Las Vegas and Los Angeles on Gambling
Visitors encountered a bit of Hollywood and a bit of Disneyland, a bit of Beverly Hills and a bit of the Sunset trip--- in Las Vegas.
The resort city catered to Southern California's fondness for glamour and fantasy, affluence and movement.
Moreover, casinos ensured that, like cars, movies, and tract homes, gambling was available to every man.
In short, gambling in southern Nevada distilled for vacationers from across the land those aspects of Southern California culture that made the Far West a pacesetter for American society.
At the same time, that Las Vegas illuminated the direction of rapid cultural change, it also registered the tribute that such change demanded. If Southern California's outpost in Nevada presaged the future, it became increasingly high after mid-century that the future had its limits; that the westering process perhaps had an end after all.
Again, legal casino gaming only condensed and highlighted in Las Vegas the senses of constraint and malaise present in the Los Angeles basin.
Along the Las Vegas Strip and in downtown Casino Center, the gambling business trended to be dominated by rigid formulas that standardized the design of hotels and casinos--- and maximized the volume of players, suggesting that post industrial developments yet required greater imagination.
In the desert metropolis, gambling served to intensify the rootless and atomistic character of society. Those urbanities who styled themselves Las Vegans nurtured an individualistic ethos for city living, enshrined the privacy of autos and single-family houses as essential for the good life.
Also, this turned inward from the risks of the gambling capital. They thus built a hometown that could protect them from the bettor and the tourist, but their responses to the proximity of gambling, and to the boomtown conditions, increased the fragmentation of community rather than reducing it.
The future that Las Vegas represented was hardly a sure thing.
Like Americans on earlier frontiers, residents of Las Vegas proved ambivalent about betting, but more than previous Westerners, they found themselves living with gambling and its trappings.
At first they tried to limit the prevalence of betting by subordinating it to the idea of the last frontier, a theme chosen to characterize life in the Silver State and promote Nevada to tourists.
But during and after the Second World War, Las Vegans reoriented themselves quickly from old West to ultimate West, from Nevada to California, and appealed much more successfully to tourists from the Pacific slope as facts of life.
They also built an urban resort, with gaming as its central feature--- that expressed the growing influence of the Far West on American culture.
Both as last frontier and as new frontier, Las Vegas capsulized the relationship between gambling and the American West.
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