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Judge Lyle's candidacy is an attempt to profit politically from his sudden headline reputation as the judicial scourge of Chicago's gang world. From the bench and with newshawks closely covering him he made a great dramatic and futile attempt to have the city's 26 "Public Enemies" arrested and held in exorbitant bail under an old vagrancy law (TIME, Oct. 13). So erratic and unstable that he had scant support from lawyers, Judge Lyle focused his campaign on the charge that Mayor Thompson was in league with the underworld, that Gangster Alphonse Capone had contributed $50,000 to the last Thompson campaign and was now ready to help the Mayor steal the forthcoming primary election. He summarized: "The real issue is whether Al Capone is to be authorized to rule Chicago again through the medium of a dummy in the Mayor's chair." At his rallies he exhibited gangsters' machine guns. When the Judge charged the Mayor with diverting funds from flood relief to his own political use, the Mayor sued him for $100,000 libel damages.*
For sheer vituperation and ridicule Judge Lyle could hold his own against Mayor Thompson. Excerpt: "Chicago is a great and growing city. But what has Bill the Bluffer had to do with it? Like an African witch doctor he looks about, sees Chicago's skyscrapers, waves his arms and says, 'I did it all!' . . . An Eskimo at the North Pole might as well have been mayor ; while he was in Chicago his head quarters were in a hotel room where he spent his time playing checkers with a policeman. He calls me loony. Did you ever see a shambling imbecile whose dis eased brain didn't defend its lunacy by snarling at others? To refer to him as a blubbering charlatan perhaps is charitable. Even a lunatic may not be charged with complete mental bankruptcy."
The Thompson-Lyle contest stirred street crowds to a frenzy of partisanship. Respectable conservative citizens, mortified by such political horseplay and vilification, could find little to choose between the two Republican candidates—except that to Mayor Thompson must go chief credit for creating 20th Century Politics Chicago Style. Meanwhile, out of the spotlight and assured of the Democratic nomination for Mayor, waited Anton J. Cermak, holding his fire until the April election.
Days of destiny in the lives of Chicago's three most public figures:
William Hale Thompson was born in Boston May 14, 1869, scion of a wealthy and respectable family. In 1900 after playcowboying in Wyoming, he took a $50 bet in the Chicago Athletic Club from his friend George Jenney that he was not scared to go into politics, was elected Alderman from the Second Ward. On April 6, 1915 he was elected Mayor of Chicago, with the aid of notorious Fred ("Terrible Swede") Lundin, on a Wet-Dry, White-Black, German-British platform. "Freedom for Ireland" got him his re-election in 1919. His third election (1927) he won on a promise to "punch King George's snoot."
Born in Indiana 49 years ago, Judge John Homer Lyle got his political start on Sept. 17, 1930 when he issued a batch of warrants for the arrest on vagrancy charges of Chicago's worst "Public Enemies."