Gambling’s Uneasy Image

ED: So that was a very flamboyant story with tarring and feathering and all other kinds of outrageous behavior. But do you guys think it was sort of anomalous, that it’s just a product of this very raw frontier in the 1830s? Peter? Brian?

PETER: No, Ed, I think it’s really revealing of a major strain in American history. These people who are dumping on the gamblers are gamblers themselves in many ways. And I think it’s really important because of the moral opprobrium in which gambling is held and that you would hear from every pulpit in the land in the years before the American Civil War. It’s not surprising that you’d want to claim you weren’t one. How do you prove it? By bashing them.

ED: You say people are gamblers. How are people gambling, Peter?

PETER: Well, it’s any speculation in land, speculation in any market transaction is a gamble. It’s a risk. But when you take a plunge, when you take a risk, of course, that’s forward thinking if it pans out for you, as they say in the gold mining districts. And so you take chances and if you win, you’re a hero, you’re a pillar of the community. If you’re not, your pilloried.

BRIAN: ED: If we leave that bad pun aside, I completely agree with Peter. You’re surrounded, Ed. Because if you fast forward to the 20th century, you have the masses beginning to participating in the stock market, for instance. It really begins in the 1920s but today, a huge percentage of the American population has their entire retirement funds wrapped up in their 401(k)s and that kind of thing.

It doesn’t matter if they go to Atlantic City or Las Vegas. We live in a highly financialized economy where people are quite literally gambling on whether interest rates are going up or going down.

ED: So guys, I’m persuaded that gambling is pervasive throughout American history. What is it about American religion that makes people opposed to gambling?

PETER: If you believe on the sovereignty of God, you believe everything is disposed according to His will and the idea of invoking lady luck, betting, gambling as if you could effect your own fate, that’s a basic insult to a good Christian.

ED: It’s kind of pagan, right?

PETER: Yes, indeed.

ED: OK, that’s pretty heavy. Brian?

BRIAN: Mine is not as heavy, although I think there is a similar impulse there, Peter. In the 20th century, we no longer see the kind of religious outrage. Lotteries are legalized in virtually all states, overcoming religious opposition.

But what we have is a very medicalized response and we know that a scary proportion of Americans who gamble develop some kind of addiction. And we have centers for treating problems that, in the 19th and 18th century were seen as sin or moral depravity.

ED: But you know, I see another profound continuity. People today think that gambling is bad for the society as a whole. It takes money from poorer people and puts it in the pockets of people who already have money.

BRIAN: I think you just described the current economy generally, Ed.

ED: That could be but notice how that resonates with what happened in Vicksburg in the 1830s. There’s a sense that I can gamble because I know how to do it responsibly but these other people out there just can’t handle all this risk.

BRIAN: And I do think what runs through all of American history is that one man’s gambling is another man’s business. And I was very much taken by the fact that these gamblers thought of themselves as business people who were doing what Americans have always done, that’s to make money on the newcomers.

PETER: And, of course, gambling is big business now. So that distinction is completely collapsed.