Boardwalk games.
You know the ones.
You get yelled at from 50 feet away by a game operator, you drop a couple of bucks on an
activity where the odds are definitely stacked against you, and in the off-chance you win,
you get a Rastafarian banana plush worth 75 cents.
They’re a classic American staple.
But did you know there was a time where they were considered illegal, and that it took
the game of bingo to save them?
To explore this story we need to go back to the turn of the 20th century, as the United
States began to wage a war against gambling.
When states began to go after games of chance, they were more often than not going after
activities like horse races or sports betting.
Even beyond that, they were more concerned with the back alley gambling dens than they
were the ring toss games on the boardwalk.
That said, in the eyes of the law they were still considered gambling.
They were games of chance that required the player to pay into them and usually depended
primarily on luck rather than skill.
Now if states and cities were outlawing gambling, and these games were often seen as gambling,
why weren’t they just shut down and done away with?
The short answer is that sometimes they were, and then they’d come back, and then they’d
be shut down again.
In most cases, these games were technically illegal the entire time.
However just because somethings illegal doesn’t mean the laws against it are always going
to be enforced.
It was common for local law enforcement to accept bribes to look the other way, and many
times when they weren’t bribed they looked the other way anyway.
Again, in the larger picture, Boardwalk games weren't that important.
People enjoyed them.
Nobody was getting hurt.
Sure, players were usually getting fleeced, but it was in the name of entertainment.
In some instances, the lack of enforcement was just pure ignorance.
In 1907 when New York formally outlawed gambling, word of the decision hadn’t made its way
up to Washington Heights in time.
So the first weekend the laws were in effect, the carnival games at the Fort George amusement
park went on without interruption.
It was later reported that an estimated one-hundred-thousand fair-goers that weekend unknowingly broke
the law.
The police captain later admitted he was unaware of the ruling.
The fair-goers?
I’m sure some of them knew, but did they really care?
Probably not.
However, when it came to early 20th-century religious reformers, they did care.
Influence by religious groups had already resulted in local laws at Coney Island that
banned everything from music to running the merry-go-round on Sundays.
In their eyes, these boardwalk games were just as much a gambling problem as betting
at the horse track.
So they made sure they’d get attention just like all the other forms of gambling.
When that happened the authorities would step in and start to shut them down, and it usually
happened in waves.
Between 1907 and 1909, police at Coney Island cracked down on the games of chance and between
1930 and 1934 the same happened at Long Beach.
New Jersey saw crackdowns in 1924, 1934, 1936, and 1942.
Game operators would be arrested and the games shut down.
Sometimes they’d fight back in court to try and argue that their games were legal,
and in the meantime run them a little longer.
By the time September rolled around the summer vacations would come to a close and as a result,
the games would shutter for the winter season.
The very next spring the feud would either pick up where it left off or sometimes the
police would go back to looking the other way.
This was the pattern for decades.
Then in 1952 in New Jersey, Bingo happened.
Of course, Bingo didn’t just happen.
The game itself is hundreds of years old and had made its way to the US decades prior.
But the game had grown in popularity during World War 2 and was experiencing a revival
after the war.
At the time it was mostly played at boardwalks and found an unexpected audience with older patrons.
See, the thrill rides of Boardwalks were often too much for older people, physically speaking.
Even a lot of the games were based on some kind of hand-eye coordination or physical task.
Bingo, however?
Bingo was easy.
You just sat there with a card and marked off a bunch of numbers.
You could just sit there, relax, have some fun, and maybe win a couple of bucks in the process.
The problem was that Bingo was, without a shadow of a doubt, gambling.
It was one of the few examples of a game on the boardwalk that was 100% chance based.
There was absolutely no skill involved.
So unlike some of the other games, in which owners tried to argue that they were skill-based,
Bingo didn’t stand a chance.
As a result, when the next crackdown happened in the early 1950s, Bingo got shut down.
Old people did not like that.
It resulted in a public outcry in support of bringing back the game.
So in 1952 the New Jersey legislature finally caved and introduced three measures that would
legalize not only bingo but raffles as well.
The first two measures allowed local municipalities to vote on legalizing the two games of chance,
and the third formed a nine-person commission called the Legalized Games of Chance Control
Commission, or the LGCCC.
Of course, municipalities all across the state voted to legalize bingo, and the elderly of
New Jersey rejoiced.
Years later, boardwalk games once again proved too popular and too detrimental to society
and were once again cracked down on.
This time however New Jersey aimed to settle the matter for good and in 1956 the state
supreme court ruled that they were illegal.
Nevermind the fact that they had been illegal for the last half-century which is why they’d
get shut down every five to ten years. This time they were SUPER ILLEGAL.
Religious groups that year pushed for the ruling, campaigning on fear.
Some went as far as arguing that if boardwalk games were allowed to continue, New Jersey
would become an “Eastern Las Vegas”.
Broken clocks, right?
While those groups were obviously pleased with the ruling, the larger majority of citizens
in New Jersey were not.
Regardless of the on-again/off-again legal troubles they faced, these games were seen
as a harmless and fun staple of boardwalks and amusement parks.
Between that and the relatively recent bingo victory, people were more outspoken in favor
of the games than ever before.
It led to two years of public debate and demand for legalizing the pastime.
That, in turn, forced the New Jersey legislature to consider doing with the boardwalk games
what they had just done with Bingo.
This time around the fear-mongering over what might happen wasn’t quite as effective.
The state had seen over the previous seven years that a legalized and regulated form
of gambling didn’t destroy society.
Furthermore, they found that by taxing the bingo games, they could collect over $78.5
million, which today would be worth about $706 million.
So in 1959, using their experience with Bingo as a template, a bill was introduced to the legislature.
It would add a referendum vote to that November’s election that would allow local municipalities
to vote on whether or not to legalize boardwalk and carnival games of chance.
It would also allow for the creation of an “amusement games control commissioner”
who, like the LGCCC, would oversee which games were and weren’t allowed and where they
could operate.
November rolled around, and just like with Bingo, the people got what they wanted.
All in all 503 out of 568 municipalities in New Jersey voted to legalize the games, including
every municipality along the coast.
With that election, New Jersey would become the first state in America to legalize amusement games.
As is often the case in instances like this, the legalization in New Jersey was just the beginning.
That very same year their neighbor, Pennsylvania, introduced their own bill in order to form
their own commission on games of chance.
They even borrowed the name and went with LGCCC as well.
Over the following couple of decades, other states would start to legalize the games.
It often followed the same pattern.
The state would try to enforce the anti-gambling measures against the games, they’d face
public backlash by residents who not only enjoyed them, but could point to other states
to prove that society doesn’t collapse, and the state would yield and finally legalize them.
As it turned out, outlawing something that the public largely didn’t see as wrong just
to appease a small vocal religious minority didn’t magically make it disappear.
Instead, it bred corruption, put people who really shouldn’t have been jailed behind
bars, and created an environment where there it still existed, but was subject to no oversight
or regulation, which only stood to put people at risk.
It was a lesson that America had already learned the hard way decades earlier, and it was a
lesson that America would apparently have to learn again, and again, and again.
Considering the popularity of the games, it seems likely that one way or another they’d
have found a path to legalization.
It just so happened that the path they did go down was kicked off with a game of Bingo.
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