January 10, 1927.
My dear Mrs Bruère: --
Your copy to Miss Addams just arrived this noon -- !
As Miss Addams was going to another meeting, she asked me whether I would get this letter off to you. She looked the copy over carefully, and read it to a small group lunching with her. She feels that the boxed names are not any improvement, and does not feel that we can let it go out that way. She feels that the opinion which all of us share, that names will have to be omitted -- will have to stand.
The situation is unusually difficult here in Chicago. We have had the best city administration for the last four years that Chicago has ever had. We are backing Mayor Dever in the primaries in February and will be working for his [reelection] in April. He has made a genuine effort to do his best in the line of prohibition, though he is not a prohibitionist. He is for law enforcement. The men who are running in the Republican primaries and will oppose him in the election probably had control of city politics for the eight years preceding Dever, and gave us a very corrupt administration. They play to all sides of a question and in their previous election campaign many church people voted for them because of the wet dry issue, while at the same time the wets did the same. They would not hesitate to use statements which might seem to discredit the present city administration, and take them out of their connection. Mayor Dever closed thirteen hundred soft drink parlors in one of the early years of his administration until a court injunction enjoined him. He shook up the entire police department, dismissed many policemen, and transferred others.
We have made some other corrections on this copy which I hope you will understand. We wonder if it is fair to say that Chicago's bootleg industry is better organized than elsewhere. We have taken out that statement, but of course we do not know what facts you may have to support it. In cities where it may be better organized, it does not come to the surface as much as it does in Chicago possibly.
I am enclosing a copy of the telegram that father sent you last night. The operator was a bit hazy about some of the words, and read back to me "vindicated poppy" instead of syndicated copy, so you may have had trouble deciphering it.
We wish one of the committee might be at the Sunday meeting from Chicago. But I doubt if any of them can go. They did not know anything about the arrangement to syndicate [page 2] the material in the [newspapers] until your letter came.
It is hard to do things at such long distance. And of course it is very hard for anyone not in close touch with our local situation to realize how sensitive the whole thing is, coming right in the midst of a mayoralty campaign with complex issues, and of vital concern to Chicago.
You have a hard job at that end of the line, and it must be very difficult to correlate the material. We are sorry to have had to make it harder for you.
Sincerely yours,
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