Tinder Box by Anthony P. Hatch

Author:Anthony P. Hatch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2003-03-23T05:00:00+00:00

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THE BLAME GAME

“Chicago is in the hands of a government of monkeys.”

—Rev. Franklyn Johnson, University of Chicago

THE FINGER-POINTING HAD actually begun well before the fire, and given the dynamics and realities of Chicago politics, it was ugly. Weeks before the Iroquois opened, the investigative journalist Lincoln Steffens, in his landmark muckraking series, “The Shame of Our Cities,” had painted an unflinching and damning portrait of Chicago under Carter Harrison.

“It is absurdly backward and uneven; the fire department is excellent, the police is a disgrace, the law department is expert, the health bureau is corrupt, and the street cleaning is hardly worth mention,” he wrote. “All this is Carter H. Harrison. He is an honest man personally, but indolent; a shrewd politician, and a character with reserve power, but he has no initial energy. Without ideals, he does not know what is demanded of him. He does not seem to know wrong is wrong, till he is taught; nor to care, till criticism arouses his political sense of popular requirement. But think of it, every time Chicago wants to go ahead a foot, it has first to push its mayor up inch by inch. In brief, Chicago is a city that wants to be led, and Carter Harrison, with all his political ambition, honest willingness, and obstinate independence, simply follows it.”

Municipal corruption was a given. Police, aldermen, building inspectors and others followed Harrison’s hands-off attitude. “Boodling,” or payoffs, was a word often heard and printed in the papers. Bookmaking was openly carried out in corner cigar stores. A state law required that saloons be closed on Sundays, but Harrison did not enforce it. So open were the bordellos that the sisters who ran the city’s notorious, elegant Everleigh Club were emboldened to publish and distribute a slick brochure complete with photographs, advertising the brothel’s many amenities.

The press, despite critical editorials, went along with much of this. The Tribune, for example, in its war on vice, specifically attacked the Everleigh brochure, but night clerks who needed to round up reporters quickly were instructed to first call the club. It was said that reporters treated the “nightly shootings, robberies, kidnappings and occasional scandals involving playboys” of the seamy First Ward red-light Levee district, including everything short of murder, “as amusing recreational reading.” The press corps, which in 1903 numbered nearly 600, was not held in particularly high esteem by the mayor, who often found himself criticized and ridiculed by many of the local dailies.

Harrison once described the Tribune’s Charles Powers, who was then delving into the mayor’s political life for a series, as “a reporter of the old school, none too clean, physically or morally…. For years,” said the mayor, “Powers had worked on City Hall assignments … neither then nor now are newspaper men with an itching palm left out of consideration when a good thing is sprung in council or legislature. The [aldermen] long ago learned that having them on the payroll pays off.”

The mayor, who earned $833 a month, was

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