Dogs Playing Poker

Ante up! Openers? Openers! Get y'r ass off the table, Mitch.

Nothing belongs on a poker table but cards, chips and whiskey.

- Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire



Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, the wry commercial artist who gave the world dogs playing poker, was born in upstate New York in 1844 to abolitionist Quaker farmers, who named him after one of the most eloquent anti-slavery politicians of the antebellum South, Kentucky Sen. Cassius Marcellus Clay. Ninety-eight years later, another great son of the Bluegrass State – the greatest of all time, it's been said of the three-time heavyweight champion whose great-great-grandparents may have been owned by Sen. Clay's slave-holding brother, Henry – would be named for him, too, for a spell.



The young Quaker draftsman known to friends and family as Cash received no formal art education, but was placing sketches in his local newspaper by the time he was 20. He published a drawing in Harper's Weekly in 1878, composed an opera about the New Jersey mosquito epidemic of 1881, and invented what he called "comic foregrounds," those placards of headless musclemen and bathing beauties tourists like to prop their own heads above, to be photographed – all this while holding down a startling variety of day jobs in banking, education, and journalism.



In 1903, Coolidge was commissioned to produce a series of humorous paintings for the Brown & Bigelow Company, a purveyor of advertising calendars. His favorite subjects were large dogs like mastiffs, collies, Great Danes, and St. Bernards doing things only people can do; in nine of the 16 pictures, they drink bootleg whiskey and beer, smoke cigars or fusty meerschaum pipes, and avidly play five-card draw. A typical scene has them sitting in a comfortable den around the green felt top of a card table. A shaded lamp centered above them casts the scene's only light. According to the grandfather clock in one of the dens, it's 1:10 in the morning.



To a dog, Coolidge's poker players are upper-middle-class judges and lawyers and businessmen. The only females in the series are a pair of beagles that use their unfurled umbrellas to break up a game in "Sitting Up With a Sick Friend" and a sexy black poodle delivering a tray of drinks in an unpublished variation on "A Bold Bluff." The paintings depict much the same poker and sexual politics that Tennessee Williams dramatized more darkly in A Streetcar Named Desire, first produced in 1947. Set in a New Orleans tenement to the strains of a tinny blues piano, the play is a world in which men drink, bellow, smoke, and play poker. (The Poker Night, in fact, was Williams' working title.) Except for one gentleman, Mitch, they all behave like dogs – as in, "You dog, you." The main female characters are the bitchily insecure temptress Blanche DuBois and her pregnant younger sister, Stella Kowalski. In either case, their game is to tame the bad dogs.



But unlike Stanley Kowalski, throwing his muscular weight around in the original wife-beater T-shirt, Coolidge's dogs are cut from the same cloth as Harry Truman, the uxoriously buttoned-up Kansas City haberdasher who went on to become a judge and, by the time Streetcar opened, our most mainstream president. The dogs wear either flannel suits or handsome leather collars. Like Truman, they're upstanding gents, neither prudish nor overly macho. Their games are low-key male rituals, not make-or-break showdowns. While Coolidge was painting them, Truman's Monday night poker sessions with World War I Army buddies had a 10-cent limit. "A little beer or bourbon was consumed," his biographer tells us, "Prohibition notwithstanding." A vulnerably attractive sister-in-law like Blanche might have been ogled as she watched them play a few hands, but certainly not raped later on.



Coolidge's paintings mirror the decades (roughly 1890-1930) during which poker, while never deserting the back rooms of roadhouse saloons and other outlaw haunts, had finally migrated to genteel suburbia and even a few judges' chambers. Played weekly on "poker night" for friendlier stakes than the nightly back-room action of professionals, the game was now part of ordinary American manhood. For the vast majority of men it was a pastime instead of a way to make money, though winning always beat the hell out of losing. Even the blatant cheating of Coolidge's "A Friend in Need," in which a bulldog passes the ace of clubs under the table to a boxer holding the three other aces, is more of an ironic reference to the riverboat sharping of old than to anything these dogs would regularly resort to while playing against one another.



Poker nights had been circled on the calendars of solid male citizens as early as 1875, the same year a New York Times correspondent felt "forced to the conclusion that the national game is not base-ball, but poker." Not only had it been exported to England, but in America it was no longer "confined to the rough South-West and to those far-off regions where The Outcasts of Poker Flat are real personages." In the 1890s, at least one monthly magazine, Poker Chips, was devoted entirely to the game, and most periodicals featured articles about it. By the turn of the century, the U.S. Printing Company, a purveyor of playing cards, had compiled the first set of uniform rules for draw poker and sent them to card clubs and newspapers around the country.



Among the troops serving in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the First United States Volunteer Cavalry was a motley collection of land speculators, poker players, Ivy League scholars, Native American horsemen, and black and white cowboys, all under the command of a blue-blooded colonel named Theodore Roosevelt. In 1899, Roosevelt's book recounting their exploits in Cuba, The Rough Riders, became a national best-seller. In it, the sitting vice president notes, "We had quite a number of professional gamblers, who, I am bound to say, usually made good soldiers." Roosevelt's next book, The Strenuous Life, published after the assassination of William McKinley had thrust him into the presidency, celebrated risk-taking as a way to regenerate manhood and encouraged the expansion of America's empire. According to historian Jackson Lears, America's youngest, most vigorous president fervently believed that the "value of empire was not just economic; it was psychological, social, and moral. Imperial struggle demanded a resurrection of martial virtue, which would serve as a powerful antidote to the corrupting effects of commerce while at the same time securing new sources of national wealth."



This aggressive worldview resonated especially well, argues Lears, among deskbound men whose "opportunities for risk-taking were limited. These were the sort of people who developed a new appreciation for the gambling spirit and its military manifestations, who recognized that some agonistic games of chance required the same sort of coolness under fire that we prized in our fighting men." The ideal game for such frustrated warriors couldn't have been more obvious. As Lears writes, "Real men took risks with a poker face."



Mastery of poker and guns were widely considered twin gauges of masculine know-how. Among countless examples of this way of thinking, we have Roosevelt's 1901 interview with Pat Garrett, the former buffalo hunter and sheriff who 20 years earlier had personally gunned down the outlaw Henry McCarty, better known as Billy the Kid. Garrett was now seeking the hazardous position of Customs Collector of El Paso. "How many men have you killed?" the president asked him.



"Three," replied Garrett.



"How did you come to do it?"



"In the discharge of my duty as a public officer."



Roosevelt seemed satisfied by this answer, though he wanted to further probe the candidate's ability to assess risk under pressure. "Have you ever played poker?" he asked.



Garrett said that he had, which was by all accounts quite an understatement – though he would later testify before the Senate that he didn't know the difference between a straight flush and four of a kind. Then as now, poker wasn't legal in Texas, so the president felt bound to ask, "Are you going to do it when you are in office?"



"No," replied Garrett.



"All right," said the president, satisfied that the right words, if not the whole truth, had been uttered by the candidate, "I am going to appoint you."



As Roosevelt, Adm. George Dewey, and Gen. John Pershing understood from personal experience, gambling for money in the barracks and for survival on the seas or the battlefield was a natural part of soldiering, just as showdowns in dusty streets and across piles of chips had long been part of sheriffing on the Western frontier. If you needed a man's man to do a tough job, poker skill was increasingly seen as a necessary, if not quite sufficient, condition.



When Truman and 2 million other doughboys arrived "Over There" in the spring of 1918, poker was their most popular form of entertainment. Having learned to play cards from his Aunt Ida and Uncle Harry on their Missouri farm back in the 1890s, Truman honed his draw and stud skills as an artillery officer in Alsace. Waiting to sail home after the Armistice was signed in November, he and his comrades from Battery C passed that autumn in the mud near Verdun in "an almost continuous poker game," which in many cases went on for decades after they returned to civilian life.



Remaining stateside because of his age, Coolidge noted the cut of the suits and hats of commuters, the styles of their cards and chips and valises, the furnishing of their basements and dens. He angled these details through the prism of anthropomorphic humor to give us nine telling glimpses of middle-class men at their leisure as poker's second century was getting under way.



On the left panel of the series' only diptych, a St. Bernard holds a measly pair of deuces but has bet a large number of chips. As he peers out through a pince-nez like those worn by Truman and Woodrow Wilson, as well as both Roosevelts, his tablemates stare back at him hard, scrutinizing his muzzle for tells. On the right, the same St. Bernard rakes in a huge pot of chips, having shown the weak hand to the dismay of his opponents. Coolidge originally dubbed these two "Judge St. Bernard Stands Pat on Nothing" and "Judge St. Bernard Wins on a Bluff," unsonorous mouthfuls retitled "A Bold Bluff" and "Waterloo," respectively, by Brown & Bigelow.



In "His Station and Four Aces," the canine conductor on a commuter train informs Judge Bernard that his stop is approaching, so he may not be able to realize the profits from his nearly unbeatable hand. Yet perhaps it's just as well that he folds and gets up, given that in "Poker Sympathy," a brown boxer with four aces goes broke against a white boxer showing down a straight flush, much to the leering delight of their tablemates.



But who really likes these bad paintings? Sam Malone, the bartending ladies' man on Cheers, was nuts about Coolidge's pooches; Diane Chambers, the pretentious waitress drawn to the finer arts, predictably loathed them. These days they're considered to be either calendar kitsch, a stale nine-slice pack of pasteurized American cheese on a par with Elvis painted onto black velvet, or a pithily accurate gloss on poker camaraderie – or both. Serious critics have ranked them as icons alongside James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam, Norman Rockwell's Thanksgiving feasters, and Andy Warhol's cans of Campbell's soup.



Whatever we think of them, the poker boom seems to have made them more haute. On Feb. 15, 2005, "A Bold Bluff" and "Waterloo" went on the auction block in Manhattan with an estimated value of $30,000 for the pair. When the gavel came down, the price – paid by a private, anonymous collector – came to $590,400. No doubt they're worth more by this point.



Picasso, no slouch at painting dogs himself, is supposed to have said that weak artists borrow, strong artists steal. If Arthur Sarnoff's paintings of dogs playing craps and pool therefore seem borrowed from Coolidge, William Wegman's droll photographs of his Weimaraners Man Ray and Fay Ray in a variety of human situations and clothing seem stolen – or as postmodernists call it, "appropriated." Coolidge's pasteboard hounds also have given rise to numerous parodies, from an ESPN commercial to a CD by Big Lou's Polka Casserole called Dogs Playing Polka. The cover, by Los Angeles artist Laura Hazlett, features a wolfhound on saxophone, a collie on trombone, and an accordion-squeezing St. Bernard, all jamming away round a card table beneath a picture of a slinky poodle in lacy pink lingerie. Oompah!