bystanders,” initiated or escalated much of the violence.50 The frequent contact between whites and black residents of these areas had caused tension before the riot; now, they became racial battlefields.

Indeed, black workers traveling to and from work were among the most vulnerable. On Monday, July 28, a black stockyards worker named Henry Goodman departed the yards and boarded a streetcar, which was stopped by a white barricade. A mob surrounded the car, ordered its black passengers to disembark, and beat Goodman to death with bricks and stones. On the morning of Thursday, July 31, black butcher William Dozier was walking to work when a white mob began to chase him. Dozier fled into the yards, but the crowd overtook him, pelting him with stones and beating him with sticks and shovels. Bloodied, Dozier lay on the ground as a man named Joseph Carka split open his skull with a hammer. Another mob cornered a group of black stockyards workers as they left work; their lives were saved only when militia beat back the crowd.51 The Tribune reported that stockyards police engaged in at least two “desperate revolver battles” with black men who were alleged to have killed a pair of white women and a white child.52 Despite the absence of union members in the worst of the bloodshed, such acts of brutality near the stockyards inextricably linked work and violence—a grim harbinger for the CFL’s efforts to create a racially harmonious atmosphere at the workplace.

By midweek, the riot had quieted significantly, thanks to the arrival of state militia on Wednesday, July 30, and a downpour the following day that broke the miserable heat that had characterized much of the week. Though the riot would not officially end until Sunday, August 3, governor Frank Lowden felt confident in declaring the situation to be “well in hand” by the morning of July 31.53 There was only one serious incident after the arrival of the militia: on Saturday, August 2, a massive fire swept through a Lithuanian neighborhood west of the stockyards, destroying forty-nine buildings, causing a quarter-million dollars in

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