An Accidental Anarchist: How the Killing of a Humble Jewish Immigrant by Chicago's Chief of Police Exposed the Conflict Between Law & Order and Civil Rights in Early - Softcover

Roth, Walter; Kraus, Joe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0897335023 ISBN 13: 9780897335027

Verlag: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

It was a bitter cold morning in March, 1908. A nineteen-year-old Jewish immigrant traversed the confusing and unfamiliar streets of Chicago&;a one-and-a-half-hour-long journey&;from his ghetto home on Washburne Avenue to the luxurious Lincoln Place residence of Police Chief George Shippy. He arrived at 9 a.m. Within minutes after knocking on the front door, Lazarus Averbuch lay dead on the hallway floor, shot no less than six times by the chief himself. Why Averbuch went to the police chief's house or exactly what happened after that is still not known.

This is the most comprehensive account ever written about this episode that stunned Chicago and won the attention of the entire country. It does not "solve" the mystery as much as it places it in the context of a nation that was unsure how to absorb all of the immigrants flowing across its borders. It attempts to reconstruct the many different perspectives and concerns that comprised the drama surrounding the investigation of Averbuch's killing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Walter Roth is a senior partner in the law firm of D&;Ancona & Pflaum in Chicago. He is president of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society and has written many articles for Chicago Jewish History, the Sentinel, and JUF News. Joe Kraus is Chair and Professor of English at the University of Scranton where he teaches Contemporary American literature and creative writing. His work has appeared, among other places, in The American Scholar, Callaloo, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Riverteeth, and Moment. He is currently the president of MELUS, the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States. 

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An Accidental Anarchist

How the Killing of a Humble Jewish Immigrant by Chicago's Chief of Police Exposed the Conflict Between Law & Order and Civil Rights in Early 20th-Century America

By Walter Roth, Joe Kraus

Rudi Publishing

Copyright © 1998 Rudi Publishing
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-89733-502-7

Contents

Preface, 
I. Two Cities Called Chicago, 
II. Read All About It: The Official Story Emerges, 
III. The Police in Action, 
IV. The Usual Sustpects: Stirrings on the Left Wing, 
V. No Room for Neutrality: The Jewish Community Reacts, 
VI. The Fight for Control of the Story, 
VII. The Fight Continues: Tug-of-War Over Averbuch's Body, 
VIII. Repercussions, 
IX. The Affair Goes National: Congress Quarrels and Emma Finds a Lover, 
X. The Inquest, 
XI. Making Sense of It All: Theories Abound, 
Afterword, 
Endnotes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 
Index of Newspapers and Magazines, 
About the Authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Two Cities Called Chicago

March 2, 1908

Chicago started the twentieth century as two different cities. There was the Chicago that had flowered in the wake of the great fire in 1871. Its citizens were the prosperous merchants, bankers, industrialists, and politicians who had shaped the business district and fashionable lakeshore neighborhoods and who held unchallenged political power. They established most of Chicago's newspapers, bankrolled construction of the city's great buildings and industries, and laid out the basic blueprint that has directed Chicago's growth ever since. Most of them were born in the United States, and many had moved to Chicago from other parts of the country. They tried to make Chicago and its government in their image — a blend of East Coast dignity and Puritanism with a frontier consciousness — and, for a time perhaps, they succeeded.

The other Chicago was the city Carl Sandburg would celebrate. Its citizens were the many impoverished laborers and newly arrived immigrants who toiled in railroad depots, shipyards, and factories. Those thousands, added to by the relentless stream of immigrants, made up the bulk of the city's population. When fortunate, they lived in the less densely populated areas of the city. When less fortunate, they squeezed themselves into the ghettos and row houses of downtown and the west side of the Chicago River. Although their individual names are remembered less frequently than the gentry's, they too took part in shaping Chicago. They are the ones who eventually developed the many neighborhoods for which the city is known. They are the ones whose labor built the canals, roads, and buildings. And they are the ones who, through their unions and organizations, gave part of their image to the city: the tough, blue collar, big shouldered identity by which Chicago is still known.

By 1908, the city abounded in contrasts that reflected the coming together of the two Chicagos. Along the lakeshore it had its many new buildings, new auditorium, museums, palatial homes, and elevated train system. Just inland were the slums, full of the gambling, drinking, and prostitution for which the city was equally well known. Its downtown Loop area was one of the world's great markets, but less than a mile west across the river was such poverty that Jane Addams located her Hull House settlement there. As close as the two Chicagos were geographically, they were inhabited by widely disparate societies. On March 2, 1908, the two Chicagos collided in an unprecedented way. That morning, the city brought together — for one fatal, mysterious moment — Lazarus Averbuch and George Shippy.

Chicago didn't give a young man like Lazarus Averbuch many choices, not that he could have anticipated many. He was nineteen years old and had never been free of oppression. He grew up in Kishinev, Russia, where he was a Jewish subject of the capricious government of Czar Nicholas II. In 1905, he and his family survived the Kishinev pogrom, a vicious attack on the Jewish community of that city in which hundreds were killed or wounded. The Averbuch family fled to Czernowitz, Bukovina, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but looked ultimately to the United States as the place to build their lives. In Austria, Lazarus worked as a bookkeeper and studied when he had time. When he reached Chicago in late 1907, he was fluent in several languages and at least partially literate in English. As one of many Jewish immigrants pouring into the country at the time, though, he would find little use for what education he had been able to give himself.

He settled on the west side of Chicago, in the Jewish ghetto, with his sister Olga. Her small apartment at 218 Washburne Avenue was home not just to the two siblings, but also to Rose Stern, Olga's friend and a subtenant. They probably paid between $6 and $10 a month in rent, a sizable amount considering Olga earned only about $40 a month and her brother little more than $30. Olga, two years older than her brother, had been in the city for nearly eighteen months and had begun to know her way. She had lived for some time at the Miriam Club, a school for young Jewish immigrant girls, where she was taught some English and given help settling in the new country. By the time Lazarus arrived, Olga was working as a self-described "sewing woman" in what we would today call a sweatshop. She claimed to be saving almost $15 a month and had achieved a kind of stability in her new life in Chicago.

Their apartment building, a two-story frame house, was typical of the area around Twelfth and Halsted streets at that time. They were close to the Maxwell Street market, where Jews and other immigrant groups sold everything from fresh foods to trinkets to rags and bottles. During the final two decades of the nineteenth century, over 50,000 Jews moved into the area, and the number was increasing as the twentieth century began. The neighborhood was the sort of place where only children could be counted on to know English. Yiddish was spoken everywhere, as were the many other languages of the varying eastern and southern European countries from which the immigrants had come. It was possible here, and indeed common, to wear "old country" clothing. There were synagogues and kosher food stores all around, so it was possible to live without ever needing to leave the area.

Lazarus Averbuch had hoped to find work as a bookkeeper in the city. He had done such work in Austria and had a reputation as being at least a solid student. He worked instead for a brief time in Tony Rubovitz's book bindery on Plymouth Place before going to work for W. H. Eichengreen as an egg packer at 183 South Water Street. Neither position satisfied him, however. He worked long hours at hard, physical work and then, in the evenings, attended the Jewish Training School at 12th and Jefferson. He earned less than his sister, which seemed to have troubled him.

Averbuch was hardly alone in his difficulty with finding satisfying work. Chicago was still feeling the effects of the depression of 1907. Such periodic economic breakdowns were common in America in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, but the 1907 depression was the most severe between the depressions of the middle 1880s and early 1890s and the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Chicago, which had seen tremendous growth in the years immediately preceding this recent downturn, was especially hard hit. Its many new and itinerant workers found likely sources of jobs drying up even as...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Academy Chicago Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0897335023
• ISBN 13: 9780897335027
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 212
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Chicago Review Press; https://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/; ; 814 North Franklin Street; Chicago; IL; 60610; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar