Gambling

Gambling has always been a part of American life, and attitudes about gambling have reflected long-standing disagreements over the meaning of manhood in American society. While some have stressed a sober version of manhood and condemned betting as antithetical to the values of hard work, steady achievement, and familial and religious responsibility; others have linked masculinity with risk-taking and all-male camaraderie and celebrated any man willing to wager a small fortune in the face of long odds.

Puritan leaders in colonial New England condemned gambling as contradictory to their socially prescribed work ethic and the Sabbatarian principles of piety and self-sacrifice that they associated with manhood. In the livelier Anglican South, however, the raucous and competitive flavor of the predominately male region provided a fertile environment for wagering on cockfights, bare-knuckle boxing, and horse racing. Through high-stakes betting, southern gentlemen asserted a definition of manliness that distinguished them from poor whites and black slaves. Since only the gentry had the time and money to risk outrageous amounts on a quarter-horse race, gambling was a public articulation of their financial independence, fierce competitiveness, and personal honor.

These opposing perspectives on gambling and manhood were reinforced and infused with an even stronger class dimension during the nineteenth-century market revolution. Members of the growing middle class viewed gambling as morally problematic in a capitalist society that valued the slow, steady, and rational accumulation of capital. Many middle-class Americans considered gambling evil because it produced nothing but easy earnings and addiction, and they viewed the gambler as an unmanly character who pursued profit but rejected hard work. Furthermore, because republican ideology linked manhood with a civic-minded willingness to sacrifice personal interests in the name of the common good, many Americans condemned the massive fortunes of commodities traders and land dealers as the dishonest gains of men who embodied antirepublican selfishness. Capitalist speculators responded by touting themselves as virtuous, business-minded Americans whose bold monetary risks bespoke strength of character and furthered industrial progress. Millionaires like the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie blurred the distinctions between hard work and speculative gain and came to be seen as the personification of the cherished masculine archetype, the self-made man.

For working-class men, who had little autonomy in the nineteenth-century industrial workplace, gambling served as a declaration of financial independence and mocked the middle-class standard of manhood based on thrift and sobriety. Equally important, gambling was one of the primary leisure activities around which all-male sociability coalesced. Men found daily confirmation of their masculinity in saloons, billiard parlors, and other environments that excluded women and allowed bachelors and married men alike to revel in shared drinks and friendly wagers. Gambling's most fertile ground was the western frontier. Removed from the emotional comforts of home, frontiersmen forged bonds in a common culture that celebrated risk-taking as the quintessential masculine activity. Gold-seeking “forty-niners” in California bet on everything from bull-and-bear fights to jumping frogs. Capitalists searching for silver in Comstock, Nevada, wagered personal fortunes in pursuit of the mother lode, and men toiling in mines and building the railroads risked life and limb by day, and their earnings in games of chance at night.

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