Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago

2. Businessmen Rebels: 1872–93

36 Businessmen Rebels 36 2 Businessmen Rebels 1872–93 In every American age, there has been a group that has sounded the cry of corruption: the cry that political values are being debased, the political system subverted, public officials bought out. This group is the American gentility. —Abraham S. Eisenstadt, “Political Corruption in American History” Graft is what he calls it when the fellows do it who don’t know which fork to use. —Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s novel, All the King’s Men Awave of fires in the summer of  had more to do with reform in Chicago than did the great Fire of . The worst one started in a rag peddler’s shack on  July and spread to destroy  buildings on fortyseven acres and to kill about twenty people. It burned down the slums between State and Clark streets south of Harrison Street, later the locale of the Levee vice district. “For the second time Chicago was like Louvain. Its heart had been consumed by fire. . . . [L]eading citizens walked around contemplating desolation and destruction.”1 After more fires on  and  July, fire insurance companies had had enough. The Chicago Board of Underwriters refused to write policies unless the city modernized its fire department, a patronage playground— “the engine houses are little better than places of resort for lewd women, the fire-men use the horses to go off buggy-riding, and the whole thing is managed in the interests of a political clique,” the Tribune scolded.2 Businessmen Rebels 37 Franklin MacVeagh (a wholesale grocer and later U.S. treasury secretary), Marshall Field, and others called a mass meeting. A resultant committee of one hundred pressed the underwriters’ demands before the city council : extend the city’s “fire limits” requiring construction of brick or stone, provide an adequate water supply, increase the size of the water mains, and gradually move lumberyards to the outskirts of the city. Naturally, reform did not happen at once. On  July, aldermen agreed to extend the fire limits but balked at other changes. Accordingly, businessmen combined to achieve them. Thus was born on  July the Citizens’ Association, the first urban reform group in the nation. Chicago then had no counterpart to New York’s Tammany Hall and cannot claim to have invented political reform. However, the Citizens ’ Association may boast of its priority in the tradition of businessmen’s civic reform organizations. On  October, the National Board of Underwriters invited fire insurers to boycott Chicago. In the resulting embargo, city merchants found not only that they could not insure their stocks but that wholesalers refused to ship uninsurable wares. The Citizens’ Association proposed hiring a former New York City fire commissioner to revamp the local fire department. The city council refused unless his fee was privately paid. So the association put up sixty-five hundred dollars and the city underwriters ’ board thirty-five hundred. The council thereafter enacted most of that New York civil engineer’s recommendations. Two years later, the National Board of Underwriters called Chicago’s fire department the best in the country. However, a baleful precedent had been set: private funding of a public job, which segued into the private funding of prosecuting people. There had been numerous local businessmen’s clubs for purposes of social networking. The first important one, the Chicago Club, was set up back in  by banker (and later U.S. treasury secretary) Lyman J. Gage. The Citizens’ Association was something new. Its explicit aim was to improve the urban environment. After fire protection was achieved, the group turned to other projects, such as a new city charter. That prototype spawned many offspring around the nation. In Chicago, business reform groups operated in various forms and degrees throughout the 38 Businessmen Rebels twentieth century. Their story is as much a part of Chicago history as the more familiar record of grafters and gangsters. Their belief was that regulated , rational public administration by itself would remove vulnerabilities for corruption. MacVeagh, who was elected the Citizens’ Association’s first president, said that “while immediate fire protection is its most absorbing thought, the association assumes a larger field,” explaining, Its business is with the whole question of our municipal government. Perhaps the most important business in America that is the most poorly done is the business of government, and of all the manifestations of government in this country by far the worst is...