by Gary Krist
At a time when alleged progressives were falling pitifully short in their support of equal rights, such words showed significant political courage. And Thompson did not back down from them when he ran for mayor. “I’ll give you people the best opportunities you’ve ever had if you elect me,” he told a black audience during the 1915 campaign. “I’ll give your people jobs … and any of you want to shoot craps, go ahead and do it.” That he was appealing more to new migrants than to the respectable black middle class is obvious from that last comment, but both ends of the spectrum ended up showing him strong support. The Second Ward’s black voters gave Big Bill the margins he needed in 1915 to win in both the primary and the general election.11
Whether Thompson’s election was truly a boon for Chicago’s blacks is debatable, but he did deliver on many of his promises. Aside from helping to sweep into office the first African American alderman in the city’s history (Oscar De Priest), he also appointed blacks to prominent posts in his administration. Edward Wright and Louis B. Anderson were named assistant corporation counsels (Anderson later became Big Bill’s floor manager in the city council), while the Reverend Archibald Carey was made an investigator in the city’s legal department. By the end of his first term, Thompson had also doubled the number of blacks on the police force. Nor did he neglect the more symbolic expressions of support. He appeared frequently at holiday celebrations and civic functions in the Black Belt, and one of his first official acts as mayor (a decision later reversed by a judge) was to ban the showing of D. W. Griffith’s notoriously racist The Birth of a Nation. Thompson denounced the film as an abomination and an insult to millions of American citizens.12
Many whites disapproved of these efforts. Writers in the daily press began referring to city hall as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and questioned the wisdom of some of Thompson’s appointments. Big Bill did back down on at least one choice (of a black physician to the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium), but on the rest he stood firm. “The persons appointed were qualified for their positions,” he argued. “In the name of humanity it is my duty to do what I can to elevate rather than degrade any class of American citizens.” This from a man derided by his allegedly more enlightened enemies as “a blubbering jungle hippopotamus.”13
The black community responded with understandable enthusiasm to Thompson’s various expressions of support. The Chicago Defender in particular was lavish in its praise of the mayor, comparing him frequently to Abraham Lincoln and calling him “the best friend politically our people have had in the past half-century.” According to the Defender, the members of the race owed him their votes. “He has treated us fairly and squarely,” an editorial claimed in late 1918, during Thompson’s unsuccessful Senate campaign. “We have waited too many long, weary years for such a friend, and we should be loyal to him.”14
But there were some in Chicago’s Black Belt who were not quite so entranced with Big Bill Thompson. For those working to mitigate the squalor of black neighborhoods, the mayor’s bruited support often seemed all talk and grand gestures, with very little real conviction behind it. Wasn’t it Thompson’s police department that was pushing vice and gambling establishments into the Black Belt, degrading the neighborhood and providing black youths with an easy road to crime and vice but no route to respectable success? And wasn’t it that same police force that was now just standing by as black homes were being bombed? Clearly someone needed to point out that fine words and a few token jobs were not enough to earn the mayor comparisons to the Great Emancipator. And there was at least one black leader in Chicago determined to do just that.
* * *
On the night of March 19, a little girl playing on a South Side pavement watched as two men in a roadster drove past and tossed a package from the passenger side. It landed on the steps of 4724 State Street, the offices of black banker and real estate agent Jesse Binga. Curious, the girl turned to a woman standing next to her. “Let’s see what it is,” she said. But the woman held her back, warning, “No, it might be a bomb.”
A few seconds later, the package exploded, rocking the neighborhood and showering the sidewalks on both sides of the street with broken glass.
Only one person—a frightened man who jumped out of a third-floor window at the sound of the blast—was hurt. Another bomb a few minutes later on Calumet Avenue, apparently thrown from the same roadster, hurt no one at all. But for Chicago’s black population, the implications of this new attack were ominous: The pace of bombings was accelerating, and it seemed clear that the Chicago Police Department was unwilling to do anything to stop them.15
Admittedly, the police weren’t doing much to fight crime elsewhere in Chicago, either. As the spring of 1919 progressed, crime suddenly seemed to be out of control everywhere in the city. Holdups, shootings, stolen automobiles—all were now on the rise, making a mockery of the hopeful New Year’s sentiments about “Chicago’s greatest year.” In the first twenty days of March alone, the city had seen eighteen murders, two major bank robberies, three payroll holdups, and scores of assaults, muggings, and other offenses. John Garrity, Mayor Thompson’s chief of police, was on the defensive. Crime was rampant nationwide, he explained. There were simply too many soldiers returning from war and failing to find jobs. In Chicago, he added, the problem was compounded by the presence of five thousand unemployed African Americans newly arrived from the South. With so many idle, rootless black men in the city, it was no wonder that crime was so high.16
To Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the well-known South Side journalist and anti-lynching activist, this was simply too much to take. Not only were blacks being disproportionately victimized by the rising tide of crime in Chicago; now, apparently, they were also going to be blamed for it. And this by the administration of a man who claimed to be the best friend of the Black Belt!
Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, Wells-Barnett had been a controversial figure for most of her adult life. Called everything from “the mother protector” of her race (by the Illinois State Journal) to “a slanderous and nasty mulatress” (by the New York Times), she had been on a one-woman “crusade for justice” since her early twenties, when she filed suit against the C&O Railroad for ejecting her from a first-class coach on a train out of Memphis. (When the conductor tried to pull her from her seat, the diminutive young teacher “hooked her feet under the seat in front of her, began scratching the conductor with her nails, and then bit his hands deeply enough to draw blood.”) Several years later, in response to the lynching of three black men in Memphis, she wrote a newspaper editorial so scathing that a mob of the city’s “leading citizens” ransacked the paper’s offices and warned the editorial’s author (who was in Philadelphia at the time) that if she ever returned to Memphis she would be hanged in front of the courthouse. This, of course, only cemented her resolve to keep writing. “They had destroyed my paper …, made me an exile, and threatened my life for hinting at the truth,” she later wrote, “[so] I felt that I owed it to myself and my race to tell the whole truth.”17
Since moving north to Chicago in its world’s fair year of 1893 (when she caused a stir with her controversial pamphlet “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World Columbian Exposition”), she had married and raised six children. But family life had done little to curtail her activities. When called upon to make speaking tours, she would simply pack up whatever child was still young enough to require her attentions and bring him or her along. She also organized several women’s political and suffrage clubs, served as Chicago’s first black female probation officer, worked with Jane Addams to prevent school segregation, and once even represented “the colored people of Illinois” in a court case against a sheriff who had failed to prevent a lynching in Cairo. (“Mother,” her thirteen-year-old son had said to her when at first she seemed reluctant to take on the task, “if you don’t go, no one else will.”) Anticipating that Chicago’s burgeoning black population would soon need a reliable source of social services, she and h
er husband had founded the Negro Fellowship League in 1910. Conceived as a kind of black version of Hull House, the league was to serve as a “lighthouse” for black migrants, finding them jobs and housing and providing them with alternatives to the saloon and the brothel as places to spend their idle hours.
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.
THE 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 testim
onials 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.
