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

by Gary Krist

  Mayor Thompson, seeing the potential for a coup, rushed to appoint his own board of arbitration to settle the transit mess. Having campaigned on a promise to preserve the five-cent car fare, he at first had been content to let the governor take the heat for any breakdown in negotiations, citing legal obstacles to intervention by the city. Now those concerns were brushed aside. Thompson proposed that the unions bypass the state commission and meet with his own nine-member mediation committee to pound out a compromise. But the president of the elevated railway employees union rebuffed the mayor’s proposal. “Never,” he stated categorically when asked if he would agree to the intervention. “That committee arbitrate? I should say not.” The unions did, however, agree to hold off on the strike for at least another few days.11

  The situation was looking grim, but even with this citywide crisis looming, the mayor was still pushing hard on his “Boost Chicago” effort. The lakefront ordinance and other important Chicago Plan measures were to be voted on in the city council on Monday, July 21. It would be, as the Evening Post put it, the council’s “most important meeting since the world’s fair days,” and Thompson and Lundin were determined not to let the current strife distract the city from its “dream coming true.” Waving aside the Tribune’s complaints about the exorbitant cost of the projects, the mayor pointed to the Michigan Avenue Bridge in particular as the kind of improvement that would pay back its investment many times over. “This bridge’ll bring property values around here up by the millions,” he argued. “They’ll be building big skyscrapers here when that bridge is finished, and some of [the people] that’ll build them will be the very ones that are howling at me now.” The city may have been falling apart all around him, but Big Bill the Builder still had his eye on the future.12

  And as for other dreams coming true, how bad could things really be in Chicago when the Sox were doing so well? On the afternoon of July 19, the South Siders had come back from a four-run deficit to defeat the Washington Senators 6 to 5 in eleven innings—against ace pitcher Walter Johnson, no less—convincing many fans that “the Sox are after the pennant.” Emily Frankenstein was supposed to go to that very game with her perpetual suitor Albert Chapsky, but she canceled the date at the last minute to secretly meet Jerry at home while her parents were away. Jerry had implied that he might be losing interest in Christian Science, a development that lifted her spirits considerably. “Maybe, after all, there is some hope of dreams coming true,” she wrote in her diary. “Maybe—but, oh, maybe—”13

  * * *

  The following Monday, July 21, 1919, dawned sunny and warm. Mayor Thompson, arriving at city hall, had a busy day ahead of him.

  One day last week, he had been approached in a corridor by a man named Earl Davenport—the publicity representative for the White City Amusement Park—who had asked if the mayor wanted to ride on a blimp that would be making flights over the city on Monday. Big Bill claimed he would love to accept the invitation, but there were simply too many crises demanding his attention. After all, the transit situation was calling. At noon, therefore—as the Wingfoot Express was making its preliminary flight over the city—the mayor was not aboard. Instead, he was meeting with members of his arbitration board to try to break the transit deadlock before the governor’s commission could do likewise.

  The outlook was more hopeful at the city council meeting later that afternoon. With the mayor presiding over the vote, the council triumphantly passed the Chicago Plan ordinances, making July 21 what Chicago Plan Commission president Charles Wacker called “the greatest day, barring none, in Chicago’s history.”

  “It marks a new era,” Wacker announced when the final tally was announced. “It is the beginning of the making of Chicago.” The council’s courageous decision, he said, “will make Chicago the most beautiful city in the world.”

  That new era, however, was about to get off to a decidedly shaky start. Before the meeting had ended, news arrived that sent a shock through the buzzing council chamber. A bizarre accident, it was said, had occurred in the Loop just a few blocks south of city hall. The Wingfoot Express—the blimp that the mayor himself might have been on that very day—had just fallen from the sky in flames and crashed into the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank.14

  BY TUESDAY MORNING, people from all over the Chicago area were traveling to the Loop to view the site of Monday’s bizarre disaster. A contingent of sixty patrolmen tried to keep order as thousands of curious onlookers milled around the ravaged bank, blocking traffic and mobbing the doors in order to get a glimpse of the wreckage inside. Thanks to some overnight volunteer work by scores of the city’s locked-out construction workers, the bank had managed to open to the public at the usual hour, and now its rattled employees—some with bandaged heads or arms in slings—were attempting to conduct business as usual. Fortunately, most of the damage from the crash had been confined to the building’s interior courtyard. The grand public areas had escaped relatively unscathed, and aside from some $95,000 worth of charred but still negotiable Liberty Bonds, the bank’s material losses had been remarkably small. “Reports that we lost any money or checks or bonds are not true,” bank president John J. Mitchell announced at 10 a.m. “Our greatest loss lies in the list of dead and injured.”1

  As the reality of those casualties began to sink in, many Chicagoans found that their initial distress over the loss of life was giving way to feelings of indignation and anger. The blimp crash, as one newspaper columnist put it, violated “all preconceived notions of safety,” allowing death to “burst into that modern monastery—a strong, conservative, and previously imperturbable bank.” Somehow the freak event seemed to strike at basic assumptions of urban order and security, leaving many city dwellers feeling vulnerable in ways they hadn’t just twenty-four hours earlier. “That girls working at their desks in the security of a bank building should be killed by flying steel and burning gas is an outrage against our civilization,” the editors of the Evening Post wrote in an editorial. “It is due, as so many other disasters are due, to the American habit of taking no preventive action till the disaster has occurred.”2

  The natural impulse was to hold someone accountable. The Chicago Daily News, describing the crash as “the most sensational tragedy since the end of the war,” fixed the blame firmly on the pilot and his employers, who irresponsibly put an entire city at risk for the sake of a “joyride” with no clear purpose. “The flight of the dirigible was a holiday stunt,” the paper maintained, “and helped advertise an amusement park.” The Tribune sounded a similar note: “There seems little question that the flight was experimental. Why, then, was an experiment carried out over the heads of thousands of persons, over the Loop of Chicago, when there are millions of acres of unoccupied land in the United States, to say nothing of a lake nearly 100 miles wide within a few blocks of the hangar?”3

  City and county officials wasted no time in apprehending the apparent culprits. Within hours of the crash, State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne, still in his old job after his unsuccessful run for mayor, had ordered the arrest of everyone associated with the Wingfoot Express. Fourteen men, all employees of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, had been held and interrogated. Most had been promptly released, but two—pilot Jack Boettner and project director W. C. Young—remained in police custody. Under intense questioning by the state’s attorney and Chief Garrity, Boettner made what were called “serious admissions” about the construction and operation of the blimp. The pilot acknowledged that the Wingfoot’s rotary engines were “experimental” and that this was the first time they were being used to power an airship. When asked whether the blimp had carried any fire extinguishers, he answered that the craft was indeed equipped with such a device, “but it was in the wrong place; by that I mean it was not handy.” As explanation for what had started the fire in the first place, Boettner could offer only “the theory of spontaneous combustion.”

  Even more disturbing was the testimony of W. C. Young. A former mining engineer, th
e twenty-seven-year-old project director confessed that he was totally unfamiliar with engine technology and in fact “did not know the difference between a spark plug and a carburetor.” Despite his inexperience, however, he had apparently taken an active part in the blimp’s construction. Insisting that the airship be assembled “in the quickest possible time,” he had even attached small makeshift hoods over the engines’ cylinders to address a problem with splashing hot oil. Hearing this, prosecutors felt they had enough evidence to request an indictment for criminal negligence, and so ordered that the two men be held overnight for a grand jury hearing.4

  Chicago’s city council had also acted with uncommon dispatch. Remaining in session after news of the Wingfoot crash reached the council chamber, the city’s aldermen spent Monday evening debating an emergency resolution intended to prohibit all aviation in the urban area. “It is unnecessary to state reasons for the adoption of this resolution,” said Alderman Anton Cermak, who introduced the measure. “This accident shows we must stop flying over the city sooner or later, and we had better do it sooner.” Further debate convinced Cermak to modify the wording of his resolution to call for regulation, rather than outright prohibition, of urban aviation. But by 11 p.m., the measure had been passed and sent on to the corporation counsel for further action. Having thus—as the Post complained—once again taken steps to prevent a disaster only after it had occurred, the council adjourned the session and the aldermen were able to go home before midnight.5

  * * *

  At morgues and hospitals across the city, loved ones of the victims held vigils through the night. At the Central Undertaking Rooms on Federal Street, Catherine Weaver, wife of blimp mechanic Carl Weaver, sat alone outside the room where her husband and several other victims lay awaiting identification. Arriving at the morgue in a state of hysteria, she at first had been denied admission to the room. She had taken a seat in a straight-back chair just outside the door and remained there for hours, pale and trembling, whispering, “He can’t be dead, he can’t be dead.” When Carl’s body was finally wheeled out to her for identification, she broke down completely, weeping uncontrollably until doctors led her away.6

  At St. Luke’s Hospital, several other victims were barely clinging to life. The family of Marcus Callopy, a clerk in the bank’s foreign exchange department, waited anxiously while surgeons labored to save the young man’s life, though the prognosis was grim. In an outer office of the hospital, Alice Norton spent the night on a bench with two friends while her husband, Milton, was attended by doctors. Early signs had been hopeful; the photographer’s legs had been broken in the parachute jump, but he appeared to have no internal injuries. His condition, however, had deteriorated during the night. Early on Tuesday morning, Mrs. Norton was taken to his bedside, but though he was able to recognize her, he could not speak. Doctors held out little hope for his recovery.7

  Others were already planning funerals. Elsie Otto—wife of Carl Otto, the bank telegrapher who had returned to work a day early—was making arrangements with her husband’s Masonic lodge to hold a memorial service at the Graceland chapel. She had first heard about the tragedy when a Tribune reporter approached her on Monday evening, as she was sitting on the porch of their North Side cottage with their adopted son, Stanley. “Are you the wife of Carl Otto?” the reporter asked. Instantly suspecting the worst, Elsie asked, “What’s happened to him?” She screamed when the reporter told her that Carl had been seriously hurt. “He’s dead! I know he’s dead!” she cried. “I told him not to go back to work today!” Leaving Stanley with some neighbors, she called a taxi and raced to St. Luke’s Hospital. Carl was still alive when she arrived, but she had only a few minutes with him before he died. Doctors gave her morphine and held her at the hospital until she had calmed down enough to go home.8

  Earl Davenport’s wife had reacted even more dramatically. Shortly before the accident, the publicity man had apparently telephoned her. She was ill in bed at the time and had asked him not to go up in the blimp, since she’d “had a premonition that something was going to happen.” Earl had promised her that he wouldn’t ride that day. But several hours later, a family friend called the house and spoke to the couple’s daughter-in-law, who was looking after Mrs. Davenport. “Earl was in the ship,” the friend told her.

  “But where is he now?”

  “Well,” the friend temporized, “he’s not in the hospital.…”

  When she heard the news, Mrs. Davenport collapsed and did not regain consciousness until Tuesday morning.9

  Survivors with less tragic stories were meanwhile repeating them all over town, regaling friends, relatives, coworkers—and newspaper reporters—with their various close calls. “All I can say is, I thought the end of the world had come,” bank worker Katherine Bruch told rapt neighbors on the porch of her Kenmore Avenue home. “Everything around me seemed [to be] on fire. I was lying on the floor, [and] I thought I might just as well stay there and burn. Then I saw a girl running, and I jumped up and ran, too. I got out, but I have no clear recollection how I did.”

  “I was working in the bond department,” Maybelle Morey told a reporter at the Iroquois Hospital, where she was being treated for cuts and burns. “I was in the front part of the office and I heard something flash. I thought they were taking pictures. Then boom! came the big explosion, and the whole place seemed in flames.… I had to jump out the window. When I came to, they were pouring whiskey down me. I don’t know where they got it, with the town so dry.…”

  Even those who were nowhere near the bank that day could not stop talking about the crash. Literally tens of thousands of people had witnessed at least one of the blimp’s three flights that day, and it was only natural that they were eager to share their war stories with all who would listen. Some of their tales, of course, were embroidered or exaggerated for effect. The number of people who claimed that they themselves would have been on the blimp, but for this or that lucky break, would probably have filled a whole fleet of airships.10

  Shortly before noon on Tuesday—in room 1123 of the County Building, the other half of the enormous neoclassical pile in the Loop that also housed the city hall—county coroner Peter M. Hoffman convened the official inquest to determine responsibility for the deaths of the victims. Two six-man juries—one consisting of engineering specialists and one of assorted businessmen—had been impaneled the previous evening (“while the airship was still burning,” according to the Daily Journal). They would now hear testimony from a wide variety of witnesses and aviation experts. It proved to be a frustrating session. The first two people called—Boettner and Young, now represented by Goodyear attorney Henry A. Berger—refused to testify on advice of counsel and were excused. Several subsequent witnesses gave conflicting testimony about what might have caused the blimp to catch fire on its final flight. After just two and a half hours, Coroner Hoffman decided to adjourn the session and reconvene on Wednesday, when Goodyear representatives, now en route from Akron, could be present.

  As he closed, the coroner stood up and said he had an announcement to make. During the inquest session, a note had been passed to him with news from St. Luke’s Hospital. “You gentlemen now have to view the body of another victim,” he told the jury. “Mr. Norton is dead.”

  The toll from the crash had now reached twelve.11

  * * *

  Mayor Thompson, distracted by the transit situation and other city business, seemed to be paying little attention to the tragedy that had struck the Loop the day before. Given Big Bill’s reputation for empathy (not to mention his instinct for the effective sound bite), this was surprising. The Eastland disaster—the excursion-boat capsizing that had occurred early in his first term—had seemed to bring out the best in the mayor; the Wingfoot disaster, by contrast, seemed not to arouse his sense of public duty, despite the fact that he’d almost been one of its victims. Granted, the death toll in the earlier accident was far greater, and it had occurred during his political honeymoon period, when the
local press was more willing to publicize any manifestations of his leadership ability. But if surviving newspaper reports are any indication, the mayor seemed far too consumed by “the traction mess” to show much sympathy for the victims of an aviation tragedy, no matter how spectacular.

  Certainly he had an excuse for being preoccupied. The heads of the surface and elevated lines, having rebuffed the mayor’s own arbitration committee, had decided to meet in closed-door sessions with the governor’s commission to discuss fare hikes. City hall was furious. “Mayor’s Forces Resent Lowden’s ‘Interference’ ” ran the headline in the Daily Journal. At issue, according to Thompson, was the city’s fundamental right to determine its own fate. He insisted that the transit situation was an affair strictly between the people of Chicago and the owners and employees of the car lines; the State of Illinois had no business being involved. “The Mayor’s position,” the Daily Journal maintained, “is that the 1907 ordinances give the city exclusive control over streetcar fares, and that this control has been assumed illegally by the utilities commission.” Seeing an opportunity for some grandstanding, the mayor and his men attempted to depict the “star-chamber sessions” as a power grab by downstate elements in cahoots with the car companies and other big business interests. “Chairman Dempcy of the utilities board is from East St. Louis,” one of the mayor’s spokesmen announced. “It ought to gall every Chicagoan to think of the Governor sending a man here from such a dinky city to settle a big Chicago question.”12