Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago

4. Progressive to Prohibitionist: 1910–20

Progressive to Prohibitionist 89 89 4 Progressive to Prohibitionist 1910–20 There is something of [William H.] Thompson in Chicago, love of a show, distrust of the responsible powers that be, appetite for spoils and graft, drifting irresponsibility susceptible to demagogic appeals, a dangerous mood in every man and in every group. —Charles E. Merriam, Chicago: A More Intimate View of Urban Politics Charles E. Merriam expressed the fundamental creed of Progressivism when running for mayor in . “You must decide,” he told voters, “whether the next four years in Chicago are to be years of graft, crime, lawlessness, waste, extravagance, and defiance of our desires, or whether they will be years of honest, efficient administration.”1 Honest, efficient: holy writ for reformers to this day. Harold L. Ickes, Progressive Republican leader, had persuaded Merriam to run for mayor. Financial backers included Julius Rosenwald, chief of Sears, Roebuck and a major civic philanthropist. Victor F. Lawson contributed ten thousand dollars and favored Merriam in his Daily News. Even the Irish president of the Chicago Federation of Labor endorsed Merriam for the general election (the labor vote split). “I like the fellow,” Mayor Busse said of Merriam, “but I can’t be too familiar with him, otherwise they’d think I was a reformer.”2 Avoiding that horrific label and yet dogged by reformers, Busse withdrew from the Republican primary. Aldermen had first been nominated by means of primary elections in ; mayoral candidates got their turn to bypass nominating 90 Progressive to Prohibitionist conclaves of bosses in . Rosenwald was in Europe on a business trip when he learned that Merriam had won the GOP primary. Rosenwald cabled Ickes: “My hat is off to you. I am returning by the first steamer.”3 The Democratic nominee was Carter Harrison II, previously mayor from  to . It was a classic, brass-knuckled Chicago campaign. On  April , ward bosses who controlled vice and patronage elected Harrison over Merriam by four percentage points. Much of the Republican organization under boss William Lorimer secretly backed the Democrat, Harrison, over Merriam in a typical party-leader crossover. Merriam wrote, The truth was that the opposition succeeded in convincing many that I was a “reformer,” and I was unable to escape from the implications of that pregnant term. . . . [W]as I not from a silk-stocking district? Was I not in the University [of Chicago]? Had I not pursued the grafters, and beaten the machine? . . . If in reality I had been rich and in reality a puritanical reformer of the type described, perhaps I might have enjoyed the situation. . . . If my managers had been thoughtful enough to produce some woman at the psychological moment, demanding that I take care of some bastard son, I should probably have been elected.4 Although Merriam returned to the city council in , his mayoral defeat took the steam out of the Progressive movement in Chicago. Its denouement came in  with former President Theodore Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” third-party campaign against his chosen successor, President William Howard Taft. In  Taft had fired Roosevelt’s holdover secretary of the interior for plotting against his administration, naming Walter Fisher to replace him. This action enraged Roosevelt, spurring his launch of an independent candidacy. Merriam, Ickes, Addams, and other Progressives led their followers through the Bull Moose door. Fisher and others thought the movement was madness. The GOP schism assured the election of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. More than ninety years later, the Chicago Republican party still has not regained its footing. Was Mayor Harrison II a reformer? The question has no clear answer. For one thing, there was no consensus definition of reform, represented Progressive to Prohibitionist 91 as it was by liberal businessmen, the settlement-house social gospel, prohibitionists , evangelical clergy, labor leaders, wealthy uplifters, populists, and socialists. In turn, Harrison and his ilk disagreed with reformers over the components of corruption. The Harrisons, father and son, were wealthy, European-educated, and distantly related to presidents William and Benjamin Harrison. Harrison II was a Protestant who studied both at Yale and at the Irish-Catholic St. Ignatius College in Chicago (now Loyola University). He was married to a Catholic who served as a courtier to Bertha Palmer, queen of Chicago society, and who reared their children in the Catholic faith. In his own person, Harrison was an ethnically balanced ticket. Harrison supported the magnificent Chicago Plan of , pressed by businessmen’s clubs, with...