by Simon Baatz
35
This defense worked. Some members of the jury believed Wanderer insane but worried that he would be committed to an asylum and released after a few years. Other jurors believed that Wanderer had knowingly and maliciously killed his wife and that he deserved the gallows. But no one wanted a mistrial, and so, after arguing for twenty-three hours and casting five ballots, the jurors came up with a compromise: on 29 October, they decided that Wanderer was guilty and would serve twenty-five years in prison.
36
The jury's decision provoked an uproar. With time off for good behavior, Wanderer would be a free man in less than fourteen years! The judge, Hugo Pam, could not conceal his dismay at the jury's folly. Immediately after hearing the foreman pronounce sentence, Pam admonished the jury, "A grievous error--you call him a wife murderer and say that he shall pay with twenty-five years imprisonment. A regrettable error."
37
Jimmy O'Brien, the assistant state's attorney prosecuting the case, was outraged. O'Brien was astonished at the jurors' ineptitude. "They found him guilty of murdering his beautiful young wife, the trusting woman who was about to become a mother. And they gave him twenty- five years. . . . What foolishness! . . . It was an asinine finding, calling for the severest censure."
38
None of the jurors would admit that he had voted for anything other than life imprisonment or the death sentence, but the damage had been done. Wanderer was jubilant at the result--"I knew they couldn't crack me. . . . I knew I'd never swing"--and, as he listened to the judge discharge the jury and thank the lawyers, a gleeful smirk played across his face.
39
But Wanderer's trial had coincided with the 1920 elections. On 2 November, just four days after the jury had returned its verdict, Robert Crowe was elected the new state's attorney for Cook County. Crowe had followed the Wanderer trial closely, and now that he was state's attorney, he promised that, despite the jury's decision, Wanderer would eventually swing from the gallows. "One of the first things I will do," Crowe predicted to a reporter from the
Chicago Herald and Examiner, "will be to force Wanderer to trial a second time. The punishment meted out by the first jury is entirely unbefitting the atrocity of the crime." The murder had been a willful act--it would be a travesty, Crowe declared, if Wanderer were to escape with a prison term.40
Carl Wanderer had received twenty-five years for the murder of his wife and unborn child. But what about the tramp? Crowe announced that he would put Wanderer on trial for the killing of the tramp.
41
The defense attorney at the second trial, W. D. Bartholomew, offered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Psychiatrists for the defense had examined Carl Wanderer in his prison cell and diagnosed his illness as dementia praecox catatonia. William Hickson, the director of the Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court, had put the prisoner through a series of mental tests and had discovered that Wanderer had been insane since infancy. A psychologist, E. Kester Wickman, testified that Wanderer had the mental age of an eleven-year-old; and James Whitney Hall, president of the Medical Insanity Commission, told the jury that Wanderer suffered from hallucinations and was undoubtedly insane.
42
But on Friday, 18 March 1921, the jury returned a verdict of guilty and fixed the punishment as death by hanging. The jury had reached its verdict after only twelve minutes. The defense attorney, Bartholomew, complained ( justifiably) that the jury had not given the evidence proper consideration.
The prosecution was delighted at the result. Robert Crowe was vindicated; his decision to put Wanderer on trial again might have backfired if Wanderer had escaped the death penalty a second time, but now Crowe was the hero of the moment. Crowe laughed and joked with reporters at the entrance to the Criminal Court Building. He puffed on a large cigar as he gave his comments to the press. "It's a great victory," Crowe exclaimed as he stood side by side with his assistant, Lloyd Heth. "Justice has been done and a great error has been corrected."
43
Crowe's successful prosecution of Wanderer was an auspicious beginning to his career as state's attorney. Crowe, now one of Chicago's most prominent elected officials, had the responsibility for tackling the crime wave that so troubled Chicagoans during the early 1920s: if he succeeded, he might be the next mayor of Chicago; if he failed, he would be consigned to political oblivion.
Although Chicago was not the most dangerous city in the United States (both St. Louis and New York outranked it in per capita murders and assaults), a series of gangland killings in 1920 had created a perception of the city as the epicenter of the crime wave that swept over the United States after World War I. Murder, robbery, rape, and assault seemed almost routine; and nothing better illustrated the lawlessness of the United States than comparisons between Chicago and other American cities, on the one hand, and comparable cities in Canada and Europe. Thus Chicago, which recorded 352 murders in 1921, had a murder rate approximately fourteen times greater than that of Berlin; Los Angeles, with a population one-tenth that of London, recorded a greater number of murders than were committed in London; there were more murders in New York City in a single year than in Britain and France combined. Only a few hundred miles separated Cook County from Canada; yet the discrepancy in the crime figures was startling: twice as many burglaries, four times as many robberies, and four times as many murders were committed in Chicago as in the whole of Canada.
44
What could be the cause of such an avalanche of crime? Was it a consequence of economic and social conditions: of poverty, unemployment, and inadequate housing? Was a high level of crime inevitable in a society divided so sharply between the wealthy and the impoverished? Crime was a result of socioeconomic circumstances, reformers argued, and until poverty was eliminated, the crime wave would continue.
Such sentiments had significant support within American society in the 1920s, yet the opposite viewpoint, that crime was less a consequence of impersonal forces and more a matter of free agency and deliberate choice, also had widespread backing. The murderer chose to kill his or her victim; crime was the result of a conscious decision, freely undertaken, and talk of determining circumstances served only to absolve the criminal of responsibility, to undermine the rule of law, and thus to make a bad situation worse.
Those who assumed that crime was the consequence of deliberate choice, malevolence, and evil intent recommended a stricter application of the law. Punishment was failing to deter only because it was not sufficiently stringent. Too few judges sentenced murderers to death; and too few death sentences were carried out. Unscrupulous and devious lawyers exploited loopholes in state constitutions and criminal codes in order to save their clients from punishment. Delays in the courts and procedural inefficiency postponed trials for years and allowed criminals to escape punishment. The Eighteenth Amendment against the sale and manufacture of alcohol was widely disregarded, and in consequence contributed to indifference and apathy among the public toward crime and criminal behavior. The inadequacy of the police and the courts found its counterpart in the increased competence and organization of criminals. Professional criminals arranged burglary as one might organize a commercial business--they paid the police to look the other way; sent stolen goods, often ordered ahead of time, to fences in distant states; and, in the unlikely event of capture, colluded with professional fixers, including bondsmen and corrupt lawyers, to fix juries and spirit away witnesses.
45
To solve such problems, it was necessary, according to those who believed in free agency, to enforce the law and to apply sufficient punishment to deter the criminal. Remove the loopholes in the law, restore morale in the police force and the judiciary, reestablish respect for the law among the general public, impose draconian sentences for wrongdoing--and crime and murder would stop. Punishment acted to deter, and just as soon as the criminal appreciated the increased probability of arrest and the disadvantages of a lengthy prison sentence, so at that mome
nt the crime wave would subside.
The idea that impersonal forces had any bearing on crime was, to Robert Crowe, nonsense. Criminal behavior was no different from any other type of behavior, Crowe believed; it was freely decided on and deliberately chosen. To claim that impersonal forces compelled the criminal to act was tantamount to removing the concept of responsibility from the criminal justice system; it questioned the very foundations of the law. Crowe's attitude toward deterministic theories of crime was contemptuous and dismissive--it was not even worth his time, he contended, to argue against such fallacious and erroneous notions. And in any case, Crowe's political ambitions provided him with little reason to concede ground to a viewpoint that might be interpreted as offering leniency to criminals. He hoped to be mayor of Chicago, and he could best realize that ambition by demonstrating his competence and ability in fighting crime. He had limited resources-- the state's attorney traditionally had just forty police officers at his disposal--but soon after taking office he began to use them against the spread of illegal gambling houses. "Gambling in Chicago must stop," Crowe announced in May 1921. "It does not matter whether it f lourishes in cigar stores and the back rooms of saloons or in the society residence district; it must be driven out." Crowe's campaign against crime made good copy: each evening, Crowe's men would raid gambling dens, seizing dice tables, slot machines, roulette wheels, tally sheets, and racing handbooks. Most of the raids occurred in the Second Ward, in the area south of the Loop notorious for its black-and-tan cabaret clubs: the Dreamland at 3518 State Street, the Green Mill on the corner of 37th Street and Vernon Avenue, the Stopover on 35th Street, the Excelsior on Indiana Avenue, the Saratoga at 3445 State Street, and the Waiters' and Porters' Club at 3415 State Street. The journalists would follow behind--waiting patiently beside the patrol wagons as the police battered down the doors of pool rooms and gambling houses and filing their reports in time for the morning editions. Crowe zealously cultivated the reporters, feeding them inside information and anecdotes; the journalists repaid the favor, liberally quoting Crowe, praising his administration of the state's attorney's office, and supporting his initiatives.
46
It was all calculated to win publicity in the media. It was more for show than for effect--how could Crowe's forty constables have any meaningful impact on crime in Chicago?--and Charles Fitzmorris, the chief of police, angrily denounced the state's attorney for interfering with the work of his own department. Fitzmorris had reason to feel aggrieved--the police under Crowe's command were technically on loan from the Chicago police department--and Fitzmorris moved to withdraw them from the state's attorney's office. But Fitzmorris himself was under attack for allowing corruption to spread within the police department--by his own admission, at least half of the men under his command were involved in the liquor trade--and he had little inclination to pursue a confrontation with the state's attorney over the inappropriate use of police resources.
47
The crackdown on gambling emphasized Crowe's independence and integrity--his war on crime, no matter that it was essentially f leeting and transitory, could only redound to his credit. And it enabled him to lessen his dependence on Fred Lundin and the City Hall machine.
The Harding landslide in November 1920 had swept all of Lundin's candidates into office. Lundin's influence over Cook County politics had metastasized--supporters of City Hall now occupied every significant political position in the county. The City Council, fiercely independent before 1920, had begun to capitulate to the Lundin regime--one by one, the aldermen were throwing their support behind City Hall. And Lundin's reach even extended as far as Springfield; the new governor of Illinois, Len Small, was one of Lundin's closest allies.
Only the judiciary still retained its independence, but now it too came under attack. The courts in Cook County had traditionally been nonpartisan, beyond the reach of party or faction, but tradition was about to be swept aside, or so it seemed. The voters would go to the polls in June 1921 to elect judges to the Superior Court and the Circuit Court; if they pulled the Republican lever, they would elect a pro-Lundin slate that was unashamedly partisan.
But Lundin had taken a step too far. The courts were the last redoubt against the excesses of City Hall, a final bulwark against the hegemony of the Republican Party machine; if Lundin controlled the judiciary there would no longer be any hope of redress against corruption and thievery.
On 6 June the voters turned out en masse and elected a nonpartisan reform ticket--City Hall had lost. It was a stunning defeat for Lundin, his first setback in thirty years. The
Chicago Daily Journal, the sole Democratic newspaper in a Republican city, crowed that "Napoleon Fred Lundin has met his Moscow. Whether this will be followed by a Waterloo remains to be seen; but just now the city hall cohorts are trekking back toward the Beresina with a chill in their hearts. . . . Will this be the beginning of the end of the Lundin-Thompson power?"48
Such a spectacular failure of the machine to elect its candidates was a sure sign that Lundin had lost his magical touch; association with City Hall might now be as much a liability as an advantage. Over the next eighteen months, Lundin's allies began to desert him, and his enemies became increasingly emboldened. Robert Crowe, now a powerful f igure within the Republican Party, split with Lundin in February 1922. Crowe explained to the newspapers that Lundin had been interfering with his duties as state's attorney, but Crowe's departure was as much a bid for leadership of the Republican Party as a sign of dissatisfaction with City Hall.
The decline of Lundin's inf luence, and the continuing factionalism among the dissident Republicans, provided the Democrats with a rare opportunity to take power. Alfred Lueder, a political novice whose previous experience in public office amounted to a single year as postmaster, was the compromise candidate for the Republicans in the mayoral election in April 1923. Lueder, by his own admission, was a hopeless public speaker who never could arouse much enthusiasm for his candidacy among the electorate. His Democratic opponent, William
Illustration unavailable for electronic edition.
Dever, won the election convincingly, receiving almost 400,000 votes.49
Dever's victory was less a consequence of Republican disunity than an effect of the corruption scandals that had begun to bubble their way to the surface in 1922. The City Hall machine under Lundin's direction had siphoned millions of dollars from the municipal budget. Corruption was rampant, and no single area of government had been more systematically despoiled than the public school system. The Board of Education had awarded contracts for school supplies to companies-- often controlled by friends of Fred Lundin--that sold substandard, shoddy goods at wildly inf lated prices. Why had the board paid the Hiawatha Phonograph Company almost $500,000 for 300 phonographs? Patrick H. Moynihan, a member of the City Council, was a part owner of the company--was there any connection? Why had the board spent an exorbitant amount, almost $1 million in 1920, for the purchase of coal? Why had the Apex Supply Company received an unauthorized contract to provide athletic equipment to the Chicago public schools? Edwin Davis, president of the Board of Education, was an uncle of Walter Titzel, an owner of the company--had that relationship inf luenced the board's decision to award the contract?
50
In May 1922 Robert Crowe presented indictments against William Bither, an attorney working for the Board of Education, accusing Bither of stealing rents derived from school property. Later that year, in August, Crowe indicted three more officials, on charges of conspiracy to defraud the school system. In September 1922, Crowe charged an additional ten officials with malfeasance and misconduct and conspiracy to defraud.
51
Crowe had always hoped to connect Fred Lundin to the corruption scandal--with Lundin in the penitentiary, Crowe would face one less obstacle in his drive for the mayoralty--and early in 1923, Crowe announced the indictment of Lundin for conspiracy to defraud. The Board of Education had awarded a contract for steel doors for school buildings
to the National Steel Door Company; was it a coincidence that Lundin was president of the National Steel Door Company?
52
Crowe had enlisted Jacob Loeb, a former president of the Board of Education, as the star witness for the prosecution. Few families played as prominent a role in Chicago's Jewish community as the Loebs: Jacob Loeb had made his fortune as a young man as an insurance broker, and since 1912 he had been president of the Jewish People's Institute; his brother, Albert, was vice president of Sears, Roebuck and a generous contributor to many Jewish charities. Jacob Loeb had been one of Lundin's victims--Lundin had engineered Loeb's removal from the Board of Education--and Loeb willingly agreed to Crowe's suggestion that he testify on the witness stand about the corruption of the public school system by City Hall.
53
The trial of Fred Lundin and fifteen codefendants in the Criminal Court began on 5 June 1923. The sixth-f loor courtroom was packed; Lundin's friends and supporters had turned out en masse. Lundin himself, dressed in a black frock coat, a white shirt, and a black Windsor tie, sat near the front of the court, his legs stretched out before him, his thumbs in the pockets of his black waistcoat, looking relaxed and untroubled. Lundin had hired Clarence Darrow to defend him. Darrow sat by Lundin's side, reading silently to himself from a sheaf of papers on his lap, occasionally pausing to confer with one of the other defense lawyers seated to his right.
The assistant attorney general, Marvin Barnhart, began his opening statement. Fred Lundin had conspired to appoint trustees to the Board of Education who would acquiesce in the theft of school funds. Lundin himself had profited directly in two instances. In the first, he had arranged for the school board to purchase insurance coverage for school buildings and property from Virtus Rohm & Company, despite a clear conf lict of interest: Lundin was a founding partner and director of the firm. In the second, the Central Metallic Door Company, owned by Fred Lundin, had sold hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of doors and windows to the Board of Education through a noncompetitive contract.