The Great Chicago Beer Riot

An “exhaustive” account of the pivotal incident between “native-born Protestant Chicagoans who founded the city and newer German and Irish immigrants” ( Bloomberg ). In 1855, when Chicago’s recently elected mayor Levi Boone pushed through a law forbidding the sale of alcohol on Sunday, the city pushed back. To the German community, the move seemed a deliberate provocation from Boone’s stridently anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party. Beer formed the centerpiece of German Sunday gatherings, and robbi