Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 37, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 May 1905 — RIOTS IN CHICAGO. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

RIOTS IN CHICAGO.

CITY'S BTREETS ARE SCENEB OP WILD DISORDER. Mobs Spread Terror and Strike Breakers March. Through Hail of Bnlleta and Missies—Merchants Demand Protection of Law, Including Soldiers. The most viojent disturbances that have been known in Chicago since the American Railway Union strike of

1894 have marked the bitter progress of the teamsters' conflict. From dawn until long after sun(l o w n Wednesday there occurred a continuous series of riots, and all manner of brutality. The union pickets, strikers and

sympathizers assailed the hosts of negroes and other non-union men who have been brought into the service of the employers. And the negroes, armed and desperate, responded in kind. The net result Is the third death directly traceable to the strike, and a list »f injured that may furnish other fa:alities. Tlje police estimate that if ;he wounded were all known they would number a hundred. Chicago pa)ers print a list of more than sixty.

among whom are a Presbyterian minister and a Catholic priest. Frank Curry, the nonnnion generalissimo, himself was badly injured. Hihead was erackej by bricks thrown it him in the disturbances, and he was reported In a

Titieal condition at the hospital, sur;eons almost despairing of his recovery. The business men Wednesday afternoon decided upon an appeal to Governor Charles S. Deneen to order out the troops, and the Mayor prepared a request to Sheriff Barrett to swear in probably 2,000 add/tional deputy sheriffs to supplement the efforts of the

police. The climax of the rioting which forced the employers to act was a murderous attack with revolvers made in an attempt to murder United States Express Company guards. It emphasized Wednesday the degree of venom that has developed in Chicago's great teamsters' strike. From hours before dawn all through the day there was terrific rioting, in which more than a score of men were injured, some of them perhaps fatally. In downtown streets, and both south and west, there were furious battles Gov. Deneen refused to send militia until the demand for them should reach him through the proper legal channels. After a three-hour conference In Springfield Thursday evening with a committee of twelve leading merchants of Chicago, the Governor maintained his position that he could act only in certain-contingencies, which had riot yet arisen. Those “contingencies” were believed to be a call from Sheriff Barrett for State troops to aid kijn and his deputies in quelling riot and disorder. Mayor Dunne strenuously opposed this plan, saying the police were sufficient as well as efficient. .

The passing of the twenty-seventh day of the strike developed, aside from the announcement of the Governor'* attitude toward the troops question, a strained situation, with the city hal and the police force on one side anc 1 Sheriff Barrett and the Employers’ As sociation on the other. Early in the day. answering the call of business men. the sheriff began to swear Jn special deputies and place them In service. This action aroused Instant hostility in Mayor Dunne’s and Chief O’Neill’s camp.

Shooting, slugging, an attempt at lynching and nearly every other kind of violence of which mobs are capable or which they may incite turned nearly every downtown Chicago street into

a battlefield Tuesday, resulting in four men being shot down and nearly forty others being more or less severely injured. It was the first day of actual terror since the teamsters’ strike began, and it spread so rapidly and wlrh such spontaneity that before noon the police had been overwhelmed in their efforts to prevent the hundreds of independent drivers imported into the city from being beaten or to prevent the independent workers, frightened out of their wits by mob attacks, from drawing revolvers and magazine pistols and shooting at their tormentors. The most furious clashes came at Harrison street and Wabash avenue, Congress street and Wabash avenue. West Jackson boulevard and Ilalsted street and Market and Madison streets. In each of these encounters many shots were fired and three or four men were shot so severely that the recovery of one is considered impossible. The kingpin of it all, from the employers’ side, was Frank Curry, whose reputation as a strike breaker Is na-

tlonal. Curry had come boasting what he inteuded to do, and he found a big task cut out for him. He seemed to be everywhere at once directing the hundreds of independent meu he had brought into the city or found ready to help him when he-arrived. Not since the great railroad strike of 1-594 have the police had such furious struggles to preserve order—and the

police could not prevent clashes between the union an d Independent tollers because of the widely scattered points at which the belligerents met. There was not a conflict in which one or more heads were not broken or bruised, and in nearly every instance there was more or less shooting or display of

li rearms. Mayor Dunne ordered Chief O’Neill to draw 900 special policemen from the civil service commission list The employers Tuesday assumed a more decidedly hostile front and bogqn taking aggressive action. Four hundred and fifty strike-break-ers were sworn in as special policemen to guard the wagons of the Employers’ Teaming Company. These men, with all the power conferred by law on special policemen, and heavily armed, accompany other strike breakers and use force to protect them as well as to protect the wagons of other concerns than the Employers’ Teaming Company.

CHARLES DOLD.

C. P. SHEA.

FURIOUS FIGHT BETWEEN UNION AND NON-UNION MEN.

FRANK CURRY.

STRIKE BREAKER.