When John F. Kennedy became president, he preferred an inner circle of thinkers above partisans. Kennedy then appointed Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian, as special assistant to the president. Schlesinger provided unmatched historical insights into every crisis that the Kennedy administration faced.
If President Donald Trump had a resident historian like Schlesinger, after threatening to send federal troops into Chicago to combat an “out-of-control crime problem,” he would have been reminded of President Grover Cleveland’s mistake in 1894.
The Panic of 1883, a devastating economic downturn that affected every sector of the American economy, prompted the Chicago-based Pullman Company, which manufactured railroad cars, to reduce wages by 30 percent. Pullman’s employees lived in company settlements and shopped at company-owned stores, but Pullman did not reduce rent or store prices.
These business decisions ignited protests against Pullman.
Pullman responded by firing anyone who protested. The mass terminations led to the formation of the American Railway Union. The wage problem remained unresolved the following year. Pullman refused to negotiate. The union declared a national strike, making it impossible for the railroad to operate. Pullman hired replacement workers, resulting in violent clashes between strikers and replacement workers on the Chicago streets.
President Cleveland’s cabinet informed him that the strikers had no right to prevent their replacements from working. To stop the strikers’ “reign of terror,” President Cleveland deployed 12,000 federal troops to Chicago.
The American Railway Union believed the troops were sent to keep the peace, but when the troops arrived, the union realized that the military’s aim was to keep the trains running.
Rioting ensued.
When Illinois Governor John Altgeld discovered that the president sent troops into Chicago without his authorization, he demanded an immediate evacuation.
Altgeld told the president: The local officials have been able to handle the situation. It’s not soldiers that the railroad needs but men to operate the trains. To absolutely ignore local government when it is amply able to enforce the law not only insults the people of the state by imputing to them an inability to govern themselves or an unwillingness to enforce the law, but it is also in violation of a basic principle of our institutions. The question of federal supremacy is in no way involved. No one disputes it for a moment, but, under our constitution, federal supremacy and local self-government must go hand-in-hand, and to ignore the latter is to do violence to the constitution.
President Cleveland replied: Federal troops were sent to Chicago in strict accordance with the Constitution. Upon competent proof that conspiracies existed against commerce between the states, the presence of federal troops was deemed not only proper but necessary, and there has been no intention to interfere with local authorities in preserving the peace of the city.
Altgeld responded: Your answer evades the question at issue—that is, the principle of self-government is just as fundamental as federal supremacy. You assume the Executive has a legal right to order federal troops into any community of the United States whenever there is the slightest disturbance and that the Executive can do this without any regard to whether that community can enforce the law itself. This assumption means that the president can send federal troops into any community in the United States at his pleasure and keep them there as long as he chooses. If this assumption is considered law, then the principle of self-government either never existed in this country or has been destroyed.
On July 4, 1894, rioters derailed railroads and set fire to railcars, leading federal soldiers to open fire. When the shooting stopped, 26 people were dead.
Returning to the present, over Labor Day weekend in Chicago there were at least 58 shootings, with 8 people killed. Trump branded Chicago the most violent city in the world, and he added that Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker sorely needed help, but Pritzker didn’t recognize it yet.
What were Labor Day weekends like in Chicago during Trump’s first term?
In 2017, CBS News Chicago reported 7 dead and 42 wounded. In 2018, the Chicago Sun-Times said there was a drop in shootings—4 people were killed, and 23 were wounded. They also reported that the Chicago Police Department attempted to reduce gun violence over the holiday weekend. The police conducted a series of raids that resulted in several arrests and the seizure of several guns. Chicago’s Police Department also deployed an additional 1,400 officers to patrol the streets over the weekend. In 2019, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that in August the city saw its lowest number of murders and shootings since 2011, but during September’s Labor Day weekend, 8 were killed and 43 were wounded. In 2020, 8 were dead, and 48 were wounded, but this time five of the wounded were under 18 years old.
The violence was the same then as it is now, and Trump made no mention of sending federal troops to combat crime in Chicago—because deterring crime in a city is not a military operation, and the current levels of violence in Chicago are no reason for Illinois to submit to federal authority.
Gov. Pritzker stated that Trump’s proposed troop deployment was unprecedented, unwarranted, illegal, and un-American; if he had a resident historian, they would have reminded him to quote Altgeld because Trump’s proposed deployment also “does violence to the constitution” by undermining the principle of local and state self-government.
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