True Stories #173 - The Slots of Sin

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Episode Transcript

(00:01):
I'm Seth Andrews, and what you'reabout to hear is a true story.
January twenty fourth, nineteen forty two, New York City Police headquarters had received
a surprise visit from the Mayor,Fiorello LaGuardia, and the matter he wanted

(00:28):
to discuss was an urgent one.There was an enemy of the people out
there. It threatened the city andstate of New York and even the entire
United States, its economy, itsmorality, its future. It was slot
machines. Gambling was a vice,a sin of blots on polite society,

(00:52):
and Mayor LaGuardia issued the order everyavailable patrolman was to report for duty to
conduct doctor raid on a local establishmentthat had slot machine gambling going on inside
its walls. I guess every generationhas seen its moral panic. We saw
the prohibition of alcohol in the nineteentwenties. In the decades after that,

(01:18):
the media was literally whitewashed. Somany things were forbidden to be shown on
television, including toilets. In themid twentieth century, you could not show
a toilet on TV. Married couples, they couldn't be in the same bed,
even fully clothed, preparing for sleep. No, no, they had
to be placed in separate twin beds. Elvis Presley performed his music on the

(01:45):
Ed Sullivan television show, but thecameras would only show him from the waist
up because his gyrating legs were fartoo suggestive and sexual Comic books were in
immune from moral panic. Aphic novelsconsidered too sinister. We're often rounded up
and tossed into piles and set onfire. And gambling, oh no,

(02:09):
gambling was definitely frowned upon. MayorLaguardium had been on a long crusade.
He used to be a congressman afterthe First World War. He actually introduced
a failed gambling prohibition back in thenineteen thirties, and then he ran for
mayor and part of his platform wasagainst slot machines. He called this quote

(02:31):
a citizens movement for the salvation ofthe city. His message to New York
was clear, the slots perpetuate thesin. And part of what drove this
opposition to gambling was the whole ideaof playing games where your fate is left

(02:52):
to blind luck. There's no skillinvolved whatsoever, It's all chance. You're
essentially casting lots. Your chances ofwinning are slim, and with those slot
machines that flashed and beeped and mesmerized, the public would be hypnotized into wickedness

(03:13):
and waste. Now, it's truethat there was kind of a dark side
to some of this. The mafiahad found a way to use these machines
to make and launder money. Andof course nobody could say that these slot
machines weren't addictive people standing there forlong periods of time locked in that spot,

(03:35):
sometimes ignoring their responsibilities as they fedthe beast and bled their pockets and
wallets and bank accounts dry. OhNo, Mayor LaGuardia wasn't going to have
any of this, and as Mayorof New York, he finally got his
great excuse to nix the slot machinesjust after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor

(03:58):
Aha. The United States was atwar. We were in a war footing.
We needed every resource, including themedal that was used to make slot
machines. Slots were superfluous. Weneeded that medal for armor and guns and
bullets, and so the war onslots carried through the early nineteen forties.

(04:20):
So many police raids every other day. They would bust into a new operation
and seize hundreds of these machines andconfiscate maybe ten thousand dollars a week that
sometimes suspiciously got put into a policepension fund. Oh yeah, that sounds

(04:42):
like a racket. Police warehouses filledup with these confiscated machines. The NYPD
held public press conferences showing off theirconfiscations. In fact, there was one
newsreel with Mayor LaGuardia with a sledgehammerand he was s ashing a slot machine
two bits. Other cities also jumpedon this bandwagon with their own bands Chicago,

(05:08):
Portland, Los Angeles, Boston,and others. Some of these bands
went on for decades. The NewYork band was not overturned until nineteen seventy
six, when an expert did ademonstration before the New York City Council showing
them that no, these were notjust games of blind luck, but in

(05:30):
fact a player actually needed a measureof skill. And so in nineteen seventy
six those machines were finally deemed atleast somewhat acceptable, certainly legal. But
the moral panickers and the pulpit poundersand the harbingers of doom continued to cry

(05:54):
foul against those insidious gambling boxes,that devices of debasement, those very specific
types of slot machine devils that weredraining pockets and dragging society into the thick
mire of moral decay. Pinball machinesand the story of the American twentieth century

(06:25):
War on Pinball is a true story. True Stories podcast dot com