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The Birth of Las Vegas
By 1931 Nevada was asking itself the very question it would ask millions of visitors in the future: What have you got to lose? The legislature passed laws that year legalizing gambling and making divorce a relatively simple procedure. The story was big news all over America. "Nevada is tired of cactus, alkali wastes, sparse population, hard times and virtue," reported the Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser. "Hell's hundred thousand acres," spit the Dallas Morning News. The Hartford Times' equanimity about Nevada: "Perhaps it is merely being honest in writing laws which are hypocritically evaded almost everywhere else."
The first casinos were opened in Reno, and they were owned by Westerners like William Harrah and Raymond Smith, of Harold's Club. By 1945, with relatively minor intervention from outside gambling interests, the Nevada gambling handle was close to a billion dollars. The following ten years witnessed the development of Las Vegas, in the southern part of the state, as a gambling center; much of the capital for that development came from Eastern syndicates. A Los Angeles gangster named Bugsy Siegel was the visionary behind the personality of Las Vegas, which became a symbol for American gambling as recognizable and as "unspeakably gaudy" as the vest of the riverboat gambler. In 1945 Siegel started to build the Flamingo Hotel on the Los Angeles side of town, the "Strip." Like Wilbur Clark, who followed him with the Desert Inn, Siegel ran out of money halfway into construction. Both men turned to the Cleveland syndicate, one of the toughest and the richest. Siegel was murdered before his hotel was finished, but he had already pushed Nevada gambling forward, far past the days of saloon doors and sawdust.
In the Las Vegas Strip the gambling syndicates had a utopia. Like William Penn creating Philadelphia or Brigham Young arriving at Salt Lake, they had a place in America to make of what they wanted. In it they acknowledge what they knew best by building a series of hotels in the milieu of the forties nightclub: in names, themes, neon signs, muted lighting, entertainment, costume, and even in the roaming cocktail waitresses and cigarette girls. The Strip's founding fathers removed any coherent sense of place. They replaced greenbacks with colorful chips and suspended time, with round-the-clock gambling, a nearly total absence of clocks, and bright lights on the Strip that give to the night the liveliest hours in the day. By careful design Las Vegas had nothing, but everything, to do with the rest of America. After nearly fifty years the Nevada experiment was a sustained success, and it finally took on a competitor in the form of Atlantic City, where gambling was legalized in 1978.
In 1964 New Hampshire conducted a lottery. Tickets cost $3 each, the top prize was $100,000, and the state earned $2.5 million: a success. Tellingly, all but one of the eighteen winners was from out of state. The lottery fever has spread ever since then to thirty-three states, and in most cases the states have imbued their lotteries with benign purpose: education in the cases of New York and New Hampshire, the elderly in Pennsylvania.
In 1980 New York State paid one of its most unsavory elements the compliment of imitation, instituting a numbers game just like "policy." A thousand number runners reacted by staging a protest in front of the governor's office. They needn't have worried, however, because most accounts show that the state's games of chance, including Off-Track Betting, have not cut into the illegal business. They have, however, helped bring gambling as a way of life to a greater population than ever before.
About 20 years ago the example set by Nevada combined with the popularity of state lotteries to obscure gambling's long history of causing problems. A new era began. In the old one gambling was one of the vices, but in the new one it has been recast as "gaming," an amusement, and it doesn't cause problems but solves them.