Gambling: Beyond Las Vegas

Southern Nevadans had generally found it difficult to accept city planning.

They also found it difficult to provide sufficient schools, or improve local roads.

By turning inward as private citizens and resisting expansion of the welfare state, they also grew less inclined to support social services or to employ the public sector to repair inequalities.

Nevada gained notoriety during the 1950s for its relatively incomplete system of social services. Priding themselves in low taxes and minimal government.

Nevadans were reluctant to invest in welfare programs and the state did without services that many other Americans regarded as basic.

During the 1950s, Nevada was one of the very last states in the country to adopt either the Uniform Reciprocal Enforcement of Support Act, which reduced interstate barriers to tracking down deserting fathers, or the Aid to Dependent Children program, which provided federal funds and guidelines for the maintenance of families without breadwinners.

In addition to featuring under financed schools that were incapable of growing apace with statewide population increases.

Nevada in 1955 had no modern adoption program, no state-sponsored campaign against tuberculosis, no facilities for either delinquent girls or emotionally or mentally disturbed youth, or the criminally insane, and comparatively meager monetary assistance to the poor and disabled.

Female convicts and mentally diseased criminals were crowded into a men's state prison that was so outdated that it still used as cells some caves dug during the mid-nineteenth century.

Before 1955, Clark County had no welfare department, and only one belief worker who operated out of a 'drab' office on the outskirts of town.

The county assisted the nonresident poor by doling out groceries and then sending them across the county line.

If indigents had no means of travel, the welfare agent wired their 'piece of legal settlement' in order to get their fare home. Impoverished local residents hardly received more assistance.

The country operated a camp of eleven trailers behind the relief office for fatherless families and the aged. Clark County afforded no other accommodations for the destitute, and doled out only a pittance---- fifteen dollars a month in 1958--- to those it had no room to house.

Between 1950 and 1960, the population of the metropolitan area grew by 163 percent, but funds for poor relief grew only by 120 percent.

By way of contrast, funding for police protection, a service regarded as more essential in a booming resort town, increased by more than 330 percent.

The level of social services was raised after the mid-1950s, but southern Nevada still trailed most American cities in providing welfare assistance. This attitude toward the social services put residents both behind and ahead of their times.

At one level, Nevadans lagged behind other states in developing more extensive welfare programs.

Long accustomed to paying first attention to providing lucrative services for visitors from out of state, and influenced by the state's reputation as tax haven and last frontier, Nevadans only slowly admitted the need for wider welfare coverage.

On the other hand, Las Vegans presaged at the municipal level a broad movement throughout the Sunbelt to provide fewer government services and rely more on private enterprise to reduce social needs.