Word: cermak
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Chicago last week decided to change Mayors. It voted out Republican William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson after three blustering terms in city hall, voted in Democrat Anton Joseph ("Tony") Cermak. The Cermak majority was 200,000. In line with Press polls which plainly foreshadowed the defeat of "Thompsonism," the second city of the land had chosen a onetime pushcart peddler, Bohemian-born, to preside at its World's Fair in 1933. His biggest promise: "Restoration of Chicago's lost reputation...
...police raid on City Hall opened the final heated week of the Thompson-Cermak campaign. Detectives from the State's Attorney's office seized records of the City Sealer, charged Thompson henchmen with an "organized system of cheating, shortweighing and shakedown" among Chicago fish dealers. Roared the Mayor: "A plot! A plot...
...campaign lacked its usual street circus. He had wanted to parade a herd of fat swine through the Loop, each one labelled with a job his opponent already held, but his friends dissuaded him from such an exhibition. The Mayor then settled down to verbal abuse of Democrat Cermak. He called him "the biggest crook who ever ran for Mayor." He accused him of being anti-Irish, anti-German, anti-Polish, anti-Negro, anti-Catholic. He appealed for the support of "one hundred percenters" against "foreigners and hyphenaters" and in the next breath promised to "load the City Hall with...
...Democrat Cermak had the firm if not ardent support of such famed Chicagoans as William Ruggles Dawes, Silas Hardy Strawn, Julius Rosenwald and Frank Jo seph Loesch. He kept his campaign on a nice, colorless plane. He harped on police reform, aid to the jobless, reduced taxes. But voters took his promises at a discount because his own record was that of a routine politician who had risen to the top of his party. When Thompson assailed him as "that pushcart peddler," he promptly organized a parade of pushcart peddlers who vowed to vote for him. Plump and precise, bespectacled...
...Nominee Cermak as an individual aroused no great enthusiasm among the electorate. He was just somebody to "beat Thompson." From a mule boy in Illinois coal mines, he had climbed up through the trucking business to be Chicago's Democratic boss. His campaign was quiet, dignified, uninspiring. He always referred to Thompson as "His Honor," used no epithets, refused to stunt for the crowds. Behind him he had a unified Democracy and uncounted thousands of Republicans sick of "Big Bill...