RUTHFULLY YOURS

This story is about a labor leader I once met whom I did understood. This fellow was named Herr Eichhorn and he’d become dictator in a town in Germany named Dusseldorf.

There’d been an uprising and the Bolsheviks captured the town. Eichhorn had been a street car conductor and now he found himself in the Burgomeister’s Palace as a dictator of whatever province Dusseldorf was in. He was running the works.

I met him at the palace to talk. He was a very fine street car conductor who sat there beaming and happy at his desk. I asked him what he’d done since he’d become a dictator.

“Well the first thing O did is two days after I was dictator, I doubled the salaries of all the street car employees,” he said.

“That’s fine, what else did you do?”

“I doubled the salaries of all the street cleaners. In fact I’ve doubled all the salaries in Dusseldorf.”

“Where do you get all the money to pay all these double wages?” I asked.

He said, “I get it out of the treasury of Dusseldorf.”

So I thought for a moment and I asked him, “What’ll happen when you run out of the money in the Treasury of Dusseldorf? How are you going to pay these double wages?”

He grinned. “I’m not worried about that, by the time that happens I won’t be dictator.”

(The Ben Hecht Show Dec 4, 1958)

CHICAGO POLITICS

Politics in my Chicago days was wonderful rampant skullduggery. You could see every crooked bone of it, every rotten piece of its inner working was visible and very gay.

I remember the citizens of Chicago surrounding city hall, three thousands of them, with ropes in their hands threatening to lynch the aldermen who had been bribed. If the aldermen passed the streetcar franchise to Mr. Yerkes, who was what they used to call a malefactor of great wealth.

I remember when Mr. William Hale Thompson was running for mayor. His idea of getting votes was not to make speeches or annoy people with ideologies. He used to put on shows all over town and the shows consisted of one naked lady being chased by an imbecile who had been borrowed from the local loony bin. The audience would sit there, applaud and yell and Thompson always got elected.

There was a violent sort of expression that people had, everything was crooked. You took your life in your hands if you went into a voting booth and voted for the wrong man. You got a bust in the nose.

This story is about voting. The two politicians I most remember out of my youth were a couple of aldermen who ran the first ward in Chicago. This was the ward where all the brothels, all the gangsters, all the dives, all the bums were. The aldermen were called Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John. And Hinky Dink was a little, wiry, nervous man and the Bathhouse was a portly fellow given to writing poetry.

They held their grip on the First Ward in a very practical way. About a week before the election, they would import from two to five thousand bums. They would put them up in rooms, twenty to a room. They would feed them a free lunch at the Workingman’s Exchange which was a saloon they ran. And when election time came these two to four thousand bums would go to the polls and vote. Not once.

Each bum was supposed to vote five to ten times. Bathouse John and Hinky Dink always came in by a great majority.

There was one election however where something odd happened and the forces of law and order struck. The two aldermen took the count for a while. About two days before the election, the Workingman’s Exchange opened. No sooner had it opened than somebody noticed there was a head sitting on the bar. It was the head of a decapitated bum. Quite a story ensued. The papers all began to talk about who cut this bum’s head off.

Around three o’clock in the afternoon, the door opened, a car passed and another bum’s head was thrown into the bar. This caused a panic among the bums who started evacuated their crowded rooms and fleeing Chicago like it was a plague spot. As a result of the disappearing, the forces of law and order won. Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink were not aldermen for the next two years.

However, when the next election came around, they prepared for law and order. They engaged the entire police department of the city of Chicago to protect their bums. Outside of every flop house stood five cops watching to see that no heads were cut off.

Ever since this incident, I’ve been careful not to lose my head over politics.

The Ben Hecht Show, Jan 29, 1959

Dear Mr. Hecht,

Several viewers of a recent telecast in which you participated have written to tel me how generously you spoke of me at the time. I want you to know of my appreciation. In the midst of a campaign period when brickbacks are more often than not the order of the day, it was most heartening to learn of the bouquets which you threw my way. I can assure you that it provided a real morale builder during some long days of work.

With every good wish, Richard Nixon

That’s very effective. It almost instantly turns one into an ardent Republican. It’s a wonderful way to get one vote. My reaction is one of pleasure because I did admire Mr. Nixon’s antics in South America. He was quite human, bold, brave, nice. But I also admire another thing about Mr. Nixon that may induce him to write me another latter.

He said the only intelligent thing that I’ve heard during the past six months of political caterwauling.

Mr. Nixon said that his objective was to reduce government to a minimum. To remove as many politicians as possible from the political scene as could be removed. And to work the country with a skeleton crew instead of adding politicians.

That is a great philosophy, and I hope Mr. Nixon is sincere.

From The Ben Hecht Show, October 1958