Gambling History - Part 3
Gambling flourished in other Western mining camps
and towns that supplied the prospectors. Virginia
City, Comstock, and Deadwood became as well known for
faro and gunfights over card games as they did for
mineral wealth. Even cattle towns such as Dodge City,
Kansas, had forty saloons and gambling houses to cater
to the cowboys, buffalo hunters, and railroad workers
that visited it in 1875. But prohibition was in the
wind.
Scandals involving lottery ticket sales, including a
massive fraud in the Louisiana lottery in 1894, the
rise of baseball and other spectator sports, and a
revival of moral concerns against idleness,
drunkenness, and debauchery led to laws against
lotteries and gambling in most states by 1910.
"Puritanism [was] the inflexible doctrine of Los
Angeles," one historian noted. By 1908, 289 of
the nation's 314 thoroughbred horse race tracks had
been closed.
Horse racing was the first gambling industry to be
reborn. Colonel Matt J. Winn, president of Churchill
Downs, dusted off old pari-mutual machines stored in
the back of the track's storehouse, banished illegal
bookmakers, and made sure the state of Kentucky got a
share of every bet made at his track. Pari-mutual
horse wagering was legalized in other states,
especially during the cash-strapped Depression years.
State racing boards or commissions supervised the
tracks, reducing cutthroat competition and providing
an aura of respectability for a public concerned about
the connection between gambling and crime.
Professionals gamblers remained, epitomized by George
E. Smith, better known as "Pittsburgh Phil,"
who made horse betting into a science. Bookmakers
prospered as well, off track, aided by advances in
communication such as radio. Although state lotteries
were not revived until 1964, numbers games were
introduced to Harlem by West Indian immigrants in the
1920s and spread to other cities. Manufactured games
such as pull tabs and punch boards appeared in rural
areas, as did illegal slot machines and other
electronic devices. Almost 25 percent of Americans
admitted gambling on church-sponsored bingo games and
lotteries in a 1938 Gallop poll. New York Mayor
Fiorello LaGuardia stated the obvious, "if bingo
is unlawful in one place, it cannot be lawful in
another." Politicians have tried to resolve this
dilemma over the remainder of the twentieth century.
Most casinos and "gambling hells" were shut
down during the early 1900s, even in obscure locations
such as French Lick, Indiana, and Canton, Ohio. True
to the worst fears of the Puritans, gangsters combined
liquor and gambling in New York, Cleveland, Chicago,
and other cities during the 1920s. Florida temporarily
legalized slot machines during the depths of the
Depression at about the same time that El Monte and
Gardena, California, licensed poker. But it was a
dusty little Nevada town located on the old Spanish
Trail that reintroduced casinos and gambling to
twentieth-century America.
Las Vegas was established as a Mormon mission before
the Civil War. Its future was assured when the San
Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake railroad laid track
in 1904 and three other railroads, including the Union
Pacific, soon followed suit. The railroads were the
town's primary employer but the providing of ice,
refreshments, shelter, and other amenities became
almost as important. Although gambling was banned in
Nevada in 1909, Las Vegas continued to grow, reaching
a population of 5,165. It remained a railroad town
until divorce and gambling laws were relaxed and the
federal government began the construction of Hoover
Dam in 1930.
The first major hotel, the 100-room Apache, opened in
1932 to augment an active red light district
patronized by dam workers. So many workers and their
families poured into Las Vegas that the New York Times
claimed the city had "a touch of Mexico's
Tijuana" in 1936. Still, Las Vegas continued to
be outpaced by its primary competitor, Reno, and
boasted only six casinos and sixteen saloons by 1939.
The post-World War II improvement of automobiles and
highways, especially to and from Los Angeles, forever
changed Las Vegas. Downtown's Fremont Street became
"Glitter Gulch" and the vacant Las Vegas
Boulevard was renamed the "Strip." Three
casinos opened in 1946 including mobster Benjamin
"Bugsy" Siegel's Flamingo Hotel. The
Horseshoe Club began hosting the World Series of Poker
in 1951. Motion pictures such as the 1952 Las Vegas
Story, staring Jane Russell and Victor Mature, and the
1959 Oceans Eleven, which featured the "rat
pack," Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis, Jr., Frank
Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Joey Bishop, promoted the
growing sophistication of Las Vegas.
The movies also helped establish gambling as an adult
entertainment in a decade noted for juvenile
attractions from Elvis Presley (who later became a Las
Vegas star) to McDonald's. They also helped erase
gambling's disreputable, low-class image. Las Vegas'
gambling industry survived and even thrived under
scrutiny from investigators led by Senator Estes
Kefauver. His Senate Special Committee to Investigate
Organized Crime leaned heavily on gambling during the
early 1950s, but only a few of the committee's
proposals were legislated.
The Golden Nugget was the first Las Vegas property
created specifically as a hotel-casino, but every
hotel provided gambling. Eventually all would feature
big-name entertainment, led by pianist Liberace, who
headlined the new Riviera in 1955. The city's
reputation as the "last" frontier served not
only as a recurring casino and hotel theme, but
intensified the gambling experience. Just as thrill
seekers had swarmed San Francisco's casinos a century
earlier, gamblers escaped their ordinary lives in the
fantasy world of Las Vegas, surrounded by flashing
lights and jingling coins, visual and auditory
"noise" that heightened their sensations of
gambling. Sports betting became popular, influenced in
part by the banning of Pete Rose from baseball in
1989.
The first theme property, the Circus Circus Hotel
Casino, opened in 1968, was joined by the Mirage in
1989, the Excalibur in 1990, and Treasure Island in
1993, attracting a new type of visitor, the
middle-class family. The introduction of gambling in
Atlantic City and other locations induced Las Vegas to
reinvent itself once again, providing educational
attractions such as dolphin habitats and family
entertainment acts like magicians Siegfried and Roy.
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