The Outfit Read Free Page B

nature’s, was punishing this wicked metropolis. The Sodom and Gomorrah analogy was heard more than once in sanctimonious sermons. In time the local assessment became a national one.
    On the positive side, the fire afforded Chicago a unique opportunity to rebuild the entire city utilizing the most recent strides in engineering and design architecture. In a mere three years the city was transformed into a distinctly modern city and one of the most potent engines for commerce in the world. Soon many of the world’s first skyscrapers dominated the Windy City skyline.
    Again, word got out just how appealing the Second City had become. With immigration unchecked and unregulated, the population swelled to over two million by 1900. One half million Poles arrived along with more than one hundred thousand Italians, and still more Germans, Swedes, Jews, etc., all gravitating to their ethnic enclaves.
    Although the Chicago of the Gay Nineties achieved many noteworthy civic successes (especially its financial institutions, universities, and museums), it was also a nutrient-rich petri dish for the diseases of crime and corruption. The anemic police department numbered only eleven hundred (vs. a 2.1 million population). More than a dozen vice districts sprang up, with appropriate names such as The Black Hole, Bad Lands, Satan’s Mile, Dead Man’s Alley, and Hell’s Half Acre. Crime gangs flourished throughout the city. A 1927 study counted 1,313 gangs, which boasted over twenty-five thousand members.
    At the lowest street level, crime was often inseparable from the gambling element. Unlike other cities, Chicago was content to allow its illegal policy (numbers) rackets to be controlled by the blacks of the South Side. More than five hundred “policy stations,” run almost exclusively by brothers Edward and George Jones, thrived on the South Side alone.
    In the Italian enclaves, criminals embraced a different means to riches: gang terrorism. Given Italy’s turbulent history, it is small wonder many of its citizens distrust authority and seek riches and security in fiercely antiestablishment gangs. For much of the millennium Italy was overrun with foreign occupation. The list of oppressive foreign rulers is daunting: Spanish Bourbons, Greeks, Carthaginians, Arabs, Normans, and French, to name a few. When the invaders were finally cast out in the nineteenth century, the southern regions of Italy did not escape oppression - this time from the northern Romans and Neapolitans. This is to say nothing of Sicilians, who were held in disdain by all Italians and thus trusted no one. In sum, a certain type of crime - the sort that flouts authority - was widely considered an honorable way to get ahead.
    The Italian Immigrant Experience
    Upon arrival, the Italian-Sicilian masses were met with intolerable prejudice and discrimination, which only served to enforce their fears. Considered “less than white” by fairer-skinned northern Europeans, the Italian experience most closely resembled the racism experienced by African-Americans. The respected
Washington Post
newspaper was among those justifying the prejudice: “The Germans, the Irish, and others . . . migrate to this country, adopt its customs, acquire its language, master its institutions, and identify themselves with its destiny. The Italians never. They remain isolated from the rest of any community in which they happen to dwell. They seldom learn to speak our tongue, they have no respect for our laws or our form of government, they are always foreigners."
    From their arrival in the 1890s through at least 1915, Italians were regularly lynched in states from Florida to Colorado. Indeed, the worst mass lynching in U.S. history involved the brutal murders of eleven innocent Italian men in New Orleans on March 14,1891. In the hysteria that followed, one of the victims’ young sons was taken to safety by a Cajun woman, who fled with the boy up the river to Chicago. That boy, Joseph Bulger