THE ARGOT of the RACETRACK1 Horseracing Came Early to America
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THE ARGOT OF THE RACETRACK1 Horseracing came early to America from England. It was more than a sport among the gentry; it became a functional part of agricultural life in the colonies. Belmont Track, established near the first American racetrack (Newmarket, 1665), has, for more than a century and a half, set the pattern for Ajnerican racing. Although racing has long been carried on under the guise of “improving the breed,” it has been throughout the centuries one of the most attractive of all gambling devices. In England it was very well developed by the beginning of the eighteenth cen tury, though at that time it was largely the sport of the nobility. Very early in colonial America, racing stock was imported and bred, and so-called “race-paths” appeared in most of the colonies, with notable concentrations in New York, Virginia, and Kentucky. In many American cities horses were raced in the main streets; 1 Although I am, of course, indebted to many people in the preparation of this study, and I appreciate the interest of many informants who are not named here, special acknowledgements are due the following: to Judge Charles Price and to Mr. Robert Leopold of Louisville, both deceased, for their assistance in getting this project under way; to Mr. Bill Ladd and Mr. Joseph Landau of the Louisville Courier-Journal for their interest, especially in the early phases of this study; to Mr. Morris Bein of the University of Louisville for his suggestions and advice; to Mr. Stuart Flexner of New York City for his thorough checking of my racing files and, in addition, his valuable conferences with bookmakers; to Mr. Robert White, now in the armed services, for his close work both on the files and in reading the early drafts of the manuscript; to Mr. Robert O’Hara of the University of Louisville, for undertaking at Churchill Downs a verification of all field-work done up to 1951, which provided a pre-publication check of the greatest value; to Mr. Ted Johnson, a pre-medical student at the Uni versity of Louisville, for making “dry-runs” on various betting systems studied; to Mr. Everett DeBaun of Rutherford, New Jersey, for reading the manuscript in the light of his own very extensive experience with non standard language; to Miss Varena Gilpin of Cincinnati, Ohio, and Mrs. Mary Shipley of Louisville for their patience in the preparation of several drafts of manuscript; to Mrs. Mary Danser of Wilmington, Delaware, for her valuable assistance in proofreading both manuscript and galley- proof s. There are undoubtedly errors, omissions, and oversights in a survey covering a field so broad and so diverse as the language of racing; for these mistakes the author takes full responsibility. To the University of Louisville an acknowledgement is due for financial assistance in the preparation of the manuscript. 3 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/16/1/3/450399/0160003.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 4 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY in fact, within the memory of living citizens of Louisville, Ken tucky, certain streets were cleared for racing of an informal type. With the development of county and state fairs during the nineteenth century, larger racetracks were established on a per manent basis and, where large urban populations made it profit able, racetracks were constructed just outside many large American cities. Today there are more than 85 of these major commer cial racetracks, as well as hundreds of smaller tracks at county fairgrounds and other rural gathering places. Racing is still a seasonal sport, with the major circuits being open for several weeks during the best weather conditions, and the season varying from North to South. The minor circuits operate on a much less regular schedule, but conduct racing somewhere during all of the open weather. Modem motorized vans make it possible to trans port horses easily from track to track; jockeys, trainers, and stable-hands travel a regular circuit; the great breeding farms, formerly concentrated in Kentucky, and still to some extent so concentrated, have spread out to other states where the centrali zation of industrial wealth has made it fashionable to maintain large stables for the breeding and training of racehorses. Ken tucky still dominates, however, both in the number and the qual ity of racehorses produced. From the earliest times, good English and Irish breeding stock was imported, and still is. Although it is still possible for small owners, breeders, and trainers to operate on an individual basis, racing has, in the sec ond quarter of the twentieth century, become a millionaire’s game. The great racing stables, bidding competitively for breeders and trainers as well as for horses, are gradually acquiring a monop oly both on stock and on the services of experts. (Citation: a six- year-old, owned by Calumet Farms, won $1,085,760.00 in purses up to July, 1951; and Bewitch, his stablemate, is at present the greatest money-winning mare in racing history.) The jockeys, for merly light-weight farm-hands (often Negro) are’ now highly spe cialized athletes in a position to command handsome prices for yearly contracts. Gambling, once handled on a gentlemanly man- to-man basis, passed into the hands of the professional bookmaker at the track and, when the tracks saw the opportunity to increase their take from the customer, was put on a mechanized basis. Most if not all important tracks in the United States today have outlawed bookmaking and take bets through the parimutuel ma Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/16/1/3/450399/0160003.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 ARGOT o f t h e r a c e t r a c k 5 chines. Racing has become a gigantic spectator sport with some 20,000,000 fans attending annually (most of whom know nothing about horses except the price) and betting more than two billion dollars a year; while racing makes heroic efforts to clear itself of the influence of the professional gambling interests, the racketeers continuously try to muscle in, as they do in most sports, both amateur and professional. As this is being written, for instance, the Boston American carries a story regarding a nationwide tie-up between gangsters and jockeys, and the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau is investigating what appears to be a jockey- ring operating at most tracks, tied in with gambling syndicates of national scope. At the same time, in the opinion of this writer, racing today is relatively cleaner and better regulated than it ever has been in all its history. When the bookmaker was ruled off the tracks, he opened his establishment in every community near a track; in fact, book makers were well established in most cities even before pari mutuels took over. With the extension of special wire service by Western Union and the Bell Telephone Company, it was possible for every town and hamlet, however remote from the track, to have its own bookmaker where local citizens could wager on horses they never saw and never wanted to see. Meanwhile, puritan ele ments in our society—opposed to the cavaliers who liked gambling —wrote laws which made a crime out of what had been formerly a harmless rural pastime. Although modem gambling is not always criminal, the profes sional gambler is usually affiliated with the underworld, even where gambling is legalized. However, in many communities where gam bling is illegal, it is at the same time both respectable and fashion able. It is a paradox of modem morality that the parimutuel machine is accepted in most states as legal, but the bookmaker is not; it is likewise a fine point of gambling ethics which requires that all bookmakers close up shop during the season when pari mutuels operate in any community. Bigtime gambling, usually protected by the police, is organized about the bookmaker on a scale which surpasses in scope any thing in the annals of modem crime. While this is not the place to analyze the social problems incident to racketeer-controlled gambling, anyone who is not already aware of the details can rapidly become so by reading reports of the recent Kefauver Com Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/16/1/3/450399/0160003.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 6 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY mittee; these investigations have only scratched the surface. It is obvious that racing constitutes the core of the highly organized gambling syndicates which, in turn, partially control most large municipal governments in the United States. Influence generated on a party-machine level extends not only to state politics, but appears to go directly to Washington. Therefore, horse-betting interests exert an influence on both local and national politics which is out of all proportion to the importance we might expect it to have in a contemporary industrial culture. The effects of the recently enacted federal tax on gamblers and gambling profits are not yet discernible. It is inevitable that such a large specialized industry as racing, together with its peripheral criminal and semi-criminal gambling interests, should develop a specialized language. While we are probably not justified in calling this language a criminal argot, since many aspects of the business are quite legal, it certainly de serves a place among the major nonstandard fountainheads which constantly freshen the literary language. On the one hand, it is firmly rooted in the agricultural and rural traditions of the country; and on the other, it is sharply current. Some of it goes back to British usage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; much more of it is indigenous and American in origin.