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

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John C. Burnham