Tag: 1925 Page 2 of 4

Detroit Largest Canadian City in U.S.A. – 100,000 Canucks Living There – But Heavy Movement Across Line Is Over – They’re Coming Back Now at Rate of Eleven a Day at Windsor Border – Natural Attraction of the Big Cities, Rather Than Discontent with Canadian Conditions, Has Sent Many Young Men From Ontario Rural Districts to Detroit

By Gregory Clark, March 21, 1925.

In Detroit they call Canadians “freshwater immigrants.”

Nevertheless, Detroit is the largest Canadian city in the United States.

Canadian cities rank as follows by population: Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Hamilton, Ottawa, Detroit.

One hundred thousand is the estimate of the number of Canadian born who dwell in Detroit. Of its million population, one in ten is a Canadian. Detroit ranks as fourth city in the United States. But it is only the seventh Canadian city.

For every so many hundred square miles of the surface of the earth, there is a dominating city. Detroit is the big city of Western Ontario. What Toronto is to central Ontario and what Montreal is to the eastern townships, Detroit is to that piece of Ontario which slopes away to the southwest.

No other American city of a size sufficient to be powerfully magnetic to Canadians is located right on the border. But Detroit is within seventy-five cents of a score of Canadian villages, It is within two dollars of London. It is bigger than Canada’s biggest city.

It costs only five cents to cross the “imaginary line” on a ferry.

So to Detroit may we turn for light on the emigration of Canadians to the States with respect to which the politicians are crying out loud.

The minute you set foot in Detroit you know it is a city. Its skyscrapers have four fronts.

The sign of a city is when the city architect discovers that a skyscraper can be seen from four different directions and therefore has four fronts. Skyscrapers with one stone front and three homely brick backs are the continuation of the village institution of false-front stores – two-storey false fronts concealing a one-room shanty behind.

You step into Detroit. Its pavements are not good as Toronto’s or Barrie’s. But they are better than Montreal’s. A large bus, two touring cars and a limousine nearly run over you. With loud Canadian exclamation you hug the inside of the sidewalk. Two well-dressed panhandlers stop you boldly and touch you for a quarter apiece. They are framed, as they stand there, hands modestly extended, against a vista of beauty – ah, silver minarets against the blue, high, higher, highest skyscraper posed against skyscraper, far and away. A policeman dressed like a motorcop taps you smartly on the shoulder.

“Hey! Move on!”

Apologizing to the two handsome panhandlers for so niggardly a gift as a quarter, you move hurriedly on.

Such are your first five minutes in Detroit.

Still, Canada may well be proud of Detroit. It is a fine city.

It is the gate through which pass by far the largest number of Canadians who enter the United States for other than a mere visit. In the opinion of the United States inspector of immigration at that port, about one-quarter of all Canadians who cross the continent-wide boundary cross it at Detroit. Here, the facts of the exciting emigration of Canadians may best be dug up.

“The flood is past,” says Inspector A. M. Doig, in charge of immigration at Detroit, “From the end of the war, until 1923, the number of Canadians paying the head tax – that means those who come for a visit of more than six months – has been on the increase. It reached its peak in the year ending March, 1923. The decrease is rapid. For the past few months, the number of Canadians entering this port has fallen to what we call normal constant, an average of between thirty and thirty-five a day.

“Of course, there are local peaks during every year – one at the end of the harvest, when the farm laborers come south, and another in the spring, after the breakup in the bush, when the lumbermen and laborers come out of the Canadian bush and come down for summer work. These farm laborers and lumberjacks constitute a very large roving band who cross and recross the border.

“Of those other than seasonal workers, the peak is past, and I imagine quite large numbers of them, who have come over in the past five years, are returning to Canada.”

“Does the fact that a person pays the head tax mean that he leaves Canada for good and takes up permanent residence in the States?” we asked.

“Oh, no,” replied the inspector. “All who enter for more than a brief visit pay the $8 head tax. They may collect it again if they return to Canada within six months. Of those who pay the head tax, about 70 per cent. do not reclaim it.”

“Meaning,” we said, “that 30 per cent. do?”

“Yes. And of course we have no statistics beyond that. While we believe that a good many of that 70 per cent. who appear to have stayed actually do stay, yet the past six years have been abnormal and very unsettled, and there is room to doubt any conclusions that we may draw from general experience,” said the inspector. “But the immigration of Canadians to the States is not a new thing. It has been going on for a century. There has always been a steady trickle of Canadians over to us. They are perhaps the most desirable of all newcomers, because they are so quickly absorbed. A Canadian is the only immigrant you cannot tell from a native-born American at a glance.”

992,388 to U. S. in Decade

And here follows the rate at which Canadians have been going over the border – the whole United States border – for the past ten years:

1914	86,136
1915	82,215
1916	101,551
1917	105,399
1918	32,452
1919	57,783
1920	90,025
1921	72,317
1922	46,810
1923	117,011
1924	200,690
Ten-year total	992,383

The present slump has occurred in the fiscal year 1925, ending this month.

About 70 per cent. of these have not reclaimed their head tax. That is, they have stayed more than six months, or forgot to go to the trouble of writing and recovering the eight dollars.

It is, of course, within political license to say that the whole 992,388 have abandoned Canada. But the only facts are that 70 per cent. of that number didn’t collect their head tax. It is not safe even to assume that the whole 70 per cent. or 690,000, have stayed in the States during the past ten years.

Canada, unfortunately, has never kept tab on the number of Canadians who come back home from the States. But since the politicians who are “out” have been raising the cry of emigration to show how bad conditions are, the government has started to keep count, which shows in the last ten months that 39,000 who had taken up residence in the States had returned to Canada.

At the Detroit border, where Canadians are going over at the normal constant rate of thirty a day, they are coming back across the Windsor border at the average rate of 351 a month or eleven a day.

If Detroit were not so handy to the border, and within such easy range of western Ontario – which she drains just as normally as Toronto drains the counties all around her – would emigration to the States have been so great? Is not Detroit a special factor in the whole case, which throws out of joint all the reasoning by which emigration can be traced to business conditions?

Why does a young fellow leave Bowmanville for Toronto, Dundas for Hamilton, the Manitoba village for Winnipeg, or the little Quebec hamlet for Montreal?

In that answer, you find the junction between economics and human nature.

Big City’s Natural Attraction

Charles Mitchell, well-known Toronto man who for five years has been in Detroit organizing the Independent Order of Foresters there, is president of the Canadian Club of Detroit.

“I would estimate,” says Mr. Mitchell, “the number of Canadian-born in this city at over 80,000. And these include many who have been here since childhood. I know plenty of old men in this city who were born in Canada and came across nearly half a century ago. It is quite as logical for young men to come to Detroit as it is for young men to come to Toronto. The big city attracts. The bigger it is, the bigger the attraction. The most prosperous year Coboconk ever had probably saw some young men light out for Toronto. Economic conditions undoubtedly have something to do with migrations, of population, but don’t forget the human factor or youth in its determination to ‘see the world.’

“These figures you show seem very impressive. But do you realize that a very large part of them are farm and bush workers who follow the seasons, around; that builders and mechanics in large numbers, when the Canadian climate suspends building, come over and go to the southern states to work at their trades? And, of course, perhaps as high as 80 per cent. of the whole lot are single men, young men, free to move and therefore – moving!

“Don’t forget another thing: Canadians as workers are very highly esteemed here in the States. Bank clerks, accountants and other skilled office men in particular. Just a moment.”

And right before our eyes, Mr. Mitchell took the telephone and called up the head of a Detroit printing establishment who was known as one who favored Canadian printers above all others.

“Why is it that you prefer Canadians, and why have you a staff largely of Canadians?” Mr. Mitchell asked this gentleman, himself a native born American.

The answer taken down was this:

“They are more thorough, more reliable, a little better schooled than our own printers.”

“Why are they more reliable?”

“By that I mean that they are not so free-and-easy and off-hand as our own people. They have a better sense of responsibility in their work. They stick to the job better.”

Detroit Favors Canadians

Mr. Mitchell hung up the phone.

“You see? Democracy is a mighty fine thing. I admire it intensely. But it has its drawbacks. Canadians as a class are more conservative than Americans. Not so free-and-easy. This quality is highly prized in Detroit by business men. I can, if you like, call up bankers, business men, merchants, and all will say the same of Canadians. Now, there is another factor in the case. Not only do Canadians come here; they are wanted here.”

“But,” we said, “we can’t print a free ad. for the States like that!”

“Why not?” said Mr. Mitchell. “There are millions of Canadians who wouldn’t live in the States anyway. Oh, Canada has its advantages.”

He looked out of the window, where Detroit was beginning to make its five o’clock roar.

While there are a little under a million people in Detroit itself, there is almost another million living close around it. From towns and villages as far away as sixty miles, commuters come in every day of their lives, by two-hour steam railway journeys, to work in the city. It has a vast foreign population – other than Canadian – mostly Polish and south European, who live in communities packed all about. You can go up Toronto’s Yonge street by street car six miles. But up Woodward avenue you can go fifteen. The street numbers go to 3500 on Yonge street. But on Woodward avenue the 20,000’s are still in town.

As you get up into the five figures of street numbers you get into the three-figure values of houses. Queer little bird-boxes, close packed, with no hope, as there are in, say, Toronto’s shacktowns, of presently expanding into a brick residential district. Huge suburbs entirely of negroes. Swarming regions where even the policemen speak English with difficulty.

We Canadians have a peculiar impression that the United States is a sort of big British brother who has left home and is living by himself. It is with a peculiar apoplectic sensation that you are herded into a wicket at the Detroit border, while an Italian, wearing a blue uniform and the eagle on his cap, halts you, eyes you coldly and calculatingly, and asks you all about yourself and your assumption that you are free to go into the United States.

If you don’t look good to him, this swarthy gentleman with the flashing eye will put a head tax on you.

Thirty thousand Canadians commute daily from Windsor over to Detroit to work. And a peculiar turn of affairs is that several thousand Americans are moving across to the Canadian side to live, though their work is in Detroit.

Some of the emigration is not deliberate.

Dr. Prentiss, the director of immigration at Detroit, told us of a dentist and his wife from Nova Scotia who came on a tourist trip east as far as Detroit. They had friends in the city with whom they stayed a month. And they found an opportunity for establishing a practice in Detroit which looked good to them. So they decided to stay. But they had to return to Nova Scotia to have their passports made out.

How Population Drifts

A Guelph business man, on his way for a winter holiday in California, stopped off in Detroit to see some business friends. He played around his own line of business, and within a week saw certain chances that made him stay two and ultimately four weeks. He did not go on to California at all. He made up his mind to open a business like his own right in Detroit. He is now the head of one of the city’s thriving manufacturing firms.

“We have no end of cases,” says Dr. Prentiss, “of Canadians who came over on a holiday who remained. Of course, that is also true of Canada and our own people.”

One emigrant to the States takes another with him. That is shown in the above table of emigration for the past ten years. In the train going to Detroit we met a prominent young Ontario financial man and promoter, who has interests equally distributed in Canada and the States.

“Western Ontario,” said he, “with its natural drift of population to Detroit, its nearest big city, is one of the biggest contributors to emigration to the States. In my immediate family connection in Western Ontario there have been seven families move to Detroit. It all began with one, a printer, who went over and at once found a good job. His success inspired a cousin to do likewise. This success spread about amongst the relatives, and seven of them moved. Not all have been a success. Two have returned to Canada. But emigration moves that way. One marked success will sometimes take half the young men away from a village. But in the end there is still only the one marked success.”

It is possible those who decry this emigration to the States have some scheme whereby human nature can be muzzled and youth held down so that it will no longer want to roam and see the world.

For as far as other factors are involved, the emigration from Canada has fallen back to normal. Canadians who, in the confusion and excitement of the end of the war, when half a million ex-soldiers were cast upon a dominion all at once deflated from munitions wages, went south to where the greatest accumulation of war wealth in the world was located, are now on the home bend.

Let’s hope they are all bringing nice fat chunks of that war wealth back home with them.

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Editor’s Notes: There must have been a political issue at the time that caused this article to be written.

Coboconk is a community in the Kawartha Lakes area.

By Gregory Clark, December 12, 1925

“No Truck or Trade With the Germans,” May Be Fine Patriotic Sentiment, But Look at the Trade Figures -To-day Germany is Canada’s Third Largest Customer and the Two Countries Are Participating in the Briskest Kind of Business Relationship

Canada right now is selling to Germany eight times the quantity of goods she was selling the year the war broke out.

Germany is now Canada’s third largest customer in the whole world.

In return Canada is buying from Germany this year about half the value of goods she was buying in 1914. During the war Canada made new trade connections with the United States and Japan in those lines of goods formerly got from Germany.

Germany is rapidly getting back her old connection.

At Toronto’s biggest commercial hotel about one hundred commercial travelers and trade representatives have registered from Berlin, Frankfort, Munich and other German cities in the past twelve months.

At least an equal number of Toronto men have visited German cities in the past year on business.

Whatever resentment and bitterness may still burn in Canadian hearts against the Germans, Canadian business men have succeeded pretty well in forgetting and forgiving. Two of the largest businesses in the city of Toronto have now more representatives in Germany, on buying work, than they ever had in their history before.

This Christmas between one-third and one half the enormous number of toys that Canadian children will receive from Santa Claus will be of German manufacture. Santa Claus, that genial saint, seems to have been one of the first to forget and forgive.

In 1914 Canada sold to Germany – her highest year up to then – four million dollars’ worth of produce. The year just closing Canada is selling thirty-five millions to Germany!

That year the war broke out; Canada bought fourteen millions in goods from Germany. This year she buys nearly eight millions from Germany.

“No truck or trade with the Germans” is a patriotic sentiment. But it has no relation to the facts. Germany is right now Canada’s third largest customer in the world, to the tune of thirty-five million dollars’ worth of Canadian produce and goods.

Germany’s come back in trade with Canada has been slow but sure. In 1920 she only sold Canada forty-five thousand dollars’ worth of foods. Then –

These figures approximate. The way she has cut into the United States and Japan in recovering her lost trade with Canada is shown in these figures comparing 1920 with 1924. Toys first –

Come-back of German Toys

Nobody, it seems can make toys as good and as cheap as the Germans. Of course, the highest class of mechanical toys, dolls and expensive toys generally still come from the United States. But according to the managers of toy departments in Toronto between one-third and one-hall the toys sold in Toronto this Christmas are German toys. These toys are all clearly marked “Made in Germany.” and no effort is made by the merchants to erase or conceal the made in Germany trade mark. The number of persons who make any protest about these toys does not average one a day. The public has accepted with perfect equanimity the German toy for their children to play with.

“When we do have a kick,” said one manager, “it is from an emotional person who protests loudly. All we can do is show them the toys made in other countries. For competition has decidedly put the German toy back on the market for keeps.”

This manager showed two identical toys, a well-known child’s game. They were identical, except that the workmanship in the German one was unquestionably the better. The German toy sold for twenty-five cents, the American for sixty-five. The manager shrugged his shoulders.

“What on earth can we do about it? The public want them.”

In the case of pocket knives, Germany has cut enormously into the United States trade and to a very considerable extent into the British trade. The figures for pocket knives for the same two years are

Germany’s increase is greater than the United States’ loss.

In chemicals, scientific equipment, lead pencils, fancy goods and small ware generally the Germans are coming back at a tremendous rate.

The goods Canada is selling to Germany are largely wheat and food products.

Hatred was surely mutual during the war. Whether Germans hated Canadians as wholeheartedly as Canadians hated Germans would be a hard question to settle. Do Germans gag at Canadian wheat, bacon and butter?

Canada in some respects seems at this stage of affairs to be more British than Britain. While Toronto’s board of education constructs a tremendous row over the purchase of German drawing paper Oxford University plays a game of rugby football with a team from Frankfort university. While some of our local statesmen are making the heavens ring with their denunciation of Germans forevermore, British statesmen are staging the love feast of Locarno.

Oxford University even went the length, some two or three years ago, when wounds were still bleeding, of including on her roll of honor the names of German Rhodes scholars who fell in battle in front of British and Allied guns!

Most significant and dramatic of all occurrences was the rushing – at the request of the British Admiralty – from the German naval base in Kiel of a salvage crew to help locate the British submarine M-1 which sank off Start Point. There, over a submarine, darkest symbol of those long years of hatred, British and German sailors struggled frantically together, shoulder to shoulder.

Britons do not make any two-faced pretense at forgetting and forgiving. If they forgive, they do it in a downright way.

Strange Dilemmas of Peace

What will smooth the path of peace between Canadians and Germans? Business is doing it. Scores of Canadian business firms have entertained Germans who have come to Toronto on business. Toronto clubs have had them as guests, perhaps unwittingly. They have been guests of Toronto homes, and some of those homes had every reason to be filled with unforgiveness.

A Toronto importer received in his office a German with whom he had been corresponding and doing business for two years. They got on fine. Both were elderly.

“Look here,” said the Toronto man, “nothing would please me more than to take you to my home to dinner to-night, but as a matter of fact -er- it might be painful for us both, because I lost a son in the war, and – my wife, you know!”

The whiskered German suddenly filled with tears.

“Stop, please,” he said. “I too, lost my son and my only other son is a cripple for lite in bed. What helpless creatures we are, after all! I would not enter your house, my friend, for my own sake and for yours.”

But these two men did dine together over the Toronto man’s table. And the mother sat with them. But they did not talk of war or of sons. And one photograph that stood in the place of honor in the living room was hidden. Here is only one of the strange dilemmas of making business and making peace.

The writer has had his experience. In the rotunda of Toronto’s largest hotel, he was hailed by a friend.

“Here, I want you to meet a friend of mine,” I was introduced to a tall, good-looking follow.

“You two ought to know each other,” said the friend. “You have been pretty close to each other often enough, but I doubt if you ever met.”

The tall fellow whose name I didn’t catch smiled.

“You were both on the Avion front at the same time,” continued the introducer, grinning mischievously.

“Oh,” said I. “What unit were you with?”

“Two hundred and umpty ump Bavarians,” said the stranger.

My confusion was so comic we all had to go up to the German’s room, where we spent over two hours talking over the war from two sides of No Man’s Land.

“Where,” was one of the first questions I asked him, “did you have those internal whizz bangs that used to plaster us from short range somewhere right in the ruins of Avion?”

The German infantry officer chuckled.

“We had a couple of guns on an elevator in a mine shaft. We’d pop ’em up and loose off half a dozen rounds and then pop down again. But you got those guns at last, you know.”

“Glad to hear it!” says I.

“But tell me,” asked the German, “what the blazes were those mean, little, soft, creepy shells that used to whisper in with a sort of trickly sound and explode with an awful bang?”

“Four-five hows, I guess,” said I.

“Well,” said the German, “those shells we hated more than all the rest of your guns put together. You couldn’t hear them coming in, and there was the most awful, unexpected crump….”

Moving Picture Patriotism

Yes: he said crump. So there was the war fought over for two hours from opposite sides. And the more we talked, the more the sameness of experience grew upon us. He admitted that he hated the Canadians best of all, because we never stayed put, always raiding or patrolling, strafing and cutting up rough. I had to admit that Bavarians were livelier than the far-famed Prussian Guards, at which he looked proud and recounted some of his regiment’s most spectacular deeds. Then I told over Vimy, Passchendaele, and the famous Hundred Days. We wrangled. We disagreed. We agreed. We agreed that “how could man die better than facing fearful odds for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?” (Neither of us having died.)

This experience is befalling more and more. In the harbor of Montreal not long ago, a German ship lay loading a cargo of Canadian grain. In the same slip lay freighters from Britain, Holland, France. The sailors were lounging about the wharf, smoking, chatting, laughing, Canadians amongst them. Many of these men had seen war service on the sea, as enemies. There was no war there, and no sense of it.

Canada’s trade with Germany is not a thing of early post-war years, when Germany was in dire need of foodstuffs. The greatest increase has been this year. In 1923 Canada sold Germany twelve millions; last year, twenty millions: this year, thirty-four millions. What appears to be a valuable and permanent trade connection has been made. Germany has to pay for this year’s Canadian goods in thirty-four million dollars’ worth of something – money or goods. In the opinion of the super-patriots, is German money less tainted than German goods?

So far, no board of education or other Canadian body has published a resolution that Canada cease selling goods to Germany.

After all, in only one respect is the sentimental hatred of Germany expressed in Ontario: and that is, that no motion picture film of German origin can be shown in Ontario. The Tor onto censors, under the Provincial treasurer, do not even look at German films. Ontario is the only province in Canada that prohibits German films. It is probably the only British unit in the empire that refuses to accept German films.

German newspapers and books have free access and come with every mail to Canada. German travelers are arriving in larger numbers each month.

In business the war is really over except in certain public respects connected with the public vote.

And the outcry against German goods occurs – as anyone might have predicted – about six weeks before voting time.

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Editor’s Notes: The “love feast of Locarno” would be the Locarno Treaties signed on December 1, 1925 that normalized relations with Germany. It was likely the inspiration for this story.

Whizz Bangs were slang to describe any German artillery in WW1, while “four-five hows” would be British QF 4.5-inch howitzers.

By Gregory Clark, September 19, 1925.

It Isn’t Safe to Be a Civilian In Chicago; And It Isn’t Safe to Be a Policeman – Here Is The Great Crime City of The World – The Killings May Be Cruel or Tragic But They Frequently Have Comic-Opera Sequels

A murder a day keeps the angels away.

There are no angels in Chicago. For they have a murder a day.

Of course, it doesn’t run on a daily schedule. Some days there won’t be a murder all day. But then they make up the next day by having two or three.

A whole day will go by without a single murder. Then the Chicago papers have a peculiar bare, dumb look. Everybody sits around in a sort of hush.

But all is well. The following morning, the usual cheery world is rackety once more with news of murder.

Chicago is proud of its murder. Of course, there are those amongst the three and half million people in greater Chicago who protest that they are pained by the city’s crime record. But you will find all sorts of people in a city of that size.

You take the average taxi driver or young business man or the lady who sits at a desk on each floor of the hotel, and they will tell you first about the murder record and second about the Boulevarde.

“Chicago, you know,” says any one of them, “has a murder a day. Oh, yes! That’s more than the whole of Britain put together. Have you been on Michigan Boulevarde yet? No? Well, to-day ain’t so windy, but you take a walk along there on a windy day! My….!”

Here are the figures announced by the Chicago police for the three most popular forms of crime for the past few years. The figures are stated to be absolutely accurate. As a matter of fact, in order to get the figures right, the police hadn’t the time to capture even half the criminals involved. But the figures are right, you understand. Ab-so-lute-ly.

1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924

Murder 330 194 190 228 270 347

Burglary 6,108 5,495 4,774 4,301 3,019 2,155

Robbery 2,912 2,782 2,658 2,007 1,402 1,799

This year, so far, there have been 262 murders to date, which brings it out exactly right, a murder a day, including Sundays and holidays.

Now, you will observe from the above table that while burglary has fallen fearfully, from 6,000 to only 2,000 in six years, and robbery – which means hold-up – has been appreciably reduced, murder, on the contrary, has showed a steady increase. Murder is obviously Chicago’s pet crime. Take away their burglaries. They can do without their hold-ups. But spare them their murders. Woodman, woodman!

“There is rarely anything poetical or mysterious about Chicago murders. They are what the police call open-and-shut. A husband tires of his wife. What will he do with her? Why, shoot her. A wife grows weary of her husband, he is such a mutt. What will she do? Why, shoot him. It is far quicker than divorce, and cheaper, too.

There is the case of a man who shot his wife and married again the next day. After the police had been hunting for him for two weeks. he came back from his honeymoon and gave himself up. The trial lasted fifteen months, owing to the fact that he was a traveler and had to be on the road a great deal of the time. A lot of the witnesses went away, and those that were left had forgotten most of the facts, having got them mixed up with other murder cases they had witnessed or read of. So that finally, the judges who were trying the case failed to re-elected in the big elections, and the new judges, not knowing the first year of the case, dismissed the matter from their minds, as they wished to begin their careers with a clean sheet.

The Reward of Faith

Think of that second wife, receiving her husband back to her arms freed of all stain! Her heroism rewarded. And it was really clever of her to have gone on all that time without shooting him, until he was cleared. Now she is free to do as she likes, of course.

Jesting about murder is unseemly. But Chiago and her crime situation has reached the jesting stage. It is hard not to be jocular about Chicago’s police and judges, her crime and criminals, her social condition as a whole.

To a high police official, we put this question:

“What is the explanation of Chicago’s crime record?”

His answer:

“Politics.”

The police are appointed and controlled by the elected city officials. The judges are elected for a short term of six years. The prosecuting attorney, the clerk of the court, everybody, is elected.

Nobody can hope to be elected without the support of the bosses. Countless hundreds of good men have run for all these offices on a ticket of reform, refusing the support of the bosses. None of them ever won.

The men who chase the criminals, who catch them; the men who try the criminals, who prosecute them; all are elected. To keep their Jobs, they have to pay attention to the requirements of the bosses who virtually elected them.

What this leads to, you are not asked to guess. In 1923, there were 270 murders in Chicago. There were 135 persons tried for murder, of which 56 were sentenced to the penitentiary and 9 were sentenced to death. Of the nine, one was hanged! Seventy of those tried were acquitted.

Life, you might say, is sacred in Chicago.

One life paid for 270 lives!

If this extraordinary ratio holds good in murder, what must, the harvest be in mere property crime such as burglary and told-up? Chicago, however, seems to care more for property than for life. Because it has been the stricter application of the law in cases of burglary and hold-up that has caused the decrease in these crimes in the past five years.

The real trouble for criminals started in Chicago in 1917. One day an express company’s truck, with two armed guards aboard besides the driver, pulled up at a big munitions plant with the payroll of $9,000.

A touring car was halted at the entrance. As the express motor paused at the door, bandits in the other car fired sawed-off shot guns, killing the guards and driver, and decamped with the cash payroll. There was no hold-up. Just a flat killing.

Chicago went up in the air. This was too much. At the Chicago Association of Commerce the big business men of the city got mad. If nobody else would look out for the life and property of the city, they would. So they formed a committee of their own members to see what could be done.

The first president of this committee was Edwin W. Sims, Canadian born, a prominent lawyer and ex-judge.

In 1920, after a couple of years of discussion, this body took a charter in the state as the Chicago Crime Commission, with Colonel Henry Barrett Chamberlin, one of the original promoters of the idea, as its operating director. He was a former newspaper editor and owner, a lawyer, soldier and what not. He had a thorough knowledge of Chicago’s problem.

The first year the crime commission got busy. There were eighteen hangings in Chicago. The murder rate fell from 330 in 1919 to 194 in 1920 and 190 in 1921.

10,000 Professional Criminals

The crime commission’s method was very simple. They simply made an independent Investigation of every case, of each adjournment, and, with the power of the Association of Commerce back of them, brought the facts to notice. In the offices of the commission are files covering every crime committed in Chicago since 1920, with a record of every criminal, and of the disposition of every case. There are upward of 200,000 files in this collection.

Colonel Chamberlin, the director, says that there are about ten thousand professional criminals of all sorts in Chicago.

“That is less than a third of one per cent of the population. Yet the crime which they commit is out of every proportion with the population. In my opinion, Chicago’s unenviable crime record is due entirely to public indifference. Chicago is a careless city, not a wicked city. The problem is further complicated by the fact that there are twenty-seven nationalities making up the city, most of them creating a large enough colony to make a separate problem in itself. There are more Poles, for example, in Chicago than in any city in Poland.

“Each of these groups has brought its own social customs, its passions and habits with it. What means their police in Europe had of dealing with them the Chicago police do not know, and in any case would not likely be free to employ. They are a free people here, and freedom has its price.

“The cure of the evil,” says Colonel Cham. berlin, “lies in the administration of justice. Justice is a simple thing, intelligible to all races. But the laws of this state are in a sad state of antiquation. They need to be rewritten and revised. As they stand now, there is a loophole in every paragraph, every phrase. The law of precedent has piled up mountain high. In the state of Illinois, we are using English law, for example, that has been rejected in England for hundreds of years.”

The comical plight of the States, having got rid of the King of England but bound in a hundred ways by the will of remote kings and barons, is one that amuses Colonel Chamberlin.

“We put a bill for the revision of our criminal laws before our legislators last year, but it was thrown out by the people.”

The absurdity of the situation is shown by the bail bond system. Murderers can get bail.

Louis Bernstein, whose business was professional bondsmen for criminals, owned a building worth $25,000. On It he had a mortgage of $11,500. He had a half interest in the equity, which gave him $6,750 worth of property. With the state, his credit should have been half of that, or $3,375. Between August and February of one year Bernstein was accepted on bail bonds for offenders totaling $269,500!

And every bond was solemnly drawn on that $3,375 worth of property.

This is a sample of the loopholes and the looseness of administration of United States law which practically invites people to be crooks. It is too easy. The secret of the matter was that Bernstein controlled a big vote in the part of the city where he lived. A score of others could be quoted from Chicago records. But Bernstein’s $269,000 is the best one.

Needed: A Dictator

Some people say that criminals commit crimes in order to get away from Chicago. Chicago has hundreds of miles of cobblestone roads. Chicago has more smells than a Chinese village. Chicago has streets of houses in which people live that would not be tolerated by the Toronto health department even as stables. It has a beautiful side and a horrible side. On the way out to some of the nicest residential regions to be found on earth, Los Angeles included, you have to pass over an open drain of raw sewage as big as a river. It has a Catholic church to every square mile of city, with churches of the other forty-two denominations in proportion. But its traffic policemen bawl you out like Thames bargemen. You are likely to be spat on out of any of the handsome giant office building windows. You rent an apartment for one year; then you move out because the bedbugs have moved in.

Not a mile from its main centre you will see a pedlar shoving a rattle-trap cart and screaming:

“ZzZbissaouto!! Szchickzts!”

He is calling fruit or vegetables in one of the twenty-seven languages of the great mid-American metropolis.

It is a city to get away from, yet three and a half millions live there in pride.

Whether it is the political corruption or the indifference of the people that is the major cause of Chicago’s Gilbert and Sullivan opera plot, there is little likelihood of improvement in the lifetime of those present. In one of the municipal offices, two men were being interviewed on the subject.

“What we need,” said one, “is a benevolent despot. We ought to pick a man famous for his wisdom and character, and appoint him dictator for a time …”

“Excuse me,” broke in the other official. “But who would appoint him – the Republicans or the Democrats?”

And the circle closes.

The manager of one of Chicago’s great hotels has his opinion of crime:

“The real trouble with Chicago is that nobody gives a darn about anybody else so long as nobody interferes with him. Now, that crime you read about is all confined to the criminal classes. They don’t come up and disturb the decent people. So leave ’em alone. Let them kill each other. It is purely local.”

That appears to be the attitude of Chicago towards a murder a day.

In a theatre, the manager came in front of the curtain and announced:

“Ladies and gentlemen – there have been a number of reports of pickpockets in this theatre. Will you kindly watch your pockets and purses. The theatre cannot be responsible for any losses occurring in this manner.”

The audience, was so little impressed by this extraordinary announcement that it did not turn its head to look at its neighbors.

Chicago has roughly six thousand men on its police force. A very large number of these are employed as traffic police, and wear a khaki uniform to distinguish them from the regular police who wear blue. In the downtown district and in those regions where crime flourishes, detectives in large automobiles patrol small areas constantly day and night. They are called the “flying squad.”

In plain clothes, leaning back as comfortably as their large guns will let them, smoking cigars, these detectives roll along. eyeing the people on the sidewalks, stopping to investigate everything out of the ordinary.

The Terrible Newsboy

Following one of these cars for some distance, in a taxi, we came to a large crowd on the sidewalk, peering into an alley. Two large detectives leaped out of the car ahead, and charged the crowd like rugby players.

“What is it?” we asked our taxi driver.

“Oh, I dunno; a broker committed suicide or a girl has shot her sweetie, I suppose.”

Presently the two huge detectives came out of the mob, dragging a small boy with them. We asked some one what the trouble was.

“A newsboy using profane language,” said he.

Chicago has its thrills. We followed around in the vain hope of seeing that day’s murder. But we had to leave the flying squad talking and laughing interminably with a couple of girls at the least busy corner of their patrol area.

That day’s murder took place. It was duly chronicled in the evening papers.

In three years twenty-one policemen were shot and killed by thugs, and ninety-six persons were shot and killed by the police in the enforcement of law and order. These ninety-six were not included in the murders of those years.

The causes of the shooting of civilians by policemen as given in the police reports are illuminating: “Attempted to escape from police officer; failed to stop auto on command; resisted arrest; made move as if to draw gun when found hiding; refused to halt on order; stray bullet while dispersing gamblers.”

It isn’t safe to be a civilian in Chicago. And it isn’t safe to be a policeman. The best thing to be is a casual visitor, in the day time.

Michael Heinan, aged 17, was shot and killed by Thomas Chap, a bartender. Chap defended his action, saying that Heinan had scratched matches on the new bar and had kicked his dog. (This is on record). Chap was released on $10,000 bail, being a well known and responsible citizen.

Eight and one-half years later the Crime Commission, mulling over ancient documents, discovered this case, which had never come up to trial!

They brought it to trial. The jury dismissed Chap, on the ground that the case was so old!

“It is an axiom,” says Colonel Chamberlin, “that cases delayed one year come fifty per cent closer to acquittal. And our laws are so involved the delays in getting a case to trial are inevitable.

“On top of the technical assets to the criminal in the complexity of our laws, there has been another thing to blame, I think, in the production of this situation we find ourselves in. And that is, there has been too much mollycoddling of the criminal, of the less than one-third of one per cent of our population which is criminal. Suppose we pause in our sentimental consideration of the condition of jails and spend some time and energy in safeguarding the law-abiding citizen and the property he has acquired by honest toil!”

The best men in Chicago want their laws rewritten and revised, want the police and judicial system remodelled to take it out of political grasp, want the United States brought up to date from the time they threw kings over board. They want to get rid of King John and the barons.

But what Chicago wants is not what its best men want, necessarily. The big city still lifts its gigantic towers and colossal smells to the marvelling sky. They still sell the Wrigley building to visitors from Canada and the sticks. And they provide their one-a-day.

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Editor’s Note: Even at the time, people were fascinated with the prohibition-era crime of Chicago, and its mobsters like Al Capone.