Gambling

Illegal Urban Gambling

Gambling in America predates European colonization; Native Americans, particularly in the western half of what would become the United States, were known as avid gamblers. English colonists in all regions gambled, betting with each other on card games and horse races and participating in public lotteries. Early laws generally left the practice of gambling unmolested but attempted to mitigate problems arising from it.

Most states in the early American republic chose to make public gambling illegal while tolerating private wagering, particularly games among social equals. The rise of market economies in the 1820s and 1830s, however, brought a general turn against entrepreneurial gambling (games such as lotteries in which players bet against the house—and usually lose). Although New Orleans experimented with municipally sanctioned gambling, licensing casinos in 1823, the city abandoned the scheme in 1835, concomitant with a national antigambling backlash that saw professional gamblers move from the river towns of the South and West directly to riverboats.

After the Civil War, gambling entrepreneurs organized themselves into syndicates in order to share the risks associated with bankrolling games of chance and to systematize protection arrangements with local authorities. New York was at this time the undisputed gambling capital of the nation, with hundreds of places to gamble that ranged from low dens, where hardscrabble gamblers played cards or dice by candlelight, to “first class hells,” with plush fixtures and complimentary gourmet meals.

Syndicates also sponsored other forms of gambling. By the turn of the 20th century, slot machines had become popular in most American cities. From that period through the 1930s, horse rooms or poolrooms were the most prevalent loci of gambling in most American cities. Ostensibly illegal, these rooms were usually “hidden” behind a candy or tobacco store, though many of these rooms had doormen posted outside to steer patrons inside. Once within, patrons could bet on horse races at tracks throughout the United States, thanks to telegraphed race odds and information. Illegal lotteries, also called policy and numbers games, also flourished in most American cities.

After World War II, the anticrime and antigambling movement became increasingly powerful, peaking with the Kefauver Committee's hearings on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce in 1950 and 1951. [Page 290]After this time, citizens in most cities demanded stricter enforcement of antigambling statutes. Though sports betting emerged, with the rise of televised broadcasts of professional and amateur games, as a major illegal gambling form, the horse rooms, slot machine routes, and clandestine casinos of earlier years soon disappeared.

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