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For all this the Kelly-Nash machine is blamed. Coal Merchant James B. McCahey, president of the Board is an intimate friend of Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly, spends weekends on the Mayor's estate in Eagle River, Wis., next door to the Mont Tennes gambling palace. Chicagoans regard Superintendent Johnson as a rubberstamp for the Kelly-McCahey commands.
Leader of the forces challenging this regime is a man who last week loomed as the John L. Lewis of the teaching profession. Squarejawed, square-shouldered John Fewkes, swimming coach and head of the physical education department at Chicago's Tilden High School, led 25,000 people in the celebrated march to the banks and the Mayor's office in 1933 on behalf of unpaid teachers, of whom he was one. He is the idol of Chicago's teachers and schoolchildren, with whom he plays football and munches ice cream cones in freezing weather at big games.
Behind Fewkes and his union are the Chicago Citizens Schools Committee (parents) and one of the eleven Board of Education members, Mrs. William S. Hefferan. Behind them also are all Chicago's newspapers except the Kelly-supporting Tribune. So greatly does the Board of Education fear the merit system suits that it passed over the seven lawyers on its payroll and hired high-priced Joseph B. Fleming of the crack Tribune law firm, Kirkland, Fleming, Green, Martin & Ellis, to defend it.