Libel

Political epithets, accustomed as they are to being taken with a counter-epithet or with a laugh, seldom provoke a libel suit. When a senator or a mayor calls a man a stool pigeon, a snooper, a boodler, a buffoon, a scoundrel, a scalawag or a person weaned on a pickle, he apparently considers himself safe from libel proceedings. And, in legislative chambers, he is. But in a mayor's chair he is not.

As everyone knows, Mayor William Hale Thompson of Chicago called Superintendent of Schools William McAndrew "a stool pigeon of King George" and other defaming phrases, both before and after suspending him as superintendent (TIME, Oct. 10 et seq.). Mr. McAndrew treated the whole affair with contempt, walked out of his "insubordination" trial by the school board like a man leaving an ineffectual burlesque show. Perhaps contempt meant "too proud to fight," perhaps there was no great glory in being the martyr of a burlesque show; so last week Mr. McAndrew turned on Mayor Thompson with a legal rapier, sued him for libel for $250,000.

Said Mr. McAndrew's lawyer, Francis X. Busch: "We are going to demonstrate that the Mayor of Chicago cannot defame a man's character without being made to answer for it. The charges now on hearing before the school board are not only ridiculous but are a collection of damnable lies, except the first in which he was accused of having an educational policy. This he confessed." Typical charges against Mr. McAndrew are that he cut pictures of George Washington out of history books, that he removed "Spirit of '76" lithographs from the walls of Chicago schools.