The Mysterious Death of Lazarus Averbuch
(March 2, 1908)
On Monday morning, March 2, 1908, Chicago police chief
George Shippy reported that a young man, probably of Sicilian or Armenian
birth, knocked on the door of his home, asked to see Shippy, and was
admitted by the family maid. Perceiving what he described as hatred in his
visitor’s eyes, Shippy grabbed the young man by the wrists and started to
search the suspect. According to Shippy, the youth squirmed free, pulled a
knife from his pocket, stabbed Shippy under the right arm and then drew a
revolver and shot Shippy’s son Harry, who entered upon hearing the
commotion. The suspect then shot James Foley, Shippy’s bodyguard. Seeing
Harry shot, Shippy pulled his own gun and shot his assailant, as did Foley.
The youth, who was struck by seven bullets, died on route to the hospital.
Despite his wound, Shippy wrote an account of the
shooting several hours later that was widely published. Shippy was certain
that the young man was an anarchist who wanted to kill him because Shippy
had banned "Red" Emma Goldman, the famous Jewish anarchist, from
speaking in Chicago. As it turned out, the dead man was not Armenian or
Sicilian but a recent Jewish immigrant from Kishineff, Russia, named
Lazarus Averbuch. The fact that Averbuch was Jewish, and that
anti-immigration forces and anti-Semites associated Russian Jews with
radicalism, worried Chicago Jewry that the entire Jewish community would be
tarred by Averbuch’s brush.
After cursory investigations, the Chicago police and the
Cook County coroner each certified that Shippy was justified in killing
Averbuch, who had apparently assaulted him. Since 1886, when an anarchist
bomb exploded at a rally in Haymarket Square that killed two Chicago police
officers, city officials effectively banned any anarchist meeting. When
Emma Goldman announced a speaking tour in Chicago in March of 1908, Chicago
mayor Fred Busse prohibited her appearances. Shippy expected her anarchist
supporters to retaliate. The inquests confirmed that Shippy killed in
self-defense.
At first, Shippy’s explanation of events was widely
accepted. Chicago’s secular and Jewish press, and most of its Jewish
leadership, accepted that Averbuch went armed to Shippy’s house with the
intention of killing him. They were primarily concerned to assert that not all Jewish immigrants were affiliated with anarchism. According to
historians Walter Roth and Joe Kraus, who recently published a deeply
researched history of the case, most of Jewish Chicago would have been
happy if the Averbuch incident would disappear from sight.
Not every corner of the Jewish community was content
with the official version of the Averbuch saga, however. The local and
national socialist press (including the Forward), Emma Goldman and her
followers, and Hull House founder Jane Addams each thought Shippy’s story
had too many inconsistencies. Funded quietly by Chicago’s leading Jewish
communal figures -- particularly Julius Rosenwald, the head of Sears,
Roebuck – Addams organized a private investigation of Shippy’s actions.
Led by young Chicago attorney Harold Ickes, who later served as Secretary
of the Interior under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the investigation surfaced
inconsistencies and absurdities in Shippy’s account that the Chicago
press had public had avoided:
Ickes represented Averbuch’s interests – and those
of the Jewish community – at the coroner’s inquest. Averbuch’s
sister, Olga, the only person who knew Averbuch well, was the only witness
of Averbuch’s behalf. She told the panel that her brother never had
anarchist leanings or contacts, that he never owned a gun or knew how to
shoot one, and that she had no idea why he went to Shippy’s house. She
pleaded for justice for her brother, and for a Jewish funeral for her
brother, who had been buried secularly in Chicago’s potter’s field. The
inquest exonerated Shippy, but Olga’s character left the impression that
there was more to the story than Shippy’s version of it.
It was the Jewish press to argue effectively that
Averbuch was the innocent victim of Shippy’s overreaction. Chicago’s Jewish
Courier hypothesized that, as a recent immigrant from Kishineff who was
seeking work, perhaps in California or Iowa, Averbuch went to Shippy’s
house to obtain a letter from the chief, such as he would have needed in
Russia, indicating that he was of good character. According to this theory,
Shippy panicked when he saw Averbuch, reached for his service revolver and
fired several shots at the young man. As Shippy’s son entered, he was
struck by one of Shippy’s wild gunshots; his aide, Foley, fired at and
struck Averbuch as Shippy’s errant bullets wounded Foley. In this
version, Averbuch was the innocent victim of Chicago’s – and America’s
– anti-immigrant, anti-radical hysteria. While the coroner’s inquest
exonerated Shippy, Chicago’s Jewish press tried to call him to account.
In the end, neither Ickes nor the Jewish press could
change the public perception that Averbuch was an anarchist and that Chief
Shippy killed him in self-defense. Despite his exoneration, Shippy never
returned to active duty after his wounding, and he resigned from his post
two months later. Shippy died, deranged from syphilis, in 1911. Lazarus
Averbuch, after being disinterred from potter’s field and re-autopsied
for the inquest, was reburied in and unmarked grave in a Jewish cemetery.
Any further investigation of the Averbuch case was dropped. A heartbroken
Olga Averbuch returned to Europe four years later and was almost certainly
killed in the Holocaust. The mystery of Lazarus Averbuch and Chief Shippy
is likely to remain unsolved forever.
Sources: American Jewish Historical
Society |