"Small wonder!" said my friend the police reporter. "Look at what the papers have handed him! I'll tell you what happens: some city editor sends a kid reporter to get a story about Hinky Dink. The kid comes and sees Kenna, and doesn't get anything out of him but monosyllables. He goes back to the office without any story, but that doesn't make any difference. Hinky Dink is fair game. The kid sits down to his typewriter and fakes a story, making out that the Alderman didn't only talk, but that he talked a kind of tough-guy dialect—'deze-here tings'—'doze dere tings'—all that kind of stuff. Can you blame the little fellow for not talking?"
I could not.
But he talked to us, and freely. The police reporter told him we were "right." That was enough.
As the "red-light district" of Chicago used to be largely in the First Ward before it was broken up, I asked the Alderman for his views on the segregation of vice versus the other thing, whatever it may be. (Is it dissemination?)
"I'll tell you what I think about it," he replied, "but you can't print it."
"Why not?" I asked, disappointed.
"Well," he returned, "I believe in a segregated district, but if I'm quoted as saying so, why the woman reformers and everybody on the other side will take it up and say I'm for it just because I want vice back in the First Ward again. I don't. It doesn't make any difference to me where you have it. Put it out by the Drainage Canal or anywheres you like. But I believe you can't stamp vice out; not the way people are made to-day. They never have been able to stamp it out in all these thousands of years. And, as long as they can't, it looks to me like it was better to get it together all in one bunch than to scatter it all over town.
"Now I know there's a whole lot of good people that think segregation is a bad thing. Well, it is a bad thing. Vice is a bad thing. But there it is, all the same. A lot of these good people don't understand conditions. They don't understand what lots of other men and women are really like. You got to take people as they are and do what you can.
"One thing that shocks a lot of these high-minded folks that live in comfortable homes and never have any trouble except when they have to get a new cook, is the idea of commercialized vice that goes with segregation. Of course it shocks them. But show me some way to stop it. Napoleon believed in segregation and regulation, and a lot of other wise people have, too.
"Here's the way I think they ought to handle it: they ought to have a district regulated by the Police Department and the Health Department. Then there ought to be restrictions. No bright lights for one thing. No music. No booze. Cut out those things and you kill the place for sightseers. Then there ought to be a law that no woman can be an inmate without going and registering with the police, having her record looked up, and saying she wants to enter the house. That would prevent any possibility of white slavery. Personally, I think there's a lot of bunk about this white-slave talk. But this plan would fix it so a girl couldn't be kept in a house against her will. Any keeper of a house who let in a girl that wasn't registered would be put out of business for good and all. Men ought not to be allowed to have any interest, directly or indirectly, in the management of these places.