Gambling History - Part 1
From TV programs such as Wheel of Fortune to daily
point spreads in newspaper sports pages, the gambling
spirit is everywhere in American life. Casinos have
spread beyond tawdry, out-of-the-way locations such as
Las Vegas to Indian reservations and cities across the
country. Riverboats, with their video poker machines
and blackjack tables, ply the nation's great rivers
again, as their predecessors did over a century ago.
The gambling and casino boom has breached even the
citadel of middle-class respectability in the form of
hotels such as Las Vegas' Circus Circus and Treasure
Island, featuring "family" entertainment
within yards of slot machines. Variously blamed on
de-industrialization, a decline in the American work
ethic, and a lapse in moral values, gambling's
something-for-nothing mentality has become an
important part of the American consciousness. Long a
refined diversion for the wealthy and a desperate last
chance for the poor, it is perhaps only technology and
style that separates twentieth century gambling from
its primeval counterparts.
Gambling, the betting or staking of something of
value, is as old as humankind itself. Betting on
horses began as soon as the animals were domesticated,
and gambling's ties to sports date back as far as 1450
B.C.E., when Egyptians competed against each other in
jumping, wrestling, and ball game competitions,
centuries before the first Greek Olympics. As many as
250,000 spectators watched, and gambled on, chariot
races in Rome's Circus Maximus. Gospel writers Matthew
and Mark report that Roman guards gambled for Jesus'
garments following his crucifixion, "casting lots
upon them, what every man should take." Towns
challenged towns in medieval archery matches, and
gambling was an ever present accompaniment as sports
competitions became organized in Europe during the
Renaissance and early Modern periods.
In the New World, special days were set aside by the
Northwest Coast Indians for "mook-te-lo," or
wagering on games. The Iroquois played a betting game
called "hubbub" with dice made from peach
stones. Participants hit themselves on the chest and
thighs, crying "hub hub hub" so loudly that
they could be heard a quarter-of-a-mile away according
to a contemporary report. The first deck of cards to
be manufactured in the Western hemisphere was made by
Columbus' crew in 1492. According to the story, the
sailors threw their European cards overboard because
they believed gambling was bringing them ill fortune
during their long voyage. Once ashore in the New
World, they regretted their impulsive behavior and
made substitute decks from the large leaves of the
copas tree. Lotteries, begun in England in 1566, were
approved for the new Jamestown settlement in Virginia
by King James I in 1612. Proceeds were used to sustain
the struggling colony until the king withdrew his
permission in 1621.
The Puritans first objected to popular recreations
like gambling during the seventeenth century because
they violated Sabbatarian principles. In the Puritan's
distinctive mixture of capitalism and Calvinism,
gambling was a double sin, a violation of the Lord's
day of rest and an ungodly diversion from work the
other six days of the week. Puritans had little
success convincing Europeans to stop betting but they
established strict statutes against gambling and other
worldly distractions in their early American
settlements beginning in 1638.
Lotteries were unnecessary appeals to providence,
according to Puritan minister Increase Mather, who
believed that "God determines the cast of the
dice or the shuffle of the cards, and we are not to
implicate His providence in frivolity." The
Puritans' holy opposition to gambling faded in the New
England colonies during the eighteenth century, and
they had never had much influence on mid-Atlantic and
southern colonists, but the Puritan association of
gaming and wagering with alcoholism, idleness, and
ungodliness became a recurrent theme in numerous
anti-gambling crusades during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
Lotteries were a common recourse for
eighteenth-century American colonists in search of
funds for wars, schools, charities, or other purposes.
George Washington himself bought and sold lottery
tickets, and Benjamin Franklin spoke in favor of a
lottery to finance the purchase of a cannon battery
for Philadelphia in 1748. In 1758, once-Puritan
Massachusetts authorized a lottery to fund an
expedition against Canada during the French and Indian
Wars.
Gambling was still considered a vice, however, and
during the first days of the American Revolution,
various colonial "committees of safety"
opposed gambling as a means of galvanizing public
morality. General Washington, a frequent gambler at
cards, forbade gambling among his soldiers when it
distracted them from their military duties, even
during the grueling winter at Valley Forge. However,
the Continental Congress sponsored a national lottery
in 1777, promoting it as a contribution "to the
great and glorious American cause," only to be
disappointed by the proceeds because the loosely-knit
colonists failed to gamble as freely as their more
sophisticated English counterparts.
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