Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Volume 92 Article 1 Issue 3 Spring Spring 2002 Learning from the Past, Living in the Present: Understanding Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930 Leigh B. Bienen Northwestern University School of Law Brandon Rotinghaus Follow this and additional works at: htps://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc Part of the Criminal Law Commons, Criminology Commons, and the Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons Recommended Citation Leigh B. Bienen, Brandon Rotinghaus, Learning from the Past, Living in the Present: Understanding Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930, 92 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 437 (2001-2002) Tis Criminal Law is brought to you for free and open access by Northwestern University School of Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology by an authorized editor of Northwestern University School of Law Scholarly Commons. 0091-4169/02/9203-0437 CTHoEpyJtOigUhRt N(A0 L20O0F3C bRyIM NINoArtLh wLeAsWte&rUnC nRvIeMsitIyN,O SLcOhGooYol f Law VPorli n9te2d, Ni osU S3A-4 CRIMINAL LAW LEARNING FROM THE PAST, LIVING IN THE PRESENT: UNDERSTANDING HOMICIDE IN CHICAGO, 1870-1930' LEIGH B. BIENEN* AND BRANDON ROTTINGHAUS** + There are many without whom the Chicago Historical Homicide Project would not have come into being or accomplished what it has. The Northwestern University School of Law, and Dean David Van Zandt, personally and institutionally, have offered strong support from the beginning. The Third Annual Faculty Conference, "Learning from the Past, Living in the Present: Patterns in Chicago Homicides, 1870-1930," took place on November 17, 2000. Several of the presentations at that Conference are now incorporated in this volume. The Project gratefully acknowledges the support of the Northwestern University School of Law faculty research fund, including the Irving A. Gordon Symposium fund. Other participants will be represented in later publications of the Project. The data transcription, coding and transformation of the more than 11,000 handwritten files into a text file, and then a quantita- tive file was supported by a generous grant from the Gun Violence Program of the Joyce Foundation. Elizabeth Olds, formerly a staff member at the American Bar Foundation, tran- scribed the 11,500 handwritten case entries into a text file over the course of a year. Juan Iziary, James Anderson, and Colin Proksel provided much appreciated and necessary com- puter skills. The assistance of the Northwestern University School of Law Library, C. Si- moni, Librarian, and especially the tireless efforts of Marcia Lehr, Pegeen Bassett, and other staff, has been and remains invaluable. Their commitment of time, energy, and resources over time continues to be much appreciated. The Information Technology staff at Rebecca Crown Center (Morteza A. Rahimi, Vice President for Information Technology) and the IT and support staff at the School of Law (Christel Bridges, Director), provided critical technical support, as did the students and others who coded and entered data. Many other staff at the School of Law and on the Evanston campus provided valued advice and assitance. Finally, the person who deserves special recognition is Juana Haskin at the School of Law. She has shepherded all aspects of the Project from its beginning, with a commitment of time, energy, intelligence and good spirit over the years which is very much valued and appreciated. Senior Lecturer, Northwestern University School of Law. *. Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science Department, Weinberg College of Arts and Sci- ences, Northwestern University. LEIGHB . BIENEN & BRANDON ROTTINGHA US [Vol. 92 THE BEGINNING The Chicago Historical Homicide Project at Northwestern Uni- versity School of Law began w ith the discovery and recent availabil- ity of a rich log of more than 11,000 homicides from 1870-1930, maintained consistently by the Chicago Police. The uninterrupted pe- riod of sixty years, and the fact of a single institutional record keep er, makes this an important new resource for the study of crime, homi- cide, urban development, and the police themselves. This long record of cases from a place of historical importance is a lens through which to view the growth and history of Chicago, bracketed by the begin- ning of the data set in 1870, until its end, in 1930. Because these crimes became cases, these records can be the foundation for a study of courts and the legal system as well. This database is also a new and important chronicle of the changing practices and attitudes of the record keepers, members of the Chicago police and the institution, the Chicago Police Force. And it is a reflection of the city's politics, for the police and their opera- tions were inextricable from those they answered to, the Mayor and aldermen, ward politicians, and the citizens of Chicago. Thus, it is an opportunity to study the rule of law, or its absence. This period was one of volatile politics and enormous economic and social change, and the police, as the symbol and embodiment of the rule of law, are part of this history. The history of crime, its punishment, of the legal and social insti- tutions whose job it was to maintain order and enforce the law, was not and is not distinct from the economic, social and political his tory. This database is both an archive and a diary, glimpses into the lives of the people in Chicago through the circumstances of their violent deaths. These cases are also a self portrait of an institution, the Chi- cago Police Force, a principal pla yer in the political and social history of the city.' Eric Monkkonen explains: City police, through their daily activities, helped shape and control much of urban life in public places. Thus a study of the police and their behavior is the examination of the interface between a formal part of the urban structure and the informal actions of most city dwellers. Considered this way, the structural position and action of the police helps to illuminate a parallel problem of urban historians: how to conceive the relationship between social structure and geographical mo- bility and thus reconcile the development of cities as physical and bureaucratic forms with their highly transient populations. This major social fact ... is the "dizzying rate" of movement in and out of American cities throughout the nineteenth century. ERIC MONKKONEN, POLICE INU RBAN AMERICA, 1860-1920, at I I (1981) (citation omit- ted). 2002] LEARNING FROM THE PAST The set of essays in this volume begins the analysis of these cases by a group of historians, criminologists, and legal scholars un- der the auspices of the Chicago Historical Homicide Project at 2 Northwestern University School of Law. One goal of the Project is to make these cases and the quantitative data set available to a variety of researchers, not just to criminologists and legal scholars, but col- lege and high school teachers, genealogists, amateur historians and other interested persons, and to link the data set to other sources, to capture the times and reimagine the lives of our immediate ancestors and predecessors in America, our grandparents and great- grandparents, for three long lived generations reach back to the be- ginning of this time period. These records of more than 11,000 homicides in Chicago will be archived at Northwestern University and eventually put on a web site with links to other archives and historical resources. The language of the case reports is itself an historical record of speech and the dis- 4 course about crime and its social meaning at the time. The details on circumstances, the content and character of the contemporaneous language in the case entries, and the length of time to various legal dispositions in routinely reported cases are now trans- formed into both a quantitative and a text based file, allowing for the analysis of these homicides simultaneously from several perspec- tives: as autonomous case narratives, as discrete data points on indi- vidual victims and defendants in a series of cases over time, as statis- tical artifacts, as subsets of homicide cases over long or short periods, as a report on homicides in particular parts of the city during a his- torical period, as a dimension of the demographic and social changes 2 The first phase of this Project was the Third Annual Faculty Conference at Northwest- ern University School of Law, titled 'Learning From the Past, Living in the Present: Patterns in Chicago Homicides, 1870-1930,' Nov. 17, 2000. Included in that archive and accessible on the web site will be a text file of the case summaries and the quantitative, coded file for the more than 11,050 cases, as well as photo- graphs, literary works of the period, other archival material, and links to other historical re- sources. 4 It would be of great historical value if comparable case summaries for the period 1930- 1965 could be located and transformed into a quantitative file. An expanded data set could then be created and linked with the Loyola University Chicago Homicide Project, which be- gins in 1965, creating an uninterrupted time series on homicide in Chicago from 1870-2002, and continuing. Such a data set would allow for the study of long term trends in homicide, and changes in legal institutions and practice over the course of more than a century. This would present a unique opportunity to study not only changing patterns of homicide, but also patterns in the enforcement of criminal laws and the behavior of legal decision makers over a period of more than one hundred years. LEIGH B. BIENEN & BRA NDON ROTTINGHA US [Vol. 92 in the population, as a historiography of how the police recorded homicides over sixty years, as a history of case dispositions by a legal system, as an account of how the po lice were themselves victims and defendants in homicide cases, and in many other ways. Although the world of 1870-1930 was strikingly different from our own world, many of the homicide patterns exhibited in this data set are familiar: killings related to what we now term domestic vio- lence, lethal violence by police and the killing of police officers, seemingly senseless slayings in bars and saloons, what appear to be impulse murders over trivial amounts of money, random and sponta- neous insults, or haphazard verbal exchanges, killings by persons who are drunk, and murders by the insane, the mentally deranged or mentally disabled. Overwhelmingly, men kill men, and sometimes women; and women kill children, a nd sometimes men. Our labels and language for these killings may have changed, but the elemental character of some of these crimes i s recognizable in today's crimes. Persistent patterns in generic categories of homicide can be seen; men kill their age cohorts, spouses, domestic partners or objects of sexual interest or hatred. Women kill children and sometimes their sexual partners or husbands, and occasionally sexual rivals. Petty thieves and crooks kill one another and the police, and are themselves apprehended and killed by law enforcement officers, who are them- selves killed by thieves and robbers and gangsters. As the century ad- vances everyone is killed by recklessly driven automobiles. Chicago was changing before the eyes of its inhabitants from 1870-1930, and they realized and co mmented upon these changes.5 The sixty years from 1870-1930 encompassed enormous economic growth and vast social and political change. The decade of the twen- ties by itself, in Chicago and in A merica generally, was revolution- ary. The stereotype of Chicago in the early twentieth century and dur- ing the 1920's is of a city dominated by organized crime. Corruption in city government long predated Pro hibition, as did the existence of enormously profitable criminal enterprises: prostitution, gambling, and other rackets controlled by a su ccession of syndicates and crime 5 The Annotated Bibliography (on file with author) collects some sources and commen- tary, both contemporaneous and retrospective, and includes references to other historical ar- chives. Elaborations on this Bibliography in later publications will include references to ad- ditional sources of original data, to additional works in disciplines other than law, sociology and criminology. This Bibliography primarily concentrates on the academic literature in criminology, sociology and law, with some references to works of history, literature, and accounts from the times. The amount and quality of serious research and writing related to crime and urban history during this period and immediately afterward is remarkable. 2002] LEARNING FROM THE PAST 6 businesses. The period of the 1920's, or more generally from 1918 to 1930, did See a large increase in killings, in both the total number of homi- cides and the rate per capita. The fact of that increase, often referred to by contemporaneous commentators, is confirmed by these data. And details on all cases in this data set from the decade of the twen- ties are now available for systematic quantitative analysis for the first time. Was this wave of homicides a new phenomenon, or just a con- tinuation of prior trends consistent with demographic changes and growth in the population, especially increases in the population of young men? And how many, or what proportion, were murders? Were urban poverty, economic crises, and the acute housing shortage contributory or even determinant factors, as many contemporaneous commentators seemed to believe? Was the increase attributable to the widely reported 'gang wars' of organized crime after Prohibition in 1918? Was the increase in the homicide rate another symptom of the breakdown of the rule of law? Or, is the bulge in homicides in the 1920's explained by other factors? Several of the papers in this vol- 7 ume begin to address these questions. Chicago during this entire period, and especially after World War I and during Prohibition, had the reputation of being a lawless 8 9 city, with an unusually corrupt judiciary and police force. City 0 council, the aldermen, and the ward politicians were said to be con- 6 The Vice Commission of Chicago noted: The first truth that the Commission desires to impress upon the citizens of Chicago is the fact that prostitution in this city is a Commercialized Business of large proportions with tremendous profits of more than Fifteen Million Dollars per year, controlled largely by men, not women .... In juxtaposition with this group of professional male exploiters stand ostensibly respectable citi- zens, both men and women, who are openly renting and leasing property for exorbitant sums, and thus sharing, through immorality of investments, the profits from this Business. THE VICE COMM'N. OF CHL, THE SOCIAL EVIL IN CHICAGO 32-33 (1911). 7 Eric H. Monkkonen, Homicide in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, 92 J. CRiM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 809 (2002) (forthcoming in this volume) 8 Perry Duis explains: But in Chicago the practice of using the court system to protect rather than prosecute saloonists continued unchanged. Those with the best connections could have their cases rotated to a safe judge . ... In Chicago, however, politicians continued to select veniremen from the so-called "jury saloons." In 1883 there were reported to be fourteen such bars located conveniently within 400 feet of the Cook County Criminal Courts Building. The constable in charge of juries dis- patched youthful runners to summon the faithful, some of whom made their living as profes- sional jurors and saw duty several times each week. PERRY DuIs, THE SALOON -PUBLIC DRINKING INC HICAGO AND BOSTON 242-43 (1983). 9 John Landesco notes that, [O]ther cities have not experienced so violent a disorder in the enforcement of prohibition. In the second place, this defiance of law and order by the gunman and his immunity from punishment LEIGH B. BIENEN & BRANDON ROTTINGHA US [Vol. 92 council, the aldermen, and the ward politicians l ° were said to be con- trolled by bribery and graft and to be receiving large and regular payments based upon revenues from illegal enterprises such as boot- 11 legging, prostitution, and gambling. In some instances the politi- cians themselves and city officials owned the illegal enterprises. The folklore surrounding the colorful mob figures in Chicago during the 1920's may be obscuring what seems to have been a sharp increase in homicides, including accidents and manslaughters, after World War 1.12 Is this view of Chicago as a corrupt and lawless city supported, by the orderly processes of law are not limited in Chicago to the field of prohibition; on the con- trary, they extend into many and diverse situations. JOHN LANDESCO, ORGANIZED CRIME IN CHICAGO: PART III OF THE ILLINOIS CRIME SURVEY 105 (Univ. of Chi. Press 1968) (1929). is Perhaps the problem was not unique to Chicago. Consider the following contempora- neous comment: the problem of Chicago is the problem of America, herself. At the gates of America and at the gates of Chicago, is the inscription: 'Give me your tired, your poor' . . We have failed to real- ize that a universal suffrage has given the ballot to all, and that the corrupt politician can mass and control the votes of the uninformed so as to perpetuate himself in power . . . . The survey on organized crime presents an appalling picture of corruption and criminal domination. It discloses the facts as they are. As long as crime is organized and efficient, and the administration ofjustice is unorganized and inefficient, so long will crime be a problem in the community. Andrew A. Bruce, Introduction to LANDESCO, supra note 9, at 6-7. 11J udge McKinley explains, "Patronage" is an elastic term and in the lexicon of the lawless it means much more than mere "jobs,"juicy morsels from the "pie counter" where public contracts are "cut" and inside informa- tion as to "sugar"-the legitimate little brother to boodle among predatory politicians.... Who is there in a police department persistently prostituted to the purposes of bad black and worse white politicians, bold enough to dispute the demands of gunmen, gangstersa nd grafters whose grip on government is so strong that criminals are the companions of county central committee- men and the confidants of party chieftains close to high police officials, prosecutors and other law enforcers? The partnership between politics and crime begins with the seizure of a city such as Chicago by bosses who have risen to power in their party on the back of "the boys" in the bad lands of a town that has been the dumping ground for criminals of all classes from all over the country. JUDGE M. L. MCKINLEY, CRIME AND THE CIVIC CANCER-GRAFT 11 (1923) (emphasis added). 12 One author indicates that, During the Prohibition Era Chicago and many other major cities were swept by what may be called without exaggeration a typhoon of crime. There were two tidal waves and they traveled in tandem. The beer and booze barons, the new aristocracy, the nouveau riche of outlawry rode the first wave. Behind them were the common run of criminals, the journeymen in the trades of thievery. It is not surprising that the dry law years saw what was undoubtedly the greatest crime spree in the nation's history. Literally the organized gangsters were getting away with murder. JOHN H. LYLE, THE DRY AND LAWLESS YEARS 121 (1960). 2002] LEARNING FROM THE PAST discounted, or in any way illuminated by this set of police records? What did the rule of law mean in this period? What was the character of the formal legal institutions: the courts, the police, the city gov- ernment? They existed. They had the appearance of a solid, stable, functioning legal structure. In the quiet of the law books the formality and the propriety of legal institutions seems sound. Yet the imple- mentation of law-the rule of law-was perhaps absent, or absent in some parts of the city at some times, or so some commentators main- tain. Were the legal institutions, whose reason for being was the im- position of the rule of law, completely perverted by the individuals in positions of power, and by the culture of corruption they created and maintained over the decades? Or, were the activities of organized crime and the corruption of city government officials and the police the whirlpool beside the stream, a small, distracting part of an other- wise orderly, law abiding society? These questions are persistent, and not easily or simply an- swered, arising again and again in the consideration of this historical record. Before turning to the patterns exhibited by the homicides themselves, however, let us consider a few aspects of the very differ- ent world in which these crimes took place. IMAGINING AMERICA AND CHICAGO DURING 1870-1930 The enormity of the economic and social changes during this long period, as well as the tripling of the population, are foremost. The Chicago Fire had destroyed much of the center city, and the re- building allowed for new and grander buildings, and the ambitions 13 accompanying them. Labor poured into the city to rebuild it, and 14 then struggled with management over unionization. In 1870, homes 13 Michael Willrich points out: Decades of breakneck industrialization and labor militancy-from the massive railroad strike of 1877 to the Haymarket bombing of 1886 to the Pullman Strike of 1894 to the bloody Teamster's Strike of 1905-had turned Chicago into a national epicenter of industrial strife. The prospect of a better livelihood and new urban freedoms made Chicago after 1880 a major destination for three historic migration streams: unattached men and women from the hinterland, allegedly un- assimilable 'new' immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and, during and after World War I, the first 'Great Migration' of African-Americans from the South. Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Crime, Law and Social Governance in Chicago, 1880- 1930 (forthcoming Cambridge U. 2003)(manuscript at 15-16, on file with authors). 14 J. Anthony Lukas explains: The severe recession of 1893-94 so eroded the company's profits that Pullman felt compelled to reduce wages 25%. When a delegation complained that he-had made no corresponding cut in the LEIGH B. BIENEN & BRANDON ROTTINGHA US [Vol. 92 and businesses in Chicago did not have electricity, and few had in- 15 door plumbing. Chicago was crude, aggressive, and on the make. Chicago was transformed by the great surges of American and 16 overseas immigrants who came to this city to work and live, often I never seeing again the families and countries they left behind. Dur- ing large parts of this period the majority of Chicago's inhabitants came from somewhere else and shared no common heritage or lan- guage, and they brought with them a distrust of their new 18 neighbors. Some civic reformers questioned whether recent immi- model village rents-already higher than for comparable houses in Chicago-Pullman loftily de- clined to talk with them. In May, the Pullman workers went on strike ....T he [national] boycott began on June 26, 1894. Within four days, 125,000 men on twenty-nine railroads had quit work rather than handle Pullman cars. J. ANTHONY LUKAS, BIG TROUBLE: A MURDER IN A SMALL WESTERN TOWN SETS OFF A STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF AMERICA 310 (1997). This detailed, powerful narrative of a sensational, political trial of 1907 is an especially valuable source on the political history of the mineworkers union and the union movement generally, with many significant historical events taking place in Chicago. 15 Lincoln Steffens, a contemporary journalist, described Chicago at the turn of the cen- tury as: "First in violence, deepest in dirt; loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the 'tough' among cities, a spectacle for the nation." LINCOLN STEFFENS, THE SHAME OF THE CITIES 163 (Hill & Wang 1960) (1904). Lincoln Steffens republished a series of his own articles from McClure's magazine on municipal cor- ruption in St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York and Chicago. 16 Milton Ravoke observed: The Germans, the Swedes, the Irish, the Poles, the Bohemians, the Lithuanians, the Italians and the Jews inundated the city in successive waves. By 1920, Chicago had more Poles than any city in Poland except Warsaw, more Bohemians than any city in Czechoslovakia except Prague, and more Lithuanians than any city in Lithuania except Vilna. New immigrants almost always moved into old neighborhoods, usually close to the terminus of whatever form of transportation they used to get to the city, the bus or train station. MILTON D. RAKOVE, DON'T MAKE No WAVES, DON'T BACK No LOSERS 28-29 (1975). 17A ccording to Eric Monkkonen: Migrants, the "floating proletariat," fitted into this new urban scene, both in fulfilling fluctuating labor demands and in creating cities with flexible, and adaptable work forces. The very flexibil- ity and fluidity of population upon which the growing cities rested required visible, depersonal- ized, predictable social control in order to facilitate population movement from place to place and to ensure a truly stable and adaptable social structure. The uniformed police answered this need perfectly. They responded to service demands of the mobile Americans, yet exerted social control for the urban power holders, those people who stayed in town, not necessarily the same as the economic elites. MONKKONEN, supra note 1, at 12. 18T he demographic categories of the United States Census reflected how people con- ceived of themselves: e.g. as "native born whites," or as "foreign born," or as children whose grandparents were "foreign born," as "English speaking." Citizenship was not yet the critical distinction it later became. 2002] LEARNING FROM THE PAST grants should be granted citizenship, or allowed to vote. During this 19 period Chicago became a city of neighborhoods. Letters were life- lines, the only communication between families, and are now docu- mentary history, often literary and graphic works of art themselves; first long awaited, then treasured and handed down for generations. Phones and automobiles were nonexistent at the beginning of the period, but relatively common, although certainly not ubiquitous, at the end of the period. One of the spectacular attractions of the Co- lumbia Exposition and the new Marshall Field's Department Store in 1893 was their lighted interiors and indoor restrooms. Not all of the population spoke English or was literate, even in their first lan- guage. Nonetheless newspapers flourished, published in a dozen languages, and were part of a vibrant civic culture, periodically bent 2 1 upon civic reform. Investigating grand juries played an important Some 800,000 immigrants lived in Chicago in 1920, and more than half of them had come from southern or eastern Europe. In that year there were more Poles living in Chicago than there were people in any other city in Illinois. The Russians in Chicago, mostly Jews, were almost as nu- merous as the total population of Des Moines, Iowa. ROBERT GRANT & JOSEPH KATZ, THE GREAT TRIALS OF THE TWENTIES 12 (1998). 19 Neighborhoods followed employment and opportunities: South Chicago was the first of these steel mill neighborhoods to emerge in the 19th century .... South Chicago owes its founding to the creation of the Calumet and Chicago Dock Company, which developed the area as an industrial site .... Originally called Ainsworth, South Chicago eventually became part of the Township of Hyde Park, as did all of Southeast Chicago. The town then joined the city of Chicago in 1889, along with the rest of Hyde Park. By that time, the steel industry had already begun to transform the district into a major American industrial center. ROD SELLERS & DOMINIC A. PACYGA, IMAGES OF AMERICA: CHICAGO'S SOUTHEAST SIDE 7 (1998). This book contains evocative pictures of factories, families, schools and other neighborhood institutions during the period of this study. "After the restrictive immigration law of 1924 was passed, these communities began to jell as centers of ethnic culture .... As they moved from the older neighborhoods into newer communities farther out from the cen- ter of the city, they literally moved en masse." RAKOVE, supra note 16, at 30. 20 The United States Census published detailed but not completely comparable f igures on literacy and other specifics from 1890 throughout the period. In 1870 the population of Chi- cago was 298,977, of which 50,092 (or about one sixth of the population) had attended school, 7,350 could not read or write, and 10,548 (including 3 Indians) could not write. See DEP'T OF THE INTERIOR, CENSUS OFFICE, I NINTH CENSUS, tbl.l I (1872). By 1890 the total population of Chicago was 1,099,850, and the number of illiterates was 39,046. DEP'T OF THE INTERIOR, CENSUS OFFICE, ELEVENTH CENSUS, tbl.6 (1895); DEP'T OF THE INTERIOR, CENSUS OFFICE, ELEVENTH CENSUS, tbl.49 (1897). By 1930 the overall population was 3.4 million, and the illiteracy rate was 3.2%, although it was around 10% for the older cohorts. This would be literacy in any language. DEP'T OF COMMERCE, BUREAU OF THE CENSUS, 2 ELEVENTH CENSUS, tbl.20 (1933). 2i The Chief Justice of the Criminal Court of Cook County in 1922-23 wrote an expose of corruption in the courts, and the connection between organized crime and civic and judi