This book is about a history of the vice in ancient and modern times all over the world and makes an exposition of its alarming prevalence and destructive effects. This work discusses with an unreserved and exhaustive disclosure of such frauds, tricks and devices as are practiced by "Professional" gamblers, "Confidence Men" and "Bunko Steerers", in order to alert readers not to fall into a trap.

The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago’s Democratic Machine tells the story of a larger-than-life figure who fused Chicago’s criminal underworld with the city’s political and commercial spheres to create an urban machine built on graft, bribery, and intimidation. In this first ever biography of McDonald, author Richard C. Lindberg vividly paints the life of the Democratic kingmaker against the wider backdrop of nineteenth-century Chicago crime and politics. Twenty-five years before Al Capone’s birth, Michael McDonald was building the foundations of the modern Chicago Democratic machine. By marshaling control of and suborning a complex web of precinct workers, ward and county bosses, justices of the peace, police captains, contractors, suppliers, and spoils-men, the undisputed master of the gambling syndicates could elect mayoral candidates, finagle key appointments for political operatives willing to carry out his mandates, and coerce law enforcement and the judiciary. The resulting machine was dedicated to the supremacy of the city’s gambling, vice, and liquor rackets during the waning years of the Gilded Age. McDonald was warmly welcomed into the White House by two sitting presidents who recognized him for what he was: the reigning “boss” of Chicago. In a colorful and often riotous life, McDonald seemed to control everything around him—everything that is, except events in his personal life. His first wife, the fiery Mary Noonan McDonald, ran off with a Catholic priest. The second, Dora Feldman, twenty-five years his junior, murdered her teenaged lover in a sensational 1907 scandal that broke Mike’s heart and drove him to an early grave. Michael McDonald’s name has long been cited in the published work of city historians, members of academia, and the press as the principal architect of a unified criminal enterprise that reached into the corridors of power in Chicago, Cook County, the state of Illinois, and all the way to the Oval Office. The Gambler King of Clark Street is both a major addition to Chicago’s historical literature and a revealing biography of a powerful and troubled man.

In a highly readable work that engages topics in American cultural, social and business history, Ann Fabian details the place of gambling in industrializing America. Card Sharps and Bucket Shops investigates the relationship between gambling and other ways of making profit, such as speculation and land investment, which became entrenched during the nineteenth century. While all these undertakings ran counter to deeply ingrained American--and Protestant--work ethics, only gambling took on a stigma that made other efforts to acquire wealth socially acceptable. Fabian considers here the reformers who sought to ban gambling; psychological explanations for the deviant gambler; numbers games in the African American community; and efforts by speculators to draw distinctions between their own activities and gambling. She combines first-rate cultural analysis with rigorous research, and along the way provides a wealth of colorful details, characters and anecdotes.

The New England Watch and Ward Society provides a new window into the history of American Protestantism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By suppressing obscene literature, gambling, and prostitution, the moral reform organization embodied Protestant efforts to shape public morality in an increasing intellectually and culturally diverse society.

From the great raconteur of the American underworld, and author of The Gangs of New York, comes Sucker’s Progress: An Information History of Gambling in America. From Midwestern Riverboats to East Coast Racetracks, Herbert Asbury explores the legal and illegal history of gambling in pre-WWII America. Describing notorious gambling havens like Chicago and New Orleans, as well as lesser-known outposts in cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Cincinnati, Ohio, Asbury examines the gambling houses, big and small, which peppered the American landscape. Also presented are the lives of some of America’s most famous gamblers, including Mike McDonald, John Morrissey, and Richard Canfield, as well as their infamous counterparts like “Canada Bill” and “Charley Black Eyes,” men who made their names as grifters and con men. Asbury also explores the games these men played, describing the rules and origins of dozens of dice and card games. From $1 lottery tickets to thousand dollar pokes antes, America’s love of gambling thrives today, but it was during Asbury’s era that gambling was established as an American passion. “Asbury embarked on what seems in retrospect an extraordinary mission: to document the entire underworld of America, from New Orleans to San Francisco....His studies of gambling, of the racial politics of the New Orleans French Quarter, and of the history of Chicago crime remain monuments to an ambition that was then confined to the fringes of pop history. Sucker’s Progress, his history of gambling and swindling in America, is dense with facts about a subject one would have thought persisted only as rumour and tall tale.”—A. GOPNIK, The New Yorker One of the best American books of its kind. He tells the story of the New York underworld of the past century, and his narrative is excellently presented in a book adorned with amusing pictures from the weeklies and newspapers.”—E. Pearson, The Sat. Rev. of Books