William Hale Thompson - Chicago major in the 1920's.

The popular contemporary author Bill Bryson describes 1920's Chicago mayor William Hale Thompson [1869-1944] as an interesting political figure.

Apart from the fact that he was apparently an idiot: "The worst you can say about Bill is that he's stupid", remarked one of his cheerful supporters. It gets much worse [for example, he led movements to get rid of "un-American" books in municipal libraries], but the cherry on the reputational doo-doo-cake must be: "He also claimed, for reasons not easily discerned, that King George V of Britain was planning to annex Chicago, and promised that if elected he would find the king and 'punch him in the snoot'".
[Cited from Bill Bryson: One Summer, America 1927. Transworld Publishers 2013. Pages 438-440.]

Now any man that is willing to say, "I'm going to find the British king, and punch him in the snoot" can't be boring.

I'm still perusing the Wikipedia page on Thompson, but I wonder if there are any other tidbits, views or even historical comparisons (I have a feeling he would have been banned from Twitter by now) regarding this former mayor of Chicago?

And I still don't know why he threatened to punch King George V in the "snoot"?
His Wiki-entry leaves me none the wiser.
en.wikipedia.org...

Interesting, OK he never became unpopular due his "patriotic" book censorship, not ending Prohibition (as he promised, but wasn't entitled to anyway), or wanting to give the British monarch a good ole knuckle-sandwich, or maybe that Chicago already had race riots in 1919.

Nope, his popularity waned posthumously:

Though Thompson was a popular figure, his popularity collapsed after his death, when two safe-deposit boxes were found in his name containing over $1.8 million ($26.7 million today) in cash and bonds

en.wikipedia.org...

Imagine how poor King George V must have reacted to a Chicago major wanting to punch him in the snoot.

Lying awake at night and wondering:

"Whatever did we do to those people to make them so savagely vexed?
Just goes to show: once the Empire goes, so does the civility".

The Most Corrupt Public Official In Illinois History: William Hale Thompson
😎💫

In 1993, a panel of distinguished historians named Chicago’s own William Hale Thomspon the worst mayor in American history. Illinois always deserves to win any worst-politician sweepstakes, but why was Thompson the baddest of our bad lot?

Because he was Al Capone’s man in City Hall.