A CITY CRIES FOR AID

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 885, 31 January 1930, Page 8

A CITY CRIES FOR AID

WITH the suddenness of an underworld bomb explosion, Chicago has disclosed u financial chaos on a scale unprecedented in the history of modern civic administration. Like a beleagured fortress of old, the panic-stricken city is calling for aid to repulse a host of creditors who threaten its very foundations with crushing charges amounting to the staggering total of 300,000,000 dollars. State assistance is being invoked by a theatrical and loud-voiced mayor who has paused in his reviling of the British Empire to listen to the clamour at his own gates—the clamour of a great army of citizen workers whose trust in a high administration has been betrayed. A sum of over 11,000,000 dollars is owing to school teachers alone. More than 1,000 nurses are without the salaries that are rightfully and legally theirs, the pension system in at least one department of public service has broken down, and the system of the Board of Education is in a state of disruption. Time alone will show the further extent of the damage wrought by Chicago’s spectacular fall. It is significant that “Big Bill” Thompson, whose unreasoning hatred of Britain is a by-word wherever the daily output of American cable agencies is read, has been the last, to admit defeat. Though this rough and ready “boss” mayor and his henchmen must have known that a volcano was cracking the ground beneath their feet it was left to legal experts to spread the alarm and predict the wholesale upheaval that lias followed. Thompson became internationally prominent when he conducted a stupid campaign against “British propaganda” in Chicago school books. “No one but a half-wit could have believed in the campaign,” wrote one observer. “And Mayor Thompson is not a half-wit. He is a shrewd, coarse man, of violent ambitions and few scruples.” So much for the queer, bellicose personality who lias ruled a turbulent city of business and crime, of great wheat markets and openly daring gunmen, of wonderful civic amenities and notoriously ineffective legal control—a city credited in America’s last census with nearly 3,000,000 inhabitants. Cross mismanagement has caused this unique failure. It is with amazing figures that financiers must juggle to set Chicago’s house in order. Whatever the future may hold, the city will have learned a grave lesson, and one that can be taken to heart by every community: there are no limits to the administrative damage that can be wrought by careless, incompetent men.