Essay: WHY PEOPLE GAMBLE (AND SHOULD THEY?)

Las Vegas. 4:30 a.m. Muzak oozing. Dice clacking. Slot machines whirring. No clocks. No windows. No chairs —except at the green felt tables. Ray the Shark, middleaged, middle class, Middle West, peeks at cards, puffs cigar, rubs lucky shirt, peeks again and draws another card. Blackjack! Adrenaline pumping, grinning beatificially, he multiplies his bets—and loses. Wife appears, her palms covered with grey metallic sheen from feeding coins to slot machines. “Quick,” he whispers, “I’m hot. Give me the money I told you not to give me.”

RAY the Shark—as he likes to think of himself—is hooked, at least temporarily. So are 86 million other Americans, who this year will bet on everything from nags to numbers, pinochle to pinball machines.* Everybody wants a piece of the action, including the politicians. In 1964, New Hampshire became the first state in this century to legalize a lottery, followed this year by New York. But even the most unscrupulous bookies, whose average “vigorish” (profit margin) is 10%, would blush at New York’s 70% lottery rake-off. The fact that state lottery tickets are sold in the marbled halls of New York financial institutions is too much for some people. Texas’ Wright Patman, chairman of the House Banking Committee, sponsored a bill to keep federally insured banks from selling such tickets and last week Patman fulminated against Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s “lottery racket.”

Not that the lotteries have proved particularly profitable so far. In New York, receipts are running a woeful 75% below estimates. Various reasons for the lag are advanced —not enough outlets, weak promotion, bad odds (1,000,000 to 1 for top prize of $100,000), and the unexciting legality of the whole thing. Some gamblers feel that their pastime has to be more attuned to the raffish ways of Moe the Gyp than to the clean-cut operation of Nelson the Rock. The mystique has to do with smoky back rooms and the smell of the paddocks, with whispered hunches and looking bored while four aces burn a hole in your hand.

The National Sweepstakes

The fuss about the lotteries is only one sign that the U.S. is on a gambling spree; gambling expenditures may have doubled in the past decade. Las Vegas, with its bargain-basement prices for rooms and floor shows and its free round-trip air fares for well-heeled customers, is now getting competition from oases in the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. The numbers racket (estimated total revenue: $1.5 billion) was once known as “the black man’s stock market”; now it is moving all over town. Perhaps the fastest-growing action is betting on sporting events (estimated total: $2.2 billion) with point spreads lending an edge of excitement to even the most one-sided contests.

Over the phone, through the mails, in ads and commercials comes a barrage of invitations to join the national sweepstakes; housewives do not just shop any more, they take chances on a freight car full of oranges, or a new convertible stuffed with $27,000 in cash. This sort of thing may not be real gambling, but it does contribute to a gambling atmosphere. Says one interested witness, the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s Wayne Pearson: “Statistically, gambling is the normal thing. It’s the non-gambler who is abnormal in American society.”

Even if gambling is statistically normal, is it psychologically so? Is it economically and ethically desirable? A great many people are faced with the question of whether it is just good, clean fun for the whole family; or a wasteful, diabolical evil; or a deeply rooted part of human life.

From Never to Whee!

Gambling has existed in every society. The American Indians bet on the different markings on concealed wooden disks, the ancient Siamese on which mussels would open ahead of others. Some scholars connect gambling with soothsaying, calling it a secular form of divination.

Tradition has it that, to quell the restlessness of his troops when they were not tossing spears, the Greek warrior Palamedes taught them to toss dice. The ivories have been chattering ever since. And so have the opponents of gambling. Attitudes toward gambling have followed a cycle of restriction and permissiveness, moving, in the words of one historian, “from never to sometimes to whee!” The early Greeks condemned it because it was considered detrimental to the order of the state, the ancient Egyptians because it was thought to make men effeminate. Summing up the view of the early church, Tertullian in the 3rd century A.D. denied that a dice player could be a Christian, because dicing made him too worldly. But most of the time through the succeeding centuries, the church had sins larger than gambling to worry about. Both champions and foes saw in it a certain obsessive, hysterical quality. Restoration Author John Cotton diagnosed it as a “witching disease that makes some scratch the head, while others, as if bitten by a tarantula, are laughing themselves to death.”

The laughter and the head scratching continued in the New World. The Virginia Company arrived on an expedition partly financed by a lottery. Colonists used the gaming wheel to help build bridges, churches and schools (including Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth). The Puritans condemned gambling with passion because, among other reasons, it meant usurping God’s role. Cotton Mather warned that the Scriptures intended lots to be “used only in weighty cases and as an acknowledgement of God sitting in judgment” and not as “the tools of our common sports.”

The fever was upon the land, and by 1832 the citizens in the eight Eastern states were spending $66.4 million on lotteries, or more than four times the national expenditure. In the late 19th century, the reformers began pitching their tents in the fairgrounds and crying out against gamblers as “a lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot.” U.S. Protestantism was especially hostile to gambling, which it saw as luring people into extravagance and away from work. By 1910, most states had passed antigaming laws, and gradually gambling went underground—or underworld. Says Gambling Historian Henry Chafetz: “Men had shot and killed each other across gaming tables on the Mississippi and the gold fields of the West, but it took the 20th century to make gamblers mobsters.”

Nobody, of course, is hypnotized into gambling, and illegal gambling flourishes today because the customers are there. Once considered either the elegant pastime of the rich or the grubby escape of the poor, it is now virtually classless. Who plays which game? Dealers and other psychologists offer only rough generalizations: competitive types favor man-against-man games such as blackjack; intellectual types and women more passive pursuits such as roulette; craps, with its rattles, pitches and shouts of “Baby needs shoes!” attracts the assertive male. As for horseplayers, according to one sociologist, about 60% are lower-and middle-class men who bet long shots “to assert their ability to make individual decisions in a depersonalized society.”

Most people who gamble do so only sporadically. But perhaps as many as 6,000,000 are compulsive. To help them, Gamblers Anonymous was founded ten years ago, modeled after A.A. In chapters in 80 cities, regular group-therapy sessions pile up endless case histories of gambling victims. One compulsive gambler tells of robbing his children’s piggy bank and selling pints of his blood so he could have one more fling at the dice; another recalls how he absconded with the money for his father’s funeral and blew it on the ponies. “You act just like a kid,” explains Sidney L. of Washington. “You go along thinking when you hit it big you’ll get the wife a mink coat, then a trip to Bermuda. Then when you do, how much of it does she see? Five dollars. You never get the car fixed or buy new tires. No odds in that. It’s dead. It has no life.”

A Meaning Machine

Addicted to their habit, the compulsives are caught in a wheel of misfortune whose payoffs are broken families, lost jobs and bankruptcy—or, often, embezzlement. G.A. is making only limited headway. The “cure,” which requires total abstinence and regular attendance at G.A. meetings, works in about only one case out of 30.

The compulsive gambler is by definition an extreme case, but many of his motivations are shared in milder form by all gamblers. Anthropologist Charlotte Olmsted, who made a study of the subject in Heads I Win, Tails You Lose, believes that “many male gamblers use gambling as a substitute for sex. This is why you see so much of it in lumber camps or among soldiers. It helps avoid a certain amount of fighting as well as homosexuality.” A lot of people clearly play for fun or excitement, and only secondarily for the just-maybe chance of winning some money. As that great prophet of potluck, Nick the Greek, once said: “The next-best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing. The main thing is the play.” But the incentives are hard to separate. Behaviorist psychologists believe that what keeps people gambling is “intermittent reinforcement”—a regular expectation of winning. Says Harvard’s B. F. Skinner: “I could arrange for a rat, pigeon or monkey to get hooked on gambling simply by providing a certain schedule of rewards or payoffs.”

But many compulsive gamblers admit that their strongest drive is to lose, not win. The classic example of this self-destructive type was Dostoevsky, whose incentive to write was often to get money for gambling; when he had it, he would boast that he was going to give fate “a punch on the nose!” Fate, of course, always ducked. In Dostoevsky and Parricide, Freud suggested that for the writer fate represented the father figure from whom he was asking punishment.

It is not necessary to accept Freud to see gambling as a challenge of fate, an existentialist insistence on man’s freedom to waste himself and his substance, if he so chooses. Others see in gambling an essentially childish desire for unearned reward, and a yearning for magic—which may explain why gamblers are notoriously superstitious.

Perhaps the most persuasive theory is advanced by Sociologist Erving Goffman, who worked for a year in Las Vegas as a dealer. He describes gambling as a “meaning machine that grinds out random decisions very rapidly. Betting on the outcome transfers mere random decisions into fateful ones. This provides an essentially meaningless but exciting situation that allows people to read into the action whatever fantasies they want, to groove, to go crazy in an intensely personal way.” In other words, gambling becomes life itself, made into whatever one wants it to be.

Some want to make gambling into a prototype of capitalism; after all, runs the argument, capitalism is based on some form of gambling or at least risk taking. True enough. Thrift and savings are essential to capitalism, but so is daring investment. The gambler’s blind challenge of fate is different from the investor’s bet on the future. Still, the gambler and the man who “plays” the stock market have certain things in common: a desire to make money without working for it in the ordinary sense, and a desire to reach beyond the monotony of life by deliberately embracing the unpredictable. Some see gambling as a cosmic, even a spiritual principle: “I think luck as well as freedom must be counted in the salvation of man as well as in the fall,” says Albert Hammond, former philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins. “I believe that luck should be counted in the story of Jesus. God may have known he had a good bet, but he had to wait for the finish.”

To Legalize or Not

Most Christian ministers would scarcely put it that way but, in general, churchly condemnation of gambling seems to be softening. While the Methodists’ latest “Disciplines” states that gambling accentuates the desire “to acquire wealth without honest labor [and] encourages a primitive, fatalistic faith in chance,” California’s Bishop Gerald Kennedy says of his fellow ministers: “The boys today don’t particularly make an issue of it.” As for the Catholic Church, it has always held that gambling itself is neutral, that it becomes evil only when it involves excess, damage to one’s family or connection with crime. Boston’s Richard Cardinal Gushing says that if Massachusetts passes a lottery bill, he will be the first to buy a ticket.

Existing gambling laws are a mass of contradictions. While banning most forms of gambling 29 states permit horse racing—but not off-track betting. Some states forbid betting on flat racing, which is presumably wicked, but allow betting on harness races—which are presumably a wholesome, rustic diversion. The California legislature puts on its best poker face and allows betting in draw-poker parlors because it is a “game of skill.” In Virginia, the statutes spell out that b-i-n-g-o is forbidden. So the churches and fire stations spell it beano, or bungo, or lotto, and go right on playing.

Many law-enforcement officials favor legalization of gambling. Their chief arguments: 1) people gamble anyway, so why not regulate the action and bring in revenue for the state rather than for mobsters; 2) legal control is the only way to keep out criminals. The counterarguments are that 1) even controlled gambling will lead many people into the habit who would not otherwise get hooked; 2) lotteries in particular are played mostly by lower-income families and thus constitute an unjust tax on the poor; 3) in places like Nevada, where gambling is legal, criminal elements have certainly not faded away. Virgil Peterson, director of the Chicago crime commission, argues that the underworld inevitably gains a foothold under any licensing system by organizing legal “fronts” and establishing rival illegal operations that place the state-operated venture at a disadvantage.

It does not have to be that way. In many parts of the world, gambling is legalized and largely free of criminal elements. State-run lotteries, which support everything from opera to cancer research, exist in 84 countries. While there have been fears recently that U.S. mobsters have infiltrated some of the thriving casinos in London, most of England’s 1,000 licensed gaming houses are fairly clean operations where, as one director says, “Dad and the family can have a bit of a flutter for a fiver.” In short, it seems better to establish some forms of government-controlled gambling and try to stave off the racketeers than to let them proliferate underground. The issue, however, goes beyond combatting crime. Life is filled with all kinds of habits that can grow problematic or dangerous, from liquor and sex to the carrying of firearms and the borrowing of money. In all these fields, subject to some controls, Americans are presumed mature enough to make their own decisions. Is gambling so much more perilous that people must be totally shielded from its seductive power? Within reason, Americans ought to be trusted with an opportunity to choose freely whether they want to gamble or not.

Some believe that, as American life gets fuller, the lure of gambling will diminish. People will find such challenge in their jobs, their families, their sports and their travels (so goes the argument) that it will not be necessary to resort to the artificial excitement of gambling, and that strange and beguiling itch will disappear. But don’t bet on it.

*That estimate comes from Gambling Expert John Scarne (who made a five-year study of the subject), and is accepted by the Internal Revenue Service. Reliable gambling statistics are as hard to come by as Red Chinese production figures. According to some reports cited by the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement, organized crime takes in $50-billion in gross revenues from gambling (as distinct from total turnover, which would be much higher). But the commission seems willing to settle for an estimate of $7 billion. Legal gambling has estimated revenues of about $1 billion.