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

by Gary Krist

  5. The account of the Wingfoot’s first two flights of the day derive mostly from pilot Boettner’s statement to Chicago chief of detectives Mooney, most completely reported in the July 22 CHE. (NB: In this statement Boettner refers to the first flight as having taken place “early in the morning,” but this is contradicted in other reports and in his later testimony to the state’s attorney and the coroner’s inquest jury.) In a bylined article in the July 22 CEP, writer George Putnam Stone (one of the two Post employees on the Wingfoot’s second flight) describes Davenport’s yielding Stone a place on the second flight but taking a place (with Milton Norton) on the third flight for himself. Boettner frankly admits his unfamiliarity with the experimental rotary engines in his testimony to the state’s attorney, most thoroughly reported in the CDT of July 22.

  6. The CDJ of July 21 reported that twelve thousand people watched the Wingfoot’s first landing in Grant Park (see also the July 22 CHE). Several “experts” were quoted in the papers as having tried to get rides on the blimp (for example, in the CDT editions of July 22 and 23). Preston’s letter about the publicity value of giving rides on the blimp was first reported in the July 22 CDT (which cites Henry Ford’s being mentioned as a “desirable” passenger) and was later confirmed by Preston himself in his coroner’s inquest testimony, reported in the July 27 CDT (“It is desirable to secure prominent men on the first flight”). The scene between Boettner and Davenport (“a running start would be no good”) was recounted by Boettner in the July 23 CHE. The preparations for flying, including Weaver’s use of a blowtorch to burn off stray oil, were described in the July 22 CDT.

  7. The angling of Davenport and Norton to get on the flight was reported in the CEP and CDT of July 22. The exchange between Boettner and the passengers about parachutes comes from Glassman, Jump!, p. 3.

  8. The most complete existing description of the Wingfoot’s final flight is in Glassman, Jump!, pp. 31–46. I have also used some scene-setting details from the CEP reporter’s account of his ride on the blimp’s earlier takeoff and flight from Grant Park (CEP, July 22), and from the photos reproduced in Hansen, Goodyear Airships. The July 22 CHE describes the Wingfoot’s sailing out over the lake before turning back inland. That day’s CDT takes note of the day’s “faint but steady wind” and the appearance of the blimp from the ground. Other details are from Boettner’s inquest testimony, recounted in several papers.

  9. For the overall description of Chicago’s appearance and geography in 1919, I have relied most heavily on Mayer and Wade, Chicago; Cutler, Chicago; Condit, Chicago 1910–29 (NB: the gatefold panoramic photograph on p. 90 was useful); and Duis, Challenging Chicago.

  10. The citywide excitement caused by the sight of the Wingfoot was reported in several papers. Boettner’s account of the moments after seeing the fire above him (“Over the top, everybody”) was reported in the CDT of July 22.

  11. The eyewitness accounts by Roger Adams (“I got there just as [the Wingfoot] went up again”) and Kletzker and Blake (“We went to the window to look again”) were reported in the July 22 CDT. The scene between Proctor and Lamson (“Exmoor and my Marmon are enough for me”) come from the same day’s CHE. Both the CDT and the CDJ of July 22 carried stories on the witnessing of the disaster from Comiskey Park (quotation from the CDJ).

  12. The description of the men abandoning ship is culled from various newspaper accounts, the most complete being the story told by eyewitness R. R. Renisch, an architect in the nearby Insurance Exchange Building (“like a rocket”), which was reported in the July 22 CDT. Boettner’s fall was described by the pilot himself in his testimony to police chief John J. Garrity (see the same July 22 CDT) and in his testimony to the coroner’s inquest jury (reprinted in the July 25 CDN). Specifics on Davenport’s unsuccessful attempt to jump are from the July 23 CHE.

  13. The scene inside the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank in the moments before the disaster are best described in the Columns, pp. 3–5, 16. The July 23 CHE (which also mentioned the departure of bank president Mitchell) contains a good description of the bank’s interior. Helen Berger is described (with picture) in the Columns, p. 9; on p. 16 her conversation with Callopy is referred to. Cooper’s movements just before the crash were described by him in the July 22 CDT.

  14. The change in light as the blimp fell toward the skylight was observed by several bank employees, including Harriet Messinger (July 22 CDT) and Helen Durland (July 22 CDN). The initial ignition of the blimp’s fuel suggested a photographer’s flash to Maybelle Morey and Maria Hosfield (July 22 CHE). Cooper’s story (“The body of a man”) was reported in the July 22 CDT. Joseph Devreaux (“I thought a bomb had been exploded”) and A. W. Hiltabel (“The first thing I heard was the breaking of the skylight”) were quoted in the July 22 CDN.

  15. The scene with Carl Otto and Edward Nelson was described by Nelson himself (“an avalanche of shattered window panes and twisted iron”) in the July 22 CDN. C. C. Hayford’s story (“I ran out and an explosion … hurled me over”) comes from the same day’s CDT. The scene in the bank’s central court (“a well of fire”) is from a Mr. Connors quoted in the July 22 CDN. The quote from Joseph Dries (“I saw women and men burning”) is from the July 22 CDT. Hosfield’s experience (“I was sitting next to Helen Berger”) is from the same day’s CHE, while William Elliott’s (“She was saturated with gasoline”) is from that day’s CDT.

  16. The scene on the street (firemen unable to enter, people pouring from windows and wandering the streets) was best described in the July 22 CDT (which cited the twenty thousand spectators who had gathered in the southern Loop). Woodward’s account (“When I got to the street”) is from the same article. The men helping photographer Norton were described in the July 22 CHE.

  17. Boettner’s descent from the Board of Trade Building and his arrest were recounted by him in the July 22 CDT. Friends and relatives searching among the charred bodies on the street is from the July 22 CDN and CHE. Editorials in several papers over the following days, as well as statements from various city officials, raised questions about the audacity of carrying on “experiments in flying” over “the helpless heart of a crowded city” (July 22 CEP).

  CHAPTER ONE: THE NEW YEAR 1919

  1. Glimpses of the New Year’s Eve festivities throughout Chicago come from the December 31, 1918, and January 1 editions of the CHE, CEP, CDN, and CDT. The slushy weather conditions were especially well described in a January 1 CDT article (“Slop, Slop, Slop; Six Days of It, More on the Way”). (NB: Thomas G. and Virginia Aylesworth, in their Chicago, p. 59, claim that the word “jazz” was coined at the Lamb’s Café in Chicago in 1914.) Curly Tim’s song about the “lemonade tree” was reported in a CDT article of January 1 (“Barrel House Bon Vivants Cheer Year In”).

  2. “This year, the holiday breathes peace and contentment,” from the January 1 CDN. The drop in crime (reported in the CDN of December 31, 1918) probably had more to do with the high employment of wartime than with any special effort of the police department. Chicago’s experience with the Spanish influenza is documented in “Report of an Epidemic of Influenza in Chicago Occurring During the Fall of 1918” by Robertson in Report and Handbook of the Department of Health of the City of Chicago for the Years 1911 to 1918 Inclusive, pp. 40–41. Misguided hopes for the salubrious social effects of Prohibition are described in Behr, Prohibition, pp. 82ff.

  3. The literature on the Plan of Chicago is extensive. Most useful to me were Smith, Plan of Chicago; Bachin, Building the South Side; and Whitehead, Chicago Plan Commission. “A practical, beautiful piece of fabric out of Chicago’s crazy quilt” is a quote from Walter D. Moody cited in Bachin, Building the South Side, p. 197. The idealistic hopes of the plan’s advocates are best described in Smith, Plan of Chicago, pp. 14–15. “The visions that once seemed only heart-breaking mirages” is from the January 1 CDT.

  4. Two excellent sources for conditions in Chicago as they existed at this precise time are Showalter, “Chicago Today and Tomorrow,” and
Smith, “The Ugly City,” the latter of which is the source of “hurried, greedy, unfastidious folk.” Henry Justin Smith also cowrote (with Lloyd Lewis) a very readable history of the city—Chicago: A History of Its Reputation—from which other facts and descriptions in these two paragraphs derive (see especially pp. 323–24).

  5. Governor Lowden’s proclamation—“The new year beholds a new world”—was cited in the January 1 CDT. Emily Frankenstein’s unpublished diary, covering parts of the years 1918–20, is in the collection of the Chicago History Museum (Emily Frankenstein Papers). Background information about the diary and the Frankenstein family can also be found in Klapper, Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, and Steinberg, Irma, the latter about Emily’s mother, also a conscientious diarist.

  6. Victor Lawson is the subject of a thorough but somewhat tedious biography, Victor Lawson: His Time and His Work by Charles H. Dennis. His broken foot is covered in the bio on pp. 433–34, but his New Year’s Eve in bed comes from letters he wrote (to Marion K. Bradley and to Mrs. Iver N. Lawson, both on January 6, and to Julius Rosenwald on January 23), which are preserved in the Victor F. Lawson Papers (series 1, box 18) at the University of Chicago. Lilian Sandburg’s details are from various sources, including Penelope Niven’s biography of her husband, Carl Sandburg: A Biography, and A Great and Glorious Romance: The Story of Carl Sandburg and Lilian Steichen by their daughter Helga Sandburg; the “lonesome day” on New Year’s Eve is described in the latter book, p. 259. For Ring Lardner I have relied principally on Yardley, Ring. However, the details and descriptions here (“Two young men were lying on the floor”) come from Lardner’s column “In the Wake of the News” in the January 1 CDT.

  7. “Hundreds of orchestras ushered in the new year” and “shouting and hammering and singing” are from the January 1 CDT, which also reported on the two accidents, the car thefts, and John Foll’s arrest. Emily’s “cold-slippery-tired” ride on the L is from her diary.

  8. Events of the first two weeks of January are from various newspapers. Charles Comiskey’s announcement and quotes (“The loyal patrons of the White Sox”) were covered by the January 1 NYT and all of the Chicago dailies. Garrity’s one thousand new policemen and the state tax cut were announced in the CDT of January 2 and 1, respectively. Chicago’s observance of Roosevelt’s death was covered widely in all of the local newspapers. The “mighty, roaring, sweltering” description of Chicago comes from Edna Ferber’s delightful novel So Big, p. 311.

  CHAPTER TWO: THE MAYOR ANNOUNCES

  1. Accounts of the rally at Arcadia Hall appeared in the January 15 editions of the CDT, CDN, and CHE, but the most thorough (if not the most objective) report was in the January 18 issue of the Republican, a weekly newspaper that served as a mouthpiece for the Thompson-Lundin political machine. The physical description of Arcadia Hall is derived from the building’s entry on the Jazz Age Chicago site, http://chicago.urban-history.org/.

  2. Specifics of the evening’s program of music and speeches are primarily from the Republican and other newspaper reports. The campaign song (“Over here we have a leader”) was reprinted in its entirety in the Republican. “The best administration in its history” was quoted, with some implicit irony, in the CDT of September 15.

  3. There have been four book-length biographies of William Hale Thompson, ranging in attitude toward their subject from the admiring to the derisive. Two were written by authors who personally witnessed the mayor’s first and second terms. John Bright’s Hizzoner Big Bill Thompson: An Idyll of Chicago is utterly condescending and dismissive, treating the mayor as a quaint political curiosity with few redeeming qualities—a view propounded by many newspapers of the day and all too often adopted uncritically by later Chicago historians. William Stuart’s The 20 Incredible Years, written by a political columnist for Hearst’s Chicago American, errs in the other direction, often presenting Thompson and Fred Lundin’s propaganda as the unvarnished truth. A more balanced portrait is presented in Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan’s Big Bill of Chicago, though its coauthors, like Bright, give much greater emphasis to the colorful media phenomenon than to the crafty politician. By far the fairest and most serious account is Douglas Bukowski’s Big Bill Thompson, Chicago, and the Politics of Image, which is the only biography that does full justice to the mayor’s complexities. Specifics about Big Bill’s physical appearance and personality in this chapter come mainly from these four biographies and from the Thompson profiles in White, Masks in a Pageant; Luthin, American Demagogues; and contemporary newspaper and magazine articles. “Loved Chicago like a boy loves his dog” is from Bright, Hizzoner Big Bill Thompson, p. 68.

  4. Bukowski is particularly insightful on Thompson’s appeal to blue-collar Chicago (while not being particularly pro-labor) in 1919; see the introduction to Big Bill Thompson as well as the same author’s PhD thesis, “According to Image: William Hale Thompson in the Politics of Chicago, 1915–1931,” pp. 1–10, and his chapter on Thompson in Green and Holli, Mayors, pp. 61–81. “Slangy, vulgar, and alive” is from Bright, Hizzoner Big Bill Thompson, p. 3. “I have been requested by petition” is from the Republican’s reproduction of the text. “Big, boozy, bellowing” roar is from White, Masks in a Pageant, p. 485.

  5. In later years—as was common in the early twentieth century—Thompson often lopped two years off his age by citing his birth year as 1869. Some people, including Bright and Stuart, apparently believed him.

  6. The State Street Bridge incident is reported in Wendt and Kogan, Big Bill of Chicago, pp. 17–18. They are also the best source for details about Thompson’s childhood, youth, and early cowboy years.

  7. For the account of Thompson’s pre-political life, I have relied most heavily on—in addition to the four mentioned biographies—White, Masks in a Pageant; Luthin, American Demagogues; Leinwand, Mackerels in the Moonlight; Thompson’s entry in the Dictionary of American Biography; and the CDT’s premature obituary for Thompson, published in error in 1931 and reprinted by Thompson in the campaign booklet A Tragedy with a Laugh.

  8. The Jenney incident (“This money says Bill Thompson is scared!”) is from Wendt and Kogan, Big Bill of Chicago, p. 33.

  9. The account of Thompson’s announcement speech (“An examination”) comes principally from the text as reprinted in the Republican of January 18. Much of the text is illegible in the surviving microfilm, however, so I have supplemented it with quotations cited by the other newspaper accounts of the Arcadia Hall speech (particularly that in the CDT) and with excerpts from Thompson’s standard stump speech for the 1919 campaign as recorded by a stenographer in the employ of Victor Lawson (Victor Lawson Papers, series 4, box 125, folder 828: “Mayor William Hale Thompson—Speeches 1919”).

  10. The listing of Thompson’s achievements comes from the text in the Republican, as are the quotations in this section (“with less revenue” and “I know that a vast majority of the people”).

  11. Bukowski, Big Bill Thompson, p. 4, explicitly makes the point that Thompson played politics as an extension of sports. “I’m spending $175 a day” is quoted in Wendt and Kogan, Big Bill of Chicago, p. 41.

  12. Bukowski, Big Bill Thompson, pp. 13–14, has the best account of the politics behind Thompson’s aldermanic misadventures. “No one’s going to beat Bathhouse” is quoted in Wendt and Kogan, Big Bill of Chicago, p. 49.

  13. Fred Lundin’s history and peculiarities are described in the four Thompson biographies (Bright devotes a whole chapter to him). But some of the best material comes from Zink, City Bosses in the United States, and from Eric R. Lund, “Swedish-American Politics and Press Response: The Chicago Mayoral Election of 1915” in Anderson and Blanck, Swedish-American Life in Chicago: Cultural and Urban Aspects of an Immigrant People, 1850 to 1930. “Get a tent” is quoted in Wendt and Kogan, Big Bill of Chicago, p. 49, as is “He may not be too much on brains,” p. 77.

  14. “The Five Friends” and their political ambitions are best outlined in Stuart, 20 Incredible Years, pp. xv, 1–4. Th
e author claimed (in 1935) that the plan had never before been revealed in print. “A thrust for power never before attempted” is from ibid., p. 1.

  15. Quotations and paraphrased assertions in this section come from the speech transcripts in the Victor Lawson Papers (box 125, folder 828) and from the text as printed in the Republican of September 18.

  16. The Tribune’s observation about Thompson being the mouthpiece, with Lundin supplying the song, is quoted in Lund, “Swedish-American Politics.” The unique symbiotic quality of the Thompson-Lundin relationship, with the Poor Swede controlling his protégé from behind the scenes, is accepted by virtually all writers on the topic, though Stuart and Bukowski give Thompson more credit for being an independent thinker.

  17. The scene at the Auditorium Theatre is best described in Bukowski, Big Bill Thompson, p. 10, and in Lovett, “ ‘Big Bill’ Thompson of Chicago,” p. 380. “I could no longer hold out agin ’em” is quoted in an unpublished lecture by Merriam, “Analysis of Some Political Personalities I Have Known,” p. 4. The most thorough account of the long odds against Thompson in the 1915 election come from Shottenhamel, “How Big Bill Thompson Won Control of Chicago,” p. 33.

  18. For newspaper reaction to Thompson’s candidacy, see especially O’Reilly, “Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick,” p. 68ff. Lawson’s judgment of Thompson as “simply impossible” is from Schmidt, “Chicago Daily News and Illinois Politics, 1876–1920,” p. 101. “Just who is this Bill Thompson?” is quoted in Wendt and Kogan, Big Bill of Chicago, p. 101.

  19. Thompson’s campaign promises as per Wendt and Kogan, Big Bill of Chicago, pp. 95, 103, and elsewhere. “You’re going to build a new Chicago with Bill Thompson!” is from ibid., p. 93.

  20. “When in doubt, give a parade” is from Bright, Hizzoner Big Bill Thompson, p. 69. Election results as per Stuart, 20 Incredible Years, p. 16. “Hoorah for Bill!” “Fred, you’re a wizard,” and other quotations in Thompson headquarters on election night are from Wendt and Kogan, Big Bill of Chicago, p. 114. “In six months we’ll know” is from ibid., p. 122.