On August 29, 1927, William McAndrew was suspended from his position as superintendent of Chicago Public Schools by the Chicago Board of Education pending an administrative hearing by the board. He was charged with "insubordination" for opposing a school board action that he believed would amount to reviving patronage in the school system. The administrative hearing, which was widely dubbed a "trial", was to determine whether he was guilty, and should therefore be removed from his office. The administrative hearing, which attracted great national media fascination and derision, took place over the course of several months, and saw McAndrew tried for counts of insubordination, and an additional count of conduct incompatible with and in violation of his duty (stemming from allegations of unpatriotic actions). The hearing was effectively a show trial. After the first several weeks of the hearing, McAndrew and his legal team refused to attend any further sessions and he was tried in absentia. The school board found McAndrew guilty by an 8–2 vote on March 21, 1928. In December 1929, the Superior Court of Cook County voided this, ruling that McAndrew had not been insubordinate, and that the school board had no authority to charge McAndrew for being "unpatriotic".
The administrative hearing came following a reshaping of the board of education with appointments made by William Hale Thompson in the months after he took office in 1927. During his successful campaign against then-incumbent mayor William Emmett Dever in the 1927 Chicago mayoral election, Thompson had promised to oust McAndrew. During the campaign, Thompson had made regular allegations that McAndrew was a British agent sent by King George as part of a grand conspiracy to manipulate the minds of American children and set the groundwork for the United Kingdom to repossess the United States, with Dever being in on this alleged plot. Thompson's allegations came amid a national wave of anglophobic attacks on textbooks. After Thompson was elected mayor, he sought to quickly oust McAndrew, who had nine months left before his contract as superintendent expired. State law stated that the Chicago Board of Education could only dismiss McAndrew after an administrative hearing before the board.
Background
William McAndrew had been appointed superintendent of Chicago Public Schools in 1924 by a Chicago Board of Education that had been reshaped by reform-minded mayor William Emmett Dever's appointees.Herrick, p. 143 The schools had been tarnished by mismanagement under Dever's predecessor William Hale Thompson. During his tenure as superintendent, McAndrew was a polarizing figure, facing tense criticism from teacher's unions and others for some of the reforms he fought to implement, but also receiving national praise.
In the 1920s, the United States experienced a wave of anglophobic criticisms in the of textbooks being "pro-British" and "unamerican". Among the leading forces of these criticisms was the Knights of Columbus.
William Hale Thompson's attacks on McAndrew during the 1927 mayoral election
During his successful 1927 campaign against incumbent Democratic mayor William Emmett Dever, Republican nominee William Hale Thompson (the former mayor) alleged that McAndrew was a British agent sent by King George as part of a grand conspiracy to manipulate the minds of American children and set the groundwork for the United Kingdom to repossess the United States, and accused the "left-handed Irishman" Dever of being part of the plot. Thompson based these claims on McAndrew being critical of such artworks as Archibald Willard's The Spirit of '76 and allowing the use in schools of textbooks which Thompson alleged were unpatriotic and full of, "treason tainted histories". Thompson's attacks on McAndrew were a major factor in his successful mayoral campaign.
Thompson accused McAndrew of conspiring with the University of Chicago's Charles Hubbard Judd and Charles Edward Merriam to "destroy the love of America in the hearts of children by encouraging teachers to attend special classes at 'Chicago University' at which the text was used which pictured George Washington as a rebel and a great disloyalist."Herrick, p. 167
Thompson was not a lone actor in publicly painting McAndrew as unpatriotic. In 1926, the "Citizens' Committee on School Histories", a group led by far-right ex-United States congressman John J. Gorman (and consisting largely of members of German and Irish descent), published a document that denounced three United States history textbooks that were in use in Chicago Public Schools as pro-British, and argued that heroes of other nationalities had been overlooked by the books in numerous instances. It also demanded that McAndrew remove from the school curriculum a list of books they alleged were "pro-British". While Mayor Dever brought this document to McAndrew's attention, McAndrew did not give it any concern. In 1927, Thompson would add the report published by this group to his campaign literature. Additionally, at the City Council's first meeting after McAndrew made a remark criticizing Archibald Willard's The Spirit of '76 for not being an accurate picture of war, Alderman John Coughlin denounced McAndrew's comments as being traitorous, and proposed an ordinance to denounce McAndrew. However, Alderman William D. Meyering, a decorated veteran of World War I, stood up and stated that he actually agreed with McAndrew's statement, which served to quash the momentum of Coughlin's ordinance.
Among the textbooks that Thompson criticized as unpatriotic were A History of the United States by Willian Fiske Gordy, Our United States by William Backus Guitteau, and The Silent Reader by Albert Lindsay Lewis and William D. Rowland.Counts, p. 267 Former president of the Chicago Board of Education Charles Moderwell, who had served during the earlier part of Dever's mayoralty, argued that textbooks which Thompson attacked as being unpatriotic had actually been approved by the school board Thompson had appointed during his previous mayoralty. Indeed, the school's history textbooks had not been chosen by McAndrew but had rather been chosen by his predecessor. Thompson made the campaign promise of appointing, "a patriotic school board...who will rid the city of Superintendent McAndrew," and "his pro-English 'yes' men and women". He faulted Dever and Democratic political boss George E. Brennan as responsible for McAndrew's hiring.
Thompson also complained of there being a large number of pro-British books populating the city's libraries, and urged the residents to pillage the libraries and burn such books.
Possible motives While it is not clear why Thompson chose to single-out McAndrew for such attacks, in a 1980 journal article, Dennis F. Thompson speculated that Thompson might have chosen McAndrew as an enemy, in part, due to McAndrew being a force against political patronage in schools, as well as due to McAndrew's ties to Dever. Another aspect that Dennis F. Thompson speculated may have been a factor was McAndrew's unpopularity with teachers. Dennis F. Thompson argued that there is strong evidence that teachers, indeed, very actively backed Thompson's candidacy in hopes of ousting McAndrew. Additionally, Thompson had, in the past, already appealed to the city's German and Irish populations by positioning himself as anti-British. A 1968 report by Robert J. Havighurst expressed the belief that Thompson was taking advantage of the situation created by McAndrew's combative relationship with teachers unions and the Chicago Federation of Labor. In addition, Thompson effectively made a liability for Dever what The New York Times considered to be his mayoralty's greatest success. The New York Times, on March 28, 1927, wrote,
The Chicago Tribune speculated that Thompson had removed McAndrew in order to clear the way for his political corruption to extend into the city's schools, writing in December 1929,
Developments in the initial months of Thompson's mayoralty Having won the 1927 mayoral election, Thompson was sworn in as mayor on April 18, 1927. In his inaugural address, Thompson declared,
At the time, McAndrew still had nine months left in his contract as superintendent. Thompson was impatient to get rid of McAndrew. On April 27, a private group with close connections to Thompson offered McAndrew $15,000 if he would resign as superintendent, but McAndrew refused to on principle.
On May 25, J. Lewis Coath was elected by the Chicago Board of Education as the board's new president. Coath was Thompson's personally-backed candidate for the job. Coath, as a board member, had spent months as a top foe to McAndrew. The board voted to select Coath by a 6–3 vote, with 3 of the votes in Coath's favor coming from board members that had originally been appointed by Dever (the three votes against his appointment also came from Dever appointees). However, the three Dever appointees who voted in support of electing Coath president of the board made it known that they would not back ousting McAndrew as superintendent. In July, Coath stated that the "bunk shooting educator" McAndrew was barely grasping onto his position and was promising that he would be ousted before the start of the new school year in September.
After becoming mayor, Thompson appointed former U.S. congressman John J. Gorman as a special assistant corporation counsel, with the assignment of looking through school textbooks for lies and distortions. Gorman, who was considered to have been an anglophobe, would reach the conclusion that books used by Chicago Public Schools were "poisoned" with British dogma, and that the British were taking over America, "not by shot and shell, but by a rain of propaganda."
On the Chicago Board of Education, member Otto L. Schmidt was made chairman of a committee to investigate the history textbooks taught in the city's schools.
McAndrew's suspension by Chicago Board of Education State law stated that McAndrew could only be dismissed by the Chicago Board of Education after an administrative hearing by the board, which would need to be held no less than thirty days after charges would be brought against him. By August, reshaped by appointments Thompson had made to it, the Chicago Board of Education was moving under Thompson's influence. Thompson had been able to gain control so quickly due to the resignations of a number of board members, as well as threats made to remaining members. A majority vote against McAndrew had been assured in August by the switch of Dever appointee Theophilus Schmid to an anti-McAndrew position.
Since 1909, the Chicago Public Schools' school clerks had simply been certified teachers who were assigned clerical duties. However, in April 1927, the Board of Education's attorney, at the urging of a Thompson-allied board member, rendered an opinion that the school clerks must be selected by the City Civil Service Commission, pointing to an opinion that the Illinois Appellate Courts had rendered in March 1927, which found that the schools' janitors and engineers needed to be selected by that commission. On August 3, 1927, the Chicago Board of Education adopted a resolution that would dismiss all 350 of the school system's school clerks, and have them be replaced with Civil Service Commission appointees. McAndrew was outraged by this, seeing it as an attempt by Thompson to return patronage to the education system, and resisted this order.Herrick, p. 165 McAndrew assisted the school clerks in preparing to file an injunction against their dismissal. He appeared as a witness to argue for the injunction, testifying that an injunction against the Board should be granted and that the school board attorney had signed his name to papers without his knowledge.