End of Hamilton

On Appomattox Day, April 9, 1890, when Benjamin Harrison was the seventh Republican President of the U. S., two young Chicago lawyers named Robert McMurdy and Lester Coffeen opened a Republican social club in a three-story white stone house facing Lake Michigan. Last week to old Lawyer McMurdy, 77, and many another stanch Republican member came the news that the Hamilton Club, for four decades one of the most famous political fraternities in the U. S., was about to close its doors.

The Hamilton moved down into the crowded Loop when it was six years old, because Founder McMurdy believed that "it's easier to run a big thing that people want than a little thing they don't want." In 1910 the Hamilton made front-page national news when Roosevelt I declined to attend a banquet in his honor there because one of the other guests was Republican Boss William Lorimer, whom the U. S. Senate sensationally refused to seat on the ground that his election was fraudulent. In 1912, when Roosevelt I split the club even more bitterly by his Chicago Bull Moose Convention, President William Howard Taft laid the cornerstone of the Hamilton's $1,000,000 16-story clubhouse in the shadow of the First National Bank.

At its peak in the 20's, when both Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge had occasion to sleep in its soft beds, the Hamilton had 3,800 members. But Chicago Republicanism struck hard times two full years before the New Deal, when the late Anton J. Cermak swept clownish Republican Mayor William Hale (''Big Bill") Thompson out of City Hall. Membership dropped from 2,300 in 1930 to less than 1,000 in 1935. That year, owing $215,000 in back taxes and penalties and $86,666 back rent on its site to the estate of Supreme Court Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller, the Hamilton filed a petition to reorganize under Section 77B of the Federal Bankruptcy Act. Last year Illinois' onetime Attorney General Oscar Carlstrom. the club's 43rd president, desperately got its members' consent to delete the word "Republican" from the charter and open membership to Democrats, chief effect of which was that a number of crusty Republican diehards huffily resigned. Another last-minute expedient was to lease part of the clubhouse to Chicago's Interfraternity Council. But last week Democratic Federal Judge William H. Holly ordered the Hamilton to liquidate in favor of the Fuller estate, appointed Banker Fred E. Hummel as receiver.

Receiver Hummel granted the Hamilton's 46 resident members until the end of the month to vacate. Most puzzling problem of Manager B. E. O'Grady was what to do with a stuffed seated elephant, borrowed from the late President Lucius G. Fisher of the defunct Elephant Paper Bag Co., which has accompanied jubilant Hamilton crowds on their special train to Washington for every Republican inauguration since 1892.

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