In the early years of the twentieth century, legal gambling in the United States, including horse racing, was under attack from antivice reformers and government regulators. For the remainder of the twentieth century, beginning with the 1931 legalization of gambling in Nevada, legalized gaming grew to become part of the structure of American entertainment, state finance, and community networks, as well as a fixture in the dreams and obsessions of individual Americans. Blunted at midcentury by concerns over organized crime and gambling raised by Estes Kefauver's Senate investigation of 1950 to 1952 and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1961, legal gambling spread and flourished thereafter. State lotteries multiplied in the 1960s and 1970s, and casino gambling outside Nevada rapidly expanded in the 1970s and 1980s.
All In is a collection of ten essays that assembles scholars from history, English, American studies, and communications to investigate particular aspects of gaming institutions (casino gambling, lotteries, and charitable gambling), as well as the social and cultural impact of gambling on a diverse set of Americans. The collection offers more breadth than depth in its analysis of the proliferation of gambling in the twentieth century. Topics range from gambling and police corruption in New York City to promotional efforts by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce and casino interests; from the dilemma of evangelical Christian casino workers to threats to Ojibwe cultural cohesion posed by reservation casinos; from bingo and cultural influences in Conservative Jewish synagogues to a California mass murderer's fixation on the lottery as the key to his rightful acquisition of wealth and status. A diverse combination of methodologies and sources also distinguish the volume.
Business historians will profit the most from the chapters written by the volume's coeditors, Jonathan D. Cohen and David G. Schwartz. Cohen offers an enlightening study of the New Jersey state lottery as the 1969 product of antitax sentiment in the Garden State. Beset by high property taxes and unwilling to support income or sales taxes that would sustain public services, proponents of a lottery argued that the gambling initiative would produce sufficient revenue on its own to support state government. Cohen argues that an unrealistic faith in the lottery as a replacement for taxes, which he calls “fiscal alchemy,” blinded many state residents to the limitations of state funding by gambling (p. 118). New Jersey's lottery, which became a model for other states, produced only 2.5 percent of state revenue in its first six years of operation. Grumbling citizens attributed the meager contributions of the lottery to corruption or mismanagement by state officials, refusing to surrender their belief that gambling on its own could fund state government. Schwartz explains the expansion of casino gambling by identifying a change in the structure of casino ownership in the 1960s. License requirements in the Nevada casino industry prevented publicly traded companies from acquiring casinos. By 1969, changes in the law allowed publicly owned corporations to enter the business. This new corporate ownership looked to expand and develop the industry. In 1976, casino gambling spread to New Jersey. The appeal of jobs and revenue influenced state and tribal authorities to attract casinos to their jurisdictions. Thus, industry reorganization contributed to the national expansion of casino gaming.
As a historian and director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Schwartz emphasizes the historical contingency of the development of legalized gambling in the twentieth century and its “temporal” rather than permanent status in American culture (p. 12). Nevertheless, despite the diversity of topics in the volume, one can identify unifying themes. For the first half of the century, ambiguity marked the relationship between gambling and institutions from government to the casino industry itself. Matthew Vaz argues that attempts to enforce laws against illegal gambling in New York City furthered police corruption until, in the 1970s, enforcement slackened and police corruption diminished. Seth Tannenbaum finds that baseball owners before and after the Black Sox scandal made public efforts to control professional gamblers in ballparks, but not to the extent that crackdowns would alienate casual bettors among ordinary fans. Larry Gragg reveals that the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce mostly ignored gambling as it sought to promote the desert city as a family recreation destination in the 1950s. Even late into the century, according to Jessalyn Strauss, casinos issued press releases emphasizing entertainment, celebrities, and spectacular events to legitimize their gambling operations.
Several chapters also demonstrate that as legalized gaming spread, gambling was normalized among groups that ordinarily would condemn games of chance. Michelle Robinson documents cooperation between casino interests and evangelical Christians to sponsor a Las Vegas Billy Graham Crusade in 1978. Graham's high-profile truce with gambling corporations reinforced the daily compromises made by evangelical casino workers. A more complicated relationship developed between Conservative Jewish synagogues and sponsorship of bingo games. Dan Judson points out that fundraising through gambling drew on the growing popularity of bingo and the ambiguous attitude toward gambling in Jewish tradition. On the other hand, periodic Conservative Jewish opposition to synagogue-sponsored bingo borrowed more from nearby cultural Protestant hostility to gambling (and Catholic bingo) than from Jewish tradition and commentary.
Finally, evidence from distinctive sources indicates that unrealistic expectations for gambling revenue akin to Cohen's “fiscal alchemy” also provoked trouble for Native Americans and alienated young white men. Seema Kurup uses Louis Erdrich's novel The Bingo Palace to suggest that Indian gaming undermined cultural cohesion on reservations. In the volume's most unorthodox chapter, Daniel Ante-Contreras frames Isla Vista killer Elliot Rodger's bizarre expectation that he would win the lottery as emblematic of a neoliberal desire for unearned social mobility afflicting alienated unsuccessful white men. For the internally raging “precariat,” the lottery was not entertainment but rather a pathway to racially and culturally appropriate success (p. 248).
This collection of essays is interesting but uneven. Historians will find enough useful material, however, to justify consulting this sampler of recent gambling research.
