City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago (39 page)

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”

As for the prospect of life with her new fiancé, Emily was her usual hopeful self: “Albert—oh! He is so wonderful and so good to me,” she wrote near the end of her diary. “[He] loves me so with all his being, and, well, I love Albert.” That same day, she decided to start a new diary to record her life with Albert. For whatever reason, that document has not survived. But Emily apparently retained her positive attitude to the end. In 1969—exactly fifty years after the summer she documented in her diary—the now-seventy-year-old widow wrote a letter to the
Chicago Tribune
about the Apollo space missions: “The recent moon walks made me too excited to sleep,” she wrote. “I didn’t want to miss a single part. Every flight is different. When there is an Apollo mission on the moon, it is wonderful just to be alive.”
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*   *   *

The arrival of the Jazz Age and the apotheosis of the Thompson-Lundin machine, of course, did not mean the end of all political opposition to the triumphant mayor. True, some enemies—such as Maclay Hoyne and Charles Merriam—did more or less cede the field and move on to other endeavors, Hoyne to a private law practice and Merriam to academia. But the newspapers continued to rage against the Thompson machine. Victor Lawson’s
Daily News
launched some of its most heated attacks against the organization’s new state’s attorney, Robert Crowe. Picking up on one of Big Bill’s favorite prevarications, Crowe
responded by threatening to buy Lawson “a railroad ticket to the penitentiary at Joliet” for tax evasion. No such prosecution was ever forthcoming, however, and Lawson, after several years of declining health, was permitted to die quietly in his own bed on August 19, 1925. He is remembered today as a seminal figure in the history of American journalism, one of the first major publishers to run his newspaper as a public trust rather than merely as a private business designed to generate profits and propagate a political agenda.
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Robert R. McCormick, a much younger man than Lawson, had more time in which to wage his war against the man he despised. Firmly convinced that Thompson must have had some tie to the German secret service during the war, the Colonel spent much of 1920 enlisting the aid of his European and Washington correspondents to find such a connection. When this canard came to nothing, he contented himself with continuing his newspaper’s long-standing campaign of resistance to the mayor, stalking him, according to his best biographer, “with the grim tenacity of Ahab chasing his great white whale.” Eventually, the feud between Thompson and McCormick assumed absurd proportions, generating numerous suits and countersuits and culminating in 1931 with Big Bill publicly accusing the Colonel of plotting to assassinate him. By that time, however, the city of Chicago was a bit weary of both men. “The people of Illinois have no enthusiasm for Thompsonism, and less for the
Tribune
,” one journalist of the day observed. “But they vote for the one, and buy the other. They would shed no tears at the downfall of either. But the fact remains that the
Tribune
, if not the world’s greatest paper, certainly is one of them, and Thompsonism does build roads and bridges …, even if they cost more than they should.”
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The ascendancy of the Thompson-Lundin machine, in any case, proved to be a temporary phenomenon. After the zenith year at the beginning of the decade, things began to fall apart in 1921. Overreaching themselves, Thompson and Lundin succeeded in uniting
their opposition against them and soon began to lose elections. And before long, the organization was being torn apart by internecine feuding as well. Much to Lundin’s annoyance, Thompson began displaying a highly unpleasant independent streak, making political decisions without consulting his mentor. Then State’s Attorney Crowe began to show some independence of his own. In an act of brazen rebellion against the machine, Crowe launched a grand jury investigation into a school board scandal that eventually implicated even the Poor Swede himself.

For Lundin, this was to be the end. Indicted for conspiracy to defraud the school board of more than $1 million, he was subjected to a twelve-week trial that brought to light much of the inner workings of the machine he had worked so hard to construct. And although he was ultimately acquitted—mainly because his lawyer was Clarence Darrow, who engineered a brilliant “Who me?” defense that played on Lundin’s milquetoast persona—the revelations of the trial severely wounded him as a political force. Mayor Thompson, who loyally testified for Lundin in court, was all but through with him afterward. “My friends have crucified me!” Big Bill complained to all who would listen. Weakened by scandal and reeling from the various lawsuits against him, the mayor recognized that it was time to lower his profile. When he was due to run for a third term, Big Bill Thompson announced that he would not be a candidate for reelection. “What a change in two years,” one historian wrote, “the triumphant overwhelming victory in county, state, and nation in 1920, the dregs of defeat in 1922!”
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And so the mighty Thompson-Lundin machine collapsed. For Frank Lowden, there was significant satisfaction in seeing the downfall of those who had spoiled his own political prospects. Even so, the sage of Sinnissippi was resolved to remain in retirement, and eventually earned a reputation as a stubborn refuser of nominations and appointments, turning down a post in Harding’s cabinet, a U.S. Senate seat,
the ambassadorship to the Court of St. James’s, and even, in 1924, a nomination by acclamation as Calvin Coolidge’s running mate. He claimed to have no regrets, though he would admit late in life that he had sacrificed the presidency largely because he’d failed to heed the advice of “some of my best friends to concede … to the worst elements of the party.” It was a lesson learned by many who dabbled in Chicago politics, where scruples could be a fatal political liability. Had Lowden been willing to play the game, Fred Lundin might actually have fulfilled his original goal of making “a Mayor, a Governor, a President.”
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As for Big Bill himself, he would go on to have the most checkered of checkered careers. Having been declared politically dead upon leaving office in 1923, he would watch as his replacement in city hall—William Dever, a well-meaning progressive Democrat of unimpeachable honesty—made a complete hash of his term in office, enforcing Prohibition with such diligence that the city’s bootleggers were soon engaged in territorial battles that lifted the crime rate to new heights of bloodiness. Seeing his opportunity, Thompson threw his trademark cowboy hat into the ring for another term in the 1927 election. The
Tribune
, the
Daily News
, and much of the rest of the world were incredulous. But Big Bill knew his city better than they did. The reformers had had their chance and had just made the city worse; so Thompson ran against them as the ultimate antireformer, promising to usher back the wide-open town (“I’m as wet as the Atlantic Ocean,” he crowed). By playing to the thirsty, vice-deprived crowds, Big Bill was able to push his way past the incumbent Dever and independent John Dill Robertson (the creature of Thompson’s new archenemy, Fred Lundin) to win handily in the April election. Chicago once again had the mayor it wanted—and probably deserved.