Untitled Document
In 1961, after a long day of working on a promotional
film at New Salem, 83-year-old Carl Sandburg granted Tom Littlewood an
interview about Sandburg’s old friend Henry Horner, the two-term
governor of Illinois who died in 1940. “Horner was the Real
Goods,” said the poet and author, who had shared with Horner a love
for Abraham Lincoln. “In the realm of politics, there have been too
few like him. He collaborated with men who were purchasable without
becoming purchasable himself. He got to high places without selling his
soul.”
As a young Chicago Sun-Times reporter,
Littlewood recognized that Illinois had no biography of Horner and needed
one to remember what the Real Goods in politics looked like. He published Horner of Illinois in 1969. Now
a retired University of Illinois journalism professor, Littlewood has
rewritten and updated his Horner biography with newly available material,
self-publishing a second edition under the title Henry Horner and his Burden of Tragedy (AuthorHouse, 2007). According to Tom’s wife,
Barbara, just after page proofs were finished this spring Littlewood
sustained a debilitating stroke, eerily similar to the stroke that
afflicted Horner. As he recovers at his home in Urbana, we can thank the
good professor for his book, which comes as a timely reminder that the
governor’s mansion in Springfield was once the home of principle and
courage. When
Horner became governor, in 1933, nearly half of the state’s work
force was unemployed, including 850,000 in Chicago. National Guard troops
were called out to disperse anti-hunger marchers descending on Springfield.
Schoolteachers were protesting because they hadn’t been paid in a
year. In downstate coal fields, the Progressive Mine Workers of America
were battling the United Mine Workers. The price of corn dropped to 10
cents a bushel and farmers faced bankruptcy.
Into this storm came the first
Jewish governor of Illinois, an honest, reform-minded probate judge. He was
elected out of the ethnic political system that saw the Czech mayor of
Chicago, Anton Cermak, slate him to woo the West Side Jewish wards in order
to break the Irish hold on Chicago politics. Horner grew up on this
“pragmatic style of urban politics,” serving as a precinct
worker in the wicked and wide-open 1st Ward. He was educated by the likes
of ward boss Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, who bragged,
“This ain’t no sissy town.” Horner would say that he
learned in the First Ward that, “There is something bigger in
politics than holding office. That thing is the true friendly interest of
your fellow men.”
Horner
had a good working relationship with Cermak, but two months after Horner
took office the Chicago mayor was killed by a bullet intended for newly
elected President Franklin Roosevelt. Ed Kelly became mayor and Patrick
Nash the Democratic chairman, forming what would become known as the
Kelly-Nash “machine.” It had no patience for a governor who
thought it OK to hire Republicans and award contracts to the lowest
bidders. While Horner’s working hours were filled with controversy
and hostility, his nights and weekends were lonely. As a bachelor in the
governor’s mansion, Horner lived alone with his 6,000 Lincoln books.
He struck up a friendship with James Griffin, the Catholic bishop, who also
lived alone, two blocks away by the cathedral. The two would often get
together at the Executive Mansion to sip Old Belmont bourbon, and sometimes
at night the governor and the bishop would stroll through downtown
Springfield, window-shopping.
In the
throes of the Depression, Horner enacted the first sales tax in Illinois,
to raise matching funds for federal relief payments. People grumbled that
every dollar purchased required “two cents for the Jew in
Springfield.” At the end of Prohibition, Horner wanted state control
of the liquor business, but the Chicago bosses wanted local control. When
he vetoed a bill to allow Chicago to license and tax horserace gambling, that really made them mad. The machine turned against Horner
and tried to defeat him in his 1936 reelection bid. He campaigned against
“bossism” and won his second term anyway with the help of
downstate voters grateful for relief payments and honest government, as
well as support from Chicago Jewish voters more loyal to ethnicity than to
the political organization. So many politicians had turned against him,
though, that he became broken and obsessed. “You’re so busy
watching the people around here so they won’t steal,” social
reformer Jane Addams told him, “that when it comes to seeing through
to the great problems of the day you don’t have the facts or the
vision.” In 1938 he had a stroke from which he never fully recovered,
and in 1940 he died in office. At his
funeral, Mayor Kelly and Chairman Nash and all the Democratic Party bigwigs
sat in the front row. The rabbi officiating at the service turned to them
when he said, “Though modest and unassuming in all his ways, he felt
that he was destined to uproot some of the unfortunate and sinister aspects
of our political life — graft, corruption, dishonesty, and the spoils
system — from the fair name of our state. Certain it is that in
trying to crush the machine and all that it stood for in 1938 he spent
himself too lavishly and today he lies here before us a martyr to the cause
of good government.”
Contact Fletcher Farrar at ffarrar@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2007.
