THE WIDE, ARCHING SKYLIGHTS of the Chicago Coliseum had just begun to darken when delegates of the 1920 Republican National Convention reassembled for a fourth attempt to choose a candidate for president of the United States. Among the fourteen thousand conventioneers packed into the Coliseum’s central auditorium, the mood was tense. The day’s first three ballots, taken at intervals throughout the afternoon, had been inconclusive. The two frontrunners—General Leonard Wood and Illinois governor Frank O. Lowden—had deadlocked each time at roughly a third of the vote each, with thirteen other candidates trailing far behind. And although Wood and Lowden had each gained some votes on every succeeding ballot, neither seemed to be moving toward the decisive lead required to win the nomination.

It was a dangerous situation. The frontrunners’ camps, aware that the convention might resort to backroom tactics to find a compromise candidate if the assembly were to recess for the evening, had agreed to block any motion for an adjournment. But the delegates were growing restless. For one thing, the heat on the convention floor was oppressive. “Crowds enormous and heat stifling,” Florence Lowden reported in her diary that day. Edna Ferber, covering the convention for the United Press Association, was more descriptive. As the session wore on, she observed, the delegates’ bald heads and “heat-suffused faces” had been turning an alarming shade of pink, and some of the men had even begun to undress: “They shed collars, ties, even shoes in some cases,” she wrote. “It was the American male politician reduced to the most common denominator.”

H. L. Mencken, also in town to report on the event, found the effects of the heat distressingly olfactory. The Coliseum, he remarked, smelled of nothing so much as a “third-rate circus.”¹

For the Lowden campaign team, the next vote would be crucial. For days they had been telling the press that the governor would steamroll his way past General Wood and take the nomination on the fourth ballot. Wood was still ahead in number of delegates, but he had very little second-choice support; the Lowdenites reasoned that many votes would migrate to the governor once it became clear that Wood had little chance of achieving a majority. And in a wide-open convention like this one, with so many delegates pledged to a candidate for only the first few votes, the numbers could change dramatically from ballot to ballot. Momentum in favor of a second-place candidate, once under way, could be very difficult to stop. But first, of course, that momentum had to be set in motion, and the Lowden forces were finding it very difficult to do so.²

It had not been an easy campaign for the governor of Illinois. When the race first started, he’d seemed like a natural choice. With his regal good looks, his solid fiscal record as chief executive of a large and important state, and his general acceptability to both the progressive and old guard wings of the party, he had far fewer negatives than his main competitors—General Wood and California governor Hiram Johnson, both of whom had a talent for making enemies. But Lowden’s campaign had been plagued by misfortune and bad publicity throughout the nomination battle. And one of the major causes of that misfortune and bad publicity had been Chicago mayor Big Bill Thompson.

Early in the campaign, Lowden had harbored vague hopes that the mayor might actually be persuaded to support his presidential bid, despite the bad blood between them. Lowden’s election to the White House, after all, would have freed up the governorship of Illinois—a tempting plum for the Thompson-Lundin organization to pluck. And Big Bill had often proved willing to join forces with a bitter enemy if he saw political advantage in the alliance.³

But it had become clear almost immediately that the Thompson-Lundin policy toward the governor’s bid would be simple—namely, to undermine it wherever and however they could. In the lead-up to the Illinois primary in April, Big Bill had shown no mercy in his bashing of Lowden. At every opportunity, he had railed against his fellow Republican, for everything from his opposition to raises for Chicago’s schoolteachers to his numerous ties to big business (being married to George Pullman’s daughter was often a political liability for Lowden). Nor was the governor’s alleged role in raising Chicago’s streetcar fares ignored; Thompson proved amazingly effective at making Lowden look like a hypocritical plutocrat, willing to deny workers their pay increases in the name of controlling inflation but more than ready to allow prices to rise when it meant preserving corporate dividends.⁴

The effect of this constant pummeling had been obvious in the Illinois primary results. Though Lowden had succeeded in winning the overall state advisory vote, he lost Cook County by a significant margin. And in the city of Chicago, the Thompson-Lundin forces had scored an unprecedented victory by winning thirty-four of the thirty-five ward committeeman races. This ultimately meant that Thompson himself would be a delegate-at-large at the convention, with a bloc of seventeen delegates in his control—all of them ostensibly “instructed” to vote for Lowden, but with a very different plan in mind.⁵

By the time the convention assembled on June 8, moreover, the Lowden campaign had given Thompson some extra ammunition. In late May, a Senate investigation into campaign finance had turned up evidence of a scandal: Two $2,500 checks had been given by the Lowden campaign to a pair of St. Louis politicians who just happened to wind up as members of the Missouri delegation to the Republican convention. The checks had probably been payments for routine campaign expenses, but no one in the Lowden camp seemed able to say what exactly had been done with the money. And although the case was still pending as the convention opened, many people had already drawn their conclusion—that Lowden was guilty of trying to buy delegate votes. As Lowden’s biographer later wrote, the governor’s enemies “could hardly have concocted a more clever scheme or timed its use at a more effective moment.”⁶

Big Bill, of course, didn’t hesitate to use the scandal as a weapon for some vigorous character assassination. As unofficial host for the convention, he met delegations from all over the country as they arrived, supposedly to welcome them to Chicago but actually to bad-mouth Lowden wherever he went. “His word’s no good,” the mayor told his fellow delegates on the eve of the convention. “You can’t count on him, believe me. You nominate Lowden and the Republicans’ll lose Illinois in the election!”⁷

But Big Bill had saved his coup de grâce for the convention floor itself. After the inconclusive third ballot on the afternoon of June 11, the Lowden campaign had urged Thompson to swing his bloc of seventeen delegates, which had been voting for Hiram Johnson, over to the governor’s cause. It was hoped that this would start the momentum needed to push Lowden toward the nomination. But Thompson instead took the opportunity to create a dramatic public scene, abruptly resigning as a delegate-at-large and bolting the convention floor with his fellow delegate Samuel Ettelson. In an open letter to the chairman of the Illinois delegation, Thompson claimed to be resigning because of the “moral issue” of Lowden’s campaign expenditures. “It is my opinion,” he wrote, “that if the delegates to the Republican State Convention had known of the conditions which were later disclosed by the Senate Investigation Committee, they would not have passed resolutions endorsing Governor Lowden for the nomination for President.… I will not knowingly make myself a party to placing the Republican nomination for President on the auction block.”⁸

It was a sensational declaration, and within hours the local newspapers—particularly Hearst’s Chicago American, always friendly to the mayor—were giving Thompson’s resignation prominent front-page display in their late-afternoon editions. When Thompson and Lundin saw the headlines, they recognized their opportunity. They ordered a “wagonload” of Chicago Americans from the publisher and then hired a beautiful young woman (in a soon-to-be-notorious pink, rose-studded dress) to distribute them free on the convention floor. “Don’t let anyone stop you,” the mayor instructed her. “Don’t ever look back, not even for an instant. There will be men behind you. When you are out of papers, they will hand more to you over your shoulder.”

And so, late in the afternoon of June 11, the Lady in Pink entered onto the floor of the Chicago Coliseum with her armful of incendiary newsprint. As one journalist would later describe the scene, “With a dazzling smile, like a vision from a June rose garden, the lady went from delegation to delegation, presenting the men with her newspapers.”⁹

The precise effect of this bit of theater would be the subject of much subsequent debate. According to one writer, convention chair Henry Cabot Lodge was given a newspaper just as the roll call on a motion to adjourn was being taken. The fourth ballot had yielded yet another deadlock, and the Lowden and Wood forces were again trying to block the recess motion. But Senator Lodge—allegedly right after reading the headline on his newspaper—slammed down his gavel before the roll call was even half over. The convention was thus adjourned, opening the door to a long night of behind-the-scenes maneuvering to break the deadlock and clear the way for one candidate to win the nomination.¹⁰

What happened in the early-morning hours of June 12 is still the stuff of legend. The traditional story, as told by Edna Ferber and innumerable popular historians ever since, was that “in a smoke-filled room at the Blackstone Hotel, a little group of shirtsleeved men chose as their candidate a figure stuffed with straw.” Less apocryphal accounts hint that the “selection” of dark-horse candidate Warren G. Harding may have had more to do with luck and group psychology than with any sinister conspiracy. What’s certain is that many of the powers-that-be at the convention decided to take a closer look at the alternatives to the major candidates. For some, Lowden’s baggage in the wake of the finance scandal had become just too onerous. He, Wood, and Johnson, moreover, were perceived by many as too independent, too difficult to control. And so, by the next morning, the fix was allegedly in. Although Lowden led in the early canvasses, by the eighth ballot it was clear that the momentum lay elsewhere. And on the tenth ballot, after Lowden graciously released his delegates, the convention elected as their candidate a man described by the New York Times as “a very respectable Ohio politician of the second class”—a man who, according to H. L. Mencken, was “of the intellectual grade of an aging cockroach.” He turned out to be the man who would go on to become the twenty-ninth president of the United States.¹¹

Lowden and his followers were despondent. “A momentous day for us!” was Mrs. Lowden’s complete diary entry for June 12. Her daughter, in her own journal, was more forthcoming: “Everyone said Father was magnificent, but all his friends were very sad, and there were many of them crying quite openly. I’m glad it’s all over anyway, for the strain has been awful.”¹²

Lowden himself left the convention hall, according to one witness, “with bowed head [and] cries of ‘bought delegates’ and ‘steamroller’ in his ears.” Later, in a letter to an associate, the governor was philosophical. “Of course, while the contest was on, I wanted to win,” he admitted. “Now that the convention is over, however, I feel a deep sense of relief that the responsibility has passed me by.” But the fight had taken a physical and emotional toll on him, and after the decisive vote he immediately retired to the farm in Sinnissippi. “We are very tired now that the strain is over,” Mrs. Lowden confessed, “and the depression of everyone about us, and the universal signs of disappointment at the outcome.… It will take some time, I expect, for us to recover.”¹³

For the mayor of Chicago, the victory was sweet. “Bill Thompson exulted,” one observer noted. “His vendetta had come to happy fruition.” Whether his resignation brouhaha had really been the deciding factor in Lowden’s loss is difficult to say, but the cumulative effect of Thompson and Lundin’s opposition campaign was undeniably significant. “Had the 17 votes in the Illinois delegation controlled by Mayor Thompson been cast on any ballot for Lowden,” the historian and politician Edward F. Dunne would later write, “his nomination would have been practically assured.” Sterling Morton, writing about Lowden many decades later, would express the lasting regret of many in the country when he nostalgically exclaimed, “What a great President he would have been!”¹⁴

And thus did Big Bill and the Poor Swede ultimately triumph in their long-fought war against the governor who had betrayed them. Two weeks after the convention, Lowden announced that he would retire from the governorship and not seek a second term. Though he would continue to be active in local and national politics—and would even make a somewhat halfhearted second try for the nomination in 1928—he would never again hold an elective public office.¹⁵

As for Thompson and Lundin, this victory only inspired them to become even more ambitious in their aims. Looking ahead to the upcoming November elections, they saw an opportunity to lift their organization to new heights of power. A number of important state, county, and city positions would be up for grabs—the offices of Illinois governor, Illinois attorney general, state’s attorney for Cook County, and many more—and the Thompson-Lundin organization wanted all of them. And so they pushed hard to make it happen. Opposition was fierce from the machine’s usual enemies, and even Lowden, now headed toward retirement, finally abandoned his reserve and turned uncharacteristically blunt in his attacks on the Thompson-Lundin juggernaut. “Thompson has developed a machine in Chicago to a point where it now holds the business, politics, and education of that great city by the throat,” the former beneficiary of that machine announced in July. “Tammany Hall of New York is not so powerful and not less scrupulous. Drunk with power, this new Tammany now seeks to extend its rule over the affairs of the entire state.”¹⁶

But it was to no avail. To the horror of Lowden and the machine’s other enemies—Victor Lawson, Robert McCormick, Maclay Hoyne, Ida Wells-Barnett, Jane Addams, and all the rest—the Thompson-Lundin candidates swept the primaries and went on to win in the November elections. Thompson ally Robert E. Crowe (the judge who had sentenced Thomas Fitzgerald to death) replaced Maclay Hoyne as state’s attorney, and Thompsonite Len Small defeated Lowden’s lieutenant John G. Oglesby for governor, thanks largely to overwhelming voter support in Chicago. “I never did understand the politics of that town,” a bitter Lowden grumbled when the results came in. And he had cause to grumble. The election of Small (“a ferret-faced Kankakee banker” who would go on to undo many of his predecessor’s achievements in office) made Thompson and Lundin’s demolition of Lowden complete. And now, with thirty-eight thousand local, county, and state offices in their control and an annual payroll of $78 million at their disposal, they were in firm command at virtually every level of government in the state. Just a little over a year after nearly self-destructing during the crisis of July 1919, the mayor and his mentor had achieved a reach of power unprecedented in the history of Illinois politics.¹⁷

“The roof is off!” Big Bill shrieked at his city hall office on election night when the magnitude of their success became apparent. As a cordon of police kept the hundreds of well-wishers in the corridors from mobbing the mayor, he called Lundin on the phone and hooted about their joint triumph. “We ate ’em alive,” he cried. “We ate ’em alive with their clothes on!”

At his suite in the Hotel Sherman, Fred Lundin was characteristically more reserved. “Oh, I don’t mix in politics,” he told some visiting reporters in his still-noticeable Swedish accent. “I’m only a private citizen, y’know.”

Then he and the reporters burst into laughter and passed around a bottle of bourbon.¹⁸