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

by Gary Krist

  The most important connection Thompson made during these years, however, was with Fred Lundin, a one-term congressman who had quickly risen to become a major figure in the Lorimer organization. Widely known as “the Poor Swede” (evocative nicknames were something of an obsession in Chicago politics), Lundin was a true eccentric—a diminutive, bucktoothed “square head” who wore enormous eyeglasses and an old-fashioned black frock coat with flowing bow tie. Affecting the modest persona of an immigrant yokel with just an average citizen’s interest in politics, he was actually a fiercely ambitious and ruthlessly manipulative operator, a former patent medicine salesman who had parlayed a one-wagon peddling enterprise into a substantial business empire. As such, he knew the value of hoopla and razzle-dazzle, especially when selling something, even a political candidate, to the public. “Get a tent,” he was wont to tell his protégés in a lilting Swedish accent. “Give them a show, forget about the issues. Give them a good time and you get the votes.”

  In Thompson—a crowd-pleasing showman who loved the bare-fisted combat of campaigning—the Poor Swede recognized the perfect receptacle for this political wisdom. The fact that Big Bill wasn’t overburdened with scruples or philosophical convictions only increased his appeal. “He may not be too much on brains,” Lundin allegedly once said of him, “but he gets through to people.” And so Lundin became Big Bill’s new mentor and proceeded to lay the groundwork for his political future.13

  Even so, it took over ten years and the demise of William Lorimer to put Thompson and Lundin in a position to make their move. In 1912, Lorimer, accused of bribing several Illinois state representatives to win election, was expelled from his Senate seat. For the Blond Boss, of course, this was a career-breaking disaster. For the Poor Swede it was a golden opportunity, a chance to pick up the pieces of a shattered political organization and rebuild it in his own image. And so, from the routed elements of the West Side Republican machine, he gathered together a core group that would come to be known as “the Five Friends,” including Lundin himself, Thompson, George Harding, the brick-dropping James Pugh, and Thompson’s old friend Gene Pike. Together they planned what one historian called “a thrust for power never before attempted by any little political group.” Their goal, as far-fetched as it may have sounded at the time, was to elect from their number a mayor, a governor, and, finally, if they were lucky enough, a president of the United States.14

  There was, of course, no shortage of people in Chicago determined to stand in their way.

  * * *

  He began, as usual, with the newspaper editors. As the Arcadia Hall crowd stirred with anticipation, Thompson started lashing out at the members of the Chicago press who had opposed him from the start of his career. All but the two Hearst papers—the American and the Herald and Examiner—had been consistently antagonistic to his administration, but his wrath was concentrated on the two major Chicago dailies: the Chicago Daily News, under its owner-publisher Victor F. Lawson, and the Tribune, run by Colonel Robert R. McCormick. To Thompson, these were the “lying, crooked, thieving, rotten newspaper editors”; they were the “great cancer gnawing at the very heart of our city of Chicago.” Calling them “crooks” and “hypocrites,” he claimed that they used their enormous influence “to destroy men in public life, men who had the courage to fight for the people!”

  But Lawson and McCormick were not alone in their perfidy. There were other villains afoot in the city, such as the tack-head academics at the University of Chicago, the corrupt Democrats on the city council, and the treacherous reformers of the Municipal Voters’ League, an alleged civic watchdog organization that had been especially hard on Big Bill’s administration. All of them opposed the mayor because all of them were merely instruments of the “sinister interests.” They were beholden, in other words, to the rich utility barons, who wanted to gouge the people with high gas and electricity rates, and to the rich traction barons, who wanted to bleed the people dry with high fares for streetcars and L trains. Those sinister interests, in fact, were the true enemy in the war against the people of Chicago. “Gold is their God!” the mayor proclaimed. And to get their gold, they had “betrayed and sold out the people!”

  Fortunately, however, the people had a champion to defend them against those who schemed to get rich at the public expense. “The People’s David” wasn’t afraid to stand up against the interests. He had done so numerous times over the past four years, taking up arms against rotten traction ordinances, venal school officials, and the meddling of corporate lawyers in city affairs. Wasn’t that the kind of mayor they wanted to lead Chicago forward to its “wonderful future”—someone willing to do battle for the common people? “I fought,” the mayor cried, as applause once again echoed through the hall. “I fought for weeks and months to protect you!”15

  * * *

  The first step in Lundin’s grand plan was to get Big Bill Thompson into the mayor’s office. The Poor Swede was convinced that this was possible—as long as his protégé did exactly as he was told. As the Trib would later put it, Thompson was to be the mouthpiece, while Lundin would supply the song. And so the two became an inseparable team. Big Bill made the speeches while the Poor Swede worked behind the scenes, calling in favors, making promises, patching together coalitions from the numerous factions that always fought for influence in this hugely heterogeneous city. The Republican Party was in disarray at this time—not just in Chicago, but in the whole country, torn apart by the rift between Roosevelt progressives and Taft party regulars. But Lundin was tireless, willing to compromise, and supremely well organized. Working with his soon-to-be notorious card files (containing records of favors owed and favors promised), he soon assembled the base of support necessary to put Thompson on the ballot for the Republican primary.16

  On December 22, 1914, Thompson stood before a packed house at the Auditorium Theatre in the Loop. Onstage beside him stood a Christmas tree adorned with signature cards of 142,111 Chicago citizens, all of them ostensibly committed to sending Big Bill to city hall. Thompson feigned reluctance at first, but as he later said, in his best cowboy drawl: “I could no longer hold out agin ’em.” Just as he would do some four years later at Arcadia Hall, the big man announced his candidacy for mayor.

  At first, most people scoffed at the idea. Without the backing of an established political machine, they said, Thompson wouldn’t even make it through the primary. Even when—thanks in part to an all-out effort to win the city’s African American vote—he eked out a narrow victory to become the official Republican candidate, few doubts were shaken. Opponents were quick to point out that the hard-fought Democratic primary, won by Cook County clerk Robert Sweitzer, had attracted 50 percent more voters than its Republican counterpart. With so much of the town voting for the party of President Woodrow Wilson, everyone expected Sweitzer to run away with the election.17

  Any less sanguine candidate than Thompson might have lost heart. The obstacles before him seemed insurmountable. Most of the city’s newspapers, having initially discounted his candidacy, grew downright hostile once they realized that a creature of the disgraced Lorimer might actually have a chance to become mayor. Thompson was “simply impossible,” stewed Victor Lawson of the Chicago Daily News. Big Bill’s opponent was equally dismissive. “Just who is this Bill Thompson?” Sweitzer complained. “I find he is a man who plays with sailboats.”18

  But while newspapers and political rivals jeered, an awful lot of regular Chicagoans seemed to like what they saw of Thompson on the hustings. For one thing, the man was an entertaining campaigner, always free with a joke or a gibe. And he knew the value of a campaign promise. Just about every voter heard from his lips an appealing pledge: To women, Bill promised a mother on the board of education; to blacks, he promised respect and equal opportunity; to workers, jobs on his big building projects; and to everyone else, an honest administration, a full dinner pail, and a cleaned-up city. He emphasized the bread-and-butter issues that would come to be a hallmark of his late
r campaigns—reduced gas rates, preservation of the five-cent car fare, greater home rule for Chicago. And always, the emphasis was on boosting the city he loved to a brighter future: “You’re going to build a new Chicago with Bill Thompson!”19

  On Election Day—following Lundin’s dictum, “When in doubt, give a parade”—the Thompson forces hired extras from a circus menagerie to march through the city streets. The animals included three elephants, a bull moose, and a donkey (symbolizing the candidate’s hoped-for appeal to Republicans, Progressives, and Democrats). The electorate seemed to take the hint. When the ballots were counted, Thompson stunned everyone by staging a landslide victory, winning by no fewer than 147,477 votes—the largest victory margin of any mayoral candidate in Chicago history.

  “Hoorah for Bill!” cheered an incredulous Gene Pike that night at Thompson headquarters. Jim Pugh, meanwhile, danced around the room, yelling: “Bill, you’re the greatest sonofabitch Chicago ever saw!”

  But Thompson himself knew just whom to thank for his victory. “Fred, you’re a wizard,” he said to Lundin, heartily shaking his mentor’s slender hand. “You did it all, and I’m not ever going to forget this!”

  William Hale Thompson—surpassing low expectations yet again—had become the forty-first mayor of the city of Chicago. “In six months,” quipped Tribune columnist Bert Leston Taylor, “we’ll know if it’s Big Bill or Big Bull.”

  It actually took more like three.20

  * * *

  After about an hour of fiery oratory, Big Bill finally started bringing his speech to a close. In that hour he had given his Arcadia Hall audience just the show they’d been looking for. He had lambasted his enemies in no uncertain terms; he had roared, whispered, crooned, and bellowed; and he had put the upcoming vote in terms easy to understand—as a fight “between the people, on the one hand, and the corporate interests, on the other,” a story with good guys, bad guys, and a massive conspiracy to confuse the electorate about which was which.

  And so he made his final plea: “If continued in the office of mayor of Chicago by the suffrage of the people,” he concluded in grand style, “I shall go on yielding to their influence only. I shall sink personal and political considerations in seeking the good of the city. And I shall give myself unreservedly—henceforth as heretofore—to the support of Law, Liberty, and Justice!”

  The band broke out with a rousing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as Big Bill, smiling his beaming, gap-toothed smile, waved his cowboy hat at the crowd and then strode off the stage. Anyone looking for signs that the audience was not 100 percent behind their mayor would have been hard-pressed to find any. According to one report, “the audience stood on its feet, and on the chairs, and cheered and sang” for their candidate. Fred Lundin—looking on, one supposes, from some inconspicuous corner of the hall—could not have been anything but pleased. His great plan had faltered once or twice since he first lifted Thompson from obscurity, but now his efforts were definitely back on track. “A Mayor, a Governor, a President”: There was still a long way to go to achieve all of those goals, but winning for Thompson a second term in office—despite the rabid opposition of their numerous enemies—would be the vital next step.21

  WITHIN 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 whi
ch 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.