Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction

7. Regime Change

7 Regime Change More than any single person or institution, Democratic Mayor Carter Harrison pacified class relations in Chicago, freeing the city’s capitalists to accumulate wealth without governing directly. Harrison was neither a native-born evangelical Protestant with roots in New England or New York, like most of Chicago’s upper class, nor an immigrant machine politician. Rather, he was a one-term congressman who had been born in Kentucky and proudly displayed the southern political style of a popular aristocrat. Harrison arrived in Chicago politics at a critical moment when his outsider status gave him freedom to maneuver politically, when his cosmopolitan cultural style gave him cachet among immigrant workers, and when the city was critically in need of a new kind of political leadership.1 In 1879, Harrison initiated a party realignment in the city that endured for decades, ending the Republican dominance that had begun during the political crisis of the 1850s. From 1879 through 1897, Democrats won seven of the ten mayoral elections, and two of the three Republican victories were due to a split in the Democratic vote. Harrison’s leadership also created a new “regime”—a set of formal and informal governing institutions linking state and civil society—that endured into the Progressive Era. Republican Rule Shattered In the aftermath of the 1877 railroad strike, the Socialists extended their leadership over the labor movement in Chicago, aided in part by the arrival of experienced and energetic new leaders fleeing repression in Germany under Otto von Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law. Passed in 1878, the law banned the Social Democratic Party and trade union organization until 1890, creating an “outlaw” culture and politics within the German working class. Among the exiles exported by Bismarck’s repression was Paul Grottkau, an architect and mason who had been active in trade union affairs in Berlin and a leader in Ferdinand Lassalle’s party. When Grottkau immigrated to the United States Jentz_Schneirov_Chicago.indd 220 2/16/12 10:51 AM in January 1878, he was well-known in labor circles within and outside Germany , even at the relatively young age of thirty-two.2 In early March—just a few months after his arrival in Chicago—a crowd packed the sizeable Vorwärts Turner Hall to hear Grottkau speak. He ended his address by observing that, while the 1877 railroad strike was over “for the time being,” it was “in no way forgotten”: “Since then, in all cities, unions are being organized, Socialist organizations are being founded. The day is not far when . . . the men who once freed the black slaves from the yoke of serfdom will be men enough to gain freedom for the white slaves.” By the summer, he had taken over editorship of the Vorbote, a weekly, and its sister paper, the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, which appeared three times a week. Grottkau’s seamless entry into the culture and politics of the Chicago left illuminated the transnational world of German labor and social reform, which was analogous to the Anglo American phenomenon represented in Chicago by such people as Andrew Cameron, the Scottish printer and editor of the Workingman’s Advocate.3 A week after Grottkau’s speech in early March, the Chicago chapter of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) held its organizational meeting for the spring 1878 elections. In the locally oriented campaign, the SLP modestly increased its total vote to over seven thousand, compared to about sixty-three hundred in the fall of 1877, and elected Frank Stauber to the city council from the Fourteenth Ward on the Northwest Side. Around thirty years old and the owner of a hardware store, Stauber was German Swiss and had been in the United States about eleven years. For the next several years, sitting members of the Common Council engaged in repeated maneuvers and subterfuges to keep him from being seated and then to isolate him politically after he was. The chicanery employed against Stauber in this and subsequent elections by members of both major parties became a cause célèbre among the Socialists , signifying to many that electoral politics was a sham. Alderman James McGrath, a key ally of Anton Hesing’s, was one of Stauber’s main enemies.4 The success of the SLP in appealing to a Democratic constituency produced an immediate response. Carter Harrison, then a sitting U.S. congressman, started courting the Socialists during the summer, enthusiastically visiting their picnics. In anticipation of the fall 1878 elections, he gave...