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Chapter 5 1877 and the Formation of a Law-and-Order Consensus The massive strikes that erupted in 1877 marked a turning point for the Chicago Police Department. The department’s role in putting down these strikes illustrates most clearly how the Chicago police reconciled democratic politics with the industrial capitalist order through violence. In these strikes, the most dramatic and disorderly they had yet to confront, the police appeared most starkly as little more than hired thugs of the city’s businessmen. In part, the police played this role because Chicago’s businessmen organized themselves as never before. As the economic crisis that began in 1873 deepened and the workers’ movement gained strength, businessmen were not content to sit back and let democratic politics run their course. Rather, these businessmen increasingly organized themselves in more permanent, politically inclusive, and effective organizations than the Committee of Seventy from the beginning of the decade. These businessmen’s groups were involved with many issues beyond policing, and they in no means represented unanimity of opinion among businessmen. Chicago’s elite remained divided politically, socially, and in its economic interests on a range of important issues, including what police policy to promote. But once workers and the unemployed erupted in anger across the country, maintaining order moved to the fore and overrode all other concerns and divisions. The police faced an increasingly difficult task as the depression deepened. They were the main institution charged with maintaining order in the face of increasing misery, unemployment, and anger. Yet violence was the only tool at their disposal. Thus, in the period immediately before the strike, police attempts to keep order served as much to engender anger among workers and the unemployed as to keep those groups orderly. The city council also heaped increasing responsibilities on the police, at the same time that it 1877 and the Formation of a Law-and-Order Consensus 113 began severely cutting police funding. As a result, the police were unable to perform their assigned tasks efficiently and came under renewed criticism from even their elite backers as corrupt and inefficient. As the strikes began, then, the police force was undermanned and disliked by rich and poor alike. Their performance during the strikes helped cement elite support for the department, but it only increased the anger of the rest of the population. Elite contemporary observers and historians alike have often portrayed the strikes of 1877 as spontaneous explosions of violence stemming from the economic depression that began in 1873.1 According to this interpretation, the strikes spread spontaneously up and down the railroad lines, feeding off the resentment caused by poverty, unemployment, and employer attacks on pay and working conditions. Allan Pinkerton and other observers even blamed outside agitators for inciting otherwise peaceful workers to rebel.2 This approach, however, fails to locate 1877 in the context of its prehistory. As historian Sheldon Stromquist points out for Upstate New York, workers had militant traditions that necessarily informed their activity in 1877, and this was equally true in Chicago.3 The flip side of this standard interpretation is that the strikes took employers completely by surprise. However, Chicago’s businessmen also had a reservoir of experience in dealing with militant labor activity. The experience of the postwar strikes ten years earlier gave Chicago’s law-and-order advocates a crucial advantage compared to Baltimore and Pittsburgh when the strikes of 1877 reached the city. In fact, all of those cities that had relatively well-established police forces, such as Boston, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, managed to avoid losing control to the strikers, while cities in which the strike reached its most powerful crescendo, among them Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and St. Louis, relied on state militia to retain (or regain) order. At the same time, in the first half of the 1870s, Chicago appeared more starkly divided along ethnic lines than along those of class. But the depression that began in earnest in 1873 and then the strike of 1877 broke the relative ethnic solidarity that had dominated Chicago politics since the 1850s. Chicago’s Germans, long the largest group of immigrants in the city, divided along class lines. Germans led increasingly militant workingclass organizations against a German-dominated city government. The Irish, Chicago’s second largest immigrant group, also divided between the workers and unemployed who fought the police and the Irish American militia that helped put down the strike. In a strike that again began among railroad workers and included...

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