The statistics are mind-boggling. In the first episode of Scratch & Win, we learn that Americans spend more on lottery tickets each year than on pizza. More than on all Coca-Cola products. More than on concert, movie, and sports tickets combined. Those facts alone are enough to justify the existence of WGBH’s eight-part podcast about how the Massachusetts State Lottery came to be.
Here’s another fact. Whereas in Wyoming and North Dakota, people spend an average of $50 a year on lottery tickets, and in New York, Michigan, and Georgia between $500 and $600, no one gets close to Massachusetts. Their figure? $1,037. That’s why it’s there that host Ian Coss bases his tale, tracing the lottery from when it was the sole purview of the Boston mafia and their numbers rackets, all the way up to its legal, near-inescapable hold on American life today.
Though a podcast about the history of the Massachusetts State Lottery may seem quite specific, the remit of Scratch & Win is surprisingly vast – episodes touch on the mafia, Catholic vs. Protestant immigration, domestic spending habits, ferocious battles about property taxes, an FBI stakeout… the list goes on.
This makes for a fascinating show. The more you listen, the more it appears that there are very few aspects of American life the lottery hasn’t touched over the last fifty years. And with that in mind, it’s not long before those enormous figures quoted at the beginning of the series start to seem reasonable.
The sprawling scope of Coss’s vision is impressive, but at the same time, the sheer range of subjects that come under the banner of the lottery can make the podcast feel too diffuse, almost unwieldy. Although there is a figure tying the show together in the form of Massachusetts State Lottery pioneer Bob Crane, he doesn’t prove a dominant enough presence to tie all the disparate parts and pull them together in a satisfying way. (In several episodes, he’s merely a peripheral figure or absent altogether.) While we’re told a number of times what an interesting character he was, we’re offered little more than his charm and his love of vaudeville to back up those fervent assertions.
Nevertheless, over the run of Scratch & Win, noteworthy themes begin to emerge anyway. Throughout the lottery’s existence, questions have swarmed about the morality of it; its beginnings in the criminal underworld did not help in that regard. Acceptability became more widespread thanks to the popularity of Bingo in Catholic churches (“I don’t think we could run our church without Bingo,” says one parishioner Coss interviews). And, of course, the state’s involvement — the many millions that the state lottery has raised has even led some to ponder the idea of using lottery income to replace income from taxation.
Still, even in the current days of ubiquity, moral concerns persist. Many question whether it’s right for the state to so aggressively promote a legal form of gambling to its lowest-income citizens, who are statistically the most likely to play. There’s an inescapable hypocrisy in a system where the state funds programs for problem gamblers while also selling $50 scratch-offs.
Another significant, though less prominent, point of concern is how playing the lottery seems at odds with the classic American dream of making it through determination and hard work. The Megabucks draw, which tempts players with the potential of unfathomably huge jackpots, achieved enormous popularity during the 1980s. At one point, 90% of Massachusetts adults were playing the Megabucks draw. Coss contrasts this with the rising wealth gap during that same era, as well as the growing sense among many that their only hope of “catching up” was the infinitesimal chance of winning the lottery.
While both of those concerns offer fertile ground for exploration, they too frequently get lost beneath the avalanche of other tangents and characters we encounter along the way. Coss’s reporting is admirably extensive and often entertaining. And yet, there are altogether too many times when we’re left wondering, “Okay, but… what does that have to do with the lottery?”
The podcast is at its most interesting when it’s dealing with the issues head-on, as it does in the opening and closing episodes, rather than sideways, as it does in the rest of them. As well-researched and warmly presented as it is, that tendency to lose the forest for the trees prevents Scratch & Win from maintaining the cohesiveness needed to become a truly compulsive listen.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.