As Chicago braces for troops, a reminder — soldiers have been here before, and often made things worse

A member of the National Guard patrols Madison Street on the West Side on April 6, 1968, after civil unrest in the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 

Chicago Sun-Times archive

     Chicago began with soldiers.
     Capt. John Whistler, to be precise, an Irishman who fought with the British during the Revolutionary War. After the peace, he joined the United States Army and was sent to the western frontier, which at the time was Indiana.
     There he helped build Fort Wayne. In the summer of 1803, he and his company of the 1st United States Infantry were dispatched to build a new fort at the mouth of the Chicago River, named after Thomas Jefferson's secretary of war, Henry Dearborn.
     A small settlement grew around the stockade. Then, on Aug. 15, 1812 the garrison's 66 soldiers tried to evacuate Fort Dearborn, joined by 15 friendly Miami, plus nine women and 18 children. They ran into an ambush of 500 Potawatomi warriors. Two-thirds were killed.
     That first military effort in Chicago — for years called the Fort Dearborn Massacre, but really a battle, a minor skirmish in the War of 1812 that went very badly for one side — was a mixed bag. The Army's presence planted the seeds of the city. They also got its residents killed by mishandling relations with the local Native Americans.
     The history of American soldiers in Chicago — about to get a significant new chapter with President Donald Trump planning to deploy the National Guard to the city — is also checkered.
     At times, soldiers provide a welcome, calming presence, such as during the 1919 race riots, when they created a buffer between Chicagoans bent on murdering each other because of the color of their skin. At times, they made matters worse, such as during the 1894 Pullman Strike, when their arrival — despite the governor's objections — sparked days of deadly rioting.
     Troops trampled American freedoms. One of the nation's worst cases of journalistic suppression happened in Chicago during the Civil War at the point of a bayonet. But soldiers also protected those rights, or tried to.
     In July 1951, Gov. Adlai Stevenson called out 300 members of the Illinois National Guard. Each was issued two rounds of ammunition, told not to shoot unless ordered and sent to Cicero, where a mob was rampaging around the home of Harvey E. Clark, a CTA bus driver whose family would have been the town's first Black residents.
     Except their potential neighbors rioted instead, trashing not only their apartment, but the building it was in. The Guard used tear gas; six Guard personnel were injured, four rioters were cut by bayonets. Young Guardsmen got a life lesson in hate, Chicago style.
     "I didn't think there were people like we saw last night," one admitted the next day.
     Military force isn't consistently effective. In April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., President Lyndon Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act, which Trump has threatened to do. Thousands of soldiers patrolled the West Side, but were deployed too late, or in the wrong locations, to keep Madison Street from burning down.

Dispatching troops as a show of power

     Sending in troops as a vindictive show of power is nothing new. On June 3, 1863, two companies of the 65th Illinois Infantry marched out of Camp Douglas to the offices of the Chicago Times — no relation to the Sun-Times, thank goodness, as it was a Confederate-sympathizing scandal sheet run by an odious bigot, Wilbur Storey.
     Gen. Ambrose Burnside, chafing at recent Union defeats, decreed that "declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed" and closed down the Times, citing its "repeated expression of disloyalty and incendiary statements," though the paper referring to him as the "butcher of Fredericksburg" might have also been a factor.
     That night, thousands of Chicagoans gathered to protest this "spectre of military despotism." The next day, President Abraham Lincoln rescinded Burnside's order.

To continue reading, click here.