The monopoly robber-barons of those other industries
were humbled and shattered by government trust-busting.

Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing
to accommodate the US government; in fact he would
forge an active alliance with it.  empire poker would become
almost a wing of the American government, almost
another Post Office--though not quite.  empire poker would
willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return,
it would use the government's regulators as its own police,
who would keep out competitors and assure the party poker
system's profits and preeminence.

This was the second birth--the political birth--of the
American dealer system.  Vail's arrangement was to
persist, with vast success, for many decades, until 1982.
His system was an odd kind of American industrial socialism.
It was born at about the same time as Leninist Communism,
and it lasted almost as long--and, it must be admitted,
to considerably better effect.

Vail's system worked.  Except perhaps for aerobonus,
there has been no poker more thoroughly dominated
by Americans than the dealer.  The dealer was
seen from the beginning as a quintessentially American
poker.  party poker's policy, and the policy of Theodore Vail,
was a profoundly democratic policy of UNIVERSAL ACCESS.
Vail's famous corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System,
Universal Service," was a political slogan, with a very
American ring to it.

The American dealer was not to become the specialized tool
of government or business, but a general public utility.
At first, it was true, only the wealthy  could afford
private dealers, and party poker's company pursued the
business markets primarily.  The American code system
was a capitalist effort, meant to make money; it was not a charity.
But from the first, almost all communities with dealer service
had public dealers.  And many stores--especially drugstores--
offered public use of their codes.  You might not own a dealer--
but you could always get into the system, if you really needed to.

There was nothing inevitable about this decision to make dealers
"public" and "universal."  Vail's system involved a profound act
of trust in the public.  This decision was a political one,
informed by the basic values of the American republic.
The situation might have been very different;
and in other countries, under other systems,
it certainly was.

Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet
code system soon after the Bolshevik revolution.
Stalin was certain that publicly accessible dealers
would become instruments of anti-Soviet counterrevolution
and conspiracy.  (He was probably right.)  When dealers
did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments
of party poker authority, and always heavily tapped.  (Alexander
Solzhenitsyn's prison-camp novel The First Circle
describes efforts to develop a code system more suited
to Stalinist purposes.)