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    American Sweepstakes: How One Small State Bucked the Church, the Feds, and the Mob to Usher in the Lottery Age
    American Sweepstakes: How One Small State Bucked the Church, the Feds, and the Mob to Usher in the Lottery Age
    American Sweepstakes: How One Small State Bucked the Church, the Feds, and the Mob to Usher in the Lottery Age
    Ebook395 pages5 hours

    American Sweepstakes: How One Small State Bucked the Church, the Feds, and the Mob to Usher in the Lottery Age

    By Kevin Flynn

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    About this ebook

    By 1963 public lotteries—a time-honored if tarnished method of raising revenue for everything from the Roman roads to Washington’s Continental Army—had been outlawed in the United States for seventy years. The only legal gambling in America was found in Nevada, where mob involvement had at first been an open secret, and then revealed as no secret at all. In New Hampshire—a conservative, rural state with no sales tax and persistent problems with funding education—state legislator Larry Pickett had filed a bill to establish a lottery in every legislative session since 1953. To the surprise of many, it won passage a decade later and was signed into law by John King, the state’s first Democratic governor in forty years. American Sweepstakes describes how King assembled an unlikely group of supporters—including a celebrated FBI agent and the staunchly conservative publisher of the state’s leading newspaper—to establish the first state lottery in the nation, paving the way for what is today a $78 billion enterprise. Despite the remonstrations of the Catholic Church, the threat of arrest by the federal government, the strident denunciations of nearly every newspaper editorialist in the country, and the very real fear that the lottery would be co-opted by the mob, eleven thoroughbred racehorses leapt from the gate on September 12, 1964, in the first New Hampshire Sweepstakes, ushering in the lottery age in America.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherForeEdge
    Release dateOct 13, 2015
    ISBN9781611688269
    American Sweepstakes: How One Small State Bucked the Church, the Feds, and the Mob to Usher in the Lottery Age
    Author

    Kevin Flynn

    Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, native New Yorkers, veteran newspaper reporters, and winners of many awards together and separately, now work at The New York Times. Dwyer is the coauthor or author of three other books. Flynn, a special projects editor at the Times, was the newspaper's police bureau chief on September 11. He previously worked as a reporter for the New York Daily News, New York Newsday, and the Stamford Advocate.

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    Reviews for American Sweepstakes

    4/5

    14 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A fun description of the struggles involved in setting up the first legal state run lottery. The account is somewhat rambling in that it takes the time to give biographies of the major players and events in their lives. I found the diversions added to the human interest of the story.
    • 5/5
      It is hard to imagine the U.S. without lotteries, from the multi-state Powerball drawing to scratch off tickets that you can buy from vending machines. But state lotteries are relatively recent, dating back to only 1963 in New Hampshire tied into a horse race. One thing that struck me is that this all goes around in a circle, such as online poker or the current kerfuffle over daily fantasy sports. You have one state that says you can do this and one says you can’t, and one government agency will override another. So I guess the more things change the more they stay the same.
    • 4/5
      From Powerball to Mega Millions, nearly everyone in the United States has heard about stage-run lotteries, but just a little over 50 years ago that wasn’t the case as seen in “American Sweepstakes”. In Kevin Flynn’s short history of the birth of the New Hampshire Sweepstakes, the beginning of the modern age of state lotteries is chronicled and how a legal state-run lottery system was created in the process.Flynn chronicles how the New Hampshire Sweepstakes came into law before back over the relationship between the United States and gambling, both legal and otherwise. Flynn then described the federal laws that New Hampshire needed to tightrope around as well as create a corruption free contest that people would have confidence in. Although many individuals were highlighted in the book, it was Governor John King and the Sweepstakes Direction Ed Powers who dominated the narrative of the history.Throughout the book, Flynn spends time on a variety of historical subjects that impacted the starting of the Sweepstakes. The Irish Sweepstakes, the acknowledged model for New Hampshire’s law, and the Brink’s Robbery are the two big historical digressions that add to the reader’s perspective of the entire story. In fact foreign policy and federal politics also played a role as both the Kennedy Presidency, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the 1964 New Hampshire Democratic primary were all contributing factors that were non insignificant.“American Sweepstakes” does not reach 300 pages, but crunch in that short length Kevin Flynn wrote a concise but thorough history of the state-run lottery that launched the present ‘American Lottery Age’. If you enjoy reading a book about a specific historical event this is the book for you without the dash of agenda politics then this is the book for you, not only do you get the story behind the event but also how other interesting historical events played their own part in a little remember event.
    • 4/5
      As a resident of one of the 44 United States that do allow a lottery, I have become so used to its existence as to never wonder how it came into existence. Flynn's book does an excellent job of providing an overview of how New Hampshire setup the first Sweeps that eventually gave way to the modern lottery. The book goes into extensive detail about the various characters and makes the endless meetings and legal wranglings seem interesting. Although the description of the different characters can be a bit overwhelming, the author is able to bring many different anecdotes such as how the ticket machines worked and why certain stores sold more tickets than others. There is also an excellent overview of why lottery tickets are regulated by states instead of the federal government. Finally, the author is able to describe the thrilling horse race with an energy level I was not expecting to encounter in such a book.This is a very well researched and well written overview of an interesting historical story from New Hampshire that has largely been lost to history and how its ramifications are still being felt today. Anyone with even the most casual interest in the lottery as an institution will find something interesting in this book.
    • 4/5
      Kevin Flynn's "American Sweepstakes" is a fascinating look at how the modern lottery came to be. This book is throughly researched, and does a great job of presenting not only the political pressure and legal issues surrounding the development of the New Hampshire Sweepstakes. Although the book starts off slow (protracted state-level legislative battles rarely make for scintillating reading), I quickly found myself absorbed in the story - perhaps because it reminded me of my job in a regulatory agency.Flynn manages to create a surprising amount of human interest - due in part to providing a significant amount of background on all of the major players. This book may be a bit too detailed for the casual reader, but does provide some surprisingly visceral moments - particularly in the horse race which decided the "big winners" of the first New Hampshire Sweepstakes.All in all, "American Sweepstakes" was an enjoyable read. If you are interested in politics, history and government regulation, this book may be a good choice for you.
    • 4/5
      Lotteries are so much a part of daily life in the US it is hard to appreciate the work it took to get the first one established. New Hampshire would be an unlikely candidate for that breakthrough, and the author exploits that perspective to detail not only the chronology of events but also the players who made it happen.

    Book preview

    American Sweepstakes - Kevin Flynn

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