National Affairs: World’s Fair Man

Four Chicago aldermen were in Hot Springs, Ark. last week not for the baths but to select a mayor for their city. The Illinois Legislature had refused to call a special election to fill the vacancy left by assassinated Anton Joseph Cermak. Gruff old Boss Patrick Nash, who succeeded Cermak on the Democratic National Committee, and Democratic Governor Henry Homer had then nudged a bill through the Legislature permitting the City Council. Democratic 37 to 13, to choose Chicago’s chief executive.

The steering committee at Hot Springs dutifully made Boss Nash their choice, started home. When they got there they had a hard time finding Mr. Nash, who was by this time issuing statements that he was too old (70) for the job, a view loudly seconded by most of the city’s newspapers.

Next day, changing tactics, all 37 Democratic aldermen caucused at the Morrison Hotel. Just as Boss Nash was about to join the group, reporters asked him: “What is the choice for Mayor?”

“My guess,” he replied,, “is Ed Kelly.”

Ed Kelly it was. The sun had not set before Edward Joseph Kelly, 57, chief engineer of the Sanitary District and president of the South Park Board, was sworn in as Chicago’s World’s Fair Mayor. Acting Mayor Frank Corr was glad to retire to his Aldermanic seat.

“Whatever Mayor Cermak stood for, I stand for!” cried tousle-headed Mayor Kelly. He promised to do his best to get an R. F. C. loan to give city employes their back pay. Next day he issued $1,700,000 worth of tax anticipation warrants, the hackneyed method by which Chicago has been preventing the wolf from coming all the way through its civic door since 1928. With this money he paid Chicago schoolteachers the first week’s salary they had had in months.*

The man who will be official host at the 1933 Fair decided to become an engineer when he watched surveyors laying out the World’s Fair of 1893. Son of an Irish policeman, Ed Kelly had been apprenticed to an undertaker. In 1894 he got a job as axman in one of the surveying crews working on the drainage canal. He went to night school to learn his trade. In 1908 he was made engineer of the commission which laid out the Great Lakes-Mississippi waterway. Mayor until April 1935. he will not give up his presidency of the South Park Board which he has held since 1924. During his regime was built the great outer highway system along Chicago’s south lakefront and Soldier Field.

A politician of wide acquaintance, Mayor Kelly had his good friend Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City, boss of New Jersey’s Democracy, as guest last week in his big red brick house on the South Side. where he lives with his second wife and their three adopted children. Briefly in 1930 the breath of scandal touched Mayor Kelly. He was indicted for helping, according to the prosecutor, to graft $5,000,000 out of sewage disposal contracts let by the Sanitary District. Others were tried, but not Engineer Kelly, whose case was quietly quashed.

*Next day the teachers, long since desperate (TIME, April 17 et ante) paraded with 20,000 pupils and parents, with a loudspeaker in a bus which announced: “We are getting seven days’ pay this morning. Tonight it will be in the hands of creditors. Four hundred teachers are now confined to sanitariums for the treatment of nervous diseases. Twenty have gone insane. A school janitor dropped dead while pushing a broom. The doctor said he died of starvation. . . . Eventually you will have to pay your taxes, why not now?”