At Odds: Gambling and Canadians 1919-1969 (review)

Until 1969, social historian Suzanne Morton points out in At Odds: Gambling and Canadians 1919-1969, virtually all forms of gambling were illegal in Canada, and yet generally law-abiding Canadians joined football pools, bet on horses, bought chances in the Irish Sweepstakes, and filled bingo halls. Morton sets out to explain this peculiar ambivalence, suggesting that contradictory attitudes of Canadians toward gambling must be understood in relation 'to a whole set of fundamental matters such as work, property, family, and faith' (5). Gambling appeared wasteful, even blasphemous, to Victorian Protestant moralizers determined to turn all Canadians into thrifty workers. But to others, gambling was pleasurable, a means to socialize or to support a charitable or patriotic cause.

Ambivalence ran deep. Efforts to regulate gambling, Morton writes, 'exposed cultural contradictions' in an economic system that celebrated both 'speculation and production,' 'merit and luck,' and 'thrift and consumption' (5). Twentieth-century Canadians learned to live with the ideological contradictions of a culture that celebrated both hard work and fearless financial risk-taking. A strict criminal code gave them one version of themselves; Saturdays at the racetrack or the bingo hall, another.

Eventually the laws on gambling came to reflect the toleration that characterized the experience of most Canadians. Morton traces this path to decriminalization, using her skills as a social historian to explore subjects more often associated with cultural or intellectual history. She is interested in what people did when they gambled but also in what people have said and thought about gambling. These knots of 'experience and meaning,' as she puts it, are the heart of her compelling and complex study.

She begins her book in the aftermath of the First World War, as a dynamic consumer-driven, service-based economy began to transform the lives of many Canadians. During the war, Canadians had been encouraged to wager on philanthropic and patriotic lotteries. Soldiers and sailors had played bingo on transport ships and in the trenches. But what would be the fate of the country if returning soldiers who had gambled their lives on the battlefields of France continued to gamble at home? In the wake of the war, were Canadians abandoning values of an older Protestant work ethic? What would be the fate of families and communities built on the authority of hardworking male breadwinners?

While these questions might have troubled a few diehard moralists, men and women, rich and poor, went on gambling at their leisure. Rich men passed their time at well-appointed racetracks, where they congratulated themselves on the fine horses Canada had sent to the European front. They also bet among themselves in the card rooms of fancy private clubs, taking advantage of the law's loopholes for social clubs.

The poor gambled too during the interwar years, dropping pennies on the chance to win toothpaste, lemon-pie filling, or handkerchiefs from a punchboard or a small payout from a pinball or slot machine. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians also bought tickets for lotteries, sweepstakes, and contests. Some observers worried that poor and working-class gamblers expressed a form of cultural resistance that threatened the diligence and thrift so central to middle-class myths about themselves.

As Morton points out, critics have left a confusing picture of gambling in the first half of the twentieth century, claiming that Canadians gambled 'more in the speculative 1920s, the depressed 1930s, and the wartime 1940s' (64). In turn, the rise of commercial leisure, economic depression, and war each fostered a climate that encouraged gambling. And middle-class, English-speaking Protestant Canadians worried that their working-class, Catholic, or immigrant neighbours were cultivating a culture of luck that challenged their well-ordered society built on diligence, thrift, and self-control.

Class offers Morton one avenue into the contradictory cultures of gambling, gender another. Debates over gambling illuminate the peculiar paradoxes of twentieth-century masculinity. The ideal man was daring, courageous, and audacious, but also stable, responsible, and dependable. While some argued that...