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Las Vegas' Struggles

The form that casino gaming assumed in southern Nevada pointed to its low status on the eve of the Second World War.

Legal, public betting remained a limited enterprise. Early operations were known as 'clubs' rather than casinos, suggesting an atmosphere of intimacy and exclusiveness.

These clubs, more akin to corner groceries than to the supermarkets of gambling that appeared afterwards, functioned with none of the sensation that later casinos created.

Bettors generally risked only little sums, and observers mostly agreed that the business was small, even harmless.

Instead of the shady and corrupt gambling dens that they had anticipated, visitors found insubstantial and seemingly innocent clubs.

Local residents prided themselves not on the economic success of gaming but rather on its upright character.

They possessed neither the resources nor the skills to build gambling into an extensive enterprise; only an infusion of money and knowledge could do that.

Similarly, local businessmen lacked the inclination to develop gambling in order to attract tourists.

This shortcoming found expression in Las Vegans' modesty in the shadows of Hoover Dam and their overconfidence in a short-sighted promotional motif.

Without a widely successful publicity campaign, and with no more than a slight familiarity with the Southern Californians who would ultimately comprise the bulk of travelers to Las Vegas, local gaming clubs in the late 1930s depended mostly on visitors who did not value the town as their primary purpose for touring the Southwest, a perilous clientèle at best.

Tourists generally regarded the dam as the major attraction in the area.

Young, federally employed dam builders had at least been steady and paying customers, unlike the excursionists to the Colorado River who might pass through the dusty town without spending money or stopping there.

Unable to attract for itself a dependable patronage from dam visitors, Las Vegas needed another captive supply of customers, men who like the construction workers had nowhere else to spend their money.

With the onset of the Second World War, the town acquired these patrons.

Round the same time, southern Nevada began to appeal more successfully to Southern Californians, the tourists who shaped the city so profoundly during the 1940s and 1950s.

Prior to the spectacular rise of legal gambling in Nevada, most casino betting in the United States was illegal, and gambling operators, the nation's only source of expertise in that particular business, were naturally outlaws.

Entrepreneurs in organized crime, who had dominated the profession since the days of riverboat gamblers, gained experience in promotion, mass merchandising, and finance during the bootlegging era, and naturally gravitated to illicit gaming after the repeal of Prohibition.

Because of their experience in large gaming halls, and because their participation in the complex enterprise of organized crime, these underworld operators provided the ideal catalyst for big-time betting when they transferred their skills and resources to southern Nevada.