Las Vegas on the Rise
Southern California continued to thrive, but ecological plight and social dilemmas produced doubts where only confidence had prevailed before.
Las Vegas survived as well, but without the aura of invincibility that characterized it during the late forties and the fifties.
The gambling industry and the resort city continued to grow impressively, but along with Los Angeles they were past their prime as harbingers of tomorrow.
They had lost much of the promise that they once held out to the postwar people of America.
Both the pitfalls and the paradoxes of the future that Southern California and southern Nevada expressed resulted in large part from the rapidity of social and cultural change.
In Las Vegas, the future materialized before the past could give way.
Since the legalization of casino gambling in 1931, the transformation of the area had virtually never stopped gaining speed.
The city hardly had time to come to grips with its frontier heritage, which reached its fullest embodiment in Glitter Gulch during the early 1940s, before another age and another vision blossomed suddenly into a quite different resort district along the Strip.
Save for times of unusual financial crisis as in 1955-1956, postwar Las Vegans had little interest in coordinated planning or imaginative city building.
Like Angelenos, they grasped the future eagerly as they embraced gambling, without weighing carefully the costs or planning fully for the consequences.
Lacking much sense of tradition and any general agreement on direction, the spectacular resort grew recklessly after 1940.
It incorporated into its rapid expansion diverse and often inconsistent elements that made it a showcase for the shifting and heterogeneous culture of the United States and the Far West, as well as an index to the limits of tomorrow.
Most Americans came to know Las Vegas as a gambling resort and hardly noticed the problems that it foretold of the future, but the city also served as home for more than one hundred thousand people by 1960.
Although most southern Nevadans applauded rapid growth and contributed to rapid change, they also gradually recognized the toll that growth and change exacted from their community, and tried to shelter themselves from the resulting problems.
At the same time that it reached out for the promise of the future and came face to face with limitations, Las Vegas grew like a frontier boom town from the past and so replicated many of the old problems of westering societies.
The fast pace of change, the devotion to risk taking, and the prevalence of cultural paradox did not always sit well with local citizens, even though they, too, were people of chance.