On August 29, 1927, Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools William McAndrew was suspended from his position by the Chicago Board of Education pending an administrative hearing by the board, being charged with "insubordination" for opposing a school board action that he believed would amount to reviving patronage in the school system. The administrative hearing, which was widely dubbed a "trial", was to determine whether he was guilty, and should therefore be removed from his office. The administrative hearing, which attracted great national media fascination and derision, took place over the course of several months, and saw McAndrew tried for counts of insubordination, and an additional count of conduct incompatible with and in violation of his duty (stemming from allegations of unpatriotic actions). The hearing was effectively a show trial. After the first several weeks of the hearing, McAndrew and his legal team refused to attend any further sessions and he was tried in absentia. The school board found McAndrew guilty by an 8–2 vote on March 21, 1928. In December 1929, the Superior Court of Cook County voided this, ruling that McAndrew had not been insubordinate, and that the school board had no authority to charge McAndrew for being "unpatriotic".
The administrative hearing came following a reshaping of the board of education with appointments made by William Hale Thompson in the months after he took office in 1927. During his successful campaign against then-incumbent mayor William Emmett Dever in the 1927 Chicago mayoral election, Thompson had promised to oust McAndrew. During the campaign, Thompson had made regular allegations that McAndrew was a British agent sent by King George as part of a grand conspiracy to manipulate the minds of American children and set the groundwork for the United Kingdom to repossess the United States, with Dever being in on this alleged plot. Thompson's allegations came amid a national wave of anglophobic attacks on textbooks. After Thompson was elected mayor, he sought to quickly oust McAndrew, who had nine months left before his contract as superintendent expired. State law stated that the Chicago Board of Education could only dismiss McAndrew after an administrative hearing before the board.
Background
William McAndrew had been appointed superintendent of Chicago Public Schools in 1924 by a Chicago Board of Education that had been reshaped by reform-minded mayor William Emmett Dever's appointees. The schools had been tarnished by mismanagement under Dever's predecessor William Hale Thompson. During his tenure as superintendent, McAndrew was a polarizing figure, facing tense criticism from teacher's unions and others for some of the reforms he fought to implement, but also receiving national praise.
In the 1920s, the United States experienced a wave of anglophobic criticisms in the of textbooks being "pro-British" and "unamerican". Among the leading forces of these criticisms was the Knights of Columbus.
William Hale Thompson's attacks on McAndrew during the 1927 mayoral election
During his successful 1927 campaign against incumbent Democratic mayor William Emmett Dever, Republican nominee William Hale Thompson (the former mayor) alleged that McAndrew was a British agent sent by King George as part of a grand conspiracy to manipulate the minds of American children and set the groundwork for the United Kingdom to repossess the United States, and accused the "left-handed Irishman" Dever of being part of the plot. Thompson based these claims on McAndrew being critical of such artworks as Archibald Willard's The Spirit of '76 and allowing the use in schools of textbooks which Thompson alleged were unpatriotic and full of, "treason tainted histories". Thompson's attacks on McAndrew were a major factor in his successful mayoral campaign.
Thompson accused McAndrew of conspiring with the University of Chicago's Charles Hubbard Judd and Charles Edward Merriam to "destroy the love of America in the hearts of children by encouraging teachers to attend special classes at 'Chicago University' at which the text was used which pictured George Washington as a rebel and a great disloyalist."