Morton’s timely book reminds us that gambling has long been viewed not only as an irrational and potentially dangerous waste of time and money, but also as a means of raising revenue for good causes or for the government. Despite the power of the anti-gambling position, this latter justification has triumphed. By 1969, as Morton argues in her well-written, fully researched, and perspicacious book, "in a complete reversal of an earlier position, the good citizen now purchased lottery tickets to finance public health care facilities and community centres" (p. 198).
At Odds begins with some autobiographical details about the writer that are intended to illustrate her personal ambivalence about the subject in hand, an ambivalence that is also reflected in the title of the book. As someone of mostly libertarian sentiments, she has found it easy to mock the tight-lipped puritans while simultaneously feeling uneasy about the promotion of gambling by the government. This is a position held, I would strongly suspect, by most academics who study the subject. Only a few, for example Carl Chinn, the eminent British historian, and a son of a bookmaker from Birmingham, are spirited in their endorsement of betting and gambling.
Morton addresses the changing attitudes toward gambling in Canada from the still "Victorian era" of the interwar years through the increasingly liberal post-war period. The range of the book is considerable. It covers many different types of gambling, notably lotteries, but also bingo, gaming, horse racing, and greyhound racing. The persistence of the anti-gambling movement and the various institutes and groups committed to prevent the spread of gambling in Canada is contrasted with the role of betting and gambling in urban working-class life, where for many, in either city centres or suburbs, it was quite commonplace. Organized crime also made an unwelcome appearance and illustrated the often difficult tasks faced by the police when intervening in a criminalized but popular activity. The relationship of Canadian gambling to American commercial forces is also touched upon.
A major focus of the book is the gendered nature of certain forms of gaming. Bookmaking on horse racing, and gaming on cards and dice, were almost always male activities, and discussed as part of a "bachelor" culture of male bonding. Bingo, however, was almost exclusively a female form of light gambling. Ethnicity and gambling is the subject of a chapter on "gambling ‘others’." Different racial, ethnic, and religious groups enjoyed their own locales for gambling, and perceptions of gambling as a problem often intersected with ethnicity.
Many of these discussions and analyses in At Odds are approached within the framework of a "moral geography" of Canada. An important theme in the book, moral geography is based on the association of certain places with certain forms of behaviour. While some cities were relatively clean, as it were, the French-Canadian city of Montreal and its citizenry were regarded as vice-ridden by English-speaking Canadians. In fact Quebec, along with Manitoba and British Columbia, took a more tolerant line towards gambling than did Ontario or Nova Scotia. Similarly, frontier towns or mining towns were viewed as ribald and licentious compared with the staid cities of old Canada. These points reveal that most of the sources about gambling available to historians are derived from towns and cities. Subsequently, this lends the subject and its treatment an urban bias. (The same is true for Britain.) Despite this, Morton does, for example, unearth some interesting snippets about gaming in agricultural fairs, and the concern this provoked from local Methodist ministers.
In essence, therefore, the persistence of criticisms of gambling derived in large part from the Protestant heritage of an earlier Canadian majority. But this critique could not defeat some significant developments and contradictions in Canadian society. Capitalism, as the book emphasizes, is at heart a system based upon risk-taking and investments on sometimes uncertain futures.
A widening moral chasm increasingly separated the majority of gamblers from the alarmist and puritanical anti-gambling campaigners. The fact that most people who liked to gamble treated it in moderation and saw it as harmless was at the heart of this historic defeat of the critique of gambling. So too was class bias, because many felt that the legislation and verbal campaigns against the small-scale and harmless gambling on lotteries and bingo was unfair to the working-class punter.
Another major force for liberalization, however, was the practical contribution that bingo and seemingly benign sweepstakes and small lotteries could make to philanthropic and charitable causes. By the 1960s, a little flutter was in many ways compatible with and even good for the welfare state. The moral ambivalence of the state was of paramount importance in the growing liberalization of gambling, a liberalization that culminated in revision of the criminal code during the 1960s. Removed from a prohibitive framework, one that had largely failed to contain gambling anyway, the activity prospered even more.
Given such a fascinating and rakish subject as gambling, and all the activities that comprised a gambling culture in Canada, At Odds might have provided a livelier and more colourful depiction of the worlds of Canadian gamblers. The clubs, for example, and the risky world of workplace betting both deserved to be brought to life a little more; oral testimony or gobbets from contemporary reports can often spice up a book here and there. Nonetheless, this is a minor criticism of a book that makes a strong contribution to the social history of gambling in the twentieth century. At Odds should be a safe bet for its publishers, deserving a place on the reading lists of undergraduate courses in the social history of Canada, and in other humanities degrees that focus upon leisure and culture. In addition, post-graduate researchers and historians of gambling in Canada now have a very useful book to consult. And historians of the subject from other countries will also find the book of great value when making comparisons and contrasts across cultures. This is a worthy addition to the field.
Mark Clapson
University of Westminster
London, UK