American Sweepstakes - Hardcover

Flynn, Kevin

4.31

16 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1611687020 ISBN 13: 9781611687026

Publisher: ForeEdge from University Press of New England, 2015

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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.

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Review:

Flynn weaves an engaging story of the New Hampshire Sweepstakes.-- "Library Journal"

"Colorful . . . entertaining. . . . Flynn chronicles it all. Like a good news writer, he gets the details without getting bogged down, taking us breezily through the first running of the Sweeps and its short history."-- "Valley News"

"Well-researched. . . . [Flynn] engages the reader with an energetically paced, well-told narrative. . . . Flynn successfully captures the spirit of the times and interestingly tells a story that deserved to be told."-- "Historical New Hampshire"

About the Author:

KEVIN FLYNN is an Emmy Award-winning former television journalist and the author of four books of true-crime reporting: Wicked Intentions, Our Little Secret, Legally Dead, and Notes on a Killing. He lives in New Hampshire.

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