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

by Gary Krist

  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.

  On March 20, the Hughes bill, which had already passed in the state senate, passed in the house by a unanimous vote of 130 to 0. The bill would now go to Governor Lowden for his signature. Thompson and Lundin would be watching to see what the governor of Illinois did next.7

  * * *

  Of all the powerful figures standing in the way of Thompson and Lundin’s aspirations to political ascendancy, Frank O. Lowden was perhaps the one they despised most. Outright enemies like Victor Lawson or Colonel McCormick could be battled head-on; political rivals like Harry Olson or the members of the Democratic organization could be bargained with; idealists like the progressive reformers could simply be marginalized. But allies who turned around and betrayed their friends were another story. In machine politics, after all, ingratitude and disloyalty were the greatest sins a man could commit. Lowden was guilty of both.8

  Like that most famous presidential aspirant from Illinois, Frank Lowden had risen from humble beginnings. Son of a blacksmith-farmer from rural Iowa, he had educated himself whenever his farming duties allowed, eventually working his way through the University of Iowa and then Union (now Northwestern) College of Law. A flourishing Chicago legal practice had given him enough stature to meet and marry an heiress—Florence Pullman, daughter of multimillionaire George Pullman of railroading fame. Always a solid, middle-of-the-road Republican of high principle, Lowden (blessed, according to Hamlin Garland, with the looks of “an English earl”) had nonetheless been enough of a pragmatist to agree to an uneasy alliance with the Thompson-Lundin machine in his run for the governor’s mansion in 1916. At the time, Lundin had been eager to proceed to step two of his grand plan to make “a Mayor, a Governor, a President,” and he saw in the distinguished-looking Lowden a politician appealing enough to win and ambitious enough to play ball to do it. And so, at a much-whispered-about colloquy in a country house near Eagle Lake, Wisconsin, the three men reportedly struck a deal: Lowden, it was agreed, would support Thompson for leader of the Republican National Committee if Thompson and Lundin would support Lowden for governor. It was just the kind of horse trade for which Illinois politics was notorious, and—in this case as in many others—it bore fruit. In May 1916, with Lowden’s help, Thompson became chairman of the Illinois delegation to the Republican National Committee. In November of the same year, Lowden, with the support of the mayor and his mentor, was elected governor of Illinois.9

  For Lowden, apparently, the deal ended there. But Thompson and Lundin had other plans. In their version of the game, elective success was naturally followed by expressions of gratitude, mainly in the form of patronage and other spoils of victory. And in Illinois these were always in abundant supply. For technical reasons having to do with the state’s antiquated constitution, major cities in Illinois had to be run by a number of independent “governments,” each responsible for a different part of the city’s operations. Chicago alone had twenty-seven of these entities—including several park districts, the Chicago Board of Education, the library board, the courts, and so forth—each acting independently to raise and spend money to accomplish its various mandates. What this created (aside from administrative chaos) was a plethora of boards, commissions, and bureaus, each of which had to be filled by appointment or election. With so many choice, well-paid positions to dispense, Illinois officials could—and did—use them as a kind of political currency, trading a commissionership here for a bit of election support there, promising a veto of a bill today for control of a parks board tomorrow. This was politics as usual in the Land of Lincoln in 1916, and—albeit to a lesser extent, thanks to constitutional and administrative changes over the years—it’s the way the game is still played today.10

  But Frank Lowden had other priorities upon becoming governor in January 1917. Once in office, he launched a full-scale effort to streamline the state government and modernize its tax structure, effectively doing away with many of the lucrative no-show jobs with which politicians repaid their supporters. Worse still, the plum appointments that remained within the governor’s gift were hardly disposed of in line with the desires of the mayor and Lundin. In fact, as Lowden’s biographer has observed, “an endorsement from Thompson seemed almost equivalent to a blackball” for any aspiring machine ally seeking state patronage.11

  Needless to say, the city hall crowd was furious. On the occasion of one of the governor’s visits to Chicago that spring, Lundin and several of his associates stormed Lowden’s suite at the Blackstone Hotel, pushed past his secretary at the outer door, and confronted the governor within. To hear one writer tell it: “It was a hectic interview. Lowden lit many cigarettes, throwing them half-smoked in the fireplace. He pleaded that appointments were personal, not political.” But the Poor Swede would not hear of it. “Lundin pressed the Governor. H
e demanded promised patronage and support for the City Hall organization. But when the final showdown came, the Governor refused point blank.”12

  Since then, relations between city hall and the Illinois governor had just gone from bad to worse. The two Republican executives had clashed repeatedly since 1916, especially over the mayor’s pacifist stance during the war, which Lowden regarded as tantamount to treason. And so in March 1919—as the fifty-eight-year-old Lowden lay in bed in Springfield with a mild case of the flu—he had a delicate decision to make about the upcoming Hughes bill. With his eye on the 1920 presidential nomination (which he very much wanted, despite pro forma expressions of reluctance), he could conceivably allow the bill to die unsigned and make it impossible for many soldiers to vote. Doing so would certainly win him some needed points with the alienated Thompson-Lundin organization and perhaps ease his path to the nomination. But it would also go against every pro-military conviction he had as the so-called war governor of Illinois. And in any case, if Thompson lost the mayor’s office, he would be a significantly less formidable enemy to Lowden, even if he managed to retain his position as a power broker at the 1920 convention. So when the bill came before him, the governor did not hesitate long. On March 27—just five days before the election—he signed it into law.

  Thompson and Lundin, loath to be seen as anti-soldier but certain to be hurt by the bill, could say nothing publicly against the decision. But the governor’s move underlined a conviction that had been forming in their minds for three years—namely, that if they were to have any hope of realizing their greater political goals, Lowden was an obstacle that would have to be eliminated.13

  * * *

  It was the last week of the campaign, and prospects were starting to look worrisome for the Thompson camp. March had been a turbulent month in Chicago. The crime wave had just grown worse and worse, a development attributed by the Daily News not to a rising black population, but rather to the “criminal politics” in city hall. Labor unrest was growing, with one meeting in the hall of Chicago’s journeyman plumbers union degenerating into a fatal gun battle. Wage demands by the streetcar unions were at the same time pushing the car lines to the verge of crisis: “It is impossible to exaggerate the seriousness of the situation,” announced Leonard Busby, president of the Chicago Surface Lines, “both to the investors and [to] the public.” Meanwhile, the entire city was fretting about Bolsheviks in their midst. On March 10, an alleged Chicago-based plot by the Industrial Workers of the World was revealed, its object “the overthrow of the government of the United States by means of a bloody revolution and the establishment of a Bolshevik republic.” Chicago police had even formed a special “Bolshevik squad” to investigate the bomb threats that were becoming ever more numerous.14

  The toll these events were taking on the mayor’s reelection prospects was clear. Even the election bettors in the city saloons, where Thompson had long been the favorite, were now holding back their wagers, “awaiting next week’s developments.” Then, just a few days before the election, McCormick and the Tribune opened up a bold new line of attack against the Thompson-Lundin forces. Filing a plea in the mayor’s libel suit that charged him with sedition during the war, the Trib cited acts and conduct that “did obstruct and embarrass, hinder and interfere with the United States” in its war effort. The timing of this plea was clearly an election tactic, the last blast in a concerted effort to remind Chicago voters of Big Bill’s war record, but it had its effect. Some were now saying that Sweitzer would run away with the election. Even the news that Ring Lardner had dropped out of the race (he decided that he’d rather make a run for the office of king) could not bring the mayor any cheer.15

  If ever Thompson and Lundin needed to shore up their base, it was now. So they turned to the people who had given them the winning edge in 1915—the voters of the Black Belt. No arrests had yet been made in the racial-bombing incidents, and black voters clearly needed some reassurance that the mayor hadn’t turned his back on them. At a March 24 rally at the Pekin Theatre, Thompson was in top form: “I always feel at home here in the Second Ward,” the mayor crooned to the all-black audience. “I feel as though I were among friends.”

  “You’re our brother!” cried a voice from the second row.

  Amid general laughter the mayor turned serious. “That’s no jest,” he said. Then, in a not-so-veiled reference to Wells-Barnett’s efforts against him, he added: “Enemies have tried to divide us—they are trying to divide us now—but we have always stood together and we always will.”

  The rally eventually turned into a virtual lovefest. Ignoring accusations of his inaction in the recent bombings, Thompson made sure to remind his audience of their frequent descriptions of himself as the second Abraham Lincoln. His advice to black voters was to deny the naysayers and remain united: “Vote as a unit and you will protect yourselves from your enemies; lose your solidarity and you will fall prey to them.”

  “And now,” he concluded to riotous applause (and with perhaps more candor than he intended), “go out and get as many ballots in the box as you can.”16

  The campaign, meanwhile, reached a crescendo in the days leading up to April 1, with Thompson, Sweitzer, and Hoyne each predicting a victory margin of more than one hundred thousand votes. “Never, on the eve of a Chicago mayoralty election, was there more uncertainty than tonight,” the New York Times remarked on March 30. The Tribune described the scene in vivid detail: “Downtown Chicago stood on its head,” the paper reported. “[Partisans] ran around in circles, got mixed up in a dozen clashes, tore down lithographs and smashed banners, paraded, yelled, swamped the betting places, and went mad.” There was widespread hooliganism in the Loop—including, according to the Herald and Examiner, the “hurling of stink bombs”—as anti-Thompson crowds grew increasingly desperate. One group painted a Kaiser-style mustache on a poster of the mayor’s face and followed his limousine to all of his campaign stops. “Whenever [Mayor Thompson] drew up at the curb,” the Trib reported, “the crowd was there with the picture and insisted on sticking it into his face.”17

  Early on Election Day, voter turnout seemed on track to break all previous records, with an estimated four hundred thousand ballots cast by noon. Amid a “general belief that party lines were [being] thrown to the wind,” no one could predict the outcome with anything approaching confidence. The Cook County ballot qualified as one of the longest and most complicated in the world, so one could never guess precisely what a confused electorate might do. This vote, though, was considered even less predictable than usual. Irma Frankenstein, Emily’s mother, went to vote with her husband, Victor, and described the process in her diary: “We knew a little about the candidates but there were so many of them [that] the ballot was a disturbing puzzle.” She tried to recall the recommendations made by the Women’s City Club, but could remember only a few. For the rest of the offices, she decided to vote “100% American,” rejecting candidates with Polish, German, Bohemian, and Swedish surnames (an odd choice, surely, for a woman named Frankenstein). “I fell for one poetic name,” she admitted, “Earl somebody or other. His name was in two places. I voted for him once. So much for poetry.” After an hour, she emerged from the polling station only to find that Victor had taken even longer to decipher the ballot. But she was apparently satisfied with her vote. “I found a system,” she concluded, “and I daresay I voted as intelligently as most voters.”18

  Mrs. Frankenstein may or may not have been right on that last point, but when the votes were tallied—again amid widespread charges of ballot fraud and voter intimidation by armed thugs—the message was clear: The city (or at least a plurality of its voters) wanted four more years of Big Bill Thompson. Granted, the mayor’s total of 259,828 votes was nearly 140,000 less than he’d gotten in 1915, but in a field divided among Sweitzer (238,206 votes), Hoyne (110,851), and the minor-party candidates, it was enough to squeak by.19

  “Truth and justice have again prevailed,” the euphoric and much-relieved
mayor announced at his victory celebration that night. “The voters have rendered their verdict. In spite of the malevolent attacks made upon me by the interests that seek to prey upon the public, my administration has been approved by the people!”20

  The national press, fully invested in the image of Thompson as a traitorous buffoon, was incredulous: “Chicago’s Shame!” screeched the New Haven Journal-Courier. The New York Times could only scratch its editorial head: “It is difficult for outsiders to understand the complicated interplay of machines and personalities and more or less artificial issues … that enter into a Cook County municipal election,” the paper admitted. Somehow, voters in that “bedraggled and dirty” city had seen fit to reelect an “eccentric Caliph,” and one who had proven himself “a bitter joke as a patriot.” It was apparently more than the members of a truly civilized East Coast electorate could fathom.

  The local newspapers seemed to have a better grasp of what had happened. The much-hoped-for surge of anti-Thompson votes—among soldiers and others hostile to the mayor—had been dissipated by the presence of too many alternative candidates in the race. Calling Thompson’s victory a “fluke,” the Daily News tried to make much of this huge but splintered opposition vote: “He becomes a minority mayor, holding office not by virtue of any confidence still felt in him by the community … but simply because the anti-Thompson voters did not work together.”

  The Chicago Daily Journal, however, was far less diplomatic. “Negroes Elect ‘Big Bill’ ” was the banner headline on their special election edition, over a story explaining how Thompson’s overwhelming support in the Black Belt accounted for virtually his entire 17,600-vote margin of victory. “The Negroes were in a frenzy of delight when they learned that their votes had put Big Bill in the mayor’s chair for another four years,” the paper reported. “South State Street, South Wabash Avenue, and the other thoroughfares in the district witnessed a demonstration of hilarity seldom seen on an election night.” In an already divided city, then, the election results provided just one more point of contention, just one more reason for many embittered whites to resent the city’s ever more powerful black population.21