New Hampshire: Legal Lottery

The House chamber in Concord was jammed by the time New Hampshire’s Democratic Governor John King appeared. King wasted no time. “A few minutes ago,” he said, “I signed House Bill 47.” He had, he explained, signed the bill because he felt that the citizens of New Hampshire wanted it, and “I am unwilling to set myself up as a Solomon or a Caesar in the holy assumption that my views are more intelligent or discerning or moralistic than those of our people.” What King had done was to approve the U.S.’s first legal lottery since 1894.

Curiously enough, there was a time when lotteries and raffles in the U.S. were considered not only moral but indispensable to the nation’s growth. In colonial days, Jefferson, Franklin and Hamilton all favored lotteries as governmental revenue raisers. George Washington was an enthusiastic ticket buyer even when he was President. The Continental Congress raised money to pay soldiers through a lottery. Hard-pressed property owners often put their holdings on the market through lotteries, and Jefferson himself, in debt near the end of his life, appealed to the Virginia legislature for permission to run a lottery. Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale made money through lotteries, and all the colonies—later the states—held lotteries to build bridges, roads, churches and schools.

But the lottery business naturally attracted crooks, and the notorious Louisiana Lottery was the last legal raffle in the country. Backed by New York gamblers in the years after the Civil War, the Louisiana company raked in millions of dollars for its bosses, who contributed only $40,000 a year to the state. It was so corrupt that the U.S. Congress at last stepped in with a law prohibiting the use of the mails for lotteries, and in 1895 forbade lotteries in interstate commerce.

The federal laws will apply to the New Hampshire lottery. Newspapers carrying the names of winners, for example, will not be permitted in the mails; nor will the lottery tickets themselves. Even transporting tickets across the state borders is technically forbidden. But New Hampshire hopes somehow to keep the Justice Department from spoiling its plans. It will sell $3 tickets at state liquor stores and race tracks for two sweepstakes horse races a year, with total prizes of $200,000. It hopes to profit by $4,000,000, with the money going to build public schools.