Editor’s note

This week’s cover story on the slow but steady implementation of legalized video gaming brings to mind Gov. Adlai Stevenson’s war on slot machines more than 60 years ago. Stevenson “hated the double-standard morality of respectable citizens who denounced corruption but played slot machines in their private clubs,” according to biographer John Bartlow Martin. Even legislators had frequented Springfield’s wide-open Lake Club until Stevenson came to town. In the spring of 1950, Stevenson made his move, sending state police to shut down slot machines where local officials refused to act. In a few months state police entered about 75 towns and raided about 300 gambling houses.

In a speech in Washington that September Stevenson said state police raids had been heralded as a “crackdown.” But he regarded it as a “breakdown – the breakdown of local law enforcement, the breakdown of decency in government in many parts of the state, the triumph of greed, corruption and perhaps worst of all, cynicism. In ordering these raids I did not feel the joyful exhilaration of a knight in shining armor tilting with the forces of darkness. I felt more like a mourner at a wake. For something had died in Illinois – at least temporarily. And what has happened in Illinois is by no means unique.”

Stevenson’s crackdown enhanced his national reputation but had no lasting effect. Now Illinois is trying a different tack – legalization – which may do more to curb slot-machine gambling than law enforcement raids ever did. –Fletcher Farrar, editor and publisher