Chicago Evening American - Aug. 2, 1919.

RIOT
Chicago, Ill.

Chicago Will Rise, Greater
Than Ever, Despite
Her Slanderers

Now come Chicago's defamers—WITHIN OUR
ATES, TOO.

In this hour of stress and tumult they run riot with their red rhetoric, and the chief offenders are certain of Chicago's own newspapers. One would think that they were FOREIGN publications.

Listen to this from a Chicago newspaper (July 31):

"Chicago is disgraced and dishonored. Its head is bloodied and bowed, bloodied by crime and bowed in shame. Its reputation is besmirched. Its fame is tarnished for years.

"Its reputation is at its lowest point. It has had the most horrible race riots of American history."

This from the newspaper which not so long ago referred to Chicago as "the slut of municipalities."

What Chicago suffers from riot will be less than the injury it receives from such publications.

Chicago's head is neither "bloodied nor bowed"; nor is her reputation "tarnished for years"; nor were these race riots, bad though they were, "the most horrible of American history."

The "horror" of the red rhetoric hurts the city more than the riots themselves.

Newspapers of this class do most to blacken Chicago's reputation—to carry through the country and across the seas a false, libelous impression of OUR CITY. They furnish the ammunition with which newspapers of other cities attack Chicago.

Chicago has enough to bear without the scandalous shrieking of her own newspapers. They add to the shame of the rioting, and work more damage to the city with their poison pens than rioters cause with ax and torch.

In this hour, as seldom before, we want FACTS, the true perspective, a calm survey of actual conditions.

Only base traducers would hold up Chicago as a one spectacle of blood and horror against a back-

of toil—blacks and Slovaks, men of every tongue, of every shade, from every clime.

Chicago feeds, houses and cares for the huge armies of industry, whether in the hour of industrial rush or in the heavier hour of slackening work.

In this great "melting pot" of civilization, we turn out CIVILIZATION and the most finished products of civilization.

The race problem has been with us for years.

Here it has presented its most intricate and pressing aspects, grave because of the vast numbers involved, dangerous because of the rush of industrial emergency and the bewildering changes of conditions, social and economic.

For the war in Chicago were mobilized whole armies of colored men for industrial work.

Chicago absorbed these men from the Southland by tens of thousands, housed them and cared for them—all without violence, although the colored line pressed for miles through residence streets which formerly had been occupied exclusively by whites.

Colored soldiers came back from Europe, where they had fought side by side with Moor and East Indian and ranked with the whites in the armies of the Allies.

Chicago welcomed them back into the ranks of industry—and, with all the crowding, shifting and foreign-formed ideas, there was no trouble.

Then in the torrid heat of a Summer day things that had smouldered kindled into flame. Men for the moment lost their head.

It is sad, it is regrettable, yes, it is very sad, but no metropolis is perfect. Sometimes problems do not work out right, and Chicago does not propose to go it sackcloth and ashes for the rest of her days because of the wild outburst of a week.

Nor will Chicago bend the knee and beseech for giveness of other city saints who are not worthy to unlace the shoes of the "IWI goddess."