Gambling and the Law

The beginning of the Twentieth Century in America was a time of settling down; it was a time when the frontier's rough ways suddenly seemed embarrassing to people, leaving them open to the exhortations of reformers and crusaders.

Gambling was, by no means, the only target of these reformers, nor did the general movement lose force after casinos and lotteries were banned. As everyone knows, the Prohibition Party, organized in 1869, finally succeeded in making liquor illegal in the U.S. in 1920.

This was a feat of considerably more power than the elimination of gambling, since so many more people liked to take a drink than liked to make a bet. Nevertheless, reform was the order of the day, and both drinking and gambling, those sins of America's raw youth, were declared universally illegal.

But gambling, like whiskey, didn't just disappear in meek obedience to the laws. As the government discovered when it began to try to enforce the prohibition laws, drinking was too pleasurable for far too many people for the practice to die, law or no law.

Respectable folks, who wouldn't think of stealing or fighting, simply didn't feel that Prohibition was a good law, realizing that it is almost impossible to protect the public against "vices" it doesn't want to be protected against.

Criminal operations sprang up, where legal ones had been closed, to satisfy the public demand for liquor and gambling. Naturally, such establishments were harder to control than legitimate ones, and both undergrounds led to much corruption in the police forces, as well as making certain organized crime interests fabulously wealthy.

Prohibition, of course, was repealed by public vote in 1933. The return of legitimate gambling was slower, except for Nevada, which shrewdly cornered the gambling business of the entire nation by ending its betting prohibition in 1931.

Then, in 1963, the chilly Yankee state of New Hampshire instituted a state lottery, and opened the way for the explosion of legalized gambling over the past 40-plus years. It is now generally expected that most states will have lotteries, and many places have gone beyond simple lotteries in order to get some of the gambling revenues out of the hands of the few in Nevada and Atlantic City and into the coffers of their states.

New York City, for example, runs off-track betting parlors where horse fanciers can put two dollars on a favorite mount without ever leaving the neighborhood, or patronizing the local bookmaker.

Several localities are organizing football and baseball pools, thus acknowledging and legitimizing what everybody has been aware of for years - that professional sports are intimately involved with big-time gambling.

Poker clubs, those holdovers from the nineteenth century, are making a comeback on both coasts, including sites to play poker online. Legalized gambling is appearing in more and more areas every year.