City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago
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And so, late in the afternoon of June 11, the Lady in Pink entered onto the floor of the Chicago Coliseum with her armful of incendiary newsprint. As one journalist would later describe the scene, “With a dazzling smile, like a vision from a June rose garden, the lady went from delegation to delegation, presenting the men with her newspapers.”9
The precise effect of this bit of theater would be the subject of much subsequent debate. According to one writer, convention chair Henry Cabot Lodge was given a newspaper just as the roll call on a motion to adjourn was being taken. The fourth ballot had yielded yet another deadlock, and the Lowden and Wood forces were again trying to block the recess motion. But Senator Lodge—allegedly right after reading the headline on his newspaper—slammed down his gavel before the roll call was even half over. The convention was thus adjourned, opening the door to a long night of behind-the-scenes maneuvering to break the deadlock and clear the way for one candidate to win the nomination.10
What happened in the early-morning hours of June 12 is still the stuff of legend. The traditional story, as told by Edna Ferber and innumerable popular historians ever since, was that “in a smoke-filled room at the Blackstone Hotel, a little group of shirtsleeved men chose as their candidate a figure stuffed with straw.” Less apocryphal accounts hint that the “selection” of dark-horse candidate Warren G. Harding may have had more to do with luck and group psychology than with any sinister conspiracy. What’s certain is that many of the powers-that-be at the convention decided to take a closer look at the alternatives to the major candidates. For some, Lowden’s baggage in the wake of the finance scandal had become just too onerous. He, Wood, and Johnson, moreover, were perceived by many as too independent, too difficult to control. And so, by the next morning, the fix was allegedly in. Although Lowden led in the early canvasses, by the eighth ballot it was clear that the momentum lay elsewhere. And on the tenth ballot, after Lowden graciously released his delegates, the convention elected as their candidate a man described by the New York Times as “a very respectable Ohio politician of the second class”—a man who, according to H. L. Mencken, was “of the intellectual grade of an aging cockroach.” He turned out to be the man who would go on to become the twenty-ninth president of the United States.11
Lowden and his followers were despondent. “A momentous day for us!” was Mrs. Lowden’s complete diary entry for June 12. Her daughter, in her own journal, was more forthcoming: “Everyone said Father was magnificent, but all his friends were very sad, and there were many of them crying quite openly. I’m glad it’s all over anyway, for the strain has been awful.”12
Lowden himself left the convention hall, according to one witness, “with bowed head [and] cries of ‘bought delegates’ and ‘steamroller’ in his ears.” Later, in a letter to an associate, the governor was philosophical. “Of course, while the contest was on, I wanted to win,” he admitted. “Now that the convention is over, however, I feel a deep sense of relief that the responsibility has passed me by.” But the fight had taken a physical and emotional toll on him, and after the decisive vote he immediately retired to the farm in Sinnissippi. “We are very tired now that the strain is over,” Mrs. Lowden confessed, “and the depression of everyone about us, and the universal signs of disappointment at the outcome.… It will take some time, I expect, for us to recover.”13
For the mayor of Chicago, the victory was sweet. “Bill Thompson exulted,” one observer noted. “His vendetta had come to happy fruition.” Whether his resignation brouhaha had really been the deciding factor in Lowden’s loss is difficult to say, but the cumulative effect of Thompson and Lundin’s opposition campaign was undeniably significant. “Had the 17 votes in the Illinois delegation controlled by Mayor Thompson been cast on any ballot for Lowden,” the historian and politician Edward F. Dunne would later write, “his nomination would have been practically assured.” Sterling Morton, writing about Lowden many decades later, would express the lasting regret of many in the country when he nostalgically exclaimed, “What a great President he would have been!”14
And thus did Big Bill and the Poor Swede ultimately triumph in their long-fought war against the governor who had betrayed them. Two weeks after the convention, Lowden announced that he would retire from the governorship and not seek a second term. Though he would continue to be active in local and national politics—and would even make a somewhat halfhearted second try for the nomination in 1928—he would never again hold an elective public office.15
As for Thompson and Lundin, this victory only inspired them to become even more ambitious in their aims. Looking ahead to the upcoming November elections, they saw an opportunity to lift their organization to new heights of power. A number of important state, county, and city positions would be up for grabs—the offices of Illinois governor, Illinois attorney general, state’s attorney for Cook County, and many more—and the Thompson-Lundin organization wanted all of them. And so they pushed hard to make it happen. Opposition was fierce from the machine’s usual enemies, and even Lowden, now headed toward retirement, finally abandoned his reserve and turned uncharacteristically blunt in his attacks on the Thompson-Lundin juggernaut. “Thompson has developed a machine in Chicago to a point where it now holds the business, politics, and education of that great city by the throat,” the former beneficiary of that machine announced in July. “Tammany Hall of New York is not so powerful and not less scrupulous. Drunk with power, this new Tammany now seeks to extend its rule over the affairs of the entire state.”16
But it was to no avail. To the horror of Lowden and the machine’s other enemies—Victor Lawson, Robert McCormick, Maclay Hoyne, Ida Wells-Barnett, Jane Addams, and all the rest—the Thompson-Lundin candidates swept the primaries and went on to win in the November elections. Thompson ally Robert E. Crowe (the judge who had sentenced Thomas Fitzgerald to death) replaced Maclay Hoyne as state’s attorney, and Thompsonite Len Small defeated Lowden’s lieutenant John G. Oglesby for governor, thanks largely to overwhelming voter support in Chicago. “I never did understand the politics of that town,” a bitter Lowden grumbled when the results came in. And he had cause to grumble. The election of Small (“a ferret-faced Kankakee banker” who would go on to undo many of his predecessor’s achievements in office) made Thompson and Lundin’s demolition of Lowden complete. And now, with thirty-eight thousand local, county, and state offices in their control and an annual payroll of $78 million at their disposal, they were in firm command at virtually every level of government in the state. Just a little over a year after nearly self-destructing during the crisis of July 1919, the mayor and his mentor had achieved a reach of power unprecedented in the history of Illinois politics.17
“The roof is off!” Big Bill shrieked at his city hall office on election night when the magnitude of their success became apparent. As a cordon of police kept the hundreds of well-wishers in the corridors from mobbing the mayor, he called Lundin on the phone and hooted about their joint triumph. “We ate ’em alive,” he cried. “We ate ’em alive with their clothes on!”
At his suite in the Hotel Sherman, Fred Lundin was characteristically more reserved. “Oh, I don’t mix in politics,” he told some visiting reporters in his still-noticeable Swedish accent. “I’m only a private citizen, y’know.”
Then he and the reporters burst into laughter and passed around a bottle of bourbon.18
ON THE BRIGHT but chilly afternoon of May 14, 1920—as bands played and choruses sang from parade floats—a line of several thousand festively decorated automobiles crept north through the Chicago streets to mark “the greatest event since the World’s Fair in 1893”—the opening of the Michigan Avenue Bridge. The largest double-decker drawbridge in the world, it had cost the fabulous sum of $16 million to build, including the expense of widening the avenue both north and south of the Chicago River. But the result had been worth much more than that. For the first time in the city’s history, Chicago’s North and South Sides were now linked by something more than narrow
, undistinguished bridges. And while this was no small improvement in the city’s physical infrastructure, its symbolic meaning was even more important. As the first major part of the Chicago Plan to be completed, the bridge represented the initial step in the transformation of Chicago from a chaotic, makeshift urban conglomeration into a “city beautiful,” a rationally planned, optimally efficient, and aesthetically pleasing metropolis worthy of comparison with any other in the world.
At 4 p.m. exactly, a tall, heavyset man rose from his place of honor on the reviewing stand and stepped to the ribbon stretched across the roadway. Mayor William Hale Thompson, with a silk top hat pressed to his heart and an expression of “gravity and pleased emotion” on his face, acknowledged the cheers of the crowds around him. Proclaiming it “the greatest day for our people, the Chicago Plan Commission, and the administration,” he proceeded to extol the new bridge and the work of those who had made it possible. But really, what words could be more eloquent than the beautiful, technologically ingenious steel-and-marble structure before him? It had been created only with great effort, requiring the city to buy and condemn no fewer than fifty-one properties (and to fight the resulting court battles) in order to let the boulevard-widening go forward. And, of course, opponents had tried to undermine the effort at every turn, pointing to, among other things, suspiciously numerous “cost overruns,” not to mention enormous fees paid to real estate experts for their services. Where, the mayor’s enemies persistently asked, had all of the extra money gone?1
Admittedly, it was a legitimate question—and one that would be asked again and again over the next decade, about this project and about many others. Big Bill’s lakefront parks, his new boulevards and plazas, his glorious museums and stadiums, would continue to rise and change the skyline of Chicago for the better, but at what price? The remarkable triumph of the Thompson-Lundin machine in 1919 would indeed mean a “Greater Chicago” in the 1920s, at least architecturally, but it would mean many other things as well. It would mean a virtually bankrupt Chicago, a Chicago notorious for crime, political corruption, gangland violence, and rampant vice. It would mean a Chicago where city officials and underworld gangsters worked hand in hand to bootleg liquor, run prostitution and protection rackets, and win elections; where a crime lord with a name and reputation known all over the world—Al Capone—would be said to have three pictures hanging on the walls of his office: one of George Washington, one of Abraham Lincoln, and one of William Hale Thompson. In a sense, it can be said that Chicago never really recovered from its descent into violence and lawlessness in July 1919. The so-called Babylon of the 1920s would be just a more controlled version of that chaos.2
Of course, that decade would prove to have widely different fates in store for those who had played a role in the events of 1919. Some would go on to achieve great success beyond Chicago and become permanent fixtures in the national culture. Ring Lardner, from his new home base in the East, would rapidly become one of the premier satirists of his time, continuing to skewer the absurdity of virtually everything, though on a much wider stage and for a much larger audience than that afforded by his former Chicago beat. Jane Addams would survive the anti-pacifist enmity of the wartime years and live to see her reputation rehabilitated in the 1930s, when she would become the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And Carl Sandburg, though he would remain on the Daily News payroll until 1932, would achieve increasing national prominence as a poet over the next decade. While his later verse would never match the vigor and freshness of the early Chicago poems, and while he would go on to produce much substandard work (including a massive biography of Abraham Lincoln described by Edmund Wilson as “the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth”), he would die in 1967 as celebrated as any twentieth-century American poet.3
For Ida Wells-Barnett, the 1920s would prove to be a demoralizing time. In November 1920—after months of increasing financial difficulties—she would be forced to close her Negro Fellowship League when the man in charge of the employment office ran off one night, “taking desks, chairs, stove, and most of the equipment of the place” and leaving her with four months of back rent to pay. Within a month she would be in the hospital for a gallstone operation that would nearly kill her. And despite her persistent efforts over the next decade to improve conditions in the Black Belt, the city’s African Americans would continue to face widespread hostility and discrimination. True, some would claim that the riots of 1919 actually had some beneficial long-term effects. Many whites, for instance, were forced to confront the city’s “Negro problem” for the first time, and the shock would galvanize at least the settlement house progressives to redirect some of their energies from the plight of white immigrants to that of native-born blacks. And for African Americans themselves, the riots would represent something of a psychological turning point. As one veteran of the riot would later put it, “Conditions in the states had not changed, but we Blacks had. We were determined not to take it anymore.” But Wells-Barnett knew as well as anyone that this new defiant attitude (which, of course, was hardly new to her) would not do much to change the practical situation of African Americans in Chicago, at least in the area of fair housing and employment. The Black Belt would expand inexorably, absorbing many of the neighborhoods contested in the riot, but Chicago would remain one of the country’s most segregated cities for decades to come.
As for Wells-Barnett herself, she would become ever more isolated from mainstream organizations like the Urban League and the NAACP. But she would keep at her independent efforts, running (unsuccessfully) for the presidency of the National Association of Colored Women in 1924, then (again unsuccessfully) for delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1928, and then (yet again unsuccessfully) for a state senate seat in 1930. On March 25, 1931, at the age of sixty-eight, she would die just as she had lived—as an outsider insufficiently recognized for her efforts. Only after the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and ’70s would her contributions to the rights of blacks and women be given their full due.4
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The lesser-known participants in the events of July 1919 also moved on to second acts of varying success in the Jazz Age. After the dismissal of the Wingfoot prosecution for lack of any violation of existing law, pilot Jack Boettner returned to Akron to pursue a long and distinguished career as a flying instructor at Goodyear. In 1929, when German aviator Hugo Eckener completed his historic round-the-world flight in the airship Graf Zeppelin, it was Boettner, now an admiral, who led the accompanying flotilla of blimps and dirigibles. By then, Goodyear had already made the decision to use nonflammable helium rather than much cheaper hydrogen to fill its airships—largely as a result of the Wingfoot debacle.
Tragedy struck Sterling Morton’s young family in the spring of 1921, when his daughter Caroline died of cancer at the age of six. This was a terrible blow, but the grieving parents endured, and through the following decade Morton’s business ventures continued to thrive. The printing telegraphs manufactured by his Morkrum Company proved to be enormously popular, and when he finally sold the company—then known as the Teletype Corporation—to American Telephone and Telegraph in 1930, the sale brought the Mortons personally the astounding sum of $30 million. Abandoning the progressive Democratic sympathies of his early years, he eventually became a well-known figure in conservative Republican circles, opposing FDR’s New Deal and working to keep the United States out of World War II. He also became a great philanthropist in later years. Just before his death in 1961, he donated the funds to build the current Morton Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. And whatever his politics in later years, he still felt gratified by the role he had played in Chicago’s 1919 crisis. “I am indeed proud,” he wrote near the end of his life, “to have been a member of the First Infantry, Illinois Reserve Militia.”5
For Emily Frankenstein, too, the 1920s brought about momentous changes. The life with Jerry Lapiner she had dreamed of for so long did
not come to be, after all. Late in 1919, Emily’s parents had discovered that she was still meeting secretly with her forbidden beau, and they were furious. For a time—amazing herself with her brazenness—Emily had defiantly continued to date him. But things soon began to change between them. Emily started to chafe at Jerry’s bad grammar, his smoking, his reluctance to improve himself, and his little failures of kindness and affection. Meanwhile, her old admirer Albert Chapsky—the more suitable boy whom her parents liked so much—began showing her more attention. On May 21, 1920, just a week after the ceremony at the Michigan Avenue Bridge, Emily went to a surprise party for her friend Marion Leopold. Since Jerry and Albert both attended, she had a chance to compare her two suitors, and she came to a realization: “I felt more tenderly chummy toward Albert,” she wrote, “as well as realizing that Albert far surpassed Jerry.”
By the end of the month, she was engaged to Albert. On August 2, she burned her copies of all of the old love letters she had written to Jerry—and she did it in a neighbor’s yard, since she didn’t want even the ashes on her own property. “It was with a thankful heart that I kept stirring the flames.… It was all a mistake. And I’m so happy and thankful things happened as they did.”