A Law Unto Himself
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum” (translation: “Speak no ill of the dead“).
During the contested Republican mayoral primary of 1931, the incumbent
mayor, the Honorable William Hale Thompson, Jr., was opposed by two candidates.
Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the powerful publisher of The Chicago Tribune was
a determined opponent of Thompson’s re-nomination bid. In a startling
display of bravado, a Thompson operative happened to liberate a draft copy of the
mayor’s obituary from the Tribune files. The mayor reproduced the text of the
obituary and made McCormick into a laughingstock in the process.
Thompson had undergone an emergency appendectomy during the previous autumn
and the paper had prepared an obituary. It is not an uncommon journalistic
practice to prepare obituaries in advance of a noteworthy person’s death. The
summaries are largely biographical ... Read More...
