TENNESSEE

A controversy over the legal status of one form of gambling, charitable bingo, first placed another form of gambling, the lottery, on Tennessee’s political agenda during the 1980s. Pressure from veterans groups and the Catholic dioceses of Memphis and Nashville prompted the state’s General Assembly to legalize bingo for charitable purposes in 1980. But lotteries had been banned by the state constitution since 1834, and in 1984 Attorney General Bill Leech declared that, as a lottery-style game of chance played for money, bingo violated that ban. In response, the legislature considered for the first time an amendment to remove the constitutional prohibition on lotteries. Some advocates of the amendment, especially State Senator Steve Cohen, hoped that repealing the ban would spur the legislature to pass a law creating a state lottery, as eighteen states (albeit none in the South) had done since 1964.

Cohen was a liberal Democrat from a relatively prosperous, racially integrated Memphis district who regarded Tennessee as a frustratingly backward, conservative state. On gambling as on most matters, he regarded the difference between public policy in Tennessee and public policy in the northern states as a gap to be closed. In contrast, most Tennessee legislators who supported repeal of the lottery ban only wanted to restore bingo. In 1984, they won majorities for their proposed constitutional amendment in both houses.

Unfortunately for the amendment’s advocates, this vote was only the beginning. Tennessee’s amendment processes are the most difficult of any state in the country.Footnote ⁸ Under the procedure that advocates pursued—the resolution method—two consecutive general assemblies must approve a proposed amendment, the first by a simple majority of the entire membership of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the second by a two-thirds majority of each house. The amendment then goes before the voters in the next gubernatorial election. For it to become part of the constitution, a majority of all those voting for governor, not just a majority of those voting on the amendment, must approve it.Footnote ⁹

Having passed the amendment in the 1983–84 General Assembly, the next task for bingo and lottery supporters was to win two-thirds majorities for the measure in 1985 or 1986. They succeeded in the Senate, where they got the necessary twenty-two of thirty-three votes. But the amendment’s sponsor in the House refused to let it come to the floor because he lacked the votes to pass it over the opposition of Republican governor Lamar Alexander. Bingo supporters then abandoned the effort to change the constitution, partly because in practice bingo was as widespread as ever in Tennessee. In 1984, as a way around the attorney general’s opinion, the legislature had passed and, under pressure from the state’s Catholic bishops, Alexander reluctantly signed, a law classifying bingo wagers as charitable contributions rather than as bets. Administration of the statute was assigned to the secretary of state’s office.Footnote ¹⁰

In February 1989, however, the Tennessee supreme court ruled unanimously that the constitutional ban on lotteries applied to all games that have three characteristics: payment of money, for a chance, to win a prize. In doing so, the court pointed out that the constitution does “not prohibit all forms of gambling.” Although “games of skill” such as poker and blackjack were illegal under state law, they were not barred by Tennessee’s constitution. But “games of chance”—not just a state lottery but also raffles and, in the case at hand, bingo—were a form of lottery and therefore unconstitutional.Footnote ¹¹ State regulators promptly ordered Tennessee’s 160 licensed bingo parlors to close immediately. Nearly all of these were private businesses that donated a share (usually small) of their profits to a charity.

The court’s decision marked the year’s second setback for proponents of gambling legalization. In January, news broke of a massive federal investigation into the bingo industry’s successful efforts to bribe the secretary of state and certain legislators. Operation Rocky Top culminated in the indictment of several lobbyists, regulators, and bingo operators, which provoked the suicides of the secretary of state and the chair of the House state and local government committee. To most legislators and many voters, Rocky Top was an object lesson in the baneful consequences of legalized gambling. The lottery amendment was not even brought to the floor of the General Assembly during the late 1980s.

In 1990, Republican state representative Dwight Henry made opposition to a state income tax the centerpiece of his campaign for governor, proposing a lottery as an alternative source of new revenues. His Democratic opponent, Governor Ned McWherter, muted the issue by saying that he would not oppose a lottery if its proceeds were used only for one-time expenditures such as school construction. McWherter was handily reelected.

In 1991, both houses of the General Assembly once again took the first step that, under the resolution method of amending the constitution, was necessary to begin the process of repealing the ban on lotteries. In April, the House voted 74–22 to approve a Republican-sponsored lottery amendment. A month later the Senate more narrowly followed suit on Cohen’s companion proposal by a vote of 19–14. With the Tennessee Poll showing that public support for a lottery had increased from 62 percent in 1990 to 70 percent in 1991, lottery advocates were optimistic that they would be able to get the amendment on the ballot in conjunction with the 1994 gubernatorial election. All they needed was a two-thirds vote from both houses during the next General Assembly—that is, in 1993 or 1994.

Cohen’s new strategy in 1993 was to urge doubtful legislators to “let the people decide.” The shrewdness of this approach was that “legislators who buy into Cohen’s argument can tell lottery opponents that they personally are strongly opposed to a lottery but that they are only voting in favor of giving the people the right to vote on this issue.”Footnote ¹² But representatives of Christian conservative groups such as the Tennessee Baptist Convention and the Eagle Forum testified against Cohen’s resolution at a Senate judiciary committee hearing. Although Republican sponsorship of lottery bills as an alternative to a proposed income tax had only recently been common, the arousal of Christian conservative opposition—a rising force in state Republican organizations in Tennessee and throughout the nation—closed that door for most GOP legislators. In fact, two Republican senators who had voted for Cohen’s proposal in 1991 announced that they would vote against it. Senator Ray Albright of Chattanooga, for example, warned that removing the constitution’s ban on lotteries “opens it up for everything. . . . Look at the kinds of elements that it would bring in here: casinos, gambling joints, roulette. It’s the Las Vegas atmosphere.”Footnote ¹³ Lacking the votes to pass his amendment, Cohen did not let it come to the floor in 1993.

For lottery advocates, 1994 loomed as a critical year. The resolution to place a lottery amendment on the ballot that legislators had approved by a simple majority in 1991 would expire unless it received two-thirds support in the 1994 session. Much to their delight, however, the political tide seemed to be running in the lottery’s favor. The Tennessee Poll showed that support for the lottery had increased to 75 percent. Four states with which Tennessee shares a border had adopted a lottery within the past eight years: Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky, and Missouri. Fifty-five percent of Tennesseans said they had bought lottery tickets in other states.

One out-of-state development clouded the lottery’s prospects, however. By the start of the 1994 legislative session, casinos were operating round the clock in Tunica, Mississippi, thirty miles south of Memphis, and the full implications of casino gambling for West Tennessee had become apparent. Memphis was the Tunica casinos’ main “feeder market,” and personal bankruptcies in surrounding Shelby County soared. Memphis mayor Willie Herenton and several prominent business leaders decided to lobby the state legislature to legalize casino gambling in their city. In an effort to broaden their base of support, the Memphis-based Promus Company, owner of Harrah’s casinos, issued a report arguing that not only Memphis but also Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga “would be good markets” for casinos.

Cohen’s reluctant response to these pressures from his city’s civic leaders was to modify his lottery proposal with a provision authorizing the General Assembly to give Memphis voters the right to approve casino gambling within city limits.Footnote ¹⁴ As he had feared, however, raising the casino issue only strengthened the opposition to a lottery among East and Middle Tennessee legislators. The Promus study backfired, arousing concern that legalizing casinos anywhere in the state would spark efforts to legalize them everywhere. “Once it starts in Shelby,” warned Senator Carl Koella, “it will creep across the state to East Tennessee.” Despite support from West Tennessee senators, the Memphis casino amendment failed by a vote of 9–21–2.

The resounding defeat of the Memphis casino proposal effectively removed casino gambling from Tennessee’s political agenda.Footnote ¹⁵ During the 1995–96 General Assembly, Cohen resumed his pursuit of a lottery amendment. The election in 1994 of a Republican governor, Don Sundquist, who, unlike most GOP legislators, was open to the idea of a lottery, had given Cohen hope. With Governor McWherter, whose support for a lottery was limited to funding one-time construction projects, term-limited out of office, Cohen was able to add to his lottery proposal the Georgia-inspired idea of earmarking the proceeds for so-called HOPE scholarships.Footnote ¹⁶ Georgia had begun selling lottery tickets in 1993 and awarded the first wave of college scholarships the following year. Cohen’s decision to incorporate this feature into his amendment made the lottery more appealing, not just to Sundquist but also to many others, especially prospective college students and their parents.

Not everything that happened in the mid- to late 1990s advanced the prospects for a lottery. Support in the Tennessee Poll fell from 75 percent to 66 percent in 1998. In an October 1999 referendum, voters in Alabama decisively defeated a Georgia-style “education lottery” proposal.Footnote ¹⁷ Tennessee legislators began to question their long-standing assumption that a lottery amendment would pass if it ever got on the ballot. Polls in Alabama had shown just as much general support for a lottery there as in Tennessee until a specific proposal was placed before the voters. Finally, Cohen’s amendment suffered from the heightened activity of Christian conservatives such as volunteer Eagle Forum lobbyist Bobbie Patray, who shrewdly combined moral objections with pragmatic arguments about the lottery’s effect on bankruptcies and on problem gambling among youths.

But proponents had a pragmatic argument of their own: seemingly painless revenue. In the early 2000s, the tide turned. A January 2001 Mason-Dixon poll showed 68 percent of Tennesseans in favor of a lottery and only 26 percent opposed. The respondents’ support for the measure derived from their adamant opposition to a new income tax or any other effective measure to address the state’s growing financial needs. Although legislators realized that the lottery would do nothing to alleviate Tennessee’s revenue shortfall—indeed, Cohen’s amendment provided that the proceeds from the lottery would be used to create a new spending program, college scholarships—they were convinced that the voters would never consider serious fiscal remedies until a lottery was up and running. “We need to get the lottery before the people to vote on it,” said Democratic House speaker Jimmy Naifeh, “and then people will be more willing to look at the shortfalls of the revenues.”Footnote ¹⁸

Voters expressed their anti–income tax, pro-lottery sentiments in the 2000 legislative elections. Two anti-lottery senators lost to candidates pledged to support the lottery, one of them a Republican whose conservative constituents’ dread of an income tax overcame their skepticism about the lottery. Cohen’s amendment received seventeen votes when it was voted on in 2000, five shy of the twenty-two he needed in the 2001–2 general assembly. Two pro-lottery senators had been absent from that vote; adding them to the two newly elected lottery supporters brought the amendment to twenty-one votes. The remaining vote seemed likely to come from Republican Bill Clabough, who had opposed the lottery in the past but now reported that his mail, much of it from anti–income tax constituents, was running 75 percent in favor.Footnote ¹⁹

On February 7, Cohen brought the lottery amendment to a final vote. “The issue is this,” he declaimed. “Do you put this to a vote of the people?” Senate majority leader Ward Crutchfield, said, “All over Chattanooga, I talk to people who tell me they are moving to the state of Georgia . . . to take advantage of the HOPE scholarship.”Footnote ²⁰ Every senator whose vote Cohen had counted on came through, and the amendment passed, 22–11. Although Republicans opposed the lottery 7–8, Cohen’s Democratic colleagues supported it by 15 to 3. One week later, the House affirmed the Senate’s decision by a vote of 80 to 15. As in the Senate, Democrats supported the amendment overwhelmingly (54–3), and even House Republicans favored it by 26 to 12. Many Republican members in both houses hastened to explain to their Christian conservative constituents that although they “favor giving the people the right to vote” on the issue in a referendum, they would personally vote no.Footnote ²¹

The lottery amendment that legislators passed and placed on the 2002 ballot was complicated. It left intact the constitution’s long-standing ban on “lotteries,” but authorized the legislature to enact by statute a “state lottery” resembling those “in operation in Georgia, Kentucky, and Virginia in 2000.” The amendment made clear that Georgia was Tennessee’s true model by providing that the “net proceeds” from any lottery the legislature might create must “be allocated to provide financial assistance to citizens of this state to attend post-secondary educational institutions located within this state,” with any remaining funds to be spent building “K-12 educational facilities” or on early-education and after-school programs.

In response to some charitable organizations’ desire to resume sponsoring occasional fund-raising events that involved gambling and thus had been banned by the state supreme court in 1989, the amendment also authorized a two-thirds majority of the General Assembly to permit any “501(c)(3)organization” to raise funds through an “annual event” that involved gambling. But the amendment forbade “games of chance associated with casinos, including, but not limited to, slot machines, roulette wheels, and the like.” Cohen wanted to attract support for his amendment by including fund-raising opportunities for churches and charities, but he also wanted to preempt any charge that a lottery would open the floodgates to casino gambling.

The campaign to persuade voters to ratify the lottery amendment in the November 2002 election got off to a strong start. Cohen formed the Tennessee Student Scholarship Lottery Coalition (TSSLC) and to run it he brought in political consultant Kevin Geddings, who had orchestrated the successful 2000 campaign for a Georgia-style lottery in South Carolina. “It’s not gambling,” Geddings had argued in South Carolina and now repeated in Tennessee. “Buying a $1 education lottery ticket is no different than buying a $1 raffle ticket at Rock Hill High School for band uniforms.”Footnote ²² In organizing the TSSLC campaign, Geddings reaped the benefit of Cohen’s adroit design of the lottery amendment. The leaders of charitable institutions such as the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Knoxville and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis spoke favorably about the amendment because it authorized the legislature to restore their right to hold annual events involving raffles, cakewalks, bingo, and other forms of charitable gambling. Until the court made all such events illegal, for example, the Knoxville group had raised $150,000 per year with its annual “Rubber Duck” race on the Tennessee River.

Opponents of the lottery were slower to mobilize. All of the state’s predominantly white Christian denominations announced their intention to defeat the referendum, but for different reasons. Nashville United Methodist minister Skip Armistead, speaking for a coalition of mainline Protestant churches, declared the lottery a “social justice issue” because lottery gambling “preys on the poor.”Footnote ²³ The conservative Tennessee Baptist Convention, by far the largest denomination in the state with more than three thousand churches, was more inclined to oppose the lottery for fostering an intrinsically immoral activity. The Tennessee Catholic Public Policy Commission argued not on moral grounds but rather because “it is poor fiscal policy to attempt to fund state government through these means.”Footnote ²⁴

Realizing how diffuse and thus ineffective their efforts were in danger of becoming, fourteen white liberal and conservative religious organizations united to form a single umbrella group to oppose the referendum. Meeting in Nashville in conjunction with the annual convention of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling in September 2001, they organized the Gambling Free Tennessee Alliance (GFTA). But, more through habit and oversight than forethought, they undertook few efforts to incorporate African American churches into this coalition, as lottery opponents had successfully done in Alabama.Footnote ²⁵ In this regard, Tennessee was typical and Alabama unusual, which is one reason why Alabama is the only southern state whose voters have refused to change their constitution to permit lottery gambling.

The combination of GFTA’s September rollout and a coordinated strategy of anti-lottery sermons in Southern Baptist and United Methodist churches helped to narrow the gap on the lottery issue in an early October 2001 Tennessee Poll. Support for the lottery dropped to 55 percent and opposition rose to 40 percent. But GFTA’s chances of defeating the lottery were weakened severely when its campaign plan was leaked to the press in April 2002. “A message centered around the lottery’s injustice to the poor does not resonate with the voters,” the plan said. Instead, GFTA should “tap into” voters’ existing “fears [of] corruption” and “distrust of politicians.” In particular, “the objective is to make Steve Cohen the incarnation of the politician you cannot trust.”Footnote ²⁶ Responding to GFTA’s strategy to defeat the lottery, Governor Sundquist charged, “This group claims to oppose the lottery on the basis of morality, yet I see a lack of moral judgment in these people.” Cohen claimed that anti-Semitism underlay GFTA’s strategy. “Singling out” the only Jewish member of the state senate, he charged, was “a very non-Godly thing to do.”Footnote ²⁷

In the aftermath of GFTA’s self-inflicted political wound, support for the lottery in the July Mason-Dixon poll rose to 64 percent and opposition declined to 30 percent. On election day, the lottery amendment passed by a majority of 894,137 (58 percent) to 638,452 (42 percent). Even taking into account the 119,043 voters who cast a ballot for governor but not on the lottery amendment, this gave the lottery 68,321 more votes than were constitutionally required for passage.

The legal effect of the 2002 referendum was to clear the constitutional path for the General Assembly to create a lottery by legislation. A few lottery opponents, such as the Tennessee Baptist Convention, declared that the war was not over. Yet most were so dispirited by the results of the referendum that they abandoned the fight, and even the Baptists did little more than send an anti-lottery letter to each member of the General Assembly. The major controversy concerning the act to create what was officially called the Tennessee Education Lottery during the 2003 legislative session was not whether to have one but how the benefits would be distributed. Cohen’s initial bill provided that students who earned a 3.0 GPA in high school and scored 19 or better on the ACT would receive an annual $4,000 scholarship if they enrolled in an in-state public institution and their family income was $100,000 or less.

Both Republican legislators and members of the General Assembly’s Black Caucus criticized Cohen’s bill. Although they attacked it for different reasons, their objections shared a common theme: the scholarships were insufficiently generous to their constituents. Because Cohen’s main concern was to get the lottery up and running as soon as possible so that revenues for scholarships could begin to accumulate, he was inclined to accommodate every politically influential demand. Republicans wanted scholarships for private as well as public college students; they also insisted that the family income ceiling on eligibility be lifted. The scholarship bill was changed to accommodate both demands. The Black Caucus, joined by several rural white legislators, wanted the merit standard lowered. As a result, the qualification for a scholarship was reduced to either a 3.0 GPA or a 19 on the ACT.

Despite these changes, complained Senator Jim Kyle, a white Democrat from Memphis, “The dumb and dumbest are going to be paying for the best and brightest’s education. That’s a helluva policy.”Footnote ²⁸ Kyle cited a considerable body of recent research showing that lotteries earn most of their money from minorities, the uneducated, and poor and working-class people and that, in Georgia, most college scholarships funded by the lottery went to the sons and daughters of the middle and upper-middle class.Footnote ²⁹ Nevertheless, the bill passed both houses easily: 28–4 in the Senate on April 21 and 76–21 in the House on May 21.

Having dealt with the lottery in 2003, recently elected Democratic governor Phil Bredesen and the General Assembly turned to charitable gambling in 2004. The bill that emerged reflected legislators’ eagerness to satisfy charitable groups that wanted to hold annual fund-raisers and the governor’s concern that a door not be opened to the sort of abuses the state had witnessed in the past. Bredesen was especially concerned that private businesses not be allowed once again to run gambling halls in the name of charitable organizations, setting the stage for another Rocky Top–style scandal. The bill that was enacted in April allowed eligible groups to apply annually to hold a one-day event and instructed the secretary of state to compile all proper applications into an omnibus bill that would need to be passed each year by a two-thirds majority of both houses. The new law was filled with provisions designed to prevent abuse, including a specific prohibition on bingo and casino-style games.

MISSISSIPPI

A lottery time-line comparing Mississippi with Tennessee would show that Tennessee seriously considered a lottery before Mississippi but then lagged behind its neighbor in making the constitutional change authorizing the legislature to create one. The time-line also would show that by the time Tennessee actually had a lottery, Mississippi still did not—and does not to this day. Instead, Mississippi chose to legalize commercial casinos, the first southern state to do so.

The stage had seemed set for the adoption of a Mississippi lottery when the 1990 session of the legislature convened in January. Two adjacent states, Tennessee and Louisiana, were actively considering lotteries. Mired in recession, the state treasury had experienced several consecutive years of budgetary shortfalls. Democratic governor Ray Mabus, eschewing a tax increase, had been elected in 1987 after championing a lottery—the first gubernatorial candidate in the South to run and win on the issue. Mabus made a lottery the financial centerpiece of his BEST program to improve Mississippi’s notoriously poor public schools, arguing that it would generate more than fifty million additional dollars per year for education. A January 7 poll by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger revealed that 62 percent of Mississippians agreed with him.

In order for Mabus and the legislature to create a lottery, however, some high constitutional hurdles would have to be surmounted. Since 1868, Mississippi’s constitution had included a provision banning lotteries. To repeal this ban, an amendment would need to pass the legislature by a two-thirds vote of both the House of Representatives and the Senate and be approved by a majority of voters in a statewide referendum. The legislature would then have to pass a law creating a lottery by a three-fifths majority of both houses in order to fulfill the state constitution’s requirement for enacting a “revenue bill.”

Religious organizations in the heavily Protestant state, especially the powerful Mississippi Baptist Convention, fought the lottery on moral grounds when it came before the legislature. Mabus’s proposed constitutional amendment barely prevailed in the House, which approved it on June 19 by 83 to 39, one vote more than the constitutionally required two-thirds majority. Two days later, however, the Senate defeated the amendment. Although senators supported it by 28 to 23, they fell six votes shy of two-thirds.

The Senate vote killed the lottery for the 1990 session. But legalized gambling as a new public policy in Mississippi was very much alive. Staying well below the media and religious group radar that was focused so intently on the lottery controversy, legislators from the state’s three Gulf Coast counties and several of its eleven Delta counties along the Mississippi River were working to secure legislative authorization to bring casino gambling to their constituencies.

In 1990, the Gulf Coast counties and their largest cities, Biloxi and Gulfport, were down-at-the-heels tourist destinations. The once-prosperous fishing industry was suffering severely from strong Asian competition.Footnote ³⁰ In addition, the coast was still feeling the long-term effects of the assault on casino gambling that had begun after Senator Estes Kefauver’s organized crime committee came to Biloxi in 1951 and spotlighted the illegal industry. Kefauver’s investigators found that during and after World War II more than three hundred nightclubs and hotels offering slot machines and table games had sprung up around the new and massive Keesler Air Force Base. In a typical month, airmen were losing $500,000 of their $4 million payroll in the illegal games. State law enforcement officials, prodded by elected politicians who were embarrassed by the national notoriety Mississippi received from the Kefauver hearings, cracked down.

If the hope of the Gulf Coast counties in 1990 was to revive the local economy, the challenge for many of the Delta counties was to create one where, for all intents and purposes, none existed. Tunica County had long been the poorest county in the poorest state in the country; it had the nation’s lowest per capita income and highest proportion of people living in poverty. Government efforts to attract industry had consistently failed. According to Benjamin and Christina Schwarz, Tunica “was so isolated, and its population so miserably educated, that even state monetary incentives and federal tax breaks could not entice business.”Footnote ³¹

Gulf Coast representatives were the first to place casinos on the state’s legislative agenda. They did so in the late 1980s in a seemingly insignificant and technical way. In December 1987, much to the delight of Biloxi’s depressed tourism industry, a 157-foot-long Panamanian-registered casino ship, the Europa Star, docked in the city’s harbor and began offering round-trip cruises in the Mississippi Sound. After sailing three miles out to what its owners claimed were international waters, the Star would open its on-board casino, cruise for a couple of hours, and then close the casino when it reentered state waters on its return voyage. (In casino industry parlance, this is known as a “cruise to nowhere.”) Mississippi’s attorney general, however, soon ruled that the state’s waters actually extended three miles past a series of offshore barrier islands and into the Gulf of Mexico. This meant that the Star had to sail much farther, thereby spending a much longer portion of each cruise with its casino closed.

After a state court upheld the attorney general’s opinion, local businesses petitioned Gulf Coast legislators to seek a modification of state law that would authorize cruise ships to open their casinos while still in the Sound. The legislature was torn between its reluctance to make Mississippi the first state to allow casino gambling in offshore waters and its norm of deference to members on matters of local concern. It resolved the tension by authorizing the cruises but adding a requirement that the casino ships be at least three hundred feet long. When one such ship, the Pride of Mississippi, began offering gambling cruises out of Biloxi, its owners found that they could not attract enough customers to operate so large a vessel profitably.Footnote ³²

Because the legislature treated the cruise-to-nowhere bill as a local matter, it triggered little attention when it was approved in March 1989. But in the course of considering the bill, a few legislators from the Delta, led by one of the House’s most influential members, Democratic representative H. L. “Sonny” Merideth of Greenville, took note of a new law legalizing casino gambling on the Mississippi River that the Iowa legislature had approved that same month. They decided to seek a similar law allowing boats moored in their counties to operate casinos. Gulf Coast legislators feared that Louisiana would soon decide to legalize casino gambling, raising the specter of New Orleans casinos draining money from Mississippians’ pockets and diverting even more tourists away from the coast.Footnote ³³

Out of this confluence of interest, example, and fear, a number of Gulf Coast and Delta legislators formed an alliance to promote the legalization of water-based casino gambling along Mississippi’s southern and western borders. Merideth realized that most of his fellow legislators, as well as the voters of Mississippi, would recoil at the thought of legalizing as morally controversial a form of gambling as casinos. Thus, he and other influential casino supporters, such as Senator Tommy Gollott of Biloxi, did their best to avoid drawing public attention to their efforts.

Merideth and Gollott were aided in this strategy by the prominence of the lottery in Governor Mabus’s legislative agenda, which diverted media attention from their efforts to draft a casino bill. Senate Finance Committee hearings on the lottery were packed with spectators, while a Merideth-chaired subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee worked on casino legislation in obscurity. (One reason was that the Clarion-Ledger, recently acquired by the Gannett newspaper chain, had reduced its legislative bureau to one reporter.) “The ‘antis’ were focused on lotteries,” a strong casino advocate from the Delta, Rep. Charlie Williams of Senatobia, recalls. “The cat was out of the bag [on casinos] before they started chasing it.”Footnote ³⁴ Rev. Paul Jones, the executive director of the Mississippi Baptist Convention’s Christian Action Commission and a leader in its anti-lottery campaign, agrees. “We just flat out missed it.”Footnote ³⁵

In addition to adopting a low-profile strategy, casino proponents in the legislature developed arguments that they hoped would appeal to the conservative majority of senators and representatives when they brought the bill to the floor. Merideth, Williams, and their allies in the House pointed out that in contrast to a lottery, which would put the state government into the business of running a gambling operation and encouraging people to wager, casinos would be private enterprises that might help to revive local economies. A casino, they noted, is a major capital investment that employs many people and, if properly designed and situated, would attract tourists from out of state. A lottery, by contrast, would employ few people, involve little capital investment, and bring in few tourists.

Casino advocates also appealed to state pride, reaching deep into the state’s antebellum past to argue that surely Mississippi had a better claim to the riverboat-gambler mythos than Iowa, as well as warning that Louisiana might soon supplant that claim.Footnote ³⁶ Further, they presented casinos as a measure of local rather than statewide interest, relying on the legislature’s unwritten rule that members should defer to one another on constituency matters whenever possible. On controversial issues, this norm ordinarily is manifested in “the walk,” in which a member “trying to pass legislation can help his or her cause by asking a fellow [member], who might otherwise be opposed to the bill, to leave the chamber during the debate.”Footnote ³⁷

Under the bill that Merideth and his colleagues drafted, casinos would be confined to, at most, fourteen of the state’s eighty-two counties: the three counties on the Gulf and the eleven along the river. Even in those counties, casinos could not be built on land but must float in water from the Gulf or river—a fine distinction whose purpose was to dilute the objections of those opposed to casinos “on our soil.” (“I am sick and tired,” said one legislator, “of people telling my people that . . . we are not going to join Jesus because we are going on the [gambling] boat.”)Footnote ³⁸ Thus, unlike a lottery, which would operate throughout the state, “the riverboat gambling idea seemed to confine the sin,” according to Democratic state committeeman Wilson Golden, “because it was for a few counties and not everybody’s county.”Footnote ³⁹ Finally, the proposed law would not impose casinos on any county that did not want them. The bill included a provision that allowed either fifteen hundred voters or 20 percent of an eligible county’s registered voters (whichever number was smaller) to demand a local referendum barring casinos from the county for at least a year.

In arguing that casinos could be of great benefit to the small minority of counties that might choose to have them, advocates tried to reassure their colleagues that the effect on the state as a whole would be modest. Williams, for example, spoke in terms of at most “three [casino] boats on the coast, three on the river, with $18 million in tax revenue to the state.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This low-ball estimate was of strategic as well as rhetorical value. De-emphasizing the fiscal consequences of the casino bill in favor of its effects on tourism and local economic development helped to preserve the bill’s status as simple legislation and thus kept it from triggering the state constitution’s three-fifths requirement for enacting revenue measures. So did the provision that any or all of the fourteen eligible counties could vote to reject casino gambling, which meant that conceivably the state could end up with no casinos at all.

When critics worried that casino legalization would turn Mississippi into a minor league Nevada, riddled with vice and corrupted by organized crime, advocates responded that the casinos Merideth was proposing would cruise on waters outside the state’s landmass. Or so most legislators were led to believe. But just as the House was about to consider the casino bill, Merideth quietly deleted the words “under way making way” from its description of the vessels in which casino gambling would be allowed to take place.

Politically, the change was inconsequential, which was exactly what Merideth had hoped. “There probably weren’t ten people in the House who understood the extent of the bill,” said Rep. Danny Guice, a Republican from Ocean Springs. If they had, “it probably would have defeated the bill.”Footnote ⁴¹ But the legal consequence of the change was enormous. In deleting the phrase, Merideth was offering a bill that would authorize casinos to operate at dockside, without ever having to leave shore. Instead of confining casinos to riverboats, the modified bill opened the door to large-scale gambling facilities constructed on massive barges moored to the waterfront. What’s more, the waterfront in the Delta counties would not need to be on the river itself. Instead it could be on any body of “navigable waters” in an eligible county that was fed by the river, including (as it later turned out) a mile-long ditch extending inland that was dug for the sole purpose of creating a commercially advantageous location for a casino.Footnote ⁴²

On March 7, 1990, the House passed Merideth’s bill, the misleadingly named Gaming Control Act, by a vote of 66 to 52. One week later, the bill passed the Senate without modification by 22 to 20. Eight senators who did not want to vote for casinos but also did not want to interfere in what had been characterized as a local matter took the walk. “If they weren’t going to vote for the bill,” said Senator Gollott, “I just asked them to abstain,” with most claiming an unspecified stomach ailment.Footnote ⁴³ Mabus signed the Gaming Control Act on March 20. “I frankly didn’t think I was signing that important a piece of legislation when I signed that bill,” he later recalled. “Neither I nor any of my staff had any idea of what doors we were opening.”Footnote ⁴⁴

As the governor’s offhand attitude toward the new casino law indicated, Merideth’s stealth strategy for getting the bill passed and signed had clearly worked. No one in the state claims even in hindsight to have foreseen that, by passing the act, the legislature was opening the door to what soon would become Mississippi’s major industry. “Casinos never had to go to a statewide vote,” notes Representative Williams. “If that had been the case, it never would have passed.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The consequence of these universally clouded crystal balls was that the lottery issue remained alive for a few years after its initial legislative defeat in 1990. Mabus centered his campaign for renomination in the September 1991 Democratic gubernatorial primary on his lottery proposal. He won and, when ten anti-lottery legislators lost their own bids for renomination, he claimed a mandate. In truth, the defeats of these legislators had as much or more to do with the redistricting that followed the 1990 census as with the lottery. Mabus himself was defeated in the November general election by Republican Kirk Fordice. But the new governor, although personally opposed to a lottery, said that he would not object if the legislature approved an amendment to remove the constitution’s lottery ban and let the voters decide the matter in a referendum. Neighboring Louisiana had approved a lottery in 1990 and Tennessee still seemed as if it might be on the verge of doing so. In early 1992, with the first casino yet to open and the state government’s revenue picture bleak, the legislature voted to remove the constitutional ban on lotteries and place the issue on the November ballot.

As has been the case in almost every state that put the matter to the voters, the lottery referendum passed in Mississippi. But, in contrast to most other states, it passed only narrowly: 53 percent to 47 percent. All of the state’s white Protestant churches mobilized to oppose the lottery amendment, reducing its margin of victory. Even then, the referendum merely made a lottery constitutionally possible. The legislature still would have to pass a bill to create one by the three-fifths majority required for revenue measures. Yet as legislators analyzed the results of the referendum in their home districts, they realized that the majority of pro-lottery votes had come from just three large counties. Most legislators represented constituencies that had voted against the amendment, primarily in the conservative Hill Country, the eastern two-thirds of the state.

In addition to conservative opposition, lottery legislation faced a fresh obstacle. Casino supporters at the 1993 session of the legislature worried that the new industry might suffer from competition with a lottery. They pointed to the casinos’ early success and the dangers of stifling further growth. In August and September 1992, three casinos had opened on the Gulf Coast, and in February 1993 the first casino on the Mississippi River opened in Natchez. With more casinos under construction, Mississippi suddenly was leading the South in job creation. From the beginning, the early estimate that casinos would contribute $18 million per year to the state treasury was wildly exceeded—tax revenues from the new casinos exceeded $10 million in the first month. What to do with a budget surplus, not where to make midyear budget cuts, was the legislature’s new challenge. “It’s on its last gasp,” casino proponent Williams said of the lottery bill in January 1993.Footnote ⁴⁶ Indeed, no lottery bill has ever come to the floor of the Mississippi state legislature, much less been passed into law, making it the only state in the country to remove its constitutional ban on lotteries without promptly creating a lottery by statute.Footnote ⁴⁷

The politics of casino gambling finally became public only at the implementation stage. Mississippi’s law allowed local voters to petition for a referendum to bar casinos from their county for one year. In some counties, including Tunica, no such petition was filed and the county board of supervisors quickly authorized casino gambling. But in most Gulf Coast and Delta counties, Southern Baptist, United Methodist, and other Protestant clergy organized petition drives and a referendum was held. In these county-level contests, the first in which the people were heard on the issue, casino opponents typically branded gambling a vice and offered additional morally grounded concerns about crime, addiction, and subversion of the work ethic as reasons to keep casinos out. Proponents of casino legalization from the business and, in some cases, the political community stressed job creation, tourism, and other economic arguments.Footnote ⁴⁸

In the end, two of the three Gulf Coast counties and seven of the eleven river counties approved casino gambling. Some of them initially voted no because a majority of their people were morally opposed to gambling, but then reversed course in a subsequent referendum because a neighboring county’s yes vote meant casinos were coming anyway.Footnote ⁴⁹ Because of their low population and inconvenient distance from a major highway, some of the river counties were unable to attract casinos even after voting to put out the welcome mat. Nonetheless, casino gambling flourished in Mississippi. In 1992, five casinos opened for business. The number doubled to ten in 1993 and, within three years, tripled to twenty-nine. By 2013, eleven casinos were operating on the Gulf and nineteen casinos were operating along the river, ten of them in Tunica County, less than an hour south of Memphis. In 2011, Mississippi casinos had annual gross revenues of $2.2 billion, employed about 24,000 people; and paid nearly $275 million per year in taxes.Footnote ⁵⁰

Mississippi’s churches continued to oppose casino gambling, and polls commissioned by Harrah’s consistently found that public opposition to gambling was higher in Mississippi than in any other southern state.Footnote ⁵¹ Senator Billy Hewes, a casino supporter from Gulfport, is one of many political leaders who agree that Mississippi’s “extremely fundamental moral core” means that, “statewide, if [casino gambling] were put to a vote, it wouldn’t pass.”Footnote ⁵²

Having been denied a chance to vote on statewide casino legalization (and having neglected the bill as it worked its way through the legislature), Christian conservatives tried in the late 1990s to place an initiative on the ballot to banish all noncharitable forms of gambling from the state. “We’re centering on the fact that the majority of counties have not had a chance to vote on gambling, and it’s negatively impacting them,” said chief strategist Paul Jones of the Mississippi Baptist Convention.Footnote ⁵³ Jones worked closely with the American Family Association, based in Tupelo, and with other Christian organizations to launch the initiative campaign.

These efforts foundered. State judges smothered three initiative efforts in 1998 and 1999 by ruling that the proposals all failed to meet the state constitution’s requirement to estimate the fiscal consequence of passage. Jones argued that expelling gambling would have no net fiscal consequence because the lost revenue to the state would be offset by reduced expenditures on gambling-induced social problems. All of the legal challenges were supported by the state’s business and political leadership. “Once you invite an industry like this into the state and require it to invest millions of dollars, to suddenly yank the rug out from under it would send a chilling signal to Wall Street,” said Blake Wilson, the president of the Mississippi Economic Council.Footnote ⁵⁴ Declaring himself both anti-gambling and “a vociferous advocate of economic development,” Governor Fordice said that he was “totally opposed, vociferously opposed” to an anti-casino initiative because it would violate the casino owners’ property rights.Footnote ⁵⁵

After failing to expel casino gambling from Mississippi, Christian conservatives concentrated on more modest measures. Starting in the mid-1990s, for example, the casino industry failed every year to persuade the legislature to allow any of the state’s eight universities and fifteen community colleges to offer courses on casino management. “What we do with every other industry we recruit is tell them, ‘If you’ll come to our state we will assist you in training your employees,’” complained Senator Grey Ferris of Vicksburg, home to four casinos. “Why are we not able to do that with this particular industry?”Footnote ⁵⁶ Whenever such bills came before the Senate, however, the Mississippi Baptist Convention and the American Family Association would mobilize their members to jam House and Senate switchboards with their objections. “We might as well teach brothel management or tobacco sales 101,” said a representative of the Baptist convention.Footnote ⁵⁷ Legislators who privately supported the casino-management measure often saw opposing it as a way to satisfy their anti-gambling constituents without placing the casino industry at serious risk.

Until Hurricane Katrina struck in September 2005, severely damaging or washing away all of the casinos in Biloxi and Gulfport, another goal of the casino industry—namely, to secure permission to move the Gulf Coast casinos from floating barges to dry land, where they would be more secure from hurricanes—also went nowhere in the state legislature. It took the devastation wrought by Katrina on the coastal economy and strong pressure from Fordice’s successor, Republican governor Haley Barbour, to persuade the legislature to change the law, and even then it was a near thing. “If we want to rebuild the coast bigger and better than ever,” Barbour told a special post-hurricane session of the legislature, “I believe we will fail if we don’t allow the casinos to come on shore. . . . A few hundred feet on shore is not going to affect the moral fabric of Mississippi.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Yet the Mississippi Baptist Convention and its allies pulled out all the stops to defeat Barbour’s proposal. Some legislators reported receiving more grassroots pressure to vote against allowing land-based casinos on the coast than on any issue they had ever dealt with.Footnote ⁵⁹ A bill to allow casinos to build on land within eight hundred feet of the Gulf passed in October, but only narrowly: 60–53 in the House and 29–21 in the Senate.