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

by Gary Krist

  Hoping to overwhelm Fitzgerald with a rush of new accusations, Howe decided to bring in five North Side women and their daughters to see him. Each mother had recently complained about a strange man bothering her child, and authorities thought that at least one or two might recognize the prisoner. But not one of the girls identified Fitzgerald as the man who had accosted her. The tactic thus backfired on the lieutenant, further emboldening Fitzgerald in his stonewalling campaign. It also raised a disturbing question: If Fitzgerald was not the molester of these girls, who was? Just how many men were out there victimizing Chicago’s children?

  By late afternoon, word had gone out to police to be on the lookout for “another moron” at large in the city streets.8

  * * *

  Day four of the Wingfoot inquest was proving to be no less confounding than the previous three sessions. Yet another new expert witness—Major John York, an officer in the army’s wartime balloon service in France—was called to testify, and he produced yet another new theory of what had actually caused the disaster. “From an examination of the bag,” he said, “I believe that the fire was a result of friction between the fabric and the finger-shaped patches that attach the bag to the cables supporting the car. A bumpy condition of the air could have jiggled the car up and down and caused such friction.”

  Apparently noting confusion among the layman’s jury, Goodyear attorney Mayer interrupted him. “Your evidence is interesting from a scientific standpoint,” he said to the witness, “but come down to earth and explain it so [that] this jury of businessmen will know what you mean.”

  Major York flushed red and asked for a pencil and paper. He carefully drew a diagram of the connection patches and showed how air turbulence might generate the friction he described.

  “I think,” an increasingly testy Coroner Hoffman said then, “these businessmen will understand now.”9

  Perhaps the jury did grasp York’s theory, but they definitely seemed more interested in the sparking-engines scenario described so vividly by Benjamin Lipsner the day before. When H. T. Kraft, chief pilot for Goodyear, was called next, he was peppered with numerous questions about the engines and their behavior on the first two flights of the day. But Kraft maintained that he had seen no sparks during the blimp’s preliminary tests, which he had conducted himself. “You know it is possible to test a dirigible on the ground—something that cannot be done with an airplane,” he pointed out. “The motors started with the first swing of the stick [that is, the propeller] and there was no backfire. They worked beautifully.” He also argued that sparks would not have been a danger even if the rotary engines had created some. It was virtually impossible for exhaust emissions to ignite the balloon gas, he insisted, since any hydrogen from the bag, being much lighter than air, would quickly rise away from the engines.10

  Which explanation, then, should the juries accept? Clearly, no one was entirely satisfied with any of the theories offered so far. The consensus was that no finding should be made until the juries heard directly from Harry Wacker, the only survivor besides Boettner of the blimp’s third flight. “I have made an effort to see Wacker,” Coroner Hoffman announced, “but he was [still] too sick.… The jury will go to Wacker’s bedside as soon as he is sufficiently well.”

  Taking note of complaints about the length of the inquest, Hoffman expressed his hope that Wacker’s testimony would complete the evidence, meaning that the inquest could be wrapped up at the next session. With that—and since it was already after noon, the time when the jury was told they’d be released for the day—he called for an adjournment until Tuesday morning.11

  * * *

  Temperatures had already hit the low nineties when the dismissed Wingfoot jurors left the stifling City Hall–County Building and joined countless others streaming out of their workplaces for the start of the summer weekend. Chicago was by 1919 a modern, round-the-clock metropolis in many ways, but most city workweeks still ended at midday on Saturday, when the streets would fill with people eager to begin their day and a half of leisure. Some of them would make straight for the Ls and streetcars to head home. Others would linger downtown to run a few errands or do a little shopping at the State Street department stores. Many would gather over lunch with friends and coworkers to exchange news and discuss the week’s events. Certainly there was a lot to talk about this week. Somehow, between the blimp debacle and the Janet Wilkinson case, life in the city seemed significantly more precarious than it had just one week earlier. There were also other signs of trouble ahead. Picket lines seemed to be going up everywhere; street crime was just getting worse. And would the trains and trolleys even be running by the beginning of the next workweek on Monday?

  But a city is a complex thing, a nexus of countless intersecting lines of narrative, comprising a myriad number of individual interests, worries, aspirations, and struggles. So there would have been other topics of conversation on that hot afternoon. There would have been weddings and vacations to discuss, along with the usual birthdays, job woes, new automobiles, visiting relatives from out of town, and deaths of loved ones that would never make the evening papers. “All Chicago” may have been collectively preoccupied with the big news stories of the day, but “all Chicago” consisted of 2.5 million individuals who had countless other distractions of their own. Carl Sandburg, for one, had been profiled prominently in that day’s Tribune, a bit of welcome publicity that probably took the poet’s mind off the ongoing troubles in the Black Belt. Frank Lowden, deeply mired in the traction situation, doubtless had one eye on Washington, D.C., where Illinois congressman Edward Everett Denison would be booming him for president on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. And Emily Frankenstein’s main concern that afternoon, according to her diary, was not a missing six-year-old or a fluke aviation disaster, but rather the conundrum of her fiancé’s unfortunate religious beliefs. She had decided just that day that it was finally time to “say goodbye” to Jerry the next time they got together. It seemed to her that they were just too different from each other in so many ways. And though it was a difficult decision for her, she thought that it would be best for both of them just to part.12

  Yet it’s not unreasonable to assume that the rising sense of menace in the city was being felt by everyone, if only as a background to their more personal dramas. The events of the past week, after all, were unsettling even by the standards of Chicago, no stranger to strife and unrest even in the best of times. If a city is an organism, capable of sickness and of health, then Chicago was showing some alarming symptoms of illness lately.

  And by the end of the lunch hour, there would be yet another alarming development to talk about.

  At twelve forty-five, two women leaving their city hall office stopped at an open window on the seventh-floor corridor, “trying to catch a breath of cool air.” Glancing upward, they saw a large, coatless man stepping out of another window on the eleventh floor of the building. As they watched, the man stood for a moment on the ledge, set his feet, and then jumped. “I saw the body flash down,” one of the women later said, “and then I heard the crash.”

  The crash was the sound of the man falling through the skylight of the city collector’s office below. There was a wire cage protecting the skylight, but the body passed right through the mesh and continued falling. Amid a shower of glass, the body hit the top of the clerk’s cage, rolled off, dropped to a desk, rolled again, and then hit the floor facedown.

  For the people working in the office, the spectacle must have been an alarming echo of the Wingfoot event five days before. Two janitors cleaning the room had in fact started running the moment they heard the crash of the skylight, apparently fearful of another plummeting firebomb. A special policeman assigned to the office, however, had the presence of mind to remain. When the body had come to rest on the floor, he approached it and turned it over, but the face was too battered to recognize.13

  The two witnesses on the seventh floor had immediately run to the office of Coroner Hoffma
n, who was still finishing up work after the day’s inquest session. When they reported what they had seen, Hoffman and Health Commissioner John Dill Robertson rushed to the collector’s office. They, too, were unable to identify the victim by sight, but a key ring in a trouser pocket established his identity. It was Judge Harry P. Dolan, an associate justice of the Municipal Court.

  When word reached the eleventh floor, the judge’s coworkers were incredulous. “I went to the judge’s courtroom shortly after noon to get him to go over to the Illinois Athletic Club with me,” attorney Eugene O’Reilly later said. “He was on the bench when I entered, but he beckoned me to come up, and he asked me what I wanted. I told him and he said, ‘No, I don’t think I can go over. You’d better go yourself.’ ”

  O’Reilly decided to wait for the judge anyway. He sat in the courtroom while Dolan finished his case—that of two boys accused of stealing and then wrecking an automobile. After letting the boys off easily, as was his wont, the judge went to his chambers, presumably to take care of a few last details before joining O’Reilly for lunch at the club. But he didn’t come out for some time.

  “After a few minutes, I and the bailiff decided we would go in and see what was detaining the judge,” O’Reilly said. “The room was empty. He had taken off his coat and left it on the coat tree. His white Panama hat and $50 were on the table.”

  At first, no one could believe that the fall was a suicide. Friends and associates discounted the witnesses’ statement that the judge had paused on the ledge and voluntarily jumped. They claimed instead that he had probably been overcome by the heat and fainted while standing at the window. Judge Dolan, they pointed out, was a highly regarded jurist in the Municipal Court, “a sort of father to the boys of Chicago” who had been prominent in the fight to reform the court’s handling of youthful offenders. “I can account for no reason for this act,” one person close to him said afterward.

  But as other information emerged, it began to look more likely that Dolan was a suicide. Back in April, the judge had suffered a nervous breakdown, apparently as a result of an attack of Spanish influenza. At the time, he had allegedly remarked to friends that he “saw nothing more in life to live for.” But a two-month stay at a Wisconsin sanitarium had restored him to good health. In June, he had apparently felt well enough to play catcher for the judges’ team in the annual Judges vs. Lawyers charity baseball game, raising money for the Tribune’s Algonquin Hospital fund (Clarence Darrow played first base for the lawyers, with State’s Attorney Hoyne on third). His friends believed that he had completely recovered. “He seemed jolly and carefree,” O’Reilly insisted.14

  For most Chicagoans, then, the judge’s suicide was just one more mystery, one more ghastly and inexplicable tragedy to augment the already pervasive sense of chaos in the city. Something seemed fundamentally wrong, and who was working to steer Chicago through this crisis? The mayor was absent, the police appeared helpless, even the governor seemed incapable of taming the disorder. And now the city’s distinguished judges were jumping out of downtown windows. This was supposed to be “Chicago’s greatest year,” and yet the city now seemed in danger of spinning entirely out of control.

  At 4 p.m., temperatures peaked at ninety-five degrees, with more heat forecast for the next few days. The early editions of the evening newspapers were just hitting the streets, and they contained more bad news about the transit negotiations. Fed up with what they called a “gross breach of confidence” on the part of the car companies, the unions had bolted from the official talks that afternoon. “Negotiations are over,” the president of the streetcar employees had declared, backed up by six other union leaders. “We are going into conference now to draw up a statement explaining our position.”

  The Evening Post was fatalistic: “Chicago is in for a streetcar strike,” the paper reported. “It may last two days; it may last longer. But it’s coming.”15

  * * *

  Late that night, after another unsuccessful interrogation in Captain Mueller’s office, Lieutenant Howe decided that the time had come to push Thomas Fitzgerald to the limit. Along with two other police lieutenants and several reporters from the Tribune and the Herald and Examiner, Howe planned out an elaborate overnight program of ruses, psychological assaults, and other interrogation tactics designed to get the already sleepless and overwrought prisoner to crack. This so-called fourth-degree interrogation, described in hour-by-hour detail in a subsequent edition of the Tribune, began at midnight with five men in Fitzgerald’s cell, all of them pummeling him with questions. And for the next eight hours, police refused to ease up on him, saying that they wouldn’t let him rest unless and until he confessed to the crime they all knew he had committed.

  They tried everything. They took his glasses away so he couldn’t see. They had a policeman dress up as a priest to counsel him and urge a private confession of his sins. They had another policeman pose as a relative of the missing girl and plead with him to end the family’s agony. A doctor came in to examine him (Fitzgerald complained of a weak heart) and then left, looking worried but not saying a word. Once (bizarrely) they even stood the suspect before a table covered with dozens of small plaster doll hands posed in pleading gestures. For hours on end, they shouted at him, whispered soothingly to him, invoked his own mother’s name, and slapped him when he tried to sleep. But nothing would work. Fitzgerald would just sit there grasping his head in his hands, complaining about the bright lights. “Sleep, sleep, sleep,” he moaned at one point. “I wish to sleep. Please let me alone.”

  “Tell me where the body is,” one of the interrogators told him, “and you can sleep.”

  “I don’t know! Honest to God, I don’t know!”

  Finally, around dawn, they decided to try something they hadn’t tried before—they left Fitzgerald entirely alone. They exited the cell and went upstairs to the main floor of the station house, locking the cell behind them. Whether they put Fitzgerald in restraints beforehand is unrecorded. Presumably they did, for he was certainly a suicide risk. But he sat alone with his thoughts for some time.

  At around 8 a.m., one of the reporters, Harry Romanov of the Herald and Examiner, went downstairs again and walked up to the cell. “The faint sound of tolling church bells reached the sunless cell room,” Romanov later wrote. “It was the Sabbath and by chance Fitzgerald’s 39th birthday. He was sitting in a corner of the cell with his head in his hands and elbows on his knees. He was reflecting. Now that he could have slept, sleep would not come.”

  “Well?” the reporter asked. “Ready to talk?”

  Fitzgerald looked up at him. “Send down Mr. Howe,” he said.

  The lieutenant, exhausted by the all-night grilling, was upstairs nodding over some routine paperwork. He was visibly emotional when the reporter told him that Fitzgerald was apparently prepared to confess. More than anyone else involved in the investigation, Howe had taken an obsessive personal interest in the case, trying to befriend the prisoner and earn his trust, working long hours to extract a confession he had known for days was inevitable. And now, apparently, that confession was finally going to come. He took a moment to compose himself before rushing down to the cell.

  “Lieutenant Howe,” Fitzgerald said calmly, stopping to draw a deep breath. “You’ve been the only friend I’ve had. I wouldn’t tell anyone else, but I think I’ll tell you.” He hesitated again and peered into the lieutenant’s eyes. “I’m afraid you’ll think me a horrible man.”

  “No, I won’t, Fitzgerald,” Howe said. “What I’ll think is what I’ve thought all the way through this case—that you have a diseased mind.” He paused and said: “Tell me the truth, my man.”

  Fitzgerald lowered his eyes. Then, at exactly 8:13 a.m., he finally told the truth: “I did it,” he said. “I killed her.”16

  Chicago after World War I stood at a pivotal moment in its evolution, struggling to accommodate a vastly diverse population and invent for itself a new, uniquely modern identity. The man entrusted with leader
ship of the city through this critical time was its irrepressible and highly controversial Republican mayor, William Hale Thompson (standing).

  Chicago skyline ca. 1925

  A former athlete and self-styled cowboy, Thompson was nothing if not colorful. Regarded by some as a blustering demagogue, he was to many others a genuine hero, hailed as “the People’s David” or “Big Bill the Builder”—the one man who could corral Chicago’s warring factions and lead the way to a “Greater Chicago.”

  The brain behind the Thompson phenomenon was the notorious Fred Lundin, known to insiders as “the Mayor’s Mephistopheles.” Masking his ambitions behind an eccentric milquetoast persona, Lundin hoped to use his protégé’s popularity to build a political machine to rival New York’s Tammany Hall.

  Many powerful enemies stood in the way of Lundin’s plans. Among them were the publishers of the city’s two most influential newspapers—Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune (left) and Victor F. Lawson of the Chicago Daily News (right).

  The most powerful enemy of the Thompson-Lundin organization, however, was Frank O. Lowden, the Republican governor of Illinois. A former ally of the mayor, he was now determined to see control of the city wrested from an administration he considered hopelessly corrupt.

  July 1919 proved to be a turning point in this conflict, as the city was hit by an unprecedented eruption of violence, technological disaster, and sordid crime. The crisis began with the bizarre crash of the airship Wingfoot Express.

  The blimp caught fire in flight and crashed through the skylight of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank in the heart of the Loop, killing thirteen and injuring dozens more in what is regarded as the country’s first major aviation disaster.