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I Predict A Riot – Part Twenty Nine

The Lager Beer Riot of 1855

For workers who had to work six days a week, the opportunity to relax on the Sabbath with a refreshing beer, even if it was lager, was too good to pass up. For Chicago’s immigrant population – there were many of Irish and German origin – their bars and taverns acted as community centres and a vestige of home as well as the source of alcoholic stimulation. But trouble was brewing, provoked by the election of Levi Boone as mayor of Chicago on an anti-immigration ticket.

Although unable to do anything about the immigrants already there, Boone decided to make life uncomfortable for them by focusing attention on their Sunday drinking habits. The Chicago Tribune, which supported Boone at the time, commented, “Who does not know that the most depraved, worthless and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community are Irish Catholics?” Boone ordered the reintroduction of an earlier ordinance requiring taverns to be closed on the Sabbath, requiring, as the Tribune noted, the immigrant communities to “restrain their Bacchanalian revels for one day.” That it was their one day off didn’t bother the Mayor. Moreover, he increased the annual liquor licence six-fold from $50 to $300 hoping to drive some, if not all of the German and Irish taverns, which numbered some 625 out of the city’s 675 drinking establishments, out of business.

The new laws were applied selectively. Drinking establishments frequented by the city’s elite were allowed to go about their business but immigrant drinking holes were raided and some of the owners were arrested for breaking the law and not stumping up the higher licence fees. Matters came to a head on Saturday 21st April 1855 when 19 bar keepers were up before the beak and a large crowd congregated around the courthouse. The streets, according to the Tribune, were “crowded with a multitude of the most desperate and savage characters in the city, ready for any blood, rapine or murder.” As the police – Chicago at the time had a part-time, volunteer force – moved in to disperse the crowd, fighting broke out, eight were arrested and the mob was forced back over the Chicago river.

Before the rioters had the opportunity to regroup, the mayor ordered the new swing bridge at Clark Street to be opened, cutting off the mob. Boone called for reinforcements, appointing police officers there and then and summoning three units of militia but the crowd on the other side of the river would not disperse. After a few hours the swing bridge was put back into position and this was the cue for the mob to storm over. Shots rang out –a policeman, George W Hunt, lost an arm and a rioted, Peter Martin, who had shot him, was killed. The militia turned up and eventually drove the crowd away. Martial law was declared that night and two cannons were ominously positioned in case of any further trouble. In all, some sixty people were arrested, although no one was sentenced to imprisonment.

A week later, the Chicago city council voted to reform the police, enforcing the wearing of uniforms, organising it along military lines and putting a superintendent of police in charge from whom the officers would take orders. The following year Boone was turfed out of office as the immigrant communities rallied behind the Democrat candidate Thomas Dyer. The indefatigable Tribune announced that Dyer would preside over “such a police as the mob which rallied in our streets after the battle would elect. What vindicators of law and order they will be let their shouts, blasphemies and orgies on the day of the ‘big drunk’ bear witness.” Ironically, Boone, who had campaigned on a fiercely prohibitionist ticket came to enjoy a beer in his dotage.

Boone’s ill-judged reforms increased the polarisation of Chicago politics. The phrase, law and order, owes its origin to the political debate that they provoked.