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

by Gary Krist

  The mayor himself offered a different analysis. “I have been maligned. I have been misunderstood,” Big Bill announced. “[But] I hope during the ensuing four years to be understood.” Turning to his perennial trump card, the Chicago Plan, he tried to refocus the city’s attention on its hopeful future. “I want to make Chicago a great city,” he effused. “I want to build her a lakefront, to finish widening streets and building bridges. I love this city! My love for her was inherited! I love Chicago with all my heart!”

  For Fred Lundin, the triumph of his protégé meant a second chance to extend the reach of his organization beyond the city to embrace his greater state and national objectives. Before that could happen, though, there was a lot of work to be done. In the days after the election, he was already busily tallying up the contributions of their friends during the campaign, in order to know who was to be rewarded and who was to be shunned. The calculus of political obligation could be arcane, but no one knew it better than the Poor Swede.

  One thing that did not escape his notice: Among the customary letters of congratulations, conciliation, and contrition—the bread-and-butter missives that came from both Republicans and Democrats, from both friends and enemies—one was conspicuously missing. From the governor of Illinois there was nothing.22

  BARELY CHASTISED by the close call of his narrow reelection victory, Big Bill Thompson moved quickly to punish his enemies and reassert his authority over a city where discord and divisiveness now seemed to be worsening every day. “Re-Election Starts Mayor on Warpath,” the Daily News reported on the day after the election. In words “bristling with militancy,” the mayor made it understood that he was ready to do battle with the full gamut of “greedy plunderers of the people.” He would launch an official investigation into the “rotten influence” of the Municipal Voters’ League, begin an effort to purge the board of education of his opponents, and take aim at the utility and transit interests that wanted to bleed the people with higher gas prices and transit fares. All this, he claimed, was to “restore to the people their constitutional powers to govern themselves.”1

  The hidden agenda behind these multiple crusades was not lost on the members of the press. “Thompson Men Plan to Extend Rule in State: Have Visions of Lowden Forced into Line,” the Tribune warned on April 3, citing rumors that the governor’s political future was now in Big Bill’s hands. “Mayor Thompson let it be known that he will shoot full of holes … Governor Lowden’s alleged hope of entering the Republican lists for the presidential nomination,” the Herald and Examiner reported. “If the Governor wishes the Mayor’s assistance, he will have to plead on his political knees.” Lowden, in other words, was going to have to start giving the Thompson-Lundin organization what it wanted—or else suffer the consequences.2

  In his official statements, of course, Big Bill adopted a different tone and was mostly magnanimous in victory. When asked in a sit-down interview with Tribune reporter Charles Wheeler if he wanted to say anything to the newspapers, Thompson chuckled. “I guess we gave you a pretty fair fight, didn’t we?” he said. “But seriously, I am not apologizing for my fight against you. I am ready for more if you want it.” After a moment, though, the mayor relented and offered to let bygones be bygones: “I am here for four years more. Let’s try to forget our personal likes and dislikes for a while and see if there isn’t something good and big and enduring we can all do for Chicago.”

  Apparently hoping to get past this genial rhetoric, Wheeler went on to press the mayor on possible changes to his cabinet and on the coming wars with the MVL and the new city council. But just when Big Bill seemed ready to be more candid, the office door burst open and Fred Lundin rushed in. “Hello there, old-timer,” Lundin said to the veteran reporter, with a smile that “hung on either earlobe.”

  When Wheeler asked the Poor Swede for his own perspective on the election results, Lundin (who owned a hardware business) merely threw up his hands. “Don’t know a thing about politics,” he cried. “I’m just selling doors.”

  “Isn’t he a wonder?” Thompson beamed.

  And that was the end of the interview.3

  Whatever their real plans, the Thompson administration continued to insist publicly that its first priority was to unite the discordant city behind “a constructive program to boom Chicago”—translation: to rally support for as much of the Chicago Plan as money could be found for. “Be a Chicago booster!” the exultant mayor now cried at every opportunity in his speeches. “Throw away your hammer! Get a horn and blow loud for Chicago!” Such enthusiasm would certainly be needed to accomplish the goal. Given the current state of the city’s finances, funding Big Bill’s big plan would not be easy. Because of strict limits on the city’s taxing and bonding powers, special legislation would be needed to aid Chicago in the months ahead—not just to raise the money for long-term projects like the Michigan Avenue extension but even for current expenses. In a time of rising prices and growing government debt, such legislation was sure to meet with stiff resistance from some quarters. “A new spirit must control public officials chargeable with expenditures of public money,” Governor Lowden warned in his public statements that spring. “The war is over. We must now plan to pay the cost.” He threatened to veto any tax increase bill “unless it is one absolutely necessary.”4

  Fiscal conservatism, however, was not high on Big Bill’s agenda in 1919, and with his new leverage over the governor, any rumblings about a veto could likely be made to disappear. In late April, Thompson and his entourage traveled south to Springfield to lobby for passage of the required aid bills in the state legislature. At a distinctly awkward luncheon with the Lowdens on April 29 (at which the chastened governor, it was reported, offered his “delayed congratulations” to Thompson on his recent reelection), the mayor turned up the pressure on Lowden to support the bills. That afternoon, Big Bill made a more public pitch before a joint committee of the Illinois house and senate. Alluding to “conditions over which the municipal government of Chicago has no control” (among them, the anticipated loss of revenue due to the coming of Prohibition), the mayor, now that he was safely reelected, made no secret of the city’s dire financial condition. Under present law, he averred, Chicago could expect to raise revenues of some $20 million for the year; the sum required to run the city, however, would be $33.5 million. The conclusion was simple: “The city of Chicago must have relief if it is to continue functioning as a city.”

  It proved to be an effective plea. Although the measure faced predictable opposition from southern and rural elements in the legislature (the struggle between “the city” and “downstate” was—and still is—a recurring theme in Illinois politics), the mayor ultimately got his way. The bills passed, and Lowden, apparently persuaded that it would be in his interest to find the tax hikes “absolutely necessary,” signed them into law, however reluctantly. For Thompson and Lundin, the pleasure of seeing the proud and aristocratic governor bow meekly to their will must have been exquisite. But passage of the bills was also an important political victory. Although individual bond issues would still have to be voted on by the taxpayers, Chicago had essentially had its credit limit substantially raised. The mayor and his Mephistopheles, as some were now calling them, had cleared yet another hurdle on their way to doing that “something good and big and enduring” for the city of Chicago—no matter what the cost.5

  * * *

  In the meantime, the citizens of the Windy City were finding refuge from their worries, as always, in sports and other amusements. Baseball season had opened in mid-April, and both Chicago teams had won their first games handily—the Cubs beating the Pirates 5 to 1 and the White Sox trouncing the St. Louis Browns 13 to 4, with the “Gleason gang” collecting a total of twenty-one hits off four different pitchers. (“I wish you could of [sic] seen this ball that Eddie [Collins] hit in the third inning,” Ring Lardner reported in the Trib the next day. The ball had been hit so hard, according to Ring, that Browns second baseman Joe Gedeon “doesn
’t know yet if he caught it or not.”) In May, the city’s two big amusement parks—Riverside on the North Side and White City on the South—opened with all appropriate fanfare. It was White City’s fifteenth summer season, and park officials had high hopes for the anniversary year. True, White City’s aerodrome was still being used for the construction of blimps and other aircraft, but the park had plenty of other attractions on tap, including a freak show, a riding academy, and “The Garden Follies,” a musical extravaganza featuring the spectacle of “100 dainty dancing ankles.” One big unknown was Prohibition’s likely effect on attendance. Because there was still no ratified peace treaty officially ending the war, the Wartime Prohibition Act, a grain-conservation measure banning alcohol consumption in most states, was set to go into effect on July 1, six months before national Prohibition. But park officials hoped that the demise of alcohol might actually increase business at the park, forcing saloon habitués to seek a more wholesome venue in which to spend their dollars and their leisure hours.6

  Fears of Bolshevism, unfortunately, also carried over from spring into summer. The success of the Russian Revolution had put the fear of God (or, rather, godlessness) into many U.S. officials, and now a full-blown domestic spying campaign was under way to root out Americans considered of dubious loyalty—a category that could include everyone from pacifists to union leaders to persons insufficiently enthusiastic about buying Liberty Bonds. During war, in fact, even Mayor Thompson himself had complained of being spied on. “My enemies have recently bored holes in the walls of my apartments, installed pictographs, tapped telephone wires, stationed operators in adjoining rooms, and employed spies to hound me,” he complained. Hearing this, many Chicagoans suspected that the mayor might be succumbing to outright paranoia, but federal records indicate that Big Bill was indeed under surveillance at the time.

  And now, in 1919, the possibility of violent revolution in the United States was considered very real indeed. The Red Menace appeared to be everywhere, with Chicago’s “Bolshevik squad” turning up rumors of sabotage conspiracies all over the city. Then, in late April, a genuine nationwide bomb plot was uncovered. On the 28th, an explosive device “big enough to blow out the entire side of the County-City building” was found in the mail of Seattle mayor Ole Hanson. The next day, a package addressed to Georgia senator Thomas R. Hardwick exploded in the hands of a servant in Atlanta. A clerk at the New York Post Office proceeded to turn up sixteen undelivered packages in a back room; all contained explosives. By the end of the week, a total of thirty-six package bombs had been found, addressed to prominent figures such as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, and Chicago’s own Kenesaw Mountain Landis. It was enough to make even the wildest conspiracy theories appear plausible.7

  Chicago’s ongoing labor unrest, meanwhile, also played into these rising fears of worker revolution, as the faltering national economy put pressure on employers and employees alike. With inflation eating into every worker’s paycheck (the cost of living had risen 75 percent since December 1914), unions were demanding hefty salary increases; but industry, scaling back production from wartime highs, refused to make any concessions at all. So, as spring ended, the number of unions threatening to strike was mounting precipitously. Not just the steel, meatpacking, and transit unions were restive; there were strike threats from Western Union telegraphers, municipal sweepers and garbagemen, members of the building trades, and even city engineers.

  Closely observing this increasingly grave labor situation was a man whose name would eventually have very different associations in the national psyche. Carl Sandburg, a Chicago resident since 1906, had already earned a reputation as a poet by 1919 (his Chicago Poems had been published to some acclaim four years earlier), but he still needed a day job to support his wife and three children in their little house in suburban Maywood. Finding himself unemployed shortly after Mayor Thompson’s reelection, Sandburg decided to make a pitch to Chicago Daily News editor Henry Justin Smith to be taken on staff as a labor reporter. “I believe there are some big, live feature stories” to be covered in the labor field, he wrote to Smith on May 31, mentioning the looming troubles in the transit unions and employment problems of the newly repatriated doughboys. “How are the returned soldiers going to work,” he asked, “and what does life mean now to the steelworkers who went overseas?”8

  Convinced by this argument, Smith hired the poet immediately and set him to work covering the national convention of the American Federation of Labor. The assignment proved to be a good fit. A former member of the Socialist Party (“I am with all rebels everywhere” is how the poet once described his political leanings), Sandburg had been active in left-wing politics for decades. Recently, upon returning from a journalism assignment in Sweden, he had even been interrogated by federal authorities for agreeing to deliver ten thousand dollars in bank drafts and some revolutionary literature to a Finnish agent in New York. Always sympathetic to the cause of labor, he was clearly moved by what he saw at the AFL convention—namely, the coming of “fundamental, seminal changes” in labor-management relations. Unions, he reported, were indeed becoming more radicalized, and if the current situation in Chicago was any indication, a major confrontation between workers and their employers across many industries was all but inevitable.9

  Conflict also surfaced in the city’s patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods. Postwar Europe’s shifting currents of civil strife—“a sorry world,” as Colonel McCormick called it, “everywhere unrest, revolution, Bolshevism”—were having repercussions among Chicago’s foreign-born populations. On May 21, a mob of twenty-five thousand eastern European Jews stormed downtown Chicago to protest the pogroms in Poland, jamming streets and sidewalks and stopping traffic in the Loop. On June 8, fearing a pogrom on their own soil, eight thousand West Side Jews gathered at the corner of Twelfth and Kedzie to fend off a rumored “invasion” by a mob from an adjacent Polish neighborhood. The invasion never materialized, but incidents of Polish harassment of Jews continued to occur. Eventually, they grew so numerous that a delegation of Jewish peddlers demanded a meeting with police chief John Garrity to discuss special police protection. In a sense, the city’s collage of ethnic enclaves had become a small-scale version of the European continent, so that conflicts occurring there were naturally being played out in miniature on the streets of Chicago’s neighborhoods.10

  Ethnic dissonance of a kind was also being felt at the Frankenstein household down in Kenwood. In March, Emily’s parents had forbidden her from seeing any more of Jerry Lapiner, her still-secret fiancé. Part of the problem was Jerry’s background. The Frankensteins, members of Chicago’s long-established German-Jewish community, were wealthy, highly educated secular Jews—Victor a doctor, Irma a college-trained intellectual who (despite her rather cavalier attitude toward voting) wrote poetry and read widely. Jerry, who came from a working-class family of eastern European Jews, was not well spoken and had never gone to college. The cultural gulf separating them was starting to become an issue, especially for Emily’s parents. Like many of those belonging to Chicago’s assimilated old immigrant groups (which had come mainly from northern and western Europe), the Frankensteins tended to look down on less assimilated, less educated new immigrants (who were mostly from southern and eastern Europe). Worse, Jerry was still flirting with conversion to Christian Science. All in all, he was not considered by the Frankensteins to be marriageable material for their daughter.

  The Christian Science issue troubled Emily as well. Sharing many of her parents’ values, she largely eschewed traditional religious observance but found spirituality “in literature, my schoolwork, reading and thinking for myself.” Christian Science seemed to her an alien and unhealthy system of belief. Still, characteristically eager to see things “in a new or different light because of the experiences I have,” she had made a secret visit in February to a Christian Science lecture to try to understand its appeal. But she had come away unimpressed. The lecture had seeme
d more like a sales pitch than anything else, and on looking around the audience she’d seen “so very, very few healthy, robust people.”

  “Was madder than ever after leaving [the lecture],” Emily wrote in her diary that night, “and more helpless.” Even so, she was determined to change Jerry, to get him interested in “things sensible—history, literature, even some kind of science. Just so he’ll see the difference.”11

  Emily, of course, was still very young and subject to girlish romanticism, but she felt she really did love Jerry. The previous summer, at the height of their untroubled first months of courtship, they had sat together in the swing on the side porch of the Frankenstein home on Ellis Avenue, baring their souls to each other. “Isn’t it funny,” she’d written in her diary afterward, “a lovely June evening, on a vine-covered porch, makes it so easy to say what one has to say.” Emily felt it was important that they have no secrets from each other. So she told him about her past suitors, of which there had been no shortage—Lenny, the boy who had been cruel to her; Albert, the overeager one whose annual proposals she always turned down flat; and Harrison, the son of one of her father’s medical colleagues, who had tragically died in an army camp during the war. She wanted to make sure Jerry knew about all of them, especially since she and Jerry were already thinking about marriage. It wouldn’t happen immediately; Jerry, like many of the other former soldiers in Chicago, still could not find work, and he was resolved not to wed until he could support a wife properly. But Emily insisted that this didn’t matter. “I told Jerry I never wanted to marry a rich man,” she wrote. “In fact, I’ve always preferred a poor man, so I could help him. I felt that that was a true test of love.”