Pinball Machines

On 21 January 1942, Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City, declared war on the pinball machine. He had police round up thousands of them across the five boroughs, then posed for newsreel cameras swinging a sledgehammer through their glass tops and dumping the remains into Long Island Sound. Similar bans followed in Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. The charge: pinball was a gambling device disguised as a children's amusement, and it was corrupting the city's youth. La Guardia's reasoning had a specific mechanical basis. Pre-1947 pinball — before the flipper was invented — really was mostly a game of chance. You pulled a plunger, sent a ball up a sloped board, and watched it bounce randomly off pins into scoring holes. Children were dropping nickels meant for lunch, skipping school, and in some cases shoplifting to feed the machines. The panic fused two durable American anxieties — gambling as vice, and unsupervised urban youth — around a specific mechanical device, and it stuck.

For nearly three and a half decades, pinball was illegal in New York City. The ban finally lifted in April 1976, when the pinball designer Roger Sharpe appeared before the City Council Consumer Affairs Committee and demonstrated that the modern flipper-equipped machine was a game of skill. Legend has it that he called his shot — predicting which lane the ball would enter — Babe Ruth-style. The council voted to legalise pinball the same afternoon. The game had not fundamentally changed in the twenty-nine years since the flipper was invented. What had changed was the willingness of the authorities to say so.

The pinball ban is remembered now as a minor absurdity of mid-century American civic life. It is also a useful reminder of how readily a moral category (gambling) and a demographic anxiety (corrupted urban youth) can attach themselves to a specific object — and how long they can stay attached once they do.