Chicago’s Anarchists Shape the Police Department

This chapter examines how the Chicago Police Department was transformed by its struggle with the city's anarchist and socialist movement during the 1870s and 1880s. Compared with the department's interaction with the wider labor movement and the working class generally, the relationship between the police and the militant workers' organizations varied solely in degree. The police and the anarchists consistently faced each other with unmistakable hostility. The first real mass confrontation between the anarchists and the police took place during the 1877 upheaval, when the police broke up their meetings with violence. But in the 1880s, the anarchist organizations grew rapidly in size and increasingly set themselves against the police. This chapter shows that the conflict between the police and the anarchists shaped the development of the Chicago Police Department, in part due to the threat of mass strikes, riots, and revolution that pushed the city's elite to seek a strong force that could be relied on to respond to the workers' movement.