Abstract
When voters in New York approved a constitutional amendment in November of 2013, allowing for construction of seven casinos in the state, it was the culmination a long-running and determined effort by the gaming industry to break open the New York market. The ballot language was dubiously worded in favor of the proposal, and the New York Times termed the effort to expand gambling as “a textbook case of how well financed interests” can bend the legislative and democratic processes to their advantage. 1 Yet the embrace of casino development by 57 percent of New York voters should have come as no surprise, as gambling has traveled a remarkable path of expansion since the late nineteenth century. Gambling has been transformed from a condemned, illegal, and deviant behavior into a legal and widely practiced form of leisure. Gambling stands as the basis for a booming private industry while providing an important element of government revenue. Gambling expansion has become a difficult force to resist.
This long process of transformation from deviancy to normalcy fits with the concept of “moral passage,” described in 1967 by sociologist and scholar of alcohol prohibition, Joseph R. Gusfield. The moral passage of gambling, the “transition of the behavior from one moral status to another,” has been a contested and complex process spanning more than a century and covering much of the country. 2 Yet all along, New York and Nevada have been at the center of the process. The four books reviewed here, two focused on New York and two focused on Nevada, offer elaborations of gambling as an element of public life, and of the complicated interactions between gambling, politics, and society.
As the history of gambling in New York reveals, when a large number of people are gathered close together in cities, gambling is sure to arise. The history of gambling in Nevada, meanwhile, reveals that if gambling is offered openly and legally in a far-flung, sparsely populated location, large numbers of people are brought to gather close together. In either case, the heavy presence of gambling in a community presents significant challenges to cohesion and civic life. As Brooklyn racetrack operators, Harlem numbers barons, Reno city boosters, and Las Vegas Casino owners pursued their own legitimacy, both legally and socially, they produced strong reactions from those who sought to suppress gambling, to circumscribe gambling within certain limits, or to set other community priorities.
The possibilities that gambling creates for community and the limitations that gambling imposes upon community are steady themes running through the four books considered here. And while the study of the history of American gambling is a limited field, the historical process of gambling’s moral passage is greatly enhanced by these four works.
Whether gambling was legal or illegal, Americans have long been intent on placing bets. The most important form of gambling in the late nineteenth century was betting on horse races. As Steven Riess makes clear in his meticulously researched book, The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime, horse racing in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York was wildly popular, immensely profitable, and intensely political. Popular racetracks in Brooklyn, in the Bronx, and upstate at Saratoga attracted upward of twenty thousand spectators, and betting was heavy, both at the tracks, and at illegal off-track poolrooms. Riess proceeds through a season by season history, paying particular attention to legislative and legal battles over the status of horse racing and related betting.
Politically, as Riess describes, “the Democrats backed the racetracks and the gamblers, while the Republicans opposed the wagering, the crooked racetracks, and the political corruption of the Democratic machines” (p. 123). While culturally, within that political framework, “the antiracetrack coalition” was made up primarily of Methodists and Presbyterians, “who sought to use their political influence to regulate social behavior,” and to “supervise individual morality in conformity with traditional American values.” However, Catholics and Jews “did not believe that the state should regulate personal conduct” (p. 125).
Yet Democratic supporters of New York racing were sometimes divided among themselves as politicians connected to track operators and jockey clubs occasionally aligned with anti-gambling moralists in opposition to illegal off-track betting in parlors known as poolrooms. “They despised poolroom operators as parasites” (p. 176). Meanwhile, the patrons of these poolrooms were cast as fiends, drawn from the lower classes, and with no real interest in racing as a sport. But the poolrooms had political advocates of their own, chief among them Manhattan Assemblymen “Big Tim” Sullivan. A major Tammany figure of the period, Sullivan was active in off-track gambling. His Center Street saloon had a second-floor poolroom, and as the head of the Gambling Trust, he determined who entered the business. While efforts against the poolrooms met with occasional success in the legislature, attempts, both genuine and farcical, to police the parlors out of existence had only limited and temporary impact. After a decade of repeated crackdowns, a reported four hundred poolrooms operated in and around New York City at the turn of the century (p. 213).
Riess maintains a narrow focus, and never offers a broad explanation or theory of New York life and politics during the period. Nevertheless, The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime will be of genuine value to those studying these topics. Any account of Democratic New York politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century must make mention of Tammany Hall’s connection to gambling. Reiis’ work on horse racing reveals just how deeply involved key Tammany figures were in the industry. They were not simply accepting envelopes stuffed with cash as they covered their eyes. Tammany’s top men poured legislative effort, large sums of money, and daily energy into horse racing and horse gambling, as a matter of politics, business, and leisure.
Horse racing stands as a good starting point for the study of gambling in contemporary American life. In particular, the late nineteenth-century debates over horse racing highlight how gambling as a practice has typically relied on a connection to a legitimate and valued activity to preserve its own existence. Horse racing improves the breed, and subsidizes agricultural fairs, and if there is attendant gambling, then so be it. Yet gambling for gambling’s sake, as featured in the off-track poolrooms, is pernicious and should be suppressed. The racetrack itself, as a special and enclosed space where gambling is appropriate and allowable, in contrast to the public nature of the street where gambling must be prevented, or the clandestine nature of the back-of-the bar poolroom where gambling must be rooted out, offers an early illustration of the ongoing effort to confine gambling within prescribed spaces. Meanwhile those who traveled to racetracks and paid the admissions fee were presumed to be of a class that gambled while maintaining control of themselves. Those who gambled in backrooms and on street corners, however, were presumed to be of a class in need of external controls upon their behavior.
Reformers succeeded in halting horse racing during 1911 and 1912. The sport came back, however, and so did betting. Horse racing maintained a steady presence on the New York gambling scene during the twentieth century, but its popularity as a form of gambling was eventually eclipsed by the lottery style game known as “numbers.” The new game appeared in the early 1920s, and for those in the market for inexpensive bets at decent odds, the “numbers” had natural appeal. In Playing the Numbers, Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, and Graham White acknowledge that the game’s origins are something of a mystery, yet they point to Casper Holstein, an immigrant from the Danish West Indies, as the game’s originator. From 1913 to 1920, Holstein was a bookmaker, arrested several times, taking bets at taverns and racetracks. But “around 1920 or 1921,” he had “the flash of genius that allowed for the invention of the Clearing House numbers as it was played throughout the 1920s.” The game supplanted the other low stakes number-guessing games, typically called “policy.” This new “wonderfully elegant scheme” relied on the published figures of the New York Clearing House to generate the winning three-digit number of the day. The betting public could choose any number between 000 and 999 in hopes of winning $600 for a $1 bet. The bettors could check the winning figures in the daily newspapers, and “for ordinary residents of Harlem, numbers was a game that seemed to be transparently fair and that offered the possibility of converting a ten-cent bet into a substantial sum of $60” (p. 63).
In its earliest days, the game was most popular among both Spanish- and English-speaking immigrants from the Caribbean. But around 1924, it broke out into the wider Harlem mainstream and became a conspicuous feature of daily life for many generations to come. The popularity of the game in Harlem soon caught the notice of the police, politicians, and organized crime figures, and the game was eventually co-opted, largely through violence and extortion, and subsequently spread to white working-class areas of the city. While control of the game was frequently contested, the basic game itself, betting on a daily three-digit number for payouts of around 600 to 1, stood as the mainstay of gambling among blacks and working-class whites in eastern cities from Washington, D.C., to Boston from the 1930s to the 1970s.
Playing the Numbers is focused on Harlem during the period of the game’s inception up through its co-optation by white organized crime. The authors place the numbers game squarely within the context of the history of black business enterprise, and their fully elaborated portrait of this gambling game and the people involved in it gives account of an economic institution that was broadly and deeply interwoven in everyday life for black New Yorkers. As the authors explain, Numbers gambling was the most successful enterprise in Harlem between the wars. Not only did it employ thousands of black men and women, but money from the illegal game found its way into every crack and crevice of the black metropolis. (p. 219)
The game was in the atmosphere in upper Manhattan during the 1920s, and many Harlem residents spent both waking and sleeping hours in search of lucky numbers, as the content of dreams and chance encounters in the street frequently offered inspiration for betting practices. “Numbers were everywhere: on subway cars and license plates, and in the form of baseball scores, commodity prices, telephone numbers, even hat sizes” (p. 72).
The immense popularity of the game brought wealth and prominence to the men and women known as “bankers,” who controlled the bet taking operations. Holstein was the most notable among them, and he strenuously pursued respectability, for both himself and the Harlem community. He was deeply involved in the Monarch Lodge of the fraternal organization, the Elks. The group provided educational programs and promoted community services extensively in Harlem. Holstein was “the black philanthropist in Harlem, probably in America—the only African American with very deep pockets and a willingness to spend money on his fellow citizens” (p. 154). He gave abundant support to the Garveyite movement, and to his homeland in the Virgin Islands. Holstein’s money financed artistic and literary endeavors during the Harlem Renaissance, and he gave generously to Fisk University, Howard University, and the National Urban League.
Overall, as far as Holstein’s economic relationship with Harlem and black America is concerned, it is likely that he took out more than he put in. Yet, socially, culturally, and politically, he sought to enhance community cohesion, and he endeavored to bolster civic institutions. And Holstein was not alone; many Harlem bankers were “champions of black enterprise and fervent believers in the importance of the black community in northern cities” (p. 213). Yet, despite their wealth and generosity, the numbers bankers’ field of action as community leaders was significantly limited by their status as illegal operators. Holstein himself was kidnapped and extorted in 1928, and in 1935, he was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. He died in poverty in 1944. Despite his drift into obscurity, over two thousand people attended his funeral on 115th street in Manhattan.
The decline of Holstein as an eminent figure in Harlem gambling coincided with increasingly aggressive incursions into the business by white organized crime. Such attempts were nothing new, and black operators and customers had engaged in a variety of collective actions to keep the numbers business in black hands during the decade. Yet the repeal of Prohibition left white crime actors in search of new business opportunities, and the enhanced efforts to take over the game proved overwhelming. A sustained black resistance to white control produced a modus vivendi within which black numbers workers exercised autonomy in local operations, but whites took control of the game at the top levels.
Playing the Numbers does not follow the numbers into the postwar period, during which the game became closely associated with organized crime, and organized crime is cast as a national conspiracy and a genuine threat to the well-being of the country. The size of the numbers economy, and the extensive police corruption involved in the game, eventually brought a governmental response in the form of state-run lotteries in New York in 1967 and in every state in the Northeast by 1977. The numbers game was the clearly announced target for these lotteries, and as the process of changing state laws unfolded, black communities in the urban North demanded the right to legally operate their own gambling. Political leaders pointed to the game’s origination in Harlem, and the vast employment structures involved in illegal gambling in black communities, to argue that legal numbers gambling should include significant business opportunities for black gamblers. Yet, as the lottery in New York crossed the line to legitimacy, the illegal numbers gambling bureaucracy of Harlem was not brought along with it.
Since 1967, government lotteries have spread across the nation. Lottery play is now a feature of everyday life for many Americans. As lottery monies are an element of state revenue, lottery advertising and promotion often appeals to a sense of civic duty to encourage play, and thus, lottery gambling has become increasingly normative. A handful of corporations dominate the lottery technology and services industry and they have had remarkable influence over the process by which lotteries spread from one state to another. The combination of corporate profit motive, together with the drive to generate state revenue, has made lottery expansion nearly irresistible All of this has de-stigmatized gambling in general, and an increasing number of jurisdictions have opened themselves to casinos as a potential source of economic development.
The casino industry developed the maturity and sophistication to influence politics and policy around the nation after many decades of practice as a mainstay of the Nevada economy. The state of Nevada has a long libertarian tradition, and during the early twentieth century, many behaviors and practices, which were illegal in much of the nation, were legal and tolerated in Nevada. The first Nevada city to make significant use of the state’s liberal laws to attract outsiders was Reno. In Reno’s Big Gamble, Alicia Barber offers a seamless blend of public history and scholarly analysis to explore Reno’s past, with a central focus on efforts to shape the city’s reputation. For Reno, the matter of reputation presented significant difficulties, as from early on Reno tended to attract visitors through the availability of practices and activities that were considered disreputable elsewhere. Beyond requiring a delicate balancing act in projecting an enticing while respectable image, “the industries that earned Reno the most national attention were the very sort of industries that tended to detract from community stability” (p. 251).
The city first gained national attention for providing easy and quick access to divorce, as many well-to-do Americans took advantage of the state’s minimal residency requirements to end their marriages. Reno also gained plenty of attention for hosting the heavyweight championship boxing match between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries in 1910. At the time, Nevada was one of only a handful places that allowed prizefighting. However, ultimately, Nevada’s lax gambling laws proved to be the most significant tourist draw.
Not all residents of the city fully embraced wide open gambling. Many cautioned against gambling’s corrosive effects. As Reno’s Anti-Gambling League explained, gambling “ruins those who would otherwise be useful and respectable citizens, keeps away those who would help build up the community, and attracts the vicious, dissolute and unworthy” (p. 72). Such arguments proved persuasive for a time, and the state of Nevada outlawed gambling in 1909. Yet, in 1931, with the depression in full swing, Nevada reversed course, and enacted a broad legalization of gambling. The position of gambling in the state was further solidified in 1945 when the state established a new tax on the gross earnings of all casinos and thus interlocked the health of the gambling economy with that of the state government.
While gambling as an activity was increasingly secure in Reno’s postwar economy, Reno’s place as the state’s top tourist destination was not. The building of the Hoover Dam and the growth and development of Los Angeles created an opportunity for Las Vegas to capitalize on the state’s liberal laws. By 1960, Las Vegas’ population of 64,000 had surpassed Reno’s population of 51,000. Las Vegas promoters also became increasingly aggressive, attempting to tap into the San Francisco market that was traditionally connected to Reno. In the eyes of Reno’s casino owners, according to Barber, “the solution to economic competition was clear: expansion.” In a process that involved little or no planning, casinos spread outward and upward, adding more tables and slots, and eventually they came to overwhelm Reno’s streetscape. “In the decades to come, Reno’s gaming community continued to embrace growth enthusiastically, prompted by an ever more desperate desire to remain competitive with Las Vegas, and putting more and more of Reno’s eggs in one basket” (p. 185).
During the mid- to late 1970s, a casino-driven building boom permanently changed the character of downtown as commercial establishments popular with locals were torn down and replaced with casinos. While the building frenzy cost a great deal in terms of “community heritage,” it did not succeed in keeping the pace with Las Vegas, and during the 1980s, Reno developed the reputation of being a “grind town.” Long gone were the days of high rollers, and many casinos came to rely on a high volume of low-end betters, offering them nickel slots and cheap food and drinks. City leaders had been too quick to accommodate the desires of outsiders, forever tearing down what they had built, as pursuit of tourist dollars took priority over community life. Barber concludes her study of reputation on a hopeful note, as she describes recent attempts by the city to chart a more moderated course, which includes less emphasis on gaming, heightened emphasis on Reno’s natural surroundings, and more balance between the desires of tourists and the needs of locals.
The postwar period indeed featured a remarkable reversal between Reno and Las Vegas, and Las Vegas undeniably surged ahead to become the national center of casino gambling. There has been no more perceptive observer of modern Las Vegas than Hal K. Rothman. In several of Rothman’s earlier works, principally Neon Metropolis and The Devil’s Bargain, he accounts for the development of the Las Vegas casino industry. As he explains in Neon Metropolis, “From 1946 to the 1970s the people who came to Las Vegas were largely of a piece.” They were people who had lived off of gambling in cities spanning the country, “who were always one step away from at least a scrape with the law.” They came to Vegas not just seeking money, but seeking legitimacy. “Only there could you, a gambler, be an upstanding citizen and a taxpayer.” 3 The successful casinos of postwar Las Vegas, The Dunes, The Sands, The Desert Inn, The Tropicana, and the Flamingo among them, were mob run. “Each of these casinos had ostensible owners and each had a mob front placed in a position of power within the casino to oversee the ‘proper’ distribution of profits, the one-for-us, three-for-the-hotel, one-for-the-government formula that has been codified into legend.” 4
Yet the mob outlook on investment in Vegas was decidedly short-sighted, born of the experience of being ever ready to pick up and run whenever the law changed or authorities closed in. As vacationing became a more common middle-class activity, and as the American appetite for leisure grew, “the limitations of the shoebox phase of mob financing became evident,” according to Rothman. 5 The decline of the mob presence in Vegas was set in motion by the passage of Nevada’s Corporate Gaming Act in 1967, which, by dropping the requirement that every stockowner in a casino have a license, opened the door to new sources of capital. Banks and corporations moved slowly at first, but during the 1970s, mob dominance of the casino industry gave way to corporate financing, and the people of Las Vegas quietly transferred their allegiance. Over time, publicly held corporations gradually folded gambling operations into broader offerings of entertainment tourism. “Sin City became more palatable and perhaps even less sinful.” 6
As gambling has traveled this long path to legitimacy, from mob casinos to corporate gaming, it has indeed succeeded in gathering together large numbers of people in the Nevada desert. Yet as Rothman notes in one of the articles featured in Playing the Odds, “proximity does not inherently promote the community that is a singularly desirable element of the mythic America” (p. 11). Edited by William deBuys, Playing the Odds is a collection of Rothman’s newspaper and magazine articles written between 1998 and his death in 2007. The essays offer a sense of Rothman’s remarkable presence in Las Vegas as a public intellectual. The works range over many of the topics that Rothman covers in his scholarship: tourism, the environment, development, public memory, and gambling. Yet the featured columns and articles stand not just as offerings of analysis, but as forthright acts of civic participation. Whether writing about water rights, the Super Bowl, taxes, or the casino floor, Rothman perpetually explores the possibilities for community, insisting that community is indeed possible, and that community can grow in the middle of the desert in a city built around gambling.
Ever a man for his town, at times Rothman adopts the voice of an outright city booster as he does in an article celebrating Las Vegas’ New Year’s Eve festivities, claiming, “As Las Vegas evolved from gambling to gaming to tourism to entertainment, we redefined the boundaries of leisure and gave it new meaning.” As for Las Vegas’ competitors, Rothman writes, “Nobody ever went to Las Vegas, and after seeing the Strip, decided they really had to see Foxwoods” (pp. 39-40). But just as Rothman sets a proud face against judgmental outsiders, he also takes his town to task with penetrating examination of how Las Vegas residents relate, and sometimes fail to relate, to one another. He cautions his fellow citizens against real estate speculation and overdevelopment. He implores his fellow Las Vegans to support a comprehensive mass transit system. He presses for enhanced public services supported by a revised tax structure that would move beyond overreliance on the sales tax and taxes generated from gambling.
While Rothman sees Las Vegas as a genuine community, he recognizes the many limitations that gambling has placed on Las Vegas. Prominent among them is the city’s inability to attract a major sports franchise. He writes, “A major league baseball, basketball, or football team would be the icing on the local and regional cake, proof positive that Las Vegas has truly arrived” (p. 109). But a web of factors spun from the city’s origination as a gambling destination has conspired to prevent any league from embracing Las Vegas. In the simplest sense, professional sports leagues are eternally on guard against having the outcomes of games corrupted by gambling, and placing a team in the national center of gambling activity might be asking for trouble.
The National Football League (NFL), with deep roots in the gambling past (many early team owners started as professional gamblers), has rejected its heritage and developed what Rothman describes as a pathological hatred for Las Vegas. The hostility has taken the form of refusing to broadcast advertisements for Vegas during league games and interfering with large Super Bowl parties held in the city. In Rothman’s interpretation, Las Vegas and the league are twins, mirror images of one another. Both rose from tawdry obscurity to the limelight as culture loosened and as they successfully negotiated the changes in American society from deferred gratification to instant adulation of the self.
The NFL is gripped by fear of its own past as the “only conceivable threat to its future,” and the people of Las Vegas should not expect a football team any time soon.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) would be the most suitable candidate, in that the league has the shortest tradition to buck by opening its doors to Vegas, while it also features several maverick owners who might be bold enough to pave the way. Yet, as Rothman notes, “Any owner who placed a team here would be running unusual risks. In Las Vegas, the only restraint comes from within. These days few NBA players demonstrate that ability.” News footage of “somebody’s $50 million investment stumbling out of a strip club at 9:00 a.m. . . . would confirm every bad stereotype about Las Vegas . . . and the NBA” (p. 110).
Despite its large population, the city itself may not be ready, both physically and culturally, for a major sports team. The long Nevada tradition of limited government and minimal public investment precludes the possibility of public finance for the construction of any suitable arena, stadium, or sports complex. The city, with its characteristic mix of retirees and new arrivals, would be unlikely to coalesce around a new team. “The city is so new that people here retain their hometown alliances” (p. 111). Most fans at a Las Vegas sporting event would likely be rooting for the visiting team, and those fans would not be sufficient in number to sell out a stadium.
Gambling has put many people in the same place, but it has not yet been able to point them all in the same direction, and perhaps it never will. In an article titled “Gambling and Technology,” Rothman notes, “the only thing stopping you from gambling on your cell phone is law; we all know that law is mutable” (p. 119). Such a combination of the inherent antagonism embedded in gambling, and the isolation produced by contemporary technology, would not bode well for community and cohesion in the future. It would be a far cry from Harlem gambling in the 1920s, which according to Shane White and his coauthors, “depended on people talking to one another” (p. 135). But the possibility is real, as the “mutability of law,” Rothman describes, particularly in the face of profit motive, has long been at the center of the narrative of gambling’s moral passage.
Yet as the process of gambling expansion proceeds, and as casino gambling creeps forward in New York State, advocates of community still hope to have their say. At present, residents of the city of Saratoga Springs, home to one of the state’s oldest and most beloved racetracks, well described in the work of Stephen Riess, have organized themselves against the development of a new casino in their town. The City Council has passed a unanimous resolution opposing plans for a new “destination resort casino,” claiming that it could “damage Saratoga’s vibrant downtown, and other local businesses, as well as its horseracing industry.” 7 The lesson of the destruction of “community heritage” in Reno, described by Alicia Barber, would be well applied in Saratoga Springs. Perhaps this horse racing city in upstate New York has already found that balance between gambling and community that has proved so elusive to so many for so long.
Footnotes
Notes
Author Biography
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