City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago Read Online Free Page B

be asked numerous times over the next days, as the people of Chicago learned the details of what had happened that afternoon. The crash of the Wingfoot Express —the first major aviation disaster in the nation’s history—had taken the lives of more than a dozen people, while injuring dozens more, and had brought utter panic to the heart of the second largest city in thecountry. To many, it was unthinkable that such a thing could occur, that people quietly conducting their business in a downtown bank could suddenly find themselves in the midst of a hydrogen-fueled inferno. Chicago had recently come through a world war and an influenza epidemic relatively unscathed. But in the new age of twentieth-century technology, there were exotic new dangers to fear, new sources of turmoil to be reckoned with. 17
    What no one could possibly realize at the time, however, was that the turmoil of the summer of 1919 had just begun. Over the next weeks, Chicago would plunge headlong into a crisis of almost unprecedented proportions, suffering an appalling series of trials that would push the entire city to the edge of civic disintegration. A population so recently preoccupied with fighting an enemy abroad would suddenly find no shortage of enemies within its own ranks, threatening residents’ homes, their jobs, even their children. The result would be widespread violence in the streets, turning neighbor against neighbor, white against black, worker against coworker, while rendering the city’s leaders helpless to maintain order. The Red Summer, as it would later be called, would leave Chicago a changed and chastened city, its greatest ambitions for the future suddenly threatened by the spectacle of a community hopelessly at war with itself.
    All of this would happen over just twelve days. In retrospect, the crash of the Wingfoot Express —as horrifying as it may have seemed on that warm July evening—would come to be regarded as the least of the city’s woes.





E ARLY ON FRIDAY MORNING , Muriel Fitzgerald was released from Women’s Detention House No. 1 and escorted to a police vehicle waiting at the curb. The day was already hot, with temperatures forecast to climb into the mid-nineties after several days of temperate highs in the seventies and low eighties. Once inside the vehicle, the prisoner was driven north through crowded streets to the Chicago Avenue police station, where she would be questioned by Captain Ernest Mueller and several detectives.
    By prior arrangement, John Wilkinson was seated in the office when she arrived. Mrs. Fitzgerald immediately ran to him and put her hands on the stricken man’s shoulders. “Oh, Mr. Wilkinson, I don’t know where your little girl is,” she cried. “I feel so sorry for you and would do anything in the world to help you find her.”
    Unmoved, Wilkinson reached up and removed her hands from his shoulders.
    Apparently upset by this rebuff, she turned to Captain Mueller and said, “When I [first] received word that my husband was in trouble, knowing his weakness as I do, I was positive that it was in connection with some little girl.…”
    “Do you think your husband guilty then?” asked one of the detectives.
    “What can I believe?” she exclaimed. “All evidence shows that he is guilty. [But] he needs someone to stand by him.” After a pause, she reconsidered: “I cannot think of him having strength of mindenough to murder a child.” She proceeded to tell them the story of her marriage—how she and Fitzgerald were wed when she was just seventeen and he was over thirty. “I knew of my husband’s having trouble. My life with him has been a living hell since I discovered his weakness.… He is subnormal, and I have not lived with him as his wife for seven years. But I always have been kind to him, and he needs my help more than ever.”
    She burst into tears then. “I have been living in horror,” she cried, “and dreaded this very thing would happen.” 1
    But what