Living the Las Vegas Life

In evoking both the old West and the new, casino betting in Las Vegas exemplified the continuities.

Between the nineteenth-century frontier, and the futuristic West of the twentieth century.

The geographic frontier had presumably passed, but modern overland migration to southern Nevada kept the attitudes and behavior of the westward movement alive.

The gambling industry generated such growth and opportunity that the resort soon resembled the frontier boom towns of an earlier period.

In prospering beyond residents' wildest expectations, however, the expanding city came to be characterized the same transiency, the same lack of permanent commitment, the same fortune seeking, and the same tensions and shortages that typified previous settlements of westering Americans.

Gambling inhibited the development of a traditional community in more than the moral sense that had preoccupied Kefauver's committee.

As centerpiece for the resort city, it attracted through Las Vegas an endless flow of travelers who presented problems for home-seekers. Residents found it difficult to make the city their own at the same time that they shaped it into what the tourist desired.

Gaming also helped to fragment the city both spatially and socially.

As the resort industry took over the city center and encouraged the dispersal of inhabitants to outlying areas, the desert metropolis lost its core.

Moreover, the gaming industry fostered an elite of businessmen whose interests often seemed opposed to the welfare of the larger community.

In short, living in Las Vegas was a gamble where success came at a high price.

To outside observers, and even to many residents, southern Nevada, like Southern California, always seemed a troubled version of the future, a vital metropolis that somehow lacked a center and a direction.

In many respects, however, Las Vegas was merely experiencing changes that the rest of the country would eventually face as well.

In serving as the basis for the success as well as the malaise that characterized life in southern Nevada, casino betting placed in bold belief the mid-twentieth century evolution of American culture.

Rapid growth, predicated on the gaming industry, dominated social development in the city.

Between 1940 and 1965, Las Vegas ballooned like a lucky Comstock camp where the lode consisted of legalized gambling rather than mineral ore.

The population virtually tripled between 1940 and 1950, from 8,422 to 24,624, and expanded another 2 and a half times to 64,405 by 1960.

Then, when it seemed as if the boom had to level off, the population nearly doubled again during the next five years.

Such explosive growth could hardly be contained within the borders of the old railroad townsite, and in 1960, Clark County gained recognition as a Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area.

The county then contained more than 127,000 residents, 90 percent of them clustered in greater Las Vegas.