Gambling Activities Of The Chicago Area example essay topic

It is often in the consideration of criminal justice and the transgressions encompassed therein that we take the letter of the law for granted. The law, after all, is designed to be executed in this way. Legality or illegality are principles intended to exist with no gray area, with any possible capitulation in reasoning to be preempted by a set of unavoidable and certain determinations. But historical evidence is damning to this philosophy, as a perpetually shifting wave of prevailing cultural, social and moral norms is eternally demanding reconsideration of the law and its relevancy.

As public advocacy, political power, financial priority and any number of intangible factors change the way we perceive some of our laws, so too must the legal system change to reflect these impulses. Even today, for instance, forty years distance from passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Supreme Court is still wrangling over revision in the vogue of affirmative action. And a statistically significant portion of the population would argue that American law still must undergo much reformation in the interests of addressing racial inequities. Such is also a prominent argument in the debate over the War on Drugs, where concepts of morality, civic health and public decency come to blows with notions of privacy, self-determinism and information accuracy.

Both the issues of race and drug prohibition reveal a permanent legal condition wherein laws are drafted, maintained or disrupted by the influence of politically dominant ideologies rather than by the emergence of one absolute legal truth. Mark Haller, in his consideration of gambling in Chicago neighborhoods between the American Civil War and World War I, invites this assessment by taking a microcosmic approach to weighing the relationship between politicians and the gaming community. Presenting a concise history of the gambling practices that were widespread in the Chicago metropolitan area during the aforementioned period, Haller ties the legal treatment of gambling to the influence of political figures that were moved to govern less by true respect for the law than by personal prejudice, public pressure and economic gain. During the historical era that Haller considers, the two most important forums for gambling were the horse racing track-as well as its many satellite poolrooms-and the policy wheel, where private operators conducted daily lottery drawings.

Both were activities that required breakage of the technical law. And both were activities that transpired largely on the radar screen, enjoying a tolerance not reserved for most other illegal rackets. This occurred mostly to the credit of Chicago office-holders who either felt sympathetic to the desires of people to gamble or who, themselves, had relations to the gambling world. Haller cites the prominent Chicago mayor, Carter Harrison, as one whose personal inclinations sparked a leniency in him toward gambling operations. Such a high level proclivity granted some safety to the major gambling kingpins of the time, with a casual execution of the law trickling down to local officials and police officers as well.

Naturally, political prejudices inclining such friendly treatment of the gambling community extended beyond the simple intimacy that Harrison took into office with him. Some public officials, such as Ed Brennan, were themselves high-ranking gambling executives. Even if this trend was a blatant undermining of the law, outrage over malfeasance did not necessarily resonate with the public. Unlike most illegal activities, "betting and horses were part of the male subculture of urban politics.

For many politicians, gamblers were not criminals but a legitimate part of the sporting world". (Haller, 12). As a result, whatever logical or ethical devices employed to criminalize gambling on a documented level were fully supplanted by the far more concrete and executable will of the political machinery. And at many points, this way of conduction was very effective.

Gambling flourished in Chicago. Wealthy society gentlemen and manual laborers alike found pleasure, opportunity and ruin at the track while the policy wheel, by virtue of its affordability and profitability, accorded great warmth between the gambling poor and lottery officiators. Both customers and business owners, in this case, were benefiting from legal leniency. This type of general popularity created a unique relationship between gambling moguls and political figures wherein the former offered the prospect of public support to the latter in exchange for policy assistance and legal understanding.

As a result of this tradeoff, "gamblers provided loyal workers for political candidates, had a special interest in providing campaign contributions and enjoyed important neighborhood ties that gave them influence among voters". (Haller, 12). Politicians were not cozy with gamblers strictly by personal prejudice but often by the necessity to develop and serve constituencies. But this same imperative, at times, would effect the opposite leaning as well. At the call of public opinion, Chicago officials were also forced to take a far more proactive stance on enforcement. There had always been a morally, oftentimes, religiously devised voice of objection to the legal laxness toward gambling.

These forces stayed at bay for a time though because "those opposed to gambling had the symbolic victory that the law reflected their values-and in communities where they constituted the majority, they could use the law to exercise some control over public gambling. At the same time, given the decentralization of American criminal justice and the neighborhood control over police and the lower criminal courts, gambling often flourished in neighborhoods where it had public support". (Haller, 1). But in the earliest years of the twentieth century, the dissent rose in public stature as groups with moral and civil objections to gambling collated and organized. Manning a public campaign against gambling, such groups as the Citizens' Association took a cue from a national effort to root out the evil of sport-betting, raising a furor that spread from the newspapers to the streets. By 1904, the public pressure that this created took such a toll on public officials that the notoriously sympathetic Mayor Harrison folded, dropping a hammer of enforcement on gambling operations.

In the late aughts, a legal crackdown ensued that featured some of Chicago's most legendary moments of violence and street-level clashing. Police raids and power struggles became standard fare as politicians attempted to balance pressures from all sides. But the moral authority that provoked regulation and, therefore, conflict and legal subversion, could not alter a simple and important truth about gambling. As long as it had the capacity to draw customers and exist as a lucrative institution, gambling could never be fully eradicated. The Citizens' Associated succeeded for a short time in truly damaging the gambling activities of the Chicago area, even effectively removing the American Derby from Chicago until 1916. But "the most popular American sport, in short, depended upon illegal gambling activities and illegal cooperation of public officials".

(Haller, 5). So in the elimination of horse betting, organizations of public moral hygiene exiled a potent industry, taking livelihood and resource away from the Chicago area. For a public official to abide or take part in establishing a legal attack on gambling would represent a serious underestimation of the public's economic needs and interests. And for electoral purposes, economic concerns must come foremost in the minds of lawmakers. It could not be refuted that "in those wards in which gambling was popular, the endorsement of gambling entrepreneurs was important".

(Haller, 19.) The paradox in answering to public demands created a compromised passivity for public officials. Bowing to moral groups, the mayor's office molded Chicago's police force as a unit geared toward uprooting the city's firmly established gambling society. At the same time, resourceful gambling enterprises, with quiet acquiescence from political officials, imagined an innumerable array of ways in which to bypass, forego and ignore the mounting legal aggressiveness. Even under the weight of this aggressiveness, though, there was a relative degree of immunity to such enforcement. For all of its disruption and economic inconvenience, the nationwide drive to eliminate gambling was never able to popularize its cardinal tenet.

The legal system, in fact, refused to acknowledge claims of gambling's evilness. Though the raids of Chicago produced many arrests, convictions were rare. It was unusual that any evidence of legal wrongdoing could be presented against specific apprehensions. And in the event that the crime was designated, only a fine was levied. Jail time was an extremely unlikely result of an arrest for a gambling charge. This both illustrates the importance of political interests in determining law and, at the time, precipitated America's modern attitude toward gambling.

In many ways, now a century later, America's governance and America's gambling have developed a far closer relationship. The lottery drawings that were conducted under the pretense of tolerance-despite-illegality in early twentieth century Chicago, now are state run and broadcast daily on network television. So too are horse betting operations above ground, legally accepted and telecast from profitable and highly visible establishments like Las Vegas casinos. In fairness, gambling still exists illegally, as rings of underworld betting thrive in the field of sporting events such as NFL football and professional boxing. But the present outcome in the battle over public policy with respect to gambling, sporting a broadly proliferated legal status, illuminates the many pressures that go into crafting our laws.