GAMBLING

GAMBLING . The religious significance of gambling is, in effect, twofold. Many religious traditions, especially the great religions, in their works of legislation and codification, promote as their orthodox norm a prohibition against, or at least discouragement of, gambling. On the other hand, in many cultures gambling takes on religious significance in connection with myths and rituals.

This twofold simplification, however, addresses gambling only insofar as it takes on overt religious significance. No discussion of gambling would be complete, however, without acknowledging its covert religious significance, particularly in cultures that prohibit it or, having adopted a secularized attitude, look upon it as something nonreligious or merely "cultural." Although beyond the main focus of this essay, it is evident that much of what goes on in the name of secular, cultural, or even legalized gambling is both enhanced by the flaunting or circumvention of traditional prohibitions and heightened by ritualized procedures too numerous to mention, by special "sacred" and "liminal" times (the American Superbowl) and places (casinos in remote or international spots), and by a cast of mythological characters and aspirations (the cool, passionate, roving, or desperate gambler; the jackpot winner).

In definitional terms, religious gambling is not easily separated from games and divination. Because gambling cannot be discussed without reference to games, this article shall deal with games only where they are the focus of wages and stakes. As for divination, the use in certain cases of similar implements (lots, bones, dice) and the occurrence of similar attitudes to unseen forces are not sufficient to support the frequently aired view that gambling derives from divination (Tylor, 1871). One does not, in fact, need implements or games at all to gamble. This article shall, however, refer to the drawing of lots and other forms of divination where their use is similar or related to that of gambling practices.

Gambling in Traditional Cultures

Unless one adopts a diffusionist perspective and attempts to derive all forms of gambling from ancient Near Eastern or other Asian prototypes, the prevalence of gambling rites and myths in archaic cultures strongly suggests that the origins of religious gambling are irretrievable. Archaeologists have suggested that the painted pebbles found in the Mas d'Azil caves in the Pyrenees, from the Mesolithic period, are gambling implements. The earliest known dice and board game is that found in the Sumerian royal tombs at Ur, from about 2600 bce. Gambling can only be assumed here, as with Indus Valley dice from about 2000 bce and Egyptian (1990–1780 bce), Cretan (1800–1650 bce), and Palestinian (c. sixteenth century bce) finds, some of which resemble cribbage boards. Evidence of ball games and gaming boards from Mesoamerican cultures, of types that continue to be played in that area today, is also traceable to about 1500 bce. And Ṛgveda 10.34 provides the first gambler's lament in its "Hymn to Gambling" (c. 1200 bce). The games of ancient cultures appear not only to be similar to those found in recent and contemporary field contexts but to have had in some cases—such as the Mesoamerican—remarkable continuity from past to present. As the religious significance of gambling is clearly more in a state of living "expression" than belated "application" (Jensen, 1963, pp. 59-64) in contemporary tribal cultures, such cultures present the best evidence for understanding the religious dimensions of gambling in general.

Unfortunately, ethnographic discussion of "sacred" gambling is uneven. There is sufficient documentation to be confident that it is found on all continents and probably among most, if not all, tribal communities. Many games and implements have been described and collected from around the world, but few studies have examined the cultural and religious significance of gambling at the field level in any detailed way. The only thorough field research on gambling seems to be Geertz's study of the Balinese cockfight, and in that situation its rather covert religious significance is tied in with the Balinese version of popular Hinduism (Geertz, 1973). Nonetheless, Geertz's findings and insights are illuminating with respect to a wider view of religious gambling.

Generally, one finds two models for understanding the archaic religious significance of gambling: Geertz's notion of "deep play," a consuming passionate involvement drawing on deeply ingrained cultural codes and strategies, and the pervasively cited notion that gambling games draw on "cosmic symbolism," or have "cosmic significance." Because Geertz mentions calendrical and cosmological ideas that bear upon the choice and placement of cocks (p. 427), it is evident that the two approaches are not antithetical. In fact, the "cosmic significance" clearly lends itself to the "deepening" of the play.

The cosmological significance of gambling games was maintained by Culin, author of several monumental works on games. In his book on North American Indian games, he summarizes the common pattern of references to gambling games in the origin myths of numerous tribes:

They usually consist of a series of contests in which the demiurge, the first man, the culture hero, overcomes some opponent, a foe of the human race, by exercise of superior cunning, skill, or magic. Comparison of these myths … discloses the primal gamblers as those curious children, the divine Twins, the miraculous offspring of the Sun.… They live in the east and the west; they rule night and day, winter and summer. They are the morning and evening stars. Their virgin mother, who appears also as their sister and wife, is constantly spoken of as their grandmother, and is the Moon, or the Earth, the Spider Woman, the embodiment of the feminine principle in nature. Always contending, they are the original patrons of play, and their games are now played by men. (Culin, 1907, p. 32)

In Culin's Zuni example, the emblems of the Twin War Gods, their weapons, are classified fourfold in accord with the four directions and are interchangeable with their gaming implements. Thus, for example, stick dice are arrows, shafts, or miniature bows (ibid., p. 33). A correlation between dice and weapons is also made in the Hindu Mahābhārata epic.

It is not, in fact, difficult to advance the principle that every game, ancient or modern, creates a miniature cosmos, its arena, rules, apparatus, and players comprising a unique spatiotemporal world that reflects and symbolizes aspects of known and accepted cosmological structures. This is as true of Monopoly, football, or cricket as it is of more traditional games such as snakes and ladders, which in its Indian context symbolized a difficult ascent to heaven (Grunfeld, 1975, pp. 131–133). There are many examples from American Indian cultures of counting boards, playing boards, and ball-game courts having "gateways" or quadrants that correspond to the four directions; to the alternating seasons; to the equinoctial points; to tribal divisions such as men versus women, married women versus single women, old men versus young men; and to moiety divisions identified with heaven and earth, changes in the seasons, or other cosmological referents (Culin, 1907, pp. 34–208 passim). In his careful study of the Mesoamerican ball game, Humphrey (1979) thus allows that "there seems to be no question" that it "was based on a kind of cosmic symbolism." He suggests that the movement of the ball represented the course of heavenly bodies through dualistically conceived upper and lower worlds, the two sides thus enacting the struggle between light and darkness, summer and winter, life and death. The ancient Chinese game of pitchpot (see Yang, 1969, pp. 138–165) may rely on cosmological notions of the pot (or, sometimes, the gourd) as a container of the world and symbol of primal chaos. Also striking in this connection is the ancient Aztec board game of patolli, which has evident formal similarities with the South Asian game of pachisi. Arguments over whether the similarities are due to diffusion or independent use of similar cosmological structures have remained unresolved since the late nineteenth century. In any case, Beck (1982, pp. 199–205) has argued cogently for the cosmological significance of pachisi. The pieces move around the four-armed board, representing the world quarters, in a way that follows the reverse (counter-clockwise) movement of the sun through the houses of the zodiac. The four-sided dice are identified with the four Indian ages (yuga s). The goal of returning to the center thus suggests a triumph over spatiotemporal conditions.

Geertz's discussion of the Balinese cockfight draws its concept of deep play from Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the English economist and philosopher, who uses the term to refer to situations in which stakes are so high that participation is irrational. At the cockfight, two kinds of bets are made: even-money center bets between the two cock owners and their allied supporters, and side bets on odds made among the assembled crowd. As a rule, the larger the center bets, the more even are the odds reached in the crowd. Interest and "depth" are thus enhanced by making the outcome appear as unpredictable as possible. But the size of the center bet also "deepens" the stakes for the cock owners. For the stakes here are not just material, but are matters of honor, esteem, status, and, also, delight in bringing oblique affront to the opponent. Except for addicted gamblers, who are drawn—usually to their ruin—to the small center bet and long odds matches, real status remains largely unaffected, because victories and losses tend to balance out. But the deep play at status reversals and reclamations of status is real enough in its psychological and social impact. Only men play, while on the periphery of the cockfight, roulette and other gambling games of sheer chance are operated by concessionaires for women, children, the poor, and others who find themselves excluded.

"Deep-play" cockfighting is thus for "the solid citizenry" and resembles an "affaire d'honneur" (Geertz, 1973, pp. 435–436). Moreover, it pits not merely individuals against each other, but corporate groups—most notably, whole villages and patriarchal descent groups. Support money for the central bet comes from other members of the group, and even side-betting against the cock of one's group is considered disloyal. The cock owners thus have not only their own status at stake, but their status within their respective groups and that of the groups themselves.

All of this is displayed "in a medium of feathers, blood, crowds, and money" (ibid., p. 444) that arouses the deepest passions but is rounded off with furtive payments that affirm a cultivated embarrassment at such personal identification with the world of demonic and animal violence. For the cockfight is also, fundamentally, an encounter with the demonic: "a blood sacrifice offered, with the appropriate chants and oblations, to the demons in order to pacify their ravenous, cannibal hunger" (ibid., p. 420). The fights are regularly performed in connection with temple festivals and as collective responses to such natural evils as illness, crop failure, and volcanic eruptions.

A correlation between status—in the largest sense—and deep-play gambling can certainly be found. The importance of status is reflected in the fact that gambling is frequently the province of kings, heroes, and aristocrats: the models of what comes down to the present as the genteel bettor. Humphrey (1979, pp. 141–146) has applied Geertz's categories to the aristocratic patronage of the Mesoamerican ball game. But still better confirmation for such an analysis comes from descriptions of the North American Huron Indian dice games collected by Culin (1907, pp. 105–110). Sacrificial offerings of tobacco to the spirits of the game precede the action. Sometimes whole townships and even tribes contend. In one eight-day game between townships, every inhabitant of each party threw the dice at least once. Players with lucky dreams were sought out for the casting:

At this game they hazard all they possess, and many do not leave off till they are almost stripped quite naked and till they have lost all they have in their cabins. Some have been known to stake their liberty for a time.… The players appear like people possessed, and the spectators are not more calm. They all make a thousand contortions, talk to the bones [i. e., throw the dice], load the spirits of the adverse party with imprecations.… They quarrel and fight, which never happens among [them] but on these occasions and in drunkenness. (ibid., pp. 105–106)

Women and girls play the same game, but only separately and under inferior conditions: with different numbers of dice, and throwing by hand on a blanket rather than with a dice box or basket as the men do (ibid., p. 107).

Gambling on one's freedom is an ultimate status wager and is a type of bet instanced in many cultures. Another suggestive feature of deep play that emerges here is the significance of "stripping," for being willing to gamble all one possesses may both literally and figuratively involve such an outcome. Loss of status is thus potentially far more than just loss of face. As Geertz remarks, there is both a literal and a metaphoric significance—sustained by the Balinese language as in the English—to the Balinese cockfighter's identification with his cock (Geertz, 1973, pp. 417–418). I shall note important recurrences of this gambling-stripping correlation, which has a wide range of effects, from deep humiliation to eroticism. Obviously, strip poker is a "secular" example of the latter orientation.

Ritualized gambling thus seems to rely on both its cosmological significance and its character as deep play. The forces of chance draw the contestants into deep involvement in a context that allows for both the regulated breakdown and the creative redefinition of the structural roles by which society and cosmos operate—a context that the games reflect. The games thus have the character of liminal passage rites, or ordeals (Humphrey, 1979, p. 144), as well as of reiterations of the cosmogony, the reestablishment of cosmos out of chaos. Such initiatory and cosmogonic overtones have been detected in the dice match that concluded the ancient Indian sacrifice of royal consecration, or rajasuya. In playing dice on even terms with members of different castes, the king overcomes the forces of chance, chaos, and confusion by his triumph (Heesterman, 1957, pp. 140–157). As is often the case in ritual gambling, the game is rigged to assure the desired outcome. But the important point is that the participants submit to the principles of the game. Similar initiatory and cosmogonic overtones are found in contexts where gambling is performed for the sick, over the dead, or at turning points in the seasons (for examples, see Culin, 1907, pp. 108–115; Hartland, 1924–1927, pp. 168–169; Jensen, 1963, p. 60).

Prohibitions on Gambling

The principles by which different religions have denounced or prohibited gambling are revealing on two fronts. First, they reflect the axiomatic theological and cultural values operative in the respective traditions. Second, they often provide theologically and culturally attuned indications of what it is that is so appealing about what they seek to oppose. Not surprisingly, cosmological significance and deep-play involvement are among the condemned attractions.

In Isaiah 65:11–12, gambling is thus one of the ways by which Israel provokes the Lord: "[You] who set up a table for Fortune and fill cups of mixed wine for Destiny, I will destine you to the sword." Gad (Fortune) and Meni (Destiny) were gods of fortune, possibly of Syrian or Phoenician origin. The polemic against gambling is thus made in the same terms as that against idolatry, which in turn is a polemic against involvement in false cosmologies ruled by false gods. The context also suggests that such gambling was, at least to the mind of the prophet, one of the alluring vices of acculturation besetting Israel. This attitude persists in Talmudic and rabbinic prohibitions against a variety of games, from the Greek Olympics to cards and chess, which Jews regarded themselves as having adopted from their neighbors. But it is particularly those games that involve gambling that are singled out for condemnation. The Mishnah declares twice that dice players and pigeon racers are disqualified from appearing as witnesses in a court of justice (R. ha-Sh. 1.8; San. 3.3), and the medieval Sefardic philosopher Mosheh ben Maimon (Maimonides, 1135/8-1204) extends the ban to include those who play chess for money (Commentary on Sanhedrin 3.3). This disqualification rests on the principle that gamblers are guilty of facilitating acts of robbery and are thus, in effect, criminals. Curiously, gamblers are similarly disqualified in Hindu law books, joined to thieves, assassins, and other dangerous characters for being "incompetent on account of their depravity" and persons in whom no truth can be found (Narada Smrti 1.159, 1.178; Bṛhaspati Dharmaśāstra 7.30).

The passage from Isaiah also introduces another strain of condemnation: Using the same Hebrew root in two words, Yahveh "destines" to the sword those who tempt "Destiny." Such a scene is, in fact, played out in another passage from Isaiah, where the rabshakeh (field marshal) of the Assyrian king Sennacherib challenges Israel to a wager over horses, and to an additional (though implied) theological wager—expressed by boasts referring to Yahveh as a fallible god like those of the surrounding nations—that Yahveh cannot deliver Israel. The wager over the horses is ignored, but the arrogant theological presumption of the affront to the Lord results in the salvation of Jerusalem and Sennacherib's death by the sword (Is. 36–37).

If gambling was denounced in the Bible, however, the casting of lots was not. The throwing of lots with the Urim and Tummim (Yes and No), articles kept in the priest's apron, was accepted as a means of discerning the divine will. Thus Saul was chosen by lot to be king (1 Sm. 10:20–21); rural priests were chosen by lot to serve in Jerusalem (1 Chr. 24–25); and Matthias was selected by lot to become Judas's successor as the twelfth apostle (Acts 1:26). In these instances, the casting of lots cannot be called gambling. But it is also evident that Israel knew of the use of lots for gambling, though the references suggest that it was only other nations that so employed them. In Joel 3:1–3, Yahveh speaks of bringing judgment upon the nations for "having divided up my land" and "cast lots for my people." And in Psalms 22:16–18, the psalmist, seeing himself dead, describes the "company of evildoers" who "divide my garments among them, and for my raiment cast lots." It is this latter passage that is taken in John 19:23–24 as a prophecy of the scene at Jesus' crucifixion, where the Roman soldiers divide up the crucified Christ's garments and gamble for his seamless tunic. Here the symbolism of stripping and gambling accentuates the deepest humiliation and suffering (see Mk. 15:16–20, 25; Mt. 27:28–29, 36).

Early Christian canon law condemned gambling in no uncertain terms. Two of the so-called Apostolic Canons (41, 42) prohibited both laity and clergy, under pain of excommunication, from engaging in games of chance. And at the Council of Elvira (306 ce), the seventy-ninth canon decreed a year's banishment from communion for anyone guilty of gambling. But restrictions of later councils were directed toward the clergy, and only certain games (especially cards and dice) were forbidden (Slater, 1909, pp. 375–376). Such relaxing of restrictions on lay gambling has facilitated church sponsorship of bingo and lottery games in fund-raising efforts. The same is true in Orthodox churches.

Christian condemnations of gambling gather their fullest force in Puritan writings. According to the doctrine of predestination, because every action is foreordained, matters of so-called chance are in the hands of God alone. To invoke God in the name of fortune is to offend him "by making him the assistant in idle pleasures" (Knappen, 1939, p. 439). Similarly, man is but a steward of his goods, which ultimately belong to God. Thus he must not wager what is truly God's (Paton, 1924, p. 166). Furthermore, losers at gambling tend to express themselves in curses.

A rather practical Islamic stance is expressed in the Qurʾān when Muḥammad discourages wine and a form of gambling with arrows in which the loser pays for a young camel that is slaughtered and given to the poor: "In both there is sin and profit to men; but the sin of both is greater than the profit of the same" (Palmer, 1880, p. 32).

The Hindu law books are full of cautionary remarks on gambling. As noted already, gamblers are judged incompetent witnesses in matters of law. There are statements that gambling makes one impure, and that the wealth obtained by gambling is tainted. Most significant, however, is a passage from the Laws of Manu concerning the duties of kings: Of the royal vices, ten are born of pleasure and eight of anger, and all end in misery; of the ten that "spring from love of pleasure," the most pernicious are drinking, dice, women, and hunting (7.45–50). This list of four vices recurs in the Mahābhārata (3.14.7) in the mouth of the divine Kṛṣṇa when he denounces the epic's famous dice match. Kṛṣṇa adds that gambling is the worst "desire-born" vice of all. Thus one seems to have here a condemnation of gambling as deep play. This correlation between gambling and desire is at the very heart of the Indian meditation on gambling, for actions born of desire are binding to this world. Yet in Hindu terms it is also the things of desire—including the four just mentioned—that draw people to the divine. Thus, whereas Kṛṣṇa here warns of gambling's dangers, when he reveals his "supernal manifestations" in the Bhagavadgītā he claims to be identical with the game of dice itself: "I am the gambling of rogues" (10.36).

Buddhist tradition sustains the same critique of gambling without such accent on the ambiguity. In the sixteenth chapter of the Parabhava Sutta, the Buddha includes addiction to women, strong drink, and dice as one of eleven combinations of means whereby men are brought to loss. The text contrasts these eleven roads to ruin with the one path to victory: loving the dhamma, the Buddha's teaching. Elsewhere, monks are warned that numerous games and spectacles—including combats between elephants, horses, buffalo, bulls, goats, rams, and cocks; various board games; chariot racing; and dicing—are addictive distractions and detrimental to virtue (Tevijja Sutta, Majjhima Sīlam 2–4).

Gambling Gods, Demons, and Heroes

Yet even the gods—not to mention their demonic adversaries—are wont to gamble. Yahveh makes an implied wager with Satan that Job will remain blameless and upright when deprived of all he has (Jb. 1:6–12). In Christian traditions, the devil continues to gamble for the human soul, as in Stephen Vincent Benét's story The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937). In Tibet, an annual ceremony was performed in which a priest representing a grand lama played dice with a man dressed as a demonic ghost king. With fixed dice, the priest won, chasing the demon away and confirming the truth of the teaching (Waddell, 1895, p. 512). In India, the two lowest of the four dice throws are demonic. Thus in the epic story of Nala and Damayantī, one demon (Dvāpara) enters the dice, and the other (Kali) "possesses" the hero, dooming him to lose all he has won (Mahābhārata 3.55–56). But the Hindu gods play anyway, and are even, as we have seen, identified with gambling. This is true not only of Kṛṣṇa but, more decisively, of Śiva, who is from very early times the lord of gamblers, and who plays dice in classical myths with his wife Parvati.

As noted, Indian dice are named after the four ages (yuga s), which "roll" four by four a thousand times within the larger time unit of the kalpa. The dice play of the divine couple thus represents the continuity of the universe and their absorption with and within it. This "deep play" is one expression of the theological concept of līlā, literally "divine play" or "divine sport." The game's disruption holds the implication of the end of the universe (the mahāpralaya ), while its resumption holds the implication of the recreation (the cosmogony). But insofar as the game is associated with the rise and fall of the yuga s, it is played ritually at liminal temporal junctures in which the continuity of the universe is imperiled. Śiva and Pārvatī thus provide the mythic model for those who play dice ritually at the festival of Dīvālī (Dīpāvalī), which marks a traditional new year. And it is at the mythic juncture of the Dvāparayuga and the Kaliyuga that the great dice match of the Mahābhārata occurs.

One of the most important themes that unites the dice play of Śiva and Pārvatī with the dice match of the Mahābhārata is that of stripping. The stakes for which Śiva and Pārvatī play are their clothes and ornaments. When Śiva loses his loincloth, he gets angry, goes off naked, or refuses to pay up. Pārvatī points out that he never wins, except by cheating (O'Flaherty, 1973, pp. 204, 223, 247). Thus it never comes to pass that both of them are reduced to nakedness, which would imply their merger as Śiva and Śakti, Puruṣa and Prakṛti, at the mahāpralaya. What is striking about the dice match in the Mahābhārata is that after the five Paṇḍava brothers have gambled away everything, even their freedom and their wife-in-common, Draupadī, the culminating act is the attempt by the winners (the Kauravas) to disrobe the heroine in front of her husbands and the whole assembly. As Draupadī is an incarnation of the Goddess, the miraculous intervention by Kṛṣṇa that prevents her stripping is a sign that the dissolution of the universe will not occur in untimely fashion during the intra-yuga period in which the story is set.

It is seen, then, that divine gambling involves persistent encounters with the demonic. Hindu materials carry this theme to great depths, accentuating a continuum between demonic possession and divine rapture. In South Indian terukkūttu ("street-drama") folk plays that enact the epic story, the attempts by the Kaurava Duḥśāsana to disrobe Draupadī result in his demonic possession, while Draupadī at the same time experiences the most sublime bhakti ("divine love"). On the divine-demonic turf of gambling, in fact, no hero can hope to win without recourse to the powers that hold the demonic in check. The hero is thus the one who is willing to take the risk, even against the seemingly highest odds. It is striking how many epics include episodes of gambling, and even more striking how frequently the "good" hero loses, awaiting final triumph or vindication elsewhere. This occurs not only in the Mahābhārata but in Indian folk epics as well. In the Tamil folk epic The Elder Brother's Story, the twin brothers play six games of dice with Viṣṇu at intervals preceding dramatic turns of fortune, the last of which is their death (Beck, 1982, p. 143). In the Telugu epic The Heroes of Palnāḍu, a cockfight wager divides irreparably the two camps of half brothers, and a game of tops and a dice match between another set of younger brothers in the heroic camp foreshadow the events that lead to their death. In recent years, actual cockfights have been outlawed at the festivals at which these stories are recited (Roghair, 1982, pp. 30 and 62–295 passim). In the Tibetan epic of Gesar of Ling, the hero repeatedly plays mōs (see Waddell, 1895, pp. 465–474), a game of divination using colored pebbles, before his adventures. Here the lots fall out in the divine hero's favor. In the Mwindo epic of the Nyanga people of the Congo Republic, the hero Mwindo plays wiki, a gambling game with seeds. Mwindo plays in the underworld against the supreme divinity of fire, first losing everything and then winning it back, in an effort to reclaim his antagonistic father from the underworld with a view toward their reconciliation.

Yet there is another dimension to the stance of the heroic gambler that figures, at least metaphorically, in all the great religions of faith: that of the person who may lose everything, or be stripped like Job or Draupadī, but will not gamble away salvation. In positive terms, this is the wager that God exists, the famous wager that Pascal set forth with such precision in his Pensées (1670):

But here there is an infinity of infinitely happy life to be won, one chance of winning against a finite number of chances of losing. That leaves no choice; wherever there is infinity, and where there are not infinite chances of losing against that of winning, there is no room for hesitation. You must give everything. And thus, since you are obliged to play, you must be renouncing reason if you hoard your life rather than risk it for an infinite gain, just as likely to occur as a loss amounting to nothing. (Krailsheimer, 1966, p. 151)

Pascal is thus at pains to show that the central bet, as in the Balinese cockfight, is for even money.

See Also

Chance; Divination; Games.

Bibliography

A good bibliography, mainly on the history and legislation of European and American gambling, is found in Stephen Powell's A Gambling Bibliography, Based on the Collection, University of Nevada, Las Vegas (Las Vegas, 1972). Valuable encyclopedia articles include those by J. L. Paton on "Gambling," E. Sidney Hartland on "Games," and G. Margoulith on "Games (Hebrew and Jewish)," in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings, vol. 6 (Edinburgh, 1913); T. Slater's "Gambling," in Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (New York, 1909); and R. F. Schnell's "Games OT," in The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, edited by George Arthur Buttrick (New York, 1962).

For theoretical discussion, see Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture, vol. 1, The Origins of Culture (1871; reprint, New York, 1958), pp. 78–83, emphasizing diffusion and divination, and Charles John Erasmus's "Patolli, Pachisi, and the Limitation of Possibilities," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6 (1950): 369–387, which evaluates Tylor's views and various opposing views (including those of Robert Stewart Culin). On "play" in different aspects, see Adolf E. Jensen's Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples, translated by Marianna Tax Choldin and Wolfgang Weissleder (Chicago, 1963), pp. 59–64, and, especially, Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), pp. 412–453, on the Balinese cockfight. Recent proceedings of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play (ATASP) are worth consulting, especially for the following: Bernard Mergen's "Reisman Redux: Football as Work, Play, Ritual and Metaphor" and Robert L. Humphrey's "Suggestions for a Cognitive Study of the Mesoamerican Ball Game," in Play as Context (ATASP Proceedings, 1979), edited by Alyce Taylor Cheska (West Point, N.Y., 1981), and Pierre Ventur's "Mopan Maya Dice Games from the Southern Peten," in Play and Culture (ATASP Proceedings, 1980), edited by Helen B. Schwartzman (West Point, N.Y., 1980).

On documentation, see Frederic V. Grunfeld's Games of the World (New York, 1975), for informed discussion with illustrations. On American Indian games, see the classic study by Robert Stewart Culin, Games of the North American Indians, "Bureau of American Ethnology Report," no. 24 (1907; reprint, Washington, D. C., 1973). See also Rafael Karsten's "Ceremonial Games of the South American Indians" (in English), Societas Scientarum Fennica: Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Helsinki, 1930); Jan C. Heesterman's The Ancient Indian Royal Consecration (The Hague, 1957); Liansheng Yang's Excursions in Sinology (Cambridge, Mass., 1969); L. Austune Waddell's The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism (1895; reprint, Cambridge, 1958). On prohibitions of gambling, see the articles by Hartland, Paton, and Slater mentioned above; M. M. Knappen's Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1939); and The Qurʾān, translated by E. H. Palmer in "Sacred Books of the East," vol. 6 (1880; reprint, Delhi, 1970).

On gambling in myths and epics, see Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva (Oxford, 1973); Brenda E. F. Beck's The Three Twins: The Telling of a South Indian Folk Epic (Bloomington, Ind., 1982); Gene H. Roghair's The Epic of Palnadu: A Study and Translation of Palnati Virula Katha (Oxford, 1982); Alexandra David-Neel's The Superhuman Life of Gesar of Ling, translated by Violet Sydney, rev. ed. (London, 1959); and Daniel P. Biebuyck and Kohombo C. Mateene's The Mwindo Epic (Berkeley, Calif., 1969). On Pascal's wager, see Blaise Pascal's Pensées, translated by A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth, 1966).

New Sources

Handelman, Don, and David Shulman. God Inside Out: Siva's Game of Dice. New York, 1997.

Alf Hiltebeitel (1987)

Revised Bibliography

37. Gambling

Gambling is an industry that is undergoing tremendous change. It was not too long ago that Nevada was the only state in the union that allowed casino gambling. Today, numerous states either are considering legalizing gambling, or have already done so. There are two factors that are driving the change. First, Native Americans have won the right to establish casinos on their lands regardless of the laws of the state in which they are located. The establishment of these casinos has softened the general public’s attitudes toward casino gambling and has led to the introduction of legislative initiatives that permit it, or to voter referendums on the issue. Often, in each situation, the initiatives have resulted in outcomes favorable to gambling. The other factor that has led to legalization of gambling is the economic impact. Many of the regions where gambling has been legalized have realized untold economic benefits in terms of taxes, jobs and development of infrastructure, etc.

Despite the economic developments, the idea of legalizing gambling is not without controversy. Many argue that despite the economic benefits, there is also associated tragedy as people who are addicted to gambling have been known to gamble until they have lost everything and have wreaked havoc on their families and personal lives.

Casino gambling is not the only type of gambling that exists, nor is it the only kind of gambling addressed by state laws. As can be seen in the following chapter, there are many different ways to gamble. The most common subject of regulation is betting. Pari-mutuel wagering is a betting pool in which those who bet on competitors finishing in the top three positions share the total amount bet, less a percentage for the management. Horse racing, dog racing or betting on sporting events are those most frequently and specifically banned. However regulation of regional events is common. Alaska lists about ten different events that are allowed, including many that would be unthinkable in the south: Deep Freeze Classic, Snow Machine Classic, and the Ice Classic are examples. Florida lists a number of legal gambling activities that relate specifically to the state’s large number of retired citizens: penny-ante games with winnings not exceeding $10 .... including poker, pinochle, bridge, dominos, mahjong that are conducted by adults within a dwelling. One of the more unusual prohibitions is found in Massachusetts where gaming is not permitted within one mile of a cattle show or military muster.

Overall, the subject of legalized gambling as an industry is far from settled and is likely to change regularly in the coming years.

Gambling

The psychology of gambling

The sociology of gambling

The legalization issue

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gambling may be defined as a form of activity in which the parties involved, who are known as bettors or players, voluntarily engage to make the transfer of money or something else of value among themselves contingent upon the outcome of some future and uncertain event.

While the origins of gambling are lost to recorded history, it appears probable that games of chance developed out of various magical and religious practices employed by man to cope with problems of uncertainty and fate. In contemporary societies gambling appears most frequently in recreational contexts and in association with various sports and games. Among the major classes of games, gambling is especially common in those in which chance plays a prominent role, but it also appears in connection with games of skill or strategy and with games of physical prowess. In nonrecreational contexts gambling occurs in the form of wagers on the outcome of future events about which the bettors have strong convictions, as in the case of election outcomes. Elements closely parallel to gambling appear in conjunction with economic activities, especially those in which risk and uncertainty are prominent. In effect, speculators on the commodity markets bet against each other about the rise or fall of commodity prices.

In its various aspects gambling is at once a major recreational institution, a minor vice, a large-scale industry, a powerful source of crime and political corruption, a perennial social problem, a fascinating psychological puzzle, and an intriguing pastime. Like prostitution, it is ancient, widespread, and widely disapproved. It flourishes, in spite of ethical taboo and legal sanction, as an institutionalized deviant pattern and as a form of crime in which the victims are willing accomplices.

Social science perspectives on gambling . Because of gambling’s complex and paradoxical nature, it is not surprising that the responses to it by social scientists and others have been extraordinarily diverse. Philosophers and theologians have struggled with the ethical and teleological implications of gambling, viewing it at times as a profane and frivolous stepchild of religion, to which it bears certain disquieting similarities. Mathematicians have exploited gambling to the hilt in the development of probability theory, some of them becoming gamesters in the process. Economists have turned to gambling to clarify the distinction between the functional and dysfunctional aspects of speculation and, more recently, for some sophisticated reformulations of utility theory. In the “theory of games” they have found in gambling a model for analyzing strategies in competitive situations involving risk and uncertainty.

Experimental psychologists have employed gambling situations in studies of probability learning and probability preferences, of levels of aspiration, and of intermittent reinforcement and conflict-drive motivation. Social psychologists have utilized gambling games to study social competition, aggression, and coalition formation. Psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists have concerned themselves with the unconscious motivations and personality structures of gamblers and with the problems of addiction. Sociologists have been interested in the incidence of gambling, its organization in relation to the underworld and the police, its functions for individuals and society, and its control. Finally, ethnographers and social historians have provided some fascinating descriptions of the cultural patterning of gambling in various times and places.

In these many different approaches that have touched on the subject, the interest in gambling has often been peripheral to some other, central interest, with the result that the coverage is piecemeal and fragmentary. While there are scattered bits of useful knowledge and theory, systematic treatises on gambling are sadly lacking. Moreover, many of the treatments that do exist are speculative, impressionistic, and moralistic, and many are also without adequate data.

The psychology of gambling

From a psychological viewpoint, gambling is at once an instrumental activity, directed toward a consciously recognized economic end, and an expressive activity, enjoyed as an end in itself. Interpretations of gambling motivations have varied widely, depending upon which of these facets has commanded the central focus of attention.

Gambling as instrumental behavior

In making their betting decisions, economically oriented gamblers must take two principal factors into account: the odds and the probabilities. In gambling terminology “odds” designates the ratio between the amount staked and the amount the player stands to win if successful. “Probabilities” refers to expectations regarding the outcome of the event bet upon, expressed as a ratio of favorable to unfavorable outcomes or as the percentage of favorable outcomes out of all possible outcomes. The actuarial value of a gambling risk depends upon the relationship between the odds and the probabilities. In gambling situations generally, there is a tendency for these two ratios to approach an inverted balance: as the probabilities of a favorable outcome become smaller, the odds become longer. For example, in horse racing, long shots fetch better prices than favorites. That this tendency exists at all may be taken as evidence for the operation of an element of economic rationality among gamblers.

It is clear, however, that no general theory of gambling behavior can be constructed from the conventional notions of economic rationality alone. In every gambling situation either the odds and probabilities are exactly balanced or they are not. Assume, first, that they are balanced, as in the case of tossing coins for even money. In the gambling world such risks are known as fair risks because neither side has any clear advantage. While it might appear that the rational gambler would have no particular reason to avoid such risks, there is also no apparent reason for him to accept them. Indeed, according to orthodox economic theory, the prudent gambler would presumably assign some element of disutility or cost to risk assumption and to the activity of gambling itself, regarding it as a form of “work.” Moreover, if he assigns some function of diminishing utility to successive increments of money income, as economic theory assumes, the utility of each unit of money he might win in a fair-risk situation would be less than that of the money he might lose. Hence, the economically rational gambler would presumably avoid such risks as in this sense “not fair.”

In all other gambling situations the odds and probabilities are not in balance. In situations of this sort, since all gambling transactions are between persons, it follows that whereas one player has backed a good risk, his opponent has by definition accepted a poor one. It is evident, therefore, that at least half of all gamblers have lost their rational economic bearings. In fact, in the gambling world the majority of good risks are monopolized by the professional gamblers who operate the various games and devices, always with a comfortable margin of safety. From the lay player’s point of view there are no “good risks” at all in any professionally operated gambling house. Yet the market behavior of such gamblers makes it clear that there is always an easy market for poor gambling risks, especially those in which the odds are intriguingly long but offset by disastrously short probabilities.

The “utility of money.” Economists and psychologists alike have advanced many arguments and theories designed to show how such apparently nonrational behavior may yet be motivationally intelligible. One line of argument has called for a reappraisal of traditional assumptions about the diminishing utility of money. Thus, Vickrey (1945) reasoned that the behavior of lottery players clearly implies that in this situation the utility of money is an increasing rather than a decreasing function of income. Following this same theme, Friedman and Savage (1948) demonstrated that for the gambler even a small probability of a large reward may have more utility than either a much larger prob ability of small loss or the certainty, if the risk be rejected, of staying at the same income level. Along similar lines, Mosteller and Nogee (1951) recorded the actual market behavior of experimental subjects in a situation that permitted varying amounts to be won, with varying probabilities of success or failure. Observing that the subjects do not automatically accept the bets with the highest actuarial values, they attempted to construct a series of curves showing the actual utility for their subjects of varying amounts of money (see also Coombs & Komorita 1958).

The “utility of gambling.” A second line of analysis has challenged the assumption that the activity of gambling should be reckoned on the cost, or disutility, side of the calculus. In effect, the gambler may justify his losses as a fair payment for the pleasure he has obtained from the activity itself. Royden, Suppes, and Walsh (1959) have proposed a carefully reasoned model for the experimental measurement of the “utility of gambling” itself, which they argue must be kept independent of notions about the “utility of money.” This line of analysis, however, is not much help in explaining why gamblers find pleasure in this activity, while nongamblers presumably do not.

Subjective probabilities

A third line of analysis, focusing on the cognitive aspects of gambling orientations, raises the question whether gambling behavior is a function of simple ignorance or error or whether the “subjective probabilities” upon which the gambler premises his behavior are systemati cally distorted or biased by various motivational factors.

Ignorance or error. Studies of probability learning provide evidence that there is ample scope for error in appraising the probabilities in complex gambling situations. Komorita (1959) has shown that experimental subjects are least accurate in estimating probabilities when the number of events or possible outcomes is large and when the probabilities for unit events depart from .50. Brim and Koenig (1959) found, in a sample of 143 college students, that none knew the correct way to combine the probabilities of independent events. And Cohen and Hansel (1958) found that even highly intelligent subjects tended to interpret multiplicative probabilities as if they were additive. Professional gamblers are less prone to such errors and employ their extra knowledge to design gambling situations in which the true probabilities are subtly concealed.

Faulty reasoning may also serve to distort subjective probability estimates, as, for example, in the widespread belief among gamblers in the “maturity-of-chances” doctrine (Jarvik 1951). Since Dame Fortune must keep her books in balance, reason such gamblers, at roulette, for example, after any unduly long run of black the probabilities of red appearing on the next few plays are greatly increased. In fact, of course, the probabilities on unit events are not affected by preceding sequences. Ironically, perhaps, while the ability to estimate true probabilities generally increases with maturity (Cohen 1957), more sophisticated reasoning errors, such as the maturity-of-chances theory, do not occur among young children and become increasingly common with advancing age (Ross & Levy 1958).

Distorted estimates of the true probabilities also result from erroneous information—a principle much utilized by shrewd professionals. Thus, race tracks abound with false tips and spurious “inside information,” much of which is deliberately circulated by touts to mislead the fans and thus to skew the betting odds in some desired direction.

Motivated bias. While there is ample scope for simple ignorance or error in gambling situations, there is also abundant evidence that such errors are not random or merely cognitive but reflect consistent patterns of motivated bias. Very simply, the “errors” are almost invariably such as to distort the subjective probabilities in the gambler’s favor. It has been observed again and again that gamblers consistently overestimate their own skill or luck, and it has been demonstrated experimentally that subjects consistently overestimate low probabilities (cf. Preston & Baratta 1948; Nogee & Lieberman 1960).

A variety of possible explanations of this phenomenon have been advanced. Atkinson (1957) demonstrated experimentally that the tendency to overestimate chances to win is especially likely to be associated with a high need for achievement. Another recent study of probability learning has shown that positive events are learned more rapidly and extinguished more slowly than negative events (Crandall et al. 1958). This might help to explain the tendency among gamblers to think they are ahead—to remember the exciting winning play and forget the losses that preceded it. But, of course, most gamblers do know in a cognitive sense that they might lose and that they have lost in the past. Leon Festinger and his associates would regard this as an example of dissonant information that must somehow be suppressed if the gambler wishes to continue, which of course he does; indeed, this circumstance may cause the actor to develop some extra attraction to the activity, harnessing various secondary drives to it to justify his behavior and compensate for the dissonant information (Lawrence & Festinger 1962).

In terms of learning theory more generally, gambling represents an ideal-typical situation of “intermittent reinforcement,” or partial reward, and the evidence is overwhelming that activities reinforced in this way are peculiarly resistant to extinction. One plausible explanation of this is advanced in the conflict–drive theory developed by J. M. Whiting and his associates. Basically, this theory argues that when the same activity is sometimes rewarded and at other times nonrewarded or punished, conflict between the contradictory expectations of reward and punishment has the effect of adding drive strength to the originally reinforced action (Sears et al. 1953). Very simply, if the gambler always won or always lost, he would presumably lose interest; however, the conflict between fear and hope helps keep him going.

Gambling as expressive behavior

In considering the purely psychological rewards of gambling, we are clearly getting away from a concern with cognitive orientations and the interpretation of gambling as an instrumental activity directed toward an economic goal and are moving toward interpretations of gambling as an end in itself. It has been shown that even mathematically sophisticated subjects, possessing full information regarding the odds and the probabilities, opt for poor risks most of the time (Scodel et al. 1959). Curiously, it is also clear that there are some kinds of people who would not even bet on a sure thing. Moreover, there are evidently important differences among gamblers themselves: between those who prefer games of pure chance and those who prefer games involving skill or strategy; between system players and long-shot players; or between petty gamblers and addicts, for example. Such differentials as these yield to analysis only in terms of the differential noneconomic needs and motives of different classes of people.

Games as expressive models. Games typically occur in times, places, and contexts that are removed from the workaday utilitarian sectors of social structure and hence from the constraints and disciplines that the reality principle imposes on task-oriented activities. Thus, they tend to become intimately involved with the expressive and social-emotional sectors and to be concerned with problems of tension release and integration. Indeed, because they operate in what Kurt Lewin called a “plane of unreality,” games are well suited to function as expressive models, onto which a variety of psychological conflicts and problems can be harmlessly projected. As Menninger noted with respect to games of strategy, they may enable us “to express aggression without reality consequences; one can hurt people without really hurting them; we can even kill them without really killing them” (1942, p. 172). In a similar vein, Phillips (1960) has interpreted certain children’s games as exercises in the mastery of anxiety, in which psychological problems can be worked through in a miniature and relatively safe context.

Observing that games are not free and spontaneous expressive activities of individuals but are embedded in culture, Roberts and Sutton-Smith (1962) hypothesize that games will have special relevance for psychological problems that are endemic and widespread in the cultures or subgroups in which they are played. While games provide a buffered learning experience for children, game involvement typically diminishes with maturity as individuals become integrated into the mainstream of their culture. Games among adults are thus presumed to represent unresolved areas of conflict, and addicted players are presumed to be persons in a high state of unresolved inner conflict.

We may go on to inquire, for what kinds of needs or conflicts, for what kinds of persons, in what kinds of groups or societies, are gambling games appropriate expressive models? A number of theories have been proposed, each with at least some evidence in its support.

Teleological motivations in gambling. Since games of chance apparently originated out of religious and magical practices of divination, it has frequently been proposed that gambling may still perform an important teleological function in helping people orient themselves to the problems and conflicts invoked by the intrusions of chance, risk, and uncertainty in a world presumed to be causally and morally ordered. In principle, chance is meaningless and unintelligible, both causally and ethically. Yet, because of its capacity to violate legitimate expectations in important ways, many people feel that it must mean something: why do these things happen? why do they happen to me? For people who find these problems salient, gambling may assume a cosmic significance as a device for probing after the ground of things and of one’s personal relationships to fate (am I lucky today?). In one of the earliest psychological studies of gambling, France (1902) argued that in an environment of uncertaint a belief in luck is functional in encouraging a necessary element of risk assumption but that too much reliance on luck would obviate action and lead to a lack of effort. Relevant empirical evidence is provided in a recent crosscultural study (Roberts et al. 1959) which demonstrates that games of chance are especially likely to be found in preliterate societies in which the deities are regarded as benevolent and nonaggressive and readily subject to compulsion by humans. In contemporary, rationally oriented societies, gambling appeals particularly to superstitous persons, and it is one of the few areas in which permissive attitudes toward superstition are tolerated.

Economic conflicts and gambling. Because of gambling’s quasi-instrumental, economic character, it is also peculiarly suitable for the working out of conflicts engendered by the discipline, frustrations, and constraints of the capitalist economic system. Since its rewards are distributed on the basis of chance, gambling would appear to make a mockery of the legitimate economy, with its stress on rationality, discipline, and hard work and its assumed correlations of effort, merit, and reward. Evidence that conflicts in this area are relevant to gambling motivation is provided in another cross-cultural study, which demonstrated that games of chance are most frequently found in preliterate societies in which child-training practices place special stress on responsibility training and arouse high anxiety about achievement performance (Roberts & Sutton-Smith 1962). The authors of this latter study have also demonstrated that in the United States games of chance tend to be preferred by women and low-status economic groups—categories especially involved with positions of frustrating drudgery and with routine responsibilities (Sutton-Smith et al. 1963). A similar hypothesis is tested by Tec (1964) in her study of gambling in Sweden, in which she demonstrated that habitual gambling is especially common in groups that find conventional channels of social advancement blocked (see also Devereux 1949; Caillois 1958).

Competition and aggression. Where gambling occurs in conjunction with games of strategy, as in poker (see Riddle 1925), motivations of personal competition and aggression may also play a prominent role. In a classic analysis of this theme, W. I. Thomas (1901) viewed gambling as a form of sublimated combat and suggested that such games may help to keep this vital “instinct” alive in our civilized, bureaucratic world. Among preliterate societies it has been shown that games of strategy tend to occur most frequently in the relatively complex societies with developed systems of stratification, in which social competition becomes problematic and a source of conflict (Roberts et al. 1959). In the contemporary United States a preference for games of strategy and also games of physical prowess is more common among higher-status persons (Sutton-Smith et al. 1963).

Anxiety and guilt in gambling. Finally, there are theories that have focused upon thrill-seeking motivations in gambling behavior and their relationship to anxiety. There is broad consensus among students of habitual gamblers that, for all their apparent external calm, gamblers are in fact highly anxious persons. The psychological literature on levels of aspiration provides abundant evidence that persons known to be high in anxiety are particularly prone to set goals for themselves that are grossly unrealistic on the basis of past performance, being either much too high or much too low (cf. Lewin et al. 1944). It has also been demonstrated that unrealistic aspirations are more likely to be set in gaming situations, perhaps because of their miniature and fictitious character, than in real life situations (Frank 1935). Addressing himself to such findings, Atkinson (1957) argues that unrealistic aspirations in fact serve the function of minimizing anxiety about failure, for if one did not really expect to succeed, failure has very little sting. In his studies of probability preferences, he was able to demonstrate that persons high in “need achievement” and presumably high in success drives typically prefer risks at intermediate probability levels, in which success or failure are equally probable and, hence, which generate a maximum of tension and anxiety. Subjects low in “need achievement” and presumably more concerned with fear of failure typically preferred risks at extreme probability levels (either sure things or long shots), in which the success-failure tension is greatly reduced. Persons with high success need would presumably prefer games of skill or strategy, while persons with high fear of failure would prefer games of pure chance, in which failure is peculiarly noninvidious [seeAchievement Motivation].

Why do people who are high in anxiety and in fear of failure elect to gamble at all? Edmund Bergler, the only psychoanalyst who has dealt extensively with the problem of addicted gamblers, has argued that such gamblers are genuine neurot ics, driven by unconscious aggression and latent rebellion “against logic, cleverness, moderation, morals and renunciation. That latent rebellion, based on the inwardly never-relinquished ‘pleasure principle,’ scoffs ironically at all the rules of education. Heavy inner retaliation is the result …rebel lion activates a deep unconscious feeling of guilt” (1943, pp. 385-386). This guilt, Bergler argues, becomes in turn a source of anxiety and creates a need for self-punishment. These unconscious feelings are then neatly displaced into the segregated, miniature, and toylike setting of gambling, where they may be more or less harmlessly worked out. The gambler persuades himself that the real source of his guilt and anxiety is the tension of the game itself, and he achieves the needed self-punishment by keeping going until he loses. Thus, unconsciously, the neurotic gambler wants to lose, and he needs to lose in order to keep his psychological books in balance (see also Bergler 1957; Olmsted 1962).

Because gambling provides such a neat, readymade, institutionalized, and culturally sanctioned mechanism for the handling of neurotic problems of this sort, the neurotic gambler does not feel neurotic and rarely appears voluntarily for treatment. Hence, to date there has been very little empirical research on gambling addiction, and academic psychologists have largely ignored the problem. There is, however, at least some empirical evidence that gambling may also serve somewhat parallel conflict-resolving functions for nonaddicted petty gamblers, along the lines indicated earlier in this article.

The sociology of gambling

From a sociological point of view gambling is of interest primarily as an institutionalized deviant pattern. Although it is widely disapproved of, gambling is nevertheless also widely practiced, and it has given rise to an extensive sub rosa organization that is elaborately articulated with the underworld, on the one hand, and with the legitimate world of its clientele, on the other.

Attitudes toward gambling

The disapproval of gambling is ancient and extremely widespread, although varying greatly in intensity, content, and rationale. At different times and places gambling has been treated as a capital offense or merely as a misdemeanor. Legal restrictions have ranged from total prohibition to selective permissiveness, in which certain types of gambling activities have been permitted or even encouraged while others were forbidden or in which the rules against gaming were lifted during stated holidays or holy days. The laws have often made a distinction between games of pure chance and games of skill or between professional gamblers and their clients. Similarly, the grounds for the disapproval of gambling have varied widely, ranging from views that hold that gambling is fundamentally wrong in. principle to views that hold that gambling is wrong only if it produces manifestly evil consequences. Essentially the same conclusions, moreover, have been derived at times from theological and ethical arguments and at other times from rationalistic, scientific, and pragmatic grounds.

In Western society attitudes toward gambling have varied significantly among different religious groups. While the Bible is silent on the subject of gambling, there are numerous references to the use of lots for serious purposes, as when Moses was instructed to allocate the lands of Canaan among the Israelites by lot (Numbers 26.55). Since chance events were considered “acts of God,” the use of the lot, with appropriate ritual and respect, was regarded as justified for discerning the divine will in serious matters. However, the use of the lot for frivolous purposes, as in gaming, was regarded as a sacrilege and profanation. While formal opposition to gambling has persisted among Jewish moralists, prevailing attitudes have softened considerably, and they now view gaming as essentially a useless waste of time. Moreover, since the Middle Ages gambling has been widespread within the Jewish community. Roman Catholics have also come to take a liberal attitude toward gambling, holding that there is nothing wrong in principle with gambling, providing only that certain conditions be met: that the game be honest, that the stakes be moderate and within the means of the players, and that the money staked be one’s own, for example.

Gambling and the Protestant ethic. In Western society fundamental opposition to gambling, as a matter of basic ethical principle, is centered squarely in Protestantism and in the cultures where these denominations prevail. These are also, as Weber (1904–1905) observed, the same cultures in which modern bourgeois capitalism has achieved its greatest development. This fact suggests the hypothesis that gambling is somehow peculiarly antithetical, in principle at least, to the core of values embraced in this dominant economic system and in its supporting Protestant ethic.

On the surface, at any rate, the antithesis would seem to be clear enough. Among the core values of bourgeois capitalism are its special emphasis on rationality, disciplined work habits, prudence, thrift, methodical adherence to routine, and the assumed correlation of effort, ethical merit, and reward. The values symbolically erribodied in gam bling are diametrically opposed to these core virtues. Since its rewards are based on chance, gambling is explicitly and spitefully nonethical and makes a mockery of the required correlation of merit and reward. Thus, it tends to undermine disciplined work habits, prudence, and thrift; and in place of the needed rational-empirical orientations, it tends to foster superstitious beliefs and magical practices. If the values fostered by gambling were to become general in the population, the whole system of ethical sentiments that functions to sustain this dominant economic system would simply wither away. So argue the Protestant moralists.

In fact, of course, even in the dominant economic system the alternative values of initiative, daring, boldness, shrewdness, aggressive competitiveness, and willingness to assume risks also play a prominent role, and sheer luck is not always irrelevant. Because these values do not fit so neatly with those of the ethically sanctioned core, they have been the focus of considerable cultural ambivalence and guilt. The American public is uncomfortably aware, for example, of certain disquieting similarities between gambling and transactions on the stock markets; but open discussion of these similarities is strongly tabooed, and standard economic texts make a frantic effort to focus on the differences. In effect, gambling becomes a whipping boy to serve the precarious distinction between forms of speculation that are functionally useful and hence “legitimate” and those that are functionless or dysfunctional. Thus, when speculation gets out of hand, the obviously dysfunctional consequences for the economy are blamed, not on legitimate businessmen and still less on the stock market system, but on “gamblers,” who have somehow invaded the market and should be driven from it. More generally, it is quite possible that the disapproval of gambling, in addition to reinforcing certain functionally appropriate values and attitudes, functions as a mechanism through which society seeks to allay its fears and misgivings about the ethical integrity of the dominant system—a fact that may account for the persistence and intensity of this disapproval in Protestant societies (Devereux 1949, chapter 18).

Functions of gambling for society

The fact that gambling persists in spite of the powerful legal and ethical taboos against it maybe taken as evidence that it serves important psychological functions for the gamblers; the preceding discussion of the Psychology of gambling has called attention to at least some of these. But what about functions or dys functions of gambling for society? This, of course, is an empirical question that cannot be answered on the basis of a priori principle. The fact that the disapproval of gambling is functional for society does not in itself establish that the practice of gambling is therefore dysfunctional, for the questions of scale, contexts, and side effects must also be considered. Most observers would probably agree that the addicted gambler, like the alcoholic, is a waste for society. Moreover, it is probably true, as the moralists have argued, that if gambling became a major preoccupation for the whole population and if the attitudes and practices of gambling were to permeate the sphere of the dominant economic system, the consequences for society would be seriously dysfunctional.

However, there is no evidence that petty gambling is in any way damaging to character or that petty gamblers differ in significant ways from nongamblers (Tec 1964). On the contrary, petty gambling may function as a kind of institutionalized “solution” for many of the specific psychological problems generated by the conflicts, strains, and ambivalences embedded in the economic system. It may serve to revitalize certain relevant patterns of motivation that are given little scope in routine economic pursuits, such as motives relating to themes of daring, combat, faith, and willingness to take chances. It has also been argued that the existence of institutionalized petty gambling is functional for society in providing a channel into which potentially disruptive speculative tendencies may be safely deflected from the legitimate market place. To these should be added the positive (and perhaps somewhat perverse) value-reinforcing and scapegoating societal function of the disapproval of gambling, for which institutionalized gambling provides a convenient target.

The legalization issue

If recreational petty gambling is harmless enough and may even perform useful functions for personality and society, the question naturally arises, should gambling be legalized? In fact, several forms of gambling have already been legalized during the present century. Gambling casinos flourish in many European countries and in Latin America; many nations, including even the Soviet Union and China, have adopted state lotteries; and legalized football betting pools have captured enormous followings in England and Sweden.

Gambling and law in the United States

In the United States pari-mutuel betting at racetracks has been legalized in approximately half the states. Several states allow the playing of bingo for charitable purposes; two states (New Hampshire and New York) operate a lottery, and only one state (Nevada) permits all forms of gambling. Although there is unmistakable evidence that moral resistance to legalized gambling is weakening rapidly in the United States, until November 1966, with the above exceptions, proposals to legalize any other form of gambling in the United States had been soundly defeated.

Although legal sanctions may have some dampening effect on the amount of gambling that occurs, they have never been able to stop gambling altogether. Sample polls in the United States have indicated over and over again that a majority of American adults do in fact gamble at least occasionally, in spite of moral taboos and legal restrictions. In 1951 the Kefauver committee estimated the volume of illegal betting in the United States at $20,000 million per year (Kefauver 1951), but that estimate is almost certainly too low. In 1963 an officially recorded $2,700 million was wagered legally on horse races alone, through the pari-mutuel machines, and experts are generally agreed that at least ten times as much was wagered illegally with bookmakers. Scarne (1961, p. 1) places the probable total volume of betting, for all types of gambling in the United States, at closer to $500,000 million a year. While this estimate is probably too large, there is ample evidence that the volume of illegal betting in the United States is sufficient to support a major industry. Indeed, since the legalization of the liquor industry in 1933, gam bling has become the major source of support of the organized underworld in the United States.

The antigambling laws are unenforced and un enforceable in the United States for two principal reasons. First, the enormous financial resources controlled by the professional gamblers have enabled them to buy protection from excessive police or political harassment. Indeed, gambling has become one of the principal sources of political corruption and graft in America, especially at municipal levels (Devereux 1949; Kefauver 1951). Second, the general public, although sufficiently ambivalent to insist that antigambling statutes remain on the books, does not really want the gambling laws enforced and hence provides grossly insufficient support to reform-administration and routine enforcement efforts. As noted above, gambling is a peculiar form of crime, which is carried on with the willing consent of its victims; even when the victims have been clearly duped or cheated, they are usually loath to complain to the police, because of feelings of embarrassment and shame.

Arguments for legalization. The proponents of legalization argue that gambling—at least regulated petty gambling—is probably harmless, possibly beneficial, and in any case ineradicable. Antigambling statutes can never be effectively enforced. By keeping them on the books, we throw the entire operation into the hands of the underworld, create thereby an enormous source of revenue and power for organized crime, and keep alive a major source of political graft and corruption in America. Moreover, we place an unnecessary burden of guilt and hypocrisy upon the lay public, which must patronize these illegal and frequently dishonest establishments to indulge their gambling propensities. Partial legalization, as it currently exists in the United States, is doubly unsatisfactory, the argument continues, for it is discriminatory, hypocritical, and sabotages the moral convictions needed for effective law enforcement. Legalization will effectively end this sort of hypocrisy, get gambling into the open where it can be suitably regulated and controlled, dry up a major source of underworld income and power, eliminate the occasion and resource for police graft and political corruption, and make available to the state a highly lucrative source of additional revenue, achieved through the most painless known form of taxation. These arguments were ably stated some thirty years ago by a leading American sociologist, E. W. Burgess (1935), and have been repeated ever since. Until now they have not prevailed, even though recent public opinion polls show unmistakable trends in this direction.

Arguments against legalization. The opposition to legalization stems from several sources and draws on a variety of arguments. The core of resistance in the United States is still firmly rooted in the residual Puritan culture, which regards gambling as inherently sinful and placates its restive conscience by keeping the official facade of culture officially against it. Whatever the merits of the moralists’ theological or ethical grounds, their arguments tend to be sociologically naive; in the empirical world one drink does not necessarily make an alcoholic or one lottery ticket an addicted gambler. While conceding that a generalized gambling mania might have disastrous consequences for society, it is an empirical question whether legalization would have this consequence. However, the moralists undoubtedly score a strong empirical point in their argument that selective legalization weakens the public will to enforce the statutes which remain.

Arguments from other sources have attempted to grapple more directly with empirical conse quences. Would legalization in fact rid gambling of gangster influence? No, answers Virgil Peterson (1945), who was for many years chairman of the Chicago Crime Commission, citing the continued influence of the underworld in the liquor business even after the repeal of prohibition laws, and the unsavory history of graft and corruption which accompanied the later days of legalized lotteries in nineteenth-century America. In rebuttal proponents point out that most European state lotteries have operated successfully for years without major scandal. But perhaps the United States is different.

Would legalization set off a wholesale gambling mania, create a population of gambling addicts, and sabotage work disciplines and the ethical attitudes which maintain them? Undoubtedly the incidence of gambling would increase, perhaps quite substantially, if the taboos were lifted and the facilities made more visible, guilt-free, and accessible, but nobody knows for sure how much it would increase. So far, the legalization of football pools and off-track betting shops in England has not produced any runaway mania. But again, perhaps the United States is different. There is at least some evidence that by the 1820s American lotteries had reached such craze proportions that they had seriously disruptive consequences for some communities (Spofford 1892) and some evidence that during the racing season at local tracks many local businesses suffer, absenteeism increases, installment payments fall off, and petty crimes increase (New Jersey State Chamber of Commerce 1939). Regarding the possible long-run effects of wholesale legalization upon the ethical attitudes and beliefs which underpin the system of bourgeois capitalism, there is no relevant empirical evidence. Opponents of legalization point to Latin America, where permissive attitudes to gambling and generally more fatalistic value systems prevail and where bourgeois capitalism has been slow to develop. Who can say whether gambling is cause or consequence in this relationship? Recalling the functions attributed above to the disapproval of gambling, could the United States afford an attitude of moral indifference?

The solution, of course, does not have to be of an either-or nature. Although few are willing to admit it and still fewer to recommend it, since it violates all the principles of logic and common sense, the United States has again and again shown by its behavior that it still covertly prefers the present type of compromise solution, in which a formal facade of disapprobation and legal taboo is combined with halfhearted enforcement and widespread practice. Through this arrangement it does achieve at least some measure of regulation and constraint, keeps the public conscience appeased, and yet provides generous opportunities for those who would gamble to do so (for a carefully reasoned defense of this arrangement, see Dos Passos 1904). But these gains, if they be that, are not achieved without serious cost; and in any event, in this age of increasing secularization it is highly probable that the proponents of further legalization will have won their battle in the United States before another edition of this encyclopedia appears.

Edward C. Devereux, Jr.

[See alsoGame Theory; Leisure; Social Control; Speculation, Hedging, and Arbitrage; Utility.]

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GAMBLING

Betting was and is a remarkably universal human activity. Various forms came with each immigrant group, Asian or European, who at different times joined the Native American populations in the New World. Keno, for example, which people of the twenty-first century enjoy in electronic form, originated out of a traditional gambling game brought to the American West by Chinese workers already intensely familiar with forms of wagering. Native Americans themselves from prehistoric times already were engaging in ritual contests and betting. In the Old World, not only dice but crooked dice were found in ancient Egyptian tombs. According to the Bible, when Jesus was on the cross, the soldiers cast lots for his clothing (Matthew 27:35). Traditional European justice often involved the use of lots, which suited well populations familiar over many centuries with gaming and betting. Indeed, the ancient Romans had already made a distinction between games of chance (which they forbade) and games of skill.

None of this wagering was a productive activity, but people found betting enjoyable and sometimes preoccupying to the point of serious addiction. In the classic formulation, games carried out in a repeated or ritualistic manner constituted play. Thus, some people used gambling to fill leisure time. Others considered making bets a recreation. People were well aware that gambling belonged in a category that was not work—except for the so-called professional gamblers, who appeared conspicuously in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the ways in which wagering violated the work ethic provided motivations and arguments for both moralists and defiant gamblers.

Gambling appeared in two forms. Sometimes it was a form of recreation in itself. One could gamble alone, as with a machine game such as a slot machine. Or one could make gambling a social activity, as in bingo gatherings or card games. Often, however, gambling occurred in connection with other recreational and leisure activities.

Always the most widespread arena for betting was any kind of contest or sport. For those who could not participate—and often for the participants as well—making a wager on the outcome of a contest was an important activity. The history of sports is inextricably bound with the history of gambling, including all kinds of human, animal, and machine contests.

Moreover, beginning early in the Western world, gambling became associated with a whole set of additional activities, many of which were not "respectable" or were decidedly antisocial. By the nineteenth century, a social constellation of so-called minor vices was well established in the United States; people commonly thought of gambling as part of a complex of activities that included drinking, smoking, sexual naughtiness, and various other minor infractions of good order and bourgeois parsimony. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a cabaret model was in place, which included various kinds of entertainment with gambling, with an additional implication that patrons were at least a bit upscale. As tourism developed, gambling sites often attracted travelers or others who indulged in the conspicuous consumption of betting. The ultimate development was the "Las Vegas package" of the second half of the twentieth century, in which gambling was central to a complex of activities that included shows, eating and drinking, and even prostitution in a holiday setting in which ordinary middle-class standards of behavior—beyond the work ethic—could be set aside temporarily.

But the custom of betting had much deeper cultural roots than commercial packaging. Placing a wager for most people in America from the beginning carried powerful implications for gender. Making extravagant bets or putting one's property at hazard often fulfilled a stereotype of aggressive masculinity. Of great popular interest and appeal was still another stereotype out of the nineteenth century: the romantic gambling lady. But the laying of a wager was still overwhelmingly a masculine act—and still often conflated with sports of all kinds. To augment a contest with a material dimension added or enhanced the risk factor typically associated with masculine stereotypes, especially young, virile masculinity in which risky behavior was an important element.

Most of the best sources for our knowledge of gambling in earlier times are the words and actions of Americans who condemned or regulated or taxed making a bet. In addition, journalists over many generations featured unusual gambling events and especially people who won big. Hence most older gambling history tended to be either antiquarian accounts of colorful personalities or narratives of moral and legal crusades. Everyday wagering outside of recorded institutions was hard to uncover. Only at the end of the twentieth century did historians, with the help of sociologists, begin to explore many of the cultural dimensions of gambling.

Colonial Americans

Intimate knowledge of various types of gambling was part of the cultural baggage of the first generations of English colonists. As a prosperous mercantile society developed, so did gambling. To begin with, promoters of both public and private ventures used public lotteries to raise funds. Perhaps most notable was the English lottery supporting the first settlement in Virginia, between 1612 and 1624. Moreover, as part of their conspicuous consumption, English aristocrats gambled ostentatiously. They particularly bet on horse races, which had the snobbish sobriquet of "the sport of kings." But they also placed wagers on other games and contests and sports of all kinds. In many such games and contests, people of every class joined in the betting, from cards to cock fighting (which was very popular in Britain but did not carry over as much to the American colonies).

Colonists of all classes and backgrounds, therefore, brought with them customs of placing bets on games, contests, and sports. In the southern settlements, particularly, aristocrats imitated the British upper classes and tried to use ostentatious gambling as a mark of high social status. Members of the other social groups, including enslaved people, also placed bets and gambled freely. At one point, however, in Virginia, sumptuary legislation forbade nonaristocrats from actually participating in the races. But betting was endemic. In the eighteenth century, the southern colonies, especially, had a strong tradition of brutal sporting events in which competing, fighting, and betting mixed together. One colorful such contest was gander pulling, in which the participants attempted to yank the head off a live, greased gander.

Calvinists, who were particularly numerous in New England, knew the general proclivity to gamble, and they condemned card playing and similar gaming activity. They had good theological reasons. Because justice was often obtained by the drawing of lots—a device that permitted God to show His will—any trivial use of chance, as in cards, was but trifling with the Almighty. Playing cards was bad enough, but betting compounded the offense. For generations, evangelicals preached against games involving "chance" because the players trifled with Providence as well as thrift.

Yet, beyond upper-class social competition in betting, large parts of the population did indeed make bets as part of their diversions. From the beginning, of course, gambling flourished where other violations of bourgeois work and order were occurring. It was in this way that unproductive betting developed a generally recognized association with the least desirable parts of the population. Yet many residents continued to enjoy wagering in any number of ways. Gambling, then as later, generated ambivalent attitudes and divided opinions.

In the revolutionary years and after, numerous witnesses described the ways in which Americans, particularly those in male groups, placed bets. George Washington was said to have won or lost in a single evening as much as £9 playing cards. Fighting of various kinds, among both humans and animals, invariably generated not just points of honor but sums placed on the outcome of the contests. Public lotteries continued in the New World. Benjamin Franklin actually led an effort to finance the defenses of Philadelphia by means of such a special-purpose lottery.

Gambling became particularly conspicuous on the American frontier. Placing bets was an important part of many lives lived under dangerous and difficult conditions. Travelers left vivid accounts of eye gouging and other brutal contests in which large amounts of money traded hands among the cheering onlookers. And, of course, traditionally not only machismo but omnipresent hard drink encouraged men (notably) to hazard anything they owned. John M. Findlay cites a British visitor who believed inhabitants of Western towns were "generally devoted to gambling on horse races, cockfights, card games, and billiards" as well as the usual personal fights (p. 35).

Institutionalization of Gambling in the Nineteenth Century

What was new in the nineteenth century was the way in which gambling became institutionalized and commercialized. While impromptu and informal games and contests continued, lotteries, racing, casinos, riverboats, and other gambling establishments brought betting into the realm of profit making and business. In the process, the recreational and leisure aspects of placing a bet became much more formally institutionalized. While it is true, as historians have argued, that each institutionalization had an independent history, over decades the general trend toward organization and institutionalization framed all gambling as American society generally became more commercialized.

The history of lotteries illustrates the trend, and, because public campaigns and governments were so often involved, the record is relatively accessible. During the Revolution, the Continental Congress tried to raise funds by means of a lottery, and after independence, various states authorized a wide variety of drawings for public and private purposes—public works, industrial development, and charitable institutions and causes. The lottery device flourished and grew in the early nineteenth century and was especially important in financing schools and churches as well as economic infrastructure. Twenty-four states approved lotteries for internal improvements between 1790 and 1860. But with increasing frequency, private contractors conducted the lotteries, and wholesalers and brokers delivered the tickets to consumers. Therefore an additional keen profit motive furthered the promotion of lottery gambling.

While lotteries flourished for years before the Civil War, the contract system eventually discredited those lotteries, and officially approved schemes diminished greatly, to the point of prohibition. Yet for many decades, lottery speculation flourished alongside land speculation and other schemes. It was especially the addition of contractors and brokers that opened the way for widespread swindling. Lottery managers would not pay out what they had promised, or they would simply disappear with the money. Various states from time to time banned the sale of lottery tickets, but chances were widely available from other states. By 1860, however, lotteries were generally illegal. The ultimate demise of the lottery as a public institution came after the ignominious scandals of the later Louisiana lottery, which inspired Congress in 1895 to pass a law forbidding interstate commerce in lotteries.

As the lotteries grew in the early nineteenth century, poor people who could not afford the substantial price of a ticket still found a way to bet on the drawing. For them, policy gamblers took small sums from people and paid off just as the real lottery would, except in proportionally miniscule amounts. Policy gambling was illegal, and fraud was common, but it grew and expanded. Observers at the time especially attributed policy betting to African American people, but many small-time bettors participated. They often based their wagers on dreams; dream books, which explained how to apply a dream to a bet, flourished for generations as policy evolved into common numbers games.

Some betting games were particularly widespread in the antebellum period. One was faro, a card game in which the house took only perhaps three percent—if honestly conducted, which it almost never was. Myriad confidence games operated, such as an ancestor of the shell game—where a bet was placed on which of three or more shells or cases concealed a hidden object—played with needle cases. For the upper classes attempting to imitate European aristocrats, luxurious commercial gaming houses, if not casinos, were available; other entrepreneurs opened a range of less-respectable establishments to service the less affluent.

The most colorful gambling of the early nineteenth century was, of course, that carried on aboard the Mississippi riverboats (557 boats were in operation in 1860). The so-called professional gamblers contributed substantially to institutionalizing gambling customs. They introduced various games such as twenty-one that were suited for commercialized gambling, and they Americanized poker with wild cards and bluffing and spread the game wherever gambling was a business. Roulette wheels were usually too heavy to carry on the boats, but a casino was licensed briefly in New Orleans in 1827, combining luxurious appointments and snob appeal (the European model) with American democratic openness for the clientele.

The casino model was not necessary for the riverboat gamblers, who had much background in card rooms and other traditional gambling establishments that flourished privately or outside of the law. Gambling onshore continued to take place in taverns and other such establishments, reinforcing the impression that betting was associated with marginal or criminal people. The fact that so many gamblers—typically the "card sharps" (or "sharpers")—were dishonest further reinforced the association. But gambling nevertheless functioned as a business, open to all. Notoriously in California during the gold rush, for example, the business ran day and night, but in established enterprises, "the house" depended more often on a percentage of the money bet than upon skill or cheating to guarantee a profit. Gambling establishments featured the most commercial games, with rapid resolution and turnover: roulette, dice throwing, and card games such as faro and twenty-one.

Speculation and Prohibition

After the Civil War, state legislators became increasingly sensitive to the opponents of gambling; into the 1920s, governments made betting illegal in different ways and in different degrees across the United States, and visible gambling declined in quantity. As new immigrants and new technologies and new sites challenged the evangelicals and Progressives, betting changed dynamically. By 1907, two new states had entered the union with constitutions that banned any gambling. Yet with the rise of commercial sports, opportunities to place bets increased greatly.

It was in the period from 1868 to the early 1890s that the Louisiana lottery flourished and fell—with the corruption and scandal that removed the lottery from a viable means of raising funds for public purposes. In many areas of the country, card rooms and other places for gambling continued as before, albeit frequently under imminent danger of prosecution. For the wealthy, however, a number of casinos did spring up, including one in the Broadmoor in Colorado that operated from 1891 to 1897. Richard A. Canfield, who ran gambling houses for the affluent in New York, Saratoga, and Newport, articulated the business basis of these new institutions. They had the trust of the customer because no cheating was necessary. "The percentage in favor of a gambling house is sufficient to guarantee the profits of the house. All any gambler wants is to have play enough for a long enough time and he'll get all the money any player has."

The way in which such entrepreneurs as Canfield came into the business is illustrated by a former prize fighter (who won substantial sums betting on himself), John Morrissey, who opened increasingly opulent gambling parlors until he finally settled in Saratoga Springs, where he could cater to the very wealthy. There, in 1864, he helped organize the first stakes horse racing in the United States—the first horse racing in the United States in which the winners won cash prizes—marking the beginning of serious commercialization of that gambling sport.

Horse racing, with betting at the track, was the premiere sporting activity connected with gambling. The first Kentucky Derby was run in 1870. In the 1870s, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote,

'Twas on the famous trotting-ground

The betting men were gathered round

From far and near. . .

By 1891, New York had started regulating horse racing. By the 1920s, more than 300 racetracks were in operation, although for a time antigambling pressures reduced the numbers greatly. As racing developed, the pressure of bookmakers changed the sport. Short sprint races replaced longer contests so as to provide more opportunities for betting. State legislators, however, generally moved to suppress open gambling in connection with the tracks.

But many other sports became important to gambling in the late nineteenth century. Bare-knuckle boxing generated an enormous amount of both organized and unorganized wagering. Early in the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt and other leaders called for the reform of college football, which had fallen under the influence of professional gamblers, as had college boat races. Americans more and more often were betting on the emerging professional baseball teams. Team owners were active gamblers, betting on their own teams. Large groups of more humble people engaged in wagering were conspicuous in the bleachers during every game. The extent of the involvement of baseball with gambling was dramatized by the famous Black Sox scandal of 1919.

In the late nineteenth century, as historian Ann Fabian has written, speculation became a highly valued activity in American society. She points out that as commercial speculators grew in numbers and boldness, they tended to try to marginalize the more unrespectable speculation of people who bet on cards and numbers and contests. The most striking contrast was the legality of the praiseworthy speculation on the stock and commodity markets by moneyed people while the operators of bucket shops for poor people were subject to prosecution. In the bucket shops, one could bet on changes in the stock market with small change and risk being arrested for antisocial gambling. In the stock exchange, doing exactly the same thing with stocks was constructive capitalism.

Even as the prohibition of gambling was proceeding, technology brought big changes in betting, whether legal or illegal. At the end of the nineteenth century, the nickel slot machine was invented (the usual date given is 1887, the inventor Charles Fey of San Francisco). From the mid-nineteenth century on, newspapers greatly increased their circulations and became great metropolitan dailies by indulging in yellow journalism. Sports news, which notoriously included betting odds, was an important part of this transformed social institution. The telegraph further stimulated sports betting. By furnishing immediate news of the outcome in many contests, wire services opened up many new opportunities for exciting wagers. Gamblers used the telegraph directly, establishing betting parlors with direct Western Union connections to sporting events. These gambling establishments were called pool rooms. Approximately 2,000 were reported to have existed early in the twentieth century in New York City alone; such gambling centers existed alongside solo illegal bookmakers far into the twentieth century.

Government Gets into the Business

Despite the general prohibition of gambling, governments from time to time made exceptions, and slowly, especially in the 1930s, legal gambling began to expand. Indeed, a pattern emerged: In times when state governments were hard-pressed financially, most notably in the 1930s and 1970s, more and more gambling enterprises became legal because they furnished revenue to the governments. The very legislators who could legalize benefited directly from doing so: By authorizing taxes on the betting, lawmakers were freed from having to impose other taxes; they thus appeared to get something for nothing for their constituents.

Meantime, in the 1920s, the media discovered the gangsters and syndicates who dominated illegal gambling and other activities such as prostitution and other rackets, with sidelines in bootlegging and major crimes. This discovery was, as historian Mark Haller points out, a little late. By the 1920s, local operatives, tied into local politics, dominated illegal gambling, not the organized crime syndicates of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, perhaps 30,000 illegal bookies were then operating in urban centers. Moses Annenberg by the 1930s dominated the information necessary for racetrack betting by monopolizing the wire services and publishing the Daily Racing Form. He recognized how pervasive sports betting had become: "If people can wager at a racetrack why should they be deprived of the right to do so away from a track? How many people can take time off from their jobs to go to a racetrack?"

But the patrons of local entrepreneurs, people who were betting on sporting events and using other kinds of gambling for recreation, were also changing. First, the white Protestant populations, in which antigambling sentiment was strong, were diminishing as the demographic base shifted to other population groups during the rest of the twentieth century. Roman Catholics, who increased relatively as well as absolutely, did not maintain doctrinal prohibitions against gambling, although church leaders often condemned various practices on Christian social grounds. Most noticeably, however, and in the second place, the cultural changes associated with World War I, the 1920s, the Great Depression, and World War II altered the place of gambling in American life.

During World War I, a substantial segment of the young men of the country learned in the barracks that they could while away time pleasurably by surreptitious gambling. Not only card games, but especially craps, a dice game, became part of the firsthand experience of "boys" from antigambling families as well as those for whom betting was already part of supermasculine life. Similar experiences affected a much larger part of the population during World War II.

The new mass media, particularly the tabloid newspapers and the moving pictures, also spread ambivalent or favorable attitudes toward the minor vices in general. The popular writer Damon Runyon was especially important in conveying a benign image of the bookies and bettors of the big cities, as in the classic musical Guys and Dolls. They were often comic characters and, therefore, no longer appeared threatening, even though they operated illegally and on the margins of society. By the 1920s and 1930s, sports journalism was more sensational than ever. Boxing (legalized by New York in 1920) made a big comeback. Bookies also found themselves compelled to work with not only baseball games (and baseball pools) but college football. By the 1930s, the football pool card had joined the baseball pool card as a mass consumption item. As radio began broadcasting sports, many listeners enhanced their recreational pleasure by risking some money on the outcome. By the middle of the century, one expert estimated that $100 million was bet on college football alone, one-tenth of it on the Army–Notre Dame game.

The major new media model, however, was the cabaret, in which trendy people mixed with socially marginal people in a framework of drinking, smoking, gambling, and presumed sexual permissiveness. Of particular importance in transforming cultural attitudes was the transfer of the stylish cabaret model to the casino in the gambling ships that were notable in the early 1930s. They carried passengers outside the continental limits, where gambling (and, incidentally, during Prohibition years, drinking) could take place legally. Los Angeles was a major port for such ships, and they caught the imagination of writers of both fiction and movies, who popularized romantic versions of the floating casinos and the lifestyle that went with them. After the gambling ships shut down, southern Californians, at least, could go to a division point on the Union Pacific Railroad, Las Vegas, and find a reasonable substitute.

That is because in 1931, the government of the state of Nevada, in a desperate attempt to develop revenue without using taxes, legalized casinos. First, criminals with experience and funds moved in; corporations followed. But with the help of publicity in the mass media, Reno and Las Vegas provided a model of a new area for vacation—not only from work, but from conventional social standards.

The other area in which at least some state governments were willing to legalize gambling in the interwar period was horse racing. The parimutuel system appeared first in one state and then another, most notably Illinois in 1927, which served as a model for legislators elsewhere. In 1933, the parimutuel machine in New Hampshire became a part of the state fiscal system. By 1935, sixteen states were taxing racetrack betting directly.

While gambling appeared in the media usually in the form of casino or racetrack images, many Americans found other means of risking their money in the inter-war years, particularly in urban settings. The media continued to publish odds on various sporting contests. The numbers game involved many small bettors; numbers apparently saved many members of the Detroit and Chicago African American communities during the worst years of the Great Depression by providing an income when no legitimate work was available.. Bingo, which started out primarily as a carnival game, became increasingly popular and was often played in a charity or church setting (Frederick Lewis Allen quotes the ironic announcement: "Bingo every night in the Holy Spirit Room."). Another sanitized form of depression gambling was bank night at the movies. Those who attended the movies could win either money or a prize, such as a set of dishes, using their admission tickets as lottery tickets. Other businesses, too, used lottery methods—drawings and raffles—as promotional gimmicks (already in the nineteenth century such marketing schemes had stimulated criticism, not least because entrepreneurs often did not hold the promised drawings). Altogether, extremely large numbers of otherwise innocent citizens by the 1930s and 1940s had become used to lottery-type gambling simply by participating in normal spending activities or by supporting charitable causes. By the 1950s, politicians who attempted to curb the abuses of the bingo craze found themselves unable to act because they appeared to be opposing religion and charity.

The Slow Shift to Legalization and Partial Acceptance

In the second half of the twentieth century, small-time socializing at bingo and bank night at the movies, along with numbers and sports betting, became transformed into very different institutions and major economic and political forces. Even social card playing for stakes became more often institutionalized in commercial card rooms (especially in California, where they had long been available by local option). Gambling became commercialized entertainment for many people while remaining an expensive ritual of risk—play—for many others. In either case, the substance and form of betting meshed with the patterns of a culture of consumption in which many activities and institutions joined gambling in violating work-ethic and other bourgeois values.

A number of writers have traced the growth of casinos, which were ultimately the victory of Las Vegas public relations. These were not the old aristocrats' casinos of Europe, but a very democratic American version in which, ultimately, entertainment mixed with vice. The Las Vegas story began with legalization in 1931 and establishment of the Strip in 1941. In 1946, gangsters definitely took over, to be succeeded by businesspeople, state regulation, and, in 1969, the entry of corporate ownership and the ultimate acceptance of gambling entertainment as just another business. Later, in the age of the globalization of business in general, the American style of casino spread all over the world. The first step, however, was to Atlantic City, New Jersey, from 1976 to 1978.

In 1978, some Florida Seminoles opened a high-stakes bingo operation that started a whole new trend of Native American casinos operating in defiance of local law and custom (confirmed legally from 1987 to 1988). In 1990, Iowa authorized some limited riverboat gambling, and in a rush a number of other states saw an opportunity to raise revenues without raising taxes by letting casinos open legally. During the 1990s, there was what one scholar has characterized as "an explosion" of casinos in the United States. By 1987, slot machines had become the most popular form of amusement in such establishments, and some states even authorized such mechanical (and taxable) devices for the diversion of patrons at racetracks, which were suffering from the competition.

Permitting businesspeople to operate gambling establishments was one matter, but, at the same time, many states were themselves going into the business of gambling. The new form was a revival of the public lottery. In 1964, New Hampshire legislators were the first to try to avoid raising taxes by operating a state lottery. New York joined in 1967, and, in 1969, New Jersey managed a format that was so successful that it served as a model for other states. By 1974, Massachusetts had introduced the instant lottery, the success of which was widely imitated, and in 1975 New Jersey pioneered a numbers game version. Even California finally joined in 1984. By 1989, three-fourths of the U.S. population lived in states with state lotteries, and in those states, the average annual household expenditure for lotteries was $240.

The conspicuous part played by legislators indicated how powerful the political forces favoring extending gambling had become. But the economic forces were even more intimidating. Large retailers such as 7-Eleven backed lotteries because they could sell chances—and were well rewarded for it. The great national accounting firms found legal gambling accounts particularly lucrative, and those firms had links to every major power broker. Suppliers of machines and electronic equipment (including General Electric) were deeply involved in lotteries. Other groups, too, such as small operators of off-track betting (authorized by New York in 1971), aggregated into political and economic forces.

For most gamblers, the major development of the late twentieth century (although the new forms had roots in the 1930s) was sports betting. Two particular factors changed the whole landscape. One was television, which made watching sports a major American activity, dwarfing the live attendance and radio listening of previous times. The other was the point spread, which was, typically, announced from Las Vegas. The point spread meant that betting could occur even when two teams were extremely unevenly matched: one could bet that the team that would obviously lose would lose by less or more than a certain number of points; thus, all team contests, not just close games, became exciting betting subjects. Football and basketball, both collegiate and professional, took on new meaning for those with even a little money to wager—legally or illegally. Professional football's Super Bowl Sunday became a generally acknowledged national carnival, implicitly based on many ordinary citizens' money at risk.

Did legalized gambling supply the entertainment and recreation that might supplant illegal (and untaxed) betting? Sociologists generally concluded that gambling simply begat more gambling, as habit, ritual, or just attitude. Economists believed rational choice might lead clear thinkers to continue to use illegal bookies because the rake-off was less than when taxes had to be added on to the take, as in the lotteries. On the whole, there was a major change so that gambling in general became much more socially acceptable among large parts of the U.S. population in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

A Growth Industry: Technology, Media, and Consumerism

Some scholars believed that what they were seeing was commercial forces coming in to serve people with working-class backgrounds who had a lot of money to spend. Such commentators could point out how technology was being drawn into the service of betting. Television, as numerous scholars such as Benjamin Rader, Richard O. Davies, and Richard G. Abram have pointed out, transformed sports so as to make them subservient to betting. "Jimmy the Greek" Snyder, who reported bookie odds from Las Vegas, became a television personality in the 1970s. The content of the rest of television not only built on the traditional Hollywood glamorization of casinos and betting but also contributed active cultural content, as in the popular show Wheel of Fortune, launched in 1975. Video games, as they came in, were rapidly adapted to gambling, and, in 1989, South Dakota became the first state to authorize video lottery terminals. In the 1990s, a whole new realm opened up with Internet gambling, which could be done online with a credit card. What the impact of this rapidly growing activity would be was unclear, but that it would be great seemed certain to observers at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Those observers and others commented on the way in which libertarian attitudes were permitting "market forces" and "social choice" to shape not only commercial but recreational activities that involved gambling, whether by operating chance machines, by emotionally or rationally calculating odds on contests, or by indulging in social activities that were based on or involved betting. Economic considerations were replacing moral considerations and thriftiness both. Gambling was, after all, not only one of the major entertainment industries but—at $50 billion and 600,000 employees for commercial legal games alone in 1997—one of the major businesses of the United States.

Moreover, the commentators continued, gambling was well adapted to the pervasive consumer society that had succeeded a bourgeois producer society. Gamblers and high rollers had long represented an ultimate of conspicuous consumption. But in gambling, it was the act that was important, not any product. Betting was therefore the essence of imaginative consuming, perfectly suited to the culture. Now participants could enjoy their fantasies at home via television or computer. Or they could participate on the job through the compulsory office or work-crew football pool. Or they could make wagering activities part of tourism or vacations or the contrived sociability of card rooms, bingo halls, or casinos. Gambling also could involve fooling the purchaser, the con game that gave additional enjoyment to shopping and deciphering ads. In the last six or seven decades of the twentieth century, thinking about shopping and purchasing, which could include risking money in other ways, became a major if not dominant entertainment mode. Many commentators concluded that gambling was no longer a socially deviant activity in the United States.

The separate histories of lotteries, sports betting, card games, machine betting, and other risky speculations reflected the specialized and bureaucratic pattern of American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the end of the twentieth century, however, gamblers were often taking on a new identity. A successful mass magazine, Gamblers World, described as being "for the individual who enjoys action," first appeared in 1973. Many individuals still specialized in taking risk for pleasure, but many others now identified with celebrities and peers who liked "action" of any kind—from dice games to sports betting to speculating in collectibles such as oriental rugs. Theirs was a new, classic "consumption community." Many Americans in the age of mass media and impulses conveyed electronically were cut loose from bourgeois restraints, and they found that they could identify with the macho television hero, Maverick: "Gambling was his game."

See also: Atlantic City, Card Games, Horse Racing, Las Vegas

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abt, Vicki, James F. Smith, and Eugene Martin Christiansen. The Business of Risk: Commercial Gambling in Mainstream America. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985.

Barker, Thomas, and Marjie Britz. Jokers Wild: Legalized Gambling in the Twenty-first Century. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2000.

Burnham, John C. Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History. New York: New York University Press, 1993.

Clotfelter, Charles T., and Philip J. Cook. Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Davidson, D. Kirk. Selling Sin: The Marketing of Socially Unacceptable Products. Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 1996.

Davies, Richard O., and Richard G. Abram. Betting the Line: Sports Wagering in American Life. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001.

Drzazga, John. Wheels of Fortune. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1963.

Ezell, John Samuel. Fortune's Merry Wheel: The Lottery in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Fabian, Ann. Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in 19th-Century America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Findlay, John M. People of Chance: Gambling in American Society from Jamestown to Las Vegas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Haller, Mark H. "Bootleggers and American Gambling, 1920–1950." In Gambling in America. Edited by Commission on Review of National Policy Toward Gambling. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976.

International Gaming Institute, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The Gaming Industry: Introduction and Perspectives. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996.

Kallick, Maureen, Daniel Suits, Ted Dielman, and Judith Hybels. A Survey of American Gambling Attitudes and Behavior. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research, 1979.

Lears, Jackson. Something for Nothing: Luck in America. New York: Viking, 2003.

McMillen, Jan, ed. Gambling Cultures: Studies in History and Interpretation. London: Routledge, 1996.

Mirkovich, Thomas R., and Allison A. Cowgill. Casino Gaming in the United States. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1997.

The National Gambling Impact Study Commission. Final Report. Washington, D.C.: The Commission, 1999.

Nibert, David. Hitting the Lottery Jackpot: State Governments and the Taxing of Dreams. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Reith, Gerda. The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Thompson, William N. Gambling in America: An Encyclopedia of History, Issues, and Society. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2001.

Wiggins, David K., ed. Sport in America: From Wicked Amusement to National Obsession. Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1995.

John C. Burnham

GAMBLING

Gambling can be defined broadly as participation in any risk-taking activity. In law gambling is defined as a bet or wager (consideration ), on a probability game or a sporting event (chance ), with the hope of winning a payoff or prize (FCC v. American Broadcasting Co., 347 U.S. 284 (1954)). From a public health perspective, activities such as day trading in stocks, commodities, and futures markets have been said to mimic gambling games.

Gambling has never in law or custom been considered inherently evil (malum in se ). Why then is betting—or accepting bets—sometimes considered a crime? Reasons that can be singled out include the belief that gambling undermines the work ethic, is destructive of personality, invites fraud and deception, and engenders social decay. Such a view of gambling, although present in most English-speaking countries, is a minority viewpoint, especially in the United States, where a variety of gambling forms are permitted under differing legal regimes. These include casinos, lotteries, wagering on horse or dog races, electric gaming devices and slot machines, jaialai, and Internet gambling.

The historical lottery

Lotteries were popular—and remain so—because they present a rare opportunity to accumulate capital by luck alone. Despite Puritan opposition, the British Parliament authorized numerous lotteries between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. "By 1775," asserted the Royal Commission on Lotteries and Betting in 1933, "the lottery had become virtually an annual event." The lottery made its entrance into American history for much the same reasons. Lotteries were said to be the "reall and substantiall food, by which Virginia hath been nourished" (Ezell, p. 8). No American governmental entity—with the exception of post–World War II Nevada or possibly nineteenth-century Louisiana—has ever been dependent upon gambling revenues for so large a proportion of its budget as was the British government. Not until the early nineteenth century, as the lottery became more widespread in England and dependence upon it increased, did its enemies gather enough influence to destroy it. England saw the last of its state lotteries in 1823.

England's Puritan opposition to lotteries reinforced America's opponents of gambling. By the 1840s and 1850s, most of the South began to feel the anti-lottery pressure, and lotteries seem to have been relatively unpopular by the time of the Civil War. National opposition to the lottery strengthened Louisiana's anti-lottery forces, who captured the governor's office and a majority of the legislature. Consequently, Louisiana discontinued its lottery. With the twentieth century approaching, lotteries vanished from the American scene.

The contemporary lottery

No state-sponsored lotteries appeared in the United States until 1964. In that year, conservative New Hampshire adopted a sweepstakes. The state had no sales or income tax, and already derived more than 60 percent of its revenues from "sin taxes" on horse racing, liquor, tobacco, and beer. From the late 1960s onward, most states searched for alternative revenue sources. Gambling became a prime candidate, particularly through the lottery, off-track betting, and casino gambling. Politicians often welcome legal gambling since it does not depend on the coercive power of the state.

Lottery revenues were often referred to as "painless" although legislators recognized that the burden of providing such revenues fell disproportionately upon identifiable income strata. The lottery is usually a regressive source of public revenue since persons who occupy lower-income positions have the most incentive to purchase lottery tickets. Although lottery ticket purchases are voluntary, so is the purchase of most goods and services, which are taxed at a rate considerably lower than the usual percentage that states take before lottery payoffs.

As states compete with one another for the lottery market, novel ways are developed to stimulate demand. States advertise and market lotteries through the following means: frequent drawings; inexpensive tickets; better chances of prize-winning; higher payoff ratios; attractive prizes (including a larger first prize); simpler buying, drawing, and paying procedures; fast notice of results; and the opportunity for players to choose their own ticket numbers. The move from state lottery prohibition to promotion in half a century is remarkable, but not entirely unprecedented given the lottery's fluctuating history of acceptance and rejection in England and the United States.

Extent of gambling

According to the 1976 report of the U.S. National Commission on the Review of the National Policy toward Gambling, 80 percent of Americans favored the legalization of some form of gambling, and two-thirds had actually gambled, signaling widespread public acceptability. Roughly a quarter of a century later, acceptance had escalated into embrace. The 1999 National Gambling Impact Study Commission, which described the intervening period as "transformative," found that by 1999 more than forty states had legalized pari-mutual racetracks and betting; thirty-seven states had established lotteries, and several others were considering introducing them. Casino gambling expanded from Nevada to Atlantic City, New Jersey, and then nationwide to the gulf coast of Mississippi, to New Orleans, to Midwestern cities on riverboats, to Detroit, and to western mining towns. The immense transformation has been accompanied by an acceptance of gambling in mainstream culture. The winning lottery numbers in ever bigger jackpot games are routinely announced on the evening news. Racetrack betting takes place over the telephone and in off-track neighborhood betting parlors in New York City. "Legions of employees" testified to the National Gambling Impact Commission about the hope and opportunities that casino jobs have brought to their families. Others, however, told tales of families devastated by problem gambling, of blight and sleaze, of a work ethic undercut by the pursuit of easy money.

When made criminal, gambling is quintessentially a victimless crime. Players rarely, if ever, call police to report that an illegal bookmaker has taken their bet. New York City's Knapp Commission found systemic corruption where police regularly received payoffs from illegal bookmakers and numbers racketeers. In recognition of this, and the consequent difficulties of enforcement, the trend in gambling law and policy has been away from strict prohibition to regulation, with distinctions made according to type and sponsorship of gambling activity. This is not entirely new. Even at common law, gambling was not criminal if the game of chance was played privately. Only when conducted openly or notoriously, and where inexperienced persons were fleeced, was gambling a crime. Most gambling statutes imposed minor misdemeanor penalties for public social gambling, with somewhat harsher penalties for gambling with a minor. Gambling by a professional player might be classified as a felony. The 1976 National Gambling Commission gave considerable attention to state criminal laws prohibiting gambling—and found that they were more widely violated than any other type of prohibition. Criminal violation of state gambling laws was scarcely an issue for the National Gambling Impact Commission. Instead, the Commission focused on social policy and consequences of the widespread growth and acceptance of legal gambling.

Gambling and organized crime

Federal criminal law monitors organized crime and gambling through the Gaming Devices Act of 1951 ( Johnson Act, 18 U.S.C. & 1804), which prohibits interstate transportation of gaming devices; the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization Statutes (RICO, 18 U.S.C. & 1961 et. seq.); and amendments made in 1985 to the Bank Secrecy Act (31 U.S.C. & 103), also known as the Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act). The latter act requires several cash intensive businesses, and explicitly casinos, to report cash transactions in amounts greater then $10,000. In addition, the Money Laundering Control Act of 1986 and the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network were enacted to "establish, oversee, and implement policies to prevent and detect money laundering" (U.S. Treasury Order No. 105–108).

The federal interest in casino gambling can be traced to Nevada's casino gambling industry, which was established and developed by wellknown organized crime figures. Although not all casinos have connections to organized-crime, such roots have at times become visible. During the 1970s, a number of casinos were found by Nevada authorities and the U.S. Department of Justice to be infiltrated by organized crime families who controlled union pension funds that facilitated casino expansion.

The introduction of strong regulatory measures by the states has been a factor in enabling casino gambling to expand throughout the United States. Moreover, gambling enterprises are typically owned and run by major hotel and leisure industry companies, whose stocks are publicly traded, reviewed by financial analysts and the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as by federal and state law enforcement agencies. In the 1980s only two U.S. jurisdictions, Nevada and New Jersey, had legalized casinos, in good part restrained by the industry's history of organized crime connections and financing. By the year 2000, twenty-eight states had legalized some form of casino gambling, usually in resorts, such as in Biloxi, Mississippi, or on riverboats. Detroit, Michigan, was the only major industrial United States city to have legalized casinos. Approximately 260 casinos were located on Indian lands, with many more expected, especially in California, in the twenty-first century.

Native American tribal gambling

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, 480 U.S. 202 (1987), holding that California had no authority, on Indian lands, to enforce its criminal statutes forbidding bingo. The Court declared that gambling is a legitimate tourist activity, like hunting and fishing, for Indians to exploit. Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) in 1988 to provide a statutory basis for conducting gambling on Indian lands. IGRA divides gambling into three classes: Class I consists of traditional tribal games; Class II consists of games such as bingo, lotto, and punch cards. If these games, such as charity bingo, are permitted by a state and do not violate federal law, they may be conducted on Indian lands without state approval. Class III consists of all other games, especially casino games, parimutual racing, and jai alai. To introduce casino gaming, IGRA requires states to negotiate compacts with Indians. From 1988, when IGRA was passed, to 1997, revenues from tribal gaming grew more than thirtyfold from $212 million to $6.7 billion (National Gambling Impact Study Commission, p. 6–1,2).

Nevertheless, disputes have arisen between states and Indian tribes over the requirements of IGRA in the areas of regulation, the scope of permitted gambling activities, and the requirement that states negotiate in good faith with tribes. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, 517 U.S. 44 (1996), held that, under the Eleventh Amendment, Congress was forbidden from authorizing suits by Indian tribes to bring states to the bargaining table to negotiate a gaming compact. This decision, in effect, invalidated the good faith negotiation requirement of IGRA.

By no means, however, did the Seminole decision portend an end to the expansion of Class III (casino) gambling sponsored by Indian tribes. States could voluntarily negotiate with Indian tribes, as Connecticut had earlier with the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, who built and ran the highest-grossing casino in the world. In September 1999, California's governor and legislature ratified gaming compacts with fifty-seven tribes. In March 2000, California voters passed a constitutional proposition ratifying these compacts and legalizing a major expansion of Indian casino gambling in California.

Gambling: personality and social costs

Fun, excitement, and the occasional thrill of winning seem to motivate most gamblers. Whatever else may be said against it, gambling is not physically risky. Some psychologists have even argued that gambling can be psychologically beneficial because some gamblers affirm their existence and worth by using skills in a risky setting (Kusyszyn). Other psychiatrists compare the excitement of gambling to the intoxication of drugs. A psychologist who interviewed members of Gamblers Anonymous seems to agree: "The compulsive gambler continues to bet because the action has come to be a refuge from thought of the outside world. His anxieties associated with his wife, family, debts, or job disappear when he concentrates on money and action" (Livingston, p. 55).

Pathological gambling is often cited as a major cost of gambling's expansion. A Harvard University sponsored meta-analysis of research on gambling found that 2.9 percent of gamblers had in the previous year reported "disordered and pathological" gambling. The lifetime rate was 5.4 percent. This was low as compared to alcohol dependence and abuse (9.7%, previous year; 23.5% lifetime). Disordered gamblers often experience "co-morbidity," that is, other life problems, such as alcoholism or drug abuse.

Those citing the social costs of gambling usually include, in addition to pathological or disordered gambling, its attraction to youth, elevated crime rates, suicide rates, family problems, bankruptcy, and the corruption of legislators. However, since gambling also provides economic benefits through employment opportunity, economic renewal of declining resorts and urban areas, and taxation, legal gambling has become an increasingly attractive option for many communities. As expansion has continued, at the turn of the century a backlash has occurred, with several states declining to introduce lotteries or casinos.

Internet gambling

Five federal statutes address Internet gambling, particularly the Wire Act (18 U.S.C. & 1084), which makes illegal the use of "wire communications" to assist with placing bets or wagers. The Wire Act's applicability to the Internet is nevertheless questionable in an era of wireless cellular and satellite technologies.

Several states, including Nevada, Texas, Illinois, and Louisiana, have introduced or passed legislation specifically prohibiting Internet gambling. Nevertheless, the large majority of Internet gambling sites, along with their owners or operators, are beyond the reach of state attorneys general.

On 17 July 2000, the U.S. House of Representatives voted down the Internet Act, legislation that sought to shut down many new online gambling sites—the number of such sites was estimated at between seven hundred and one thousand—most of which operated beyond U.S. borders. Proponents of the legislation included an unusual coalition of Nevada gaming interests, major sports leagues, and Christian conservatives. Proponents cited the potential dangers of Internet gambling, including the undermining of the integrity of sporting events; the potential for defrauding unsophisticated gamblers; the ease of access by children; an increase in gambling addictions; and the need to preserve state revenues from legal, state-run gambling.

Opponents carried the day arguing that the legislation would drive online gambling underground; tamper with the Internet economy; invade Internet privacy; and be difficult to enforce against sophisticated but inexpensive technologies. Even assuming that law enforcement could develop the technological capacity to detect violations, provisions allowing for prosecution of gamblers would require enormous expansion of federal law enforcement to obtain and administer search warrants and subpoenas. Also cited were issues of jurisdiction, comity, and sovereignty, especially where other countries have chosen, or likely will choose, to regulate, that is, license and tax, Internet gambling.

Most basic to the legal and social issues of Internet gambling is the reality that cyberspace transcends borders. Consequently, Internet gambling markets are inherently global, undermining the traditional territorial basis for legal regulation of borders. Governments have the power to grant licenses and to tax within their sovereign territory. The Internet makes it possible to supply the demand for gambling "services" such as blackjack, poker, sports, or horse race betting outside any state or national borders, and without paying gambling privilege taxes. State-licensed casinos in the United States are taxed on their winnings at 7.75 to 8 percent, as in Nevada and New Jersey, and to two to three times that amount in some riverboat states. Internet purveyors will be able to offer better odds to price-sensitive gambling consumers. Will gamblers demand better odds from land-based gambling sites, such as casinos and racetracks? Will states be forced to lower gambling taxes? Will cyberspace gambling replace sited gambling or increase the demand for it? At the onset of the twenty-first century, predictions are difficult. Nevertheless, most commentators agree that gambling on the Internet will increase, perhaps exponentially, as the new century unfolds—and with uncertain but feared consequences regarding gambling taxation, the social costs of expanded gambling, and the viability of present control systems through licensing, taxation, and enforcement.

Jerome H. Skolnick

See also Criminalization and Decriminalization; Organized Crime; Police: Policing Complainantless Crimes; Victimless Crime.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthelme, Frederick, and Barthelme, Steven. Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

Blakey, G. Robert. "State Conducted Lotteries: History, Problems, and Promises." Journal of Social Issues 35, no. 3 (1979): 62–86.

——, et al. The Development of the Law of Gambling: 1776–1976. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, 1977.

Christianson, E. M.; Sinclair, S.; and Cabot, A. N. "Internet Gambling: Who Regulates?" 11th International Conference on Gambling and Risk-Taking. Las Vegas, Nevada, 15 June 2000.

Clotfelter, Charles T., and Cook, Philip J. Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Cornish, D. B. Gambling: A Review of the Literature and Its Implications for Policy and Research. Home Office Research Study no. 42. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1978.

Devereux, Edward C., Jr. Gambling and the Social Structure. A Sociological Study of Lotteries and Horse Racing in Contemporary America. 2 vols. Edited by Harriet Zuckerman and Robert K. Merton. New York: Arno Press, 1980.

Dombrink, John, and Thompson, William N. Success and Failure in Campaigns for Casinos. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1990.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor M. "The Gambler." In The Gambler; Bobok; A Nasty Story. Translated with an introduction by Jessie Coulson. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966.

Downes, D. M., et al. Gambling, Work, and Leisure. A Study across Three Areas. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976.

Eadington, Wiliam R., ed. Gambling and Society: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Subject of Gambling. Springfield, Ill.: Thomas, 1976.

——. "The Evolution of Corporate Gambling in Nevada." Nevada Review of Business and Economics 6 (1982): 13–22.

Eadington, William R. and Cornelius, J. A., eds. Gambling Behavior and Problem Gambling. Reno, Nev.: Institute for Gambling and Commercial Gaming, 1993.

Ezell, John Samuel. Fortune's Merry Wheel. The "Lot" in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Geertz, Clifford. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock-fight." The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Pages 412–453.

Goffman, Erving. "Where the Action Is." Interaction Ritual. Essays on Face-to-face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine, 1967. Pages 242–270.

Halliday, Jon, and Fuller, Peter, eds. The Psychology of Gambling. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

Hawkins, William. A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown, or a System of the Principal Matters Relating to That Subject, Digested under Their Proper Heads. 5th edition. London: Worrall, 1771.

Kaplan, H. Roy. Lottery Winners: How They Won and How Winning Changed Their Lives. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.

The Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption. Report of the New York City Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption and the City's Anti-corruption Procedures. Foreword by Michael Armstrong. New York: Braziller, 1972.

Korn, David A., and Shaffer, Howard J. "Gambling and the Health of the Public." Journal of Gambling Studies 15, no. 4 (1999): 289–365.

Kusyszyn, Igor. "Compulsive Gambling: The Problem of Definition." The International Journal of the Addictions 13 (1978): 1095–1101.

Livingston, Jay. "Compulsive Gamblers: A Culture of Losers." Psychology Today, March (1974): 51–55.

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Royal Commission on Lotteries and Betting, 1932–1933. Final Report. Cmnd. 434 1. London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1933.

National Gambling Impact Study Commission. Final Report, 1999. World Wide Web document. http://www.ngisc.gov/reports

Shaffer, H. J.; Hall, M. N.; and Vander Bilt, J. Estimating the Prevalence of Disorder GamblingBehavior in the United States and Canada: A Meta Analysis. Boston: Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College, 1997.

Skolnick, Jerome H. House of Cards: Legalization and Control of Casino Gambling. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978.

Skolnick, Jerome, and Dmbrink, John. "Legal Aspects of Public Gaming." Symposium. Connecticut Law Review 12 (1980): 661–947.

"The Social Risks of Casino Gambling." Psychology Today, July (1979), pp.: 52–58, 63–64.

Trevelyan, George Macauley. English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria. 2d edition. London: Longmans, Green, 1946.

U.S. National Commission on the Review of the National Policy Toward Gambling. Gambling in America: Final Report. Washington, D.C.: The Commission, 1976.

CASES

California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, 480

U.S. 202 (1987). FCC v. American Broadcasting Co., 347 U.S. 284

(1954). Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, 517 U.S. 44 (1996).