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Gambling and Grace, Profit and Providence

2004; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rah.2004.0073

1080-6628

Amy Reading,

Gambling Behavior and Treatments

Jackson Lears.Something for Nothing: Luck in America. New York: Viking Penguin, 2003. xi + 392 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.95 (cloth); $16.00 (paper). In a classic scene of a green young man's initiation into the urban underworld, the narrator of James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man finds himself in a gaming house within hours of arriving in New York City, and not long after that, becomes fully ensnared in the rites of the craps table. "Whether it was my companion's suggestion or some latent dare-devil strain in my blood which suddenly sprang into activity I do not know; but with a thrill of excitement which went through my whole body I threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table and said in a trembling voice: 'I fate you.'" To fate means to challenge the dice thrower in the hopes of seizing control of the game, and the Ex-Colored Man's daring is swiftly rewarded. "My companion and all my friends shouted to me to follow up my luck. The fever was on me. I seized the dice. My hands were so hot that the bits of bone felt like pieces of ice. I shouted as loudly as I could: 'Shoot it all!' but the blood was tingling so about my ears that I could not hear my own voice. I was soon 'fated.' I threw the dice—seven—I had won. 'Shoot it all!' I cried again."1 Where Johnson sees depravity (with this taste of victory as a gateway, his protagonist falls into a year-long downward spiral of gambling away his meager income), Jackson Lears sees something far more exalted. To Lears, the impulse to "shoot it all," to taunt fate with one's last dollar, connects gambling to the spiritual yearning for grace. In Something for Nothing, he overturns the conventional wisdom on gambling as vice in order to suss out the laudable challenge that it poses to a society fueled largely by profit and productivity. To Lears, the salient characteristic of the gambler is his blithe indifference to material gain. The gambler may seek something for nothing, but both of those terms turn out to be more complex than first they appear. The "nothing" is money itself, for the gambler's insouciance comes from his willingness to reduce money to "mere counters in a game" (pp. 8, 327). And the "something" is far more than money—that something is nothing less than [End Page 532] an expanded connection with the universe, "a deeper awareness of the cosmos or one's place in it—when luck leads to spiritual insight" (p. 7). Lears builds on social histories of gambling such as John M. Findlay's People of Chance (1986) and Ann Fabian's Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops (1990), in which gambling figures as "a 'negative analogue,' the one form of gain that made all other efforts to get rich appear normal, natural, and socially salubrious."2 Yet Lears abstracts the discussion to a plane one degree removed from their consideration of the relationship between gambling and the legitimate marketplace. Instead, Lears's cultural and intellectual history seeks to reveal the alternative worldview in which gambling is embedded, a move which allows him to link the gritty world of racing, roulette, and cards to more overtly spiritual practices such as divination and the use of emblems and charms, and to connect the American fascination with luck to the role of chance in other cultures. He eavesdrops on four centuries of debate about gambling, reading an impressive body of gamblers' autobiographies and screeds and exposés by gambling reformers, in order to discern the threat that casting dice and flipping cards poses to mainstream culture. Finally, he browses his way through philosophical, religious, and economic conversations that have nothing to do with gambling but that manifest, under the light of his exacting scrutiny, a dominant interest in luck and...