Poker & Pop Culture: The Thanatopsis Pleasure and Insight Straight Club

Following the first world war came a period of relative growth and prosperity in the United States which saw a number of social and cultural changes occur. School kids learning American history are taught to remember the “Roaring ’20s” as booming decade, a time marked by the introduction of mass-produced automobiles, of planes that could fly from coast to coast, of motion pictures with sound, “speakeasies,” “flappers,” and radios providing a constant soundtrack of jazz music.

Among the many fancies that occupied Americans during this period preceding the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed were various games, including card games. As Ben Yagoda notes in About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, “part of the unreal frivolity of the twenties was that intelligent people should have occupied themselves with card, board, and parlor games to a degree not seen before or since.”

In particular, Yagoda speaks of how members of the famed Algonquin Round Table, that group of writers, actors, and wits who met daily for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, would constantly battle with one another at “cribbage, backgammon, obscure word games, pachisi, casino, [and] hearts,” among other forms competition.

However, writes Yagoda, “the most important game was poker.”

Here’s a brief sketch of what was probably the most famous ongoing poker game of the period, a game played at the Algonquin Hotel and whose participants dubbed themselves “The Thanatopsis Pleasure and Inside Straight Club.”

The Algonquin Round Table: A “Vicious Circle”

The Algonquin Round Table was kind of a 20th-century version of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope’s Scriblerians or Dr. Samuel Johnson’s literary club, those 18th-century gatherings of writers, artists, and intellectuals who regularly met to dine and opine on various aspects of their respective cultures.

The daily gatherings at the Algonquin Hotel began in 1919 and continued over the next decade-plus. Members included newspaper columnists, actors, poets, playwrights, and critics.

Among the group’s charter members were Franklin Pierce Adams (noted columnist for various New York newspapers), Harold Ross (founder of The New Yorker), Robert Benchley (editor of Vanity Fair), George Kaufman (playwright), and Dorothy Parker (writer). Actors Tallulah Bankhead and Harpo Marx would also become regulars at the Algonquin, as would the composer Irving Berlin and producer and screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Membership was never constant, and in all there were probably three dozen or more individuals who would come to be associated with the “Vicious Circle” — an early name humorously applied to the group who could sometimes be wickedly savage with their wit.

Like the 18th-century clubs that preceded them, the Algonquin Round Table provided its members opportunities both to socialize and to share ideas, with many of those ideas eventually being disseminated via the newspaper columns, stories, poems, plays, illustrations, and other cultural productions of the group. In other words, like the round table of Arthurian legend, this one also exerted significant influence on the culture at …

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