William Hale Thompson was an American politician, mayor of Chicago.
Background
Thompson was born May 14, 1867, in Boston, Massachusetts to William Hale and Mary Ann Thompson. On the paternal side he was descended from Robert Thompson, an Englishman who emigrated to New England around 1700. His father was a wealthy Boston merchant with extensive inherited landholdings in New Hampshire; while serving as a staff officer under Adm. David G. Farragut during the Civil War, he married a Chicago girl, the daughter of one of the city's original incorporators, and in 1868 moved to Chicago, where he prospered in real estate and was elected as a Republican to the state legislature (1877 - 81).
Education
Young Bill attended the select Charles Fessenden Preparatory School in Chicago, but at the age of fourteen rebelled and won permission to strike out for himself in the West. Big for his age, he caught on as a ranch hand and for the next six years spent nine months a year on the Wyoming range and, under parental compulsion, the three winter months in Chicago at the Metropolitan Business College.
Career
In 1888 his father bought him a 3, 800-acre ranch at Ewing, Nebr. , which he managed well, showing a profit of $30, 000 at the end of three years. The death of his father in November 1891 brought him back to Chicago. With few responsibilities (family real estate holdings, valued at more than $2, 000, 000, were ably managed by others), Thompson spent most of his time at the Chicago Athletic Club, where he became expert at water polo, played baseball well, excelled at football, and mastered the difficult sport of yachting.
In 1899 a wealthy friend persuaded him to run for alderman of the second ward, and Thompson won his first political contest. Labeled a reformer, he hardly lived up to his billing. He took little part in the activities of the city council and declined to run for reelection at the end of his two-year term. Nevertheless, his proven ability to win votes in both the silk-stocking and the boardinghouse districts of the second ward attracted the attention of the powerful Republican manipulator William Lorimer. Under Lorimer's sponsorship Thompson was elected to the Cook County Board of Commissioners.
After serving without distinction from 1902 to 1904, Thompson dropped politics and again devoted himself to athletics, even organizing a new club, the Illinois Athletic, of which he was immediately elected president. His victories in yacht racing brought considerable newspaper publicity, and to Fred Lundin, the rising, ambitious boss who succeeded Lorimer, Thompson looked like a certain winner. Lundin quietly built an effective Republican organization which in 1915 elected Thompson mayor by the largest plurality ever given to a Republican in Chicago.
Once in office Thompson paid scant attention to his campaign promises to clean up the police department, appoint a woman to the school board, and make the municipal government economical and efficient. Lundin, pulling the strings behind the scenes, manipulated the police and wrecked the civil service. The Thompson administration did begin implementing the Chicago Plan of Daniel H. Burnham to beautify the city, but many a citizen noted what appeared to be exorbitant fees of real estate appraisers and the fat profits of contractors. With Lundin's encouragement, Thompson in 1918 entered the Republican primary for the United States Senate.
Having already gained national notoriety through his outspoken opposition to United States participation in World War I, he now proposed to conscript excess war profits and keep the country free of all foreign alliances. Although his position on foreign affairs drew a favorable response from Chicago's large German population, it alienated downstate voters and contributed to Thompson's overwhelming defeat in the primary by Medill McCormick. Unabashed, Thompson announced that he would run again for mayor in 1919. Reelected by only 21, 000 votes, he immediately spurred on a program of public works: street widening, bigger sewers, new viaducts, the long-planned Michigan Avenue bridge across the Chicago River, all regardless of cost. Criticism was met by a booster slogan: "Throw away your hammer! Get a horn and blow loud for Chicago!"
Other events, however, cut seriously into his popularity. In the summer of 1919 he was criticized for allowing a race riot to get out of hand before calling on the governor for the National Guard. That same year the courts overruled his board of education's ouster of a capable school superintendent, Charles E. Chadsey, and fined Thompson's supporters on the board for contempt. The Chicago Tribune, bitterly hostile, pointed up extravagance in municipal spending by suing Thompson and two associates for conspiracy to defraud the city of over $2, 000, 000 in "expert's" fees.
Never one to discount his appeal to the voter, Thompson was still confident of a third term when a grand jury in 1922 produced sufficient evidence to indict Lundin and twenty-two other members of the Thompson organization for robbing the school treasury of over $1, 000, 000 through fake contracts, false bids, and exorbitant prices for school supplies. Holding Lundin responsible for ruining his reelection plans, Thompson broke with his mentor and withdrew as a candidate for mayor.
Thompson spent the next four years courting newspaper publicity by getting up an abortive "expedition" to hunt tree-climbing fish in the South Seas and denouncing the World Court and the King of England. By 1927 he was ready for a comeback. Running again for mayor, he attacked prohibition, the League of Nations, and William McAndrew, Chicago's superintendent of schools, whose rigid regime had won the enmity of the city's teachers and organized labor. With state and federal patronage controlled by Lundin and by Thompson's longtime enemy Senator Charles S. Deneen, "Big Bill" drew on the financial support of underworld leader Al Capone and won by a margin of 32, 000 over the combined votes of his opponents. Once in office, Thompson moved promptly against the man he had labeled a "stool pigeon for King George. " The Thompson-dominated school board suspended Superintendent McAndrew, charging that he had introduced pro-British history textbooks into the public schools. The ensuing trial, at which a succession of "experts" traced the insidious ways of British propaganda, together with Thompson's abortive attempt to purge the bookshelves of the Chicago Public Library, brought nationwide ridicule.
The gangland-style bombing of the homes of two Thompson opponents during the Republican primary of 1928 further turned sentiment against him, and his candidates went down to defeat. Though he himself won renomination in 1931, Thompson lost decisively to his Democratic opponent, Anton J. Cermak. This defeat marked the end of Thompson's political career, although he made two more bids for office. In 1936, running for governor on the Union party ticket of William F. Lemke, he came in a poor third. Three years later he entered the Republican primary for mayor but was badly beaten by Dwight H. Green. After 1939 Thompson rarely appeared in public.
He died in Chicago in 1944 of arteriosclerotic heart disease. After funeral services in the Thoburn Methodist Church, which he had joined in 1932, he was buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago.
Achievements
Personality
In the last years of his life he became fat, flabby, and lethargic.
Connections
He had been married, on December 7, 1901, to Mary Walker Wyse (they had no children), but in 1931 he left his wife to live in hotels, with a young woman, Ethabelle Green, established nearby as secretary and companion.