Placing Bets

Jonathan Harrington Green. Gambling Unmasked! Or the Personal Experience of J. H. Green, the Reformed Gambler. Philadelphia: G. B. Zieber & Co., 1847.

Jonathan Harrington Green. An Exposition of Games and Tricks with Cards. New York: G. & S. Bunce, 1850.

Jonathan Harrington Green. A Report on Gambling in New York. New York: J. H. Green, 1851.

Trained as a joiner, Jonathan Harrington Green fell into a twelve-year gambling career before he remade himself into an anti-gambling crusader. Rather than reform, however, Green’s true aim was to capitalize on his self-styled expertise as a gambler. Working for the New York Association for the Suppression of Gambling, Green made it his personal mission to expose the true extent of gambling in the city. His Report on Gambling in New York, published by his own press, unbelievably claimed there were over 6,100 gambling establishments. The report also contained lively and enticing descriptions of the city’s most “prominent.” For instance, Suydam’s Gaming House, on Barclay Street, was “considered an exclusive and aristocratic establishment.” In Wallis’s Gaming House, on Park Place, shady characters such as thimble-riggers, watch-stuffers, and pocket-book-droppers shared tables with merchants, lawyers, and railroad conductors, “men who pursue an honest livelihood.”

Green’s popular autobiography and his many works on gaming, published in several editions, tapped into public anxieties about the moral perils of gambling. Addressing merchants more concerned with the bottom line, Green also offered to assemble a private police force which he would hire out to merchants for the purpose of following clerks they suspected of gambling their employers’ money away.