Free P.S. by Studs Terkel

unions, fiercely battling against the Pullman Palace Car Company. Pullman organized the ideal town for his good honest workman. No Irish allowed. The Irish were the blacks of their day. It was said of the Irish: coal in the bathtub, promiscuous, living on the dole—all the earmarks stereotypically associated with black people. That was a battle.
    And of course there was 1886, the fight for an eight-hour workday. The first time that phrase was ever used anywhere in the world was in Chicago when local anarchists and others gathered to campaign for it. There was a meeting. The rains came heavily. The speakers went home, the mayor, Carter Harrison, a good man, was there on horseback and saw that all was quiet. Most of the crowd had dispersed when someone, we don’t even know who, threw a bomb. It killed several police officers and some laymen. The hysterical headlines of the local papers all said: “Hang Them!” The case caused indignation
the world over, from Leo Tolstoy to Mahatma Gandhi to George Bernard Shaw.
    Several enlightened industrialists were for commuting the sentence. But the merchant prince, Marshall Field I, with his white mustache pointing heavenward, said, “Hang the Bastards!” and they did.
    There was also 1937, the Memorial Day Massacre, when the strikers of Republic Steel Company gathered for a mass meeting. The weather was fine; it was a perfect day for a picnic. Men brought their wives and children for a parade and mass rally. But five hundred policemen were stationed there, fully armed with guns loaded with real bullets. As the marchers, singing, made their way toward the plant, the cops began whaling away with their billy clubs. Panic. And then the cops started shooting. Ten men were shot in the back. Killed. Over a hundred wounded. There were strikes by the score in Chicago.
    As for the black man, great as the opportunities were at the time for jobs, especially in the stockyards, the black man found few openings. Even Lake Michigan was divided. A young black kid happened to swim past the invisible division line. He was shot and killed, sparking the race riot of 1919. Martin Luther King Jr. visiting Chicago made an astonishing discovery: that where he had traveled was more dangerous than Birmingham and Bull Connor’s dogs. A rock struck Dr. King and left him with a bruise as a fond keepsake of Chicago.
    So there you have it. Chicago’s god is Janus of two faces. The one that says come on here, there are jobs, all hands wanted. And the other that says, not you, you stay away.

JANUS: SOME PORTRAITS FROM MEMORY
    IT WAS THE MOST SEGREGATED of all northern cities.
    You must understand that our god is different from all others. We worship Janus, the two-faced deity. There is a full human being here, his sunny and his dark side: his life-liness and his necrophia. Former governor George Ryan, imprisoned in a state penitentiary for malfeasance in office, is a likely candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. He struck the first blow against capital punishment and cleaned out the death cell allowing the condemned a new trial on the basis of the DNA evidence. Some who were due to be executed were freed, innocent of any crime.
    Harold Washington was to become our first black Mayor in the country’s most segregated northern city. After an unprecedented brutal campaign, he was easily reelected. A great many white voters were impressed that the trains ran on time and the garbage was picked up regularly.
    Let’s continue with Janus, the god of two faces. I worked with both sides of that Janus. One was my raffish colleague Vincent De Paul Garrity and the other was my sound engineer Frank Tuller. They represented all of Janus I needed to know, Chicago clout and innocents.

Vince Garrity, 1974
    SQUINTY - EYED THROUGH THICK - LENSED GLASSES. Short, squat, with intimations of a potbelly. No Robert Redford, this one. So what? He was a celebrity in his hometown. It’s what he had in mind from the very first: that summer