Your Phone Is a Slot Machine

"All of the cockfighters, lottery participants, and sailors throwing scrimshaw dice had to work around the ethical code imposed by Quakers, Shakers, and Puritans who vehemently opposed these games of chance. Gambling has been intermittently banned throughout this country's history. (By the 1830s, lotteries were banned outright in most states.) The result was a certain cultural ambivalence: Gambling was widespread despite being morally out-of-bounds."

"The critics took a variety of approaches. In the December 1907 issue of The Atlantic, the Unitarian minister Charles F. Dole argued that "the long and costly experience of mankind bears uniform testimony against gambling, till at last the verdict of civilization has become as nearly unanimous as human judgment can be that it is an intolerable nuisance." Even the humble church raffle, he proposed, flirts with an inherent moral danger: "We have no right to expect to receive when we give no equivalent return.""

"In the April 1962 issue, Robert F. Kennedy condemned gambling not for its moral valence but for its inevitable connection to organized crime. His view was that the factory worker filling out a basketball parlay card at a local lunch counter was in some sense complicit. "Once the housewife, the factory worker, or the business executive gives money to a local bookie or policy writer, it disappears"

Gambling has long been both pastime and enterprise in the United States, entwined with cultural life from frontier poker to organized lotteries. Moral opposition from Quakers, Shakers, and Puritans produced intermittent bans and prohibition of lotteries by the 1830s, creating cultural ambivalence as gambling remained widespread despite censure. In the 19th century gambling intersected with politics through public betting on elections. Early-20th-century critics framed gambling as a civil nuisance and moral hazard, while mid-20th-century leaders warned of its ties to organized crime and the complicity of ordinary citizens who patronize bookies and policy writers.

Read at The Atlantic