(2 of 6)
Even if gambling is statistically normal, is it psychologically so? Is it economically and ethically desirable? A great many people are faced with the question of whether it is just good, clean fun for the whole family; or a wasteful, diabolical evil; or a deeply rooted part of human life.
From Never to Whee!
Gambling has existed in every society. The American Indians bet on the different markings on concealed wooden disks, the ancient Siamese on which mussels would open ahead of others. Some scholars connect gambling with soothsaying, calling it a secular form of divination.
Tradition has it that, to quell the restlessness of his troops when they were not tossing spears, the Greek warrior Palamedes taught them to toss dice. The ivories have been chattering ever since. And so have the opponents of gambling. Attitudes toward gambling have followed a cycle of restriction and permissiveness, moving, in the words of one historian, "from never to sometimes to whee!" The early Greeks condemned it because it was considered detrimental to the order of the state, the ancient Egyptians because it was thought to make men effeminate. Summing up the view of the early church, Tertullian in the 3rd century A.D. denied that a dice player could be a Christian, because dicing made him too worldly. But most of the time through the succeeding centuries, the church had sins larger than gambling to worry about. Both champions and foes saw in it a certain obsessive, hysterical quality. Restoration Author John Cotton diagnosed it as a "witching disease that makes some scratch the head, while others, as if bitten by a tarantula, are laughing themselves to death."
The laughter and the head scratching continued in the New World. The Virginia Company arrived on an expedition partly financed by a lottery. Colonists used the gaming wheel to help build bridges, churches and schools (including Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth). The Puritans condemned gambling with passion because, among other reasons, it meant usurping God's role. Cotton Mather warned that the Scriptures intended lots to be "used only in weighty cases and as an acknowledgement of God sitting in judgment" and not as "the tools of our common sports."
The fever was upon the land, and by 1832 the citizens in the eight Eastern states were spending $66.4 million on lotteries, or more than four times the national expenditure. In the late 19th century, the reformers began pitching their tents in the fairgrounds and crying out against gamblers as "a lying, perjured, rum-soaked and libidinous lot." U.S. Protestantism was especially hostile to gambling, which it saw as luring people into extravagance and away from work. By 1910, most states had passed antigaming laws, and gradually gambling went underground—or underworld. Says Gambling Historian Henry Chafetz: "Men had shot and killed each other across gaming tables on the Mississippi and the gold fields of the West, but it took the 20th century to make gamblers mobsters."