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  • 2016-11-08 (xsd:date)
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  • Cubs Win, the Woman's In! (en)
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  • In November 2016, an image of notorious gangster Al Capone was circulated on social media along with a quote ostensibly uttered by him, positing that the chances of the United States' electing a woman president were as slim as the chances of the Chicago Cubs' winning the World Series: This quote was nothing more than a joke started in the wake of the Cubs' finally bringing home their first world championship in over a century less than a week before the 2016 presidential election. Not only is there no record of Al Capone's ever having uttered such a thing, but it makes little historical sense that he would have. The Cubs were the long-running butt of baseball jokes for a very long time because (until 2016) not only had they failed to win a World Series since 1908 (by far the longest championship drought of any Major League team), they hadn't even appeared in one since just after the end of World War II. But Al Capone died in early 1947, at which time the Cubs hadn't established their reputation for World Series futility. The Cubs won two World Series and ten pennants during Capone's lifetime, and just a year before the gangster's passing, Chicago had both brought home the National League pennant and come extremely close to securing another world's championship — they took the 1945 World Series to the maximum seven games before falling to the Detroit Tigers in that year's Fall Classic. It's possible Capone was skeptical about a woman's chances of being elected President of the United States (not much of a stretch, given that women didn't secure the right to vote until 1920), but there's no record of his having made the above-displayed when pigs fly comment. Similar quotes connecting the Cubs to Hillary Clinton were circulated in the wake of Chicago's historic 2016 World Series victory. On 3 November 2016, the web site Daily Kos published a short article with an almost identical title to the alleged Capone quote: A woman president? Ha! The Cubs will win the World Series first. Similar messages were also circulated on Twitter: (en)
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