Gambling: California Culture Reaching Las Vegas

Southern Californians no doubt felt especially comfortable in the gambling district, for few appeared to mind the five or six-hour drive to southern Nevada.

As residents of the Golden State, they belonged to a restless society that had long thrived on speculation.

Moreover, Southern Californians found Las Vegas just far enough removed from the environs of Los Angeles to relieve them of hometown inhibitions, yet so similar in its orientation to autos that it seemed convenient and familiar.

After all, the Sunset Strip, the Miracle Mile on Wilshire Boulevard, and other Los Angeles roadtowns were at bottom the ancestors of the Las Vegas Strip.

In roadtown Las Vegas, Southern Californians could see, in an intensified form, the same resemblance between the two cities helped to explain Southern Californian's fondness for the desert gambling resort.

At the same time, that they led the way to Las Vegas, Angelenos led the rest of the country in creating the culture of the future.

Other Americans retained more ambivalence about the promises of modernity, but Southern Californians embraced the future without hesitation.

They incorporated moving pictures, theme amusement parks, automobiles, and other cultural advances into a new way of life for average citizens.

In addition, they also transmitted the new styles to the rest of the country by way of such spectacle suburbs as Hollywood, Disneyland, and Las Vegas--- where many Americans first encountered Southern California culture.

Like migrants to previous frontiers, new arrivals brought the high expectations to a golden land of promise Having already staked their futures on California, they were inclined to accept the additional risks that modernity presented.

Residents of the state adopted new technologies and styles that promised to heighten the prosperity and enhance the good life that had drawn them westward to the Pacific Coast in the first place.

The future held out to mid-twentieth century Californians the same positive prospect of chance and change that gold had offered to Argonauts one hundred years earlier, and that betting had offered throughout the history of the state.

Since the early years of American settlement, Californians had acted as pioneers of the nation's economic culture.

The state had generally been among the first to industrialize mining, agriculture, and tourism, and led the nation in using and producing modern technologies.

After 1940, huge increases in defense-related spending and a continuing influx of migrants and new technologies made California the nation's first postindustrial society.

Residents adjusted eagerly to to the conditions that accompanied the aftermath of industrialization, illustrating for other Americans the direction of tomorrow.