“Elections have consequences” is what pundits and politicians say when they have given up trying to explain why things are the way they are. The phrase is deployed with a passive-aggressive spin in an attempt to end the conversation with a variation of “You lost – live with it”. This is not exactly what the framers had in mind for the level of discourse in a democratic republic, but they didn’t have a chance to account for talk radio and Reddit.
The United States is currently enmeshed in an election season of consequence that will come to a climax on November 3. To suggest that the whole world is watching would not be an exaggeration. It has been characterized as the most important election in the history of the nation (although I’d put in a bid for 1860 or 1932), with the choices of a president and a 117th Congress sucking most of the air from the room.
Pity, then, the quiet local elections drowned out by the national focus. Two of them even have implications for the economy of horseracing.
Sports betting on the ballot
In Nebraska, yes votes on a cluster of three ballot initiatives would legalize casino-style gambling operations within licensed racetracks, as well establish a Nebraska Gaming Commission and direct a percentage of the gross handle to specific state programs.
There are half a dozen facilities in the state that can call themselves ‘racetracks’ under the provisions of the measure, but only one of them – Fonner Park in Grand Island – remotely resembles a full service Thoroughbred racing operation with a significant amount of dates and a stable area to accommodate participants. Located on the grounds of the Nebraska State Fair, Fonner already offers its patrons slot machines.
The Nebraska initiative was inspired by the state’s horsemen’s association in partnership with the Winnebago tribe and has been fronted by a group called ‘Keep the Money in Nebraska’, a direct reference to gaming dollars flowing to neighboring states. The opposition is led by ‘Gambling with the Good Life’, an anti-gaming effort that benefitted from a $100,000 personal contribution from sitting Republican Governor Pete Ricketts. Recent polls have the initiatives well ahead.
Sports betting is on the ballot again, but not in California – the grand prize of the business – where a well-funded effort last year failed to secure sufficient verifiable signatures. Maryland voters, however, will get a chance to legalize sports betting through Question 2 on the November 3 ballot, a measure backed mightily by such interests as FanDuel and DraftKings and promoted by the Maryland Jockey Club, owner of Pimlico and Laurel.
Anti-gambling legislation
Elections have consequences, and those consequences certainly were dire in 1906 for Thoroughbred racing in New York, where the sport seemed poised for a golden era with the opening three years earlier of the grand new Belmont Park on Long Island. At the same time, racing interests, along with legal casinos, were battling a wave of church-fueled anti-gambling legislation making its way across the 45 states of the Union.
New Jersey had banned gambling in 1898, and New York was the movement’s greatest potential prize, with the Republican party signing on for the ride.
As 1906 dawned, New York state two-term assemblyman George Bliss Agnew, 38, was urged by party leaders to run for the state senate in Brooklyn’s Republican-controlled 17th district to fill the seat occupied by Martin Saxe, who was shifting to the 18th. Meanwhile, upstate in Oneida County’s first assembly district, political novice Merwin Kimball Hart, a 25-year-old insurance executive who also worked for his father’s law firm, was recruited to run for the state assembly.
Agnew won handily, nearly doubling the vote total of Democratic candidate Cambridge Livingston, 18,022 to 9,426, while Hart won a squeaker for the Republicans over Democrat Louis Vogel, 4,342 to 4,194.
Most of the headlines for that November 6 election went to the New York governor’s race, won by Charles Evans Hughes over publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, later to be dramatized in Citizen Kane. As far as horseracing was concerned, however, it was the names of Hart and Agnew that had the most dramatic impact. In June 1908, the Hart-Agnew Act was passed by both chambers and signed by Hughes, effectively outlawing betting on horseracing in New York and crippling the sport as a national enterprise.
This is not to say that the anti-gambling forces could not have found other New York legislators to carry their water. The loudest voice of all came from Governor Hughes, who spoke often at rallies in favor of banning horseracing and proclaimed, with all the sincerity a disingenuous politician could muster, “The bills are not aimed at racing or at racetracks or at property. They are aimed at public gambling, prohibited by the Constitution, condemned by the moral sense of the people, irrespective of creed, and conceded to be the prolific source of poverty and crime.”
The Hart-Agnew Law, draconian as it was, had enough loopholes that racing continued for a while with bookies going underground and betting conducted in a backhanded, wink-wink manner. Soon, however, the authorities enacted stricter laws and increased enforcement, and in 1910 August Belmont and his fellow racetrack investors pulled the plug. Belmont, Saratoga, Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach, and Gravesend went dark, prompting an exodus of horses and horsemen abroad.
A most unusual afternoon
Three years later, the climate had eased to the point that Belmont Park reopened, but without the betting banned by Hart-Agnew.
In what was possibly the most unusual afternoon of American Thoroughbred racing, more than 30,000 people turned up at the track to stroll the gardens and admire the horses and riders. The New York Times noted that one man was arrested for overt bookmaking, but otherwise any betting was on the down low.
“It was not denied that there was sedulously restricted betting by men within the precincts of the clubhouse and by a few others on the lawn in front of the grandstand,” the Times reported. “But the general public took no part in wagering, because there was no such thing as a professional market.”
The mind boggles, and the Times reporters were similarly astounded at the sight of such a throng attending Thoroughbred racing without the usual cohort of bookies scrambling for attention.
“Perhaps for the first time in metropolitan racing history the rank and file took occasion to enjoy the environment under which they were to spend the day,” wrote the Times. “Hundreds stopped along the walks leading to the stands and viewed the natural loveliness of the place.”
For the following two decades, Hart-Agnew and other associated anti-racing laws were lamely circumvented by the practice of oral betting, an inefficient work-around that did little to enhance the health of the sport. Then, in 1934, the Brooklyn legislators William Breitenbach and James J Crawford, both Democrats, successfully sponsored a bill that turned the bookmakers loose once again and led eventually to the pari-mutuel system being adopted in New York.
Breitenbach was subsequently defeated in a bitterly controversial primary later that year and died in 1937, at age 41, from a heart attack brought on by infection from a ruptured appendix. Crawford served his Brooklyn constituents in the New York senate until 1952.
And those two scamps Hart and Agnew? Their actions to ban the popular sport of Thoroughbred racing had definite consequences. Merwin Hart was defeated in his re-election bid in 1908, before the effects of his legislation even had time to sink in, while George Agnew lasted only a little longer. His Brooklyn constituents, deprived of their favored pastime, gave him the boot in 1910.
Author’s note
For a comprehensive history of New York racing’s intersection with politics, I highly recommend Horseracing in New York in the Progressive Era by Bennett Liebman, published in the Gaming Law Review and Economics.