New Yorks Promise

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A Casino Land Reportby David Blankenhorn

New Yorks PromiseWhy Sponsoring Casinos Is a RegressivePolicy Unworthy o a Great State

Institute for American Values


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About the Author

David Blankenhorn is the ounder and president o the Institute or American

Values, a nonpartisan think tank devoted to strengthening amilies and civilsociety. He is a co-editor o eight books and the author o Thrit: A Cyclopedia(2008), The Future o Marriage(2007), andFatherless America (1995). He lives inNew York City.

Acknowledgements

For their help and colleagueship, the author wishes to thank Les Bernal, SamCole, Paul Davies, Earl Grinols, Mathew Kaal, Alicia Savarese, JosephineTramantano, Pete Walley, Barbara Daoe Whitehead, Jody Wood, and Amy Ziet-

tlow. The views expressed in this report are the authors alone.

For nancial support, the Institute or American Values wishes to thank the Bod-man Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Institutes other nan-cial supporters.

This report is dedicated to the memory o Fiorello La Guardia.

On the cover: Fiorello La Guar-

dia (18821947) smashing con-

scated slot machines, 1934 (b/w

photo), American Photographer,

(20th century) / Private Collection

/ Peter Newark American Pictures

/ The Bridgeman Art Library

2013 Institute or American Values. No

reproduction o the materials contained

herein is permitted without written per-

mission o the Institute or American Val-

ues.

ISBN# 978-1-931764-48-3

Ebook ISBN# 978-1-931764-49-0

Institute for American Values

1841 Broadway, Suite 211

New York, New York 10023

Tel: 212.246.3942Fax: 212.541.6665

Website: www.americanvalues.org

E-mail: [email protected]


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Table of Contents

1. Who Are We? ................................................................................................. 4

2. The New York Idea ....................................................................................... 6

3. Gambling and Political Greatness in New York .......................................... 22

Fiorello La Guardia Had a City to Reorm................................................... 22

Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Evans Hughes

Had a Constitution to Protect....................................................................... 34

De Witt Clinton Had a Canal to Build......................................................... 53

4. Gamble-Speak ............................................................................................... 63

What is Gambling?........................................................................................ 63

Who Gambles?............................................................................................... 65

Is Gambling Entertainment?......................................................................... 73

Are Casinos Resort Destinations?.................................................................. 75

Are Casinos Private Businesses?.................................................................... 77

Are Casinos Casinos?..................................................................................... 81What Do You Call a Huge Room Full o Slot Machines?.............................. 82

5. Slot Machines ................................................................................................. 86

6. Governor Cuomos Casino Plan ................................................................... 101

7. The Mississippi Model ................................................................................... 108

8. New Yorks Wonderul Lie ........................................................................... 118

9. An Appeal ...................................................................................................... 125

Endnotes ............................................................................................................... 129


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New Yorks PromiseWhy Sponsoring Casinos Is a Regressive PolicyUnworthy o a Great State

1. Who Are We?

To gamble is to ask destiny Am I avored? and to get a reply. It can be adeeply thrilling experience. Because to gamble is to test and tempt ones ate,gambling takes us to the heart o human need and personality.1

So lets give the thing its due. Gambling is almost never, as some would have it,

simply a matter o entertainment (although entertainment is sometimes involved).Nor is gamblings primary lure the likelihood o acquiring money (although moneyis typically involved). The essence o gambling is something much deeper and armore psychologically proound.

What makes gambling so attractive is risk-taking, and risk is a powerul orce. Inthe real world, taking a risk can move mountains. Across history and cultures, thedrive to take risks has been a major orce or dynamism and innovation in humanaairs. It has helped propel human beings to build and spend ortunes, explorethe stars, wage wars, conquer diseases, and make deserts bloom. Especially in

ree societies such as ours, whose economies depend so decisively on innovationand the entrepreneurial spirit, this deep human need or risk-taking emerges as acherished and highly valued social good.

Yet on occasion, this same basic driveso important to human achievementbecomes separated rom real lie, sidetracked and sidelined into essentially rivo-lous activities that produce nothing and accomplish nothing. Today, the main

word that we use or such activity is gambling. Many years ago, Dr. J. LeonardCorning, a distinguished New Yorker among the rst medical proessionals tostudy gambling as an addiction rather than a moral disorder, ramed the matter(according to theNew York Times) this way: Gambling is merely a misuse o thatcapacity and inclination to take chances upon which enterprise and progress oevery kind largely depend.2


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In this sense, gambling becomes risk-taking miniaturized and ctionalized. Letsgamble on which grasshopper will jump rst. Lets wager on whose dice throw will

add up to the number seven. Gambling activities such as these may produce a tem-

porary sense o excitement or the gambler, and may reinorce the belie (whichis also quite old in our species) that human aairs are undamentally controlledby magic, or luck. But unlike actual risk-taking in the real world, they contributenothing to social dynamism or human progress.

At the same time, at our best we are a tolerant species. Whenever gambling re-mains private, local, and largely inormalimmigrants in Chinatown playing Mah-jong, the guys Friday night poker game in a Muncie, Indiana, neighborhoodwetend to conclude that it can produce some laughs, solidarity, and un times, andthat these limited and private activities are at most only mildly destructive to the

nobler purposes o building prosperity and ueling innovation. I such modes ogambling are a vice, they are a minor vice, and almost certainly a orgivable one.

But on more serious occasions, sidetracking this core human drive rom the realworld to the make-believe, rom useulness to uselessness, rom o productivity tostagnation, takes on the imprimatur o society. The resulting change is not one odegree, but o kind. A new regime emerges. No longer merely private and local,in this new order the ctionalization o risk through gambling becomes public andpolitical, universal in reach and infuence, a major source o public nance, andthereore ocially sponsored by powerul government structures in partnership

with equally powerul corporate structures.

This is not your Friday night poker game. This is something dierent, and muchuglier. Government-sponsored gambling says: This is how to be a good citizen.This is ocial. This is how we want everyone to spend their time and money. Thisis a good thing, or all o us. This is who we are.

The question or New York is a simple one. Is this who we are?


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2. The New York Idea

The New York Idea, although it steers away rom any ideological imperatives, ispredicated on certain basic valuesprinciplesthat dene it.

Mario Cuomo, The New York Idea3

Many authors, including Washington Irving, De Witt Clinton, John Burroughs,Theodore Roosevelt, Edith Wharton, Joseph Mitchell, E.B. White, Carl Car-mer, and numerous others, have sought to capture in words the essence o New

Yorkwhat New York stands or and what it means, and ought to mean, to sayI am a New Yorker. One o those authors is Mario Cuomo, who was born inQueens, New York City, in 1932 and served as governor o New York rom 1983to 1994. His 1994 book, The New York Idea: An Experiment in Democracy, is a sig-nicant contribution to this literature, not least because Cuomo is an accomplishedman o letters as well one o his generations most important political leaders.

Cuomos New York Idea is dened by ve basic values: work, amily, reedom,beauty, and hope.

Work

For more than ten generations, America has been an invitation to hard workand its rewards. That is the central idea in the American experience.

Mario Cuomo, The New York Idea

An essential promise and premise o America is that hard work is rewarded andidleness is not. The work ethic plays a central role in the American Dream andin the New York Idea.

But what are the actual components o hard work? And what ethic is the chiedestroyer o the work ethic?

At the most basic level, to work is to be employedto carry out an activity or per-orm a set o tasks, usually in exchange or nancial compensation. The opposite


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o work, understood in this sense, is idleness.According to the dictionary, idlenessmeans passing time without working or avoiding work.

Idleness and gambling were made or each other. Thats why casinos in the nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, both in Europe (legally) and in the big Ameri-can cities (illegally), generally catered to the idle richin particular those withmore money than good sense.

Another basic dimension o work is productivity. Is casino gambling productive?To ask the question is to know the answer. But lets hear the answer anyway.

Arguably the oremost U.S. academic economist o the twentieth century, Paul A.Samuelson, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1970 and whosetextbook,Economics, is used in college courses everywhere and is the best-selling

economics textbook o all time, reminds us that gambling

involves simply the sterile transers o money or goods between individuals, cre-

ating no new money or goods. Although it creates no output, gambling does

nevertheless absorb time and resources. When pursued beyond the limits o rec-

reation, where the main purpose ater all is to kill time, gambling subtracts

rom the national income.4

Not surprisingly, a signicant body o scholarly evidence suggests that casino gam-bling, precisely because it produces nothing o value, is economically regressive,and, in the communities where it is located, typically does not spur long-termeconomic growth and oten retards it.5

A third basic dimension o work is creativity. Economists and philosophers teachus that creativitya closely linked word is entrepreneurshipis essential to eco-nomic progress and a core trait o productive work. Is gambling creative? Is di-

verting the human drive or risk and excitement rom the real world to the make-believe world creative? Is playing games that produce nothing but loss o time andmoney creative? Is putting money into fashing machines and hoping that certainnumbers or colors appear creative?

The ourth and nal dimension o work is useulness. True work is not only hard,its useul. It has a social and utilitarian aspect. It benets not just the worker, butthe workers community. Is casino gambling useul in this sense? O course not. A


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core value o all gambling is covetousness, or the desire to gain something romothers in exchange or nothing. The entire concept is inescapably sel-centeredand asocial. No one goes to casinos to help other people or to do something use-

ul or the community.

Is gambling a riend or oe o the work ethic? The work ethic says: Results aredetermined by eortso suit up, get out there in the real world o adventure,and try hard. The gambling ethic says: Results are determined by chancesorelax, dont sweat the details, nd a seat in adventures antasy world, and waitto get lucky.

For obvious reasons, the work ethic nds its truest home in the middle class.These are the New YorkersGovernor Cuomo and others oten call them work-

ing amilies, and or good reasonwho cant aord not to work and who wantand are able to work to achieve their American Dream. The gambling ethic, bycontrast, nds its truest home either among the idle rich, who have time andmoney to waste, or among the demoralized poor, who have been beaten downby circumstances and lost hope, replacing it with a desperate desire or luck andor escape.

For these reasons, it seems clear that the opposite o the work ethicits destroyer,in actis the gambling ethic.

Is this what we want or New York? Is it among our current goals to harness thepower o state sponsorship to embed the gambling ethic ever more deeply withinour middle class? Will the gambling ethic, spread via a ligree o new casinosacross the state and backed by the tools o government, help to solve challengesacing Bualo, Seneca Falls, Walton, Utica, Hermon, Elmira? Do we want this ethicto become a dening part o the New York Idea?


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The mathematicians have a name or this ugly little reality. Its called The Law oGamblers Ruin. It was rst stated in 1656 by the Dutch mathematician ChristiaanHuygens, although numerous others, including Galileo and Blaise Pascal, had pre-

viously articulated the same principle using dierent phrasing. Here is one basicormulation o this law:

A gambler with nite resources playing a air game o chance against an op-

ponent with innite resources will eventually go broke, regardless o the betting

system.10

Amazingly, this law holds true even i the game is a air onethat is, even whenplaying a game (such as tossing a coin) in which the probability o winning anysingle bet is hal.

But in a casino, o course, the games are not air. Thats the undamental changethat occurs when the games become ones in which you are betting against thehouse. Each and every time you make a bet in a casinoregardless o the gamebeing played and regardless o the betting system you are usingthe probabilityo your winning any single bet is mathematicallyless thanhal, which means, inturn, that the time it takes or you to lose everything is signicantly less than it

would have been i the game had been air.

Exactly how long it takes or the steady player to lose everything is determinedmathematically by each casino. To use economists jargon, the casinos goal is tond that precise point at which, on a mathematical graph, the trajectories o theplayers desire to gamble and the players average loss per bet intersect at theirrespective maxima. This sweet-spot number, which casino managers and gamingprogrammers take great pains to pinpoint, determines what is oten called thecasinos take or percentage orto borrow loan-sharking termsvigorish orvig, although these latter terms, due to their historical association with mobsters,are seldom used anymore by todays gambling house operators.

But while the words may get soter, the underlying mathematical reality remainsas hard and unbending as steel. For the casino, no risk or chance is involved and

luck has already been arranged. As the mathematician Dr. Deborah Rumsey putsit:


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When you play any casino game that involves betting, youre playing against

a house that has probability on its side. Studies show that i you play any game

long enough (without stopping) you eventually lose everything.11

The psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler treated compulsive gamblers or many years.He writes:

The technique o losing is simple enough: the only pre-requisite is that the gam-

bler gamble. . . . It must always be remembered that the gambler acts irratio-

nally. He allows himsel to be pushed into an unequal ght against superior

orces, orces which he cannot control, and which make him into an object.12

In his amous 1909 essay The Gamblers Ruin, the Harvard mathematics proes-

sor Julian Lowell Coolidge urther explains that, given the inevitability o ultimateruin, the gamblers single best strategy as a mathematical proposition is to makethe smallest number o bets possible while wagering the largest possible sum oneach bet made:

The players best chance o winning a certain sum at a disadvantageous game,

is to stake the sum that will bring him that return in one play, or, i that be not

allowed, to make always the largest stake which the banker will accept.

And what o gamblers who view such advice as oolish? Says the proessor:

The average gambler will say, The player who stakes his whole ortune on a

single play is a ool . . . The reply is obvious: The science o mathematics never

attempts the impossible, it merely shows that other players are greater ools.13

Probably the clearest and most concise iteration o the law o gamblers ruin comesrom Martin Scorseses 1995 Casino. In the lm, Sam Ace Rothstein, the casinomanager, makes this absolutely accurate statement:

In the casino, the cardinal rule is to keep them playing and keep them coming

back. The longer they play, the more they lose. In the end we get it all.

In the book on which the movie is based, author Nicks Pileggi nicely evokes Pro.Coolidge:


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A casino is a mathematics palace set up to separate players rom their money.

Every bet made in a casino has been calibrated within a raction o its lie to

maximize prot while still giving players the illusion that they have a chance.14

The latest development in the playing out o this historic law comes rom thenew science o machine design, with revolutionary results. Remember the oldone-armed banditsthose slot machines where you pulled a big lever, watchedsome spinning, and hoped to see a certain pattern o ruit or numbers emergeas the spinning slowed down? Such machines no longer exist, except maybe inmuseums. Those old-timers are to todays machines what a peashooter is to aRapid Fire AK-47.

Computerized slot machines drive todays casino industry. Amazingly, roughly

three-quarters o all casino gambling revenue in the U.S. now comes rom peoplewho sit in ront o these high-speed machines and press buttons.

These machines are specically designed or psychological manipulation and de-ception, aimed at creating a distorted, narcotic-like sense o time, so that the playereels like he or she is in a zone.15 Slot zombies is the term sometimes used todescribe players who are under this infuence, and some medical researchers whospecialize in studying addiction compare the psychological jolt o playing slot ma-chines to the psychological jolt o cocaine.16 Zoned-in players are encouraged tomake scores o bets within a matter o minutes. For example, in one slot machinegame, The Apprentice, Donald Trumps voice shouts Youre Fired! ater losingspins, each spin costs $2, and experienced players can play ve to six hundredspins an hour.17

From the casinos perspective, nothing could be better. Remember Rothsteins rule:The more bets you make, the more you lose. Back in Rothsteins day, the 1970sstill the era o the one-armed banditsit wasnt remotely possible to make as manybets per minute as todays players can make. Today, when the law o gamblers ruinhas gone high-tech, and as betting happens aster and becomes more intense, thetime that it takes or a casino to ruin a gambler grows shorter and shorter.

And what does this tale o ruin have to do with what Mario Cuomo calls amily?A lot.


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First, consider the health o amilies. The inestation o requent, problem, andpathological gambling into a community is fatly inconsistent with a concern oramily. So much o the gambling ethic and its personal and social consequences

including debt servitude, addiction, alcohol abuse, depression, mendacity, crime,and time stolen rom work and homeare the open enemies o strong amiliesand healthy amily lie.

Second, consider amily as a metaphoras the part o the New York Idea thatreminds us o how we as citizens should aim to treat one another and how thestates governing group should aim to treat the governed. Lets start with the latter.

Is it part o the New York Idea or the governing to play a substantial number othe governed or suckers? To permit and encourage proessional gambling organi-

zations to feece them, to take their money and whats let o their hope in orderthat the state may get some o the revenue? To prey upon human weakness, ormoney? Is that who we are in New York? Lets hope not. To do this thing wouldrupture the social contract between New Yorks leaders and its citizens and mocko the very idea o amily.

Its tempting to stop right here and say, Shame on our politicians, i they do thisshameul thing. But saying onlythat might leave the deepest and most painultruth unsaid.

Its not just the politicians. Its we the people. The dirty little secret is that many,perhaps a majority, o New Yorkers seem to endorse the idea o playing their

weakest and most vulnerable neighbors or suckers in order to protect themselvesrom tax increases.

The early polls are certainly hinting at it.18 The idea seems to be that we NewYorkers can nd a way to keep a lid on taxes and still maintain government ser-vices, even during economic hard times. We pull o this remarkable eat throughthe governments sponsorship o a statewide gambling program that we know

will procure the lions share o its revenue rom the at-risk and the have-notsamong us and deliver the lions share o benets (in the orm o government

spending and tax relie) to everyone else. And the entire operation can oc-cur under the harmless-sounding rubric o entertainment and without anyone(starting with our political leaders) having to utter the unpopular word tax! For


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those o usalmost certainly a majoritywho might come out on the winningside o this ormula, it must seem almost like magic.

The only catch is that we must be willing to avert our eyes rom the thousands odiminished lives and the rank injustices that the magical operation requires. Wemust be willing to disavow the part o the New York Idea that says that were allin this together, that we have certain ethical obligations to one another, and thatas New Yorkers we aim to treat one another not simply as means to an end, butas amily. Are we willing to make this disavowal, or money?

Freedom

Freedom or all o us is guaranteed, and tempered intelligently, by our commit-

ment to the common good.


The reedom to gamble is not the issue. People are, and should remain, ree towager money and to play games o chance or money.You and others can bet money on the outcome o nearly anything, rom who willcross the nish line rst to whether or not it will rain next week in Spain. You canplay low- or high-stakes poker or other card games to your hearts content. You

can shoot craps with your riends, or with perect strangers. You can organize o-ce pools on which team will win the Super Bowl, or whether the groundhog willor will not retreat back into its burrow. You can engage in high-speed stock trad-ing or in any o the many other perectly legal nancial practices that are, or allintents and purposes, primarily games o chance. You can play bingo or buy rafetickets in support o any number o good causes. You can gamble occasionally, or

you can gamble every day o the week. You can maintain limits on what you areprepared to lose, or you can gamble away every penny you have, or can obtain.

Whether or not New Yorkers are ree to gamble is simply not the issue here.

But there is something that New York has never permitted. We do not permit cor-porate gambling operations to establish or-prot gambling houses on the public


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policy grounds that these gambling houses will provide jobs or New Yorkers andrevenue or the state. Why does New York, a state whose citizens are perectly reeto gamble, restrict the reedom o gambling corporations in this way? Why, among

other things, would the state deny itsel this source o revenue?

There are three reasons why. None o them are hard to understand.

The rst reason stems rom the seminal dierence between a recreational game,in which I bet privately against other people, and a banking game, in which I betagainst the house. All casino games are banking games.

The core question is: Who runs the games? In recreational gambling, howeveroolish or dangerous it may be or the players to participate, the games are not

controlled by a sel-interested party whose only incentives are to entice players tobet and to cause them to lose. The issue is partiality. The house is not impartialin the matter o whether or how I gamble. Quite the contrary. Because its goal isprot, not disinterested sponsorship o recreation, the banks only interest in thematter is causing me, in whatever ways it can, to place as many bets as possibleand to lose as much money as possible. And because thats exactly and solely whatthe bank wants, thats typically what the bank gets.

Even on the strictest libertarian principlethat inficting possible harm on myselis permitted, but intentionally harming others is notproessionalized bankinggames, in which the only purpose and the only long-term outcome is feecing oth-ers, do not and should not enjoy the protection o our laws. Here in New York,

where wise and oolish alike are ree as private individuals to gamble or not togamble, we do not permit or-prot corporations to create and operate games ochance or these deeply questionable purposes.19

Norand here is the second reasondo we encourage or-prot businesses tocreate and operate games o chance that are patently rigged. Recall the essentialteleological act o the casino: Each bet placed is a bet against the laws o prob-ability. The more you bet, the more you lose. Eventually, as Sam Rothstein andRichard Caneld plainly stated, the casino gets it all. Permitting such a process to

occur under the ull protection o the law conficts with the public interest.


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Finally, here in New York, casinos are not endorsed by the state. Richard Can-eld and his ilk did not seek state approval or his ethical code and gamblingactivities. The illegal gambling houses o old New York, at least ormally, did not

carry the imprimatur o society. Governors and legislators did not rise to makesupportive remarks about themThis is good or us. This creates jobs. Thisdelivers money to the state. We need this. Here in New York, our governmentdoes not seek to become a ormal stakeholder in the house, thereby establishinga kind o government-gambling complex in which government does whatever isnecessaryeven to the point o changing the state Constitutionto collude withprivate gambling houses and turn to them or a signicant and growing share ostate revenue.

Should we now, in the name o reedomor o work, amily, beauty, hope

change our minds and scrap our laws in order to let government do this? Or is itstill obvious, as it has been obvious to New Yorkers since at least 1821, that suchpredatory activities, especially when carried out under the sponsorship o govern-ment itsel, are not in the public interest?

Beauty

Whenever I fy over this stateand I do it requently, by helicopter or small

planeI am reminded o how generous God has been to New York.


New York is a beautiul statearguably the most beautiul state in the nation.Beauty is an important part o the New York idea.Casinos are unbeautiul. People who dont requent casinos these days (a group

which included me until a year or so ago and probably includes many people whowill read this report) still tend to imagine them as glamorous places ull o styleand drama and brightly lit elegancepicture a beautiul woman blowing on thedice held by a tuxedoed man surrounded by an excited group o onlookers, like

a scene rom a James Bond movie.


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I next year a casino were to arise in, say, Seneca Falls, New York, is this what youwould see? It certainly wasnt what I saw during recent visits to casinos in Kansas,Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.

There is something prooundly aesthetically unappealing about Americas regionalcasinos. For starters, casinos are almost never located within settled neighbor-hoods, the communal spaces where people live and work and interact daily. Ca-sinos are usually located dockside on a river or a beach or a highwaynear theedge o things.

Casinos tend to dominate and demean their immediate surroundings. Especiallywhen they are connected to hotels (when they are resorts), casinos are over-sized, shiny to just this side o garish, and almost always completely out o sync

with the surroundings. Casino signage overwhelms the local ad landscape and ca-sinos are adjoined to parking lots the size o a ootball eld. The overall aestheticis likely to remind you o a theme park.

Go inside a casino, and the rst thing you notice is how dark it is. It could behigh noon on a sunny day in the real world, but in the casino its always nightand always the same temperature. In the casino our normal, natural cyclesday/night, early/late, start/close, light/dark, summer/winterhave disappeared. Youcan gamble at 5:00 a.m. and have breakast at midnight. A casino is ready to enter-tain twenty-our hours a day, seven days a week, in exactly the same way, underunvarying conditions. None o which is likely to remind you o how generous Godhas been to New York, or to any other part o the country.

In every casino its hard to miss the Welcome or Members Desk, where you can signup to become a casino member, a process that takes about our minutes resultingin a personalized membership card, which resembles a credit card and is intendedto track and record your every interaction with the casino. As a new member, youusually receive ten to twenty dollars o ree play at the slot machines.

Youll nd a bar in every casino, and the more you play, the more you can drink alco-hol or reeroaming waitresses bring your drinks while you sit and gamble. There is

also usually a restaurant with air to good ood at reasonable prices, and a shop to buyT-shirts and other casino mementos. The bathrooms are clean and accessible.


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Every casino foor has rows o cashiers along a wall, similar to what is ound in abank, as well as a plentiul supply o ATM machines, in case players need cash.There are no windows. There are no plants. Usually there are ashtrays. There are

large foor posters advertising special drawings or ways to win abulous prizes.The art on the walls is ake and tacky.

But these are only perimeter accoutrements. The main part o the casino, its raisondtre, is row ater row ater row o fashing machines that look like video gamespumped up with testosterone. The main physical sensation this space evokescomes rom the patterned pulse o colored lights blinking in the surroundingsemi-darknessan insistent, orceul, one-dimensional, and (or some) narcotic-like encroachment on the senses by spinning colors and strobe lights. This is thecasinos inner sanctum, the magic areathe place where you put your money into

whirling machines in the hope that youll get lucky and win.

You will nd that there is little laughter, ew smiles, and very little talking amidstthe slots. The baseline activity, the undamental act in a casino, is one personintensely relating to one machine. Press a button, watch the spin, see the result.Press a button, watch the spin, see the result. Press a button, watch the spin, seethe result . . . Some casinos have side areas to play bingo or other games that in-

volve at least some engagement with ellow gamblers, and occasionally you maysee a young couple on the main foor playing the slots or one o the table gamestogether, but by ar the dominant phenomenon o todays American casino is oneperson connected to one machinepress a button, watch the spin, see the resultas i joined by a kind o umbilical cord through which fows money and a certainkind o experience, with almost no ace-to-ace, genuinely human interaction.Ultimately, its a very sad thing to watch. And it is very, very ar rom beautiul.

Why are casinos so beret o joy, so removed rom beauty? As John Dewey a-mously put it in Art as Experience, pleasure can at times be derived rom merestimulationthe pulsing machines, the strobe lights, the repetitive soundsbutthe happiness and delight that come rom beauty, which satisy us much moredeeply, are a dierent sort o thing.20 Casinos are always about stimulation andnever about beauty.

Is asking or beauty in daily lie asking or too much? Is beauty only or special orrened occasions? O course not. Beauty does not only reside in art museums or


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music halls or national parks. Steve Jobs, the coounder o Apple, was a business-man. He made products and sold them. But when he died in 2011, millions o

Americans elt a sense o personal loss, and we saw a massive public outpouring

o aection or Jobs. This phenomenon occurred not simply because Jobs madelots o money (though he did) or because he developed innovative products(though he did), but also, and perhaps even mainly, because what he produced

was aesthetically pleasing. Steve Jobs created things that are beautiul. Beautymatters. I New Yorks elected ocials partner with gambling executives to bringcasinos into New York, we can be certain that no one years rom now will engraveon their tombstones: They created things that are beautiul.

Hope

In the end, I think the New York Idea comes down to aspirations.


To hope is to entertain an expectation o something desirable. In the traditionalunderstanding o the term, to hopeis to believe with some measure o con-dence and trust that what is desired will occur. Hope ultimately derives rom thephilosophy that good lies within our reach and that the good can and will prevailover the bad.

Many philosophers and religious leaders teach us that hope is a virtuesomethingto aspire to and to practice. They seek to persuade us that hope, especially whenlinked to other virtues, can realistically align us with the expectation o goodthings to come. Certainly hope is not a panacea. Sometimes even our most pro-ound hopes go unullled. But true hope, in the context o a sincere desire to livea good lie, can oten do great things. It can help protect us rom discouragement,separate us rom selshness, and sustain us in times o grie or trial or abandon-ment. Hope can lit up and ennoble our actions, keep us properly ocused, andhelp us remain oriented toward the good. In these and other ways, according tothe philosophers, hope corresponds ttingly to the aspiration o happiness.

The opposite o hope is despair, but hopes main competitorits main philo-sophical alternativeis luck. To believe in luck is to believe that getting what we


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desire is a matter primarily governed by chance, or by unknown orces beyondour reach.

Philosophically, thereore, hope and luck are incompatible ways o seeing theworld. A world that we believe is governed by hope is a world that is meaningul.A world that we believe is governed by luck is a world that is random. Throughouthistory, our wisest thinkers have taught us that hope ultimately aligns with realism,

whereas luck aligns almost entirely with antasy. For these and other reasons, rely-ing on hope usually osters positive activityhopeul is something we can be,and hope is something we can live out and practice. By contrast, a reliance on luckalmost always osters passivitylucky is something we simply get, and luck issomething that just happens, like the weather.

Free, democratic societies such as ours depend in proound ways on citizens whopossess the virtue o hope. Thats why hope is an important part o the New Yorkidea, and why luck plays no part in that idea.

The principal philosophical tenet o casino gambling is luck. And not just any oldluck, but luck as something powerul and magical enough to overcome the math-ematical laws o the universe, since every player in every casino is placing everybet against a house that has every mathematical law o probability o winningrmly on its side.

The casino is, in act, our societys current greatest monument to the belie in luckas a governing orce. The essence o the casinos activityits business modeldepends quite explicitly on undermining classical notions o hope and replacingthem with a widespread belie in luck as the pathway to success and happiness.

Is this the transormation we want or New York? Is this who we want to be?

It is unsurprising that the public man who wrote so evocatively o the main tenetso the New York Idea strongly opposed casino gambling. In his book, MarioCuomo states that, over and above both his personal eelings and the signicantcivic and religious opposition to casinos, there is a respectable body o economic

thought that holds that casino gambling is actually economically regressive to astate and a community.21 Indeed, there is.


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In 1994, when legislators in Albany were considering a constitutional amendmentto legalize casinosthe idea ailedtheNew York Timesreported:

Gov. Mario M. Cuomo has also expressed opposition to casino gambling. TheGovernors signature is not needed or a constitutional amendment, but Mr.

Cuomo said he might ght the proposal in public debate.22

The governor told the Times that bringing casinos into a state doesnt generatewealth, it just redistributes it.

The reporter interviewing him pushed back: Why doesnt the governor publiclyoppose race-track betting? Why did he recently push or a signicant expansion,through Keno games, o the New York State Lottery? Governor Cuomo answered:

There is no question that we have made that concession to gambling. All Im

saying is, enough is enough. Casinos are a whole dierent breed. It changes

communities.23


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3. Gambling and Political Greatness in New York

Political leaders come in three categories. A minority are venal. The majority are

well-meaning but undistinguished. And a ew are great. Greatness in politics israre. Even in a great state such as New York, only a very ew politiciansperhapsone or two in a generationare remembered by posterity as truly great leaders.

I do not purport to dene in this document what constitutes political greatness.But I do condently report two historical ndings:

Formorethantwohundredyears,NewYorksgreatestpoliticalleadershave

been gamblers and risk-takers.

Inresponsetowhetherstategovernmentshouldpartnerwithgamblinginter-ests in order to create jobs and bring revenue to the state, virtually all o thegreat New York leaders have answeredNo.

These two qualitiestaking bold risks in pursuit o genuine reorm, and fatlyopposing state sponsorship o gamblingseem to go together. Consider threeremarkable examples rom New York history.

Fiorello La Guardia Had a City to Reform

To appreciate what La Guardia did, we must understand what came beore him.For nearly a century, rom the 1840s to La Guardias election as mayor in 1932,New York City ran a gigantic experiment in state-sponsored gambling. In act,parts o this old city-level government-gambling complex closely resemble whatcasino operators and their partners in government are currently proposing or thestate o New York.

Consider the high-end gambling house. Starting in earnest in the 1840s, genera-tions o New York gaming industry leadersincluding pioneers such as ReubenParsons, Sherlock Hillman, John Chamberlain, and John Old Smoke Morrissey,

and ollowed by men such as Sam Suydam, Richard A. Caneld and Arnold Roth-steinestablished gambling houses that catered to the wealthy in New York City.24


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O course, the main purpose o these establishmentstheir proprietors and pa-trons usually called them clubs, while outsiders and critics usually called themgambling-houses or, in some cases, skinning-houseswas to separate wealthy

men rom their money. But they served other purposes as well. For one thing,they provided jobs. In act, or much o this period, perhaps 5 to 6 percent oall New York City jobs were connected to gambling houses, book-making, thenumbers, and other state-sponsored gambling activities. These elegant clubsalso attracted visitorswealthy men rom other states who came to New York togamble in high style. In act, we might call these clubs the original destinationgaming locations.

Jobs and tourism mattered, but rom the perspective o City Hall, by ar the mostimportant purpose o the gambling houses was to provide revenue or the city.

New York City politics in this era was largely controlled by the notorious Tamma-ny Hall machine, and the Tammany bosses (or sachems) who governed the citydepended upon the money provided by their partners in the gambling business.Gambling revenuetypically delivered by gambling operatives to city police cap-tains in regular, stipulated amounts or percentages, and subsequently distributedthroughout the citys ocialdomhelped to pay or all manner o governmentservices and political activities, rom the costs o campaigns to the salaries o po-lice ocers, judges, and other ocers o the court, building inspectors, and othercivil servants and city ocials.

New York gambling operations also directly paid or government-style servicesand programs to help the community. For example, or decades the leaders oracetrack gambling in New York covered the costs o county airs organized by lo-cal armers associations. John Morrissey gave to New York charities. In Saratoga,Richard Canelds gambling houses unded the construction o a local library andCaneld gave generously to the arts and to local civic associations.

In return or these revenue streams, New York Citys political establishment, inholding up its end o the partnership, granted these gambling houses eectivelegal immunity (by ignoring the anti-gambling laws they were ostensibly obligedto enorce), helped them to maintain local monopolies (by prosecuting their com-

petitors), and did their part to enhance the respectability o gambling in generaland the social status o their partners, the gambling-house operators, in particular.


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This government-gambling partnership was so cohesive that it was oten hard tosee where one side o the joint venture ended and the other began. High-rankingTammany bosses such as Fernando Wood, Richard Croker, James J. Hines, and

Jimmy WalkerWood and Walker also served as New York City mayorscouldand did conduct city business on gambling-house premises, gamble themselves asmuch as they wanted to, and proudly socialize with their partners in the privatesector. In those days an ambitious young man who started out in New York Citygambling might end up in politics, and one who began as a Tammany operativemight branch out into gambling.

Consider John Old Smoke Morrissey. A street tough in Troy, New York, he wenton to achieve ame as a prizeghter. In New York City, Morrissey allied himsel

with the Tammany machine, getting his start as a street-level enorcer and political

organizer, and then opening the rst o what would become a chain o Morrissey-controlled gambling clubs in the city and Saratoga. He became very rich. As aTammany boss and politician, Morrissey was elected twice to the New York StateSenate and represented New York or two terms in the U.S. Congress. In essence,

who wasJohn Morrisseya gaming industry innovator or a political leader? Hardto tell.

In Arnold Rothsteins New York glory days in the 1910s and 1920s, according toone historian:

A number o Rothsteins gambling clubs were run in partnership with local

politicians who kept the police rom annoying the games. Oten they were in the

political clubhouses, with the gambling conducted by an outside proprietor who

gave a share o the take to the political leader.25

Who exactlywas the main leader o such a venture, Rothstein or the politician?Hard to tell.

Mechanical Pickpockets

This long-standing and seemingly impregnable government-gambling alliance,which had reliably ed mouths and generated public revenue or generations,came to a crashing halt in 1932, when Fiorello La Guardia was elected mayor oNew York City.


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La Guardia hated government sponsorship o gambling. He hated everything itstands or. He hated every dimension o it. When he let oce in 1946 ater serv-ing three terms as mayor, La Guardia had largely smashed the citys government-

gambling alliance and driven many o its private-sector operativeshe called themtinhorns and chiselersout o town. In the case o the chiselers whose busi-ness was slot machinesthe contraptions La Guardia hated most o allhe haddriven nearlyallo them out o town.26

What so enraged La Guardia about state-sponsored gambling? Lets start by under-standing what did notseem to motivate him. La Guardia was neither a prude noran extremist. He did not support using the law to root out all human vices. Forexample, he viewed recreational gambling as largely harmless. Or consider Pro-hibition, one o the great issues o La Guardias day, which took eect nationally

in 1920. La Guardia opposed Prohibition throughout his career and consistentlyargued that trying to use the power o law to prohibit people rom consuming al-cohol amounted to bad public policy. Nor was La Guardia motivated by religiouservor. In act, he was never a particularly pious or conventionally religious man.

Nor was La Guardia any variety o political conservative. A ull-throated politicalprogressive, he won election to Congress in 1924 as a Socialist. He was PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelts avorite mayor and a strong supporter o the New Dealand everything that it stood or. Throughout his career, La Guardia was a tirelesschampion o the underdogthe poor, the unemployed, the exploited, and the

weak and vulnerable.

Which is precisely why La Guardia so detested state-sponsored gambling in gener-al and slot machines, that systems most visible and pernicious product, in particu-lar. In two notable ways, La Guardias campaign to rid New York o slot machinesserved and advanced his progressive political agenda.

First, La Guardia ercely opposed boss politics and ought throughout his may-oralty to disable the old Tammany Hall political machine. He kneweveryoneknew, no one tried to hide itthat gambling revenue was mothers milk or theTammany system. He also knew that the corruption that virtually dened Tam-

many politics stemmed largely rom and was made possible by Tammanys long-standing joint ventures with gambling operatives. And so, La Guardia set out withgreat gusto to smash the entire arrangement. In doing so, he would surely weakenhis political opponents. And just as surelyor its worth recalling that La Guardia,


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notwithstanding his faws, believed in good governmentin doing so he wouldbegin to reintroduce the concept o integrity to New York City government. Inshort, La Guardia wholeheartedly believed that politicians partnering with gam-

blers led to bad government.

La Guardia also believed with equal intensity that politicians partnering with gam-blers led to what he termed bad economics.27 This, or La Guardia, was the hearto the matter.

La Guardia did not like to see ordinary New Yorkers getting cheated. He did notlike that some New Yorkers were cynically exploiting other New Yorkers. He couldnot abide the institutionalization o unairness. For these reasons, La Guardia wascontemptuous o chiselershe also called them economic verminwho ed

o o what was not rightly theirs.28

He included in this category individuals whobenetted rom stock market speculation, as well as those who charged exorbi-tant interest rates on small loans. There is an epidemic o loan sharks around thistown, La Guardia declared in one o his weekly radio addresses in 1942. I dontlike loan sharks and usurers and Im just giving notice, thats all.29 But most o all,

when it came to cheating ordinary New Yorkers, La Guardia ocused his anger onthe gambling touts, tinhorn punks, and scum o society who operated New

Yorks vast network o slot machines. For La Guardia, slot machines were nothingmore than mechanical pickpockets perpetrating larceny.30

When La Guardia took oce, slot machines constituted a huge New York political-economic venture. An estimated twenty-ve to thirty thousand slot machines op-erated openly in the city in January 1934, diusely located in small shops, diners,cigar stores, speak-easies, candy stores, pool rooms, hotels, and other small outletsacross the ve boroughs. (Proprietors were told by the gambling operatives thatthe machines were okay, the police did nothing but encourage the system, andany property owner with the temerity to resist or complain was likely to experi-ence property damage.) A nickel slot machine in a good location could take inabout $20 per day. In 1932, total revenue rom New Yorks slot machines reachedan estimated $57 million.31

In all 1933, while campaigning or mayor, La Guardia denounced the citys slotmachine operatives and oten cited statistics rom two articles by Wayne W.


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Parrish that had appeared earlier that year in The Literary DigestGamblingSlot-Machines That Swallow Millions and You Cant Win in the Slot-MachineRacket.32

In January 1934, only days ater La Guardia was sworn in as mayor, a New YorkCity civic association, the Society or the Prevention o Crime, publicly released areport alleging that Tammany politicians are deeply involved in the policy andslot-machine rackets. The report declared that slot machines take millions odollars annually rom the poor and (since many are located in candy stores nearschools) encourage children to gamble and steal.33

Mayor La Guardia immediately and publicly ordered the police to conscate themachines. By late February, about 350 had been conscated.34 But that same

month, a U.S. court o appeals dealt the mayor a setback by declaring that thepolice could not conscate a slot machine unless they could prove that the ma-chine in question was used or gambling. Meanwhile, slot owners began to alterthe machines design, in order more plausibly to claim that machines existed notto enable gambling, but instead, say, to dispense candy or ruit.35

La Guardia pressed on. Availing himsel o his right to sit as a committing magis-trate, he took over the West 100th Street police station or a day to preside over aslot machine case. During the proceedings, the mayor examined the machine inquestion and declared himsel convinced o its purpose:

The slot machine speaks or itsel. It does not require any legal education to see

that it is a slot machine as described by the Penal Code. . . . It is not a vending

machine and not even a ederal judge can make it one. It is a gambling ma-

chine, a slot machine.36

He also assured the public that the adverse court decisionwhich the city appealedand eventually won in the U.S. Supreme Court37would not slow him down:

Gamblers need take no comort [in the decision] because all gambling machines,

whether mechanical or not, will be immediately seized by the police and arrests

made. The mechanical gambling machines give the player no chance. The pub-lic is going to be protected.


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A crowd cheered the mayor as he let the station.38 Throughout this campaign, LaGuardia never lacked a fair or the dramatic. He even managed to star in a news-reel story about the slot-machine problem at the Trans-Lux Newsreel Theatre on

Broadway.39

La Guardia was always reaching out to the public, urging citizens to write to himabout their personal experiences with the problem and lecturing the citys schoolchildren on the dangers o gambling.40

He organized a slot machine expos in Rockeeller Center eaturing ty slotsmachines that the public could examine or ree. The theme was You Cant Win.Scholars rom NYU announced that the slots were programmed to pay in prizes onlyabout 75.6 cents or every dollar going into the machines.41 As a part o the expos,

La Guardia asked The Literary Digestto turn Wayne Parrishs two articles on slot ma-chines into a pamphlet that he and others could distribute to the public.42

La Guardia also constantly threatened the police and the political old guard. InApril 1934, in a radio address on his First 100 Days as mayor, he said: Theslot-machine racket has been possible in this city or many years by reasons o amysterious and powerul infuence protecting it.I want more policing and lessstrutting.43

Somehow, he got it. In October, the mayor, his police and re commissioners, anda squad o laborers loaded 1,155 conscated slot machines onto a barge at Pier

A and headed out to Long Island Sound, whereupon La Guardia took a sledge-hammer and himsel smashed a number o the machines to bits. Then all o themangled machines were sunk. The mayor took this opportunity to refect on thepolitical side o the government-gambling partnership:

It [the slots racket] could never have existed without political protection. To show

you how powerul this political protection was, I tried or years to get a bill

through Congress prohibiting the moving o slot machines over State lines. I

could never even get the bill moved out o committee.44

But now the very police and politicians who or so long had propped up the slotmachine business would be obliged to put an end to it: Every precinct [police]captain will be held responsible or any machines ound in his district hereater.45


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The machines kept disappearing. Two years later, in 1936, when 1,300 machineswere smashed and thrown overboard into the Sound, the mayor said: We willsoon have them all out o the city.46 And soon, nearly all o them weregone.

Ordinary New Yorkers had won an important victory. On a 1936 visit to ConeyIsland to talk about the importance o clean beaches, La Guardia said:

We are here celebrating a clean

beach campaign. However,

I am particularly proud that

we cleaned this resort in other

ways. We took several thou-

sand crooked slot machines and

dumped them at sea. That kindo service did a world o good or

Coney Island.47

La Guardia unfinchingly opposedall orms o state-sponsored gam-bling. In his 1948 autobiography,The Making o an Insurgent, he

vividly describes these early experi-ences:

My rst attempt at applied mathematicsI must have been ourteen or teen

thenwas to gure out the percentage against each player in a crap game, a

aro game, and what was then called policy. . . . I remember Mother telling

me that [policy, or the numbers] was the same as Lotto, which was sponsored in

her native Trieste by the city or the state. Mother would play a ten-cent policy slip

almost every week. I she had an exceptional dream, she would risk a quarter.

She never won. No one else I knew ever won . . . . I gured it out then as nothing

but petty larceny rom the pockets o the poor, and showed my mother how she

couldnt win.48

In Prescott, Arizona, where La Guardia did most o his growing up, he tells us thatthose who took advantage o people like his mother were known as tinhorns.He writes:

LaGuardiasmashing slotmachines,

October 13,1934.


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To me they have been tinhorns ever since. . . . They are no good. They were

never any good in Prescott, or New York, and they will never be any good any-

where.49

La Guardia never changed this view. In 1939, on the eve o the popular vote onwhether to amend the New York State Constitution to permit racetrack betting, he said:

The amendment is not progress but retrogression. . . . Gambling is socially un-

desirable and it is also bad economics. . . . A large part o this betting would

have to come rom people who cannot aord to lose.50

He rueully added: I suppose instead o calling them punks, i the constitutionalamendment should be approved, I will have to call them mister. 51

When the amendment passed, the mayor promised that, apart rom the now le-gally permitted betting at racetracks, there would be no let-down in his campaignto rid New York City o politically-sponsored gambling. He concluded on a hope-ul note:

I dont believe people should be encouraged to spend money needed or ood,

clothing, and housing. I dont think that gambling is going to be successul in a

progressive, enlightened State like New York.52

In September 1942, La Guardia addressed a class o 161 rookie police patrolmen,again using his avorite word or a person whose business is to entice others togamble away their money:

Dont give a tinhorn a break. I you see him on your beat, sock him on the jaw.

Ill stand back o you. . . . When you see one, grab him by the back o the neck

and bring him in. They break up homes and bring only misery.53

When he was about to leave oce in 1945, one o La Guardias most urgent warn-ings to the city he had so ably governed or twelve years was captured in thisNewYork Timesheadline: La Guardia Fears Gamblers Return.54


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Mechanical Pickpockets, Then and Now

La Guardias victory against slot machines could hardly be more relevant to the

challenge New York State currently aces. Ater all, outside o Nevada and AtlanticCity, what exactlyisa casino in the United States in the 2010s?

Forget the movies youve seen. Forget men in tuxedos and women in eveningdress. For the most part, you can also orget glamorous-sounding games such asroulette and baccarat. And you can certainly orget the happy talk rom casino lob-byists about entertainment and destination gaming resorts.

Three-quarters of all casino rev-

enue today comes from slot ma-

chines. For this reasonnotwith-standing all o the ads and slogansrom promoterstodays casinosare essentially super-sized slot par-lors.

The machines in these casinos areexactly the same machines thatLa Guardia sledgehammered anddumped into the sea, except that to-days slots are must aster and more

addictive. Their sole purpose andonly reliable unction is to feecethe vulnerable.

Many scholars view Fiorello La Guardia as the greatest mayor in American history.55Certainly he was one o the greatest leaders to serve New York State. La Guardiahad a city to reorm, and he knew that political sponsorship o gambling was theenemynot the riendo his reorm agenda. He took big risks, but he ought thegood ght, and more times than not, he won. We remember him warmly today orhis honor and his integrity.

Does anyone remember the names o the Tammany hacks who staked their honorand reputations on nancial partnerships with tinhorn gamblers?

Slot machines

about to bedumped into

the harbor.


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The West Coast La Guardia

The closest thing to Fiorello La Guardia on the other side o the country wasEarl Warren o Caliornia. He began his war on slot machines in 1927, shortlyater his election as district attorney o Alameda County, when he seized anddestroyed 116 slot machines in Oakland. Warren launched this eort despite,and in part due, to the act that slot machine operators had established a mu-tually rewarding partnership with Burton F. Becker, the county sheri.

Warrens eorts were ongoing. In 1935, he led a series o highly publicizedraids conscating slot machines and the records o slot manuacturers in theOakland arearaids that were likely the decisive actor in deeating a bill

pending in the state legislature that would have legalized the machines.

In 1938, Tony The Hat Cornero, a bootlegger and gambling entrepreneur,was operating a twenty-our-hour-a-day foating casino he called The Rexin Santa Monica Bay. The Los Angeles Timescalled it a unique casino in

which beautiully gowned women rubbed elbows with ordinary ellowsrom Spring Street and squat tipsters rom Santa Anita.56 Cornero took the

view that The Rex operated ar enough o shore to be exempt rom Cali-ornias gambling laws.

Warren, now serving as state attorney general, was not amused, and disagreedwith Mr. Corneros regarding the reach o Caliornia law. He stated that Cor-neros operation was gloriying gambling and encouraging young people tolead idle and dissolute lives.57 In 1939, Warrens orces boarded The Rexas well as three other smaller gambling ships operating nearby, seizing about120 slot machines and ceremoniously dumping them into the bay.

Cornero was not easily discouraged. In 1946, he tried his luck in the bayagain, converting a war surplus mine sweeper into a foating casino henamed The Lux, and with the tacit support o the Los Angeles Countydistrict attorney. Warren, now governor o Caliornia, called on President

Harry Truman to push or ederal legislation banning gambling ships romall U.S. coastal waters. The legislation was passed and Truman signed the


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bill into law. Warren promptly seized The Lux and once again destroyedTony the Hats slot machines and other gambling devices.58

Time passed. Earl Warren went on to serve as the ourteenth Chie Justice othe U.S. Supreme Court, presiding over some o the major civil rights cases othe era, includingBrown v. Board o Education (1954), which ended enorcedracial segregation in U.S. public schools, and Miranda v. Arizona (1966),

which established new rights orpersons in police custody. Hes

widely viewed as one o the greatleaders o his generation.

Earl Warren had what he calledin his memoirs an ingrainedbias against commercializedgambling. Not mere bettingbetween individuals but ratherthe commercialization o it.

Why? Because commercializedgambling is corruptive. Be-cause its dishonest in operationand oten cruel in practice. Andbecause, as he once put it to oneo his law clerks, it preys uponthe poor and takes the paycheck out o the hand o the worker.59 In 1950,as governor, Warren supported and signed into law a bill prohibiting theownership o slot machines in Caliornia and establishing a $500 per machinene or anyone caught owning one.60

Tony Cornero went on to serve as a leader in the gaming industry in Nevadaand (or a while) Mexico. In 1948, some business associates made an unsuc-cessul attempt to murder him. Corneros main activity thereater was to builda swanky gambling establishment in Las Vegas that he named the Stardust.

Cornero appears to have originated the lucrative concept o placing slot ma-chines in the hotel lobby to attract passing guests. He died under mysteriouscircumstances in 1955, shortly beore the Stardust was scheduled to open.

Sinking slotmachines in

Santa MonicaBay, 1939.


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Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Evans Hughes Had a Constitution toProtect

Fiorello La Guardias public career spans and connects two major reorm move-ments in American politics. We remember La Guardia today mainly as mayor oNew York City during the period o the New Deal, whose national leader, o course,was ormer New York governor and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt. But LaGuardias political roots were in the Progressive era, and he was deeply infuencedby the Progressive political movement in New York State in the early 1900s.

The two great New York Progressive leaders during these years were TheodoreRoosevelt and Charles Evans Hughes.61 In 1906, when La Guardia, age twenty-three, arrived in New York to apply to law school and nd work, Roosevelt wasserving a second term as president o the United States, promoting his SquareDeal or Americans, and about to receive the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. And orty-our-year-old Charles Evans Hughes, a strong Roosevelt ally and resh rom high-prole victories as the counsel to state legislative committees investigating gas andelectric company abuses and insurance scandals, was about to be elected New

Yorks thirty-sixth governor.

What were the main tenets o New York Progressivism during this decade? Firstand arguably oremost was the revolt against boss politics, or the eective con-trol o government by non-elected political operatives. During these years, bossrule meant two men: Charles F. Murphy, the Tammany boss who came to power

in 1902, and long-time Republican boss rom Albany, William Barnes. Together,these men and their designees operated what Roosevelt in 1915 described as Al-banys all-powerul invisible government which is responsible or the maladmin-istration and corruption in public oces o the State.62 As La Guardia would doseveral decades later in New York City, both Roosevelt and Hughes staked theircareers and reputations on opposing boss rule and everything it stood or.

The second tenet was opposition to economic unairness. Trusts needed to bebusted. Financial speculation needed curbing. Shady business practices needed tobe prohibited. Public utilities needed closer regulation. Social insurance programs,

such as workmans compensation, needed to be established. Speaking to the El-mira Chamber o Commerce in 1907, Hughes makes the point to local businessleaders in this way:


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What [the people o New York] revolt against is dishonest nance. What they

are in rebellion against is avoritism which gives a chance to one man to

move his goods and not to another; which gives one man one set o terms and

another to his rival; which makes one man rich and drives another man intobankruptcy. . . . It is a revolt against all the infuences which have grown out

o an unlicensed reedom, and o a ailure to recognize that these great privi-

leges [o operating businesses], so necessary or public welare, have been cre-

ated by the public or public benet and not primarily or private advantage.63

Which brings us to gambling. As much as any other issue, state sponsorship ogambling involvedand deeply oendedthe political and economic ideals oNew York Progressives. The Progressive perspective on this topic was, as it is to-day, quite clear.

I you mix two parts politics with one part gambling, you not only get corruptpolitics, which diminishes democracy, but also lousy economics, which diminishesprosperity.

For these reasons, Roosevelt was contemptuous o gambling and all its ways. 64Probably the best summation o his view o the subject comes rom his 1901 mes-sage to Congress:

The men who are idle or credulous, the men who seek gains not by genuine

work with head or hands but by gambling in any orm, are always a source o

menace not only to themselves but also to others.65

Roosevelt requently warned o gamblings harmul infuence on society, althoughhis sense o what constitutes gambling was open-minded and inquisitive. For ex-ample, he appreciated the necessity o risk-taking in pursuit o economic growthand to achieve what he recommended as the strenuous lie, but he also com-pared nancial and stock market speculation to garden-variety gambling, and hadlittle patience or either activity:

There is no moral dierence between gambling at cards or in lotteries or on

race track and gambling in the stock market. One method is just as injurious tothe body politic as the other.66


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Even more undamental, perhaps, Roosevelt also equated ormally illegal gam-bling with legal or quasi-legal business trickery, or swindling. In a 1908 mes-sage to Congress he insisted that

the man who makes an enormous ortune by corrupting legislatures and munici-

palities and feecing his stockholders and the public stands on the same moral

level with the creature who attens on the blood money o the gambling house.67

During the rst decade o the twentieth century, much o the blood money o thegambling house in New York State was connected to horse racing. In essence,betting on a horse in New York in 1908 was not much dierent rom puttingmoney in a slot machine, throwing dice on a board, or betting at roulette in acasinoit was all ormally illegal but openly sponsored by a partnership o public

ocials and private gambling operatives, and it was all based on the principalthat unwary or vulnerable people can be systematically and inevitably separatedrom their money.

One o the best descriptions o racetrack betting in New York in this period comesrom Harry Brolaskis 1911 book,Easy Money. For years Brolaski had been a pros-perous racetrack book-maker, but he quit the proession in 1909. In 1911, he wentto Albany to tell any state legislator who would listen that permitting betting onhorses was nothing more than a method o skinning the public. He added: Theonly honest thing on a race-track where gambling is permitted is the horse.68

InEasy Money, Brolaski tells hair-raising stories o politically-sponsored horse racebetting at the tracks and in city poolrooms (not to be conused with billiard par-lors), which tended to be in or near places like the Union Ca at Broadway and39th Street in Manhattan, operated by a ellow known as the Chicago Rat, whoconducted amous euds with his erstwhile patrons in Tammany Hall, or at thenearby (and wonderully named) Casino Ca. Brolaski writes:

Bets can also be placed in New York City at most o the hotels and cigar stands.

. . . There are over one hundred thousand race-horse gamblers in New York City

and ex-Police Commissioner Baker claimed not to have known o such a act.69

All o these activities, o course, were prohibited by the state Constitution. The rel-evant section o Article 1 o the New York State Constitution could hardly have been


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clearer: Nor shall any lottery or sale o lottery tickets, pool-selling, book-making, orany other kind o gambling hereater be authorized or allowed in this state.

How to Bet on a Horse in 1907

In 1907 in New York, to bet on a horse racethat is, to play the races,or play the horses, or play the poniesyou couldgo to the bettingring at the track.Or you could visit or telephone an o-track pool-room,

which is a room devoted to horse race gambling. Or you could nd ahand-book, which is someplace less structured and less conspicuous,such as a cigar stand or hotel lobby, where all thats needed to take abet is pencil and paper.

In all three places, youd nd a bookie, someone who accepts and payso bets; a bookie is a proessional gambler. At the track, the bookie isengaged in book-making, which is setting and publicizing the odds onthe various horses and betting against anyone wholl take those odds.For example, i the odds on Hydrangea are 5-1, the bookie is bettingve dollars against anyone elses one dollar that Hydrangea wont win.In the pool-room, the bookie does exactly the same thing, but there itscalled pool-selling.

Bookies and their sponsors (which usually include a syndicate) makemoney rom the bets they win as well as rom the hety commission othe top (thevig) o all money wagered against them.

A dope sheet is inormation on horse racing (such as track conditions,jockeys, weights, and prices, or odds) printed in newspapers. A dopeshop is an establishment that sells tips (inormation on which horse isa sure thing) to betters. Dope shops oten buy and circulate dope adsin order to attract customers. To say I couldnt dope it out is to say Icouldnt gure it out.

See Gambling, The New Encyclopedia o Social Reorm (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Com-

pany, 1909), 53032; Mark Sullivan, The Pool-Room Evil, Outlook77, no. 4 (May 28, 1904):

21213; Abolish the Dope Sheets, letter to the editor,New York Times, May 16, 1904.


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That the Constitution prohibitedsuch activity meant approximatelynothing, however, one important

reason or which derived romspecic actions o the legislature.Through an ingenious piece o 1895legislation called the Percy-GrayRacing Lawingeniously calledan act or the incorporation o as-sociations or the improvement othe breed o horsesthe gamblinginterests and their political partnerseectively voided Article 1 o the

Constitution as it pertains to trackbetting, rst by stripping away prac-tically every penalty or violatingthe law, and, or good measure, by

making violations nearly impossible to prove.

The result was almost comical. No civilized State, wrote prominent author andjournalist Mark Sullivan in The Outlookin 1904, covers up such unchecked licensein the practice o vice with so much pious pretense o statutory virtue as does New

York in its relation to horse racing and the gambling that accompanies it, con-cluding New Yorks race-track legislation is a hollow sham.70 In 1906, the yearHughes was elected governor, Leroy Scott in The Worlds Worksimilarly pointedout that in New York at every race is enacted the arce o wild betting betweenthe public and book-makers in a betting ring that is posted with placards prohibit-ing betting and book-making.71

The situation cried out or reorm. In 1904, Progressive political maverick F. NortonGoddard, the above-mentioned leader o the New York Civic Club, had led a high-prole and largely successul campaign to pressure the Western Union TelegraphCompany to shut down its racing bureau, which or years had made money orthe company by transmitting racing results rom the tracks to poolrooms across

the state.72 In 1907, the amous muck-raking journalist and photographer JacobA. Riisormer New York City police reporter, author oHow the Other HalLives, and the man whom Theodore Roosevelt called the best American I ever

1892 drawingo New York

Pool-Rooms


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knew73wrote a blistering attack in The Century Magazineon the current gam-bling mania (gambling is by instinct and nature brutal, because it is selshnessin its coldest orm) and on racetrack gambling in particular:

Am I prejudiced? Judge or yoursel. Twenty-three years o my lie were spent

at the New York Police Headquarters, where the nal results o the race-track

are checked o in the case o those who lose, and, oten enough, o those who

win, too. I have seen the thing work rom the time the oce boy caught the

contagion and swiped stamps at the oce to bet at the pool-room, ever con-

veniently handy to down-town businesses, to the day when, a man in years,

he was taken to Sing Sing, handcued, or stealing his employers thousands.

They had gone the same way as the stamps, into the coers o the house that

ran the game, and there was let the poor thie, the wrecked manhood, and the

desolated home.

74

Also in 1907, the prominent sociologist and author Josiah Flynt published a ve-partseries in Cosmopolitan Magazinethat laid bare and excoriated the ecology o New

York horse race betting, rom the ordinary suckers who gamble and lose, to thebookies and poolroom managers and their syndicate backers who conceive andcarry out this skinning operation, to the political, social, and business leaders whosponsor and make possible the enterpriseprimarily in order to enrich themselves.75

Into these circumstances walked young Gov. Charles Evans Hughes, strong-willedidealist who detested boss politics, Progressive reormer who admired Roosevelts

vision o civic righteousness, and straight-laced man whose chie interest, otherthan work and amily, was his Sunday School class at the Fith Avenue BaptistChurch.76 He observed the situation and did not like what he saw.

In his January 1908 Annual Message to the New York legislature, Hughes rstreminds legislators what the state Constitution says about gambling, then drylynotes that the Percy-Gray Racing Law has not accomplished the purpose whichthe Constitution denes. Further commenting on the provisions o the currentlaw, Hughes says:

The evils and demoralizing infuences, and it must be added, the economicwaste, at which the Constitution aimed, are in act stimulated and increased

by its provisions.77


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The battle was joined. On January 3, the New York Times declared that Gov.Hughes Crusade against Betting Will Meet with Vigorous Opposition and madethis prediction: The ght will be bitter and relentless. Both sides will enter into

the contest with a determination to win.78

Certainly Hughes was determined. Largely bypassing the legislature, Hughes ap-pealed directly to the people, relentlessly traveling the state or months, makingspeech ater speech to group ater group. On January 16, or example, he spoketo approximately two hundred delegates at the jointly held annual convention oNew Yorks County Fair Association and Town Fair Association:

We are dealing with a matter which is a serious menace to the morals o the

community. My mail is burdened with letters rom athers and mothers, rom

employers, rom those who come in close contact with the demoralization thatis spread through the encouragement o the gambling instinct . . . because o

things which are openly encouraged and made possible by the direct action o

the State in contravention o the spirit o the Constitutional provision.79

In one o the letters, a woman wrote:

My husband has spent a ortune o hard-earned money. He has always made

good pay, but as soon as he had a ew dollars saved he went o to the races

and came back without a dollar, and I would have to go to work and help him.

Would have to leave little children while I went rom home to work. I have a son,

and he is a very good young man, but I ear he is going in his athers ootsteps,

or when he saves a ew dollars he begins talking about next summer and the

races. My husband is ty-ve years old, and he has not a dollar to his name

ater working or one rm thirty years.

In another letter, a police lieutenant describes the pitiul spectacle at the race-tracks o countless people all trying to beat an impossible and crooked gamelegalized by this state.80

Whenever possible, Hughes brought more to the ght than words o sweet rea-

son. He kneweveryone knewthat or years, as gestures o good will and oinfuence-buying, the track owners and racing associations attening themselveson racetrack betting had made donations to New Yorks various agricultural


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societies, whose leaders used the money to support county and town airs. Hughesand his allies developed a simple but strategically crucial idea: support the airsdirectly through state aid, replacing gambling money with public money.

The idea largely worked. On January 17, the day ater Hughes addressed thecounty and town air associations, the Central New York Farmers Club passed aresolution stating:

Resolved, That we consider that the proposed [Hughes-supported reorm] legisla-

tion would help to reduce the evil o gambling in New York State, which result

would certainly redound to the benet o the commercial, agricultural, and

special interest o the State; urther

Resolved, That we believe that the airs will stand higher in the good opinion othe vast majority o our citizens when the support o the racing associations is

gone and replaced by direct support rom the State.81

On January 30, Hughes addressed a mass meeting at the Majestic Theatre in NewYork City sponsored by an ad hoc coalition o civic, agricultural, business, andchurch groups calling itsel the Citizens Anti-Race Track Gambling Committee. Theaddress, reported the Times, was part o a determined crusade in all parts o theState.82

By late February, the organizations ormally supporting Hughes stand against race-track gambling also included the State Grange (an agricultural advocacy group withseventy-seven thousand New York members), the Canandaigua Grange, the EssexCounty Fair Association, the Merchants Association o New York City, the PeekskillBusiness Mens Association, the Brooklyn League, the Good Government Club o

Waterloo, the Cooper Civic Club o the Peoples Institute, the New York City Soci-ety or the Prevention o Crime, the Columbia County Law and Order League, theFlushing Association, and the Jamaica Citizens Association, among others.83

Churches across the state became active in the eort. On Friday, February 7, about250 New York religious leaders pledged to the Anti-Race Track Gambling Commit-

tee that they would on Saturday and on Sunday advocate beore their congrega-tions the abolition o race track gambling.84 On Monday, February 10, the NewYork Timesreported:


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Many ministers came to the support o Gov. Hughes bill against race track gam-

bling in their sermons yesterday morning. The Rev. Dr. Van De Water praised

the Governors attitude on race track gambling at his sermon yesterday morn-

ing at St. Andrews Church. He asked the members o his church to lend theirpersonal eorts.85

Other prominent religious leaders supporting Hughes on this issue included Rev.Charles H. Parkhurst, social reormer and pastor o the Madison Square Presbyte-rian Church; Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Progressive reormer and Zionist leader whohad ounded the Free Synagogue o New York; Lyman Abbott, Congregational-ist theologian and editor o the widely read weekly, The Outlook; and Dr. WalterLaidlaw, director o New Yorks Federation o Churches and chairman in 1908 othe Citizens Anti-Race Track Gambling Committee.86

Conservative Protestants concerned with moral reorm strongly supported Hughes.Looking back at that 1908 grassroots mobilization in 1910, the Rev. Ola RicketsMiller, who in 1908 was serving as the Albany-based District Superintendent o theInternational Reorm Bureau (IRB), recalls that he

traveled more than 3,000 miles inside o New York State during the campaign

o 1908, lecturing on race-track gambling, oten speaking six nights a week, in

dierent towns each night and speaking three times on Sunday, usually hold-

ing great anti-gambling mass meetings Sunday aternoons. And everywhere we

got the main acts o our address into the local newspapers. We prepared a little

leafet entitled Evils o Racetrack Gambling, in which we gave a large number

o short clippings rom New York daily papers telling o people who had been ru-

ined through racetrack gambling. We sent out thousands o them to the pastors

all over the State to distribute among their people.87

When the campaign began, the smart money in Albany was being bet, so to speak,against Hughes. Ater all, Hughess immediate predecessor as governor, the Re-publican Frank W. Higgins, had tried and ailed to curb racetrack betting. (Higgins,a state senator in 1895 when the Percy-Gray bill was passed, was among the ewsenators opposing the measure. He stated in 1906: I believed that, in spirit at least,

it was not constitutional.)88 Ater all, New Yorks racetrack owners and racing as-sociations constituted a well-organized, well-nanced lobby with a long history ogetting pretty much what it wanted. Ater all, state politics was boss politicswhat


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Tammany Hall boss Charles F. Murphy and Republican Party boss William Barnesdesired was usually exactly what happenedand Murphy and Barnes most cer-tainly wanted unlimited horse race betting in New York to continue.

So when Hughes decided to tackle the issue, there was more snickering than earin Albany. As the Timesput it on January 31, 1908:

When the Governors message was read, the recommendations directed against

race track gambling were greeted with ill-suppressed derision by many legisla-

tors who had in mind the ate similar measures had suered in the past. When

the bills embodying these recommendations were put, it was to the accompani-

ment o general predictions that they would never come out o committee. Both

Senator Raines, leader o the Senate majority, and Speaker Wadsworth o the

Assembly proessed to see no hope or the proposed reorms.

89

As Hughess grassroots campaign began to shit public opinion, the smart moneypeople began to worry, and Hughes became even more determined and passion-ate. On March 3, some pro-gambling members o the Assembly demanded thatHughes explain and document some o his recent public statements on the issue.Hughes icily replied that he must respectully decline to comply with your re-quest. He used the occasion to summarize his case:

On the one side we have a plain provision o the Constitution that pool-selling

and book-making shall not be allowed in this State and that the Legislature shall

pass appropriate laws to prevent these oenses.

On the other side stand those who would sacrice the morals o our youth by ex-

tending the area o unnecessary temptation; who would infict needless suer-

ing upon helpless women and children, dependent upon the cultivation o thrit

and industry; and who would imperil the welare o thousands o our people,

simply because o their selsh desire to make money out o gambling privileges.

They atten upon wretchedness, and have the erontery to demand that the

laws o the State shall be adapted to their purposes.

He declared the purposes and procedures o his opponents a scandal o the rstorder and a disgrace to the State.90 He and his ellow reormers were hitting theirstride.


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In a late February speech to City Club members, Hughes responded to his oppo-nents charge that the larger public issue at stake was not gambling, but the hobbyo horse breeding and the sport o horse racing:

I am told that 90 percent o the men who go to the races go because o their love

o the resh air, [laughter;] that they go or a chance to get away rom the crowd-

ed city, and look upon the green elds; that they are interested in the splendid

exhibition o the result o training horses, an

New Yorks Promise

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