Here's just something fun and interesting to listen to. It's a short form,
six and a half minute true story. It is a future release going to
come out officially in a few months on my second podcast, True Stories with
Seth Andrews. That show's getting notice. We just crested three hundred and fifty
thousand downloads on one hundred and fourteen shows and we had billboards up around my
hometown for four weeks. And you've made that happen and it's just so exciting.
So listen, enjoy, and then go subscribe to True Stories with Seth
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Today. Six and a half minute feature is called The Slots of Sin.
I'm Seth Andrews and what you're about to hear is a true story. January
twenty fourth, nineteen forty two, New York City Police headquarters had received a
surprise visit from the Mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, and the matter he wanted to
discuss was an urgent one. There was an enemy of the people out there.
It threatened the city and state of New York and even the entire United
States, its economy, its morality, its future. It was slot machines.
Gambling was a vice, a sin of blots on polite society, and
Mayor LaGuardia issued the order every available patrolman was to report for duty to conduct
a raid on a local establishment that had slot machine gambling going on inside its
walls. I guess every general ration has seen its moral panic. We saw
the prohibition of alcohol in the nineteen twenties. In the decades after that,
the media was literally whitewashed. So many things were forbidden to be shown on
television, including toilets. In the mid twentieth century, you could not show
a toilet on TV. Married couples, they couldn't be in the same bed,
even fully clothed preparing for sleep. No, no, they had to
be placed in separate twin beds. Elvis Presley performed his music on the Ed
Sullivan television show, but the cameras would only show him from the waist up
because his gyrating legs were far too suggestive and sexual. Comic books weren't immune
from moral panic. Graphic novels considered too sinister were often rounded up and tossed
into piles and set on fire. And gambling, oh no, gambling was
definitely frowned upon. Mayor Laguardium had been on a long crusade. He used
to be a congressman after the First World War. He actually introduced a failed
gambling prohibition back in the nineteen thirties, and then he ran for mayor and
part of his platform was against slot machines. He called this quote a citizens
movement for the salvation of the city. His message to New York was clear,
the slots perpetuate the sin. And part of what drove this opposition to
gambling was the whole idea of playing games where your fate is left to blind
luck. There's no skill involved whatsoever, It's all chance. You're essentially casting
lots. Your chances of winning are slim, and with those slot machines that
flashed and beeped and mesmerized, the public would be hypnotized into wickedness and waste.
Now, it's true that there was kind of a dark side to some
of this. The mafia had found a way to use these machines to make
and launder money. And of course, nobody could say that these slot machines
weren't addictive people standing there for long periods of time locked in that spot,
sometimes ignoring their responsibilities as they fed the beast and bled their pockets and wallets
and bank accounts dry. Oh no, Mayor LaGuardia wasn't going to have any
of this, and as Mayor of New York, he finally got his great
excuse to nix the slot machines just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Aha.
The United States was at war. We were in a war footing.
We needed every resource, including the metal that was used to make slot machines.
Slots were superfluous. We needed that medal for armor and guns and bullets.
And so the war on slots carried through the early nineteen forties, so
many police raids. Every other day they would bust into a new operation and
seize hundreds of these machines and confiscate maybe ten thousand dollars a week that sometimes
suspiciously got put into a police pension fund. Oh yeah, that sounds like
a racket. Police warehouses filled up with these confiscated machines. The NYPD held
public press conferences showing off their confiscations. In fact, there was one newsreel
with Mayor LaGuardia with a sledgehammer and he was smashing a slot machine two bits.
Other cities also jumped on this bandwagon with their own bands, Chicago,
Portland, Los Angeles, Boston, and others. Some of these bands went
on for decades. The New York band was not overturned until nineteen seventy six,
when an expert did a demonstration before the New York City Council showing them
that no, these were not just games of blind luck, but in fact
a player actually needed a measure of skill. And so in nineteen seventy six
those machines were finally deemed at least somewhat acceptable, certainly legal. But the
moral panickers and the pulpit pounders and the harbingers of doom continued to cry foul
against those insidious gambling boxes, the devices of debasement, those very specific types
of slot machine devils that were draining pockets and dragging society into the thick mire
of moral decay. Pinball machines and the story of the American twentieth century War
on pinball is a true story True Stories podcast dot Com