Kasino Italy

Gambling: On a Serious Business Note

California's need to reform itself seemed especially keen in early 1856 because of the region's recent depression.

A victim himself of the hard times, James King came to regard gamblers as one of the roadblocks preventing California from taking its rightful place as the richest place as the richest and most virtuous state in the country.

The editor argued that the tremendous influx of new migrants to the West had slowed terribly. For a society dependent upon increasing population for economic growth, this was a serious blow, and King searched for causes.

He found one answer in the moral tenor of the population.

Californians shunned patient industry and established vocations he wrote, and plunged into every kind of speculation and enterprise which presented the alluring prospect of increasing a quick or brilliant fortune.

Even more discouraging to potential immigrants, King reasoned, was the state's permissive attitude towards gamblers.

According to the Bulletin, Californians had corrupted themselves by tolerating gamblers as acceptable citizens. Now the sharpers seemed on the verge of controlling government, and that in itself would drive potential residents away.

In order to continue to attract newcomers, the state had to reform its ways. Some practically minded men argued that completion of a transcontinental railroad would encourage growth, but James King of William disagreed.

So long as gamblers are accepted as legitimate businessmen and permitted to hold political office, he advised Californians in 1856 to thread the plains with a network of railways and one cannot expect any advancements in the prosperity of the state.

By the time the editor's abrasive and fiery columns provoked his murder the next month, King had convinced many San Franciscans that the city's political establishment was under the control of the vilest of creation desperadoes of every caste, the gambler the thief, the murderer and assassin.

The editor's death made him a martyr to the anti- gambling cause and provided opponents of the Democratic regime with sufficient excuse to take the law into their own hands.

As the ranks of the vigilantes swelled, they perpetuated the slain editor's battle against gamblers.

Whereas the vigilance committee of 1851 had only thought about barring gamblers from membership, the committee of 1856 made a large point of it.

Moreover, King's crusade against gaming ensured that, when the vigilantes lynched the editor's killer, they also hanged Charles Cora, who had been awaiting his new trial in jail.

The lynch mob thus fulfilled James King's prophecy of another Vicksburg episode--- the Bulletin had finally gotten its man.

The vigilantism of 1856 reenacted a familiar western ritual of purification, played out within the context of local politics in San Francisco.

Its unfolding highlighted the changing attitudes of Californians toward the public business of gaming.