Gambling: Las Vegas Brings it On

Los Angeles played the same role within the state that California played for the nation.

The metropolis became the preeminent city in the Far West, the changing part of the Golden State, and the most fertile source of new cultural styles during the twentieth century.

There, westering migrants arrived in the largest numbers with the loftiest expectations; new methods of production and ways of living gained the earliest acceptance.

Postindustrial society blossomed first. Southern California had been the most forward-looking part of the state since the rapid expansion of the late nineteenth century.

This taught Angelenos to expect and plan for growth, and to view technological progress as essential for mastering an improbable natural setting.

Southern Californians lived for tomorrow. Their future tended to be organized in a series of speculative booms that engaged Angelenos in projecting their lives beyond the present.

Southern Californians gambled continuously on the future, and so explored the only frontier left for the American West.

They simultaneously developed novel cultural forms, such as casino betting in Las Vegas, that suited the new day.

Los Angeles relished its role as cultural pacesetter for the nation, but it also paid a price.

The future never quite turned out as anticipated; some expectations remained unfulfilled, and gambles did not always pay off.

The troubles resulting from automobiles in the metropolitan area demonstrated the pitfalls of such a headlong leap into modernity, and suggested that the future, like other frontiers, had its limits.

Yet Southern Californians' enthusiasm for tomorrow never seemed to diminish through the mid-1960s.

As cultural leaders for the rest of the nation, and as residents of an increasingly rich and influential urban center, Southern Californians shared with other Americans the lessons of their encounter with the future.

Attitudes toward affluence, automobiles, technology, work, and leisure emanated from Southern California to the rest of the nation, making Los Angeles the heart of the cultural frontier reshaping American society from West to East during the mid-twentieth century.

Las Vegas assumed a prominent place on this cultural frontier because, especially on the strip after 1945, certain of the changes originating in Southern California appeared there in accelerated form.

The urban resort was slower to acquire the high-tech enterprise and diversified economy that Los Angeles seized so rapidly.

In southern Nevada however, where commercial play provided the economic base, the cultural changes involving leisure appeared quickly and came into sharp focus.

They made the city 'the new frontier of the entire West in its way of life'.

Observers often overlooked the modern economy of Los Angeles and concentrated on its unique recreations as an essential measure of the metropolis.

In Las Vegas, on the other hand, visitors devoted themselves to play every day of the week. If 'amusement' seemed to be one of the major contributions of Los Angeles to American civilization, it could be discerned most clearly in Las Vegas.

The desert city accelerated and concentrated Southern California trends that were remaking leisure.

By heightening the senses of freedom, luxury, and mobility, the commercialization of play, the significance of recreation, the feelings of fantasy and rootlessness, and the availability of the fruits of affluence surely paved the way for its success.