The Role of Internal Politics in American Diplomacy
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries and American Inequality Jonathan D. Cohen Newton, Massachusetts BA, McGill University, 2013 MA, University of Virginia, 2015 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Virginia March, 2019 © Copyright by Jonathan D. Cohen All rights reserved March 2019 ABSTRACT Americans are obsessed with playing the lottery in pursuit of life-changing jackpots. Every year, Americans spend over $80 billion on lottery tickets, more than they spend on books, sports tickets, video games, music, and movie tickets combined. “For a Dollar and a Dream” illustrates the parallels between lottery players and the political actors who facilitated the spread of legalized gambling in the United States. In an era of declining social mobility and rising inequality, millions of bettors turned to lotteries driven by the hopeful, wishful belief that gambling could solve their financial problems. Similarly, between 1963 and 2013, 44 states enacted lotteries because lotteries appeared to offer something for nothing, a painless solution to the pressing political and financial problems that beset state governments in the post-World War II period. Voters and legislators refused to confront the conflict between their demands for tax breaks and their desire for government services, and they turned instead to gambling, hoping for a budgetary miracle. “For a Dollar and a Dream” illustrates that the magical thinking frequently condemned among lottery players represented a fundamental feature of many citizens’ relationship with government in the late twentieth century. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction…………………………………………………...…………………...………………1 Chapter 1: Something for Nothing: The Fiscal Alchemy of Lottery Legalization………............19 Chapter 2: Not Luck, But the Work of God: The Meritocracy of Lottery Miracles.…...….…….59 Chapter 3: Rivers of Gold: Scientific Games Inc. and the Spread of State Lotteries……………91 Chapter 4: Somebody’s Got to Win, Might as Well Be Me: Lottomania and Class Mobility…139 Chapter 5: This Could Be Your Ticket Out: The Promise of Lottery Advertising…………......179 Chapter 6: Panacea Politics: Lotteries, Education, and Inequality………………...…...............224 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...284 Acknowledgements………......…………………………………………………………………287 List of Archives Consulted………………………………………………………….………….288 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………290 1 INTRODUCTION Americans are obsessed with playing the lottery in pursuit of life-changing jackpots. Every week, 25 percent of American adults buy a lottery ticket, and almost 50 percent do so at least once a year. In 2018, American gamblers spent $85.56 billion on lottery tickets, more than they spent on books, sports tickets, video games, music, and movie tickets combined. As early as 1989, the Gallup Poll dubbed lottery playing the new “national pastime” and sales were so high that industry officials predicted an inevitable slowdown. These prognostications proved premature. Ticket sales have increased almost every year since 1970 and have quadrupled since 1989. Between 1998 and 2018, American bettors cumulatively spent over $1.25 trillion on lottery tickets. In the words of one journalist, the United States has become a “jackpot nation.”1 Lotteries are notable not only for their popularity but also for their relatively rapid spread across the American consumer landscape. New Hampshire legalized the nation’s first state lottery in 1963 to raise revenue without increasing taxes. New York and New Jersey followed shortly thereafter, as did other northeastern and Rust Belt states. Lotteries reached the West Coast in the early 1980s and made inroads into the upper-South and Midwest in the second half of decade. In the 1990s and 2000s, legal sweepstakes spread to the Bible Belt. The lottery era began with $5.7 million in sales from one state in 1964. Fifty years later, 44 states sold over $70 billion worth of lottery tickets.2 1 Zac Auter, “About Half of Americans Play State Lotteries,” Gallup, July 22, 2016; Pew Research Center, “Gambling: As the Take Rises, So Does Public Concern,” Social Trends Report, May 23, 2006, 21; National Association of State and Provincial Lotteries Resource Index, “United States Lotteries,” https://www.nasplmatrix.org/nri; Chris Isidore, “Americans Spend More on the Lottery than on ...” CNN, February 11, 2015; George Gallup Jr. (ed.), The 1989 Gallup Poll (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), 138; Richard Hoffer, Jackpot Nation: Rambling and Gambling Across Our Landscape of Luck (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 2 In 2013, Wyoming became the 44th state to legalize a lottery. As of 2019, the six states without lotteries are: Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, and Utah. 2 The American fervor for lottery tickets has inspired a great deal of opposition. Whenever massive Powerball or MegaMillions jackpots capture media attention, journalists and political figures chastise the nation for its lottery habit. Lotteries, they charge, prey on the poor, are inefficient as methods of public finance, and offer gamblers infinitesimal odds of winning. Bemoaning the loss of a traditional work ethic, critics lament the number of wishful dreamers trying to change their fortunes through luck. These commentators assume that gamblers simply do not understand basic probability, perpetuating the old idea that lotteries represent a “stupid tax” or a “tax on people who are bad at math.” By this calculus, lottery players buy tickets because they are irrational people driven by the wishful fantasy that they will overcome the overwhelming odds. “The lottery business,” author Kurt Anderson writes, “is all about selling ridiculous long shots to magical thinkers.”3 Yet, magical thinking is the reason lotteries are ubiquitous in the United States. Between 1963 and 2013, 44 states enacted lotteries in ultimately vain attempts to reconcile voters’ demands for tax breaks with their expectations of continued government services. Lotteries promised something for nothing, allowing states to offer public services without forcing taxpayers to pay for them. Even as evidence emerged that lotteries could only provide a small percentage of government revenue, states kept passing them, desperate for their longshot gamble to pay off. Like lottery players hoping for a jackpot to painlessly solve their financial problems, legislators and taxpayers turned to gambling hoping for a budgetary miracle. Magical thinking is hardly the preserve of desperate gamblers but represents a powerful force central to American politics, American culture, and American society. Magical thinking is founded on an imagined or exaggerated causal relationship, the belief, despite a lack of empirical 3 Kurt Anderson, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017), 230. 3 evidence, that a certain action will cause a certain reaction. Wishful thinking represents a form of magical thinking, the sense that hoping for a specific outcome will bring it to fruition. In his examination of 2008 financial crash, Nick Paumgarten provided an apt definition for this phenomenon, explaining that Wall Street had been afflicted by “the tendency to believe that wishing it so makes it so. … Magical thinking enables you to see good where there may be only bad.”4 This type of thinking, premised on the possibility that individuals can control matters outside of direct human influence, gains particular currency in moments of crisis. As anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski wrote in 1948, “We do not find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable, and well under the control of rational methods and technological processes.” Rather, “we find magic wherever the elements of chance and accident, and the emotional play between hope and fear have a wide and extensive range.”5 Magical thinking offers a way to create order out of disorder, to draw causality where there may be none to draw, and to assure oneself that complex problems have simple, miraculous solutions. American state lotteries are the product of magical thinking. Every week, millions of gamblers buy tickets because they believe that they will defy probability and secure a life- changing jackpot. Yet, classist condemnations of these players chastise gamblers for a universal human instinct.6 Lotteries spread in the United States because legislators and voters saw gambling as a miraculous budgetary solution and because they refused to confront the fact that 4 Nick Paumgarten, “Wiz Bucks,” The New Yorker, September 29, 2008, 28-29. 5 Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), 116; on the relationship between intuition and magical thinking, see: J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 6 As anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss contends, “Conceptions of the mana [magical] type are so frequent and so widespread that it is appropriate to wonder whether we are not dealing with a universal and permanent form of thought,” Claude Levi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950 [1987]), 53. 4 their support for lotteries rested on wishful thinking. For gamblers and taxpayers alike, lotteries offered a distant chance at a windfall. “For a Dollar and a Dream” tells two stories