OK, I want to start with a visual that just completely
shatters what we think a powerful politician
looks like. So forget the boring Navy suits,
the flag pins, all that. Right. I want you to
picture a man. It's Chicago, maybe 1890. And
he's wearing a suit that is just electric lime
green. And not just the suit. Yeah. We're talking
a frock coat the color of, you know, a billiard
table. Maybe a pink waistcoat, yellow gloves.
Exactly. He looks like he just walked off a vaudeville
stage. Or maybe out of a circus tent. He writes
this really sentimental, just awful poetry. Awful.
He weeps openly at the opera, has this ridiculous
mustache. You see this guy and you think, okay,
local eccentric, town mascot maybe. But then
you pull back the curtain. Yeah. And you realize
this man is John Bathhouse John Coughlin. And
he, along with his partner, a tiny, quiet guy
named Hinky Dink Kenna. He isn't a mascot. Not
at all. He's running one of the most ruthless,
efficient and notoriously corrupt political machines
in American history. It's the ultimate paradox.
So today we're doing a deep dive into the Lords
of the Levee. We're looking at how a former masseur
and a saloon keeper basically held Chicago in
a chokehold for nearly 50 years. Yeah. And the
question isn't just how did they steal so much?
It's how did they get people to love them for
it? That really is the central tension, isn't
it? I mean, Coughlin was the alderman of the
first ward from 1892 all the way to 1938. That's
a lifetime. It is a lifetime in politics. He
was reelected 19 times, never defeated. 19 times.
You don't win that many times just by, you know,
stuffing ballot boxes, though, spoiler alert,
they definitely do that, too. Oh, for sure. You
win by being a character. So before we get to
the corruption, we have to understand the bathhouse
persona. Because he didn't start out as a political
boss. No. His origin story is surprisingly humble.
He was born in Chicago 1860. His parents were
Irish immigrants and his dad ran a little grocery
store. Right. Until the Great Chicago Fire in
71. And that's when everything changes. The store
burns down. The family loses everything. And
usually, you know, in a politician's biography,
that's the from the ashes I rose moment. Very
serious. Very solemn. But not for Coughlin. He
had a completely different take. He famously
said why money didn't mean anything to me. I'm
glad that fire came along and burned the store.
Which sounds completely insane. Why would you
be glad your house burned down? Because of what
he said next. Say, if not for that bonfire, I
might have been a rich man's son and gone to
Yale. And never amounted to nothing. Never amounted
to nothing. I love that. So he saw the Ivy League
as like the road to failure. Exactly. For him,
the real education was the street and specifically
the bathhouse. OK, so that's where the name comes
from. That's it. He started as a rubber, a masseur
in a bathhouse. And that's how he got the nickname
Bathhouse John. You have to remember, back then,
the bathhouse was a social hub. Right. It's where
the wealthy merchants, the gamblers, the politicians,
they all stripped down and... you know, talk
shop. So he was literally rubbing shoulders with
the power players. Literally. He saved his tips,
eventually bought his own bathhouse, then a tavern.
And the tavern, well, that's the classic entry
point for Irish politics in Chicago. And he gets
elected alderman in 92 with zero experience.
None. Just because he was a known, liked guy
in the neighborhood. And this is where that eccentricity
factor just explodes. Because once he gets a
little power, he doesn't try to fit in. He cranks
the volume up to 11. We mentioned the green suits.
Oh, the fashion was absolutely a strategy. He
hired costumers who designed clothes for actors
to make his suits. But my favorite example of
his style is the poetry. The dog roll. Yes. He
really thought he was a bard. He'd write these
incredibly sappy, structurally... questionable
poems there was one dear midnight of love and
he didn't just like keep it in a drawer no no
he had it set to music he tried to hire a famous
opera singer to perform it she refused wisely
so he got a friend's daughter to sing it at the
chicago opera house the audacity is just incredible
but the public kind of ate it up didn't they
Oh, they loved it. It became a running joke.
People would write terrible poems and sign his
name to them in the papers. And he didn't mind.
He bathed in it. Made him seem accessible. You
know, he wasn't some stiff bureaucrat. He was
the bath. And then there's the elephant. You
cannot tell the Coughlin story without Princess
Alice. This is Pete Coughlin, the height of his
using power for whimsy. He'd opened an amusement
park out in Colorado Springs. Zoo Park. And he
decided it needed an elephant. You need a star
attraction. So he looks at the Lincoln Park Zoo
in Chicago, a public zoo, and he sees they have
an elephant named Princess Alice. Most people
would just buy an elephant. But not Bathhouse
John. He goes to the city council and makes a
fiscal argument. He says essentially, why is
the city wasting taxpayer money feeding this
elephant? It's a burden. He framed stealing an
elephant as budget cutting. And it worked. He
actually argued that having another elephant
was a waste, so he should just take Princess
Alice off their hands. He moved a public zoo
animal to his private amusement park, two states
away. That is the definition of chutzpah. But
it also shows you how he operated. He could wrap
this totally selfish desire in the language of
public good. Or at least make it so entertaining
people let him get away with it. Which is the
perfect transition to the darker side. Because
while he's distracting everyone with green suits
and elephants, he and his partner, Michael Hinky
Dink Kenna, were building a machine that was
robbing that same public blind. Yeah, let's talk
about that partnership. You've got Coughlin Loud.
large, flashy, the front man, and then you have
Kenna. Hinky -dink Kenna. Yeah. So small, so
quiet, rarely smiled. Ran a saloon called the
Working Man's Exchange. If Coughlin was the voice,
Kenna was the brain. The organizational genius.
He was the one who made sure the votes were counted,
whether they were real or not. There's that great
quote from the mayor at the time, Carter Harrison
Jr. He asked Kenna, basically, is your partner
crazy? Right, which was a fair question. And
Kenna defended him. He said, John isn't Dottie
and he ain't full of dope. And then he says,
to tell you the God's truth, Mr. Mayor, they
ain't found a name for it yet. They ain't found
a name for it yet. Like he was a force of nature.
But their business model had a very specific
name. Boodling. Boodling. It sounds like a cartoon
noise, but it was serious, serious business.
We need to break this down. People hear corruption
and think of cash and envelopes, but the mechanics
of bootling were really about franchises. Exactly.
A franchise was a government -granted monopoly.
So if you wanted to run a streetcar line or lay
gas pipes, you needed the city council to give
you the exclusive right to use the public streets.
So if I'm a tycoon like Charles Tyson Yerkes,
who's trying to build the transit system, I can't
just build. You need permission. Yeah. And that
permission is worth millions. Because if you
get the franchise, you have no competition. It's
a license to print money. So a bribe of, say,
$50 ,000 to get that vote, that's a drop in the
bucket. It's a toll booth. Coughlin, Kenna and
their crew, the so -called gray wolves, were
standing at the gate. You want to do business
in Chicago, you pay the wolves. That's it. They
were selling public rights for private gain and
they were just relentless. But here's what I
don't get. This wasn't a secret, right? Reform
groups like the Municipal Voters League, the
newspapers, they were screaming about this. Constantly
on the front page. So how did the voters in his
ward? The people in the levee put up with it.
That's the key. Yeah. And the answer is they
were providing a social safety net. Remember,
this is before the New Deal. There's no Social
Security, no unemployment, no welfare. If you
lost your job, you were on your own. Unless you
knew your alderman. Right. If you were starving,
Kenna gave you a turkey. If you needed coal for
the winter, Coughlin sent a truck. Your son gets
arrested. Kenna's lawyer was there before the
ink was dry on the police report. So they weren't
just buying votes. They were buying loyalty.
They were purchasing survival. The graft money
from the streetcar lines and the vice districts,
it subsidized this primitive welfare state. The
voters knew Coffin was a crook. But he was their
crook. And his neighborhood, the Levee, was the
vice district. Brothels, gambling saloons. The
Lords of the Levee. It was a symbiotic relationship.
The vice lord paid the machine for protection
from the police. The machine used that money
to win elections. And the police, well, they
did what the aldermen told them to do. Which
brings us to the 1894 election. I want to slow
down here because this whole thing plays out
like a heist movie. It shows you the machine
in action. This is their first real test. Coughlin
is running against a guy named Billy Skakel.
And Skakel isn't some reformer. No, he's a rival
gambler. It's shark versus shark. Skakel ran
for alderman out of spite because Coughlin let
a competitor move in on his turf. And Skakel
had money and muscle. So how does the machine
fight back? It starts with the nominating convention.
Which was a complete farce. The sources say it
lasted only a few minutes. Why? Because a big
prize fight was starting and all the delegates
wanted to go. They just shouted Coughlin and
ran out. Priorities. But the election day itself.
That was Kenna's masterpiece. It really was.
Skankle was actually popular. So Kenna organizes
what you could call the homeless infantry. He
went to the flop houses, the rail yards, recruited
hundreds of homeless men. The deal was simple.
50 cents, a meal, and a place to sleep. In exchange,
you vote for Coughlin. And probably not just
once. As many times as you could get away with.
It was an assembly line of fraudulent votes.
But they also needed intimidation. So Kenna calls
in the Quincy Street Gang. That sounds unpleasant.
These were the toughs, the bouncers, the leg
breakers. Ken has stationed them near the polling
places to discourage any Skakel voters. And the
police were just letting this happen. The police
were part of the rig. The mayor was on their
side. He ordered the police to actually detain
Skakel's campaign workers until the polls closed.
He even had them shut down any saloon that supported
Skakel. It's total warfare. You've got bribery,
intimidation and state power all working together.
And it worked. Coughlin went on a landslide.
The Chicago Tribune was horrified. They wrote
that the methods would have disgraced even the
worst river parishes of Louisiana. That is a
serious burn for 1894. But Coughlin didn't care.
He had the seat. And he wasn't afraid to use
that power for petty revenge either. We have
to talk about the boxing ordinance. Oh, it's
wonderfully petty. So a rival named Sol Van Praag
causes some trouble for the machine. Coughlin
decides to destroy him. Von Praag had organized
a huge boxing match, a huge moneymaker. And Coughlin
decides to just cancel it. He introduces a city
ordinance banning fighting, but he does it the
night before the fight is scheduled. For maximum
damage. Exactly. But then he realizes the new
ordinance might not hold up. So he digs into
the archives and finds an ancient ordinance banning
bare -knuckle fighting. But they were using gloves.
Didn't matter. Coughlin argued the spirit of
the law applied. He sent the police to storm
the ring right before the semifinals, arrested
the fighters, the ref, everyone. He ruined the
event, cost Van Praag a fortune, and sent a message.
Do not cross us. It's terrifying power, but they
also knew how to celebrate it. The first ward
ball. The annual fundraiser. Yeah. This wasn't
your typical rubber chicken dinner. Paint the
picture. Okay, imagine the Chicago Coliseum,
the biggest hall in the city. It's packed. And
the guest list is a sociological nightmare. You've
got high society businessmen next to safecrackers,
pickpockets, madams, hitmen. It's the cantina
scene from Star Wars, but in Chicago. With a
lot more booze. Yeah. They were raising over
$50 ,000 a night, which is millions today. It
was the complete merger of crime and politics
out in the open, daring anyone to stop them.
But that party couldn't last forever. What happened?
How does a machine that strong finally start
to break? Well, the world changed around them.
The biggest blow was prohibition. Right. If your
whole power base is saloons, banning alcohol
is kind of an existential crisis. They just dried
up all the easy money from the levy. And at the
same time, the reform movement was finally getting
real traction. The chaos of the first ward ball
became too much of an embarrassment. The mayor
banned it in 1909. The beating of the end. It
was a slow decline. Coughlin had to close his
zoo. He lost his summer home. And then there's
the personal tragedy of his finances. You'd think
a guy who stole that much would die rich. But
he didn't. No. Coughlin had his own vice. Horses.
He was obsessed with horse racing. Poured his
entire fortune into his stable. But the horses
weren't any good. They were terrible. He was
just throwing bad money after bad horses, always
thinking the next race would be the one. By the
1930s, he was broke. What about Kenna? That partnership
faded, too. In 1923, the ward boundaries changed.
Kenna saw the writing on the wall. He stepped
down, let Coughlin stay on as arterman, but Kenna
was effectively retired. So Coughlin was left
alone, a dinosaur in a lime green suit. Precisely.
By the 30s, the press called him a vestige of
a past era. The feared Lord of the Levee was
gone. When he died in office in 1938, at 78,
he was penniless. Penniless, the guy who treated
the city treasury like his personal ATM. Left
nothing behind. Nothing but the legend. So when
you look back at Bathhouse, John, what's the
legacy? Is he just a crook in a funny costume?
I mean, he's definitely a crook. A 2012 study
ranked him and Kenna as the third and fourth
most corrupt officials in Illinois history. And
that is a very competitive list, I'll bet. I
think he represents something deeper about American
politics. He represents the transaction. He never
pretended to be a saint. He basically said, I'm
going to steal, but I'm going to entertain you,
and I'm going to make sure you have coal in the
winter. And for 50 years, the voters said, deal.
It's the charisma trap. We forgive so much if
a politician is one of us or if they make us
laugh. We do. And you see the DNA of the Coughlin
-Kenna machine in Chicago politics for the rest
of the century. The organization they built.
Didn't die with them. The machine just kept humming.
It did. Because the underlying need for a safety
net, for favors, for a fixer, that never goes
away. Well, that is a lot to process. We went
from bad poetry to elephants to streetcar monopolies.
Just other day in the first ward. I want to leave
our listeners with this thought. We like to think
we've evolved past the days of Bathhouse John.
We have ethics committees, transparency laws.
But ask yourself. How much eccentricity do we
still tolerate today? If a politician is entertaining
enough or charismatic enough, do we still turn
a blind eye to the boodling that's happening
right in front of us? It's a question worth asking.
Thanks for diving in with us. We'll see you on
the next one.