One Summer: America, 1927

visitors often arrived at dinner to find the dishes being cleared away. fn1
    In addition to Henry Luce, McCormick deeply detested Henry Ford, immigrants and Prohibition. But above all else he hated Chicago’s mayor, William Hale Thompson.
    Thompson was an oaf from head to toe and ear to ear, but his supporters never held that against him. ‘The worst you can say about Bill is that he’s stupid,’ remarked one cheerfully. Thompson was supported because he never got in the way of corruption or the making of money. Born two years before the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871, Thompson grew up rich. His father made a fortune buyingproperty cheaply from distressed owners after the fire and selling it at great profit as Chicago rebuilt. Young Thompson grew into a strapping lad – he was six feet four inches tall and so known to all as Big Bill – but not an especially promising one. He dropped out of school and went west, working as a ranch hand and cowboy, but in 1899 after the death of his father he returned to Chicago and took over the family business. Despite a lack of brains or aptitude, in 1915 he was elected mayor, and for the next eight years presided serenely as the city became the most resplendently corrupt and lawless in the nation.
    Chicago was to corruption what Pittsburgh was to steel or Hollywood to motion pictures. It refined and cultivated it, and embraced it without embarrassment. When a mobster named Anthony D’Andrea was killed in 1921, eight thousand people attended the funeral. The cortège was two and a half miles long. The honorary pallbearers included twenty-one judges, nine lawyers and the Illinois state prosecutor.
    Gangsters enjoyed almost total immunity in the city. When three men came to the home of an underworld figure named Patsy Lolordo and shot him dead on his own sofa, they left fingerprints all over the room. Mrs Lolordo knew the men and said she was prepared to give evidence against them. Police investigated but decided, with regret, that they couldn’t find enough evidence to proceed. In 1927, the state of Illinois had never successfully prosecuted a single mobster for anything.
    It was a city where the chief of police, George Shippy, could shoot and kill an innocent man who was trying to deliver a package to his house because the man looked Jewish, and Shippy thought he might be delivering a bomb. The deceased, it turned out, was just an innocent deliveryman trying to do his job. Shippy was not charged.
     
    Thompson, his work done, retired as mayor in 1923, but his admirers, fearful of the kinds of things Prohibition enforcer EmoryBuckner was doing in New York – padlockings and so on – persuaded Thompson to run again in 1927, just to be on the safe side. By Chicago standards the election was peaceful. There were just two bombings, two shootings, two election officials beaten and kidnapped, and twelve declared cases of intimidation of voters. Al Capone donated $260,000 to Thompson’s campaign. He or someone in his camp is believed to have coined the droll slogan ‘Vote early and vote often’, and it appears that many took him at his word. According to the official tally, slightly more than one million votes were cast in a city with almost exactly that number of registered voters.
    Thompson had run on a novel platform. He had vowed to repeal Prohibition, keep America out of the League of Nations and end crime in Chicago. The first two he had no power to do; the third he had no intention of doing. He also claimed, for reasons not easily discerned, that King George V of Britain was planning to annex Chicago, and promised that if elected he would find the king and ‘punch him in the snoot’. His first action on re-election was to set about removing all treasonous works from the city’s schools and libraries. Thompson appointed a theatre owner and former billboard changer named Sport Hermann to purge the city’s institutions of any works that were less than ‘100 per cent American’. Hermann appointed a body called the Patriots’ League to decide which books were sufficiently objectionable to be discarded, but admitted when pressed that he had read none of the books that he was proposing to burn – it is entirely possible that he had never read a book of any kind – and further admitted that he couldn’t remember the names of any of the people advising him. Just to make sure that no possible element of self-inflicted risibility was overlooked, Hermann announced that the