1. The Rise of Corporate Resorts

Vegas at Odds: Labor Conflict in a Leisure Economy, 1960–1985

No 1
The Rise of Corporate Resorts

Modern systems of water distribution and air-conditioning have turned many desert towns into thriving urban complexes. Las Vegas’s rise, however, was unique. In the quarter century after World War II, its population grew at a faster rate than that of any other city in the nation. Warm weather, low taxes, affordable housing, and employment opportunities attracted residents; gaming, entertainment, and other leisure activities enticed tourists. The construction and then the operation of new hotels and casinos created thousands of jobs. By the 1970s, hotels and casinos in the metropolitan area employed about thirty thousand people, a third of the workforce, and other tourist-related businesses another third.

Entrepreneurs as well as public policies facilitated this development. The collaboration between entrepreneurs and bureaucrats, including government agencies at the national, state, and local levels, bestowed a sense of legitimacy on a category of business activity that many Americans still saw as questionable or undesirable, if not sinful. That legitimacy encouraged industrial development and soon ushered in a new age of enterprise in which large corporations had distinct business and economic advantages. The advent of corporate structures and corporate control, though not apparent to tourists, loomed large in the eyes of resort workers. By the mid-1970s, corporations occupied the vital center in the story of tourism and tourist work in Las Vegas.

In 1950 Nevada was a sparsely populated agricultural and mining state in the Great Basin, an arid region of the American West stretching from the Sierra Nevadas to the Rocky Mountains. Its agriculture centered on stock raising and hay production, the expansion of which was limited by lack of water and irrigation systems. Mining centered on copper, zinc, and lead production. Gold and silver production was also important to the state’s economy, but largely a byproduct of other mining operations. Nevada’s small population and isolated location inhibited development in other sectors of the economy. The state’s population was 160,000, that of its largest city, Reno, 32,000.¹

Political leaders were already hard at work to change these circumstances. Among the earliest of these was Charles Russell, the first Republican to hold the governorship in the postwar period. After assuming office in 1951, Russell wrote personal letters to business leaders across the country, boasting of Nevada’s warm climate, low taxes, and improving transportation systems, describing the state as a “strategic center” in the rapidly growing West, and thus a “logical place” to locate new distributive and manufacturing facilities. He also drew attention to opportunities in recreation and leisure. “Nevada is growing steadily in prestige as one of the West’s foremost recreation states,” Russell wrote, “and its varied types of entertainment are unexcelled anywhere.”²

By this time, the business of providing accommodations, transportation, and other services to tourists was the most dynamic sector of Nevada’s economy. Like other western states, Nevada benefited handsomely from the postwar surge in vacation and recreational spending.³ Camping grounds and other indoor and outdoor recreational facilities drew tens of thousands of people to Lake Tahoe in northern Nevada, and to Lake Mead in the south, where the chief attraction remained the still relatively new Hoover Dam, “the great pyramid of the American West.” Harnessing the fast-moving waters of the Colorado River, that dam provided much needed water and energy to the West. Built in the 1930s, the dam was a massive engineering phenomenon. Some 400,000 people took guided tours of it in 1950, a figure that increased steadily thereafter.⁴

Legalized gambling, however, was already Nevada’s greatest attraction to outsiders. Gambling had been a way of life in Nevada since the nineteenth century, when mining camps and boomtowns were major centers of economic activity. It was legal from 1869 to 1909, when reform-minded citizens succeeded in outlawing it and other “immoral” activities. The state removed the ban in 1931, however, and at midcentury gambling was the driving force behind the state’s emerging tourist industry and a major source of tax revenue. Gross gambling income in Nevada topped $50 million in 1951, which exceeded the value of all minerals produced in the state. About 3 percent of that money went into the state’s tax coffers.⁵

Public officials often portrayed gambling as one part of the state’s larger recreation and leisure economy, as though it fit in the mainstream of American business activity. But gambling was an unusual industry. The firms engaged in it were unlike the state’s other businesses, including those in other tourist-oriented activities. In the early postwar years, legalized gambling as often as not took place in dingy bars, pool halls, or characterless commercial buildings. Even glitzy gambling locales looked more like saloons than modern casinos. Most operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and were patronized almost exclusively by men. Although these establishments were supposed to be licensed, it was a challenge for public officials to check their paperwork or their books. They had difficulty detecting “skimming” and the resulting tax fraud in such places, or even ensuring they were properly licensed. Such establishments often served as gathering places for alcoholics, hoodlums, and prostitutes and might even admit minors with money to lose. They were constantly under attack by opponents of gambling, who hoped once again to outlaw the activity.⁶

The popularity of gambling reflected the interest many people had in playing slot machines and table games like blackjack and poker, knowing—or suspecting—that the odds of winning were tilted against them. Slot machines, which one operated by inserting coins into a slot and pulling down a handle on the side, were typically programmed to retain 5 to 10 percent of the money inserted. Though an occasional player beat the machines out of a meaningful sum of money, almost no one beat them over a long period of time. The odds of winning table games were not much better. Experienced players had a much better chance of winning than amateurs, but “the house” always had an advantage. The house—the proprietors—treated the lucky few who won “jackpots” as celebrities, which only encouraged other would-be jackpot winners.⁷

By the early 1950s, gambling in Las Vegas, a fledgling city on the southern tip of the state, was centered downtown. The city originated near springs of fresh water in a large valley in which indigenous Native Americans and then Spanish-speaking settlers had once lived, and in which Mormon missionaries later canvassed. It was little more than a whistle stop on the Union Pacific Railroad until the late 1920s, when President Herbert Hoover approved construction of the nearby dam that bears his name. Only twenty-five miles southeast of Las Vegas, the construction site attracted thousands of job-hungry Americans during the worst years of the Great Depression. Many of the job seekers brought their families with them, and many of these settled in Las Vegas.⁸ The population of the area surged again during World War II, when the federal government funded construction of a huge magnesium processing plant south of Las Vegas, powered by energy from Hoover Dam. The plant employed more than two thousand people, more than any mining operation in the state. Its presence encouraged construction of new housing and creation of new service activities in and around the city.⁹

By midcentury, Las Vegas was a bustling municipality of twenty-five thousand people, surrounded by several thousand more in nearby Henderson, Boulder City, and North Las Vegas, and in such suburbs as Paradise City and Winchester. The population of Clark County, which encompassed these areas, topped fifty thousand.¹⁰ Economically, the area benefited from new manufacturing enterprises as well as new wholesale and retail outlets, and from an especially dynamic construction industry. Between 1950 and 1954, the value of new construction in greater Las Vegas quadrupled over that of the previous five years, from $15 million to $60 million.¹¹

The construction of several large hotels and casinos along a three-mile stretch of highway just outside the Las Vegas city limits, which came to be known as the “Strip,” spearheaded this construction boom. The first gaming properties appeared outside the city limits in the early 1930s, when city officials limited gambling in the city to a few downtown “clubs.” The largest and most lavish of these out-of-the-city establishments, the Meadows Club, opened on the road to Hoover Dam only months after Nevada legalized gambling in 1931. But it was El Rancho, which opened in 1941 on Highway 91 a mile south of downtown, that ushered in the new age of development on the Strip. The Last Frontier opened near El Rancho a year later, and the Flamingo and the Thunderbird soon thereafter. Like their downtown counterparts, these Strip properties kept their casinos open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.¹²

Strip properties had distinct advantages over their downtown competitors. Their location made them the first places motorists from Los Angeles reached in the area and enabled them to avoid city taxes and land prices. They were also more than gaming houses, or gaming houses with facilities for overnight guests. They were resorts, upscale hotels with varieties of recreational facilities and leisure services for vacationers as well as gamblers. The Flamingo, the most glamorous of them, had not only a large gambling casino but more than a hundred hotel rooms, an unusually large swimming pool surrounded by lush gardens and palm trees, a gym and steam room, as well as badminton, handball, squash, and tennis courts, a stable of forty riding horses, even a trap-shooting range. Its waiters and dealers wore tuxedos and treated customers as guests after the fashion of comparable establishments in Monte Carlo.¹³

The Thunderbird seemed modest by comparison, but its Navaho Indian motif gave it a distinctive character and charm, as did its fine-dining restaurant, which featured not only rich, red carpeting, crystal chandeliers, and spectacular views of the swimming pool and surrounding garden but gourmet food as well. Guests who found this or an equally elegant Oyster Bar too formal or expensive could patronize a smart coffee shop just off the casino floor, open around the clock. Twice a day, the shop featured a “chuck wagon” buffet that offered popular dining favorites, such as prime roast beef and southern fried chicken.¹⁴

In the early 1950s, after Clark County officials blocked Las Vegas’s efforts to annex the Strip, the resorts there increased in size and number and in the economic level and cultural sophistication of their appeal. The Desert Inn, which opened in 1950, was perhaps the most impressive of the new resorts in these respects. Spread over seventeen acres, it boasted three hundred air-conditioned hotel rooms with individual thermostats and a 2,400-square-foot casino, the largest in the state. It also featured an eighteen-hole golf course that hosted professional tournaments. The Sahara and the Sands opened two years later, followed soon by the Dunes, the Riviera, the Tropicana, and the Stardust. Each seemed to reach new heights in resort development. The Stardust, for example, had more hotel rooms—one thousand—than any of its competitors, as well as the supreme status symbol, the largest neon sign on the Strip. Some 216 feet long and 27 feet high, the sign was the first Las Vegas image motorists saw as they approached the Strip from the west, that is, from Southern California.¹⁵

Because these resorts were newer, larger, and more elegant than downtown properties, the Strip soon acquired an atmosphere of its own. Sensing this, entrepreneurs soon remade downtown in the image of the Strip. A refurbished and enlarged Golden Nugget, which had opened there in 1945 at Fremont and Second streets, had the most hotel rooms and the largest, most glamorous casino downtown. It also had a gourmet restaurant, and the city’s tallest neon sign, which soared a hundred feet in the air. It likewise had a distinctive motif, a romanticized re-creation of old San Francisco and the Barbary Coast. Construction of the Fremont Hotel soon further changed the downtown landscape. At fifteen stories, with chips of quartz on its exterior sparkling in the sun, the Fremont was the tallest structure in the state, and one of the most visually dazzling. The $6 million spent to construct and furnish it was a staggering sum at the time. Despite these improvements, the downtown area remained less glamorous than the Strip through the postwar years. Its hotels and casinos never matched the elegance of the Strip and offered less in terms of dining and entertainment facilities, catering as they did largely to slot machine players.¹⁶

This first wave of remaking Las Vegas ended in the late 1950s. By then, the Strip boasted a dozen multimillion-dollar resorts, all of them with extravagant features and services, including live stage shows and finedining, and downtown hotels had attractions of their own. Collectively, the resorts and hotels in the two areas had become the cornerstone of the Las Vegas economy, attracting millions of tourists and gamblers. In 1960 nearly ten million people visited the area and spent an estimated $250 million, including $100 million on gambling.¹⁷ These figures continued to rise rapidly, especially after McCarran Airport expanded to accommodate jet aircraft, which shrank flight times from the East Coast by half.¹⁸

In 1964, when Nevada celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary of statehood, Governor Grant Sawyer took the opportunity to boast of these transformations. “We no longer are a rustic Western outpost with our eyes turned to the age of cattle kings and mining barons,” Sawyer proclaimed, “[but] a modern, progressive state.” The governor, a Democrat, had made his own notable contribution to this development. A year earlier, Sawyer had sent a thirty-seven-person “Sell Nevada” delegation on a three-week tour of Europe to discuss investment in the state with business and civic leaders in six Europe an nations. His mood was celebratory. From 1950 to 1960, the state’s population had increased from 160,000 to 285,000, giving Nevada the fastest growth rate in the nation.¹⁹ This growth was transforming Las Vegas into a metropolis. In 1960, 130,000 people lived in and around the city, constituting more than a third of the state’s population. Most of them enjoyed the conveniences of modern living, from decent housing and medical facilities to an expanding education system and a vigorous community life, as well as a rapidly expanding labor market.²⁰

Tourism was at an all-time high and growing. A new convention center, one of the nation’s first facilities designed specifically for conventions and exhibitions, hosted more than a hundred conventions with more than sixty thousand delegates during its first year of operation. The annual tourist count in Clark County surpassed twelve million in 1964, when tourist spending topped $360 million, having more than doubled in ten years. Gambling in the county that year accounted for more than half the state’s gross gaming income. Las Vegas had become the gaming capital of Nevada, the nation, and the Western Hemisphere.²¹

Organized crime played an important role in some of these developments. In the early 1930s, when Nevada legalized gambling, criminal gangs in the East and Midwest were deeply involved in gambling activity as well as black-market operations that included smuggling alcohol and narcotics into the country. The gangs were distinguished from other criminal groups by their centralized and authoritarian structures of control and the utter ruthlessness of their enforcement methods and mechanizations. Their crimes included intimidation, extortion, kidnapping, smuggling, robbery, and murder. Relations between the several “families” in the gangs depended on many things but often hinged on understandings between leaders, many of whom lived as ostensibly conventional businessmen and whose influence often extended into political circles and law enforcement agencies. Many of them were Italian Americans from southern Italy or Sicily, where the “Mafiosi” had extended unofficial and largely sub-rosa structures of power and patronage.²²

By the 1950s illegal gambling in cities like New York, Chicago, and Miami had, under the patronage of such men, become a major source of income for organized crime. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which monitored such activity, there were in Chicago alone more than ten thousand locations where illicit gambling took place at that time. These included underground casinos much like those operating aboveground in Nevada but, more typically, myriad smaller places all the way down to newsstands, cigar stores, and lowlife watering holes where individual “bookies” accepted bets. There, clients put money on everything from the outcome of sporting events to political elections, even on future weather conditions. Like the owners of Las Vegas casinos, the men who financed the bookies made money by calculating the odds of winning or losing bets to their advantage.²³

As the Nevada gambling industry matured, some of the notorious personalities who operated in this underworld invested in the state’s casinos. A few of them moved to Las Vegas as owners or proprietors of gambling enterprises, including hotels and later resorts, and contracted with legitimate service firms and trade unions to operate the legitimate aspects of their business. Others sent associates-in-crime to oversee the management of their properties. A few leased out the hotel side of their enterprises to independent firms like the United Hotel Company and themselves managed only their gambling casinos. The latter arrangement enabled their “skimming” operations, that is, the withholding of moneys from casino receipts before calculating a total for accounting and tax purposes. This evidently common practice of raking money “off the top” gave owners and investors a lucrative source of tax-free income and enabled them to pay off “hidden interests” in their illicit activities.²⁴

The Flamingo’s owners skimmed money from their casino throughout the postwar period. One of the resort’s managers, Jerry Gordon, later admitted to participating in such operations and, in doing so, explained how the operations worked. Gordon and two of his associates collected money in the Flamingo’s casino three times a day and added it up in a private “counting room.” “My usual function was to record the amounts counted,” Gordon explained. Concerned that FBI agents might be listening in on their conversations by means of a “wiretap,” the men used hand signals to communicate with one another. “Where the currency was sufficient, the counter would call out an amount less than what he had actually counted and would indicate to me by hand signal the amount held out. I would record the amount on the ‘stiff sheet’ and the counter would give me the amount held out, usually in $100 bills, which I would put under the clipboard.” Gordon then transferred the money to a safe-deposit box in the back of the cashier’s cage and later gave it to owners of the resort. For his participation in the operation, Gordon said he was paid money “over and above the salary paid me and reported for income tax purposes.”²⁵

Authorities had difficulty knowing the extent of such activities because of their inability to infiltrate agents into the circles of individuals privy to such information and practices. “Only the most trusted employees take part in the ‘first count’ of receipts at which the ‘skimming’ takes place,” an informant explained to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.²⁶ Authorities even had trouble understanding how casinos worked. “The insidious nature of organized crime was not understood in the 1950s,” the Las Vegas Sheriff’s Department later admitted. “Few persons outside of the casinos possessed the working knowledge needed to control the cash flow and keep the operators honest.”²⁷ No reliable estimate of the amount of gambling revenue skimmed from Las Vegas casinos in the postwar years has ever been established, but FBI agents suggested that casino owners skimmed perhaps a third of their gambling revenues.²⁸

Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, whom the FBI linked to murder and bootlegging in New York, helped work out ways of hiding money as well as financing resort development. Siegel had moved to Southern California in the late 1930s to help associates extend their illegal gambling operations there. He first went to Las Vegas in 1941 to oversee the installation of racing wire services in cooperating casinos, services which became an essential link in nationwide betting on horseracing. Low costs and strong-armed tactics enabled Siegel and his partners to monopolize this market, and they used the monopoly to extort money from illegal book-makers across the country. They used at least some of the extorted money to purchase a controlling interest in the Flamingo, then being constructed on the Strip just beyond El Rancho and the Last Frontier. After spending a million dollars of his own money on the construction of the Flamingo, Siegel borrowed another $3 million to finish it. He did so largely by selling blocks of stock in the Flamingo for $50,000 each. Though he miscalculated the cost of constructing the Flamingo, Siegel’s method of raising capital worked. When unidentified gunmen murdered him in his Southern California residence in 1941, the Flamingo had already opened.²⁹

These patterns of financing became institutionalized with the Desert Inn. The Strip’s fifth resort was the progeny of Wilbur Clark, a former dealer and bartender on gambling boats off the coast of Southern California. By the 1940s Clark had investments in more than a dozen bars in Southern California, the earnings from which he used to purchase a share of El Rancho in Las Vegas. In 1945 he bought a large tract of land on the Strip which he envisioned as the site of his own luxury resort similar to one he had seen in Palms Springs. Clark had difficulty finding the money to build his Desert Inn until 1948, when a group of Cleveland businessmen led by Morris “Moe” Dalitz, a one-time rumrunner who had muscled his way into various “rackets” in the Midwest, lent him more than $1 million to finance his project. In return, Clark gave Dalitz’s group a controlling share in the property, thereby becoming the group’s “front man,” a locally respected businessman who had little control over gaming activity in the resort he ostensibly owned. Several of the Cleveland investors, including Dalitz, moved to Las Vegas in the early 1950s to oversee casino operations at the Desert Inn while employing others to run the hotel side of the enterprise.³⁰

This pattern of investment, ownership, and management appeared also at the Sands, another new Strip resort. One of the original investors in this property, Charlie “Babe” Barron, was a former Chicago bookmaker with two arrests in cases involving gangland-style murders, for which he was once on the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of most important criminals. He also once managed a gambling establishment, Hotel Riviera, in Havana, which federal authorities linked to organized crime. The principal owner of that establishment, Meyer Lansky, another investor in the Sands, was according to the FBI a major figure in the American Mafia. Lansky had worked closely with Siegel at the Flamingo in Las Vegas and reportedly controlled gambling syndicates in Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, and other states. FBI informants linked him and other investors in the Sands in Las Vegas to illegal gambling operations in Houston, Minneapolis, Palm Springs, and St. Louis.³¹

If mob figures in Las Vegas behaved as they did in other cities, where bloody factional fighting was common, reform-minded Nevadans might once again have outlawed gambling. But men like Meyer Lansky knew the importance of appeasing the local electorate and insisted on keeping the city a relatively pleasant place to live. Las Vegas was what one former police officer called an “open city,” where warring factions from across the country shared in the gambling industry’s profits. “This was not the mob that had terrorized the cities of the East,” the officer explained. “This was the mob on its best behavior. This was a mob that was careful to offend no one among the townspeople, and, in fact, made every effort to endear itself to the population.”³² If mobsters wanted to kill someone, they normally waited until the person was away from Las Vegas, as the case of “Bugsy” Siegel reveals.

The ability of underworld figures to shape resort development in Las Vegas was never controlling, and it declined as legitimate lending institutions began funding casinos and resorts in the city. Local business leaders, along with Salt Lake City bankers, opened one of the city’s first investment institutions, the Bank of Las Vegas, in 1955. Headed by E. Parry Thomas, a Utah Mormon and a longtime investor in Nevada real estate, the bank’s initial capitalization was $250 million. Under Thomas’s direction, the bank financed the construction or expansion of several resorts along the Strip, including the Desert Inn, the Dunes, the Riviera, the Sahara, and the Sands. Its profits from its Las Vegas ventures made it one of the area’s largest financial institutions in the 1960s, when it changed its name to the Valley Bank of Nevada.³³

Another important source of funding for resorts and casinos was the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund. Created in 1955 by the nation’s largest trade union, which had a sizable membership in Las Vegas and Clark County, the Teamsters used the huge resources of this fund to finance enterprises that created jobs for union members. This included tourist resorts in Florida, Southern California, and other locales, including Las Vegas. The union began investing in Las Vegas in 1959, when it made a loan to Moe Dalitz and his associates to build the Sunrise Hotel. Dalitz and his partners tapped the fund again in 1960 to acquire the Fremont Hotel and the Stardust. Over the ensuing decade, the Teamsters fund helped build or improve more than a dozen of the Las Vegas area resorts, including the Aladdin, Caesars Palace, Circus Circus, the Dunes, the Four Queens, the Landmark, and the Sahara.³⁴

These new capital sources, while vital to the development of the resort industry, were limited and tainted by popular as well as FBI association with organized crime.³⁵ In the late 1950s, a congressional investigating committee headed by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas uncovered numerous cases of corruption and political chicanery involving a number of labor unions, including the Teamsters, and the revelations led to the downfall of Teamsters’ president James P. Hoffa, who had helped establish the Central States Fund. By 1967, when Hoffa went to prison for jury tampering, federal investigators had linked organized crime to the fund and concluded that criminals had used it to gain some control of casino operations at Caesars Palace, the Landmark, and the Stardust. The Teamsters had channeled suspect money into Las Vegas through the Bank of Nevada.³⁶

Revelation of these developments over a number of years generated public pressure to remove the men and influences of organized crime from the Las Vegas tourist industry. This encouraged Nevada officials, if reluctantly and gradually at first, to impose regulations on the industry. In 1945 the Nevada Tax Commission assumed responsibility for licensing and taxing gambling establishments, though it lacked the power or the will to confront organized crime in the industry. This began to change in the early 1950s after federal investigators demonstrated conclusively that “skimming” operations were not only financing criminal activity in other parts of the country but cheating state and local governments of tax revenues. In 1955 the state created a Gaming Control Board to remedy this situation by acting as an investigative and enforcement branch of the Tax Commission. The continued rapid expansion of the gaming industry plus budgetary and other constraints on the board, including perhaps its own lack of assertive leadership in novel circumstances, overburdened or otherwise compromised the agency and rendered it in effective. This failure, as well as mounting public concerns, caused the state legislature in 1959 to create the Nevada Gaming Commission with the Control Board as its investigative and enforcement arm.³⁷

These agencies took increasingly effective steps to curtail the presence of criminals and criminal activities in Las Vegas tourism. They made extensive background checks on applicants for casino licenses and denied licenses to anyone with underworld ties. They also distributed a list of persons excluded from the industry, known as the “Black Book,” and warned casino owners that business contacts with anyone in the book could result in the revocation of gaming licenses. In 1962 a federal court rejected challenges to the Black Book, ruling that the “good people” of Nevada were dependent on gaming and therefore justified in taking extraordinary measures to keep the undesirable individuals out of the gaming business. If Nevada gaming authorities believed individual casino owners were ignoring the Black Book, the courts ruled, the individual owner could defend his actions before the Nevada Gaming Commission, which had the power to revoke gaming licenses.³⁸

Singer Frank Sinatra was one of the first to lose his gaming license as a result of this ruling. Sinatra’s widely publicized fight with gaming regulators showed how Nevada was working to clean up the industry. In 1963 state gaming regulators learned that Sam Giancana, one of the men listed in the original Black Book, had recently stayed for more than a week at Sinatra’s Cal Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe. To the regulators Giancana was a mafia figure, and his presence at the lodge evidence of Sinatra’s association with organized crime. Federal agents were already aware of incidents of violence at the lodge and of allegations concerning the interstate transportation of prostitutes there. Giancana’s visit to Sinatra’s lodge thus violated requirements the Gaming Control Board imposed on its licensees. The board therefore subpoenaed several employees of Sinatra’s lodge and, on the basis of their testimony, recommended the revocation of Sinatra’s gaming license. The singer quickly surrendered the license and sold his interests in gaming enterprises.³⁹

Nevada regulators took other steps to fight organized crime. They standardized methods for counting casino moneys and surveilled counting rooms. They prohibited casino owners themselves from counting money. They also placed new restrictions on the activities of “junketeers” who received heavily discounted room rates from hotels in return for bringing groups of gamblers to Nevada. In concert with the Internal Revenue Service, the regulators suspected junketeers of lending money to gamblers at exorbitant rates of interest and channeling interest payments to crime families in the East. A new state licensing process helped regulators identify the junketeers’ financial ties and kept some of them out of gaming.⁴⁰

It was the threat of federal intervention that prompted the state to take these actions. Nevada officials and resort owners alike had long worried that Congress might use the linkage to organize crime to regulate or even outlaw gaming. Proposed laws to do just that had been before Congress since the early 1950s, when a congressional committee headed by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had investigated criminal activity in Nevada. The Kefauver Committee, whose hearings were broadcast nationally, proposed that the federal government shut down gambling in Nevada unless the state got rid of the criminal elements infesting it. The U.S. Supreme Court hinted at the likelihood of federal prohibition of gambling in Nevada when, in 1962, it upheld the state’s right to revoke the gambling licenses of casinos owned by or otherwise connected with anyone listed in the Black Book. If Nevada failed to eliminate known criminals from its gambling industry, the Court ruled, “the federal government would be pressured to move in.” If that happened, the Court continued, “licensed gambling in Nevada would come to an end with ever greater celerity than that which saw the end of polygamy in Utah.”⁴¹ By the late 1960s, after a notable investigation of mob-related activities in Nevada by the Justice Department, all opponents of federal regulation saw the necessity of cleaning up the state’s gambling industry.

Whether the industry could survive such a shakeout was not clear. The men who ran casinos in Las Vegas knew as much or perhaps even more about the intricacies of operating and managing gambling enterprises than anyone else in the country. They understood how cards were “stacked,” slot machines “rigged,” and books “cooked.” Recognizing this, Robbins Cahill, the original chairman of the Gaming Control Board, suggested that such men were “too valuable to lose” for the industry and perhaps even for the Control Board, provided the board could tap into their expertise. “They’re keen businessmen, they’re competitive, and they know the business,” Cahill explained.⁴² Other industry insiders agreed. “We couldn’t learn in a lifetime what some of these ‘old-timers’ know almost instinctively, like when to give a high roller more credit and when to shut him off,” one of them said. “No one else knows as much about running gambling operations.”⁴³ These men were among those who had pioneered the ways of doing business that shaped the tourist industry and made it successful and, in the process, had defined the city and its economic success.

It would be inaccurate to suggest that the mob made Las Vegas what it had become by the 1960s or that there had been no “clean” businessmen in the gambling and resort business before federal officials pressured the state to rid the business of their ties to organized crime. The line between legitimate and illegitimate casino owners seems always to have been blurred. Some individuals with shadowy pasts in gambling were no doubt more businessmen than anything else, and no doubt some ostensibly legitimate businessmen had questionable or even mob connections. The two groups coexisted in Las Vegas with little evident friction, and both contributed to the development of the tourist industry and thus to the city. Many aboveboard entrepreneurs and developers had deep understandings of even arcane aspects of gambling, from table games to horseracing. Like “first movers” in other industries, they had goals of their own and the desire and resources to realize them. At a time when gaming was an open market in which individuals with limited resources could invest, they saw opportunities and seized them. Business acumen and personal connections were critical to their success. They forged partnerships with one another, and worked closely with political, civic, and union leaders to promote their own interests and the interests of their industry. They often relied on relatives to make their enterprises, most of them small, function successfully. They dealt with workers and unions as they had to. Gambling was a risky business. The turnover among owners and managers in the gambling industry in the early postwar years was perhaps as high as the turnover among low-skilled employees.

Sam Boyd, who came to control three major downtown resorts, was evidently an entrepreneur without ties to organized crime. Boyd entered the gaming industry in the early 1930s, running bingo games on a ship off the coast of California. He moved to Las Vegas during World War II, as a penny roulette dealer in a small downtown casino. After the war he became a “pit boss” at El Rancho and then at the Thunderbird, supervising the work of dealers and other casino workers. In 1952, at the age of forty-two, Boyd became an owner of the Sahara, a new Strip property, investing $6,000 of his own money and another $10,000 borrowed from a friend. He worked as a “shift boss” in the casino there for five years before purchasing 3 percent of the new Mint Hotel downtown, where he soon became vice president and general manager.⁴⁴ Like many other men in the industry whose careers paralleled his own, Boyd was a workaholic. “His day would usually start with a function around 7 a.m.,” one of his secretaries later recalled. “Then he’d work till 3 p.m., maybe go home or take a nap for an hour, or just rest on the sofa in his office, then shower and change clothes and work until two or three in the morning. He’d sleep for a couple more hours, then start his day again.” Boyd kept this schedule seven days a week, “and thought everyone else should too.” By the 1970s, Boyd had investments in two additional downtown resorts, the Union Plaza and the California Hotel.⁴⁵

Mel Exber and Jackie Gaughan, longtime business partners, were others who began with limited resources and became successful through hard work and resourceful management. The two men came to know each other in the late 1940s through sports betting. Exber, who then managed a sports book in Las Vegas, took bets from Gaughan, who lived in Omaha, Nebraska. The men worked together after Gaughan moved to Las Vegas in the 1950s, and in 1961 they pooled their resources to buy the Las Vegas Club, a shuttered downtown casino once run by L. B. “Benny” Binion, a gambler who also owned the nearby Horseshoe Club. To turn the property into a successful business, Exber and Gaughan put in race and sports books, introduced table games like faro, and raised betting limits. “We dealt the highest limit craps in town,” Exber recalled. “Ten cents to a thousand dollars.”⁴⁶ They also opened a small restaurant, its walls plastered with caricatures of major league baseball players. “It drew in people with kids,” Exber said of the caricaturing. The men also curried favor with townsfolk through such well-publicized activities as purchasing Girl Scout cookies and distributing them to the public. Their resourcefulness and success enabled them to buy additional downtown establishments, including the Union Plaza and El Cortez.⁴⁷

Such entrepreneurs turned Las Vegas into an entertainment Mecca. As early as the 1930s, gambling clubs began booking nationally known entertainers such as Judy Garland, who performed at the Meadows Club shortly after it opened. By the 1940s, live entertainment had become a regular attraction at the resorts. Pianist and comedian Jimmy Durante performed at the Flamingo when the hotel opened, and other popular entertainers followed him, including Abbot and Costello, the Andrews Sisters, Pearl Bailey, and Xavier Cugat.⁴⁸ Jacob “Jake” Kozloff, a Pennsylvania brewer who purchased the Last Frontier in 1951, showcased such performers as Liberace, Sammy Davis Jr., Nat “King” Cole, and Lena Horne. Such stars added glamour to the emerging marvel already called “Vegas!”⁴⁹

Jack Entratter, one of the original investors in the Sands, played a vital role in this development. Part owner of the Copacabana Nightclub in New York, Entratter moved to the Sands when it opened in 1952 and, by featuring such stars as Martin and Lewis, Paul Anka, and Frank Sinatra, made the Sands a major venue for Las Vegas entertainment. He coaxed such entertainers to perform through multiyear contracts at high pay. He also hired some of the nation’s best songwriters, among them Jule Styne, Sammy Cahn, and Jimmy Van Heusen, to write original music for his productions. A dozen or so “Copa Girls,” whom Entratter billed as “the most beautiful girls in the world,” appeared on stage with the entertainers.⁵⁰ Like baseball caricatures at the Las Vegas Club, the girls helped offset the image of Las Vegas as “Sin City.” They were young, under twenty-three years of age, and had what the Sands called a “wholesome” look. All were new in show business, which helped sustain an image of innocence to match their beauty.⁵¹ Like other Strip properties, the Sands made its showgirls a centerpiece of its marketing campaigns, featuring photos of the “girls” in advertisements across the country. The eroticized photos caught the attention of female as well as male readers, helping to cement the public image of Las Vegas as well as the Sands as one of glamour and excitement.⁵²

Warren Bayley, who opened his Hacienda Hotel at the southern end of the Strip in 1956, was equally innovative. Bayley had run a company with investments in several California hotels, but he saw himself as a “country boy” and shaped the Hacienda in his own image. The resort was cozier and more family-friendly than other Strip properties. Its hotel rooms were better furnished and decorated than those of its competitors. Its swimming pool, shaped like the letter Z, was Nevada’s largest; its night-lighted golf course was unique in Nevada, as was its miniature racetrack around which children drove “pee-wee” race cars. Bayley’s management strategy, described on the cover of Hacienda matchbooks, was to do “everything possible” for his guests. “It is our pleasure to be of service,” the matchbooks read. This was the “Hacienda Way.” It was also what Las Vegas resorts were increasingly offering tourists and gamblers.⁵³

The Hacienda’s marketing campaigns were impressive as well as representative. The resort offered some of the industry’s first “packaged” vacation plans. A basic “Hacienda Holiday” included a deluxe room for $16 a night and $10 in poker chips. More expensive plans not only included these bargains but added tours of Las Vegas and environs, via chartered bus, airplane, and/or helicopter, as the tourist chose. The Hacienda’s general manager, Richard Taylor, came up with an especially innovative promotional stunt after being denied permission to erect a billboard advertising the Hacienda at a major highway intersection where cars heading to Las Vegas from Bakersfield, California, merged with those traveling to the same destination from Los Angeles. Taylor paid two attractive cocktail waitresses to stand at another intersection on the highway where traffic stopped because of a construction project and distribute coupons for free drinks at the Hacienda. One man who received a coupon later testified to the effectiveness of the campaign, which lasted more than a year. “Coming upon a pretty girl in western tights and tassels is something of a surprise,” he said, “especially when she starts moving toward your car.”⁵⁴

The opening of Jay Sarno’s Caesars Palace in 1966 marked another milestone in the evolution of the ownership and management of Las Vegas resorts. Sarno was a building contractor who in the 1950s had used money borrowed from the Teamsters pension fund to build a motel chain in the southeastern United States. With still more money from the Teamsters and several business partners, Sarno built Caesars Palace with such architectural flair as to make the resort itself a tourist attraction foreshadowing a later major feature of Las Vegas tourism. Caesars featured an egged-shaped casino surrounded by Romanesque fountains and statues that included a mammoth inside frieze depicting the Roman battle at Etruscan Hills and an oversized floating lounge called Cleopatra’s Barge. In one of its five restaurants, “wine goddesses” massaged male diners as they ate, while its main showroom, the eight-hundred-seat Circus Maximus, was a miniature of the Roman Colosseum. The hotel itself, a fourteen-story, crescent-shaped Greco-Roman structure, was similarly eye-catching.⁵⁵ The immediate success of Caesars Palace led Sarno soon thereafter to borrow still more money from the Teamsters to open another spectacular property on the Strip across from the Riviera, which he named Circus Circus. Its tent-shaped casino included carnival games, sideshows, and a baby elephant, Tanya, who pulled the handle of a giant slot machine.⁵⁶

Such places made resorts much more than hotels with gambling facilities. When tourists stepped into them, they entered a world of make-believe, of relaxation and diversion, whose regnant values and permissible behaviors were new to middle-class Americans. Everything in sight seemed to mock traditional values. The atmosphere itself spurned bourgeois social conformities even to the point of ridiculing the prudence and moral constraints most Americans used to contour their social lives and public deeds. The aura itself encouraged people to squander money by creating a setting in which squandering was more fun than frugality, an environment that challenged social conventionality and even traditional norms of personal modesty and that privileged indulgence over restraint. In short, Las Vegas entrepreneurs created a breathing space in the American world in which ingrained habits and values could be questioned and, if one were not careful, loosened and even suspended. This was perhaps the entrepreneurs’ most significant accomplishment. They turned Las Vegas into the ultimate destination for adult entertainment.⁵⁷

Basic changes in American culture assisted this effort. Social and political developments in the 1960s transformed popular mores and values in ways that validated the accomplishment just noted. Popular culture became more tolerant of casual dress and relaxed codes of public discourse and activities, which in turn permeated public entertainment. Proponents of women’s liberation promoted relaxed standards of social and sexual behavior, while comedians and other entertainers, many of them African Americans, helped further loosen the standards of permissible public speech. By the early 1970s, as George Carlin noted in one of his famous comedy routines, there were only seven “dirty” words a person could not say on the public airwaves. Las Vegas’s special contribution to these developments was to transform gambling—heretofore variously illegal, sinful, or antisocial behavior—into gaming, an acceptable social diversion.⁵⁸

The shift in control of gambling casinos from entrepreneurs and men associated with organized crime to publicly traded corporations facilitated this transformation. Before the 1960s, the closest example to a modern corporation involving itself in Las Vegas gaming was perhaps Warren Bayley’s ownership and management of the Hacienda Hotel. Bayley raised capital to build the Hacienda through Standard Motels, one of the first publicly owned motel and hotel chains in the nation, of which he was chairman of the board. However, while Standard Motels owned and operated the Hacienda Hotel, Bayley and a few close business associates owned and operated the hotel’s casino.⁵⁹ Del Webb, a businessman who made his fortune in construction, entered the gaming business in a similar way. In 1960, the year stock in the Del Webb Corporation was first publicly traded, the corporation built the Sahara Hotel for associates of Alfred Winter (who once ran an illegal gambling operation in Portland, Oregon). A year later, Webb’s company purchased and operated the Sahara and subsequently invested in the Thunderbird, the Mint, and the Lucky Club.⁶⁰

Corporate investment in gaming was at this point impossible because Nevada law required the Gaming Control Board to investigate anyone with any investment in the industry for ties to organized crime. Because the state interpreted that requirement to include anyone who owned any stock in a licensed gaming corporation, it functioned to keep modern corporations out of the industry. The Gaming Control Board could not possibly run background checks on all stockholders in such corporations, even if the stockholders agreed to be investigated. Warren Bayley and Del Webb had circumvented this requirement by creating subsidiaries of their own to own and operate gaming operations in their hotels. Only men who qualified for gaming licenses invested in these subsidiaries.⁶¹

By 1966, when Republican Paul Laxalt became governor, many Nevada officials, including Laxalt, recognized that the state’s regulatory system had not only failed to exclude men with “mob” connections from the Las Vegas gaming industry but functioned to deter investment in the industry by corporations. The result of this recognition was passage of two corporate gaming acts by the state legislature in 1967 and 1969. The acts amended the state’s gaming codes by opening the industry to the capital resources of American business enterprise. They accomplished this by limiting the requirement for background investigations of corporate stockholders to those who owned more than 5 percent of a corporation applying for a gaming license. The legislation, which Laxalt called the “salvation of Nevada gaming,” opened the door to corporate ownership of gaming properties because the capital resources of major national corporations dwarfed those of “mobsters,” thus putting the latter at a distinct competitive disadvantage. No individuals or syndicate in the underworld could match the financial resources of any such corporation. Once corporations with access to national capital markets began purchasing gaming casinos, often at inflated prices, “mobsters” began disappearing from the industry.⁶²

Howard Hughes, the son of an inventor and businessman who made a fortune in oil and toolmaking, played a symbolic role in the resulting revolution in the ownership and control of Las Vegas gaming. Hughes began investing in mining and real estate in Nevada before he moved to Las Vegas in 1966. On Thanksgiving evening of that year, the reclusive billionaire slipped into Las Vegas and moved into a suite on the top floor of the Desert Inn, a property long associated with organized crime. Cloistered there, he presently applied for a gaming license to buy the property. Governor Laxalt, whose election Hughes had supported, endorsed the application, seeing Hughes as a business leader whose investments and charities would promote the state and its economy.⁶³ His application approved, Hughes bought five Strip properties over the next three years—the Desert Inn, the Sands, the Castaways, the Silver Slipper, and the Frontier. He also tried to buy Caesars Palace, the Stardust, and other resorts, but the federal government blocked his effort on the grounds that the purchases would give him a monopoly on lodging in Las Vegas. He nonetheless added the thirty-one-story Landmark Hotel to his empire in 1969, by which time Hughes controlled about a seventh of Nevada’s gaming revenue, including a quarter of all revenue generated on the Strip.⁶⁴

Hughes’s entrance into the resort industry had long-term implications. Hughes was different from other men who invested in Las Vegas gaming. He not only had access to far more capital than any of the others but had no ties to organized crime and a positive public image. For all his eccentricities, he was a respectable, enterprising entrepreneur whom the press described variously as a “gentleman,” a “genius,” even a “hero.” Because of this image and his vast wealth, his purchases of Las Vegas casinos enhanced the glamour as well as the legitimacy of the gaming business itself. By 1970, when he moved from Las Vegas to the Bahamas, he had a reputation as the man who had chased the “mob” out of Las Vegas. The image was undeserved, but as his business partner Robert Maheu said, Hughes did try to “clean up” Las Vegas. The fact that he purchased resorts long associated with organized crime, Maheu explained, was part of that effort. Hughes managed his properties through his Hughes Tool Company, a Houston-based corporation with extensive holdings in aerospace and airlines, the top executives of which were major operators in national and international enterprises.⁶⁵

Conrad Hilton and his son Barron played a similar though less overwhelming role in the advent of corporate control in Las Vegas. Conrad Hilton, founder of Hilton Hotels, was a respected businessman who had built his first luxury hotel in Dallas, Texas, in 1925. Shortly after World War II, he formed the public corporation that still bears his name, the first hotel firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange. By the time Hughes began investing in Southern Nevada, the corporation owned upscale hotels across the nation, including properties in the Caribbean with large casinos. The son became chief executive officer of the company in 1966 and was one of the men who urged Nevada officials to reform the state’s gaming laws. In 1970 the corporation purchased a controlling interest in the International Hotel, a huge, modern Y-shaped property that had recently opened east of the Strip, as well as the older Flamingo, and two years later it took full control of those properties. Like Webb and Hughes, the Hiltons lent a new aura of respectability to the gaming industry, and soon other large corporations began investing in Las Vegas, among them Holiday Inn, Hyatt Corporation, and Ramada Inn.⁶⁶

The entry of these high-profile national chains into Las Vegas consolidated the public impression that the area’s gambling establishments were now entirely legitimate enterprises offering equally legitimate leisure experiences to growing hordes of American tourists. Of course, a number of independently owned resorts remained, but they too adopted corporate forms of organization and operation and continued under the control of local businessmen whose stock was closely held. Incorporation offered such men access to new capital and limited their financial liabilities in case of failure. It also prevented the death or whims of individual owners from forcing the dissolution of the firm. Once they adopted the corporate form, owners of these small enterprises sold only enough stock to raise sufficient capital to enable them to renovate and expand their properties to the extent necessary to survive the competition from national chains. Individual owners of these places often maintained operational control of their incorporated properties by owning enough of their stock to do so.⁶⁷

Steve Wynn exemplified the continuing importance of these individual entrepreneurs. Wynn owned part of the Frontier Hotel before Howard Hughes bought it and began buying stock in the Golden Nugget when its shares became available to public investors in the late 1960s. Wynn became a member of the Nugget’s corporate office in 1973, by which time he owned 5 percent of the resort’s stock. He continued to purchase the stock and used the resulting leverage to become president and chief executive officer of the resort. By the time he owned 13 percent of the company, he raised money to remodel the Nugget’s casino and add a tower of hotel rooms. His strategies paid off handsomely. From 1972 to 1976, pretax profits at the Golden Nugget jumped from $1 million to $7.5 million. The increase reflected Wynn’s entrepreneurial talents as well as the ability of independent resorts to cope with changing conditions in the industry prompted by the entry of national corporations.⁶⁸

With the triumph of the corporation, ownership and management of the resort industry increasingly resembled those of other American industries. Management became concentrated in the hands of corporate officers elected and responsible to stockholders. Corporate leaders focused not on daily operations but on long-term policy and planning and on the bottom line of profitability. Barron Hilton’s description of his own role in company affairs underscores the point. “I’m not involved in the day-to-day operations of our hotels,” Hilton told public officials in these years; “I monitor the profit and loss statements of the hotel.” Unlike earlier investors in Las Vegas, Hilton took what he called a “truly long-term outlook.” “We are not now and never have been seekers of the quick return,” he explained.⁶⁹ Men like Hilton were attuned to rationalizing practices that enhanced efficiency and profitability. Advised by financial and legal staffs, they employed nationwide marketing strategies, streamlined accounting, auditing, and money-handling procedures, and systems for extending credit to gamblers.⁷⁰ They also developed and applied systematic personnel and employment policies. In the words of Jack Pieper, general manager of Howard Hughes’s Frontier, the advent of corporate control introduced “updated management-by-objective techniques.” Those techniques, Pieper said, enabled him to manage the Frontier “in an orderly and organized manner with carefully defined parameters of predictability and control.”⁷¹

A day in the life of Henri Lewin, a vice-president of the Hilton Corporation in these years, typified these patterns. Lewin, who had worked in the lodging industry for more than a quarter century, had the responsibility of overseeing hotel operations in nearly a dozen Hilton resorts spread over California, Oregon, and other western states. From his office in the Las Vegas Hilton, Lewin scrutinized all aspects of hotel services.⁷² “I must know every single thing,” he told a journalist when describing the scope of his activities, “I must be involved at every level.”⁷³ Like leaders at other large corporations, Lewin demanded frequent reports from every department head and supervisor he oversaw. He enforced scores of administrative rules and regulations, including one that dictated that every letter he received be answered the same day. He telephoned the managers of the properties he oversaw, often three or four times a workday, which typically began at seven o’clock in the morning and might not end until midnight. Lewin’s chief concerns were profitability, long-term planning, and handling complaints from those above and below him in the corporate chain of command. He looked for ways to improve all aspects of resort operations and wanted the best of everything for the public as well as the corporation he thought of himself as serving. “If Elvis Presley is the best star, then I have to hire him for your entertainment,” Lewin explained. “If the oldest elevator makes the best elevator, then I must get it.”⁷⁴

The reorganization of the Hughes Las Vegas holdings in these years epitomized the transformed resort industry in which Henri Lewin operated. In 1972 Hughes sold his oil and toolmaking business, in which he had built his fortune, and created the Summa Corporation to house his remaining investments, which included not only resorts and additional real estate in Southern Nevada but an airline and other businesses. Hughes had little to do with the operation of Summa, which he left to a five-member board of directors and its executive officers. Like Lewin and his peers and supervisors at Hilton, these few men controlled a giant, profit-oriented corporate structure. Summa was then the largest owner of Las Vegas gaming and resort properties. Each of its score of resorts generated millions of dollars in annual revenue, for a combined total of more than $1 billion a year, which amounted to perhaps three-quarters of the income for all properties on the Strip.⁷⁵

The management of other large resorts, such as the new MGM Grand at Flamingo Road on the Strip, also epitomized the new patterns in the management of the Las Vegas gaming business. When it opened in 1973, the MGM advertised itself as the world’s largest hotel. The resort itself encompassed 2.5 million square feet of covered space and cost $160 million to build. It was part of a business empire run by Kirk Kerkorian, who made his fortune in the airline industry. Kerkorian financed the construction by creating his own publicly traded corporation, which he funded in part by selling his interests in the Flamingo and the International. Like the International, the MGM was a Y-shaped structure with three towers of rooms with views of the city and the surrounding desert. Its casino housed a thousand slot machines and a hundred gaming tables. Its main showroom sat nine hundred people, and its seven kitchens could serve thirty thousand meals a day. There were also swimming pools, tennis courts, and a spa. The resort employed forty-five hundred people, more than twice as many as the average resort in the area.⁷⁶

The MGM also pioneered new changes in resort management in Las Vegas. Its management structure was even more structured than those of Summa or Hilton, consisting as it did of a board of seven corporate officers, nine “senior directors,” and fifty-seven lower-level managers and supervisors. The lines of authority and communication between these levels were minutely detailed, as were the responsibilities of each position. The duties of the nine senior directors illustrate the pattern. One director managed separate departments of purchasing, engineering, warehousing, and security, each of which had its own manager and cadre of supervisors. Another director was in charge of promotion, advertising, and public relations; and still another oversaw personnel policies. A food and beverage director was responsible for the management of all restaurants, banquet rooms, and room service. Other directors dealt with convention sales, hotel operations, entertainment, and casino operations. The director of casino operations administered the work of two dozen subordinate supervisors, from card room supervisors and credit department managers to the head of the slot department.⁷⁷

MGM personnel policies were thus as minutely specified as any in the industry. When the resort hired a new employee, it gave him or her a pamphlet signed by President Alvin Benedict, which spelled out management’s “objectives and philosophy.” Though designed to instill a sense of confidence and trust in management, employees likely read it from a perspective of their own. Many no doubt recognized the pamphlet’s subliminal message and purpose. It defined employees as “subordinates” with “potential” who should work according to rules. “You will be attending sessions on company familiarization,” the pamphlet explained. “You will be given a list of rules that contain your responsibilities regarding conduct of work.” The handout told employees they were part of a “family,” though they were unlikely to be on family terms with managers above their immediate supervisor. “It is impossible at this point in time to introduce you personally to each officer and senior department head,” the pamphlet read, “but you should be able to recognize them and know their positions when you see them.” To help with that, the handout included photographs of each of the resort’s corporate officers and senior directors.⁷⁸

Other passages in the pamphlet reflected management’s concern to “rationalize” the workplace. Despite the differences of social being between labor and management, the pamphlet suggested that workers and employers shared similar interests in making the MGM a success. “The secret of a successful organization is teamwork, where people work together for common interests and goals,” the pamphlet explained. Employees would receive competitive wages and job security “insofar as practicable.” “Exceptional achievement” on the part of employees would result in “positive personal recognition.” In the language of the new era of affirmative action, employees were assured that race and gender were “never factors in employment,” a statement that might equally have been read cynically, with traditional patterns of discrimination in mind, or hopefully, with the efforts just then underway in the industry to rectify those patterns. Read either way on this sensitive matter, the pamphlet displayed the impersonal face of management in the new age of corporate control of the Las Vegas tourist business.⁷⁹

By 1975 Las Vegas had become “Fun City.” Its promoters no longer promoted it as a refuge for seekers of gambling, booze, and “broads”; it was instead a vacation destination for families, with something for everyone from five to ninety-five. This was a purposeful change designed by new corporate interests to appeal to middle Americans, including women and children. Las Vegas and its leisure-based economy had matured. About 300,000 people now lived in and around the city, which upwards of ten million tourists visited annually. The local economy in and out of the gaming and resort business was booming. “Everywhere you look,” the president of the Chamber of Commerce said, “Las Vegas is expanding up and out, bulging and straining to keep up with the demands.”⁸⁰ Indus-trial development was phenomenal. In less than a generation, the informalities and human scale of traditional forms of business enterprise had given way to large-scale rationalization and bureaucratization. The period of this profound transition was so brief that thousands of workers experienced the whole of it.⁸¹