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Hal Rothman is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the editor of the journal Environmental History. The author of Devil's Bargains:Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West, Rothman is a frequent commentator on Las Vegas. He has been featured on National Public Radio, CBS Sunday Morning, and in The New York Times,The Wall Street Journal and in the four-hour A&E Television Network documentary, LasVegas.

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Neon Metropolis

Routledge

Chapter One

The numbers are there, but they don't mean much. How do youexplain a town that began as a railroad land auction in 1905, reached eightthousand in 1940, and topped one million people in 1995? There's noprecedent for Las Vegas, no way to put its experience into the framework ofother American cities. Distinct from the American whole, away from thearrows of progress and prosperity, Las Vegas was an insignificant part of thegreat government-industry matrix that defined the twentieth century. Noset of circumstances led to Las Vegas. It didn't have fertile land or richmineral veins; railroads didn't meet, highways didn't cross there. Banksdidn't seek out Las Vegas, developers didn't fashion it into the next paradise,corporations didn't come to the desert to establish new headquarters,and people certainly didn't come looking for the little oasis to put downroots. Las Vegas's attractiveness was lost on Americans until after WorldWar II and to the mainstream until well after 1975.

The reasons are obvious. Las Vegas was nowhere, a "miserable dinky littleoasis town," the mobster Meyer Lansky supposedly called it, and withouttransportation that made it easy to reach or air-conditioning to make the staybearable, Las Vegas's appeal was as seasonal as any ski resort. Before 1945, ithad little to recommend it. Las Vegas had no markets, no hinterland to colonize. Even today, nearby St. George and southern Utah, heavily Mormon,look north to Salt Lake City; Kingman, Arizona, is a highway crossroads ofits own; Flagstaff is fast becoming a suburb of Phoenix; and Barstow occupiesits own dystopic universe. Las Vegas did not even have enough water to makeit prey for Los Angeles. At its twentieth-century birth, Las Vegas was podunk,weak, and dependent, an inconsequential speck on the map.

The new town was typical of the small-town West. Modern Las Vegasbegan atop the remains of a nineteenth-century Mormon settlement thatleft only a few cantankerous ranchers. It started as a railroad town, a repairshop for the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad. Like so manyother places in the West, its sustenance came from the rails, and when theyprospered, as they did with the opening of the silver mines in Bullfrog andRhyolite before 1910, so did the town. By 1910, Fremont Street, the heartof the old downtown, was paved, guttered, and flagged with sidewalks, andten miles of local dirt road had been oiled to reduce the dust. The companybuilt sixty-four workers' cottages and offered easy terms to workers whowanted to build their own. When the railroad's fortunes dipped, so did thetown's. A track washout in 1910 sent the population spiking downwardfrom twelve hundred to eight hundred. Only an upsurge in regional fortunesredirected the number upward. A pattern that typified the rural Westin this period and ever after defined Las Vegas was set: the town wasdependent on decisions made in other places.

Las Vegas's circumstances mirrored the history of the state. Nevada hasalways been a colony, dependent on the whims and needs of other larger,more powerful states, some adjacent like California, others farther away.Shoehorned into the Union to guarantee Abraham Lincoln's reelection in1864, Nevada enjoyed the privilege of statehood at the cost of its dignity and,some said, its independence. Some nineteenth-century senators fromNevada never lived in the state. Some of those who did never bothered toattend the Senate. Nevada may be the only state in the union that faced thegenuine prospect of losing its statehood. By 1900, the state's population hadso dwindled that its status was in question. Representative Francis Newlands,a Californian who transcended the carpetbagger label, decided that farmerswould save the state. In 1902, he engineered the Reclamation Act, whichcreated the Reclamation Service, later the Bureau of Reclamation, toimpound water for yeoman farmers. The bureau became a dam-buildingmonstrosity, a remarkable example of what political scientists call the "irontriangle" that took on a life of its own. Despite Newlands's intentions, theReclamation Act created a new colonial master for Nevada, a federal agencythat controlled the most basic need of an arid state.

For two decades, Las Vegas was a simple small western town. Its mainindustry was the Union Pacific, which bought out the San Pedro, LosAngeles, and Salt Lake in 1921, kept the maintenance shop, and becamemaster of the railroad town, responsible for its infrastructure as well as forits open social climate. Las Vegas had all the virtues and vices of such places.It was tough, raw, and sometimes mean. The rules of high-tone Americanot only did not apply, they simply didn't exist. Like many similar towns,Las Vegas did not explicitly forbid prostitution. As long as it was confinedto one square block, block 16 of the original town plat, "quasi-legal" bestdefined its status. Railroad flat restricted gambling, legal in Nevada untilProgressive reformers barred it in 1910 in a prohibition that lasted until1931 and alcohol to the same area. Illegal but only in a technical sense, suchactivities were part of the compact the railroad made when it created townsthat functioned like the port cities of yore. The railroad brought life and ittacitly condoned behavior at odds with Victorian norms. Railroad companieswell understood the advantages and drawbacks of the rails, and townsthat grew up along them made accommodation, even in the most moralisticof times.

Las Vegas's circumstances were typical of the rural West and even morecharacteristic of railroad towns. The railroad provided a capital regime; itwas the only consistent source of funding for the town, and its goals determinedthose of the city. Much like the cattle trade of the nineteenth century,the rails brought a rowdy element with plenty of cash and a feeling ofmobility. Workers lived in Las Vegas, but travelers passed through, and thesense of movement along the rails freed people from place and time. Viceflourished and became an integral part of local commerce. Although stillconsidered not quite proper, it was recognized as necessary. Catering toother people's desires proved so lucrative that even the most upright small-townburghers held their noses and looked away, as they had in the cattletowns. The accommodation made life palatable. Without vice there wasn'tenough business to eke out a living.

This condition reflected a larger theme in the state's history. WhileNevada liked to bill itself as the Old West, where the rules of modern civilizationdidn't apply, it was equally true that the state had few choices.Neither of its two nineteenth-century industries, mining and railroads,encouraged stability. Mining exploded on the landscape, peaked in greatrushes, then left huge visible scars as testimony to its transience. The railroadepitomized nineteenth-century mobility, defying the rooted ideals ofthe time. Its reputation in American folklore for encouraging transienceand license and freedom inspired generations of songwriters and otherartists. The state embraced these industries because it had no other choice.If Nevadans seemed more willing to mind their own business than most,this incipient libertarianism was a product of the limits of its land andinfrastructure in a harsh climate.

One-owner towns had their drawbacks for the people who lived inthem. Even though they allowed locals considerable autonomy and leeway,outside power maintained tremendous control. Early Las Vegas was wise toheed and placate its masters. When it didn't, disaster resulted. After theUnion Pacific purchase in 1921, the new owners laid off sixty workers, earningthe ire of the town. The next year, an opportunity arose for railroadworkers to pay back their new overlords; workers shut Las Vegas down duringthe national railroad strike in 1922. The new masters were not amused.In retribution, the Union Pacific signed the town's death warrant: it movedthe maintenance shop and three hundred jobs to Caliente, about 125 milesuptrack toward Utah. The railroad regime ended as arbitrarily as it hadstarted, and Las Vegas was consigned to the fate of other small western towns.It had to adapt-or diminish, wither, and finally go under. The period justfollowing the railroad's departure was the bleakest in modern Las Vegas'sshort history. The whistle-stop easily could have become a ghost town.

Only California and its imperial need for water saved the city. Sincethe remarkable fiction that created modern Los Angeles, the City of Angelsbecame a vacuum for every drop of water it could collect. SouthernCalifornia's growth demanded ever more water and threatened its neighborsnear and far, paralyzing even distant states like Colorado. Largely toprevent California from taking all the water in the Colorado River, theother river states sued for peace. The result was ratification in 1927 of theColorado Compact, which adjudicated the waters of the Colorado River ona state-by-state basis, and the decision to construct the Boulder Dam, nowHoover Dam, the largest public works project of its time, in Black Canyonabout thirty miles from Las Vegas.

The dam was the signal event in the history of southern Nevada withramifications far beyond the region. Beginning in 1931, construction lastednearly four years, which meant four years of paychecks to almost fivethousand workers at the height of the Depression. When Franklin D.Roosevelt dedicated the dam on September 30, 1935, the 760-foot concreteface presided over a technological miracle: a holding tank for all thewater in the river, distributed by legal agreement between haves and have-nots.The dam created life, an economy, infrastructure, business, and eventourism. Secretary of the Interior Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur decided he wantedno part of the sinful railroad town of Las Vegas for the project. A sternmoralist, Wilbur preferred the dry style of the Coolidge administration thatpreceded his tenure. Although Wilbur built a government town calledBoulder City, dry and free of gambling, the road to the dam led through LasVegas. Wilbur's puritanism had inadvertently given Las Vegas a new future.

The synergy the dam created was tremendous. Its success paved the wayfor the the Bureau of Reclamation to become the preeminent federalagency of the 1930s and a powerful engine of federal spending until the1970s. After Boulder Dam, the Bureau of Reclamation engaged in forty-yearorgy of dam building until it controlled the distribution of most of thewater west of the Mississippi River and created legions of dependent localoligarchies in the small-town and mini-city West. As the dam revived LasVegas, it also provided a new master, one that carried other federal beneficiariesin tow.

Las Vegas was entirely typical of other western towns in the 1930s. Theregion's economy survived or thrived based on the size of the federal contribution.Compared to places without a Civilian Conservation Corpscamp, which housed young men paid a dollar a day to work on federal projects,or a WPA project, Las Vegas fared well. The dam pumped $19 millioninto the region. Another $4 million went for federal dole to the many disappointedpeople who showed up in southern Nevada for a job only to findthat they were all filled. In the desperate 1930s, Las Vegas was little differentfrom Wichita, Omaha, Billings, or Prescott. It responded to the samestimuli and felt the same losses, held to same sentiments and emotions andaspired to the same things. There wasn't a tube of neon to be found, andwhen Slats Jacobs, a Las Vegas cowboy who competed in the national rodeocircuit, won the annual competition held in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1938, hewas the archetype of the moment. Despite the preeminence of the NationalFinals Rodeo in Las Vegas every December since the 1980s, Jacobs mighthave been the last real cowboy of any note to come from Las Vegas.

There was one way that Las Vegas could stand apart from the multitudeof similar towns. It possessed a sense of itself as a place out of time, left overfrom an older western past. A certain amount of the Old West was considered ribald by 1930s standards, but Las Vegas wasn't really sinful, its symbolismseemed to say. It just hadn't changed while everyone else had, andso held a convenient place in memory that allowed it-and you, when youvisited-to get away with things that you couldn't at home. In a society quickto condemn aberrant behavior yet nostalgic for its lost roots, ribald couldbe packaged as individual freedom.

This tradition became the crux of the vaunted Nevada individualism,the most appealing and vexing characteristic of the state then and now.Nevada was and is wide open, a dream for anyone who was ever a sophomorein college and entranced by Ayn Rand, even for a moment. In theirrugged self-image, Nevadans pride themselves on having real freedom, notthe namby-pamby eighteenth-century Paul Revere-style freedom withinthe constraints of the community, but the right to do what you want, wheneveryou want, wherever you want, and with whomever you want. Fusing itsrugged history with economic necessity, Nevada put as few constraints onthe individual as possible. Your property is your property more in Nevadathan in any other state in the union; you can carry a concealed weapon withless red tape than in most places, and the concept of self-defense-yourright to protect yourself-is carried further in Nevada law than elsewhere inthe nation. The desert alone was not the sole attraction for James "Bo"Gritz, the survivalist who negotiated the surrender at Ruby Ridge in Idaho.Nor is it accident that within a mile of the state capitol in Carson City, legalhouses of prostitution flourish. Nevada is the home of the SagebrushRebellion, an attempt to privatize most federal lands in the West under thepretext of furthering private property rights. Nevada still sells this samenostalgia. All of this individualism pulls on the nation's emotions in an agewhen we're oppressed by institutions and information and told that the selfis all there is. But this romanticism embodies a difficult paradox: withideals like these, it's hard to run a modern society.

The next capital regime, federal dollars, illustrated the perils of colonialexistence. Lacking industry or infrastructure, Las Vegas depended firstand foremost on outside money. Almost as an afterthought, the state permittedactivities that were regarded as scandalous. Southern Nevadansespecially recognized the perils of dependence. An arbitrary change in federalpolicy could threaten not only individual livelihood, but the economicviability of the entire region. Before air-conditioning, attractingnewcomers to a town where summer temperatures routinely topped 110degrees was a difficult task without the lure of easy prosperity.



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Excerpted from Neon Metropolisby Hal Rothman Copyright © 2003 by Hal Rothman. Excerpted by permission.
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