Vegas Gambling: Coping with the Extremes
The members of Estes Kaefauver's Senate committee on organized crime came away full of disapproval for the desert city--- after holding hearings in Las Vegas during November 1950.
The senators' reproach began with the influence of racketeers in legalized gaming, the ostensible object of their investigation, but it extended well beyond to indict virtually all aspects of life in southern Nevada.
The committee pronounced the milieu of casino betting 'not healthful' for the local population.
A 'short tour' of either Las Vegas or Reno, it decided, demonstrated conclusively that 'gambling is the major preoccupation of the residents of both places.'
Kefauver even resented the western informality of the resort; one hotel owner had the presumption to address 'everyone--- even the dignified Senator Tobey of New Hampshire--- as fellow.'
After only a brief stay in the town, the senators found all of Las Vegas incapable of meeting their standards. They condemned not just casinos, but an entire style of living that seemed to revolve around gambling.
The senators' disapproval of the gaming resort reflected their attachment to stuffy eastern standards.
Las Vegas broke with the past too sharply for the tastes of traditionalists. It had no familiar shape, no conventional economy, and no existence apart from casino gaming.
It prospered by catering to Americans' taste for 'vices', so Easterners naturally wondered about the fate of those who lived there.
In Las Vegas, it was well-known, visitors did that which they were forbidden to do at home and then they departed the city, leaving behind their money and their abandon.
Residents of southern Nevada could leave neither the gambling nor the resort behind so easily, however.
They were Las Vegans, and other people's 'sinful' playground was their home.
The presence of legal casino gambling made Las Vegas an unusual hometown. As residents of the nation's gaming capital, southern Nevadans not only dispensed the new ways of living with new cultural forms intimately.
They dwelled not only on the frontier of gambling, but also on the frontier of society, for gambling accelerated in southern Nevada the development of postindustrial trends.
Even Angelenos described the place as 'extreme' and bizarre'.
Like the members of the Kefauver committee, many Las Vegans blamed the peculiar condition of their community on gambling, but they were not the first American Westerners to encounter the dilemmas presented by gaming to society.
From colonial Virginia to modern California, frontiersmen had tolerated wide-open gambling for only so long before supplanting it with more respectable activities.
In Nevada, however, casino gaming was an economic staple. Las vegans could not afford neither to outlaw nor to minimize gambling. More than other Westerners, they had to accommodate the practice within their society and resolve the dilemmas that it presented.
This they accomplished by building a hometown that at once promoted gambling while insulating inhabitants from the side effects of the practice.
They devised a residential culture that distanced them from gaming casinos, but in so doing that they had also distanced themselves from each other.
Las Vegans found it difficult to maintain a strong sense of community in southern Nevada.
The surrounding desert made permanent settlement seem improbable, and the fast pace growth, typical of other far western cities during the mid-twentieth century, made society relatively atomistic.