When reporters write today that political candidates took shots at each other and their supporters battled for voters, readers know it is figurative language to spice up humdrum campaign coverage.
On April 1, 1924, such language was literal — and it wasn’t a joke, either.
“Bullets Fly in Cicero on Election Eve” was the headline over a story that described “gun play and riotous scenes” in the western suburb ahead of its local vote. The man who had the nerve to run against Mayor Joseph Klenha was roughly handled, to say the least. Gunmen shot up his offices, and he “fled from the headquarters with bullets whistling at his heels and took refuge in a nearby house.”
The Democratic challenger for city clerk was pistol-whipped in front of his wife, children and numerous supporters. Men who came to his defense were answered with brass knuckles. Campaigners from both parties were beaten up on town streets by roaming gangs of “sluggers.”
Election violence was not unheard of in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but this was a whole new level, even for Prohibition. The next day, under the screaming banner headline “GUNMAN SLAIN IN VOTE RIOTS,” the Tribune reported that the Cicero election was “marked by shootings, stabbings, kidnappings, and other outlawry unsurpassed in any previous Cook County political contest.”
What was happening in Cicero?
Al Capone. Scarface was taking control of the town, though he would pay dearly.
In 1923, Chicago voters elected reformer William Dever after enduring eight years of notoriously corrupt William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson, who was in bed with gangster Johnny Torrio. The reform movement didn’t have much of a chance against the powerful bootleggers, but it spooked Torrio anyway and the mobster decided he needed a second base of operations in case Chicago suddenly decided to take the Volstead Act seriously. He picked Cicero, and the man he sent to do the job was Capone, then just a young gunman and brothel bouncer.
According to Chicago municipal Judge John Lyle, who battled bootleggers and corruption throughout his career, when the mob wanted in on the action, small-time gangsters didn’t have much of a chance. Capone muscled some, bribed others and threatened still others with retaliation from Cook County Sheriff Peter Hoffman, who was in Torrio’s pocket. He also went directly to the voters, paying off mortgages and buying new furnaces, Lyle wrote in his 1960 book, “The Dry and Lawless Year,” which was excerpted in the Tribune.
Cicero politics was turned on its head, and Klenha suddenly worried for his future. According to Lyle, “He asked Capone’s assistance in turning the tide. Scarface was only too happy to oblige.”
Unlike the mob’s multipronged campaign to infiltrate Cicero vice, Capone’s Election Day game plan was nothing but brute force and terror. Commanded by Al and his brothers Frank and Ralph, gunmen in automobiles “sped up and down the streets, slugging and kidnapping election workers,” the Tribune reported. “A Cicero policeman was disarmed, beaten and sent to the hospital.”
Stanley Stankievitch, a Democratic worker, was one of the first kidnapped. “He was blindfolded, carried to a basement, and held a prisoner until 8 o’clock last night, when he was tossed out of an automobile at Harrison Street and Laramie Avenue,” the Trib reported. He was hospitalized in serious condition. As many as 20 men were kidnapped, carted off to the basement of a plumbing shop in the city, and chained to pipes and posts.
Would-be voters were accosted outside polling places, and if they didn’t have the right answer to “Who ya votin’ for?”, they were sent packing — or worse.
By the afternoon, election officials appealed for help, and a Cook County judge deputized 70 Chicago police officers and five squads from the detective bureau to try to bring law and order back to Cicero.
It was one of these detective squads that rolled up to 22nd Street and Cicero Avenue, in the shadow of the massive Hawthorne Works facility of Western Electric Co., to see three gunmen clearly up to no good. One of the gunman was Frank Capone, who opened fire on the detectives. He missed; they didn’t. Frank fell dead. His brother Al “took to his heels.” He was never arrested.
The Chicago cavalry’s rout of the Capone brothers failed to turn the tide at the polls. Klenha and his GOP cohorts won by comfortable margins. The brazen violence shocked many Chicagoans, but nothing much came of it. There was a short investigation and four low-level thugs were jailed for assaulting voters, but in short order, “Scarface came out of retreat and swaggered down Cicero Avenue,” Lyle wrote.
Capone set up shop in the three-story brick Hawthorne Inn, which no longer exists, and Cicero became “Caponeville.” (If Klenha had any illusions of being mayor, it was corrected after Capone once knocked him down outside city hall.)
Klenha was re-elected handily in 1928, with Chicago police again standing guard, though by then Capone didn’t need overt thuggery to stay in power. But in April 1932, Klenha’s GOP machine was “smashed to bits,” the Tribune reported, “by an outpouring of Democratic votes such as had never been approached in the town before.”
What was happening in Cicero?
Al Capone had other things to worry about. He had been convicted in October 1931 for tax evasion — and was due to start his 11-year prison term the next month.
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