As President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt finished speaking, he signaled Anton Cermak with a flick of his wrist to meet him at Roosevelt’s nearby car.
Chicago’s mayor was in Miami to convey his city’s needs to FDR, who was returning from a Caribbean fishing trip. It was 1933, a bleak Depression year. The city’s coffers were empty. Its schoolteachers weren’t being paid.
Cermak barely got to speak to Roosevelt that Feb. 15. Just as he reached him, a bystander named Lillian Cross saw a man in front of her take a gun out of his pocket. “I saw the man level the gun, it seemed to me, at Mr. Roosevelt’s head and he fired one shot,” Cross told the Tribune.
Grabbing the arm of the gunman, later identified as Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian anarchist, she deflected three more shots. FDR lived to dramatically remake the federal government. But Cermak was badly wounded and died a few weeks later, on March 6, 1933.
He had been mayor less than two years, but during a career in public office that began many years earlier, Cermak politically remade Chicago. By bringing ethnic communities into the political establishment, then virtually a WASP monopoly, he created the fabled Chicago machine.
“He was a credit to the country of his birth — Bohemia — and to the country he adopted in early youth,” John Prystalski, chief justice of the criminal court, told the Tribune upon learning of Cermak’s death.
Cermak wasn’t a back-slapper or a spellbinding speaker. “He appeared to take pride in his own absence of polish,” his biographer Alex Gottfried reported in “Boss Cermak of Chicago”.
But as Chicago’s first foreign-born mayor, he had two things going for him: Prohibition and changing demographics. He understood that immigrants wanted a glass of beer after work, just like they had in the old country. Cermak made his position clear five years before Prohibition went into effect.
In 1915, he was an organizer of a massive parade through the Loop sponsored by the United Societies For Local Self-Government that opposed banning booze.
“We propose to bring home to the taxpayers of Chicago the calamity that will follow if Chicago should be voted dry,” said Cermak, then chief bailiff of the Municipal Court.
The pastor of the Moody Church on LaSalle Street denounced the demonstration as a “serpents parade.”
His position was echoed by other Protestant ministers, and middle-class reformers supported Prohibition. But the constituencies of both were shrinking in the city.
“Older Chicago Protestant families were beginning their short march to the suburbs … more recently arrived Catholic and Jewish families were moving into vacated Protestant neighborhoods,” Paul Green noted in a 1987 anthology, “The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition.”
Cermak lived in a Czech and Slovak enclave on the West Side. Just to the north was a large Jewish community. Nearby was a Polish settlement. Some residents were precinct captains, but the aldermen and ward committeemen were more likely Irish. Virtually the only Catholics in the Democratic Party’s higher ranks, the Irish had the advantage of speaking English when they came to Chicago.
As Cermak moved from one elective office to another, he witnessed the frustration of the ethnic Chicagoans who didn’t have that opportunity. He realized there was political capital to be made by forming a coalition of the excluded. Jacob Arvey, a Jewish politico, and Cermak became lifelong friends. Cermak made enemies among the Irish by giving other ethnic groups an equitable share of the pie.
An Irish police captain cursed the “no-good Bohunk,” adding that opposing Cermak was futile because he “would crucify you.”
Another view was more diplomatic. “You couldn’t love Cermak,” a reformer named Frank Busch said. “He didn’t have personal warmth.”
Busch also noted: “You wouldn’t fool him. He always knew how much influence each one had in his ward.”
Cermak’s knack for sizing up people was honed in various workplaces.
As a teenager, he was a coal miner in Braidwood. He worked in a stable in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, bought a horse and cart, and wound up with a drayage business. By 1911, he was also a political powerhouse.
That year, Carter Harrison Jr.’s run for mayor was backed by a series of foreign voter clubs. The Czech voters of Cermak’s 12th Ward organization gave Harrison the largest plurality of any ward in the city, making him an immediate favorite with the political powers that ran the city.
The more prominent Cermak became, the more friends and foes focused on his ethnicity. The Tribune so credited his administrative skills when he was up for reelection as president of the Cook County Board in 1926:
“Mr. Cermak is of Czecho-Slovakian blood, and those who have watched his career say that certain characteristics of this people, such as a close watch on detail and small expenditure, have been demonstrated in his career as head of the county board.”
He ran for mayor two years before Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition. An opponent who followed him to the podium of a candidates’ forum alluded to Cermak’s grammatical errors.
“When you think of selecting your World’s Fair mayor,” he said, “think of the beautiful and exquisite English you have heard here tonight.”
The incumbent mayor, William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson, played cowboy in Wyoming at an age when Cermak was digging coal in Braidwood. Thompson’s father, a prominent businessman, intended his son to have an Ivy League education. But when Thompson refused to go, his father bought a ranch for him to manage.
His election strategy in 1931 contrasted his patrician roots with Cermak’s plebian origins. In one instance, with a bit of doggerel:
I won’t take a back seat to that Bohunk, Chairmock
Chermack or whatever his name is
Tony, Tony, where’s your pushcart at?
Cermak responded: “Of course we couldn’t all come over on the Mayflower, or maybe the boat would have sunk. But I got here as soon as I could, and I never wanted to go back, because to me it is a great privilege to be an American citizen.”
Immigrant baiting previously worked for Thompson, who was in his third term. It distracted voters’ attention from Big Bill’s outrageous grafting and his buddying up to Al Capone.
But by then, in a city where many residents were either foreign born or the children of immigrants, there were lots of voters who heard Thompson’s putdowns of Cermak as a slur on their own ethnic heritage.
Cermak beat Thompson by almost 195,000 votes and had just enough time before Zangara’s bullet struck to blueprint his political thinking. “The back room is gone,” he told the press.
In its place, he started a weekly radio program, so Chicagoans would know his plans. “We need your constructive criticism,” Cermak said. FDR later followed his lead with his “Fireside Chat” broadcasts.
Having created the Chicago machine, Cermak devised a measure of its efficacy: “a scientific mathematically exact grading of the vote getting machinery in each of Chicago’s fifty wards.”
He was obsessing about what still needed to be done, as he lay dying in a Miami Beach hospital bed 90 years ago this month.
“I do not know whether I’m going to get well,” he said. “I hope whoever succeeds me will make his first duty the payment of money owed (the teachers). If this will have helped me get loans … I am glad I was shot. This bit of lead is not too burdensome for me to carry. For a long time I have had lead in my heart over their distress.”
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