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

by Gary Krist

  “That man is a perjurer,” Henry Berger interjected, “and I will personally take the burden of proving it!”

  Even members of the jury lost their tempers. “Produce the evidence,” one juror shouted, “and don’t waste so much time!”

  Amid this upset, John C. Lowery, an assistant to State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne, threatened to clear the inquest room unless everyone settled down.9

  Order was restored after a few minutes, but Mayer wasn’t finished. “Wacker isn’t dead yet—he will get well,” the attorney asserted. “We will have him testify to the coroner and then Lipsner will learn that Wacker calls him a liar and a crazy man!”

  He turned to Major C. H. Maranville, another expert witness. “He [Lipsner] said Wacker reached up to put out the flames of his chute with his hands. Major Maranville, is that possible?”

  The Major shook his head. “No, it is not. The man hangs 40 feet below the supporting surface [of the parachute].”

  Thus caught in an obvious absurdity, Lipsner stood up and refused to answer any more questions. He pointed out that he was not testifying as an expert witness—that he was merely reporting what Wacker had told him. He also said that he resented the Goodyear attorneys’ attacks on him. Coroner Hoffman, pounding his desk for order, agreed to excuse Lipsner for the time being, but asked that he remain available for the rest of the hearing.10

  With the inquest room still buzzing from this dispute, Assistant State’s Attorney James O’Brien demanded that Jack Boettner be questioned next. The pilot, dressed in a light-colored suit and carefully knotted tie (while most present were in their shirtsleeves), exuded an air of unruffled coolness as he came before the juries. Answering questions in a steady, dignified voice, he testified that he had been an aviator since February 1917, and that he had never experienced a mishap of any kind before this. Proceeding systematically, he related precisely how the airship had been assembled, and described each of the three trips made that day. “We had no trouble during our flights on Monday,” he said. “Everything went smoothly. The ship did not roll much on the first two trips, but it was very sensitive to control.” When asked if the flights were experimental, he insisted that only the first one was, and that this initial trip had taken place entirely along the unpopulated shoreline of the lake. “After that flight,” he said, “I believed the ship perfectly safe.… I know that the engines were working perfectly and that there were no sparks or flames thrown from them.”

  “When did you discover the dirigible was in trouble?” he was asked.

  “About three minutes to five,” he said. He described feeling a jerk on one of the suspension cables holding the gondola. That’s when he looked around and saw a flame on the back of the balloon near the equator line. “I knew we didn’t have a chance,” he said calmly. “I said, ‘Everybody jump; that’s our only chance.’ They went over and the gondola dove down.” He insisted again that he was the last person to leave the ship, and that he remembered seeing Wacker four hundred feet below before he himself finally jumped.

  When asked to explain Lipsner’s contradictory testimony, Boettner said that he didn’t believe Wacker had really made the statements attributed to him.11

  As if to confuse the coroner’s juries even more, the remainder of the session was devoted to an examination of several eyewitnesses who seemed to agree on very little. Major Maranville, who claimed to have watched the entire flight from Grant Park, asserted that the fire had started “on the right side [of the balloon] near the rear fins.” But the next witness—Irwin A. Phillips—insisted that the fire had started near the front, just above the blimp’s nose. Several other witnesses corroborated Phillips’s account. Just about the only thing everyone agreed on was that the flame was yellow and not blue, indicating that it was the bag that was burning and not the hydrogen gas inside. Even so, by the end of the day’s session, the two juries still had no idea what to believe.12

  * * *

  Over at the transit parleys, negotiations were moving ever closer to a breakdown. Emerging from a two-hour morning session, all sides seemed grim. “I can’t see that we’ve done a thing,” surface line president Busby grumbled. Maurice Lynch, his opponent on the labor side, agreed. “We may have something to say after our next conference this afternoon,” Lynch said, “[but] just now everything is up in the air.” Even utilities commissioner Patrick J. Lucey refused to be upbeat: “All I can say is that we haven’t reached a dead wall yet.”

  As before, the main sticking point was the issue of the eight-hour day. The companies and the unions disagreed vehemently on how much a shortened workday would cost the car lines. According to the unions, management was exaggerating the costs in order to force through a nine-hour compromise—something that the car-men still considered unacceptable. Talk of a possible strike vote, to be taken on Saturday, was becoming more insistent.13

  Some hope was offered by a personal intervention in the talks by Governor Lowden himself. The governor, perhaps hoping to take advantage of his rival’s absence, had come up from Springfield on Thursday evening, determined to sit down with everyone involved and hammer out an agreement. Starting at 4 p.m. at the Blackstone Hotel, he began a series of closed-door meetings with negotiators to hear all sides of the dispute. And although he refused to comment on the outcome of the talks, prospects were looking somewhat brighter by Friday evening. “It is understood,” the Herald and Examiner reported, “that some progress toward conciliation was made, and for the first time there appeared a chance that an agreement might possibly be reached.”

  In his private communications, however, the governor was decidedly less sanguine. “Frank telephones [to say] that the streetcar situation is very bad,” Mrs. Lowden wrote in her diary. Apparently, the governor had hoped to make short work of the negotiations and get away to the family farm at Sinnissippi, west of the city, for some rest and relaxation. But now he was forced to cancel those plans: “He cannot possibly come out here for the weekend,” his wife lamented.14

  Still more disturbing news was emerging from the Black Belt, where the racial tensions of early summer were showing signs of coming to a head. Carl Sandburg’s reports on “the Negro Problem” had been appearing in the Chicago Daily News for ten days now, and the situation they described was hardly encouraging. White newspaper coverage of the Black Belt always tended to be anecdotal, focusing on individual instances of alleged black dysfunction. But Sandburg’s articles were showing the problem in a different light, hinting that the true root of the troubles might have more to do with white attitudes than anything else. Though the poet was careful to point to a few areas of hope, his emphasis was on the blatant injustices that Ida Wells-Barnett had been complaining about for months—the rampant discrimination in jobs and housing, the inequalities in access to services, and the inept police response to repeated incidents of bombing and other interracial violence.

  Sandburg’s article in Friday’s paper—“Deplore Unfounded Negro Crime Tales”—was especially blunt. Writing about the race riots that had convulsed Washington, D.C., for several days that summer, he attributed the violent outbreaks to the prevailing atmosphere of mutual racial suspicion, showing how specious accusations of black crime against white women often served as cover for the “ulterior purposes” of hostile white agitators. Another article published in that same day’s Tribune, on the other hand, focused on black defiance and served only to intensify white paranoia. “The American Negro encountered no color line in France,” the article claimed. “Returned to the United States, he is determined never again to submit to race segregation in either society, business, or politics.” The reporter cited analysis in two leading French newspapers, which maintained that “the Washington riots do not represent sporadic outbreaks,” but rather were “ ‘feelers’ to test the strength and determination of whites and blacks, and a possible forerunner to widespread revolt.”

  “The attitude of the Negro movement in America,” one of the papers had ominously suggested, “leaves it s
upposable that a general Negro upheaval may develop.”15

  Clearly, this analysis could not be entirely dismissed as typical Tribune race hysteria. Blacks across the country—especially former soldiers—were indeed showing a greater willingness to assert their rights, and by violent means if necessary. “[Black veterans] will never be the same again,” W. E. B. DuBois had said in a speech at Chicago’s Wendell Phillips High School in May. “They are not the same men anymore.” This so-called New Negro sensibility was marked by a rejection of the accommodationist stance espoused by old leaders like Booker T. Washington. Of course, talk of a premeditated insurrection was nonsense, but as the riots in Washington, D.C., demonstrated, blacks were no longer willing to cower in the face of lynchings, mob attacks, and other instances of white hostility. Aggressive resistance had become common. Just a few days earlier, in a poem published in the journal Liberator, Claude McKay expressed the essence of this new defiance:

  Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;

  Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,

  And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!

  What though before us lies the open grave?

  Like men we’ll face the murderous cowardly pack,

  Pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back!

  To some, that “awful day” of armed conflict in Chicago that the Broad Ax had warned about in early May was seeming ever more plausible in July.16

  Recognizing the dire situation in the city, the Chicago Evening Post made its recommendation known in a plainspoken editorial in its late edition, under an all-caps headline reading simply: “THE MAYOR SHOULD RETURN.” “One way to boost Chicago is to go bronco-busting,” the Post observed. “Another is to stay on your job when your city is threatened.… Mayor Thompson should not go to Cheyenne; he should turn in his tracks and come back to face his difficult and important duty at the City Hall.”

  But this advice was much too tardy. Big Bill and his crew were already in Wyoming, kicking up their heels in fine fashion. Dressed in a cowman’s Stetson, a colorful silk shirt, and shaggy black chaps, the mayor had already led the Frontier Days parade through the Cheyenne streets, showing off his skills with a lariat. “From noon to dewy eve,” wrote Charles MacArthur in the Tribune, “the Mayor and his Chicago boosters roped steers … and carried on in real Wild West style. Chicago was talked of, sung of, and boosted of as long as their voices held out, which was until about four o’clock.” MacArthur, later to achieve fame as Ben Hecht’s collaborator on the play The Front Page (and as husband of the actress Helen Hayes), was making plenty of ironic hay with the mayor’s visit, using the event to comment obliquely on the politics back home: “Excitement was caused during the afternoon by the disappearance of Fred Lundin from the grandstand before the last event,” MacArthur wrote. “He was discovered beneath the stand in earnest conference with Hole-in-His-Sock, an ancient Indian chief. In return for some lore of the northland, Mr. Lundin was instructing the chief how to vote his tribe.” MacArthur also took delight in pointing out that Big Bill seemed particularly adept at lassoing attractive young ladies.17

  Whether the mayor ever heard about the chastising Post editorial is unclear. Even if he had, however, he likely would have ignored it. With the weekend at hand and their return to Chicago scheduled for Monday morning, Thompson and his entourage saw little reason to curtail their stay. After all, their goodwill mission, frivolous as it may have seemed, had the highly laudable purpose of boosting their illustrious hometown. And besides, if they were to leave now, they’d miss the Saturday night gala and parade.

  ALL CHICAGO SEEKS SOLUTION of Missing Child Mystery,” the Chicago Daily News reported in its early-Saturday edition. The headline was hardly an exaggeration. The entire city, it seemed, was now engaged in a gruesome guessing game, appalled and yet intrigued by the ongoing Janet Wilkinson case. The Daily Journal, calling the girl’s whereabouts “the biggest question in the minds of hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans today,” outlined its four working hypotheses: that Janet had drowned in the lake; that she had been hit by an automobile whose driver then carried her away in a panic; that a lonely, childless woman had abducted her; or that Fitzgerald (or some other person “of low moral type”) had murdered her.1

  By the time the Tribune announced an additional $2,500 reward for a productive lead, the Chicago Avenue station was already being flooded with calls, telegrams, and letters by the hundreds. Some merely sought corroboration for one of the many wild rumors running through the city; others offered purported leads, most of which the police did their best to check out. One tip—that Janet was seen on a Chicago-bound train now en route from Benton Harbor—was taken especially seriously. John Wilkinson and a police detective rushed to the Dearborn Station to meet the train. They discovered that a young girl of Janet’s age was indeed among the passengers, but it wasn’t Janet.2

  The close of business at noon made many additional volunteers available to scour the streets for any sign of the girl. As Janet’s classmates at Holy Name Cathedral School finished summer classes for the weekend, their sister superior urged them to join the search. “Don’t waste your time in the playgrounds or [on] the beaches,” she said. “Go look for Janet.” It was a call that many adult Chicagoans also heeded, joining police and other city workers in what had now become a regionwide hunt. “Boatmen began dragging the lake for a third time at daybreak,” the Evening Post reported. “Police and volunteer searchers are once more going over the double stone building at 112–114 East Superior Street.… Other searchers are covering every foot of the weed-grown vacant property in the neighborhood. Men from the street department are looking in sewers and catch basins near the Wilkinson home.”3

  Detectives received a shock that afternoon when a dredging tool used to probe the Virginia Hotel sewer came up filled with crushed bones. Chief of Detectives Mooney sent them over to a Dr. W. A. Evans for identification (there was no official medical examiner for Cook County until 1976, so police often had to rely on private doctors for such tasks). After a brief examination, however, Dr. Evans determined that they were a combination of chicken joints and the bones of “an animal far larger than a human being”—probably a cow.4

  At the Chicago Avenue station, investigators were now questioning Fitzgerald’s coworkers, and this new testimony only strengthened their conviction that they had the perpetrator—of whatever crime—in their custody. Marie Pearson, a Virginia Hotel chambermaid, told police that Fitzgerald had once attempted “familiarities” with her. William Harris, a chef, claimed that the night watchman had nearly fallen asleep over his supper on Tuesday evening, six hours after Janet’s disappearance, and that he complained of not having slept all day. Engineer W. J. Hogan claimed that Fitzgerald had mysteriously sent him from the hotel boiler room on Tuesday night on “some trivial business.” When Hogan returned, Fitzgerald was still in the boiler room. The engineer had been gone long enough, police concluded, for Fitzgerald to dispose of the child’s body in the furnace.

  Most incriminating, however, was an incident described by Michael Kezick, a fireman at the hotel. Kezick claimed he saw a girl fitting Janet’s description sitting in Fitzgerald’s lap in the boiler room a few days before her disappearance. Fitzgerald tried to insist that it had been another girl—the daughter of hotel employee Florence Howe—but Kezick wouldn’t back down. “No, it was Janet, I am sure.”

  Fitzgerald shook his head at this, making a show of “pitying the ignorance” of his accuser. “Mike,” he said, “you are mistaken.”

  “I am not mistaken,” Kezick said vehemently. “I know the [Howe] girl.”5

  The incident was typical of Fitzgerald’s ever more brazen intransigence. Despite the wealth of evidence against him, the man continued to flatly deny all accusations, often adopting a tone of outraged condescension toward witnesses against him. Now facing his fourth day of round-the-clock interrogation, he apparently had yet to request a lawyer, and no attorneys had voluntarily come forward
to offer their services. According to the Evening Post, this was unprecedented in Chicago: “Ordinarily, the arrest of a suspect in any case is followed by a rush of lawyers to the station. So brutal does this case appear, however, and so strong is the circumstantial evidence against Fitzgerald, that no offers of legal aid have been made.”

  At any time since his arrest, an attorney could have insisted on Fitzgerald’s release, since no formal charges had yet been brought against him. That the prisoner seemed unaware of his basic rights was fortunate for police, who, in those days before Miranda warnings, were naturally in no hurry to enlighten him. Even so, Lieutenant Howe had a backup plan, should any effort be made to free him. John Wilkinson was reportedly willing to press charges based on Fitzgerald’s alleged assault of Janet the previous December—although without a victim or firsthand witness to testify against him, holding the suspect on those hearsay charges might have been problematic as well.6

  Certainly any conscientious lawyer would have objected to the manner in which the suspect was being questioned. Forced to stay awake for days now, slapped or shouted at whenever he tried to sleep, Fitzgerald had broken down at least once in a fit of hysterical weeping. But for the most part, he was maintaining a cool, almost haughty, sometimes taunting demeanor under questioning, once even interrupting an interrogation to tease Captain Mueller about a new straw hat he was wearing. Lieutenant Howe, who must have been near weeping in frustration himself by now, was nonetheless still sure that a confession was imminent. “He is the most stubborn and one of the shrewdest men I have ever questioned,” he told reporters after a morning session with the suspect. “He misrepresents about the most trivial and unimportant details, apparently just to be contrary. But I am sure he will come off his high horse before many more hours. He will have to give in.”7