“Chicago Tonight” also posted a gallery of some of the postcard art featured in Picturing Illinois.

Q: What is your definition of organized crime?

Lombardo: I use the term organized crime to define the political corruption that afforded protection to gambling, prostitution, and other vice activity in large American cities from the second half of the nineteenth century until the end of the twentieth century.

Q: Conventional wisdom traces the roots of organized crime in large U.S. urban centers to the Sicilian mafia. What’s wrong with this paradigm?

Lombardo: Tracing organized crime to the South of Italy ignores the historical record. Organized crime in Chicago existed before Italian immigration, and it existed in Chicago’s black community independent of Italian participation for a period of almost 50 years. Additionally, much of the information upon which this “importation” model is based comes from popular, non academic sources.

Q: When did reports of organized crime first surface in Chicago?

Lombardo: In 1873 Michael Cassius McDonald organized Chicago’s saloon and gambling interests into “Mike McDonald’s Democrats,” and elected their own candidate, Harvey Colvin, Mayor of Chicago. With Colvin in office, McDonald organized the first criminal syndicate in Chicago composed of both gamblers and compliant politicians.

Q: Al Capone is synonymous with “Chicago mafia.” Are there more influential figures about which the general public is unaware?

Lombardo: Mike McDonald for sure, but also Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly. Kelly “franchised” all vice activity in Chicago to the Capone Syndicate during the 1940s.

Q: Do related crime syndicates still operate in Chicago today?

Lombardo: There may be some bookmakers and old-time gangsters still around, but traditional organized crime in Chicago is largely a thing of the past. The Chicago Outfit as the progeny of the old Capone Syndicate is almost dead. They have been destroyed by law-enforcement efforts.

Q: What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Lombardo: What I found most interesting was the untold story of Lt. Joe Morris and the Chicago Police Scotland Yard detail under Mayor Kennelly. Had they not been disbanded by Richard J. Daley, they would have drove the Chicago Outfit out of town.

The University of Chicago, ca. 1935. Max Rigot Selling Co., Chicago (#272); C. T. American Art. Courtesy of Curt Teich.

Taken from Picturing Illinois: Twentieth-Century Postcard Art from Chicago to Cairo (University of Illinois Press, October 2012).  Previous postcards here, here, here,  here, here, here, and here.

Over the next two weeks we will feature one postcard per day from the book. The above image is State Street subway ca. 1945. A. C. Co. (#217).

In The Haymarket Conspiracy, Messer-Kruse thoroughly debunks the dominant narrative through which most historians interpret the Haymarket Bombing and Trial of 1886–87.

Here is Dissent‘s dissenting book review, and Messer-Kruse’s response.

Last week, as the strike was suspended, he participated in a round table on Chicago Newsroom. Watch the episode here.

This week Professor Ashby was interviewed by University of Illinois’s News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora.  He discussed the outcomes of the strike,

“The union got a 7 percent raise over 3 years, instead of the original offer of 2 percent. . . .

The union won the hiring of 600 additional teachers in art, music, physical education and other subjects. . . .

The board agreed to put it in the contract that textbooks will be available to students on the first day of school. . . .

The union sought but did not succeed in pressuring the Chicago Public Schools board to reduce class size. But the contract would maintain limits on class size.”

He also talked about strategies the union used to educate and mobilize not only its members, but the Chicago public. Read more of the interview here, and read more about an earlier successful union negotiation in Illinois in Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement.

“Jones’ wields his hatchet with a particularly clumsy swing when he is compelled to misquote a passage from my book in order to depict me as some sort of neo-con:

‘Demonstrating his enmity toward the defendants, Messer-Kruse asserts that modern Americans should abide by the assumptions of a flawed nineteenth-century legal system explicitly designed to protect plutocratic interests. “According to the law that was operative at the time of the Haymarket trial,” he writes, “the most relevant act was not the throwing of the bomb” but the plotting of the demonstrations that resulted in violence. If prosecutors at the time had employed a standard as lax as Messer-Kruse advocates today, every labor activist in Chicago would have been as legally culpable for the attack as the individual bomber.’

Here is the actual quotation from p. 14 of my book:

‘According to the law that was operative at the time of the Haymarket trial, the most relevant act was not the throwing of the bomb but the meeting at which this attack was planned.’

…

(Note that in order to twist my words, Jones elides the end of my quote which would have clarified my meaning had he included it.)”

Read more about The Thai Jones Hatchet Job for Dissent.

Chicago Tribune: “Unlike the Harlem Renaissance, from about 1919 to the mid-1930s, the Chicago movement didn’t have as its face such well-known intellectuals as W.E.B. Du Bois. Chicago artists didn’t have relatively large numbers of wealthy white patrons who helped to support their art. In addition, Chicago, unlike New York, wasn’t the publishing mecca of the country, so artists and their work weren’t as readily introduced to a national audience.

But Chicago was a mecca in other ways.”