100 years ago in The Record
Monday, Dec. 3, 1917
Rensselaer County sheriff William P. Powers defends his record on slot machines and other forms of gambling in a letter published in today’s Record.
Powers, a Republican, is limited by state law to one three-year term that ends on December 31. His letter is a response to a December 1 letter signed “Bunked,” that accused city and county officials equally of ignoring the spread of slot machines through Troy after last month’s elections.
“We have confiscated and destroyed upward of 150 slot machines which aggregated in value more than $5,000.00,” Powers writes, “Our efforts in this direction were not spasmodic; did not happen ‘some weeks’ before election and did not terminate after election.
The sheriff recalls that on November 24, “we confiscated seven slot machines, and our plans included several others. But telephones were pressed into service by the machine owners, and further raids were frustrated.”
Powers claims that “during the last three years this office confiscated and destroyed more gambling paraphernalila than was ever before destroyed by all administrations (collectively) since Troy was organized as a city. For verification of this statement ask those who owned or tried to operate slot machines during this regime. The ‘nice’ things they say about us will probably be unfit to print. There’s a rea- son.”
On the same page, “H.N.M.” writes that “Gambling is always going on in Troy, gambling is always going on in Albany, Watervliet, Hohowis, Petrograd or wherever human beings live and give manifestation of inborn evil, and the jurist does not live who could draw up a law whose enforcement could suppress all its forms.”
H.N.M. observes that “every time the ‘ lid goes down’ the same effect as occurs from the operation on a stew takes place and [gambling addicts] literally seethe. Then Mr. Layer, injured martyr of reformists, slips them the word how they can gamble and not be detected, and each and every one would gladly shin a tree to follow his instructions.
“Nine cases out of ten, he needs only a speaking acquaintance, pad and pencil for a business equipment, and it is a poor saloon, indeed, that at these times cannot transform itself to a one-hour- every-minute aquarium and share in the odds-layer’s harvest.”
Highly-publicized raids are counterproductive “when only ‘ from fryingpan into the fire’ can be the logical result of the aforedescribed fish whom by so doing you seek to help.” But as for slot machines, “anything which can nip in the bud the bloom that has to be considered a necessary evil should be exercised with decision and dispatch.”