The lottery isn’t self-evidently ground-breaking, or even all that appealing. It’s a simple game: you pay money, guess a group of numbers from one to fifty-nine (or more, in some cases), and hope that those numbers match up with those randomly spit out by machines. The odds of winning are astronomically low, but somehow the gamble still draws in millions of people.
The Lottery is a story about the blind following of outdated traditions and rituals. The main character, Mr. Summers, is a man who represents authority in the story. He holds up a black box and stirs the papers inside. This symbolizes his role as the lottery’s organizer. He takes this position seriously.
Cohen’s story begins in the nineteen-sixties, when America’s obsession with unimaginable wealth collided with a state funding crisis. As population and inflation climbed, states struggled to balance budgets without raising taxes or cutting services. This led them to turn to the lottery for cash, which could be spent on anything from subsidized housing to kindergarten placements.
A lot of money was made in this period, and state-sponsored lotteries became a major source of revenue for the nation’s schools, roads, and hospitals. But it wasn’t always this way. Lotteries were once a rare point of agreement between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton: both believed that everyone “would prefer the small chance of great gain to the certain loss of little.” But by the nineteenth century, the industry had become tangled up in the slave trade.