Chicago began with soldiers.
Capt. John Whistler, to be precise, an Irishman who fought with the British during the Revolutionary War. After the peace, he joined the United States army and was sent to the western frontier, which at the time was Indiana.
There he helped build Fort Wayne. In the summer of 1803, he and his company of the First United States Infantry were dispatched to build a new fort at the mouth of the Chicago River, named after Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of war, Henry Dearborn.
A small settlement grew around the stockade. Then on Aug. 15, 1812, the garrison’s 66 soldiers tried to evacuate Fort Dearborn, joined by 15 friendly Miami, plus nine women and 18 children. They ran into an ambush of 500 Potawatomi warriors. Two-thirds were killed.
That first military effort in Chicago — for years called the Fort Dearborn Massacre, but really a battle, a minor skirmish in the war of 1812 that went very badly for one side — was a mixed bag. The army’s presence planted the seeds of the city. They also got its residents killed by mishandling relations with the local Native Americans.
The history of American soldiers in Chicago — about to get a significant new chapter with President Donald Trump planning to deploy the National Guard to the city — is also checkered.
At times, soldiers provide a welcome, calming presence. Such as during the 1919 race riots, when they created a buffer between Chicagoans bent on murdering each other because of the color of their skin. At times they made matters worse, such as during the 1894 Pullman Strike, when their arrival — despite the governor’s objections — sparked days of deadly rioting.
Troops trampled American freedoms — one of the nation’s worst cases of journalistic suppression happened in Chicago during the Civil War at the point of a bayonet. But soldiers also protected those rights, or tried to.
In July, 1951, Gov. Adlai Stevenson called out 300 members of the Illinois National Guard. Each was issued two rounds of ammunition, told not to shoot unless ordered, and sent to Cicero, where a mob was rampaging around the home of Harvey E. Clark, a CTA bus driver whose family would have been the town’s first Black residents.
Except their potential neighbors rioted instead, trashing not only their apartment but the building it was in. The guard used tear gas; six guard personnel were injured, four rioters were cut by bayonets. Young guardsmen got a life lesson in hate, Chicago style.
“I didn’t think there were people like we saw last night,” one admitted the next day.
Military force isn’t consistently effective. In April, 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act, which Trump has threatened to do. Thousands of soldiers patrolled the West Side, but were deployed too late, or in the wrong locations, to keep Madison Street from burning down.
Dispatching troops as a show of power
Sending in troops as a vindictive show of power is nothing new. On June 3, 1863, two companies of the 65 Illinois Infantry marched out of Camp Douglas to the offices of the Chicago Times — no relation to the Sun-Times, as they were a Confederate-sympathizing scandal sheet run by an odious bigot, Wilbur Storey.
Gen. Ambrose Burnside, chafing at recent union defeats, decreed that “declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed,” and closed down the Times, citing their “repeated expression of disloyalty and incendiary statements,” though the paper referring to him as the “Butcher of Fredericksburg” might have also been a factor.
That night, thousands of Chicagoans gathered to protest this “spectre of military despotism.” The next day, President Abraham Lincoln rescinded Burnside’s order.
Trump tries to justify the incursion by painting a false, exaggerated picture of crime in Chicago. The connection between deploying troops and rampant rumor was clear in 1871, after the Great Chicago Fire. The smoke had barely settled when the press flared up with wild tales of arsonists, looters, revolutionaries, lynchings, none of them true.
“The city infested with a horde of thieves, burglars and cut-throats, bent on plunder, and who will not hesitate to burn, pillage and even murder,” the Chicago Evening Journals assured its readers.
Help was close at hand — Civil War General Philip Sheridan was a Chicago resident. Two days after the fire ended, Mayor Roswell B. Mason entrusted the “preservation of the good order and peace of the city” to Sheridan. His force consisted of 700 federal troops and 500 state militia.
While traumatized citizens were reassured, with troops came trouble.
“The soldiers seemed at times as likely to create disorder as stifle it,” Carl Smith writes in his excellent “Chicago’s Great Fire,” citing instances of drunken bar fights.
The welcome mat can be quickly withdrawn when soldiers start killing people. Lawyer Thomas Grosvenor was heading back to Hyde Park after a dinner where perhaps wine was served in over-abundance. He told a 20-year-old sentry who challenged him to “go to hell” and was shot and killed. Two days later, the troops were sent home.
The death toll was greater during the 1877 railroad strike. In late July, Chicago was torn by days of violent protests, and President Rutherford B. Hayes put the militia under command of the governor. Thirty workers were killed and 100 injured in one clash at the Halsted Street viaduct.
The 1877 strike struck fear into Chicago businessmen, further magnified by the Haymarket bombing of 1886. The Commercial Club purchased 600 acres in Highwood and demanded the federal government put soldiers there. Fort Sheridan was constructed the next year.
President Cleveland sends troops Illinois didn’t want
Those troops were put to use in the Pullman Strike of 1894. The strike shut down railroads across the country, but was relatively peaceful in Chicago — until President Grover Cleveland sent troops to the city, over the objections of Illinois Gov. Peter Altgeld.
Just after midnight on the 4th of July, 2,000 federal troops entered the city and set up tents on the lakefront. A squad of 90 went directly to the Swift stockyards, where they dispersed a crowd of 3,000 protesters by marching through them with fixed bayonets. They then lined the tracks so meat trains could come and go.
Strikers did not like seeing the federal government side so strongly with their bosses.
“The mob rapidly grew more excited,” the Chicago Daily News reported the next day. “Threats of violence were loud, stones were thrown and the temper of the crowd was such that … bloodshed seemed imminent.”
It was. Over the next four days violence exploded, mobs burning boxcars and smashing windows. Soldiers were at first held back, then ordered to shoot anyone interfering with the railroads.
“SHOT DOWN BY SOLDIERS” read a headline in the Daily News, recounting those killed and wounded. The military was not spared. Any large movement of troops is itself a dangerous activity — three soldiers were killed at the corner of 40th and Grand when a Hotchkiss gun they were towing exploded, wounding many pedestrians.
Alteld begged Cleveland to remove the soldiers.
“The principle of local self-government is just as fundamental in our institutions as is that of Federal supremacy,” Altgeld said in a July 6 letter to Cleveland, accusing him of acting as if he were “the sole judge of the question as to whether any disturbance exists or not” and “can send Federal troops into any community in the United States at his pleasure, and keep them there as long as he chooses.”
Altgeld painted a situation not very different from today, of an executive trying to wield complete power.
“His judgment, that is, his will, is the sole guide, and it being purely a matter of discretion,” the governor wrote. “His decision can never be examined or questioned. This assumption as to the power of the executive is certainly new, and I respectfully submit it is not the law of the land … The autocrat of Russia could certainly not possess … greater power than is possessed by the executive of the United Sates, if your assumption is correct.”
An unacceptable pretext
If Cleveland could send troops to Chicago, he could send them everywhere.
“There are always more or less local disturbances over the country, it will be an easy matter under your construction of the law for an ambitious executive to order out the military forces [to] all of the States, and establish at once a military government.”
On Tuesday, a federal judge said the same thing, in essence, finding Trump’s sending the National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles a violation of federal law, with concerns for safety an unacceptable pretext.
Cleveland, foreshadowing Trump, claimed he was “saving the nation” while Altgeld split hairs in his “rather dreary discussion.” One of Cleveland’s advisers said Altgeld “ought to be whipped.”
The troops did break the Pullman strike, but also energized the American labor movement, which saw in stark terms the power aligned against it. If soldiers arrive in Chicago, they might have some impact on crime. But they also might give you a glimpse of a very different America, not hurtling down the road at us, but very much already here.
