Born in Massachusetts but moving to Chicago in young adulthood, William Dever became an alderman and prominently supported municipal ownership of mass transit.

Such enforcement was initially effective, but indifference from government at other levels limited its efficacy and the lower amount of alcohol increased violence among bootleggers, souring Chicagoans' view on it.

[2] When Kate noticed an ad stating that leather tanners could make good money in Chicago, the couple moved west.

[2][3][4] Dever was elected as a steadfast supporter of municipal ownership of the city's streetcar services amid the Chicago Traction Wars.

[3] Active campaigning on his part and strong support from Mayor Dunne secured Dever reelection with a comfortable margin.

[3] In 1907, Dever ran to fill the vacancy on the Superior Court of Cook County left after Judge Joseph E. Gary's death in office.

[3] Dever tied his candidacy to Dunne's re-election effort in the coinciding mayoral election and to the municipal ownership/traction issue.

[8][9] McSurely refused to take a stance on the traction issue, due to the fact that the court might soon review the Settlement Ordinances.

[3] Dever lost by a margin of roughly 13,000 of the nearly 340,000 votes cast, a result mirroring that of the coinciding mayoral race.

[3] In the spring of 1908, Dever ran a spirited race against seven candidates in the Democratic primary for Cook County state's attorney.

[3] Dever was backed by Carter Harrison IV, Edward F. Dunne, J. Hamilton Lewis, John Traeger, Joseph Le Buy (president of the Polish Businessmen's Democratic Club), the Chicago Commons caucus, and the Municipal Voters League.

[3] In 1916, due to the duration of a trial of William Lorimer for misappropriation of funds and conspiracy to defraud, which lasted two months before reaching acquittal, Dever had only three weeks to run a reelection campaign.

Jesse Holdom won a special election to finish Dever's unexpired term on the Cook County Superior Court.

In March 1921, Dever rejected the prosecution's motion to indefinitely postpone proceedings and set a prompt peremptory trial date.

[14][15] In 1923, Democratic party boss George E. Brennan selected Dever as having the best chance of defeating the incumbent, Mayor William "Big Bill" Thompson.

[17] Early into his mayoralty, Dever had begun making plans to improve the city's public transit, which he had previously made a central issue in his mayoral election campaign.

[18] On September 7, 1923, a shootout occurred took place at a South Side cafe between two rival groups of rum runners, killing one man.

However, he observed that bootleggers had been making under-the-table payments to public officials and law enforcement, thereby corrupting the government.

[18] By the end of the year, within only one hundred days of the inauguration of this effort, Chicago was being hailed as the "driest" city in the nation.

[18] While Chicago acquired a reputation as a "crime capital", a survey by Andrew A. Bruce (whose findings were unveiled in January 1927), contrarily, found that Chicago had no more crime than twenty other American cities the study looked at (including Kansas City, Los Angeles, Memphis, and St.

[22] This was in contrast to Dever's predecessor, William Hale Thompson, under whose previous mayoralty the schools had been tarnished by politics and fraud.

[24][25] On December 5, 1926, in a surprise move, Mayor Dever broke his neutrality amid a school board dispute, he sided with Alderman Leo M. Brieske's position that it would be preferable to see McAndrew replaced with a new superintendent.

On March 28, 1927, The New York Times wrote that, No work of Mayor Dever's Administration has been more praiseworthy than the improvement and extension of the public school system, the seat of enormous mismanagement and inefficiency under Thompsonism.