My Chat with R. Emmett Tyrrell, Editor of The American Spectator - He Plans to Run for Mayor of Chicago

A few days ago, Mark Rhoads, a former Illinois legislator and journalist, informed me of a meeting that he had with Robert Emmett Tyrrell –founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator. Bob Tyrrell told Mr. Rhoads of his desire to enter the race the upcoming race for Mayor of Chicago.

I spoke with Bob Tyrrell on Monday September 13th and he confirmed this fact.


“I plan to run of Mayor of Chicago for various reasons. First of all, my roots in Chicago go back a very long way. In the 1870s ,my great, great grandfather, P. D. Tyrrell, U.S.S, was the head of the Secret Service, and as the head of the Secret Service broke up a plot that originated in the Hub, a Chicago eatery of low repute, to steal Abraham Lincoln’s body from its crypt, bury it in the Indiana Dunes, and hold it for ransom and the release of counterfeiters notorious in the region. There was also something about counterfeit plates, but P. D. made all this academic. He nabbed them and eventually they were locked up.

My great grandfather was the sole survivor ( last living perhaps police officer, perhaps) of the bomb tossed by Haymarket Square* anarchists. Some sixty years ago, I, as the great grandson of the sole survivor of the Haymarket Riot, Frank Tyrrell, was chosen by the Chicago Police Department to place a wreath on the statue. Thus, I was particularly offended when Bill Ayers attempted to blow up the statue not once but twice during his violent youth. I want to redeem the police. Ayers has lived on, swaddled in the respect of Liberals. I want to remind them of the many police and laboring men who were maimed in that riot that Ayers tried, in his violent past, to exploit and apparently is still proud of.

Thus, my roots as a Chicagoan are unassailable.

I see my campaign as facing up to the large budget crisis that the corrupt machine has built up, a crisis that is not being faced. I also want to challenge the local pols to face the enormous federal budget overhang that faces Chicago and the nation. It will either be met now or will burden our children and our children’s children and drive them in inherit a second class nation. There is a plan. I include it in my recent book. It will work.

A particular tragic problem that I perceive is that vast neighborhoods in Chicago have had their social structure gutted. Law and order is (now) the law of the gun, often in the hands of teenagers. I want young people to be able to grow up in safe neighborhoods where law has returned to the peaceful community and the rough and ready life a young man seeks is in sport. In that spirit, I will return to the practice of having fire houses with handball courts and young people invited to play.

All of this I (save the handball courts) have outlined in my latest book. It will be a roadmap for the campaign ahead.

I want to announce my candidacy very soon in a proper venue. I have thought about government for four decades. I have written about it. Now, I am ready to implement my views, which really are not original. Milton Friedman and Edward Banfield and others laid them down a generation ago. It is only that implementing them in Chicago will be original. But why not do so in Chicago? They were mostly dreamed up at the University of Chicago.”


R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. ( Parenthetical comments my own)

Mr. Tyrrell said that he will announce his intention to run very shortly.

The American Spectator

About The American Spectator
The American Spectator was founded in 1924 by George Nathan and Truman Newberry over a cheap domestic ale in McSorley's Old Ale House. In 1967 the Saturday Evening Club took it over, rechristening it The Alternative: An American Spectator; but by November 1977 the word "alternative" had acquired such an esoteric fragrance that in order to discourage unsolicited manuscripts from florists, beauticians, and other creative types the Club reverted to the magazine's original name. Published remarkably without regard to sex, lifestyle, race, color, creed, physical handicap, or national origin.

*

In the late 1950s it returned to the Haymarket area and was situated on the north side of Randolph Street a block west of Desplaines, just to the east of the new Kennedy Expressway. The third photograph shows the police monument in this location in the early 1960s. The finials have been modified since the monument's move from the Union Park location (other photographs indicate that they were perhaps damaged or stripped at various times). A medallion, which is also evident in some of the photographs of the monument in Union Park, is just above the inscription. The pedestal is badly stained and chipped.

The city named the monument a historic landmark in the mid-1960s, but this did not prevent further vandalism, presumably in protest against police brutality in the context of opposition to the Vietnam War and social inequality in the United States. On October 6, 1969, in what was almost certainly a deliberate symbolic reenactment of the original Haymarket meeting, someone placed a powerful explosive at the base of the statue, blowing out about a hundred windows nearby and sending chunks of the legs onto the expressway. This took place amidst demonstrations in the city by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The SDS sponsored a march from the Haymarket to Grant Park, and this and other demonstrations were peaceful, although the group's radical Weatherman faction battled police elsewhere in the streets of Chicago over several days.

The statue was repaired, but early on the morning of October 5, 1970, it was blown up again. The body of the statue badly bent a nearby railing before settling on the expressway embankment, and one of the legs landed two hundred feet away. Immediately after the blast, a person or persons called various news outlets to declare that the bombing was the work of the Weathermen. According to one newspaper, the caller said, "We just blew up Haymarket Square Statue for the second year in a row to show our allegiance to our brothers in the New York prisons and our black brothers everywhere. This is another phase of our revolution to overthrow our racist and fascist society. Power to the People." The two attacks on the police statue were among several politically-motivated bombings throughout the country at the time.

An angry and determined Mayor Richard J. Daley had the statue repaired again and put under twenty-four-hour police protection. It was soon moved to police headquarters and then finally, in 1976, to a secure interior courtyard in the Chicago Police Education and Training Division facility on West Jackson Street. Click on the fourth thumbnail to see it in this location.

Back in the Haymarket area, only the pedestal remained, where it was subject to graffiti and various other indignities. The pedestal was removed in 1996, but the spot continues to be a contested site. As the last photograph shows, someone has recently inscribed the slogan "LONG LIVE THE HAYMARKET MARTYRS " on the large round scar left on the concrete.