City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (12 page)

Now a white-haired and matronly woman of fifty-seven, Wells-Barnett had become a familiar figure on the streets of the South Side, marching resolutely from one political meeting to another (“She walked as if she owned the world,” her daughter once said), always willing to take up a cause. And although she did admit that Chicago was now the “one spot in this entire broad United States [where] the black man received anything like adequate political recognition,” that didn’t mean the city’s current racial situation was in any way satisfactory to her. True justice, she knew, required a constant goading of the powers-that-be, and as her son might have put it, if she didn’t do it, no one else would.
¹⁸

The lax official response to the recent bombings just confirmed the need for strident protest. Big Bill Thompson, a mayor for whom she had once campaigned, had done nothing to prevent the ongoing attacks on the people who regarded him as their champion. And now Chief Garrity’s blaming of them for the high crime rate merely added insult to injury. Furious, Wells-Barnett called a meeting of the Negro Fellowship League on March 24. In a contentious session, they adopted a series of resolutions denouncing the mayor and his associates. Branding Garrity’s charges “a willful and malicious libel against the Negro,” the league depicted the statement as an attempt to make blacks the scapegoat for police incompetence: “It is bad enough that we are being discharged from work and made idle through no fault
of our own without being held responsible for all the crime in Chicago in an attempt to excuse Big Bill’s inefficient police force.”

These were hardly mincing words, but the league saved the worst for last: “We urge all self-respecting, law-abiding Negroes in Chicago to resent this insult against the race by going to the polls next Tuesday and voting for Maclay Hoyne for next mayor of the city.”
¹⁹

To many in black Chicago, this was tantamount to blasphemy. Hoyne, the Cook County state’s attorney, was running for mayor as an independent, but he was a longtime member of the Democratic Party—the party of the southern whites they had come to Chicago to escape. And, besides, how could blacks turn against the mayor they had so long regarded as their friend?

Clearly, any attempt to turn the Black Belt against Thompson was going to face staunch opposition. But given the closeness of the polls, even a slight shift away from the mayor was potentially dire to his and Lundin’s plans. The “Second Lincoln” was counting on his usual flood of African American votes to give him his victory on Election Day. The last thing he needed was Wells-Barnett, the eternal troublemaker, stirring up resentment among his most reliable base of support.

T
HE ELECTION WAS
—as hoped—turning into a free-for-all.

By mid-March, there were four major candidates actively campaigning to wrest control of the city away from its incumbent mayor. Each had vulnerabilities. Democratic nominee Robert M. Sweitzer, who had lost to Thompson in 1915, was an affable, somewhat Falstaffian county clerk burdened with inconvenient ties to the local gas interests. Sweitzer had the dominant Democratic faction behind him, but his support in the party was likely to be sapped by the independent candidacy of State’s Attorney Hoyne, an “iron-jawed Irishman” whose family had been prominent in Chicago since it was a village. Never much concerned about vice and corruption until a Republican captured city hall in 1915, Hoyne had since become a persistent thorn in the side of the Thompson-Lundin forces, launching several high-profile campaigns against prostitution, police malfeasance, and illegal gambling. Meanwhile, Labor Party stalwart John Fitzpatrick and Socialist candidate John Collins, hoping to capitalize on the growing disaffection among the city’s union and radical elements, were also running hard—neither likely to win, but each capable of drawing away crucial votes from the main contenders.

And now even Ring Lardner had thrown his homburg into the ring. In a series of columns entitled “Me for Mayor,” the ever-sardonic journalist was amusing
Tribune
readers with his run as “the People’s candidate.” In his daily column he was making a joke of the whole
election, casting his campaign promises in verse (“The fire department will be my special delight / So that I may fire someone every night”) and vowing to make “a strong play for the Walloon vote.” He also made sure to point out that, if elected, he would be the thinnest mayor in Chicago history.
¹

On this last point Lardner definitely had the advantage of his main opponents—rather voluminous figures all—but for sheer absurdism he had plenty of competition among the city’s pols. Chicago had the pleasure, for instance, of watching Judge Harry Olson, who during the primary campaign had warned that reelecting Thompson would “ruin the Republican Party for years to come,” suddenly change his mind and come to the ruinous mayor’s support in the general election. Other Republicans—with the exception of intellectual progressive types like Charles Merriam—were also miraculously finding virtues in the man they had so recently lambasted. This, of course, was not unusual behavior in the Windy City. Deal making among political enemies was a venerable Chicago tradition. It was no accident, after all, that Charles Dudley Warner, the editor who coined the old saw about politics and strange bedfellows, spent several formative years practicing law in Chicago.
²

The mayor’s nemeses in the press, on the other hand, were proving to be more than just fair-weather enemies. Victor Lawson of the
Daily News
again took a practical approach: “None of the mayoral candidates is of the type which should be chosen for the high office of Mayor,” he admitted to Arthur Brisbane in mid-March. “But under the circumstances, the controlling consideration is to deliver Chicago from the menace of four more years of the Thompson-Lundin combination.” Since, by Lawson’s arithmetic, “Sweitzer can beat him; Hoyne can’t,” the
Daily News
adopted the cause of the official Democrat. McCormick at the
Tribune
, trying to be equally practical, came to the opposite conclusion: “The Thompson-Sweitzer issue was fought out four years ago,” a
Tribune
editorial noted on March 3,
“and Thompson cleaned Sweitzer with the precise and meticulous violence of a high wind taking the shingles off a decayed farmhouse.… We do not say that Hoyne is a fair-haired boy who would meet the unqualified approval of the City Club. But he is immeasurably a better candidate than Thompson or Sweitzer.”
³

But while the anti-Thompson forces may have disagreed on who qualified as the least of three evils, they did seem united on at least one point—that Big Bill was most vulnerable on the issue of his alleged disloyalty during the war. Crime, scandals, the growing city deficit—all were given their due in the screeds against Thompson delivered throughout the month of March. But candidates and newspapers alike seemed to doubt the potency of these issues, which had failed to do much damage to the mayor in the primaries. Instead, hoping to arouse the sentiments of a city joyfully welcoming home its sons in arms, critics focused their attacks on Kaiser Bill—Thompson the antiwar apologist, the snubber of Marshal Joffre, the mayor of “the sixth German city” of the world. Thompson, according to celebrity lawyer Clarence Darrow, who was campaigning for his colleague (and frequent courtroom opponent) Maclay Hoyne, “used his influence to weaken our power, to discourage our people, and to strengthen our enemy.” Hoyne himself was even more caustic, accusing Thompson of failing the nation in its hour of greatest need: “He disgraced Chicago in the eyes of the world, and in fact became a national menace.” The state’s attorney recounted stories of German fliers who allegedly dropped extracts of Big Bill’s antiwar speeches into American trenches during the war “in an attempt to make our soldiers believe that their own country was not united back of them.” This last point was much emphasized by the newspapers, which reprinted numerous letters from soldiers decrying their hometown mayor. “A guy was ashamed to acknowledge that he was from Chicago when he was mixing with other troops,” ran one of these alleged testimonials reproduced in the
Daily News
. “They
[always] wanted to know if it was a fact that Chicago had a German spy for a mayor.”

One letter—from a First Sergeant Alfred B. Backer to his family—was even more dyspeptic: “Honestly, I believe if that big fat Bolshevik crook is elected to office again, I don’t want to come back to Chicago to live.”
⁴

Thompson could only parry these attacks with blunt and categorical denial. He was
not
a traitor, he insisted, and in fact had been the soldiers’ greatest defender against exploitation by war profiteers who put their greed above human lives. He reminded the electorate of his numerous libel suits against the newspapers for raising the specious disloyalty charges in earlier elections. Thompson, of course, was trying hard to turn his wartime behavior into a nonissue, but in truth the hint of pro-German sentiments did not work entirely against him in certain quarters. After the primaries, Fred Lundin had determined that Thompson could win the general election by capturing big margins among three important demographics: blacks, the Irish, and Germans. None of these groups had been particularly pro-war—blacks because of widespread racial discrimination in the armed forces, the Irish because of anti-British sentiments, and Germans for obvious reasons of ethnic loyalty. (“Damn him,” one German voter would later say, “we know he’s no good, but he made life livable for us in 1918, and [so] he gets our votes.”) Always known for sounding off on national and international topics, Thompson had no problem campaigning on emotional issues that would seem to have little to do with a local city election, so he made a point of espousing Irish home rule, calling for “the dissolution of the British yoke of oppression,” and railing against England’s aggressive posture in the Paris peace talks.

The mayor was also careful to cultivate his old friendships in the Black Belt. Ida Wells-Barnett’s efforts to turn the black vote to Hoyne were troublesome, and Thompson and Lundin were taking nothing for granted. When the “Old Eighth” (the 370th Infantry, an
all-black regiment) returned to Chicago from active duty in France, Big Bill was on the scene to greet them. Bursting into the hall of the Coliseum, where the troops were being feted by large (and largely black) crowds, Thompson rushed to the podium and, amid cheers and applause, hailed the returning heroes in lofty terms. “You have come back decorated for distinguished service on the battlefield,” he intoned, “and for your glorious service, your devotion to our country, and your heroism in battle, I bespeak for you that justice and equality of citizenship which shall open the doors of opportunity to you.” These were fine words indeed, and they were received with gratitude by the returning soldiers in the crowd. The fact that such “justice and equality” had been denied them so often in Woodrow Wilson’s segregated army—where they routinely faced abuse from white officers—just highlighted the mayor’s enduring appeal to the city’s African American community. Big Bill’s actions may have left much to be desired, but at least he was saying the right words, at a time when few other politicians were doing likewise.
⁵

Whether Thompson and Lundin were seriously worried about their support among blacks is impossible to say. The Poor Swede had already managed to broker his deal with the heads of the other two GOP organizations, and his formidable army of ward committeemen, precinct captains, and election workers—in the Black Belt and throughout the city—was firmly in place. But there was another uncertain factor that could possibly prove decisive in the contest—namely, the soldier vote. According to Illinois law, anyone voting in the April 1 election had to be registered by March 11. Because of delays in bringing the troops back from Europe, many Chicago soldiers would not arrive until after that deadline. In fact, members of the Rainbow Division (the 149th Field Artillery, composing one of the largest contingents of potential Chicago voters) were expected to arrive after the registration deadline but before the election. Given Thompson’s unpopularity among the returning
white soldiers, allowing these men to vote would pose a distinct threat to the mayor’s reelection chances.
⁶

Back in January, Robert Sweitzer, among others, had proposed emergency legislation to allow unregistered soldiers to vote if they could present their discharge papers at polling places on Election Day. A measure to this effect, sponsored by a state senator named Edward Hughes, had been introduced in the legislature at Springfield and was now swiftly advancing through the readings process. The bill was expected to pass in time, but before becoming law, it would have to be signed by the Illinois chief executive—Governor Frank O. Lowden. A Republican who owed his election in 1916 to the support of the Thompson-Lundin organization, Lowden could choose to stop the emergency bill by refusing to sign it. But his decision would be influenced by a few major considerations: namely, that Lowden would be running for the upcoming 1920 Republican presidential nomination; that Thompson was likely to be reelected chairman of the Illinois delegation to that convention; and that the two men, once friends and political allies, were now sworn enemies.