And They’re Off!

ED: Today on this show, we’re going to look at many other gambles Americans have taken over the years and the backlash that those bets sometimes brought. We’ll find out why Americans worried about gambling in the life insurance industry in the 19th century. And we’ll explore how a series of congressional hearings in the 1950s helped turn Las Vegas into the nation’s dice rolling capital.

PETER: But first, Sunday’s Kentucky Derby is the first leg of the prestigious Triple Crown horse races. It’s known as the fastest two minutes in sports but if you’ve been watching the news lately, you’ve been hearing a lot about a much longer, some of us would say, interminable horse race.

FEMALE SPEAKER: And the good news, the horse race to the 2016 Presidential election is heating up.

MALE SPEAKER: A 16-horse race, so who won the week?

FEMALE SPEAKER: But three factors in the 2016 Republican field are turning the Presidential primary into a horse race.

PETER: Now, this metaphor in American elections isn’t exactly a recent invention. In the 18th and 19th centuries, horse racing was much more than a political turn of phrase. According to historian, Ken Cohen, the track was the place for those in the know to lay a bet, broker a deal, or cultivate political allies.

KEN COHEN: In the 18th and 19th century, race courses were, by far, the largest sporting arenas in the country. It was the most popular sporting event in terms of live spectatorship, in terms of sheer numbers, that existed in the country.

PETER: But they’re doing stuff there, too, right? They’re not just pandering to their own impulses. There’s business going on. Maybe you could describe what really happens at a horse race.

KEN COHEN: Well, the business is right and the gambling or the tawdriness of what goes on at the horse race isn’t divisible from the business, but in the 18th and 19th century, those are the same thing. We have this phrase in English now that everybody uses at the end of an agreement, right, done and done. The phrase done and done comes from the betting sequence, the face-to-face betting sequence.

When you’re done with a deal, each party should shout done. The first one should shout done and the second one should shout and done. And the reason why you were supposed to shout it, and in the manuals it had exclamation points at the end of the phrase, was so that everybody around you could hear because wagers, for all their importance, we’re not legally prosecutable in the period.

And so the only way to make somebody pay who might be reluctant to pay was to get a bunch of witnesses who heard the negotiation and heard the done and done at the end that sealed the deal. That’s why these wagers come to carry so many different values other than just whether or not I can win money on a bet.

PETER: Ken, it sounds like we got friendship, business, and maybe some of these addictions.

KEN COHEN: It’s life.

PETER: A public spectacle, everything is happening at the same time, which suggests that this is a very important place, the racetrack, because a lot of things that we maybe haven’t paid attention to are taking place there.

KEN COHEN: In terms of building networks, building friendships, and building connections, I think that’s right. And if you start to go through diaries and letters between people who are betting at the racetrack, you very quickly uncover the deep business and political affiliations that they share with each other and the way that they went about building those affiliations through their gambling at the racetrack.

PETER: It’s like credit. There’s an ongoing relation of confidence.

KEN COHEN: That’s absolutely right, yes. And wagers are one way that those networks of confidence are expanded. People were constantly short on money then. They needed credit. And so in order to make a decision about who was worthy of that kind of credit when you’re not sure when you’re going to get paid back, developing trust is very, very important. And wagers didn’t have to be paid back.

You could filch on a wager and walk away. It was only your reputation that would get injured, but, of course, that reputation is very important in a credit economy where everybody everyday is making decisions as to whether or not they should loan you money. Whether or not you pay your wagers is a business decision, in fact.

PETER: Ken, you’ve told us some interesting things about races. A lot of stuff happened at the racetrack, including politics. Maybe you could explain that a little bit.

KEN COHEN: Right, well, politics happened at the same track in much the same way business did. In fact, it was often the same people because the people that owned the horses that were racing in the major races in Colonial America were extraordinarily wealthy men. Lots of racehorse owners who had business interests were also running for office. And so they used their horses to help rally support. They would also name their horses things like Democrat or Anti-Democrat.

There was a series of races in Richmond in 1832 with one horse being named Andrew Jackson and another being named Nullification, which, of course, was the challenge by South Carolina in 1832, at that very moment, to laws being passed by Andrew Jackson. So political purposes were served at the racetrack, in much the same way business ones were, through the networking hub that was the racehorse.

PETER: Ken, you’ve brilliantly illuminated this space, this place, the horse race and how it is a site for doing business and doing political business, as well as financial business. But how do we make the shift toward what we recognize as modern political horse races and there are no horses any more. And we don’t even bet any more, at least not in public the way they did in your day. So how does that transition take place? How do we get a politics that seems very much like competition, a sporting competition, but it’s no longer so closely associated with actual horse races?

KEN COHEN: So this is a process that sort of plays out over the course of the Antebellum period and then again in another wave in the late 19th century. So the first step is in the wake of the panic of 1837, which really destroys this broad thoroughbred market that had upheld racing for the previous 50 or 60 years. And so the panic drives thousands of men to divest themselves of their horses, particularly the ones that might bring some money because they have some thoroughbred blood in them.

Second of all, you have the rise of new political parties. And the Whigs and the Democrats of the 1840s have far greater party infrastructure and wherewithal. They start to stage their own events. They don’t need races to be political hubs because they’re staging their own massive rallies that borrow elements of racing, including the metaphor of talking about politics as races, as a way to lure people to these political events. Hey folks, this is going to be just like a race. It’s going to be just as much fun as the races used to be only now we’re celebrating Harrison or Van Buren or a local gubernatorial candidate.

PETER: But Ken, it sounds like the spectacle of the horse race now is being reenacted in a different way in conventions, which have some of the same entertainment and engagement values that you might associate with sporting events in the past.

KEN COHEN: And it’s been created by a sort of mass media and news media coverage that draws attention and draws interest by creating conflict in competition and by covering politics as if it’s sports. And there’s been several articles in the last few years written about this so-called sportification of politics.

And, I think, the sort of epitome of this process is when you listen to Donald Trump speaking today, right, and his emphasis on winning. We’re going to win against China. I’m going to win against Ted Cruz. We’re going to win everything back. It’s the sort of summation of taking this process of personal stakes and reusing it but transforming it at the same time into something that’s impersonal and just vaguely about winning and competing rather than about building personal networks with long lasting relationships.

PETER: Well, Ken, this has been a marvelous discussion and you’ve helped peel back the layers and we can see where it all came from. I don’t know where it’s going, but that’s always the problem with democracy. Thanks very much for joining us.

KEN COHEN: Thanks for having me, Peter.

PETER: Ken Cohen is a historian at Saint Mary’s College of Maryland and author of the forthcoming book, “They Will Have Their Game, Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic. He spoke with us from Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

BRIAN: Earlier, we heard from author Matthew Sweeney. His book is The Lottery Wars, Long Odds, Fast Money, and the Battle Over an American  Institution.

Singer/songwriter Juliana Dougherty interpreted the Jamestown lottery jingle. We’ll post the full song and a link to Juliana’s other work at backstoryradio.org.