Gambling: Nevada on the Right Track

The acceptance and promotion of the testing of atomic weapons typified the quest for respectability--- by southern Nevadans, of course.

Still smarting from the negative publicity that accompanied the hearings of the Kefauver committee in late 1950, Las Vegans readily adopted the nuclear weapons experiments beginning in the early 1951 as their own.

Happy to accept such a noble mission, residents soon became knowledgeable about the blasts and disputed any criticism of the testing program.

When the people of southern Utah wondered with good reason about the harmful effects of radioactive fallout from the above-ground explosions, Las Vegans generally discounted such fears and admonished critics to accept the detonations willingly.

Of course, southern Nevadans did not live downwind from the test site, but they nonetheless took pride in the 'sacrifices' they had made for national defense by surviving the blasts.

After nicknaming the town 'Atomic City', an appropriate label for that mid-century vision of tomorrow, residents congratulated themselves for their courage and asked who else could have endured experiments of the world's most horrible weapons.

Las Vegans parlayed their proximity to nuclear weapons tests into a tough patriotism that was not uncommon in the Sunbelt.

They welcomed atomic blasts as well as the nearby air force base because defense projects, by identifying the city with the global struggle against communism, erased some of the stigma attached to a gambling capital.

Eager to overcome a reputation for cynicism and greed, southern Nevadans posed as among the fiercest Cold Warriors in the nation.

By 1961, townspeople could look back upon a decade of defense projects that put the city in the enviable position of making perhaps the most telling contributions to this high priority national effort.

In a town that questioned the premises of the welfare state, government provided the second highest number of jobs to the local work force in 1960. Industrial employment, on the other hand, remained quite limited throughout the postwar period.

Many Nevadans did not want the pollution, unions, and taxes that factories would supposedly bring. Casino owners in particular long resisted efforts to attract more manufacturing to the area.

They worried that industrial labor, which might not be able to afford to gamble very much, might provide the nucleus of an attempt to do away with legal gaming.

Two hotel publicists explained that gamblers had seen many other towns lose their freedom the factory labor came in, and union leaders combined with groups of wives to demand that the temptations be removed.

Sensitive to the charge that legal gambling inhibited the evolution of a more traditional industrial economy, Las vegans grew more interested in diversifying their economic base after the 1955 crisis in the resort trade.

By attracting more manufacturing, residents hoped to reduce their reliance on tourists and to limit the impact of slumps in the gaming business.