America's history of gambling

Sin Cities on a Hill

How legalized gambling moved from the Strip to Main Street.Alas, in trying to protect history from gambling, you also have to protect history from history. As any contemporary gambling booster will tell you, Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, was underwritten by a lottery conducted in London by the Virginia Company. That trend continued as the New World moved toward nationhood. With all 13 colonies establishing lotteries at one time or another, government-approved gambling was one of the original features of the landscape.

In the 1700s, newspapers regularly published the odds on local cockfighting matches. Harvard and other institutions of higher learning used lotteries to finance construction projects, as did numerous churches. Ben Franklin helped organize a lottery in 1746, and George Washington was—according to George Sullivan's 1972 history of lotteries, By Chance a Winner—a "frequent ticket buyer" who won land in one raffle, five pounds in a 1763 lottery, and 16 pounds in a 1766 drawing. Nearly three decades later, he was still playing: In 1793, when the District of Columbia sold 50,000 lottery tickets at $7 apiece to raise funds for federal buildings, Washington purchased tickets for himself and his friends.Comment:  This history is highly relevant to the question of whether we should support tribal governments that conduct gaming.