Today -100: April 7, 1915: The crooks had better move out of Chicago

Belgium’s Prince Leopold, joins the army. He’s 13½.

Headline of the Day -100 (Chicago Daily Tribune):

Big Bill Thompson is elected mayor of Chicago in a landslide. The last ever Republican mayor of Chicago. It will not go well. “The crooks had better move out of Chicago before I am inaugurated,” he says. “Because that’s my job now,” he doesn’t add, but should have. Republicans also sweep the city council, including Oscar DePriest, the first black person ever elected to the city council, which will lead to a graft trial, as is the custom in Chicago. Defended by Clarence Darrow, he was acquitted. DePriest was a US congressman 1929-35, the first African-American elected to Congress in the 20th century.

Women, whose votes were counted separately, voted exactly the same way as the men.

German-Americans tried to make the mayoral race about the war, saying that a vote for Robert Sweitzer (whose grandparents immigrated from Baden) would “save the Fatherland.” Also, Sweitzer is Catholic and Thompson Protestant, which was the cause of some debate and indeed rioting, as was the custom.

Ambrose Bierce turns out not, in fact, to have enlisted in the British army, and is still missing.

France claims to have caught three German submarines in nets.

The Providence Journal says Collector of the Port of New York Dudley Field Malone’s investigation of tugboats supplying British warships (which the British consul-general denies and which officials other than Malone aren’t even sure is illegal because Congress endorsed Wilson’s neutrality proclamation but didn’t make any provision for enforcement) was spurred by intel given him by German Naval Attaché Capt. Karl Boy-Ed, the not-so-secret head of the German sabotage campaign in the US & Canada. Malone denies this.

Terre Haute, Indiana Mayor Donn Roberts is convicted for election conspiracy.

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