Nation of Gamblers (September 1994 | Volume: 45, Issue: 5)

Nation of Gamblers

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Authors: J. M. Fenster

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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Subject:

September 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 5

“I’m dad-gum disgusted at trying to police every half-square and every half-house,” Senator Huey Long told a radio audience in Louisiana in May 1935. “You can’t close gambling nowhere where the people want to gamble.”

Dozens of casinos in St. Bernard and Jefferson parishes reopened the next day, after a nearly five-month hiatus.

In California, Santa Anita Race Track was in the midst of its second season in the summer of 1935. As sleek as a luxury ocean liner, it brought horseracing to the West Coast, whereupon a network of bookmakers brought it to the neighborhoods. “1 had a wedding at four o’clock yesterday,” wrote a minister from Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. “It was with no little reluctance that the bride’s parents turned off the radio which bore the news of their horses.”

 
Back on the East Coast, Harlem ministers reported that gamblers couldn’t wait to go to church. Once there, they waited anxiously for the hymn to be announced, so that they could bet it, by its numerical designation, in the numbers game. 

Three weeks later, the police in Grand Rapids cracked down by put- ting Mrs. Eleanor Girodat in jail. She had organized a bingo game to raise money for the Catholic Daughters of America.

That one year, 1935, served as a trial for Huey Long’s supposition that “you can’t close gambling nowhere where people want to gamble.” Every other year in American history has tested it as well and, so far, proved it.

The lines were drawn tightest around gambling in America in the nineteenth century, when the betting crowd was small and maverick, pushing around in search of “a place where everybody can do what they please, just so they don’t interfere with other people’s rights,” as a Reno man later said. The best that could be said of professional gamblers in those days was that some of them had nice clothes.

Some of them did not. In 1835, the upstanding citizens of Vicksburg, Mississippi, rose up in rage against the gamblers who camped along the river there. They went from shack to shack, chasing the bettors into the swamp, and when they found resistance at one dark place, they dragged five of its denizens out and hanged them from a tree. The incident was widely publicized, and it drew a line between good and bad in the gambling issue, for both sides to see.

Since that eerie night the line has faded. Gambling itself has turned from a social ill to a social remedy; the town today that tried to chase gambling interests out might trip over its own head.

 

Nothing in gambling has changed as much as have the gambling interests, the people behind it. They create the games, run them, and, in the process, define the bettors. Gambling interests include gangsters and syndicates, but also church groups,