Somebody’s Gotta Win, Might As Well Be You

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh. The Kentucky Derby is the most heavily wagered horse race in the US with millions of dollars exchanging hands each year. But in the 19th century, Americans went to the track for more than a few bets. Political candidates got in on the action.

KEN COHEN: And so they used their horses to help rally support. They would also name their horses things like Democrat or Anti-Democrat.

BRIAN: Today on BackStory, we’re looking at a history of gambling, from the moral hazards of betting on your own life–

SHARON MURPHY: The life insurance industry’s always kind of haunted by this element of gambling and this taint of ickiness.

BRIAN: To an anti-gambling campaign that turned violent.

JOSHUA ROTHMAN: If people in the United States, when they have an association in their minds with the city of Vicksburg, their memory of Vicksburg is, oh, that’s the place where they murdered the gamblers.

BRIAN: A history of gambling coming up on BackStory.

ANNOUNCER: Major funding for BackStory is provided by the Shere Khan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

PETER: Welcome to the show. I’m Peter Onuf, here with Ed Ayers.

ED: Hey, Peter.

PETER: And Brian Balogh.

BRIAN: Hey there, Peter. Today’s episode is on the history of gambling in America. And we’re going to start with one of the most ubiquitous types of gambling. BackStory listener Sarah Hobbes called in to ask about it.

SARAH HOBBES: Hey, guys. I’ve got a question. How long, historically, have we had lotteries and have lottery funds historically always gone toward a cause?

Ed: So Sarah wants to know if we’ve always had lotteries and if we have, have they all been put towards some socially constructive purpose? You know, I always thought lotteries were invented when we invented scratch-off cards but maybe there’s a different history to this than we realize.

BRIAN: Well, Ed, I think you can understand why I reached out to author Matthew Sweeney to answer the question. He’s written a book on the history of American lotteries.

MATTHEW SWEENEY: Oh, in America, lotteries go back to the very beginning. The nation was founded on lottery dollars.

BRIAN: Sweeney’s not kidding. He says as far back as the early 1600s, the Virginia Company in London looked to a series of lotteries to save its struggling venture across the pond, a little colony called Jamestown.

MATTHEW SWEENEY: The colony itself was in financial trouble. It hadn’t returned profits. A lot of the financial backers were, I think, getting wary. So the company applied and sought permission from the crown to hold a lottery.

BRIAN: Sweeney says that public lotteries like this were still relatively novel. So the Virginia Company spread the word with broadsides featuring tantalizing descriptions of lottery prizes.

They even commissioned a song. It was a little more high-minded than today’s radio jingles. A patriotic anthem painted the lottery not just as a game of chance but an opportunity to fund England’s glory. The actual tune didn’t survive. So we decided to commission our very own version.

FEMALE (SINGING): Take courage then with willingness. Let hands and hearts agree. A braver enterprise than this, I think, can never be. The merchants of Virginia now have nobly took in hand the bravest golden lottery that e’er was in this land.

ED: Well, that’s quite the jaunty air. I’d buy a lottery ticket with that.

PETER: Yeah, it sounds like you’d buy any lottery ticket, Ed.

BRIAN: Sweeney says the first drawing in June 1612 was a major public spectacle, almost like a carnival.

MATTHEW SWEENEY: They constructed a special house next to Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London and it was not too dissimilar from a bingo hall that you would see today. You’d put all the slips into a drum. It often had glass sides to allow the public to see the slips or the tickets that were rotating around inside.

Often there’d be a child, you know, a symbol of innocence brought out to pull a ticket And, you know, you can imagine that moment of tension as the child dipped their hand into the drum to pull out a ticket and everything would go silent as they waited for, you know, the ticket to be pulled to see who was going to win the top prizes.

BRIAN: Now, some people had decidedly mixed feelings about these lotteries. The Spanish ambassador wrote a scornful letter home claiming the English had been reduced to begging in the streets to fund their colony. Others commented that poor people were being cousined, that’s Elizabethan for fooled, by the lure of big prizes they stood little chance of winning. Despite these concerns, these lotteries eventually paid off.

MATTHEW SWEENEY: By 1620, the estimates are that 2/3 of the funding of Jamestown was provided by the lotteries and it was John Smith’s comment that lotteries had provided the real and substantial food of Jamestown during that time period.

BRIAN: Jamestown was just the start. Over the next century, all kinds of lotteries sprang up in Colonial America. At a time when cash and banks were scarce, Sweeney says lotteries where often the quickest way to raise funds for public works.

MATTHEW SWEENEY: It is Colonial Era crowdfunding. You vote your support for the project by buying a lottery ticket.

BRIAN: The Continental Congress even got in on the action, attempting and failing to use a lottery to raise money for American troops during the revolution.

MATTHEW SWEENEY: After the Revolutionary War, lotteries really spread like wildfire. You had a new country that had just ended a war over taxation. They weren’t about to start levying, you know, major new taxes and they already had debts to consider and they needed to build.

BRIAN: Now, throughout these periods, religious groups like the Quakers saw lotteries as a form of state sanctioned gambling. But Sweeney says, going back to Jamestown, lotteries offered betters something different than cards or billiards. It was the chance to win big but also to feel like they were contributing to a greater, sometimes even glorious, cause.

MATTHEW SWEENEY: There’s a certain ironic symmetry, I think, to asking folks to gamble some money on what was essentially a gamble for the Jamestown colony to take root. You see a similar metaphor made by Adam Smith, at the time of the Revolution where he compared the revolutionaries to lottery players who were willing to take a risk to win a big prize from the English state lottery wheel.