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In this book, Sam Mitrani cogently examines the making of the police department in Chicago, which by the late 1800s had grown into the most violent, turbulent city in America. Chicago was roiling with political and economic conflict, much of it rooted in class tensions, and the city's lawmakers and business elite fostered the growth of a professional municipal police force to protect capitalism, its assets, and their own positions in society. Together with city policymakers, the business elite united behind an ideology of order that would simultaneously justify the police force's existence and dictate its functions.

Like other U.S. cities, Chicago built a powerful police force virtually from scratch in the second half of the nineteenth century. This essay posits that business leaders in Chicago pushed the municipal government to create such a force in reaction to the labor movement, and focuses on the crucial decade of the 1870s. As the city descended into an economic depression after 1873, Chicago seemed more divided along ethnic than class lines. A German-led People's Party ran the municipal government, and the native-born elite scrambled to reassert its power. Businessmen soon created the Citizens' Association to ensure professional control of the police no matter who won elections. When the strike of 1877 reached Chicago, businessmen further united to strengthen the police force, donating enormous sums to put down the strike and buy weapons for the department. They also formed a new, more exclusive organization dedicated to promoting their interests and police power, the Commercial Club of Chicago. This story suggests that business interests, not the threat of crime, drove the development of the police department, and that the police served to reconcile electoral democracy with the extremely unequal and exploitative Gilded Age economy. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

On April 21, 1855, an angry crowd of German immigrants assembled at Chicago’s court house on Clark Street between Randolph and Washington. They loudly demanded that the court release nineteen imprisoned saloonkeepers. Ten had been arrested for refusing to pay the new $300 liquor license fee, up from $50, and nine had been arrested for serving alcohol on Sundays.¹ Operating taverns on Sunday violated an old, never-before-enforced municipal ordinance, but it was the only day off for most workmen. This crowd of immigrants confronted Kentucky-born, anti-Catholic Mayor Levi Boone. Boone headed a Law and Order ticket that had swept the

The Haymarket bombing forever changed what it meant to be a member of the Chicago Police Department. It gave the police their own set of martyrs and made being a patrolman meaningful in a way that gradual pay raises and merit awards could not. It made clear what the forces of law and order were defending civilization against. Most importantly, Haymarket and its aftermath consolidated a positive image of the Chicago Police Department in the eyes of the respectable citizens of the city. The image of the gallant blue line between anarchy and civilization, of men ready to risk their

On March 12, 1856, theChicago Tribunedeclared: “[Mayor Dyer’s] promises to the rapscallions who electioneered for him, who secured him the fraudulent votes to which he owes his election, who stood for him at the polls to overawe opposition and bully the timid, must be kept.” Dyer was the Democratic candidate for mayor, supported by many of the city’s workingmen and immigrants and stridently opposed by Republicans like the editors of theTribune. To theTribune, the election turned on the question of order. “We shall probably have as the fruits of the ‘great victory,’ [of Mayor Dyer] such

During the 1870s, it became increasingly clear that the promise of “free labor” would not be met. Rather than an expanding economy of small proprietors, the North was becoming more and more divided along class and ethnic lines. New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and other cities were full of immigrant working men who were not about to become the free laborers of antebellum mythology. Many of these wage workers did not adhere to the developing norms of middle-class respectability, nor did many of them even speak English. In addition, the unemployed of all ethnicities swarmed into the cities especially once