Former Illinois Gov. James Thompson, whose tenure from 1977 to 1991 was the longest in state history, died Friday at the age of 84. Thompson, a moderate Republican, spearheaded a number of major building and transportation projects in Chicago, including the expansion of the McCormick Place convention center and the new baseball stadium that helped prevent the White Sox from relocating to Florida. Neil Steinberg’s obituary in the Chicago Sun-Times notes that these projects were financed through “the largest increase up to that point in state history — which caused his popularity to suffer in his last term, particularly after he arranged for the legislature to double his own pension.”
Thompson got his start in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office, and he first achieved fame for prosecuting Lenny Bruce after the comedian was arrested for, as Steinberg writes, “holding up a photograph of a woman’s breast onstage at The Gate of Horn in 1962.” Thompson went on to work in the federal prosecutor’s office, and in 1970, Richard Nixon named him U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.
Thompson achieved prominence for successfully prosecuting federal judge Otto Kerner, the state’s former Democratic governor, for corruption. He also charged several associates and allies of Richard J. Daley, Chicago’s powerful Democratic mayor, and for being part of the investigation into Vice President Spiro Agnew that led to his resignation in 1973.
Thompson launched a bid for governor in 1976 against Democratic incumbent Dan Walker, whose populist politics brought him into conflict with Daley and saw the legislature block much of his agenda. However, while Thompson had no trouble winning his party’s nomination against Weight Watchers founder Richard Cooper (who, Steinberg writes, “had the self-destructive habit of lecturing farm wives on the campaign trail that they were eating too much pie”), Walker lost a close primary to the Daley-backed Secretary of State Michael Howlett. Walker beat Howlett in a 65-35 landslide, a showing that began a 26-year period of GOP rule that would only end after Rod Blagojevich’s 2002 win.
Illinois had opted to move its gubernatorial elections from presidential to midterm years, so Thompson was up again in 1978. The incumbent won 59-40 against Comptroller Michael Bakalis, but his final two campaigns would be far more eventful affairs.
In 1982, the Democrats nominated former Sen. Adlai Stevenson III, the son and namesake of the two-time presidential nominee from the 1950s. Stevenson declared that “government was for sale” under Thompson, and while polls showed Thompson easily winning, the contest surprisingly ended up being the closest gubernatorial election in state history. The vote tallies showed Thompson ahead 49.4-49.3—a margin of just over 5,000 votes, and Stevenson contested the result. Things were only settled when the Illinois Supreme Court struck down the recount law Stevenson was relying on in a four-to-three vote days ahead of the Republican's inauguration.
Thompson and Stevenson faced off in a 1986 rematch that would become infamous for reasons having nothing to do with either man. While Stevenson easily claimed the Democratic nod again, the lieutenant governor primary was won by a little-known candidate named Mark Fairchild, an ally of the notorious fringe figure Lyndon LaRouche, while a like-minded candidate won the nomination for secretary of state. Illinois at the time required candidates for governor and lieutenant governor to compete in separate primaries and be paired together on the general election ballot, but Stevenson said the day after the primary that he “will never run on a ticket with candidates who espouse the hate-filled folly of Lyndon LaRouche.”
Days later, Stevenson kept his word and he announced that he was running as an independent, a move backed by the mainstream Democratic statewide ticket. The former senator acknowledged at the time that this could hurt the Democratic Party because voters would need to split their ballots between him and the party’s mainstream nominees, but "that is a small price for a message that our Democratic Party is united ... against the madness of Lyndon LaRouche and his small band of neo-Nazis." Two months later, Fairchild declared himself the new Democratic gubernatorial nominee by “right of succession."
Ultimately, no candidate was the Democratic nominee for governor. Stevenson, who had created the Solidarity Party for this bid, lost his rematch to Thompson 53-40, with another 7% voting for the Democratic nominee "no candidate."
