Harry Targ
Protestors demonstrating
against ICE and National Guard deployment gather Downtown on Oct. 8, 2025.
( Credit: Mustafa
Hussain for Block Club Chicago)
From Carl Sandburg “Chicago,” 1914
(HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight
Handler;
Stormy, Husky, Brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders)
As I watch from afar the efforts of the ICE armies and the National Guard to invade my hometown, Chicago, I weep from within and at the same time think back to the history of the city with pride. The proud thoughts come from the education, formal and informal, I received about my hometown (an education incidentally that President Trump and his rightwing followers want to expunge from public discourse).
Sandburg correctly identified the centrality of Chicago for the growing national political economy of the late 19th century and what followed. Chicago became the center of continental distribution of goods with the construction of the railroad system. Agricultural goods were transported eastward from the rail hub of Chicago and goods produced in the East were moved westward across the continent. The “hog butcher” referred to the emerging meat processing, with the invention of the refrigerated railroad car, and continental distribution. With the meat packing industry came finance, manufacturing, and architectural innovations. The Chicago ruling class wanted the world to know of the city’s centrality to the new world order of capitalist innovation and architecture and put together the World’s Fair of 1892, celebrating the 400 years since Columbus “discovered” America.
But big capital did not qualitatively change the
United States alone through its Chicago venue. Also, Chicago was the site of
the mobilization of the modern working class. The eight-hour day movement
culminated in 1886 with the Haymarket Affair, protestors victimized by
violence, and their leaders tried, and some hanged for phony allegations of
violence. Almost a decade later, 1894, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to
Pullman to break the Eugene Debs led, railroad workers strike. Meanwhile, Hull
House which opened in 1889 by Jane Addams offered social services to the poor
and immigrants.
Despite the victimization of the working class in the
city, workers’ movements grew. The IWW was founded to organize the working
class in a convention held in the city in 1905.
Men’s clothing workers walked out of manufacturing facilities to protest
wage cuts in 1909. Members of the Socialist Party met in the city before and during
World War One.
And in the Depression years workers associated with
the new Communist Party launched Unemployment Councils to protect workers from
evictions. And CIO organizing, occurring all around the country, was visibly manifested
in the packinghouses and farm equipment manufacturing plants in and near the
city. Chicago, along with being a hub of big capital, was also a major site of working-class
militancy.
After World War Two, Chicagoans were both on the side
of urban racial segregation and militantly opposed to it. Meatpacking union
locals and unions in steel, auto, and farm equipment manufacturing participated
in the rising national civil rights movements in the 1950s and 1960s. And in
addition, Bronzeville artists and musicians, the Nation of Islam, and the Black
Panther Party, the Young Patriots, and the Young Lords were leading players in
the Northern struggles against racism. And the 1968 Democratic convention
symbolized the congeries of ruling class violence and resistance that
epitomized US political history.
So today, Chicago is again a visual manifestation of
political struggle. The Trump Administration and the Right seek to crush the
residues of progressivism that still exist in multi-cultural, class conscious,
and racially diverse venues. If the resistance that has represented the best in
the US experience can be crushed in Chicago, the thinking goes, then the entire
nation can be controlled.
