Poker & Pop Culture: Heads-Up for Pols — Henry Clay v. Daniel Webster

Similarities between poker and politics are so obvious, it almost seems redundant to remark how one resembles the other. Of course politicians are always working on their images, using aggression, raising the stakes, exploiting edges by applying pressure to opponents, and “going all in” behind this or that cause.

Politicians bluff, too. A lot.

We’ve already seen multiple articles during the present election cycle assessing presidential candidate Donald Trump’s “poker strategy” during his campaign, with Phil Hellmuth even being called upon to comment on the subject. But that kind of analysis tends to come every election, given how poker and politics really are two of a kind.

Many think being proficient at poker can be useful to those hoping to reach the nation’s highest office. Those who do echo Albert Upton, a college professor whose most famous student, Richard Nixon, was one of many examples of poker-playing presidents. Upton once told a Nixon biographer he was “convinced that a man who can’t hold a hand at a first-class poker table is unfit to be President of the United States,” a sentiment with which many agree.

It’s true — learning poker can help teach presidential candidates lessons in the ways of negotiation, diplomacy, and even salesmanship. Even so, being known as a card player isn’t always a positive on the campaign trail. Barack Obama’s background as a poker player (to cite an example) might have helped him among fellow players during his presidential campaigns, though it didn’t necessarily enthuse that segment of the voting population who are less comfortable with gambling games.

We look again this week at one of the earliest examples of poker being discussed in print, and this time the story gives us reason to discuss two of the first examples of U.S. presidential candidates who were poker players — two “pols” who famously played poker against each other.

A Common Claim About Clay

In 1844, the stage actor Joe Cowell published a memoir titled Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and America that included a mention of poker, another interesting, early cultural response to the still-new game that helps fill in more gaps in the early historical narrative.

Cowell’s book further attests to poker’s spread up the Mississippi and through the American south thanks to his inclusion of the story of a poker game occurring aboard the Helen M’Gregor back in December 1829. At the time Cowell, an Englishman, was in the middle of a tour of American stages, and having just boarded near Louisville was traveling back down to New Orleans.

An inexperienced card player himself — “my skill only extending to a homely game at whist,” he insists — Cowell becomes introduced to several card games that are new to him while aboard the ship. One of the games is “uker” or euchre, and his reference to it represents one of the earliest mentions of that game as well.

Like other early poker stories, Cowell’s again takes place during the evening hours, during a “foggy, wretched night” of low visibility for those piloting the ship.

Near the beginning of the episode — before the game switches to poker — a suspicion of cheating results in a player suddenly chopping another’s finger off with a Bowie knife as a punishment for the crime. The tension is therefore understandably high once they turn to poker, during which opponents’ cards are “carefully concealed from one another” while “old players pack them in their hands, and peep at …

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