state convention. Neither Thompson nor Deneen themselves were standing for election to their respective offices during the 1928 campaign. Deneen's faction was considered less corrupt than the Thompson faction, but Thompson's faction had the advantage of his Cook County political organization. At the time of the campaign, Thompson's political organization controlled every office in the city, county, and state governments except for one municipal clerkship and the office of Secretary of State, the latter seat held by Emmerson. The State's Attorney for Cook County prosecutes public corruption cases in Cook County. Thompson threatened to resign if Crowe lost the state's attorney. "I don't have to stand this abuse," Thompson quipped. Most of Chicago's newspapers, however, urged for Crowe's defeat, one news account describing his office as "the overlordship of Chicago crime and vice." The Deneen faction charged that Thompson and Crowe had done little to combat crime, observing that none of the bombings had led to a conviction, and none of the shotgun or machine gun murders during the months prior to the election had been solved. Deneen's forces proclaimed that, if elected, they would improve conditions in Chicago. Small, Thompson, and Crowe, accused the Deneen faction of exaggerating the amount of crime, and accused their opponents of setting bombs in their own homes, and for sending Federal prohibition agents to Chicago to discredit Thompson. Most of Chicago's newspapers supported the reformers in the Deneen faction. Some out-of-town papers were less sanguine; The Washington Post lamented that the primary was fundamentally a choice between "which particular gang [was] going to harvest the $100 million a year of graft" flowing from liquor bootlegging and gambling. The Democrats had few primary contests during the 1928 election, and contented themselves with a few jabs at the Republicans. They were generally considered to have little to lose, given the enmity and strife taking place in the Republican campaign. Response to the violence As the violence heightened, the focus of the voters turned to crime and Prohibition. Chicago's violent campaign drew attention and scorn from out-of-town newspapers. In the days before the election, a Federal grand jury was sworn in with instructions that it would be called upon to protect the voters of Chicago under the federal statutes about intimidation or conspiracy to prevent a citizen from exercising his right to vote. Special federal Prohibition officers swarmed into the city after the Deneen and Swanson