“A Montstrous Doctrine” - Chicago’s Lager Beer Riot

By Paul Durica


Less than a decade before the start of the Civil War, the office of the mayor of Chicago did not generate much controversy. Since incorporation, a steady succession of businessmen had fulfilled the post and pursued, more or less, the interests of businessmen. This changed when the American Party, backed by the Chicago Tribune, came into power in 1855,gaining control of both the Common Council and the mayor’s office. The new mayor, unlike his predecessors, was not a businessman. He was not a transplanted Easterner. The new mayor was a doctor, had grown up in the wilds of Kentucky, and had as his great-uncle the famed frontiersman Daniel Boone. Mayor Levi Boone was a man. He was an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-Mason man. And he intended to improve the character of his growing city by limiting its access to drink—in particular, to beer.


At his inaugural address, given before the Common Council on March 13, Boone made his intentions clear. “The friends of temperance and humanity generally,” he said, “came with as firm if not as boisterous a front to my support.” He intended to reward this support by enforcing the Sunday closing laws on bars and saloons. He also increased the cost of liquor licenses from $50 to $300, and these licenses were now valid for three months rather than a full year. The new ordinances did not meet with favor from the rising working class Irish and German populations, who resided north and South of City Hall. The men in these communities labored six days a week and looked forward to their Sunday leisure and libations. To these individuals, Boone’s anti-booze crusade seemed to disproportionally affect their beverage of choice, beer. For this reason, the Mayor’s proposals could be understood as an attack on working people and the foreign-born. Their saloons, barrelhouses, and beer gardens served as important social centers. Now these would become centers for political agitation and revolt.


The Irish and German citizens of Chicago had good reason to be wary of Boone’s policies. The American Party is better remembered by their colloquially used name, the Know-Nothings, since it was reported that if one asked a member anything about the party, he’d reply, “I know nothing.” When contemporary commentators are searching for a historical analogue to the Tea Party movement, they often reference the Know-Nothings. Pervasive fear, leading to anger and reaction, seems to be what unites these political movements separated by more than a century. The Know-Nothings came into being just as industrialism started hit-ting its stride in the United States. Party members feared economic and political dispossession but what really had them worried was the changing character of the nation. Suddenly, there appeared across the country all of these Irish and Germans—so many papists and socialists, with their odd customs, ways of speaking, and palates. Mayor Boone was a teetotaler; he was also a Kentuckian. He knew that a true American preferred bourbon to beer.

In his address, Boone made the sort of move that Republican politicians of the contemporary moment have perfected. He stated that the Know-Nothing label had been applied to him by his opponents; he wasn’t a member of the movement, but nonetheless he sympathized with its aims. He also claimed to hold no prejudices against foreign-born citizens of Chicago. But near the end of his speech, he refined this position:

When, however, I come to count the true friends of our country, and those to whom our institutions may be safely committed, I am frank to confess, gentlemen, and I know many, both of native and foreign birth, who think with me, I cannot be blind to the existence in our midst of a powerful politico-religious organization, all its members owning, and its chief officers bound under an oath of allegiance to the temporal, as well at the spiritual supremacy of a foreign despot, bolding avowing the purpose of universal dominion over this land, and asserting the monstrous doctrine, that this is an end to be gained, if not by other means, by coercion and at the cost of blood itself. Against such doctrines and such schemes, gentlemen, I wish to be known as taking my stand, and to their defeat I must cheerfully consecrate my talents, my property, and if need be my life.

For Catholics in Chicago, it didn’t take a lot of reading between the lines to figure out what Boone meant by a “powerful politico-religious organization” headed by a “foreign despot.” The anti-booze ordinances and Boone’s subsequent decision to restrict city jobs, in particular within the police department, to native-born citizens, clarified his position. Unfortunately for Boone and his American Party supporters, they would have to contend with more-than-irate Catholics.


When Boone took office in May 1855, the nation’s preference in alcoholic beverages was undergoing a radical change. It’s difficult to imagine a time when beer could be considered un-American, particularly for contemporary Chicagoans who encounter Old Style and Schlitz signs as frequently as they do pigeons. But in the mid-nineteenth century, beer proved difficult to preserve, and barley was hardly a bump-er crop. English style ales were produced in some cities—and no less an American than Ben Franklin liked to make a corn-based brew—but ciders and whiskeys dominated the nation’s drinking practices. In the 1840 presidential election, William Henry Harrison was not someone you wanted to have a beer with; instead, his supporters touted him as the “Hard Cider Candidate.” All of this changed with the arrival of large numbers of Irish and Germans accustomed to drinking beer. Situated between a river and a lake, Chicago proved ideal for the brewing of beer. In neighborhoods like Bridgeport on the South Side and all throughout areas north of the river, saloons and beer gardens began to appear in numbers that matched the rising tide of immigrants. By the early 1850s, one fifth of the city’s population was Ger-man-born. They liked lager beer.

In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had written of a “spectre . . . haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.” What they could not predict at the time is that with the failure of revolutions in Germany and elsewhere, this haunting would materialize in the United States. A year after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, Henry David Thoreau produced his essay on “Civil Disobedience.” The Irish and German communities of Chicago had ample models for resisting the policies put in place by Boone. When the Sunday closing and liquor license laws went into effect, several tavern owners ignored them. They were fined and, in some cases, arrested. This set the stage for trials that would serve as test cases. When the dates of these cases were announced, that also provided opponents of the laws a moment to assemble and protest. On Saturday, April 21, in the early afternoon, scores of angry Germans and Irish from the North Side began to march toward the courthouse.

The same river that made Chicago an ideal location for the brewing of beer also offered Mayor Boone a natural defense. Before angry imbibers could reach the courthouse, they had to cross the water. All the Mayor had to do was order the bridge at Clark Street to be raised. This allowed the equally motley group of Chicago’s defenders—native-born police officers and deputized citizens, and, somewhat later, a detachment of National Guards-men—to position themselves in relative safety. According to the Chicago Daily Journal, “at a concerted signal, a hand-kerchief was waved by a German and an indiscriminate firing commenced, some eight or ten shot being exchanged in rapid succession.” Within minutes the event that would be-come known as the Lager Beer Riot had ended.

It was not without its casualties. Police officer George Hunt received a load of buckshot, courtesy of a fowling rifle, in his left arm; the limb had to be amputated. His assailant, Peter Marsden, a shoemaker, was shot in the back while trying to flee. Two businessmen, including John Hume Kedzie, after whom a street in Chicago is named, happened to be struck by stray bullets. An Irishman, James Farrell, had his nose broken. And then there were the arrests. Nine agitators had been taken in earlier in the day for protesting outside the courthouse. Among them was a Dr. Larue who, according to the Daily Journal, had urged Germans to “turn out and show their strength on the day of the trials.” By the end of the afternoon, forty-seven more men, mostly Irish and German laborers, would be taken into custody. The greatest casualty, however, would prove to be Mayor Boone’s administration.

When the next round of municipal elections arrived, Boone decided not to run. The Germans and Irish, who had previously not taken much interest in local politics, turned out in force. Democrat Thomas Dyer became the mayor, and the unpopular Sunday closing and liquor license laws were no longer enforced or rescinded. Over time, the Germans and the Irish exerted more and more political influence. Radical elements within both communities took part in the 1877 railroad strike, opposed in part by a veteran of the Lager Beer Riot, the detective and corporate ally Allen Pinker-ton. In 1886, during the push for the eight-hour working day, radical Germans used saloons and beer halls as sites for organizing; the movement would be stalled by the tragic bombing that occurred that year in Haymarket Square. The Irish also used the saloon as a site for consolidating political power although, as a community, they seemed to prefer to work within the existing system.

Back in 1855, some believed that Boone and his American Party colleagues were able to assume power because the vote in Bridgeport had not been properly tallied. This mistake would not be repeated. Within a century, Bridgeport stood unchallenged as the center of Chicago politics. A day before the centennial of Lager Beer Riot, April 20, 1955, Bridgeport placed one its own in the mayor’s office, where he’d remain for the next twenty-one years. His name was Richard J. Daley.