A violent fix for a morning staple
During Chicago’s milk wars, unions, the mob and farmers battled for price, control
Political fixer Murray “The Camel” Humphreys, leader of the delegation, told Sumner that the mob had bought a dairy, intending to muscle in on the milk business just as it had on beer, the Tribune wrote.
“He asked me to lay ok them for six weeks so they could employ nonunion help and undersell the regular dairies,” Sumner recalled. “After that time I could hold a demonstration at their plant, they said, and thatwould give them an excuse to raise the price of milk and employ union men.”
Sumner told Humphreys he wanted no part of the scam — and so flared Chicago’s milkwars.
The battle over the dietary staple amid the economic devastation of the Great Depression initially pitted union officials against gangsters and dairies that delivered milk to homes against those that marketed milk in stores. Volatile prices compelled Wisconsin’s dairy farmers to walk off the job in 1933. Every penny that was chipped off the price of milk by the milk wars was bringing them closer to the wave of bankruptcies engulfing America’s farmers.
One of Sumner’s first moves after Humphreys left him in a huff was to fortify the union’s offices with sheet metal. That wasn’t the union’s only form of protection, the Tribune noted: “A police squad has a machine gun nest across the street.” Mobsters had menaced Local 753 before. Robert Fitchie, the union’s president, was kidnapped and tortured by gangsters in late 1931 and released only when the union paid a $50,000ransom. After that, Sumner drove “a rolling fortress,” a 3-ton armored car built for a utilities tycoon.
Over several years, the Tribune told the story of the region’s milkwars, reporting on the violence, milk dumping, price manipulations and frustrating attempts to bring peace to the industry.
During the dairy farmers walkout, “some 200 strikers and their sympathizers were taken prisoner and scores of National Guardsmen and strikers were bruised” on one day in May 1933, the Tribune wrote. “The farmers caught the gas bombs as the (Guardsmen) tossed them into their ranks and tossed them back.”
In Chicago, flashes of violence punctuated the conflict. Early on, in 1932, a union guard leaving home to go to Sumner’s office was shot by a passing car with shotguns sticking out its windows. In 1938, a milk wagon driver faced charges after a grocery store was torched for selling milk at cut-rate prices.
Over a period of just 18 months in the city, therewere 11 bombings, 22 window smashings, two sluggings, an incident of acid throwing, one truck stolen and another tipped over, according to federal investigators.
Right after it opened in 1932, the mob’s Meadow moor Dairies plant was bombed. “The next day it was announced the company planned to sell milk at 9 cents a quart — the regular price at all other distributors then was 11 cents,” the Tribune noted.
For his part, Sumner demanded a uniform price be restored for all milk, no matter where it was sold. In 1938, he claimed that 2,500 of his union’s drivers had lost their jobs because store-bought milk was cheaper.
An official with the Associated Milk Dealers said price parity wasn’t possible.
“The large dealers can’t cut the homedelivery price without taking a loss and cannot raise the store price without losing business to the cut-rate milk companies,” the dealers’ spokesman said, according to the Tribune.
In the midst of the din, calmer voices were occasionally heard. Potential arbitrators were nominated or suggested themselves. Striking farmers asked Dr. Herman Bundesen, head of Chicago’s Board of Health, to intervene. He was well known for his efforts to secure Chicago a sanitary milk supply.
The farmers in 1935 proposed suspending their strike while Bundesen mediated their dispute with the dairies. He declined.
Chicago Mayor Ed Kelley, who was hearing from constituents about disruptions in the milk supply, intervened and advocated for a panel of arbitrators. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace tried repeatedly to resolve the conflict. Upon his failure, the federal government jumped into the fray, headfirst.
In November 1938, a grand jury indicted nearly 100 defendants, a mix of individuals and businesses, on monopoly charges that accused them of trying to fix the price of milk. Among those indicted were Sumner, Bundesen, state’s attorney police boss Daniel Gilbert, Associated Milk Dealers officials, and the Bowman and Borden dairy companies.
Sumner claimed the defendants were being punished for what the public was clamoring for: getting the milk flowing again.
“When the milk producers, the distributors andmyself and other representatives of labor sit down to work out a plan, what happens?” Sumner said. “The government socks us with an anti-trust indictment.”
The anti-trust case was thrown out by a district judge but reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Yet instead of taking the indicted to trial, the government offered them the option of signing a consent decree — by which they promised to stop doing what the government said theywere doing.
The farmers’ organizations pledged not to prevent independent producers from marketing milk, and distributors vowed to end price fixing. The drivers union promised not to hamper store sales of milk, and so the milk wars ended in 1940.
The union’s rank and file had already voted Sumner and Fitchie out of office. “The young fellows wanted to move in, so we’ll have to step out,” Sumner said.
Two years after wars’ end, the 3-ton symbol of Sumner’s power vanished into a blast furnace. Union officials retrieved the armored car from Sumner’s garage and donated it to a World War II scrap metal drive.
Sumner died in 1946, shortly after essentially dictating his epitaph while being interviewed by American Mercury magazine.
“There was slavery in this sort of living before we formed a union; we worked eighteen to twenty hours a day for twelve dollars a week,” Sumner said. “I defy anybody to prove that I ever did any slugging unless Iwas slugged first.… Milk is like the mail, only more important. It has gotta go through.”