“I do.”
“Good,” I said.
“I want you to come back, be my personal photographer,” Ed said.
“Aren’t you afraid Hearst and Wilcox won’t approve?” I asked.
“To hell with them! The fair’s such a big success they don’t dare attack me. Imagine, Noni, over a hundred thousand in attendance every day! People are coming to Chicago from all over the country, all over the world. Spending millions of dollars in the city,” he said.
“Happy to escape their troubles for a little while, I guess,” I said.
He nodded.
“I’ve decided to extend the Century of Progress for another year. Instead of ending the Fair this October we’ll keep it open until next October,” he said. “And I plan to be there on the grounds greeting our famous visitors, and opening the new exhibits. I’ve started special days of celebration—Polish Day, Irish Day, Negro Day, and so on with free admission offered to members of each group,” he said.
“That will be popular,” I said.
“I want you there at my side to record these events,” he said.
“And take your photograph?” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
So instead of a book of the “Faces of Chicago,” I’m supposed to concentrate on Ed’s face? Not like him to be so concerned about personal publicity. He seemed to know what I was thinking.
“I want voters to realize that I fought for the Fair when everyone else wanted me to cancel it,” he said.
“The voters?” I said. “But once you finish Cermak’s term aren’t you done with the voters?”
And not a moment too soon for Margaret.
“We’ll see about that,” he said. “The election for mayor is in April ’35 so just a few months after the Fair will close.”
“Wait a minute. Are you thinking of running?” I said.
I had been there when Pat Nash explained to Ed that he was going to be a “place holder” acting as mayor until the party found a better candidate for the 1935 election. What was Ed thinking?
“Does Pat know?” I asked.
“Ná habair tada,” Ed said.
Granny’s phrase—Whatever you say, say nothing.
* * *
So. The grand finale of the Century of Progress had been meant to be the visit to Chicago by the Graf Zeppelin on October 26, 1933. But extending the fair would take some of the Germans’ thunder away, which probably was just as well.
Ed had done a lot of maneuvering in order to get the Graf Zeppelin to agree to come to Chicago on its record-breaking circumnavigation of the globe. Zeppelins were the future, Ed told me. The Germans had been working on dirigibles for years and now had created this huge airship. It was longer than two football fields and four stories high. The Graf Zeppelin could cross oceans, travel at a speed of 80 miles per hour. Ed had financed the visit by getting Jim Farley, the now postmaster general, to issue a special stamp showing the airship flying over Lake Michigan toward the Century of Progress buildings. Most of the revenue from the stamps would go to the Germans. Anyone who purchased a stamp could put it on a letter, bring it to the Zeppelin and it would go around the world with the ship.
“But the Zeppelin is a tool of Nazi propaganda,” Milton Goldman had told Ed the month before the dirigible was to land. An older man who taught at the University of Chicago, he was a short, intense fellow who had been one of the leaders of the Jewish community’s protest march demanding that Ed cancel the Zeppelin’s flight to Chicago. He said that it was bad enough to have a German pavilion at the Fair, but to take part in this charade was playing into Hitler’s hands. “Look at all the good press Balbo got for Mussolini,” Goldman said.
Jake Arvey had brought Goldman to Ed’s office. I’d come to take his photograph with the mayor, but stayed because what Goldman was saying rang very true. A few months before July 15, 1933 twenty-four Italian seaplanes had arrived in Chicago, after their trans-Atlantic flight. One of the newspapers captioned a photograph of the planes this way: “Italy’s roaring armada of goodwill sweeps over the Century of Progress.” The article went on to praise General Italo Balbo who was one of Mussolini’s top lieutenants. He had led the flight that had included a stop in Derry, Ireland.
Ed had invited every Italian civic leader in the city and even some members of the Outfit in to welcome the great aviator at a grand banquet. Balbo went on about all the good Mussolini was doing and how he was restoring the ancient Roman virtues. After I photographed Balbo and Ed, the whole group wanted their picture taken with him. Balbo grandly announced that Il Duce was sending an ancient column to us in order to commemorate the occasion. Chicago wasn’t alone in falling for him. Balbo was given a US military escort to New York where millions came out for the parade honoring him and the Italian pilots. But since then, reports were coming out of Mussolini’s attacks on Italians who disagreed with him.
Goldman said that as bad as Mussolini was, Hitler was ten times worse. He told us that Hitler’s speeches were full of ravings against the Jews, who Hitler called a parasitical people whose aim was to destroy all other Folk, especially the Germans. According to Hitler, the Jews were mongrels who had to be annihilated so Germany could be cleansed.
“Hitler dresses up his hate with poppycock conspiracy theories about how we Jews caused the Great War and are plotting to take over the world,” Goldman said.
As chancellor of Germany, Hitler had started confiscating Jewish businesses. Not just shouting out his hate for the Jews in his mesmerizing rants but acting on them, Goldman told us.
“But isn’t Hitler a nut?” Ed said. “Surely the German people will wake up and get rid of him. The zeppelins were developed long before he showed up and if Graf Zeppelin doesn’t land in Chicago it will only go on to St. Louis and Cincinnati and those cities will get the national attention.”
Jake then said that the captain of the Graf Zeppelin, Hugo Eckener, was known to be anti-Hitler. Maybe we could use the occasion for good. Ed could invite him to make a statement denouncing the Nazis.
“He’d never do it,” Goldman said. “Too afraid. Even decent people in Germany have become infected.”
But Jake and Ed thought it was worth a try. The Graf Zeppelin had to come to Chicago. There was no way around it. I’d say a million people watched the Graf Zeppelin circle the Fair on October 26, 1933, and then head north to Glenview air station where Ed and I waited along with a large group of reporters.
“Dear God, Ed,” I said. “Look!” Painted on the tail of the ship was a swastika that had to be twenty feet high. All too soon this image would symbolize unimaginable horror.
Eckener was an older man, gray hair cut very short, wrinkled and tired looking. I took a photograph of Ed handing him a mailbag full of letters with the special stamp. The press conference was very short. Goldman asked the first question. Why was Eckener allowing himself and his extraordinary machine to be used for Nazi propaganda?
“I am not here to discuss politics,” Eckener said and marched back to the huge ship branded by the Nazis.
I remember thinking of the Yeats quote: “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
* * *
But for most people, walking around the Century of Progress was like being transported into the future at a time when even having a future seemed in doubt. If the 1893 Columbian Exposition gave us “The White City,” then the Fair was “Rainbow Country,” full of color, sleek buildings, and bold murals. I would pose Ed and visiting actresses in the Women’s building against the wall painting of suffragists marching forward. We used celebrities to attract the press to the Fair’s more nuts-and-bolts attractions. When the movie star Don Ameche came, we took him to the railroad building to photograph him and Ed with the new Zephyr locomotive. On the day the comedian George Jessel brought the girl singers who were on the bill with him at the Oriental Theatre, I set up the photo at the Atomic Energy Building. The girls were called the Gumm Sisters. Though Jessel told E
d he had suggested they change their name to “Garland.”
Name any movie star, Broadway actor or actress, or sports figure prominent in the 1930s and I’ll bet they came to the Century of Progress and were photographed by me with Ed Kelly. I would write up a press release and send the package to the newspapers. Nine times out of ten they used both. One in the eye for Manny Mandel to see my credit under the photographs. Ed was very pleased with the attention he was getting.
But in October 1934 when the Fair ended, I was more concerned about whether Ed would get the nomination that he wanted. It wasn’t looking good.
12
DECEMBER 1934
“You’ve done a grand job, Ed, no question,” Pat Nash said. “But you’ve had your turn. The other fellows won’t stand for you running. They’ll say you weren’t elected, and have never campaigned for office—which is true, after all—and that you can’t get votes. Thompson’s going for mayor again. The boys say he’d beat you, hands down.”
“They are wrong,” Ed said.
Pat had come to Ed’s city hall office unannounced and unexpected. I knew Ed thought Pat was down in Kentucky where he was spending more and more time breeding thoroughbreds at his Shannon Farms. Ed said it was because Pat realized reasoning with horses was easier than convincing aldermen. “And horses are more loyal,” he’d added.
I was there in the office because even after the Century of Progress had closed, celebrities continued to come to the mayor’s office. They often stopped in during their time between trains, since it was still necessary to change in Chicago from East Coast to West Coast lines. They knew a picture with the mayor would be printed in the papers. Good publicity.
I’d just taken a picture of Ed with the Negro film star Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the one who had danced up and down the stairs with Shirley Temple in the movie that had made all that money, in spite of theaters in the South refusing to show it. I had an arrangement with the Chicago Defender, the Chicago-based newspaper that has been read by Negroes across the nation since its founding in 1905. Whenever someone they were interested in visited Ed, I’d send them a photograph. They’d run the shot I took of Ed and Joe Louis on the front page, just after the boxer became World Champion. The editor and founder, Mr. Robert Sengstacke Abbott, told me they had printed twice as many copies as usual, and sold them all.
“I had to bring big bundles down to Union Station,” he’d said.
It was the Pullman porters who had brought the Defender to towns and whistle stops below the Mason-Dixon Line. I wondered if Melvin Grant and his son were part of the network.
“Some of our people down there would have a hard time believing your cousin made a colored man mayor for the day, less they read it with their own eyes,” Mr. Abbott said. He also told me that more and more Southern Negroes were getting on those trains and heading north for Chicago. I almost sang a bit of “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree?”—Nora Bayes’s hit from 1919. But Mr. Abbott was a very dignified and slightly remote man, and I never presumed.
Though, of course, I would have loved to tell him that I had met William Dawson, a Negro civic leader in Paris, right after the First World War. Dawson was a lieutenant in a Negro unit there. He was in a café with two other Negro soldiers, when a fellow with him sang that very song, and Dawson predicted that the lyrics would turn out to be true for colored farmers as well as whites. I often wondered if Dawson would remember me, but I didn’t have the nerve to seek him out. He was a Republican, after all, like most of the Negroes in Chicago. Though how they could have voted for Big Bill Thompson just because he belonged to the party of Abraham Lincoln, I could not fathom. Because, though Roosevelt had overwhelmingly won the Negro vote in 1932, locally that community supported Republicans.
So I knew the Defender would take the Bojangles picture and pay me two dollars. Give me credit, too. I had picked up my camera and started to leave the office as soon as Pat came in the door. He hardly looked at me, which wasn’t like him. Always the gentleman, Pat. Agitated, another state unusual for him. He’d sat down in front of Ed’s desk, and launched right in before I could leave. Now, if I left, it would look as if I were running away from his raised voice. So I stood for a minute at the side of the room. Then, I said, “So long Ed, Pat.”
“But,” Ed said, “wait a minute, Nora. You tell Pat.”
Now I didn’t say, “Tell Pat what?” because I knew Ed wanted me to describe the crowds who had gathered during our photo sessions at the Fair. Spontaneous rallies where Ed had joshed with the people. Maybe Ed wasn’t a natural showman like Thompson, but I thought that was all to the good. Big Bill was ready to do anything to take back the office of mayor. Putting up somebody who would try to out-antic the Master of Antics would be a mistake. But I didn’t say all that to Pat. I simply reported.
“Pat, Ed makes people feel better. He’s steady, and they like that. I’ve been with him at Communion breakfasts and wakes. He’s one of them, and yet there’s something of the chieftain about Ed. He can deliver. Look at the Century of Progress. Even you thought it was a mistake to continue it for another year when families were still suffering,” I said. “But Ed said there’d be no admission charge for children so fathers and mothers could give their kids a day away from want and worry. And attendance went through the roof. Look how popular the free concerts in Grant Park are. Ed did that. Voters won’t forget.”
“Oh, Nora,” Pat said, “all these years, and you still don’t understand politics. It’s the aldermen tell their people who to vote for—and if they’re against Ed, and they are, well…” He shrugged his shoulders.
“But really, Pat, who cares about the aldermen when Ed has the president of the United States in his corner? I bet Roosevelt would even come and campaign.”
Ed had visited the White House dozens of times. The connection he and Roosevelt made in Florida had deepened. After all, Chicago was a New Deal success story—public works had cut unemployment in half. The banks had gotten in line. Ed had even found a way to use the Civilian Conservation Corps, the program designed to create jobs in rural areas by planting trees, clearing streams, and building dams. Right now, there were two CCC camps in our Forest Preserves.
Ed and Margaret had attended two White House dinners with the Roosevelts, and Margaret said Eleanor Roosevelt could not have been nicer to her. Not much for small talk—but then, neither was Margaret. Two shy women pushed into public life. Lots in common. Mrs. Roosevelt had mentioned to Ed that she had a number of protégés in Chicago who needed jobs, and I knew for a fact that the First Lady had recommended four Negro women who Ed had working in the county clerk’s office now.
“Maybe Mrs. Roosevelt would attend a rally for Ed. That would put the tin hat on it,” I said.
But Pat sighed.
“I was hoping I didn’t have to tell you this, Ed. That you would just bow out. But I got the word from Jim Farley. Roosevelt told him—and I’m repeating what Farley said—‘Take the necessary steps to stop Kelly’s nomination.’”
Well, I’d never seen Ed so silent. He just stared at Pat.
“That’s terrible!” I said. “What a betrayal! I thought Roosevelt was a more honorable man than that. I—”
Ed raised his hand. “Easy, Nonie,” and looked at Pat. “Who?” he asked. “Who do they want? I can’t see Roosevelt going for Clark or any council member.”
“Merriam is their choice,” Pat said.
“Merriam?” I said. “But he’s not even a Democrat!”
Charles Merriam was a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who had been involved in local politics for years. He’d twice been elected as an alderman, and had run for mayor three times. Once, on the Republican ticket in 1911, he’d lost to Carter Harrison. Then, he was defeated by Big Bill in the 1915 Republican primary, and again in 1919. Merriam started the Illinois Progressive Party with Harold Ickes. Both of them had big jobs in Washington now. Roosevelt had been careful to bring Repu
blicans into his administration, especially those who had taught at universities and had written books. I wouldn’t say either Merriam or Ickes had much good to say about Ed Kelly, or Irish pols in general. Both of them descended from Scottish Presbyterians—bred in the bone for them to see us as Papist idolaters—born to be corrupt.
“Merriam’s willing to become a Democrat,” Pat said.
“Well, that’s big of him,” I said.
“That guy treats the city like a laboratory for his theories,” Ed said. “He runs for office just to annoy the other professors.”
“Thompson will roll over him,” I said.
“Not if the Roosevelts support him,” Pat said.
“You know,” Ed said, “at that last dinner, Eleanor Roosevelt asked me what my opinion of Charles Merriam was. I said I respected him. Didn’t know I was measuring myself for the drop. Or that my best friend would deliver the sentence.”
He really cares, I thought. Usually Ed was so even—in control. What to say? Find something positive.
“I suppose Margaret will be glad,” I said. “And you can spend more time in Eagle River and—”
“No!” Just that—one word. Then Ed brought his fist down on his desk. Once. Twice. Three times.
“Anyone wants to take this job will have to fight me for it,” Ed said.
“Dear God, Ed,” I said, “you’re too old to get into the ring.”
“He doesn’t mean a physical battle, Nora,” Pat said, “although I’d like to see if the professor could take a punch.”
He leaned across the desk toward Ed. “Though in Gaelic Ireland, when the clan gathered to select a chieftain and a candidate contested the decision, he could challenge the chosen one to single combat. And, you know which one won?” Pat was looking dead into Ed’s eyes.
“The one who wanted it more,” Ed said.
“That’s right,” said Pat. “Campaigning can be a grinding, humiliating experience. Asking for money, for favors, for votes. You’re a proud man, Ed. You have the skills to be mayor—but do you have the fire in your belly?”
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