City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (8 page)

W
ITHIN DAYS
of the mayor’s Arcadia Hall announcement, his foes in the Republican Party were already making plans to stop him. No one was expecting the task to be pleasant. Big Bill, they knew, would not surrender the nomination without a struggle, and anyone running against him would have to be prepared for a vicious campaign. Federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, later to become the first commissioner of major league baseball, probably spoke for many of his fellow Republicans when—after being approached to become a candidate—he demurred with the comment: “I would just as soon have you ask me to clean a shithouse.”
¹

Still, the city’s various Republican factions did find their champions soon enough. First to move were those from the loosely organized progressive wing of the party. Convinced as always that Chicago’s problems could be solved only by electing an incorruptible “expert” in municipal administration, the progressives threw their support behind one such prodigy—Captain Charles E. Merriam, a University of Chicago sociologist who had long served as an alderman from the Hyde Park district. According to Jane Addams (founder of Hull House and now something of a Chicago institution at age fifty-nine), Merriam was an “honest and fearless” politician who “would make Chicago the pioneer in the scientific administration of American cities.” Merriam himself, promising Chicago “a clean, honest, progressive administration,” adopted a somewhat more combative tone in declaring his candidacy. “The administration of Mayor Thompson
is an epic of betrayal,” he claimed, “a history of treachery without parallel in the annals of American history.… [Thompson’s] continued rule would certainly undermine the foundations of democratic government.”
²

Fearing that the academic Merriam would have limited appeal to the average Chicago voter, GOP regulars lined up behind a more plausible challenger. Harry P. Olson, the so-called Harmony Candidate of the city’s other two Republican organizations, was chief justice of Chicago’s Municipal Court. Taking a more pragmatic approach than Merriam, Olson focused his attacks less on the immorality of the mayor’s alleged corruption than on its practical effects. “Thanks to Mayor Thompson and his political blunderbuss,” the judge said in opening his campaign, “the city’s finances have broken down completely. Chicago is broke. Actually, honestly, broke.” He proceeded to outline exactly how this had happened: “They made the school treasury a political feeding crib; they filled the payrolls with ward heelers and followers of the Lundin-Thompson political army.” Olson also made sure to harp on the numerous scandals that had plagued Thompson’s first term—the making of nine thousand “temporary appointments” to city jobs, the stacking of the board of education with unqualified toadies, the hiring at outrageous rates of an army of real estate assessors and legal experts in connection with city construction projects, and so on. Thompson and Lundin, he concluded, “have used the vast public expenditures, the great public enterprises, the enormous business activities of the city, to build up a personal machine for themselves.”
³

That such accusations were largely true is indisputable; less clear is how much these issues really mattered to the average Chicagoan just trying to make a living and raise a family. After all, machines such as the Thompson-Lundin organization may have been corrupt, but at least a portion of the monies they skimmed tended to percolate down rather than up the socioeconomic scale. For many
in working-class Chicago the machine actually served as a kind of social service agency, a quasi-official organization with a “ceaseless devotion to getting a job for Tom, taking care of Dick’s sick mother, and getting Harry out of the clutches of an over-savage or vindictive public prosecutor.” All this in exchange for a simple vote. So why should a working-class voter care about “good government,” especially when the term so often meant government that was good for the factory owners who exploited him, good for the utility owners who raised his car fares and gas rates, and good for the businessmen who charged ever higher prices for his meat, milk, and clothing?
⁴

Besides, had Big Bill really been such a bad mayor so far? It often seemed to depend on whom you asked. Certainly, he had got off to a brilliant start. Riding high from his landslide victory, Thompson had begun his first term in 1915 with plenty of goodwill. On the day of his inauguration, Lundin organized a “Prosperity Parade,” with seventy thousand banner-carrying citizens marching down LaSalle Street. Even the
Tribune
seemed impressed. “No mayor ever entered the City Hall with such a backing, such apparently universal good will and sincere spirit of cooperation,” wrote
Trib
political columnist Charles Wheeler. “If he doesn’t make good, he will be the most despised mayor of the whole lot.”
⁵

Determined not to let that happen, Big Bill offered an olive branch to many who had criticized him during the campaign. To McCormick he sent a conciliatory letter professing thanks for the “fair manner” with which his paper had treated his campaign, and the
Trib
, for its part, seemed willing to give the new mayor a chance. But the
Daily News
had not been quite so generous. Summoned to a meeting with Thompson shortly after the election, Victor Lawson listened as the expansive new mayor, surrounded by sycophantic lieutenants, crooned on about what a good mayor he would be, and how sure he was that the
News
would approve of his plans to build Chicago. Lawson was apparently unmoved. “Mr. Thompson,” he said when
Big Bill had finished his pitch, “everything you do as mayor that is beneficial to Chicago will meet with the approval of the
Daily News
. I should be lacking in frankness, however, if I did not say to you now that I have no confidence in either you or your chief supporters.” And with that, Lawson calmly rose from his chair and walked out of the room.
⁶

But the mayor was feeling far too upbeat at that point to have his victory spoiled by an old prig like Victor Lawson. He had just won the most important ballgame of his life. The city he loved had shown its love back, and Thompson was determined—in that boyishly sentimental way of his—to make good. “We’re going to drive every crook out of Chicago!” he vowed to his fans. “No shadow of corruption, dishonesty, [or] wrongdoing shall cloud … the city government during my term of office!”
⁷

And for the first few months of his administration, it looked as if Big Bill might just be the man Chicago was hoping for. Early signs were promising. Seedy pool halls were closed; wholesome youth recreation centers were promised. Faced with a streetcar strike in June, Thompson locked representatives of both sides into his city hall office. “I’m not going to let them leave,” the mayor told reporters, “until they make peace.” Negotiations went on through the night, interrupted only when Big Bill took everyone into his lavatory to race his prize model sailboat in the bathtub. And when the doors opened at dawn, the strike was settled.

Then, later that summer, he had a chance to show another kind of leadership. On a bright Saturday morning in July, a steamship named the SS
Eastland
capsized at its mooring on the Chicago River, drowning 811 people who were about to leave on a pleasure cruise. Thompson was in California at the time, but he returned immediately by special train and coordinated the relief efforts. He established a charitable fund for victims and led a funeral procession through the Little Village neighborhood, home of many who had died. “I am here
to emphasize the grief and indignation of this great city,” the mayor told mourners. Chicago appreciated the gesture. Thousands began wearing wide-brimmed Stetsons on the streets—“Big Bill hats” they called them.
⁸

Of course, there was the inevitable carping about campaign favors and the dispensation of patronage. A few days after the election, Thompson handed Lundin the city payroll, saying, “Here it is.
You
play with it.” The Poor Swede obliged. His first step was to “advise” the mayor on filling his cabinet, peopling it with, as one critic put it, “a roster of his nearest and dearest friends, [adding] a name or two for tone.” Some of the appointments raised hackles. When John Dill Robertson, Lundin’s own personal physician, was made health commissioner, many in the medical community protested his lack of administrative experience. But for the most part, Chicagoans seemed willing to let their colorful new mayor surround himself as he and his advisers saw fit. Even after the newspapers started raising the alarm about those thousands of “temporary appointments”—made to circumvent civil service requirements for city jobs—few citizens seemed terribly exercised. What politician didn’t repay his supporters with jobs and other sinecures? So what if Big Bill bent the rules a little to do so? That was how politics had always worked in the Windy City.
⁹

Even so, it wasn’t long before the Thompson administration started to make some less forgivable missteps. An early attempt to establish the mayor’s reform credentials (by having him enforce the city’s widely ignored Sunday-closing laws) quickly backfired, earning him the ire of Chicago’s formidable legions of beer drinkers. And there were times when the Thompson-Lundin machine-building efforts proved to be a little too aggressive even by Chicago standards. Hoping to oust Theodore Sachs, the head of the city’s Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium, in order to replace him with a more pliable machine crony, the mayor hounded the man so mercilessly that he
ended up poisoning himself in despair. The doctor’s dramatic suicide note—addressed “to the people of Chicago” and published prominently in the papers—was explicit: “Unscrupulous politicians should be thwarted. The institution should remain as it was built, unsoiled by graft and politics.” Thompson maintained that the suicide had nothing to do with him, and he excoriated the press for trying to turn a troubled man’s desperate act into a political football. But the episode was, if nothing else, a public relations nightmare.
¹⁰

The machine’s worst miscalculation, however, came two years into the term, when Lundin, with an eye on bigger political game, started angling to get Big Bill elected to the U.S. Senate. By early 1917, the Great War in Europe was looking hopeless, and when President Wilson began edging the United States toward engagement in the conflict, Lundin saw in the move a potential campaign issue. “The people don’t want it,” he told Thompson in a closed-door strategy session. “Any man who is against the war can be elected United States Senator on that issue alone.”
¹¹

The mayor actually needed little persuasion on this point. Notoriously anti-British, he always fancied himself a proponent of America First, and so he embraced the isolationist stance with his usual gusto. When Marshal Joffre, hero of the Marne, came to the United States on a nationwide tour, Thompson did not rush to invite him to the city. “Chicago is the sixth largest German city in the world,” he pointed out, quite accurately. “Some of our people might not be so wildly enthusiastic about it.” Although the invitation was ultimately issued, Thompson continued to drag his feet on American involvement in the war, discouraging the sale of Liberty Bonds at city hall and even allowing a controversial pacifist organization to hold a meeting in downtown Chicago. “This war,” he kept insisting, “is a needless sacrifice of the best blood of the nation on foreign battlefields.”
¹²

This position, of course, would hardly seem to be unreasonable, especially in a country that had just reelected its president on the
slogan “He kept us out of war.” There were also many reasonable public figures who shared the mayor’s pacifism, including Chicago’s own Jane Addams. But Thompson and Lundin had misread the change in Americans’ sentiments once their country had actually entered the fray in Europe. Consumed by the reflexive jingoism that war inevitably inspires, otherwise rational citizens were now disposed to greet any expression of pacifism with instant and rabid denunciation. And so Thompson was soon pilloried in newspaper columns, speeches, and sermons—not just in Chicago, but all around the nation. “I think that Mayor Thompson is guilty of treason and ought to be shot,” said one clergyman in Baltimore. Big Bill was variously maligned as “a disgrace to the city,” “a low-down double-crosser,” and (the name that would stick far longer than any other) “Kaiser Bill.” And it only got worse as the war fever grew. The Rotary Club voted to expel him; Theodore Roosevelt condemned him for giving aid and comfort to the enemy; he was hanged in effigy on the lakefront by members of the local VFW. For a time, there was even talk of the Democrat-dominated city council voting to impeach him.
¹³

Big Bill took none of this passively. He defended his America First agenda, put out a call for the conscription of excess war profits, and instituted libel suits against three of the Chicago daily papers. But these counterattacks weren’t enough to salvage his hopes for a Senate seat. In the Republican primary of September 11, 1918, he lost the nomination by sixty thousand votes—to Medill McCormick, brother of the despised editor of the
Tribune
.

Clearly, Lundin had miscalculated badly. But there was a silver lining in the debacle. Though Thompson had lost the overall state vote in the Senate primary, he actually carried the city of Chicago by a significant margin. There were, it seemed, many Germans, Jews, Irish, and other ethnic voters in the city who had not found the mayor’s antiwar stance particularly distasteful. His Senate loss, then,
was seen as merely a temporary setback. As one Thompson-friendly newspaper pointed out after the primary: Didn’t Abraham Lincoln lose to Stephen Douglas in the Senate race of 1858, and didn’t Lincoln go on to do a thing or two of importance afterward?
¹⁴