Lance Mannion: The Trump of Chicago. Fifth Ward and Final Ward: Triumph of the gang

Ballot box stuffed Thursday, November 1, 2018. Re-counted Thursday, November 12, 2020.

Big Bill Thompson posing for a campaign photo in 1926 when he was running for his third term as mayor of Chicago, a campaign financed by Al Capone.

Why did 70 million people vote to keep a villain like Trump as president is the question roiling up social media since the election, as if the answer isn’t obvious in the minds of people asking it and they aren’t prepared to give it in their next sentence. Here’s my next sentence and a couple more for good measure: Why wouldn’t they? Americans have elected villains, sharpers, scoundrels, thieves, knaves, charlatans, clowns and fools, and would-be dictators, often all stuffed into the same flashy suit, to every other office, high and low, in the land, since the beginning of the Republic: it was only a matter of time until one got himself elected president. The wonder, as I say in the notes below and have said in many other posts and tweets before and since, the wonder isn’t that we got a Trump for president, the wonder is we didn’t get one sooner. Big Bill Thompson, three-term mayor of Chicago in the 1920s, was one of those over-stuffed flashy suits...

November 1, 2018:

The reason I keep bringing up scoundrels like Big Bill Thompson every chance I get isn’t that I want to make the high-minded point that having survived the likes of Thompson---and Aaron Burr, and Boss Tweed, and Warren Harding, and Huey Long, George Wallace, Richard Daley, Spiro Agnew, Newt Gingrich, just to name a few of the most recognizable---we’re likely to survive Trump and his gang of vipers. I’m just hoping to remind any political journalists who happen to stray across this once-upon-a-time influential blog that those others existed and not only thrived but ended up paying no price or hardly any for their crimes and depredations. They fooled and they suckered many voters, but most people knew them for what they were and voted for them in spite of it---in many cases because of it. Thompson had two terms as mayor of Chicago, serving from 1915 to 1923, in which he racked up a fair number of progressive achievements but also showed himself again and again for the grafter and clown that he was at heart. In the 1922 mayoral election, he decided not to run again---he had his eye on higher and more lucrative office---and he was replaced by the reform-minded William Dever. Dever proved to be too mindful of reforms, particularly those regarding enforcing Prohibition. Thompson ran against him in the next election, and beat him by 85,000 votes. The people of Chicago were thirsty. They wanted a drink, and Thompson promised to give it to them. He made good on his promise, taking his cut, of course, and sharing it gratefully with Al Capone, with whom he was in cahoots and who had funded his campaign to the tune of a quarter of a million bucks. Thompson’s slogan that year was “Vote for Big Bill the Builder. He Cannot Be Bought, Bossed or Bluffed”.

The rest of the country viewed Thompson’s re-election as a new low for Chicago. The city had chosen as its mayor a “political blunderbuss,” in the words of one journalist---”indolent, ignorant of public issues, inefficient as an administrator, incapable of making a respectable argument, reckless in his campaign methods and electioneering oratory, inclined to think evil of those who are not in agreement or sympathy with him, and congenitally demogogical.”

Many saw Thompson as a product of the special cocktail of corruption and bluster that animated local life.

“They was trying to beat Bill with the better-element vote,” observed the humorist Will Rogers. “The trouble with Chicago is there ain’t much better element.”

But others recognized Big Bill as the symptom of a deeper rot permeating the country---”a strong example,” wrote the Indianapolis Star, “of the potency of demagoguery and appeals to prejudice in American elections.”

For one sociologist, writing in Century Magazine, Thompson’s victory proved that democracy itself had failed---not just in Chicago, but in any major metropolis.

“The people were not fooled,” he wrote. “They knew that a vote for Thompson was a vote for Thompson and the ‘boys.’”

The old open form of government---”the kind envisioned by Thomas Jefferson”---had given way to cabals of crooks, grafters, and party bosses who cut their deals behind closed doors.

“That is essentially what has come to pass with Thompson,” the sociologist wrote. “His election is the triumph of the gang.”

---from “Scarface and the Untouchable” by Max Collins and A. Brad Schwartz.

Thompson ran for a fourth term in 1931, but by then enough voters were tired of his antics that he was defeated soundly by Anton Cermak, who was reform-minded like Dever but also tougher-minded. Lessons learned. All’s well that ends well. Democracy is redeemed. Except that in less than a generation Richard Daley would be elected to his first term as mayor.