City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (37 page)

The next day—in a courtroom filled beyond capacity with “morbidly curious men and women”—Fitzgerald quietly repeated the story of the slaying. After the closing pleas were made, Judge Crowe asked the prisoner to stand. Fitzgerald smiled faintly as a bailiff helped him to his feet.

“Have you anything to say before I pronounce sentence upon you for the murder of Janet Wilkinson?” the judge asked.

Fitzgerald’s fingers twitched uncontrollably as he muttered, “I’m sorry. I—I ask forgiveness.”

“Is that all?”

“I ask God to forgive me.”

Judge Crowe did not hesitate: “Thomas R. Fitzgerald,” he announced, “I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead on Monday, October 27, at the Cook County Jail.”

Seated at a table opposite the defendant, Mrs. Wilkinson put her face in her hands and wept.
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Over the next few weeks, hundreds of requests for tickets to the hanging were received by Chief Deputy Harry Laubenheimer. The date of the execution was moved up to October 17 for technical reasons, but even Fitzgerald himself apparently did not object to this. On October 14, Governor Lowden refused a request by Mrs. Fitzgerald to reprieve her husband. Two days later, the ubiquitous Kenesaw Mountain Landis denied her petition for a stay of execution. And on the morning of October 17—after thanking his jailers and exclaiming, “I have sinned against God and man and I desire to be punished”—Fitzgerald was taken to the platform in the death chamber of the Cook County Jail.

“Fitzgerald,” Sheriff Peters asked, “have you anything to say?”

“No, thank you,” the prisoner replied.

A shroud was tied over his head. And at 9:24 a.m., Thomas Fitzgerald was hanged before the largest crowd that had ever witnessed an execution in Chicago history.
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Emerging from the aftermath of his summer struggles—incredibly—more popular than at any time since his first year as mayor, William Hale Thompson spent the waning weeks of 1919 working hard
to burnish his reputation as “Big Bill the Builder.” Exhorting the city’s detractors again to “Throw Away Your Hammer and Pick Up a Horn” (that is, stop knocking Chicago and start celebrating it), he launched a broad-based public relations campaign to publicize the Chicago Plan, boom the city as a tourist destination, and promote his vision of the “City of the Future.”
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To a great extent, the campaign worked. Helped enormously by several newspaper supplements extolling the virtues of the plan’s goal of a more beautiful and thus more prosperous Chicago (“Beauty has always paid better than any other commodity and always will,” Daniel Burnham once said), Thompson lobbied energetically for the plan. He urged voters in the November elections to support the all-important bond issues needed to fund his enormous public works projects. And by impressive 2-to-1 margins—despite the fact that the city was virtually bankrupt—they did, opening the door to an unprecedented wave of city improvements (not to mention kickback and graft opportunities). For Big Bill, the result was a political triumph, and just the vote of confidence his administration needed to go forward. As Thompson biographer Douglas Bukowski would later write, “Concrete, poured in great quantities and with equal fanfare, went a long way in silencing [the mayor’s] critics.”
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Thompson also found other ways of turning attention away from his summertime failures. He precipitated another school board controversy and made a great show of tackling national issues such as the punishment of war profiteers, the imposition of an embargo on food exports, and the rejection of the League of Nations. Why such issues should concern a city mayor was not entirely clear. But Thompson still had aspirations to national office, and in any case the issues served him well enough among his local constituents. When Big Bill railed against the king of England or war profiteers, he was by proxy railing against bosses, traction barons, and all other representatives of power and privilege who opposed the common man—a message
that was appreciated by everyone from the city’s Irish and blacks to its working-class Poles and its disconsolate middle-class commuters.
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The transit issue, too, continued to serve as a convenient vehicle for the mayor’s rehabilitation. When Thompson went to the city council in October to ask for money to fund a commission to study his municipal ownership plan, the aldermen voted unanimously to grant it—a legislative victory in and of itself. But then Thompson went on to turn it into a Black Belt coup by naming his assistant corporation counsel, Edward Wright, to the new commission. The move was hailed by the
Defender
, which noted that the appointment elevated Wright to “the highest position … ever held in local government by any member of our Race.” If any blacks still held the race riot against the mayor, gestures like the elevation of Ed Wright were proof that Big Bill hadn’t abandoned them after all.
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By the end of December, then, Thompson had once again taken command, all but eliminating the taint of those twelve days when the city he was elected to lead nearly broke down completely. True, the establishment national press still treated him with contempt, and his local enemies certainly had not given up the fight against him. But one thing was definitely clear: Big Bill was back in the saddle, with the Poor Swede sitting right behind him. Having regained his bearings as a political operator, the mayor’s Mephistopheles was once again ready to engage the machinery of his far-reaching organization. And his plans were nothing if not ambitious. As one historian put it, Lundin “was going to try to obtain as vise-like a grip on the county and state as he had on the city.”

But first, of course, he and the mayor had one piece of unfinished business to attend to. The traitor who had once been their ally would have to be disposed of before they could realize their aspirations to greater power. In other words, Governor Lowden—now training his eye on the White House—would have to be eliminated from the political equation once and for all. It was a fight that Thompson and Lundin both seemed to be relishing.
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T
HE WIDE, ARCHING SKYLIGHTS
of the Chicago Coliseum had just begun to darken when delegates of the 1920 Republican National Convention reassembled for a fourth attempt to choose a candidate for president of the United States. Among the fourteen thousand conventioneers packed into the Coliseum’s central auditorium, the mood was tense. The day’s first three ballots, taken at intervals throughout the afternoon, had been inconclusive. The two frontrunners—General Leonard Wood and Illinois governor Frank O. Lowden—had deadlocked each time at roughly a third of the vote each, with thirteen other candidates trailing far behind. And although Wood and Lowden had each gained some votes on every succeeding ballot, neither seemed to be moving toward the decisive lead required to win the nomination.

It was a dangerous situation. The frontrunners’ camps, aware that the convention might resort to backroom tactics to find a compromise candidate if the assembly were to recess for the evening, had agreed to block any motion for an adjournment. But the delegates were growing restless. For one thing, the heat on the convention floor was oppressive. “Crowds enormous and heat stifling,” Florence Lowden reported in her diary that day. Edna Ferber, covering the convention for the United Press Association, was more descriptive. As the session wore on, she observed, the delegates’ bald heads and “heat-suffused faces” had been turning an alarming shade of pink, and some of the men had even begun to undress: “They shed collars,
ties, even shoes in some cases,” she wrote. “It was the American male politician reduced to the most common denominator.”

H. L. Mencken, also in town to report on the event, found the effects of the heat distressingly olfactory. The Coliseum, he remarked, smelled of nothing so much as a “third-rate circus.”
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For the Lowden campaign team, the next vote would be crucial. For days they had been telling the press that the governor would steamroll his way past General Wood and take the nomination on the fourth ballot. Wood was still ahead in number of delegates, but he had very little second-choice support; the Lowdenites reasoned that many votes would migrate to the governor once it became clear that Wood had little chance of achieving a majority. And in a wide-open convention like this one, with so many delegates pledged to a candidate for only the first few votes, the numbers could change dramatically from ballot to ballot. Momentum in favor of a second-place candidate, once under way, could be very difficult to stop. But first, of course, that momentum had to be set in motion, and the Lowden forces were finding it very difficult to do so.
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It had not been an easy campaign for the governor of Illinois. When the race first started, he’d seemed like a natural choice. With his regal good looks, his solid fiscal record as chief executive of a large and important state, and his general acceptability to both the progressive and old guard wings of the party, he had far fewer negatives than his main competitors—General Wood and California governor Hiram Johnson, both of whom had a talent for making enemies. But Lowden’s campaign had been plagued by misfortune and bad publicity throughout the nomination battle. And one of the major causes of that misfortune and bad publicity had been Chicago mayor Big Bill Thompson.

Early in the campaign, Lowden had harbored vague hopes that the mayor might actually be persuaded to support his presidential bid, despite the bad blood between them. Lowden’s election to the White
House, after all, would have freed up the governorship of Illinois—a tempting plum for the Thompson-Lundin organization to pluck. And Big Bill had often proved willing to join forces with a bitter enemy if he saw political advantage in the alliance.
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But it had become clear almost immediately that the Thompson-Lundin policy toward the governor’s bid would be simple—namely, to undermine it wherever and however they could. In the lead-up to the Illinois primary in April, Big Bill had shown no mercy in his bashing of Lowden. At every opportunity, he had railed against his fellow Republican, for everything from his opposition to raises for Chicago’s schoolteachers to his numerous ties to big business (being married to George Pullman’s daughter was often a political liability for Lowden). Nor was the governor’s alleged role in raising Chicago’s streetcar fares ignored; Thompson proved amazingly effective at making Lowden look like a hypocritical plutocrat, willing to deny workers their pay increases in the name of controlling inflation but more than ready to allow prices to rise when it meant preserving corporate dividends.
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The effect of this constant pummeling had been obvious in the Illinois primary results. Though Lowden had succeeded in winning the overall state advisory vote, he lost Cook County by a significant margin. And in the city of Chicago, the Thompson-Lundin forces had scored an unprecedented victory by winning thirty-four of the thirty-five ward committeeman races. This ultimately meant that Thompson himself would be a delegate-at-large at the convention, with a bloc of seventeen delegates in his control—all of them ostensibly “instructed” to vote for Lowden, but with a very different plan in mind.
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By the time the convention assembled on June 8, moreover, the Lowden campaign had given Thompson some extra ammunition. In late May, a Senate investigation into campaign finance had turned up evidence of a scandal: Two $2,500 checks had been given by the
Lowden campaign to a pair of St. Louis politicians who just happened to wind up as members of the Missouri delegation to the Republican convention. The checks had probably been payments for routine campaign expenses, but no one in the Lowden camp seemed able to say what exactly had been done with the money. And although the case was still pending as the convention opened, many people had already drawn their conclusion—that Lowden was guilty of trying to buy delegate votes. As Lowden’s biographer later wrote, the governor’s enemies “could hardly have concocted a more clever scheme or timed its use at a more effective moment.”
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Big Bill, of course, didn’t hesitate to use the scandal as a weapon for some vigorous character assassination. As unofficial host for the convention, he met delegations from all over the country as they arrived, supposedly to welcome them to Chicago but actually to bad-mouth Lowden wherever he went. “His word’s no good,” the mayor told his fellow delegates on the eve of the convention. “You can’t count on him, believe me. You nominate Lowden and the Republicans’ll lose Illinois in the election!”
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