At 90, Robert D. Stuart, Jr. is a Leading Progressive Entrepreneur. But at 24, With JFK and Others He Built a Dynamic Grassroots Movement that Saved Lives and Made U. S. Stronger.

How He Led “America First” Before He Joined World War II as Aide to General Eisenhower. Restraint Seen as Model for Foreign Policy of Today.



The first in a series of three articles on the birth of the historic “America First Committee” that sought to keep the U. S. out of World War II. and a blueprint for those today who seek to restrain future needless international involvements. Reprinted from The Wanderer, the oldest national Catholic weekly in America.

By Thomas F. Roeser

LAKE FOREST, IL.--We celebrated the 90th birthday earlier this summer of the greatest entrepreneur and most public-spirited leader the legendary Quaker Oats Company of Chicago ever had, Robert D. Stuart, Jr. He is a key architect of this city’s social contract with generations of mayors, governors and presidents…a lifelong conservative Republican, charming family man, role model for employees and CEO colleagues. And also the founder, national director and last surviving leader of the original “America First Committee” which was formed to keep this country out of the 2nd World War.

Never was a peace movement so valiant and so successful in terms of delaying a war and saving human lives. Far from being disproved by Pearl Harbor, its fear of unprecedented presidential power to maneuver to war was thereby justified. Those who joined with Bob Stuart to keep America out of war went on to fame in other fields. They included a young John F. Kennedy, Sargent Shriver, Charles A. Lindbergh, Chester Bowles, William Benton, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Gerald Ford, Potter Stewart, Bill Scranton, novelist Kathleen Norris, actress Lillian Gish, the LaFollette brothers of Wisconsin (former governor Philip and U. S. Senator Robert), Kingman Brewster, Gore Vidal, Jay Hormel, General Robert Wood (of Sears-Roebuck), John T. Flynn. While not a member, a close ally was Archbishop Francis Beckman of Dubuque, Iowa.

Because he was my boss for 27 years and valued mentor, I was glad to stand with my colleagues and raise a slender goblet of champagne to Robert D. Stuart, Jr. But at evening’s end, he told us our work was not over, ordering us to return to the same spot—his homey, tasteful but not ornate mansion—for his 100th. Born in 1916 of Scottish Presbyterian heritage, he had planned to be a lawyer and run for public office—setting his eyes on a U. S. Senate seat. But later it was clear that nobody else was ready to run Quaker after his uncle and father—and so it fell to him. And there he remained, a businessman when all the time—unbeknownst to us—he wanted a career in public life.

But it was his company’s inestimable good fortune to get him as CEO. It didn’t hurt that his name was Stuart to head a company partially founded by his grandfather—but his selection was not inevitable (his family actually owned only a micro-fraction of stock). Much had to be done. When he took over the company Quaker was regarded as principally a breakfast food company. His uncle and father moved it out of the general store classification to mid-20th century stature. When he left it, it was not only the choicest marketing marvel of the breakfast food industry but superbly diversified, owner as well of Fisher-Price, the Cadillac of toy companies, a men’s clothing chain, a marquis restaurant chain and a leader in providing quality television entertainment and with a prestigious reputation for social responsibility the conscience of grocery manufacturers. Bob Stuart made it so prominent a company that it was generally listed as outstanding in many categories: marketing and public responsibility foremost.

When he left to serve as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Norway, his company fell upon evil days, into the hands of transitional professional managers who viewed commerce only as funnel for their own enrichment. And who saw their goal as piling up lavish salaries, accoutrements and private jets (which he would not have tolerated).

The stock first spurted but then greed got too much: as it is said of the Jacobins of the French Revolution, they knew the cost of everything but the value of nothing. Rather than hunker down and repair their mistakes, these pragmatic managers “sold out”—the proper phrase for it—and consigned the Company as an appendage to a conglomerate, making big bucks for themselves in the process. But a final bright note: As a retiring vice-president, I was the last of my contemporaries who walked out under his own power. Everybody who plotted the debacle was either booted out the door or was forced to scoot like a river of frightened, squealing mice ahead of the tidal wave. What happened to them didn’t bring a good company back but showed there is such a thing as remunerative justice.

But it’s not of commercial enterprise that I write but of the “America First Committee” which Bob Stuart founded. After 65 years, he has written a book of memoirs, Making a Difference which he subtitles: Memoirs of a Lucky Man. It is privately circulated but which, if put on the market, would greatly alter some current misconceptions about the effort to keep this country from plunging into World War II very early—which was what Franklin Roosevelt sorely wished. The battle waged was valiant and by postponing our entry into the conflict enabled the U. S. to emerge from World War II with fewer casualties than any other nation participant. Pearl Harbor did not invalidate America First: on the contrary, when historians look at the machinations of the FDR administration to goad Japan to war, what happened on December 7, 1941 supported the fears of “America First.” Now as this nation is engaged in an agonizing reappraisal of the Iraq War, the words Bob Stuart writes and his insights are instructive indeed.

In 1938, Roosevelt’s New Deal began to fade into “a Roosevelt recession.” Before that happened, the president had been judged a conservative in foreign policy. Now, as the stock market sagged and unemployment rose, he began to warn of foreign aggression. He became especially became concerned with Nazi Dictator Adolf Hitler who spoke of the German people’s wish for more living space (“Lebensraum”) and initiated a private correspondence with a “retired naval person” aka Winston Churchill, out of power. The yen to stride across the world stage was entrancing.

. But FDR was frustrated; the Congress, propelled by overwhelming opinion, passed five different Neutrality Acts that forbade U. S. involvement in foreign conflicts. Most Italian-Americans and many German-Americans were Catholics and moved by anti-Communist considerations. Irish-Catholics abhorred the idea of helping British policies anywhere. Which meant that Roosevelt must gingerly, duplicitously, edge toward war while vowing to avoid it. All the same, he wanted to give heart to his international fellows and saw the perfect opportunity to make a pronouncement. In Chicago: where else?

In Chicago on October 5, 1937, he came to dedicate a portion of the Outer Drive bridge. The press had been tipped off that his speech would deal with the need to “quarantine” foreign aggressors. Covertly, Col. Robert R. McCormick, editor and publisher of the Tribune rented a huge billboard behind the speakers’ stand. A tarp covered it but underneath, painters were at work. When at noon the president approached the rostrum (with great difficulty due to his paralysis) and the cameras were focused, the tarp was pulled away and the crowd gasped. Some applauded. The billboard showed majestic white letters on a deep blue background that read: “The Chicago Tribune: Completely Undominated!”

Roosevelt turned and viewed the sign, saw that it would be in the background of every photo taken that day and smoldered. Later in Washington he held a news conference in the Oval Office and asked, “is Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune here? Would he stand, please?”

Trohan, deputy bureau chief, stood up. Roosevelt said, “Thank you, Walter. Now you may sit down. I just wanted to get a view of a completely undominated newspaper reporter!” Trohan told me the story personally a year before he died in Washington at age 102. The press group roared with laughter but understood that from that moment on, the struggle to keep the nation out of war was centered in one big city—Chicago.

But not for long. One McCormick cousin, Joe Patterson, owned the New York Daily News and another, Eleanor (“Sissy”) Patterson the Washington Times-Herald. McCormick and the two Pattersons started to throw the book at Roosevelt, charging he was seeking war, warning that the so-called “Neutrality Act of 1939” was legislation that sailed under false colors. It enabled warring Britain and France to buy armaments and munitions in the United States and extended cash-and-carry provisions that had expired six months earlier. Roosevelt used the mis-named Neutrality Act to extend “aid short of war.” As increased national defense spending began to revive the economy, there came the subtle Roosevelt strategy to repeal or further drastically revise the Neutrality Act. Grass-roots committees sprung up like mushrooms including one headed by small town editor William Allen White called, coyly, “The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.”

The New York Times and the Henry Luce press—Time, Fortune, Life—were beating the drums for intervention and Hollywood was getting into the act. Still, the polls showed 81 percent of Americans did not want war. The most fashionable foreign policy columnist of the time, Dorothy Thompson, was actively crusading for our entry into the war while her husband, Sinclair Lewis, had signed up for America First. A few organizations formed to oppose the war were pacifist. One was headed by socialist Norman Thomas. Non-pacifist American nationalists needed a grassroots movement to oppose the war.

It was at that psychologically right moment that a student movement to keep us out of war got a leader from Chicago—a young law student of 24 at Yale, Bob Stuart, whose father was a vice president of Quaker Oats and whose grandfather had been a company founder. The difference between his generation which opposed involvement in war and the much later grungy generation of unshaven, unshorn and un-bathed Hippies of the 1960s and `70s was like day and night. Then, bright, cogent and immaculately researched students vowed to defend America if it were attacked; in the `60s the grunge generation skipped to Canada. Today so-called “peace movements” are ineffective, camp out with Cindy Sheehan near Crawford, Texas, tool around with Al Sharpton and invite the president of Iran to berate President Bush and America in Harlem.

The grunge protests hit the nadir in the `60s when a disheveled, bearded effeminate youth held aloft a sign “Make Love Not War!” in front of California Governor Ronald Reagan as he addressed the crowd. With brilliant timing, Reagan read the sign aloud to the crowd: “Make love not war! I’m not sure this chap can do either!” to resounding cheers. Since that time, no grassroots movement protesting usurpation of executive power has been seen as clean, orderly, meticulous and reasoned.

As FDR moved toward war, Bob Stuart fashioned a committee unequaled in prestige. Earlier, in March, 1939 Hitler dismembered Czechoslovakia and stepped up pressure on Poland for Danzig and the Polish Corridor that separated the two parts of Germany. Then on September 1, 1939 he moved on Poland. In April, 1940, he launched his blitzkrieg against Denmark and Norway. Stuart believed that if America kept up its defenses it could avoid war. He did not believe nor does he now that the forces of Hitler’s aggression could possibly overtake the United States. He believed then as he does now that the up-building of a strong military is the best preventive of war. At no time in public polling did Americans prefer war. Rather sizable skepticism felt that war was viewed by policy makers as a stimulant to bolster the economy where the old New Deal had failed.

“My primary reason for believing that America should stay out of the war was simple,” Stuart writes in his memoir. “I had learned at Princeton that the United States had gained nothing from its intervention in the `Great War’ of 1914-1918. On the contrary, our country had lost a great deal. We had wasted lives, squandered treasure and betrayed some of our most sacred founding principles. More than 112,000 `doughboys’ fresh from the prairies and Main streets of Ohio and Kansas and Georgia had died horrible deaths in the killing fields of Europe. The war cost us countless millions of dollars (and broke the economies of Britain, France and Germany). At home, our government had curtailed civil rights and expanded federal power with abandon—actions that smoothed the way for the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, the calamitous social experiment known as Prohibition.”

So, “afire with antiwar convictions” he called together a handful of like-minded students at Yale and formed in spring, 1941 what would come to be known as “The America First Committee.” Four of them circulated a letter to collegians nationwide requesting their support in “forming a definite program to counter the forces that are leading the United States toward intervention in the European war.” Stuart’s wife, the late Barbara, then a 25-year-old mother, did the mailing and mimeographing. Stuart recalls, “The vortex of America First might have pulled other couples apart but it strengthened our marriage. In later years, Barbara had a few emotionally shaky periods but she was always at her best when she had a project—and overseeing a truly grass-roots movement to keep America out of war was one helluva project.”

Its first public announcement made these points:

1. The United States must build an impregnable defense for America.



2. No foreign power, nor group powers, can successfully attack a

prepared America. American democracy can be preserved

only by keeping out of a European war.

3. “Aid short of war” weakens national defense at home and

threatens to involve America in war abroad.

Stuart led the group on its first step—to obtain signatures on hundreds of thousands—potentially millions—of petitions. “Our general purpose,” the group declared, “is to give expression to the large but unorganized mass of American people who believe in defending America in the Americas, instead of forfeiting democracy by fighting abroad.”



All the while he ran the petition drive, Stuart, from an unused Quaker office at the Board of Trade building, met with Sears’ General Robert Wood, himself a brilliant quartermaster general of World War I and phoned and corresponded with a great number of leaders—elected and non-elected. Earlier he had gone to the Philadelphia GOP convention to try to nominate Sen. Robert A. Taft. His list of acquaintances was bulky: from Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a foe of intervention, to Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, to then nationalist Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, to Jack Kennedy who was handling the grassroots in Massachusetts, to Lillian Gish in Hollywood who was beginning to feel the sting of a blacklist, to Jerry Ford, the assistant football coach at Yale.



And to the leading Roman Catholic prelate in the United States who was unalterably opposed to our entering the war—Archbishop Francis Beckman of Dubuque. Fr. Charles E. Coughlin struck Stuart then—and now—as too extreme although through his newspaper Social Justice he carried a strong message.



The money was coming in. General Wood was raising money by the bucket-full. But “The America First Committee” was composed of clean-cut college kids and new grads plus a phalanx of grey-haired businessmen: not an ounce of charisma in a carload.



Then there came into the organization, America’s Number One Hero, a man Bob Stuart today calls “a one-of-a-kind phenomenon in our country’s history”—the Lone Eagle, Charles A. Lindbergh. How Stuart and Lindbergh worked—and flew together across the country—and how Archbishop Francis Beckman of Dubuque made a speech that electrified the country and got the fury of the Roosevelt Justice Department on his neck meting out retaliation that ruined his career—will be told in the next two installments.

John Schmidt

If you know the answer to the following riddle, give the Comments section a holler. You political junkies remember John Schmidt: Daley’s first chief of staff, prominent establishment lawyer, associate attorney general of the U. S. under Clinton, succeeding Webb Hubble, then a Democratic candidate for state attorney general, beaten by Lisa Madigan…now back as blue chip law firm major partner. Not long ago, Schmidt wrote an Op Ed for, I believe, the Wall Street Journal which got major attention because it defended George W. Bush, no less, attesting that he indeed has inherent constitutional power to tap phone lines in behalf of national security. The story took off because of Schmidt’s high service to Bill Clinton.


Nothing further has been heard of Schmidt so far as I know, except that he appeared startlingly the other day sitting next to none other than John Dean at a Senate Judiciary hearing, the aptly-named Feingold seeking to find political gold with the far-left portion of the Democratic base for a presidential run. Dean got huge press saying that Bush could and should be censured or impeached. You remember that. What did Schmidt say? I haven’t found any word of his testimony in the press. Which leads me to suspect that Schmidt kept to his old position that Bush has the constitutional power. Which would be one reason why Schmidt didn’t get any attention in the New York Times beyond his being shown in a photo sitting next to John Dean (along with Bruce Fein, a conservative legal theorist). Now, Lynn Sweet, the Sun-Times’ liberal Democratic secular saint who has the charism of bi-location, enabling her to cover Democrats here and in Washington at the same time, somehow missed mentioning Schmidt’s testimony, unless I’m far wrong. I am sure her failure to report Democrat Schmidt was not due to lack of diligence: she rightly decided Schmidt’s apostasy did not deserve coverage in her pristine Democratic newspaper. Am I right about this? It’s late on Sunday night and I must go to bed so I won’t try to look it up on the web—but I’ll be Schmidt once again offended all liberaldom. If you have run into his remarks, I’d appreciate a note on Comments

The First Anniversary for Father Mac: Father Clements’ Reminiscence

New Year’s Eve, Saturday, December 31 was the first anniversary of the death of Chicago’s most revered priest, Monsignor Ignatius McDermott. He died at 95, twenty-nine years to the day that his world-famed institution, Haymarket Center, opened. The joint commemoration, marking Father Mac’s and Haymarket’s 30th anniversary, was marked with a Mass at Haymarket Center’s chapel and a reception. Many of those attending were, it is fair to say, beneficiaries of Father Mac’s tough love which rescued them from the deadly perils of addiction. Others, like me, while fortunately spared the ravages of the disease, were privileged to have known this colorful priest with whom I dined twice each week for a number of years—each Monday for dinner and each Saturday for lunch (at Manny’s)—and about whom I wrote his biography.

I was particularly struck by the brief sermon delivered by the celebrant, Father George Clements. Father Clements has attained national recognition as a South Side pastor who adopted several homeless African American youths as “sons” and who urged his fellow pastors to motivate their parishes to adopt other young people. Now he is in Washington, D. C. urging Catholic parishes to “adopt” recovering alcoholics and addicts. I didn’t take notes and wasn’t prepared to (until I regretted not having pad and pencil, so struck was I by its simple eloquence) but it went like this:

“Not many people know that mid-way through my course to study for the priesthood, I had decided to leave, believing the priesthood was not for me. By the time I had made the decision, the fall term ended and the question was whether or not I would serve out the summer vacation in a kind of internship which was requisite for the study. I had told them I wasn’t interested in the priesthood but decided to serve the summer out anyhow, and go on my way afterward. Because I was drawn to the problems of what was then Skid Row, I made a visit down there one hot summer night. The men were drifting by. Suddenly a sick, all but physically destroyed man tottered out of a saloon and threw up all over himself. So nauseating was the sight that the other men veered away from him and indeed I was withdrawn as well. Then somebody said, “Here he comes!” A car pulled up and an elderly priest leapt out and reached out for the man.

“Somebody said, `watch it, Father, he’s throwing up all over himself!’ The priest treated their caution gruffly, shunted all of us away and tenderly helped the sick man into the car, the vomit and defecation soaking the priest’s coat. The car pulled away.

“I said, `who was that?’ The men in the group said, nonchalantly, `that was Father Mac. He’s down here every night.’

“It was then that I decided to stay in the seminary and with the help of God I would grow up to be just like Father Mac.”

The talk took all of five minutes after which he returned to celebrating the Ma

Claude Murphy Gets His First—and Last—Big Outfit Assignment III.

Fresh from a vital friendship with Al Capone’s mother, Claude parked cars for only a day or two when he was accosted by a gentleman with a sleek pompadour and wing-tips. “I unnerstan’” he said, “you wanna associat’ wit’ us, well you can’t. Not here. But you’ll start out in East St. Louis and we’ll see that you get there.” It was his first big break. He got on a train for East St. Louis with the fare paid by the Outfit and with instructions on how to contact the East St. Louis subdivision of the Outfit.

Murphy did this and soon was routed to a meeting in a garage where he was told that he would be the wheel man for a bank job. Not particularly edifying but it was a start. “The way you do this is,” said a sandy-haired man wearing a cap, “you drive us to this location” showing a map. “It is very important that you stay in the car and keep the engine runnin’. In a short time we will come runnin’ out and you’ll drive us” and he pointed to the map, outlining the direction. “At this place” indicating a garage, “you’ll drive us in to the garage here and we’ll change cars. Then you’ll drive us here”—indicating on the map. “Now we want you to run the route with Freddie here so you get the layout of the town.”

Freddie and Murphy made the route. Freddie said he was impressed with how quickly Claude took to the instructions. “It’s important,” Freddie said, “that you keep the engine runnin’ so that you’re ready to go when we come runnin’ out of the bank.” Claude understood completely. He determined to be the best wheel man in the Outfit.

The next morning, full of importance for his mission as wheel man, Claude drove them all to the bank, parking adjacent to the bank. His colleagues left the car and walked into the bank. Claude was very nervous and greatly interested in seeing that this first job went well. He kept his toe on the accelerator, revving it up to that when they came running he would be ready for them. As he was revving up the car, a policeman across the street saw the car and came over to him, signaling for Claude to roll down the window. This Claude did.

“You’re going to run that car!” said the cop. “Running it like that. Don’t do it! Take your foot off the gas, you’hear?”

Claude did as he was bidden. The engine flooded. The cop went on his way and Claude struggled to start the engine but it was stalled. Then the group ran out of the bank and yelled, “Start the engine!” Claude shouted: “I can’t!” He tried futilely. As he almost stood up trying to get the car to start, the group ran out but were picked up by the police—as was Claude. They were convicted of robbing the East St. Louis bank and Claude was the accessory. Claude received a shorter term than did they since the state maintained that Claude was the wheel-man and not the perpetrator. They swore at Claude and shouted, as they were being taken away. But, then, they were racists anyhow.

In prison, Claude served his time profitably, reading and reflecting. One day reading a magazine he spied an ad and sent in $10 to get a mail-order license as a minister of the Divine Freedom church with headquarters in Atlanta. When he came out, in about three years (while his colleagues still were serving with much time ahead of them) he returned to Chicago with no interest in returning to the Outfit. And of course since the rumors circulated through the Outfit, it had no interest in him. Since the Outfit was—and continues to be—a racist organization, Claude told me that forever after because of him they swore not to allow any African American to be associated with them. Which is a break for the African Americans. I think he exaggerated his importance. Yet it is true that there are no blacks in the Outfit even today. Unlike his associates who served quite long terms, Claude continued to be well-off—not from his marriage but from his annulment. As a man of some property he, understandably, joined the Republican party and quickly became a ward committeeman. He never married again, believing that being married once was sufficient and in line with his theological beliefs as certified by the degree in the ministry.

At his last hospitalization, I visited him at Rush-Presbyterian where he had a private room and was surrounded by admirers who saw that he had far richer food than ordinary hospital fare. He was old and ill but cheerful for he had come a lot way. His last greeting to me was the same as his first: “Ha, buddy.”

How Claude Murphy Got into the Outfit: A Very Short Career. Part II

When he had just come up to Chicago from Mississippi, Claude Murphy told me he was young, ambitious and eager to please any employer. He was born in 1908, Until he came along the only black to be anyway close to the Outfit was one William Crutchfield, a porter at Charles Dion O’Banion’s flower shop directly across from Holy Name Cathedral. O’Banion was a sentimental type: drawn to the church where he had been an altar boy and chorister. Then his voice changed which made him ineligible as a boy tenor. At sixteen he became a singing waiter at McGovern’s, a north side speakeasy. Then he got into the newspaper business--not as a journalist but as a circulation expert. His job was to serve the Hearst Chicago Examiner where he expertly overturned the competition’s delivery trucks, set them afire and beating up dealers who sold them. All newspaper circulation directors had crews that performed similar duties while the directors turned a blind eye. O’Banion was told he had a definite future in the newspaper circulation business but he was disdainful of it.

Deciding on aesthetic grounds not to continue working for Hearst, O’Banion went into business for himself: commonplace activities such as burglary, safe-cracking and highway robbery. In addition, he was a consultant to the Hearst people but he rather fancied working for himself rather than under supervision. O’Banion recruited what he considered a crack staff of experts including one Henry Wajiechowski, of Polish heritage, another altar boy and choir singer at Holy Name who voluntarily left the good graces of the Church when he became conflicted between its moral teachings and a Ziegfeld Follies dancer named Josephine Libby with whom he took up a simulated connubial residence without benefit of marriage.. Because O’Banion had trouble pronouncing Wajiechowski’s name when he had to refer to him in a hurry, he shortened it: he shortened Henry to Hymie and Wajichowski to Weiss. Since then the Jews have believed one of their number named Hymie Weiss was the brains of the O’Banion group but they are wrong.

O’Banion’s main line of work was rum-running, gambling and prostitution as result of a treaty he concluded with the Sicilian Johnny Torrio—but there is no doubt that he took the job as manager of Schofield’s Flower Shop at 738 N. State because he admired flowers. That and the fact that funerals and weddings utilized floral pieces which O’Banion supplied but principally because of the lavish funerals that were held when his associates (as was likely) was cut down in the prime of life.

Torrio, a Naples import, hired as his top aide a Brooklyn native, Alphonse Capone. Torrio had the moniker “Terrible John” which was deceptive because he stood no higher than Capone’s chest and was a pale, round-faced, wide-eyed man with small, delicate artist’s hands and feet. Torrio and O’ Banion hit it off immediately and their pact found room for the two gangs, about which O’Banion was careful not to insult because of Torrio’s Sicilian background. Unfortunately for O’Banion, he was not entirely blemish free of ethnic racism. Unfortunate characterizations escaped his lips on one occasion following a disagreement. O’Banion was a true entrepreneur. He persuaded fifty Chicago speakeasy owners to move to Cicero where he sold them good quantities at low cost. Torrio and Capone felt they should get a percentage of the revenue; O’Banion demurred. Difficulties mounted until O’Banion made the statement : “Tell them Sicilians to go to hell.”

It was more than an ungrammatical utterance but an unfortunate statement of crass bigotry. On November 10, 1924 while O’Banion was in the rear of his shop, clipping the stems of some choice chrysanthemums and the porter Crutchfield was sweeping up. O’Banion was preparing a floral display for the funeral of one Michael Merlo, president of Union Sicilione. Then a dark blue nickel-trimmed Jewett sedan glided to a halt before Holy Name cathedral. The driver kept his car idling and three men got out, crossed the street and entered the flower shop. When they entered the shop, a tinkling bell rang out announcing the customers. Crutchfield was waved to go to the backroom which he did with alacrity. O’Banion emerged in shirt-sleeves, a pistol visible in his vest holster. “Hello,” said O’Banion when he saw them, “are you boys here from Mike Merlo’s?” Mike Genna, known familiarly as “Il Diavolo [the Devil]” but an affable sort, gripped O’Banion’s hand and didn’t let go. O’Banion sought to free his hand but was unsuccessful. They pumped five shots into O’Banion and one, for good measure, in his mouth and then again, since they were ordered to complete whatever they began, in the temple.

The Church gave O’Banion some difficulty in death because George Cardinal Mundelein ordered that no funeral mass could be offered in behalf of one who was, at sketchy count, responsible for, by the Church’s count, twenty-five murders. But despite this, one priest who was known charitably as a confessor to the Outfit and who had amassed the biggest Bingo party in the archdiocese, attended and supported by Union Sicilione, gave O’Banion a requiem funeral mass. That so enraged the Cardinal that he banished the priest to the farthest point on the globe he could imagine: the nation of Panama. It took many years before the priest, one Michael Malloy, was allowed to come back to Chicago whereupon he won great plaudits for successful fund-raising which led to his promotion as a monsignor. But I digress.

One who recounted the story about O’Banion’s murder in detail to me, in addition to Claude Murphy who had heard it as a legend and verbally as was told the early books of the Bible until someone wrote the words down, was Msgr. Ignatius McDermott. It so happened that the man to become known as Father Mac was, at age 17, skipping school from Quigley preparatory seminary when he heard the shots and saw the Italian gentlemen sprinting across the street. Thereupon Msgr. McDermott was confronted with the first dilemma of his life: whether to tell the cops what he saw and acknowledge that he was in the vicinity when he was supposed to be elsewhere—or not. Fortunately he did not have to make that resolution as Crutchfield talked to the police with such excitability that they had trouble transcribing his thoughts and told him to slow down or they would have to hold him as an uncooperative witness. .

It was in the spirit of that time that young Claude Murphy, then also 17, determined to get a job in the Outfit. Of course he was turned away because of his race. But he was a determined sort. He started parking cars in a parking lot. Then one day came his chance. He always marveled at how organized the Outfit was but examining it up close, he saw some organizational flaws. One day when he was spotting cars at a prominent hotel, a huge black Packard pulled up in the back seat of which was a proud little woman of ostensibly Italian heritage. She alighted and the driver, a man with a sleek black pompadour and wing-tipped shoes beckoned to Murphy. He said, using as disgusting epithet the “n” word: “Here, n-----, see this lady? She wants to be driven home and I can’t do it. I’m givin’ you $10.” Then he drew his face close to Murphy’s. “Don’t scratch that car, hear me? And see that the old lady gets anything she wants. She’s Mrs. Capone.”

Claude was thrilled. He quickly deduced: Not Capone’s wife, Mae Coughlin Capone, not his sister, Matilda or his other sister, Rose. This was none other than Teresa Riola Capone, his mother. He drove her to her home on south Prairie avenue near St. Columbanas in a two-story, fifteen room red brick which Al had built—and, to his surprise, they hit it off! . She was so happy with his on-the-spot tour that she invited him in. The upstairs parlor of No. 7244 had floor-to-ceiling mirrors. The bathroom, she told him, had accouterments imported from Germany with a seven-foot bathtub. A steel gate shielded the house from an alley. She proudly pointed out that the walls were impervious to bullets. Claude arranged to be her driver on any occasion where she wished to get some air and told her about the man who had referred to him with the disgusting epithet. She put her hand to her bosom and said she would tell her son about it as soon as he came home. Then he went home, satisfied that he had made an opening for what would be an auspicious career.

Oh, look at this: I’ve gone on too long. There will have to be a third installment but I assure you I’ll complete it tomorrow.

How Claude Murphy Caused the Greatest Civic Tribute a Mayor Ever Received. In Two Parts: Part I

Leaf through the most significant histories of organized crime in the U.S. and Chicago and you will find nary a black face: Public Enemies by Bryan Burroughs [The Penguin Press, N.Y., 2004] and the indispensable two volumes Return to the Scene of the Crime: A Guide to Infamous Places in Chicago by my fellow Taft high school alumnus Richard Lindberg [1999]. That’s because despite all the bad things you’ve heard about the Outfit, it was also a bigoted no-equal opportunity employer. Blacks were allowed to run their own scarcely profitable little enterprises but never crashed the Big Time in organized crime: a record that stands even today.

Why not? Because the gentlemen with wing-tip shoes were racists is the answer. But there was one attempted exception and it so happens I knew him. He is safely dead now (of old age and longstanding mistreatment of body through rich food and expensive wines) and the story deserves to be told since he cannot write his memoirs. It so happens I knew him very well. This African American had the improbable name of Claude Murphy. When I knew him, he wore $2,000 suits (at a time when I wore off-the-rack numbers from Benson-Rixon labeled: “You can look nifty for one hundred and fifty.” I was the government relations guy at Quaker Oats and a part-time civic booster as president of the City Club of Chicago. There was a time (A.D.: before Jay Doherty) when the City Club sorely needed money. It had one employee who was staging a slow-down because he had the temerity to expect that his check would arrive on time. I was too busy attacking Mayor Jane Byrne for purportedly awarding rebuilding contracts to her developer friends for the North Loop. But the time came when I had to face it: the City Club would either raise money or depart this life.

The usual way to raise money, originated and executed brilliantly by Jewish philanthropies, was to find a pigeon—er, distinguished citizen with plenty of bucks and offer to make him that year’s Distinguished Citizen with the quid pro quo that he would get all the attention and a plaque with his name engraved before a hotel ballroom full of his friends if. If he would use clout to get his friends to contribute so as to attend the dinner in his honor. But we had used up every available Jewish gentlemen we could find: starting with 90-year-old A. N. Pritzker who obligingly delayed his death until our Fall Tribute, then Leonard Lavin of Alberto Culver and on and on. Our imagination had limits and we had not fathomed that we could do the same trick with gentiles—but that’s why we were not the sharpest knives in the drawer in that hazy era. All the while the energetic civic reform committee of the City Club were blistering Jane Byrne but I was generally coming to the view that we had better spend our energies to raising money. Enter the improbable Claude Murphy: a little rotund black man with a bald head which shone brilliantly under the fluorescent lights of my office with a gentle voice and grandiose manner of the old south and a rich Mississippi accent from which he had emigrated decades before. He admitted himself without checking at the main receptionist, plumped himself down and said, “Ha, buddy.” Ha meant hi. I had met him earlier. He was an anomaly in that he was a Republican ward committeeman—yes, Republican—on the South Side. Then as now no African American with any yen to use the political system would ever associate himself with the Republican party. But Claude did. In a party that had no clout whatsoever, he was a Republican king-pin. For what it meant.

I was writing at my desk. He said it again: “Ha, buddy.” I said distractedly: what do you want, Claude? He said, “Ah heard you fellas sorta need money at the—at the--.” City Club, I supplied. “Yeah.” Yes, that’s right, Claude. Do you have any idea on who we could honor? He said, “Yep.” Who? “Jane Byrne.” Claude, I said, you don’t read the papers, do you? “Not regular.” The City Club has attacked Jane Byrne almost every day for two weeks as part of our civic mission to safeguard the integrity of the north Loop from rapacious developers with political clout. He said, “yeah?” Yeah. Do you have any other ideas? “Nope, I just think you oughta call her.” We’ve called her everything we can think of, Claude. Think of another honoree.

Whereupon he walked over to my phone, picked up the receiver from its cradle and said to me, “Do ah dial 9 to get outside?” Yes. He dialed and spoke so softly that even before my present state of decrepit lack of hearing it seemed a low murmur. Then he said, “wait a minute” and handed the phone to me. I said hello. On the other end was Mayor Jane Byrne. “Mr. Roeser,” she said, “Claude says that you’re looking for an honoree. I know you have criticized me on the north Loop development and I take your criticism in the positive manner in which it was offered—I think. I am perfectly ready to open the bids up to anyone for that development. In fact, if you come over to City Hall right now—and I mean this minute—I’ll show you the mailing that’s going out.” I said: I’ll be right over, thank you, Mayor. With that phone call we had brought reformism to the north Loop project.

When I hung up I looked mystifyingly at this little man. He smiled slowly and said, “Ha, buddy.” I said, “Claude, how in the world do you know her?” And in the cab over to City Hall he told me. He was leaving his usual haunt at what was then the Conrad Hilton hotel very, very late one evening during the mayoral campaign of 1979 when he bumped into the little lady with her husband Jay McMullen as they were leaving a function. Michael Bilandic was running for reelection and was a sure thing—until the legendary snow fell. The snow fell. And fell. And fell. With it the rage of black citizens grew fearsomely. And it was still falling when Claude bumped into her outside the Hilton.

She spotted Claude whom she had met somewhere years earlier and shouted: “Hey, Claude!” When he came over she said, “Claude, I need $75,000 for one TV spot right now. I’ve got a feeling I can win this thing. Don’t you, think so, Claude?” He did. “Can you help me? I need the dough tonight or we can’t shoot the commercial tomorrow morning. Claude, if you can help me out with this thing and I get elected, I’ll never, never, never n-e-v-e-r forget it.” Claude said, “You got the money. Go home and sleep well tonight.”

She said, “Don’t b.s. [pronouncing it explicitly] me, Claude. Will I have the money tonight?” He said, “you will.” And she did. Where did he get the money? Claude was an improbable man of means. He often rode with a chauffeur. How did he get it? In the long stretch of his past, in the 1930s, he married it. Claude Murphy married an heir to the Proctor & Gamble fortune. When the girl’s parents found she married Claude, they convinced her—in that bygone age when whites weren’t supposed to marry blacks—to get an annulment. Thereupon a lawyer from a prosperous firm came to see Claude. He asked if Claude loved her. Claude said yes. He said, $100,000 worth? Claude said oh dearie me much, much more than that. In fact my heart would be broken and could only be assuaged for--. And he named the price. Whereupon the price was paid as a lifelong sinecure courtesy Proctor & Gamble. Claude’s heart was broken and he used his money to invest wisely in various irregular enterprises. And he bore his shattered marriage manfully.

Jane Byrne got the money, made the commercials and for the first time in Chicago history the machine went down the drain—in 1979. And true to her word, she didn’t forget Claude. When we arrived at her office, I was deservedly a nobody. She embraced Claude, took his coat, allowed me to hang up my own coat and sat us down with her eyes never leaving Claude. What do you think, Claude, she said. Should I allow myself to be honored by the City Club of Chicago for—oh, let us say $200 a plate? Claude said he could vouch for me. Then we went to her big desk where, sitting at it she looked like a very little, precise lady. She lit a cigarette and went through her book. How about (she named a date two months later). Claude said, “Ma’am I think Mr. Roeser’s club needs your help sooner than that, right buddy?” I said right.

And so it was scheduled. “Er, there’s one thing,” I said. She looked up expectantly. “We need a general chairman who will round up the money, er raise the money in your honor. These things always have general chairmen, you know.” Yes, she said, of course. She thought for a second and said, “your general chairman is” and named an obscure man whom I had never heard of. “Here’s his number,” she said, scribbling it. “I’ll call him ahead of time. You might just get over and see him now.”

In the car going over to the general chairman’s office, Claude said shyly, “Ha you lik’ that, buddy?” I was stunned. When we got to see the general chairman we found he was a very un-prosperous labor lawyer, with a secretary he shared with publishers’ reps in a cooperative office. He said, “What the hell is this? I’ve just had a phone call from Mayor Jane Byrne! I’ve never raised a dollar for charity in my life! I have no list, no staff, no nothing and now I find I’m the general chairman of a civic salute for an organization I never heard of for a guy I’ve never heard of—you, Mr. Roeser!” I was almost ready to agree with him when Claude motioned me to silence. “We have some impo’tant things to discuss,” he said.

“Ah know the mayor. When she says she does somethin’ she does it. Get your secretary to sit by the phone and you sit by the phone for pretty soon the calls’l start comin’ in.” Calls? Not long later the phone started to jangle. Both the general chairman and his secretary were furiously scribbling down notes. The plumbers union wanted to buy four tables for the Tribute to Jane Byrne. The carpenters union saw the plumbers and raised them for five tables. Then came the construction industry, then the investment bankers. Somebody had alerted them to the dinner before the hall was hired and the date was announced. The hall was filled before it had been scheduled for a dinner that had not yet been set and for which invitations had not yet been printed. It was the greatest tribute I ever saw. And that night when the mayor got her standing ovation, Claude Murphy caught my eye as I presided. He chuckled and I could see his lips move in a “Ha you like all this, buddy?” Counting the receipts that allowed the City Club to continue in business, I allowed I liked it very much.

That’s the end of Part I. If you notice at the top of this article, I mentioned that there are no African Americans in the Outfit. That still goes. The money Claude made, he didn’t make from the Outfit but from his marriage and certain irregular investments. . But he did get invited to join—and join he did, staying for a very short time. Which will be the story tomorrow, if you’re interested.