Class turmoil, labor, and law and order in Chicago

In this book, Sam Mitrani cogently examines the making of the police department in Chicago, which by the late 1800s had grown into the most violent, turbulent city in America. Chicago was roiling with political and economic conflict, much of it rooted in class tensions, and the city's lawmakers and business elite fostered the growth of a professional municipal police force to protect capitalism, its assets, and their own positions in society. Together with city policymakers, the business elite united behind an ideology of order that would simultaneously justify the police force's existence and dictate its functions.

Tracing the Chicago police department's growth through events such as the 1855 Lager Beer riot, the Civil War, the May Day strikes, the 1877 railroad workers strike and riot, and the Haymarket violence in 1886, Mitrani demonstrates that this ideology of order both succeeded and failed in its aims. Recasting late nineteenth-century Chicago in terms of the struggle over order, this insightful history uncovers the modern police department's role in reconciling democracy with industrial capitalism.

| Cover Title Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. Drunken Immigrants, Businessmen's Order, and the Founding of the Chicago Police Departmen Chapter 2. Paternalism and the Birth of Professional Police Organization Chapter 3. The Police and the First May Day Strike for the Eight-Hour Day Chapter 4. The Native-Born Protestant Elite's Bid for Control in the 1870s Photo insert Chapter 5. 1877 and the Formation of a Law-and-Order Consensus Chapter 6. Carter Harrison Remakes the Chicago Police Department Chapter 7. Chicago's Anarchists Shape the Police Department Chapter 8. The Eight-Hour Strikes, the Haymarket Bombing, and the Consolidation of the Chicago Polic Epilogue: The Pullman Strike and the Matrix of State Institutions Notes Index | "A fine contribution to police history. Recommended."—Choice

"The author tells a compelling story. Richly researched and nicely written it can be recommended to all interested in Chicago political labor history. It shows how the police were created and developed due to immigrant workers and new ideologies finding their way in America."—Journal of Illinois History
"A valuable, well-informed examination of the formative period in the development of the American police."—The Journal of American History

|Sam Mitrani is a professor of history at the College of DuPage.