by Gary Krist
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
And now, at the beginning of 1919, Big Bill’s popularity seemed to be on an upswing. With the war over (and the conflict at the peace table proving to be nearly as grisly), his alleged traitorousness was seeming less dire—except, perhaps, to the city’s native-born Protestant elite, who were, in any case, losing influence in city politics as more and more of them moved to the suburbs. That left the city’s working-class immigrants and blacks, many of whom were tired of war, tired of reform, tired of pious, intellectual do-gooders lecturing them about ethics and ideals and making the world safe for democracy. What they really needed were steady jobs, affordable streetcars, reasonable gas rates, and a local pol they could rely on for a favor. If Kaiser Bill was the man who could deliver those things, then Kaiser Bill was the man they would vote for. Or so, at least, Thompson and Lundin were hoping.15
* * *
Once it became clear who would be opposing Big Bill in the primary campaign, the Thompson camp wasted no time in returning fire. Merriam and Olson had both run for mayor in earlier elections without conspicuous success, so it was easy enough to dismiss them as merely inept and unqualified opportunists. “Who are the other two candidates for the Republican nomination for Mayor?” asked the editor of the Republican, the weekly mouthpiece of the Thompson-Lundin organization. “They are professional men, neither of whom has had any experience in practical business.… If there is anything more objectionable than a judge in politics, it is a college professor in politics.”16
Within days, Thompson issued a challenge to Merriam and Olson to take part in a
debate. Both opponents accepted, but when the event finally took place—at the Masonic Temple on February 11—Olson was inexplicably absent. Not that this mattered to Thompson. With the crowded hall evenly divided between Merriam’s partisans and his own, the mayor commandeered the podium and delivered a seventy-five-minute diatribe denouncing both of his opponents and the masters they served. Then he waved to the crowd and left the hall before Merriam had said a word.
Flummoxed, Captain Merriam, a trim, handsome figure who made a point of wearing his uniform in all of his campaign photos, stepped to the podium and began his part of the “debate.” Before he could utter more than a few words, however, the hall erupted with hissing, catcalls, and booing. Unable to speak uninterrupted, Merriam jettisoned his prepared remarks and resorted to shouting out the 1919 equivalent of sound bites: “Mayor Thompson has disgraced Chicago!” he screamed. “[He is] a shirker in times of peace and a slacker in times of war!” To much hooting and groaning, Merriam brought up the old disloyalty charges: “I want to say to the Mayor of Chicago that this is not the sixth German city in the world, but the first American city in the world!” He even dragged the mayor’s deceased father into the fight. “If Lt. Commander Thompson could speak from his grave tonight,” Merriam proclaimed, “[even] he would rebuke this un-American mayor!”
But it did the captain no good. No one seemed to be listening, and the event soon degenerated into a shouting match between the opposing camps. Unable to make himself heard, surrounded by zealous Thompson-ites yelling “rather uncomplimentary things” at him, Merriam could finally only give up and slink from the stage.17
Then, on February 18, Thompson distributed a campaign flyer that made it absolutely clear just whom he regarded as his real opponents in the struggle for Chicago’s future. “FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHTS!” the mayor urged voters in the one-page screed:
Defeat the traction and gas barons and other greedy interests, the newspapers which support them, and the political bosses who serve them! These interests and the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Municipal Voters’ League—which always has a corporation lawyer at its head—are trying to get you to vote against yourself and for some candidate who, if elected, will do what they want done.
It was by now a familiar litany of villains: Robert R. McCormick and the Tribune. Victor F. Lawson and the Daily News. The Municipal Voters’ League. These were the enemies Thompson had been fighting for years. Against them he already had all of the ammunition he needed.
So the game plan for the mayor’s reelection was clear. He wouldn’t run against Merriam and Olson; they were just figureheads. He would run instead against the symbols of entrenched wealth and power in the city. He would run against McCormick and Lawson.18
THEY WERE, it must be admitted, easy targets:
Colonel Robert R. McCormick—imperious, aloof, dogmatic, and visibly, extravagantly, undeniably rich—was just the kind of figure that working-class Chicago loved to hate. A nephew of Cyrus McCormick (manufacturer of the mechanical reaper), he had been educated at English boarding schools, Groton, and Yale, and spoke with the faux-British accent to prove it. As patrician as Thompson was populist, he was notorious for showing up at Tribune editorial meetings in jodhpurs, often with a trio of noisy German shepherds in tow. Occasionally, he would repair to the roof of the newspaper’s downtown headquarters to practice polo on a mechanical horse. “The Colonel,” as the six-foot-four, thirty-eight-year-old McCormick was always called, had served honorably in the Great War and had come back to Chicago determined to turn his “World’s Greatest Newspaper” into a leading force for good government and the conservative Midwestern values he held dear. But his aristocratic mien, his country estate in the western suburbs, and his overweening sense of superiority and entitlement (“Working for McCormick is a little like working for God,” an employee once confessed) made him easy prey for any politician hoping to incite class resentments.1
Where the Tribune’s publisher was eccentric and often slightly ridiculous, Victor Lawson, the sixty-eight-year-old publisher of the Daily News, was dignified and bland, a deeply religious man whose formal manner and gray Vandyke beard made him appear a relic of the nineteenth century. One of the founders of the Associated Press, he had taken a small, struggling Chicago daily and turned it into the third-largest-circulation newspaper in the world. Severe, even prudish at times (he once fired a Daily News pressman for dancing at work), he professed to exacting standards of newspaper ethics, even making a point of personally testing advertisers’ claims before he would accept their ads for publication. But although he touted his paper as an independent and objective voice in city affairs (in contrast to the sharply partisan Tribune), he was united with his rival publisher on the issue of Thompson, whom he considered “a man of mental and moral poverty.” Needless to say, Thompson had no problem depicting him as a rich Gilded Age holdover in cahoots with the “sinister interests.”2
Against these two pillars of privilege, then, the Thompson campaign could position itself just as it wished. Chicagoans had traditionally harbored a deep distrust of their hometown newspapers, whose idea of civic righteousness often seemed to coincide conveniently with the preservation of the rights of wealth and property. By pounding the daily press, Thompson could make himself a populist hero while at the same time explaining away all of those news stories about his administration’s alleged venality. “Some newspapers, as evil as they are powerful, have mercenary reasons for their attitude toward your city government,” the mayor maintained in one of his campaign booklets. “Their hands are befouled with ill-gotten school funds, thefts of taxes, and corrupt profits derived from gigantic corporate and public utility interests.” Thompson slyly focused on two high-profile newspaper “scandals,” the first involving the Tribune’s below-market lease on some land owned by the city schools, the second concerning a $17.32 annual tax bill paid by Victor Lawson for his million-dollar North Side home. Neither issue was truly a scandal. The long-standing Tribune lease, while certainly an advantageous deal for the newspaper, was entirely legal, while Lawson’s minuscule 1911 tax bill was merely a prorated payment intended to compensate for overpayment the previous year. But such subtleties were easily glossed over in the heat of the campaign. To Thompson (and, he hoped, to the majority of Chicago voters) these were clear indications that the two most powerful newspapers in the city had their hands in the public till. McCormick, Thompson declared, was “robbing the school children of Chicago,” while Lawson was nothing but a “tax dodger.”3
The Tribune and the Daily News did their best to correct these blatant mischaracterizations, but with indifferent success. No matter what they printed in their own defense, Thompson merely repeated the charges ad nauseam. Even Big Bill’s main target admitted that the tactic was effective. In a letter to fellow newsman Arthur Brisbane, Lawson (who fancied himself something of an advertising expert) pointed out that the mayor’s practice of “iteration—and iteration—and iteration” was actually an ingenious application of the new science of selling. “Thompson is a good advertiser,” Lawson wrote, “but of bad wares.”4
So the newspapers did what they could to bury the master advertiser’s message. The Tribune and the Daily News both gave extensive coverage to the two challengers’ attacks while providing far less ink to the mayor’s responses. And as the February 25 primary approached, the tactic seemed to be having some effect. “Mayor’s Men Panicky Over Swing to Olson,” the Daily News reported in mid-February. To some, this probably seemed more like hopeful cheerleading than objective journalism. But even in his private correspondence, Victor Lawson was allowing himself some cautious optimism. “I think ‘stocks are up’ as respects the mayoralty outlook,” he wrote to E. D. Hulbert on February 15. “Indications are very strong that Thompson is losing ground.”5
But there were also other concerns preoccupying the Chicago electorate. On January 16, Nebraska had become the thirty-sixth state to approve the dreaded Eighteenth Amendment, meaning tha
t Prohibition would soon become the law of the land. Two days later, the much-anticipated Peace Conference got under way in Paris, with all eyes on President Wilson and his controversial Fourteen Points. Closer to home, the first sizable contingents of Chicago soldiers had begun returning from Europe. Emily Frankenstein was one of the thousands of Chicagoans who gathered in the Loop to welcome home the 333rd Field Artillery of the Blackhawk Division, the first group to arrive. Securing a good vantage point at the window of a family friend’s office on the fourth floor of the Willoughby Building, she watched the procession as it made its way up Michigan Avenue toward city hall. Two weeks earlier, Emily had been approached on the street by a “shell-shocked soldier” who had followed her home, asking if he might call on her. The incident had unsettled the young girl—some of the returning soldiers seemed quite changed by their ordeal in the trenches—but today she was happy to cheer them on, disappointed only that the parade was more subdued than she had expected. Mr. Caspery, the family friend, told her not to worry, that the really big celebrations were yet to come. “Wait until the Rainbow and Prairie Divisions come in,” he said, referring to the two Chicago-based forces that would arrive later in the spring. Whether Chicago would be able to house and employ this influx of demobilizing troops, however, was a question that was already being asked with some trepidation.
Also a question was how—and how many of—the returning soldiers would be voting in the upcoming elections. The conventional wisdom (in the newspapers, at least) was that the vast majority of soldiers would naturally support anyone except Kaiser Bill, the man who had allegedly undermined their efforts during the war. But the United States was being agonizingly slow in repatriating its armed forces after the close of hostilities. With the deadline for voter registration looming, it was possible that few soldiers and sailors would be back in time to make their voices heard in the April 1 general election. In a close race, a disenfranchised military could very well mean the difference between defeat and victory for the Thompson forces.6
