CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE

LAS VEGAS PIO~TEERS: A.t\f APPLICATION OF DISSONA.l\JCE THEORY

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in

Anthropology

by

Diane Elaine Ainsworth

January, 1980 The Thesis of Diane Elaine Ainsworth is approved:

Keith Morton

Lynn Mason

David Hayano

California State University, Northridge

ii DISCLAIMER

The names of the informants in this study have been changed to protect them. However, certain historical facts that may identify them have, by necessity, been left unchanged.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

DISCLAIMER iii ABSTRACT vi

1 INTRODUCTION 1 Purpose of the Study 1 Organizational Design 6 Delimitations of the Study 7

2 lliEORY AND MElliODS 10 Symbolic Interactionism as a General Perspective 10 Cognitive Dissonance Theory 17 The Experimental Evidence 23 Other Perspectives 33 Methods and Materials 36

3 HISTORY: THE PIONEERS OF LAS VEGAS 41 The Settlers of Las Vegas 41 The Founding of Las Vegas 44 Hoover Dam and the Resort Hotel Business 53 About the Informants 60

4 DATA PRESEl'ITATION: PATTERNS FOR CONSTRUCTING A SOCIAL LIFE 69 Introduction: Organization of the Data 69 Small Town Las Vegas 73 Roles 86 Groups and Organizational Scales 90 The Significance of Gambling in Las Vegas 96 The Significance of Religion in Las Vegas 107

iv 5 WORLDS IN CONFLICT: TI-IE EVIDENCE FOR DISSONANCE 112 Introduction: Merging Data and Theory 112 Dissonant Images of Las Vega~ 112 Behavior, Commitment and the Conditions for Dissonance 117 Self-Attribution as Evidence of Commitment 123 Mechanisms for Dissonance Reduction 124 Psychological Distancing 125 Spatial Distancing 126 Social Distancing 129 Commitment and Psychological Implications 130 Linking Attitudes and Behavior 132

BIBLIOGRAPHY 139

v ABSTRACT

lAS VEGAS PIONEERS: AN APPLICATION OF DISSONAl'IJCE THEORY by Diane Elaine Ainsworth Master of Arts in Anthropology

This study serves to identify the various psychosocial charac­ teristics of a subculture of pioneer Las Vegans who have created and upheld a distinctive view of their environment in the face of rapid change within the more complex society of Las Vegas today. The per­ spective of symbolic interactionism is a convenient conceptual framework for looking at such social and psychological phenomena. By further incorporating the psychological principles of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1956) into the everyday situations of this group, it is possible to account for the pioneers's successful main­ tenance of an exclusive "mindset" which binds them together. The observation of parallels between individual psychological and collective processes must be recognized before the use of any psychological orientation can be injected into a body of field obser­ vations. These parallels involve the distribution of information, which in turn, induces possible attitude changes. A common need for cognitive consistency, however, can be found at both levels. Disso­ nance theory attempts to explain this struggle to minimize perceived

vi inconsistencies in the environment. Consequently, it is a vehicle for more fully understanding a group's constnJctions of the world and how they function within it. The results of this study indicate that specific behavioral and psychological "distancing" mechanisms are functioning to support a view of Las Vegas that is lillcommon to the rest of the residential population. These mechanisms include psychological, spatial and social separations among the informants, and are rooted primarily in their past experiences of settling the town of Las Vegas.

vii CHAPTER ONE

INI'RODUCTION

Purpose of the Study

The social worlds that people build are rich with information about themselves and their environment. Social knowledge is gained from participation in various social events and interactions with others. The social world is not only "known about," it is acted within (Glick 1978:5) and "interactively maintained" (Garfinkel 1967).

Accordingly, we might expect that situations from which we construct our worlds lead to strategies of knowledge, or knowing, that sustain a coherent course of action related to each interactive context (Glick 1978:5). These courses of action do not appear to be fully "rational" in form, dealing as they do with shifting social and informational domains. Hence, in order to understand the construction of a particular social world, it is necessary to treat the participant as both an "observer" and "theorizer" of the world as it is displayed to him or her in different social arenas (Glick 1978:6). Social knowledge is, in turn, referenced to external devices which serve to reduce the amount of information in the environment while, at the same time, allowing for the maintenance of some basis for social action (Abelson 1976). Schank and Abelson (1977) refer to these conditions as "social scripts," in which coherent action

1 2 sequences must be carried out in relation to the situational context and the internal state of the participant. Knowledge for an actor is determined as much by the conditions of its application (Glick 1975) as it is by its structure, or coherence, as a domain of information.

As Glick describes it: Two bodies of knowledge must intersect: knowledge of a domain of information and knowledge of the domain of application ... In much the same way that we use appropriate syntax without being able to talk explicitly about grammar, or follow rules of conversational sequencing [Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974] without being able to describe them, we probably know about sociability without that knowledge being explicit [Glick 1978:5]. The advantages to using this perspective, then, are much the same as those o£ cognitive anthropologists; ethnographic description takes the form of a knowledge domain defined by the ways in which the actor behaves in his or her interactive context rather than what the actor knows about the interactive context. The act of "knowing" about one's social domain is not equivalent to the act of "behaving" in one's environment. The topic of this thesis revolves around a small group of women who share such a social domain. They participated in the settling of the town of Las Vegas, Nevada, and remain residents of that town today. The perspective that they have constructed of this environment stems from a number of common experiences: they all arrived in Las Vegas at the time of its official founding in 1905, or shortly thereafter, 3 with the exception of one informant; they all became active members of the community, centering their efforts on the establishment of social and religious groups and activities; they are all approximately the same age; they all see themselves as "religious" people, "actively concerned citizens," involved in community projects or religious fundraisers that they feel contribute to the "well-being" of the community; and importantly, they see themselves as "separate" or "apart" from the larger connnunity in which they live. The environ­ mental feature that they dissociate themselves from, but which allows them to maintain their "separateness" from the rest of the connnunity, is the gaming industry, an enterprise which gainfully employs half of the residential population of Las Vegas. For these "pioneer" women, that environmental aspect no longer plays a part in their world. It instead creates a major source of conflict in their lives because it represents a set of values and attitudes that do not match the values that they attribute to themselves and "their" conummity. There are several underlying assumptions that influence the depiction of the world of these pioneer women of Las Vegas. First, it is assumed that a participant's thinking within a specific domain is characterized by a unity of organization, underlying rules that participants adhere to in nonexplicit ways. Second, any changes in these social domains reflect an internal process or reorganization of one form of thinking into another. The participants act in such ways as to construct frameworks by which their social domains can be defined. In the lives of these pioneer Las Vegans, then, such conceptual frameworks as the world of gambling are directly affected 4 by the behavioral patterns of their everyday lives, and in this way, can be defined within their domains. Further, recognizing that more information is understood or intended than is actually received or expressed presumes what Cicourel (1973) describes as a reflective monitoring of information that is perceived, retrieved from memory, and generated during interactional exchanges with others. We recognize more information than we actually express in external events, and this stored and shared body of knowledge constitutes a sociocultural reconstruction that is linked to both the context of social interaction and the orientation of the participants (Cicourel 1978:275). The particular circumstances that exist at the time of observation provide the context for the inferen­ tial step of making interpretations about what is happening in a social exchange. As Cicourel (1973) explains, the observation of facts by participants in social interactions means that those participants perceive a setting in terms of what is assumed to be culturally known in common with others. Hence, the refusal by these pioneers to identify and associate with the gaming industry in Las Vegas is detected in their behavioral patterns and the shared values that undercut those behaviors. This viewpoint stems from a well-established notion that social interaction is an emergent activity (Cooley 1902; Mead 1934). Finally, the conditions that create doubt (Peirce 1931-1935) or unceTtainty about one's understanding of the social domain produce an uneasy psychological state of tension foT the participant, and motivate him or her to act in such ways as to reduce the 5

inconsistencies of that psychological state (Festinger 1957). Reorganization of one's thinking from one form to another is a result of this motivation to reduce conflicting cognitions within the individual. Festinger (1957) describes the relationship between two conflicting pieces of information as "cognitive dissonance," and says this condition motivates the individual to actively reduce the flow of such conflicting information exchanges by avoiding them or reorganiz­ ing them to conform to the participant's own social domain. The Las Vegas pioneers, in their attempts to ignore the gaming industry because of its conflicting set of values in relationship to theirs, can be viewed in such a light. Festinger's theory is intended to identify the particular psychological factors that contribute to a body of information that is shared within a subcultural unit, and hence, identify those factors that produce dissonance within the group. His concept designates a condition of individuals and a method of reducing such dissonance by way of a social support network. It seems reasonable, then, that Festinger's theory should identify for us the psychosocial dynamics by which this group of Las Vegas pioneers can maintain and reinforce a lifestyle that excludes an environmental feature that, in fact, supports half of the town. The purpose of this study, then, is to apply these cognitive principles to a small group of individuals who constitute a sub­ cultural unit that has managed to remain stable in the face of extreme change over the last fifty years. Further, the validity of Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance can be tested with this case-in-point, as the psychosocial variables which form the ethos of 6 this group should serve to identify any psychological dissonance that may exist, and explain behaviors which may serve to reduce the dissonance. The theory should illustrate how these pioneers have reorganized their own perceptions of their environment in order to maintain the distance they evidently desire from any association with the gaming industry. It is this particular state of individual internal conflict that I have chosen to focus on as a way of describ­ ing and defining the social interactive domain of these pioneers.

Organizational Design

The organization of this study is straightforward. Following this preliminary introduction, Chapter Two serves to introduce the major theoretical foundations of the thesis by briefly discussing the importance of the perspective of symbolic interactionism to this study and supplying the reader with an account of the theoretical under­ pinnings of cognitive dissonance theory. In addition, Chapter Two includes a section on methods and a condensed discussion of various alternative approaches to examining the psychosocial dynamics of this subculture. Chapter Three is primarily concerned with orienting the reader to the historical development of Las Vegas and introducing the sample of Las Vegas pioneers used in this study. The description of early Las Vegas is important to understanding how these pioneers live in the town today. It provides the backdrop for their underlying socio­ cultural beliefs, attitudes and values. Further, in Chapter Four, direct quotations collected from formal interviews with each 7 informant will better exemplify the ways in which these pioneers per­ ceive their world and the ways in which they are able to maintain their particular construction of the environment around them. The behavioral and attitudinal patterns which they exhibit conform to sociologist Lofland's (1976) definitions of "roles" and "worlds" within a complex society. Hence, the data that is presented in Chapter Four is organized according to this sociological model. Chapter Five tackles the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of cognitive dissonance theory in particular, and other approaches which depend on psychological and social variables in order to define the social domain of a group of people. The issues of the role of commitment to explicit behavior and the conditions for dissonance will be examined, as well as the overall adequateness of such cognitive models for generating psychosocial descriptions of this type. The conclusion of this chapter includes a brief summary of the study and the validity of applying cognitive dissonance theory to this kind of data. It is, in short, a summary of my attempt to consider both the psychological or cognitive states of my informants and the sociologi­ cal foundations that account for their knowledge of the world and their actions within it.

Delimitations of the Study

The observation of parallels between individual psychological and collective processes must be recognized before the use of any psychological orientation can be injected into a body of data collected in naturally occurring, everyday situations. The 8

similarities basically stem from a general assumption that, as Newcomb explains, "if tmits of which a larger system is composed typically behave in a certain way then the larger system will simply show more of the same" (1968:566). The parallels between individual and group phenomena, Newcomb says, involve informational distribution, which in turn, induces influence and/or attitude change. Hence, informational channels and exchanges are viewed as mediators between the individual and the collective experience. Newcomb concludes that this mediated parallel between individuals and groups produces a common link at both levels: at the individual level, psychological forces toward consistency are operating, and similarly, at the collective level, the ftmctional demands for group solidarity are in motion (1968:566). It is as important to point out what this study is not intended to illustrate as well as what its central arguments have to offer. Because it is precisely in the situation of a subculture embedded in a larger culture that one would expect to find the conditions of contrasting cognitions, Festinger's theory is an appropriate model to employ. However, I am not studying cognitive dissonance theory in its usual fashion, which is to test its various components in the laboratory environment. Rather, I am using the notion of dissonance in an attempt to explain the stability of this subculture's lifestyle, rather than its evolution and change over time. Minimally, Festinger's perspective seems appropriate for the task of identifying the cognitive dynamics of this group. It is important, however, to 9 point out that Festinger defines dissonance as an internalized state and, accordingly, the nature of this internalization also implies that open admission of dissonance cannot be expected to occur (1956:28). Hence, it is seldom the case that open admission of any psychologi­ cally uneasy state is available in the data. It is also important to point out the fact that my sample of informants is not intended to be representative of the remaining original pioneers of Las Vegas. According to one informant, there are between 250 and 300 original pioneers living in Las Vegas currently.

~~ sample of informants includes a mere seven individuals. In addition, they are all female. The limitations of this type of sample are obvious. It is my assumption that in a society which is organized in terms of subcultures, there are certain psychosocial characteristics that can be identified as variables which serve to uphold the belief system of that subcultural unit. In an environment in which people with differing cultural patterns unite and organize themselves with similar others in order to maintain a specified psychosocial system, Festinger's theory of psychological dissonance seems plausible. It is my intention to use cognitive dissonance theory as a channel through which the dynamics of this subculture's shared belief system can be identified and their constructions of the environment accounted for. '1

CHAPTER TWO

TI:IEORY AND METIIODS

Symbolic Interactionism as a General Perspective

The social construction of meaning--that which is imposed on, what William James once referred to as the "blooming, buzzing confusion" that constitutes the world of the newly born infant--has appeared under many guises in many different disciplines. In sociology, this perspective grew out of a strong opposition to classical, ''objective,'' sociological methods of measurement, and evolved into what is now called qualitative sociology or "symbolic interactionism." This latter tenn was invented by Herbert Blumer (1937) although it stems from an extensive history of related ideas. The writings of James (1890), Cooley (1902) and George Herbert Mead (1934) argued that people's self-concept is dependent on how others view and react to them. Cooley (1902) developed the idea that selves develop as they reflect the appraisals of others, an idea referred to as the "looking-glass self." Mead's social behaviorism concentrated on the idea that "the behavior of an individual can be understood only in tenns of the behavior of the whole social group of which he is a member," for it is this larger group that provides the context for individual acts (Mead 1934 :6). Central to the philosophy of these scholars was the concern for

10 11 process, for seeing ideas as a part of ongoing activity. All life is involved in activity, activity that takes place naturally and is organized by goals which themselves emerge and change through ongoing processes of adjustment and readjustment (Schellenberg 1978:42). This orientation suggests that people react to stimuli on the basis of what meanings it has for them; that meaning rises out of social interaction with others; and that meanings are handled and interpreted subjective­ ly (Schellenberg 1978:45). This orientation further presumes that from the time we enter the world, we are constantly attempting to make sense out of all the stimuli bombarding our senses, and in our efforts to do so, we place constructions on reality; we rely on others to validate our perceptions; and we become progressively more selective in what we perceive (Jones and Day 1977:75). All societies are heterogeneous by definition, and people do not necessarily share the same "world" within a society (Moscovici 1969). Individuals, classes, and professional interests are in conflict, and their objectives and methods of action, too, are often incompatible. The Las Vegas pioneers distinguish themselves from the rest of the community because of their shared experiences of growing up in "young" Las Vegas, and their corrnnon values and goals for the developing town. They can be seen as one such group whose goals are incompatible with the values put forth by the larger community, including the rest of the senior citizen population. Their expressed attitudes and values bind them into a social entity out of which meaning arises. If meaning, or social reality, comes from both the internal processing of information by the individual (Lewin 1936), and 12

as a result of external conditions of the social situation ~~ead 1934), then surely the Las Vegas pioneers must have found ways of smoothing out incompatibilities between internal images and external actions. According to symbolic interactionism and social psychology, the individual is viewed as an internally active processor of information, an organizer and modifier of reality whose goal it is to maintain some degree of cognitive coherence (Tedeschi, Schlenker, Bonoma 1971). The Las Vegas pioneers, in order to reach some sort of consistency beuveen the methods they used to build their town and the way in which they wished to be viewed as individuals, established an elaborate way of justifying their actions. The discrepancy between wanting to be viewed as "religious and morally sound citizens" while in the midst of building entertainment clubs that featured gambling and alcoholic consumption, forced these pioneers to somehow distance themselves from any personal associations with the activities of these clubs. Their resulting construction of reality incorporated an understanding shared by all of them that entertainment clubs were being constructed to attract outside business rather than local participation. Hence, an elaborate mental distancing came about. Common attitudes, opinions and values further serve to bind individuals into social groups that can act to reinforce a particular construction of reality, what Hyman (1942) calls reference groups. The reference group, which generally encourages exclusive membership, serves as a reinforcement agent for the individual and identifies a particular construction of the outside world, the subjective world, by 13 a particular set of people. Sherif and Sherif (1967) characterize this particular situation as forming out of quite naturalistic conditions:

The essential condition for the formation of a human group is interaction over a period of time among individuals with similar concerns, similar motives, similar frustrations, or generally, a common dilemma which is not effectively dealt with through established social channels and arrange­ ments [1967:255].

With few exceptions (e.g. Kelley 1935), social scientists agree that the group or individual will be more likely to apprehend truth with the necessary social and material resources available via the reference group. Such is the case with the Las Vegas pioneers. Their observable patterns of interaction with each other define the nature of their social world. Further, this information is conveyed through particu­ lar stylized patterns of interaction with others outside their reference group. The manner in which they conduct themselves with others, their viewpoints and the ways in which they structure their activities all reflect this common body of attitudes and opinions. Their commitment to the group and their involvement in group activities help make their system of beliefs more understandable. Their perspective of symbolic interactionism, then, is a conven­ ient conceptual framework for looking at various social and psychological phenomena. Stone and Faberman (1970) point out that the 14 symbolic interactionism perspective is defined by a concern for the generation, persistence and transformation of meaning in our percep­ tions of reality. Meaning for the individual, in turn, can only be established through patterns of persistent behavior with others. The specific individuals with whom a person chooses to communicate are a major, if not total, determinant of how one will perceive and define objective reality. Berger and Luckmann (1966) write:

Every individual is born into an objective social structure within which he encounters the significant others who are in charge of his socialization. These significant others are imposed upon him. Their definitions of his situation are posited for him as objective reality. He is thus born into not only an objective social structure, but also an objective social world. The significant others who mediate this world to him modify it in the course of mediating it. They select aspects of it in accordance with their own location in the social structure, and also by virtue of their individual, biographically rooted idiosyn­ crasies. The social world is "filtered" to the individual through this double selectivity [Berger 1966:131].

The fundamental process of perceiving reality, then, is identi­ cal for each individual. The definitions that others hold of reality are posited as being that reality. Differences in definitions are negotiable, and as symbolic interactionists say, the key to negotia­ tion is power, group status, or individual social influence. 15

However, the self, despite his or her status within the group, is treated as both an active and reactive information-processing agent attempting to order the world and make sense of it through the process of interactional communication. There are certain central themes that unify students of symbolic interactionism. Thomas and Thomas (1928) pointed out one of the most important ideas fifty years ago: that the most significant element in any situation is how the subject defines the situation. In looking at the conflicts between the Las Vegas pioneers' aspirations for their new town, how they achieved those goals, and how they viewed themselves in all of it, I am concerned with their methods for explaining con­ flicts, and their methods for achieving the equilibrium between their attitudes, self-images and overt behaviors. The particular techniques that one chooses to systematically study a social situation will partially determine how that individual interprets the reality of others. However, total Drumersion in the social setting was, and is, believed by many to be the only way to understand the complexities and ambiguities of the situation, or the definitions of reality imposed and manipulated by the individuals in that group, in their efforts to uphold a particular view of the world. It is also important to point out the implications concerning these common themes that link the various theoretical and methodologi­ cal issues within this perspective. That theme, Jones and Day (1977), Lofland (1976), Berger and Luckrnann (1966), and others say, is a concern for understanding the constructions or interpretations that individuals place on their own experiences. Yet, underneath that 16 seemingly simple statement, the authors suggest, are the implications that: 1. 'Reality' is susceptible to different interpretations. 2. 'Reality' is less important to the individual than is his or her interpretation of reality. 3. In order to understand the perceptions of another we cannot rely entirely on an analysis of the external stimulus situation [Jones and Day 1977:100]. Kelly (1963) states:

The universe is real; it is happening all the time; it is open to piecemeal interpretation. Different men construe it in different ways. Since it owes no prior allegiance to any one man's construction system, it is always open to reconstruction ... Since man is always faced with constructive alternatives, which he may explore if he wishes, he need not continue indefinitely to be the absolute victim either of his past history or of his present circumstances ... The construc­ tion systems are also real, though they may be biased in their representations [1963:43].

By using a perspective in which social and cognitive events cannot be considered separately from their context, and by favoring a methodology of total immersion in the immediate situations of a particular environment, it is not difficult to see how the symbolic interactionism perspective applies to investigations of social groups in natural environments who uphold distinct interpretations of the 17

world they share with the larger whole, what Cooley (1902) called "the significant others." Experiential constructions, though reinforced through the refer­ ence group, also need to be balanced in the individual's mind. According to Heider (1946), human beings need to maintain cognitive consistency between the information they receive about the envirorunent and information they receive about themselves. This idea has been developed under several different labels, reaching the pinnacle of attention under Festinger (1957). IVhen dissonance, rather than consis­ tency, arises, the theory predicts that individuals will alter either an overt behavior or attitudinal stand in order to maintain that mental consistency. Despite the fact that cognitive dissonance theory is an internal­ ized process that 1s difficult to test outside of the laboratory setting, Festinger's insistence that people attempt to behave consis­ tently, at least publicly, has validity for this study as a possible way of accounting for some of the attitudes of the Las Vegas pioneers.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Leon Festinger was well on his way to formulating the basic components of his theory of cognitive dissonance in 1956 in an unusually documented study he conducted with some of his colleagues entitled When Prophecy Fails (Festinger, Riecken, Schacter 1956). The study laid the groundwork for analyzing the conditions under which an individual would experience dissonance, although the documentation only loosely followed those predictions. The data consisted of a 18

collection of direct observations made about a woman, Marian Keech, living in a small town, who believed and publicly announced that catastrophy would strike her town on a specific date. She further claimed to know this infonnation because "superior beings" from a planet she called "Clarion" had connnunicated this to her via "automatic writing" (Festinger 1956:30). What Festinger was inter­ ested in explaining through this actual incident was how disconfinnation of a publicly held belief would be handled by the in­ dividual expressing the belief (1956:28). From this material, Festinger was able to define consonance and dissonance in relation to cognitive processes. Dissonance and consonance, Festinger pointed out, are relations among cognitions. Cognitions he defined as opinions, beliefs or knowledges about one's environment (1956:25). Two opinions, beliefs or knowledges stand in a dissonant relation to each other if they do not "fit together," or if they are inconsistent with one another. Hence, disconfirmation of Mrs. Keech's prediction that a flood would wipe out the city of Lake City, Kansas, on December 21, constituted two pieces of infonnation, or knowledges, that did not "fit together" simply because the prediction was never validated. Festinger's more well-known example of two cognitions that create dissonance was fonnulated in 1957 in A Theory Of Cognitive Dissonance: "A cigarette smoker who believes that smoking is bad for his health has an opinion that is dissonant with the knowledge that he is continuing to smoke ... " (1957:25). 19

Dissonance, Festinger further argued, produces "discomfort," or psychological tension, and serves to motivate the individual to reduce that uneasy state. He elaborates:

Accordingly, we should expect to observe believers making determined efforts to eliminate the dissonance or, at least, to reduce its magnitude. How may they accomplish this end? The dissonance would be largely eliminated if they discarded the belief that had been disconfirmed, ceased the behavior which had been initiated in preparation for the fulfillment of the prediction, and returned to a more casual existence ... But frequently the behavioral commitment to the belief system is so strong that almost any other course of action is preferable. It may be less painful to tolerate the dissonance than to discard the belief and admit one had been wrong. When that is the case, the dissonance cannot be eliminated by giving up the belief [1956:27].

Rationalization, Festinger continued, can reduce dissonance to a degree, but to make rationalizing fully effective, support from other people is necessary. Alternatively, he suggests that "forgetting" or "reducing the importance of those cognitions that are in a dissonant relationship" can diminish any existing dissonance (1956:26). The concept of dissonance, or psychological inconsistency, is an appropriate idea to apply in the case of the Las Vegas pioneers because it is able to account for the values and attitudes of a group of people that have not changed in the face of dramatic environmental 20 and social changes. Festinger's notion that given enough social support from others about some opinion or attitude enables the individual to effectively "blind" him/herself from any evidence to the contrary, is an appropriate channel for accounting for attitudinal stability rather than change. It is, in fact, the only social psychology theory that attempts to account for people's ability to block out items in the environment or pieces of information that they find displeasing or troubling. Festinger contended that support from as many outside people as possible would effectively curb any remaining dissonance (1956:28). If proselyting proves successful as a dissonance reducing mechanism in the face of a disconfirmation of a publicly expressed belief, then it (proselyting) can also be predicted as a result of such public dis­ confinnations. Festinger found this to be the case with Marian Keech's predictions of catastrophy. After the assigned date of catas­ trophy had passed, her followers increased their proselyting behavior, reaffirming their convictions to Mrs. Keech's particular beliefs, and effectively blinding themselves to the reality of the situation (1956: 227) . Unlike alternative theories of cognitive consistency such as balance theory (Heider 1946), congruity theory (Osgood, Tannenbaum 1955), and psycho-logic theory (Abelson, Rosenberg 1958), cognitive dissonance theory allows for the prediction of nonobvious results over a wide range of situations (Tedeschi, Schlenker and Bonoma 1971). Curiously, Festinger's attempt to apply the model to naturally occurring conditions is the only such effort. His work, however, 21 created an avalanche of experimental research and testing as well as criticism and confusion because of his vague definition of dissonance and other researcher1(?1 tmsuccessful attempts to prove the existence of such an internalized psyche state. Moreover, the theory's weakest point lies in the definition of dissonance; because dissonance is internalized, admission of its existence cannot be expected to occur. In fact, as Festinger points out himself, many people may not be aware themselves of this psychologically uneasy state, although he contends such persons may seek out support from others in order to reduce any troubling cognitions.

Rationalization can reduce dissonance somewhat ... But when­ ever explanation is made, it is still by itself not sufficient. The dissonance is too important and though they may try to hide it, even from themselves, the believers still know that the prediction was false and all their preparations were in vain. The dissonance cannot be eliminated completely by denying or rationalizing the disconfirmation. But there is a way in which the remaining dissonance can be reduced. If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after all, be correct .... [Festinger 1956:28]

Festinger's main intent was to develop a theory that would account for the internally experienced state of tension brought on by two conflicting pieces of information, and how this state might be resolved. Although his use of the term dissonance is definitionally 22 deficient, the notion that such internalized balancing takes place in individual thought explains how people can effectively cope with con­ flicting information in the environment without themselves being socially or culturally insulated, or "tuned out" to events in the real world. Moreover, Festinger's ideas fundamentally assume that the individual selects from the environment what information he or she wishes to recognize without shutting out all conflicting information about the environment or about oneself. Social support for a particu­ lar construction of the world is a selective process, fundamentally depending on the individual rather than on a support network that simply protects the individual from certain realities. In short, the individual decides the parameters of his or her own reality and builds a support network that encourages that perspective, without being unaware of information or cognitions that discredit that particu­ lar perspective; rather than insulating oneself from conflicting values or goals, dissonance theory predicts that the individual will be aware of all incoming information about the environment and select values or goals that correspond to one's own self-image. Ultimately, it puts the individual in control of his/her own behavior and is capable of ex­ plaining the lack of change in a subculture's values or goals in the face of rapid change. Festinger's definition of dissonance is a negative drive state which occurs whenever a person simultaneously holds two cognitions that are internally inconsistent. In situations where a small group of people have maintained a worldview or lifestyle unchanged from that which they established many years previously, dissonance can also 23

explain unexpected responses to the environment, such as the unwill­ ingness of a group of people to change certain values or behaviors accordingly to outside pressures. When a belief is reaffirmed shortly after it has been publicly discredited, dissonance theory is able to account for the individual's unexpected resistance to public scrutiny without assuming that the individual is passively responding to his/her environment. Rather, he/she is depicted as actively selecting various informational cues out of that environment. In keeping with the perspective of symbolic interactionism, dissonance theory views the individual as an internally active processor of in­ formation, an "observer" and "theorizer" of the environment, a parti­ cipant in a social domain out of which meaning arises.

The Experimental Evidence The strongest claim of support for dissonance theory is, as Tedeschi, Schlenker and Bonorna (1971) point out, that the theory has a predictive quality for nonobvious or internal effects over a wide range of seemingly unrelated situations. The authors contend that sirnilar results cannot be deduced from other theoretical schemes. The empirical evidence supporting cognitive dissonance seems to fall primarily into two categories: the free choice and the forced compli­ ance paradigms. One of the classic free choice experirnents was performed by John Brehm (1956), in which individuals were given a choice between two appliances they had previously evaluated. He found that his subjects, after having decided initially on one of the two 24 appliances, tended to increase their liking for the chosen one and downgrade their evaluations of the item not chosen (Brehm 1956:384- 385). Brehm concluded that after making a difficult decision, his subjects experienced dissonance; cognitions about negative attributes of the chosen object are dissonant with the act of choosing it; cognitions about any positive attributes of the unchosen object are dissonant with not having chosen it. In order to reduce dissonance, his subjects emphasized or dwelled on the positive aspects and be­ rated or deemphasized the negative aspects of the preferred appliance, while simultaneously emphasizing the negative and berating the positive aspects of the appliance not chosen (1956:388). A second experiment, performed by Festinger and Carlsmith (1959), tested the magnitude of a subject's incentive to express a highly positive counterattitudinal statement regarding a rather boring task. In this forced compliance paradigm, Festinger and Carl~nith had subjects spend an hour participating in several dull tasks and then offered the participants either $1 or $20 to tell an alleged subject waiting outside to participate in the experiment that the task was really very interesting. When the subjects were later asked what their own real opinion of the experimental tasks was, the researchers found that subjects paid the least said they found the tasks more interesting (1959:209). This finding directly conflicted with traditional learning theory and cleared the way for the advancement of cognitive dissonance theory. Festinger and Carlsmith explained that the obvious results could be understood because under the small incentive conditions (the $1 group), insufficient justification was 25 provided. The cognitive elements, "I disliked the task" and "I had little monetary reason to lie," are dissonant. To resolve this dilemma, those subjects merely increased their post-experimental attitude about the task to restore cognitive consistency (1959:210). Bern (1967) has taken a different path to interpreting dissonance theory. According to him, dissonance is actually the result or consequence of the individual's own inferences about the causes of his or her own behavior. A "manded" behavior is a behavior expressed by the individual and caused by external pressures; thus, both the indiv­ idual and the observer should not attribute the behavior to any true beliefs or feelings of the individual. On the other hand, a "tacted" behavior is caused by no obvious external cause and must be attributed to internal causes manifested in the true beliefs of the individual (Bern 1967:184). Bern makes no mention, though, of any possible mechanism by which a person decides internally whether a particular action is tacted or manded or on what basis that decision is made (Aronson 1968). One major push has been to lump cognitive dissonance theory into an already existing approach, namely, conflict theory (Aronson 1968). According to Aronson (1968), there are several differences that rule out this possibility. Conflict occurs before a decision is made, and dissonance occurs after the decision. Conflict implies that an individual will carefully weigh the pros and cons of an issue before making a decision, while dissonance implies no such rational process; in fact, the individual experiencing dissonance will seek biased information and evaluations designed to make his or her 26

decision appear more reasonable. It is this process of seeking out "biased" information after-the-fact that Festinger was most concerned with, rather than any after-the-fact rationale that involved logical reasoning. The more difficultly the individual has making a decision, the greater the tendency toward this kind of behavior as a means of justifying the decision (Aronson 1968:204). Hence, the environmental elements that the Las Vegas pioneers chose to recognize, and those that they chose to ignore, can be seen as the result of conscious decisions made when the town was founded. The decision to build up a strong tourist/resort business via night clubs and casinos has been justified through the years by the pioneers'S:insistence on separating themselves from the rest of the population by both physical and psychological means. This separateness allows them, as a subculture, to justify their self-images of being "religious" and "serious-minded" residents while they live in the midst of a "recreational" city. Further, this mental distancing enables the pioneers to filter out what they chose to see in their environment and what they chose to ignore. The ultimate goal is some balance between self-image and overt behavior, and overall consistency in the way they live and the way they see themselves. There are other problems that dissonance theory has created in its brief history. One problem is the different ways in which dissonance is reduced. Aronson (1968) suggests that if a person struggles to reach a goal and fails, he can reduce the subsequent dissonance by convincing him/herself the goal was not worth it anyway; or, the person might find something else in the task leading to the 27

goal that he can attach some value to in order to justify expending all the energy to attempt his feat. Aronson (1961) found from one of his experiments that people do attach value to an incidental stimulus when confronted with dissonance stemming from an unsuccessful effort to attain a goal. A study by Walster, Berscheid and Barclay (1967) successfully predicted that individuals choose a particular mode of dissonance reduction which will be least likely to be challenged in the future. In their experiment, children were given their choice between two toys, and half of the children were told they would hear objective infonnation about the toy they rejected. The other half were told they would hear objective information about the toy they chose. As predicted, the children tended to distort the attractiveness of the toy they would not hear information about. They opted to reduce dissonance by brushing aside the importance of their preference for the toy that they would be told objective information about (1967:211- 216). Similarly, the pioneers of Las Vegas keep dissonance at a minimum by filtering out or distorting the importance of the gaming industry to the livelihood of their city. They refuse to admit that gambling and the tourism trade are vital to the financial survival of Las Vegas. An important step was taken by Brehm and Cohen (1962) in empha­ sizing the importance of commitment and volition in determining not only the strength of the dissonance involved, but the nature of the dissonance, and the mechanism needed to reduce it. Studies such as Linder, Cooper and Jones (1967) have consistently found that only when 28

volition or "tacted'' behaviors are concerned will dissonance predic- tions be confirmed. If counterattitudinal behaviors are seen as external and not controllable by the individual--"manded"--no

\ dissonance will be found. The rigidity of the Las Vegas pioneers ',s'. social circles indicates that they desire to protect themselves from incoming information or persons that may challenge their own values or attitudes. But whatever incoming information is counterattitudinal is also dismissable because it can be viewed as external and uncontrol- lable to their own attitudes. Kiesler (1968) demonstrated that another condition closely related to volition--commitment-- is influential in situations where the individual is constrained from changing any particular behaviors, and how strongly he will express responsibility for those behaviors or how important they are to him or her. Experimentally-manipulated counterattitudinal behaviors show that when commitment is strong, dissonance is operating (Collins and Helmreich 1968; Carlsmith, Collins and Helmreich 1966; Kiesler and Corbin 1965). When commitment is nonexistent or very weak, incentives are operating instead. The pioneers I observed in Las Vegas expressed quite strongly their commitments to "preserving worthwhile activities" in Las Vegas with- out any incentives to do so from myself or any other outside agent or purpose. There is also a tendency to dehumanize cognitive dissonance theory by viewing the subject in an experiment as a "passive target" of the experimenter (Aronson 1968). Only Allen (1968) has helped to lift the subject out of his/her passive role by suggesting that the 29 individual in a dissonance experiment is doing more than what is being asked of him/her. Using a Goffmanian analysis of social behavior, Allen points out that the social interactions always signal an inter­ play between the individual's maintenance of his/her self-concept and the presentation he/she creates for others of the role. Allen further suggests that individuals are continually structuring their beliefs and behaviors in an attempt to appear consistent with others' expecta­ tions, rather than privately structuring them to be consistent with their own true beliefs (1968:128). 1~at has grown out of this aspect of dissonance theory is a new, more integrative theory called "impression management theory." Contrary to Bern's self-perception theory (1967) or Festinger's dissonance theory (1957), Tedeschi, Schlenker and Bonoma (1971) propose another way of looking at such situations. Impression management theory says that people learn to behave consistently because otherwise they will be perceived as foolish or punished by others witnessing their behavior. Simply, we try not to get caught at behavioral inconsistency. By managing the impressions we create of ourselves, we actively seek to create consistent images, thereby avoiding hurt or punishment from others (Tedeschi, Schlenker and Bonoma 1971:690). In contrast to self-perception theory and dissonance theory, impression management theory views people as having the capacity to actively change their attitudes when necessary, in order to gain rewards and avoid punishments. It does not infer that people are internally upset by psychological inconsistencies as Heider (1946) and 30

Festinger (1957) propose, or that people are passively inferring that their attitudes are from their own behaviors, as Bem (1967) would like to believe. Further, unlike Bern's hypothesis that individuals per­ ceive their own counterattitudinal behaviors as tacted, or internal, "true" beliefs, this perspective suggests that it is not the individ­ ual's own beliefs that matter but what that individual believes about the impression that he/she is creating for the observer (Tedeschi, Schlenker, Bonoma 1971:690). The fundamental principle in impression management theory is that people engage in activities that create and maintain particular identifies, and that through conscious efforts to manipulate that identify, people are able to control how they are see by others and how they see themselves. Attitudes, consequently, are a form of social communication that people manage for purposes of self­ presentation and self-identity (Eagly and Himmelfarb 1978:540). This line of reasoning fits well with the amount of time and the importance the Las Vegas pioneers place on their social activities and their friends. However, although this theory emphasizes the individual as an active controller of his or her own public identity, it negates any evidence that individuals care or are committed to their own internal beliefs. The inconsistency that an outsider may observe between how the Las Vegas pioneers characterize themselves and their city from how an outsider might characterize the town (i.e. that it is a gambling haven, or recreational town), indicates a strong commitment to certain values that have not been distorted or tossed aside in favor of appearing consistent with a more popularized image of Las Vegas. 31

Consistent images are necessary to enhance credibility with others. Counterattitudinal behaviors can be accounted for through excuses that will make plausible a denial of responsibility for actions, and through justifications that indicate responsibility but reduce to a minimum the negative consequences of those actions (Schlenker, Forsyth, Goldman 1977). Attitudes will change under high choice counterattitudinal conditions in the form of an impression tactic to explain socially undesirable behavior. This theoretical stand has many similarities to Aronson's argument that "dissonance is created by violations of the self-concept," although the underlying motivations are somewhat different (1968:7). Impression management theory, according to a study conducted by Riess and Schlenker (1977), supports the idea that people will avoid responsibility for actions that produce aversive consequences. Schlenker and Schlenker (1975) tested the idea that people will assume responsibility for actions that lead to positive consequences, especially under no-choice conditions. Schlenker and Riess (1976) point out that impression management theory also predicts attitude change under "proattitudinal conditions," or, in situations when an attitude is used as a way of strengthening commitment and responsibil­ ity for actions that the individual sees as beneficial and enhancing to his/her self-worth (1976:540). Probably the most advantageous aspect of impression management theory is that it puts the phenomenon of dissonance into the social­ ization process, thereby avoiding any assumptions about psychological tensions and whether or not they motivate the individual to seek some 32 type of resolution. The need for consistency, even if it is only a public display, is embedded too within the socialization process and remains a powerful motivator to dissonance resolution. Unlike dissonance theory, impression management theorists make no assumptions about an individual's internal state of affairs or his/her need to reduce cognitive inconsistencies. However, the consistencies that this model predicts people strive for in the public arena can also be applied to an internal striving for consistency. Although cognitive dissonance theory depends for its validation on careful manipulation within the laboratory environment, the theory itself offers a somewhat unique way of approaching the problem of identifying the cognitive "maintenance" system of a group of people within a complex society. Primarily, the theory is built on the assumption that individuals are aware of all the informational domains that affect and influence their environment. However, because dis­ sonance theory rests on the idea that people seek out some degree of internal cognitive consistency in their lives and that they continually attempt to maintain that level of consistency, the theory proposes to identify the circumstances under which recognition of conflict occurs and is manipulated or balanced in some manner by the individual. Whether the inconsistency arises from an individual's problems of his/her own self-image or whether the imbalance occurs from public image management, dissonance theory offers us a method by which to identify an individual's "filtering" system and a way to explain the maintenance of such a cognitive system in the social domain. 33

The advantage of dissonance theory is that it is capable of accounting for the maintenance of a specific construction of reality by elucidating the source of conflict, and the ways in which individ­ uals are able to rationalize, or reduce, the dissonance that is created internally from that conflict. It essentially identifies the motivating force behind the person's need to act in accordance with the norms of his/her own refernce group without erasing all signs of individual variation within its theoretical framework. More recent

branches of dissonance theory, including ~pression management theory, are attempting to lift dissonance theory out of its limiting defini­ tional boundary of being an internalized condition, and put it into the socialization process where learning theory can influence it. Such efforts to broaden those limits will eventually lead to a more integrative theory of the development and maintenance of cognitive systems in one's environment.

Other Perspectives Ideally, portions of the theory, combined with the perspective of symbolic interactionism, can produce a valuable depiction of the cognitive makeup of a particular subculture. However, cognitive dissonance theory is rooted in the behavioral trend of analysis, emphasizing quantitative verification and generating etic explanations. If its basic concepts were applied to a less rigid, hypothesis-testing format, it would be possible to utilize its principles in naturally occurring, everyday situations. Nonetheless, dissonance theory can produce a more encompassing account of social 34

behavior because of its emphasis on variance. The model treats under­ lying individual motivations as the key to explaining sociocultural variance. Unlike structuralism, it rejects the notion of values and norms as adequate ways of accounting for behavioral variability in the social environment. It opposes the Durkheimian fact that "anomie" is a product of mass society, looking rather to individual variation as a source of possible explanation. Instead, it identifies a psychologi­ cal condition of the individual in order to show how that condition acts to influence an individual's behaviors and how conflicting information in the environment is rationalized in order to make it "fit in" with one's cognitive constructions, or on the other hand, to block it out. The idea of a social support system that reinforces the individual's chosen cognitive world is also important for it allows dissonance theory to be applied to groups or sub­ cultures. The goal in the behavioral trend of anthropology of accounting for individual variance is exactly what limits dissonance theory's applicability to conventional anthropological description and, rather, promotes highly individualistic varieties of interpretation. However, attacking the problem of psychosocial constructions of the world from the perspective of structuralism would create similar shortcomings. Whereas the behaviorist tends to look at society as a bundle of individuals acting in such ways as to resolve particular problems, the structuralist tends to over-generalize, focusing on shared ideologies and patterns of social solidarity that would account for the same outcome. Not unlike the cultural relativist position, emphasizing the need to look at cultures as whole and distinct units rather than disecting them into various systems all of which have certain traits associated with them, structuralists tend to ignore the individual within a given social unit, and his/her individual strategies for maintaining a particular construction of the world. Instead, the structuralist opts to look at the social unit itself, its order within the larger social system and the collective ideologies that are invented, and maintained, in order to deal with conflicts that arise from the merging of two or more subcultures. Individual variation is basically left out of both structural and functional models of analysis because, in fact, it is not what is being examined. Contrasting ideologies constitute separate cultural systems for the structuralist in his attempt to find order within social systems. What structuralists seek are cultural explanations for social behavior, explanations that ultimately lead back to the society, not the individual, as the source of accountability. Essentially, the structural perspective views individuals as mere products of society, with little flexibility or capacity for adjust­ ment within an environment. However, for the purposes of describing the variability of a specific social unit who share specific cognitive strategies for coping with their environment, accountability must come from the individuals who created that system, not from the system itself. 36

Methods and ~hterials I first came to know the group of individuals from which this study resulted through my work at the time as a reporter for one of two local newspapers, the Las Vegas Review-Journal. I had lived in Las Vegas for approximately seven months before I became aware of this group of pioneers. What initially struck me as different about them was their continual talk of "old Las Vegas," and their disdain of anything associated with casinos, gambling, and the "Strip" in Las Vegas. That basic group denial of the importance and influence of the gaming industry in Las Vegas, coupled with the knowledge that these were original settlers of Las Vegas--and therefore likely participants in the building of casinos and gambling houses during the town's early days--puzzled me. In February, 1976, I was working on a special historical supplement for the newspaper in honor of the Bicentennial, and found myself contacting these pioneers for interviews. My first encounter with an informant occurred in the newspaper office when Florence Cahill, a regular columnist for the lifestyle section of the paper, dropped off her weekly "Society" column. Always before, she had sent her husband to deliver the column so I had never met her until that time. When I, along with several other employees of the paper, began working on the special historical section, we needed to interview many of the remaining pioneers of the community, and in the process, I was able to meet most of the women who later served as informants. 37

This group of women, whom I classified as pioneers because of their times of arrival and settlement in Las Vegas, appeared to me to be more than just a group of individuals with common interests. They spent a good deal of time together and had known each other since their mutual times of arrival. Mbst of the women were in their early SO's, one woman being in her early 90's. Florence Cahill is a genera­ tion younger than the rest of the women, but evidently well-versed in the history of the town through her work in early years as a reporter on the same newspaper. These first observations were quite accidental in nature, and obtained under a different personal guise. I was not then a research­ er. Rather, I presented myself to those women as a reporter and my purpose was not to record the daily activities of a social group, but to write accounts of Las Vegas's development through their experiences. The switch in personal identities from reporter to anthropolo­ gist created some disadvantages for me. I left Las Vegas in August, 1976, and returned to Los Angeles. After developing the basic idea for my thesis, I then returned to Las Vegas in July, 1977, approxi­ mately sixteen months after I had first interviewed them. ~~ previous encounters with these women had not been difficult because they all knew the newspaper I worked for and did not question my intentions for interviewing them. When I returned over a year later, this time as an anthropology student rather than a reporter, they were confused. Except for Florence Cahill, they did not understand the field of anthropology or why I would need to interview them. 38

However, once the agreement was made that their statements would not be used for purposes other than a thesis, they became enthusiastic and helpful. When I returned to Las Vegas in July, 1977, my interest in these individuals had shifted to such a degree that I was purposely collect­ ing specific information, observing specific activities that might contribute to their preoccupation with the town of the past, and conducting personal interviews. My orientation was one of focusing on the individual in society, the methods and manners of individual functioning in the subjective world of values and norms. Most importantly, I was interested in observing the stress-reducing techniques these women used because their worldview seemed to me to be so exclusive and so rooted in the past. I was only able to stay in Las Vegas for three weeks when I returned in July, 1977. Hence, my selection of individuals was greatly hampered by time limitations. I chose only the individuals I had known previously from my work in Las Vegas, and admittedly, I selected informants that had been most helpful to me previously. I ended up with nine complete interview sessions, although only seven were complete enough to be used in this study. This sample of Las Vegas pioneers, however, is not intended to be viewed as representa­ tive of the ideologies of all of the remaining 250-300 pioneers, nor is the absence of males intentional. As it turned out, all of the spouses of the pioneers in this study were dead, except Florence Cahill's husband. 39

The largest group of materials used in this thesis are derived from the formal interviews I conducted in July, 1977. Each indiv­ idual interview lasted, on the average, of three to four hours. Because of Florence Cahill's insistence that I not tape record her interview (a request that stemmed from her uncertainty toward my intentions for obtaining the interviews), I chose not to record any of the interviews. However, as a reporter well-accustomed to notetaking and familiar with the need for accuracy in reporting, I consider my interview material to be both accurate in detail and as close to verbatim as is possible without the use of a tape recorder. Another group of materials used in this study are written documents of historical and personal accounts of the development of the town. I have drawn on both general historical accounts used by the newspaper I was working for, a special newspaper series document­ ing the development of Las Vegas by a local historian, and historical accounts stored in the special collections section of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. These materials were used as supplements to the interview material in the event of questionable statements. During the course of my first interview with Florence Cahill, I was able to gain access to a few social group meetings in which

Florence explained the reasons for my attendance, and basically, legitimized my presence. Her reasons for assisting me were largely a result of her identification with the profession I was then working in; she lik~"reporters, especially female reporters. Through her portrayal of the town in the 1930's, I gained a new perspective of how she viewed Las Vegas, and how she upheld that distinctive, 40

exclusive depiction. Because my first encounters with Florence

Cahill were unplanned, as well as my encounters with the rest of these pioneer women, there are inherent gaps in the material I was able to collect, and most likely many insights into this group of people that have been lost as a result. However, it was this hap­ hazard manner in which I first gained access to these people that allowed my later indepth interviews to occur. My access to these people in any systematic manner would undoubtedly have taken a great deal more time to achieve, and perhaps, would have resulted in a very different set of results. CHAPTER THREE

HISTORY: TilE PIONEERS OF LAS VEGAS

The Settlers of Las Vegas

Las Vegas goes hand-in-hand with the word 'Strip.' That's really a very unfair assessment of the town. But then, all those reporters who have created that image are outsiders themselves. [Florence Cahill, Las Vegas pioneer]

On January 30, 1905, the last steel spike was driven into a railroad line that extended from Salt Lake City to a place about 23 miles south of a lush desert oasis. Although it would take some years more to complete the San Pedro, Los Angeles, Salt Lake Line of the Union Pacific, a town was laid out in anticipation of the water supply that would later be used for the steam locomotives coming through (Edwards 1975:7). After a public land auction executed by the Union Pacific Railroad, the town of Las Vegas was officially founded on May 15 of that same year. But the new city, christened 'The Meadows' by its Spanish predecessors, was quickly exhausted of its natural resources. By the time the railroad began transporting potential land buyers from California, free of charge, there was little of anything valuable left

41 42 in Las Vegas. The gold and silver mines, the farmlands and pastures had been exploited and left barren during earlier migratory waves. Las Vegas grew up in a fashion typical for a railroad town. Workers for the railroad used it as a stopover on their way to Los Angeles. Mormon missionaries had succeeded in overpowering the Southern Paiute Indians, depositing them on reservations where they could be indoctrinated into white ways. Many of the first families to settle in Las Vegas had come from Salt Lake City, where the Mbrrnon population had soared to uncomfortable heights and freedom from persecution had become a dominant issue in the survival of the new religion. As in the days of early Christianity, and later during the period of the Reformation, the ideas advanced by this new creed were considered by many as heresy. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, organized in Fayette, New t•Iexico and also in New York in 1830, was established on the principle of revelation from a supreme being to man through a divinely chosen prophet. It claims to be a restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ as it was organized at the time he taught his gospel on earth. The organization was patterned after the primitive church that existed at the time of Christ's ministry (Edwards 1975:7). From its organizational date in 1830, the Mormon Church became a proselyting organization, sending missionaries across North America as well as deep into northern Europe and England. Seeking converts to the "restored gospel," the new religionists ventured finally into Utah, after a journey that had originated in New York and taken them first to Ohio, then Missouri, and later Illinois. In large numbers, 43 waves of migrations swept across the plains and mountains to church headquarters in Salt Lake City (Edwards 1976:7). When Joseph Smith, founder/prophet and president of the church, was murdered by a mob while he was being held prisoner in a jail in Carthage, Illinois, the MOrmons pushed on into the Great Basin of the 'Far West,' under the guidance of the new leader and prophet, Brigham Young. The migration into new territories west of Nauvoo, Illinois--a city which, because of the Mormon influx, became the largest in the state, with 20,000 people--began with the expulsion of the exiles from there (Edwards 1975:7). In February of 1846, thousands of religionists joined the migration to Great Salt Lake in the Great Basin. "Dignity of work, economic responsibility and self-sufficiency were concepts as basic to the movement as were the ecclesiastical, spiritual and moral principles," writes Elbert Edwards, a local historian (1975:7). To meet the needs of new immigrants continually arriving, expansion into virgin territory was necessary. New settlements were established wherever conditions of soil, climate and water justified them. The 1850's and 1860's were periods of community building and growth. As early as 1852, an initial expedition into parts of Southern Nevada, around the drainage areas of the Virgin River, had been made (Edwards 1975:7). In 1854, headquarters for the mission had been settled on the Santa Clara River and by 1862, 245 people had made their homes in St. George, Utah. Subsequent to this settlement, St. George was chosen as headquarters for the Southern Mission that 44 would direct the establishment of communities throughout the Virgin Basin in present-day Nevada (Edwards 1975:7). Following the Mormon effort to establish a rest station in Las Vegas in 1855, and the White Mountain Mission in 1858, the next attempt at settlement was in Clover Valley, near present-day Lincoln County, in early 1864 (Edwards 1975:7). The mission, under the direction of Edward Bunker, was forced to continue by a severe drought in 1863, and despite several ambushes by Southern Paiute and Shoshone Indians, a temporary settlement in Clover Valley was finally agreed on by both parties. Shortly after the arrival of this group, another band of Mormons settled in Meadow Valley on May 6, 1864, a mere 25 miles northwest of Clover Valley (Edwards 1975:24). Mineral resources in this area had previously been discovered by the l~ite Mountain ~tission, and the development of mines encouraged the simultaneous development of the Mormon community. The Pioche Valley, in turn, became a ready market for Mormon farm and range harvests. Although the influx of people into Nevada also consisted of miners and ranchers outside of the Ivlorm::m persuasion, the majority of colonizers in Nevada were :tvlormon followers (Paher 1971:65).

By the close of the Civil War, the Nevada territory had 40,000 citizens, and shortly thereafter, it was proclaimed a state by President Lincoln, who had passed a law to lower the number of residents necessary for statehood.

The Founding of Las Vegas

Southern Nevada t s largest town at the turn of the century was 45

Delamar, a gold mining camp 100 miles north of Las Vegas. With 1,000 people, it was larger than Pioche, the silver mining town that had boomed in the 1870's, and Searchlight, an emerging gold mining camp 60 miles south of Las Vegas. Farmlands and ranching could be found 1n Eagle, Clover, Moapa and Virgin Valleys, all near the Nevada/Utah border. At that time, the entire Las Vegas Valley had a total of 30 residents (Paher 1971:65). In August of 1900, Montana Senator William Clark organized an offshoot railroad company, splitting from the Oregon Short Line, which would traverse the Vegas Valley territories later. Clark's San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad immediately thrust itself into a dispute with the rival company over an abandoned railroad grade extending eastward from Culverwell Ranch in Caliente toward Uvada, Utah, a station close to the Nevada/Utah border on the Oregon Short Line (Paher 1971:65). The two competing companies disputed the right to cross Culverwell Rancl1, and both sides hastily carved out a grade through Meadow Valley Wash, south of Caliente, heading toward Las Vegas (Paher 1971:66). Las Vegas Valley was seen as a natural division point for shop facilities and a town, mostly because of the natural water supply and the availability of timber from nearby ·Mt. Charleston. The Helen J. Stewart Las Vegas Ranch, located in the middle of the valley, sported anywhere from 1,800 to 2,000 acres of figs, dates and tropical fruits, sustained by 400 inches of water diverted from Las Vegas Creek for irrigation (Paher 1971:66). 46

Clark's Oregon Short Line was quick to purchase the Stewart Ranch and water supply, securing a $60,000 option to purchase both. After the two companies compromised in 1902, Clark bought the ranch and springs for $55,000, and quickly afterward, pushed construction onward toward Las Vegas (Edwards 1975:7).

As the railroad construction advanced during the summer of 1904, tent saloons, stores and boarding houses kept pace with the graders at the end of tl1e track. Later in the summer a tent settlement called Las Vegas sprang up one-half of a mile west of the Las Vegas Ranch (Paher 1971:68). A rush to the newly discovered Bullfrog mining district, 120 miles northwest and near present-day Beatty, kept the transient settlement of Las Vegas alive. By early November, 1904, more than a dozen saloons and gambling houses were conducting a successful business, along with two meat markets, two stores and four restaurants, made of canvas and boards (Paher 1971:68). J. T. McWilliams, the tent town owner of Las Vegas, and an engineer and surveyor who had surveyed the Stewart Ranch in 1902 to determine the boundaries in preparation for its sale to Clark, filed a claim on an 80-acre plot of government land on the west side of the ranch, in 1905 (Paher 1971:68). Although he also owned a quarter section east of the railroad tracks which had been mistakenly laid through the southeast corner of his land, he sold lots through the winter of 1905 to miners and potential town residents. After Senator Clark announced that Las Vegas would be a division point on his line, building materials began to flood in. By late January, 1905, Las Vegas consisted of about 150 buildings either 47 completed or under construction. An icehouse was still on the drawing boards and two brickyards had contracts on hand to keep them busy for the next six months. Additional businesses started up, and independ­ ent businessmen came from other states to start their own shops. One Salt Lake City barber forwarded a bath tub, barber's chair, and other equipment in a rush to open his shop by February (Paher 1971:70). Confusion over where the railroad would stake out its townsite did not discourage people from starting businesses. The cluster of tents on McWilliams's land east of the new railroad tracks was considered a good miner's supply point. The locals believed, though, that establishing the town on the west side of the Clark townsite, where it would stand as the "gateway" to Bullfrog and other northern mining towns, would be a better choice (Paher 1971:70). Finally, on January 30, 1905, the new railroad line rolled through the townsite, with Charles "Pop" Squires--one of the first men to arrive in town on the new railroad, and also the father of one informant in this study-­ aboard. Other than the businesses already being constructed, the rail­ road restricted anyone from camping on its land in order to avoid filling the town up with "sooners" (Paher 1971:71). New arrivals during February, 1905, continued to buy land from r4:Williams's Las Vegas townsite, primarily because he sold lots very cheap, offering no guarantees about a water system or street improvements. Purchasers simply sank their own wells and easily drew water (Paher 1971:71). Railroad Street, a row of tents facing the tracks and containing stores, a mercantile company, lodging houses and saloons, became busy 48

districts in the new town, catering mostly to miners, prospectors and teamsters who needed supplies, entertainment and places to sleep

(Paher 1971:71). As one local historian describes them:

... These few hundred adventurous settlers, drawn together as if by some common purpose, had come from throughout the nation to seek easy wealth. Winter's hardships did not cloud their dreams. Occupations varied greatly, though saloon men and gamblers seemed to be predominant ... [Paher 1971:71]

McWilliams thought he had struck the jackpot when, in ~~rch, 1905, the railroad people decided to build their Armour ice plant on the east side of the tracks, atop his small chunk of land. Without informing the company that they were building on his land, McWilliams allowed them to pour their foundations, thinking he could later ask for a large sum of money for his land's sale (Paher 1971:72). He waited patiently all through May, during which time the railroad land auction had taken place, before he called the company into account. After discovering their mistake, the railroad officials, furious with McWilliams for his swindlings, immediately stopped work on the ice plant and began digging a new site about three-quarters of a mile south of McWilliams's property (Paher 1971:74). The railroad land auction had already triggered the decline of McWilliams's original Las Vegas tent town, and removal of the town's first major business, the ice plant, furthered this decline. Other businesses, too, were torn down and moved to the west side of the tracks and by the 49

beginning of summer, McWilliams's "Ragtown" looked unimpressive (Paher 1971: 74). Conveniently, one month before the land auction in May, John S. Park opened the First State Bank of Las Vegas, bringing with him a large iron safe from Los Angeles, which became the town's emblem of security. Although the first bank had been opened in March by Los Angeles bankers with $100,000 in capital and named the Las Vegas Bank and Trust Company, Park's bank also represented a local business, and quickly drew a healthy clientele (Paher 1971:74). During this hustle and bustle, the Las Vegas Ranch was being transformed into a retreat for tired Las Vegans (Paher 1971:76). Newer tent houses, adobe structures and recreation halls were built to encourage locals out of the main business district. Nestled in the nicest nook of the entire valley, where a natural creek flowed, the Las Vegas Ranch became known as a place where a tired businessman could cool his temperature and his spirits (Paher 1971:76). It proved to be a successful undertaking. The tent Las Vegas Hotel, which was being built during the early part of May, 1905, was completed and ready for guests one day before the land auction started. All 30 rooms filled up within the first few hours after it opened. The next day, lots went on sale under a shady mesquite tree just north of the present-day Union Plaza Hotel (Paher 1971:80). Three lots at the northeast corner of Main and Fremont Streets, where the present Sal Sagev Hotel stands, sold for $1,750 and almost equal amounts of money were paid for lots on the so

opposi-te side of Fremont Street (Paher 1971: 80). Lots beuveen Main and First Streets and those sitting on Fremont sold for $750, $800 and $850 (Paher 1971:81). The land auction continued throughout May 15 and 16, with lots being sold from 8 a.m. to sundown. During those two days, the rail­ road netted approximately $265,000 (Paher 1971:85). Except for "Block Sixteen" of the Clark townsite, all property, including that on Fremont Street, was designated with a "no liquor" clause written into the deeds (Paher 1971:85). Block Sixteen, which lies on Second Street between Ogden and Stewart Streets, developed into a "redlight district" after an apparent shooting occurred on the first Thursday night of the Clark townsite's opening (Paher 1971:85). The legal liquor sales on that block made the property highly desir­ able for hotel and restaurant owners, but there were ways of getting around the clause. Those purchasers who wanted to open a saloon out­ side of Block Sixteen simply made a few rentals and called their establishment a "hotel" (Paher 1971:96). It was not until mid-August that the railroad's subsidiary called its first suit against a man for alleged violation of the "no liquor" clause (Paher 1971:96). Nothing came of the trial and for many years the controversial clause remained just that--controversial. No one's license was ever revoked because of alleged violations. After World War II, the rail­ road rescinded the clause by filing a declaration with the county recorder (Paher 1971:97). · The first families of Las Vegas were conservative people, and the majority of them were also religious (Paher 1971:97). The 51

Protestant ethic of working hard in order to secure salvation was a common characteristic of those settlers (Paher 1971:97). Hence, the contradictions between this ethic and the saloon/entertainment businesses that were attracting outsiders into town, placed the residents in a peculiar position: the business districts were strategically divided from the saloon districts in order that residents did not have to pass by entertainment clubs if they did not want to (Paher 1971: 97). Because the "no liquor" clause was not being enforced in the saloon districts, gambling houses prospered and outsiders flooded into the new townsite. From its official founding in 1905, to the start of construction on Boulder Dam in the early 1930's, Las Vegas drew in a large transient population that almost alone kept the town alive (Paher 1971:98).

By the time the town was a month old, the residents, in a wild building crusade, had erected nearly every kind of business imaginable. Only a few solid frame structures had been completed, and the saloons, hotels, post office and bank continued to conduct business inside tents. Las Vegas's first school term began in a tent under the cottonwoods near Las Vegas Creek (Paher 9171:96), while a new, wooden frame structure was being completed on the corner of Second and Lewis Streets, for 200 children. Old Las Vegas, McWilliams's eastern townsite, continued to deteriorate until, after a summer business slump in 1905, a fire destroyed the entire area. Railroad Street, once a bustling row of

commercial businesses, was reduced to ashes on September 5, while the 52

Clark townsite began another building boom of solid business blocks. The editor of the Las Vegas Times lamented, after the disaster:

... The old town is but a memory ... in its day it was a roisterer with all the vitality and spirit of a typical frontier rag town. Bustle, hustle and jostle was its lot in its heyday. All this is gone., Fire has consumed it ... no hope remains, like the Phoenix of old, that the town would rise again [Paher 1971:97].

After the fire, Block Sixteen became the only "seat of pleasure" (Paher 1971:97). Local historian Paher depicts life in early Las Vegas as "riotous":

Nearly every night, including Christmas, it [Block Sixteen] ran full blast. The Gem, the Red Onion, the Turf, the Favorite, the Double-0, the Star, the Arcade saloons and the Arizona Club were continually crowded with sharp-eyed dealers and boosters and men standing around trying to solve the mysteries of gaming. All night long sounded the strains of music, the rattle of ivory chips and the clink of silver and gold coins on the bales of faro, roulette, craps, black jack and poker. Standing room around the stoves was at a premium in the winter ... [Paher 1971:97].

Close to the saloons were small businesses featuring prostitutes who waited at the dance halls for possible customers (Paher 1971:97). Paher adds, "That part of Las Vegas looked like a rip-roaring, 53

whiskey-drinking, gun-toting, gambling town, while the rest of the town was conservative and businesslike" (1971:97). The distinctions between the "business-like" townsite and "riotous Block Sixteen" represent an important division between what the residents saw as necessary for bringing people and business into Las Vegas, and what they saw as necessary to their own daily activities. Paher notes that residents "tended to stay away from the saloon districts" (1971:97) and rather involved themselves with town social events and church activities. Because the gambling houses were restricted to a particular area "away" from the rest of the townsite, residents did not feel threatened by the encroaching saloon districts. The "fun and frolic" aspect of Las Vegas was specifically designed to attract outside business from which the town could support itself and continue to grow.

Hoover Dam and the Resort Hotel Business

During the weeks before the official founding of Las Vegas in 1905, the establishment of a bank and a newspaper, the Age, influenced most of the decision of Las Vegans to split off from Lincoln County (Paher 1971:105). At the time, that county included all of south­ eastern Nevada. While Nevada was in its infancy in the mid-1800's, Lincoln had been carved out of Ny County, and on February 20, 1866, it split off and formed territorial boundaries that were not disturbed until the Clark County division in 1909 (Paher 1971:105). After a lull in the growth of Las Vegas, the events leading up to the county division sparked new interest in town building. 54

Senator William Clark and others of the railroad announced in 1909 that new machine and maintenance shops would be built for the rail­ road, raising spirits with the promise of employing 500 additional men and boosting the town's population from 1,200 to around 1,700 (Paher 1971:105).

On New Year's Day, 1910, though, a distant flood suddenly brought a halt to many trains corning through to\~ and curtailed the town's commercial activity until mid-summer. 11hen the 1910 census was taken, Las Vegas had a population of only about 800 (Edwards 1975:7). That same summer marked the beginning of construction on a $25,000 grammar school located on land donated by the railroad near Lewis and Bridger Streets between Fourth and Fifth Streets (Paher 1971:106). During its construction a fire destroyed the old school, pushing the teachers and pupils into a temporary quarter in the Methodist Church 1mtil the fall of 1911 (Edwards 1976:24). By then, the Methodist and Episcopal churches, as well as a Catholic church, had been built. New railroad shops opened for business in early 1911, but the biggest event during that year was town incorporation, provided in a legislative bill that Governor Tasker Oddie signed into law on

~~rch 16, 1911 (Paher 1971:119). The new bill allowed Las Vegas to be governed by a mayor and a board of four commissioners--the first Nevada town to implement this form of government, popularized by the City of Galveston, Texas. Peter Buol, a local landowner and business­ man, became the first mayor, and his board of commissioners .. ~,' ------

55

included W. J. Steward, Ed VonTobel, C. M. ~tGovern, and J. J. Coughlin, all prominent locals (Paher 1971:119). During those years, small farms and ranch homesteads dominated the local economy in the valley. With the formation of a governing body in town, badly needed irrigation systems were financed through bonds. Landowners had drilled their own water wells, and for many years, excellent fruits, grains and vegetables flourished. World War I had no major effect on the local economy either, and until the early 1920's, when word spread about the possible Boulder Dam construction, life in Vegas Valley was slow and uneventful (Edwards 1976: 7). The seven states of the Colorado River Basin, during the 1920's, formed a special commission to discuss the possibilities of construe- tion on the Black Canyon site of the Colorado River. It was named Hoover Dam after the commission chairman, Hoover, who later became president. On December 21, 1928, the Boulder Canyon Project Act (called the Swing-Johnson Bill) was passed by Congress, and President Hoover signed the initial appropriation bill on July 3, 1930 (Edwards 1976:7). C. "Pop" Squires, Edward Clark and James Cashman, Sr. were vigorous supporters of the dam construction in Las Vegas, while

Arizona's governor and senators battled against them. Until ~Brch,

1925, when the 726-foot high dam was completed and accepted by President Roosevelt, the dispute continued. But the influx of workers into the area during this time did not stimulate the local economy in quite the same way as did the legalization of gambling in 1931 (Paher 1971:120). 56

After the dam's dedication in September, 1935, the construction workers began to flow out of Las Vegas. On the notion that the dam might attract more tourists, the first "resort" hotelman, Thomas Hull, from Los Angeles, opened the "plush" El Rancho Vegas south of the town in 1940 (Edwards 1976:24). A Texas theatre-chain owner, R. E. Griffith, was watching the success of Hull's El Rancho Vegas, and in 1943, he decided to build the Last Frontier Hotel on the highway leading to Los Angeles, a place considered to be "far out" in the desert (Paher 1971:121). In town, Robert Brooks was constructing the Nevada Biltmore, and Marion B. Hicks was busy with construction of the El Cortez in the early 1940's (Paher 1971:122). Both hotels became popular gathering places for Las Vegans and military personnel.

Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo went up in 1946, at the end of World War II. After his assassination, Marion Hicks and Clifford A. Jones founded the Thunderbird Hotel, one year later (Paher 1971:121). All of the casinos quickly stimulated the local economy, as did the opening of Las Vegas Army Air Field in 1941, at the present-day site of Nellis Air Force Base. Fishing and boating resorts at Lake Mead and Lake Mohave also attracted tourists as well as permanent residents to Las Vegas. In 1950, the population of Las Vegas had soared to 24,624, a substantial increase from the 8,422 residents recorded a decade earlier (Paher 1971:121). Resort hotels and casinos continued to spring up from the barren desert landscape. In 1950, Wilbur Clark opened the Desert Inn Hotel (Paher 1971:121). Two years later, Milton Prell followed suit with the ~, ------·------

57

opening of the Sahara, situated on the site of the old Club Bingo (Edwards 1976:24). In 1953, the Sands opened its doors to the public and in the early part of the following year, the Riviera Hotel jutted upward from the desert floor (Paher 1971:121). Its distinctive architectural design featured nine stores, a definite split from the previously constructed low ranch style casinos. In the same year, 1954, the Showboat Hotel went up on Boulder Highway instead of the Strip, founded by William J. Moore Jr. (Paher 1971:122). The Moulin Rouge, on the north side of town, was erected in 1955. Downtown Las Vegas, known as "glitter gulch," featured a new high-rise in 1956, called the Fremont Hotel, towering over the oldest club on Fremont Street, the Boulder Club, which had opened for business after the approval of the Boulder Dam construction in 1930 (Paher 1971:123). The Golden Nugget opened the same year that the Flamingo did, and the Apache Hotel later evolved into Benny Binion's Horshoe Club. The Lucky Strike, the Bingo Club, the Pioneer, the Westerner, the California Club, the Monte Carlo and the Las Vegas Club were among the other popular downtown casinos (Paher 1971:121). The casino construction did not stop there. Beginning in the mid-1950's, the Dunes, the Hacienda, the Tropicana and the Stardust opened their doors consecutively one year after another beginning in 1955. By 1960, the Las Vegas population figures had climbed to

64,406 and the area population was estimated at 119,200 (~aher 1971: 121). During the 1960's, the Mint Hotel opened, in 1964, joined by the Four Queens Hotel two years later. Caesars Palace opened on the 58

Strip that same year, and the Frontier Hotel was doing business one year later. By 1969, two additions to the Strip, the Landmark and the Las Vegas Hilton, had extended the boundaries of the Strip beyond Las Vegas Boulevard South (Paher 1971:122). Smaller hotels such as the Castaways, built in 1963, and the Aladdin in 1966, all contributed to the growth of the "resort" industry in Las Vegas. In 1971, the Union Plaza Hotel opened for business at the corner of Casino Center, just a short distance north of the spot where the original townsite lots had been auctioned off 66 years earlier. Paher describes Las Vegas and its people this way:

Behind the mask of the Strip is an air-conditioned tmvn made up of substantial citizens who seldom if ever gamble, but occasionally spend an evening enjoying the unparalleled enter­ tainment that the town offers ... These Las Vegans comprise a community with its own social, educational, cultural and recreational activities which combine for worthwhile family living in this hot dry climate. They enjoy boating and skiing, take in the movies and go on weekend vacations. They do anything that a family might in Seattle or Boston. Underneath the glamor and tinsel of Las Vegas is a normal American city that continues to grow, maintaining a character only seen by visitors who linger awhile [Paher 1971:121].

In 1979, Las Vegas reports a permanent residential population of 375,000 in Clark County alone (Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce 1978:10). The other incorporated cities are North Las Vegas, adjacent to Nellis 59

Air Force Base; Henderson, the county's center of heavy industry; and Boulder City, 7 miles from Hoover Darn. The Strip, which runs south

from Las Vegas for 3~ miles, is located in the townships of Winchester and Paradise, two of the county's nine townships (Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce 1978:11). Of this large city population, the pioneer women who later became informants for this study estimated that perhaps 250-300 residents are original settlers. Their estimates come from the person­

al files of one of the informants who keeps family and individual histories as part of her work for the local newspaper. They are, at best, approximations that have been confirmed by other pioneers in Las Vegas. These pioneers also feel they are different from the rest of the senior citizen population because of their common historical experience in Las Vegas. Hence, they do not include themselves in population figures for that segment of the whole city population, which comes to 55,000 (Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce 1978:25). The most current reports from the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce state that in 1977, over 10 million visitors traveled to Las Vegas, an average of 30,000 tourists daily (Las Vegas 1978:6). Of the 79,100 people employed in service industries in Las Vegas in 1977, 52,800 of them were directly employed in the hotels, gaming and recreation industries (Nevada Employment Security Department, 1978:32). The Nevada Gaming Abstract for 1978, the most recent report of gaming profits, put out by the State Gaming Control Board in Carson City, Nevada, reports that "total revenue from all sources--gaming, ------·- _>!!>_'

60

rooms, restaurants, bars, etc. of 217 nonrestricted licenses was approximately $2.7 billion--an increase of 21 percent over 1977." The report continues: "$2.619 billion was generated by 115 major casinos in the state, each of whom grossed $1 million or more in gaming revenue .... Of the $2.619 billion produced by the 115 major casinos, about $183.3 million remained as net profit after all operating costs and an estimated allowance for Federal income tax ... The 115 casinos paid $750.9 million to nearly 83,000 employees (25.6 percent of the 1978 average industrial employment) during the year'' (Nevada Gaming Abstract, 1978:3). With these statistics in mind, there is no denying that Las Vegas is supported by the tourist/resort industries. Instant wedding chapels, divorce courts and many day-care centers stand as reminders of the demands a 24-hour resort city imposes. The emphasis that Paher puts on the "normalcy" of the town is, at best, a defense against these statistics.

About The Informants

Florence Cahill, my key informant, arrived in Las Vegas in 1933, fresh out of college, and temporarily moved in with her parents,

Mr. and Mrs. B. M. Morganne. They had moved to Las Vegas from the midwest in 1931 to buy a gas station and tourist court out in Whitney, Nevada. Her husband-to-be, John F. Cahill, had arrived in Las Vegas from Reno, in 1929 to join his brother, A1 Cahil4 half owner of the

Nevada State JournaZ, in starting up a new daily newspaper. The ~,, ------

61 other owner of the paper, Frank Garside, had bought the paper in 1926 and made Al Cahill co-owner. Florence's parents became friendly with the Garsides, which resulted in Florence's decision to move to Las Vegas for a newspaper job, after earning a college degree in journal- ism from the University of Missouri at Columbia. She began as a proofreader and quickly became the only reporter for the paper for many years. John Cahill married Florence in 1934, and they built a large, ranch-style house close to the newspaper office. Florence became very active in many social organizations, for professional and personal reasons. Such groups as the Mesquite Club and Junior League were particularly attractive to her because of the emphasis on historical projects and community fund-raisers. She covered the activities of these clubs particularly closely in her weekly society column for the newspaper. Because of her recognition as a reporter, the community responded to her attempts to join these organizations promptly. In 1935, Florence had her first and only child, Virginia Cahill. Florence continued to be an active participant in many community activities as the town developed. She remembers vividly her experiences as a young reporter covering the construction of Boulder Dam in the late 1930's. She worked as the Sunday lifestyle and society editor for the Las Vegas Review Journal until 1953, when she retired and was replaced by another one of the pioneers in this study, Maisie Roberts. After retirement, she continued her weekly society column, and is still writing it today. She is 69 years old. 62

Florence Benning, daughter of Charles and Delphine Squires, was born in Redlands, California on August 21, 1890. "Pop" Squires, owner of the "Pop's Oasis," a rest and recreation area in the middle of the Mojave Desert, half way between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, had arrived in Las Vegas on February 13, 1905, just before the railroad land auction, intent on making a claim to some of the business profits that would soon be exchanging hands in the new town. Along with several friends--J. Ross Clark, the brother of Senator Clark, who was building the railroad; Chris Brown, an old friend; and Frank Waters, the right-of-way agent of the railroad--Squires formed a partnership called the Las Vegas Trading Company, and set up a tent hotel, opened a lumber yard and started a bank. While her father was in Las Vegas starting up his businesses, Florence, her mother and three younger brothers were in Redlands, California, staying with her grandmother. Her family moved back to Las Vegas in 1906, while Florence stayed with her grandmother to finish high school. After graduating in 1908, she came "home'' to Las Vegas, and took a job teaching the third, fourth and fifth grades in Las Vegas. After her first year of teaching in Las Vegas, she decided to attend Mills College for a year. She taught at Mills for two years, and then returned again to teach in Las Vegas, where she married Frank Dunne in 1912. They had three children: Alice, born in 1913; John, born 1n 1914; and Charles Squires, born in 1916. Frank died in 1917 and Florence supported her family by teaching. In 1924, she then married C. C. Benning, a division engineer with the ~,·

-~--- .. --

63

California Highway Department, who was working on road construction plans from Reno to Las Vegas at the time. Florence's mother was very active in the first women's club in Las Vegas, the Mesquite Club. Because of her immersion in various community activities, Florence says her own membership in clubs was almost an automatic response. She recalls that town growth was always an important concern in her life, and that women were expected to organize fund-raisers in order to help in building the town. She and her second husband built a small house on Seventh Street and Ogden Street after they were married, and Florence lived in it until 1956, when her own father died, and she sold the house. Her husband died in 1963, and Florence moved to a small duplex, where she now lives. She is 89 years old. Leva Bettinger, a close friend of both Florence Cahill and Florence Benning, was born in Nebraska in 1887, and moved to Las Vegas in 1910 to marry William Bettinger, the owner of a man's clothing store on Fremont Street. Her twin sister, Alta, had previously moved to Las Vegas to marry the bother of Leva's husband, Jake Bettinger, and Jake had been the one to lure William out to Las Vegas to invest in the young town's various businesses. Bill and

Leva Bettinger built their own house on a 2~ acre lot on South Fourth Street in 1912, where Leva still lives today. They had two children, Bruce Bettinger, an attorney in Las Vegas, and Virginia Bettinger, also living in Las Vegas. Leva's brother-in-law, Jake, joined Ed VonTobel in starting a lumber yard, but joined his bother's clothing store in 1916. 64

Leva and her husband became active in several community organizations, including the Rotary Club and the Elks lodge. Leva joined the Methodist Church and the Mesquite Club in 1912, where she became close friends of the Benning's and the Cahill's. When her husband retired from the clothing business in 1940, the couple spent the next 15 years traveling off and on around the United States and Europe. Leva Bettinger was 90 years old when I last talked to her in 1976. When I returned to the field in 1977, I was unable to visit her because Florence Cahill told me she was ill and senile. I have heard no new reports of her health since then. She is still living in the house on South Fourth Street, and her daughter takes care of her household and medical needs. Francis Fountainne, the closest friend of Leva Bettinger, came to Las Vegas in 1909 with her husband, David, from Pasadena, California. She was born there and married her husband on August 22, 1908. They moved to Las Vegas when her husband accepted a position with the Nevada First State Bank. Two days after Clark County was officially established, on July 1, 1909, Francis had her first child, Dorothy Fountainne. They had a son, John, in 1913, and a second daughter, Betty, in 1920, after which they moved back to California and did not return to Las Vegas until 1931. During this time, they established the Troy Steam Laundry in California, a successful business, which they sold in 1931 in order to return to Las Vegas. A 20-year prohibition against gambling was also lifted in 1931 as they returned. 65

Despite her 10-year California residence, Francis Fountairllle continued her membership in the Mesquite Club, the U-Wan Study Club, the Hostess Club and the Methodist Church. On her return to Las Vegas, she joined the Republican Women's Club. Her husband accepted an unexpired term as county recorder from 1931 to 1934 and afterward, filled another unexpired term in the same office from 1936 to 1938. He was re-elected to that office successively until he retired in 1950. He died in January, 1973, at the age of 93. Francis Fountainne, too, lives in a small duplex close to down­ town and near to Leva Bettinger's house. She is visited by her son and daughter frequently, and is very active in the Methodist Church and Mesquite Club. Florence Cahill lives close by also, and visits her frequently. Together, they have put together several historical films for young children on the history of Las Vegas. The films are used in such groups as Junior League and the Mesquite Club in order to help orientate new members. Jules Nelson was born in Las Vegas in 1910 after her family moved from Arizona in 1904 to invest in real estate. She is an only child, attended Las Vegas High School when Maude Frazier (a pioneering educator in Nevada's history) was the superintendent, and was married and widowed three times. Her third husband, Daniel Nelson, was a real estate agent and they had one child, Cindy, in 1954, when Jules was 43 years old. The original house she and her husband built in 1905 on Second and Fremont Streets, just opposite of Leva Bettinger's street, is no longer there. Jules Nelson lives in the house that she 66

and her husband moved into in 1953, near Francis Fountainne's duplex in an older, Mormon section of town, behind downtown. Jules Nelson never was an active club-goer. She preferred to restrict her social activities to her high school friends. The only club in which she took an active role was the U-Wan Study Club, a group concerned with studying and preserving the historical develop­ ment of Las Vegas. But she is as active in voicing her concerns about educating the Las Vegas community in history as any of my other informants. Because of some problems that she said her father encountered with other families in town during the first few years of Las Vegas's growth, her family kept to themselves more than the rest of my informants. Today, Jules does most of her socializing with high school friends who visit her for afternoon card games. Her daughter lives with her, and takes care of any problems she might have. Jules is 89 years old now, but in much better physical condition than some of the other informants. Maisie Roberts is also a native of Las Vegas, born in 1910 to Mr. and Mrs. Roy W. Elroy. Elroy was the first private physician in Las Vegas and built the Las Vegas Hospital in 1905. With W. W. Ferron, another pioneer family, Elroy became a druggist, opening The 1~ite Cross in 1915, on Fifth and Oakey, and The Fremont Drug in the 1920's, adjacent to Pop Squires's home. Maisie attended school with Jules Nelson, a classmate, and married Howard Roberts in 1932. They had two daughters, Juliana, born in 1950, and Phila, 67

born in 1952. In 1953, Maisie took over as editor of the women's section of the Review-JournaZ, replacing Florence Cahill. Maisie Roberts, although active in many clubs, is most concerned about historical clubs. She spends a good deal of time with drives to establish a museum at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and her closest friend, for that reason, is Florence Cahill. Together, the two have been major sources of energy for fund-raisers and the development of programs to educate the young about Las Vegas. She retired from her post at the newspaper in 1958, and has since then lived on the outskirts of downtown Las Vegas with her husband. She is 69 years old. Marabel Zackery, also born in 1910, is the daughter of Ed VonTobel, who arrived in Las Vegas in 1905 and started the first lumber yard, a business she later took over. He also was the first treasurer of the Masonic Lodge, a group founded the year she was born. She remembers her family as an active part of the town, constantly working on community events or cultural affairs. She married Kenneth Zackery in 1934 and they had one daughter, Susan. She still works frequently in the family business, although it no longer belongs to the family. Marabel went to high school with Jules Nelson, and is among the classmates who meet for card games periodically. She is also active in the U-Wan Study Club with Jules Nelson, and the Republican Women's Club. Today she lives in an apartment off of Maryland Parkway, near the new VonTobel's Lumber Yard. She is widowed, but she 68 sees a good deal of Florence Cahill, Leva Bettinger's children, and Francis Fountainne. She is 89 years old. p '

CHAPTER FOUR

DATA PRESENTATION: PATTERNS FOR

CONSTRUCTING A SOCIAL LIFE

Introduction: Organization of the Data

The design for presenting the following collection of data parallels Lofland's (1976) methodological scheme for deciphering social behavior by breaking it down into scales of situations and types of strategies. The advantage of this approach is that it enables the observer to also consider the context from which the data is obtained; different types of situations involve different numbers of people congregating for different purposes, and thus producing different outcomes. It further aids in the discovery of strategies that are being used by individuals to manipulate the situation. By using this perspective, the observer is able to present a relatively intimate and accurate account of people doing social things (Lofland 1976:22). The situation-strategy approach for analyzing social interactions also gives the observer a more complete sense of a group's ways of building their social world. Lofland (1976:27-29) defines four situational scales that are useful for deciphering social interactions. These four operational definitions are characterized as:

69 70

Encounters: The smallest type of situation, involving two or more .people in a brief exchange. This might include a coffee break conversation, a formal interview, hallway verbal exchanges, or door­ to-door sales pitches. This micro situation is primarily characterized by the brevity of the exchange, whether it be two minutes or two hours. Much of the data was collected from this type of social situation. In most cases, the encounters involved only two persons: myself and the informant. The focused encounter, though, yielded an abundance of material useful to this study. RaZes: Social situations that are somewhat larger in number of people, and involve more long-term activities are characterized in terms of the roles that individuals assume during the course of the interaction. Lofland (1976:28) says the interactions must last long enough for the participants to act toward a goal. Roles can include many temporary situations, such as classroom situations, temporary employment or court trials. Longer scale roles include being assigned to a gender or age bracket, occupational role or type of relationship such as friendship. The focal point for deciphering a situation in these terms is on the individual viewpoints of the participants as they examine a problem or work toward a goal. Groups: Group scales differ from roles or encounters because they use the collective vie\~oint of the group as the unit of action. Rather than observe individual roles as they affect the action of the group, group scales go beyond the individual's role. Families, social cliques and informal work groups are examples of this situational type. 71

Organizations: Organizational scales have longer histories and include possibly larger numbers of people. Like the group scale situation, organizational scaling uses the viewpoint of the whole acting unit, or the combined actions of the participants. Organiza­ tions are typically more formal and often have specific goals to work toward. Organizational affiliations, business corporations or educational institutions are examples of this type of scale. Lofland (1976:29) defines larger social scales as "worlds," "settlements," and "societies." For the purposes of this study, only the first of these larger situational scales is necessary. A situation in which no one individual has an unbalanced amount of power or responsibility, and a situation in which the participants account for each other's actions and attribute related efforts to each other is called a "world." The pioneers distinguish themselves in precisely this way. Their "world" is made up of one network of individuals equal in rank and responsibility, working toward specific goals. They attribute similar endeavors to each other, account for each other's activities and distribute responsibility and authority evenly among themselves. Each situational level can be used to scale down and define the contexts in which the material I am presenting in this chapter was collected. The end result is to illustrate how the various situational analyses combine to form the "world" in which the pioneers operate. The material here is broken down, first, by topic of discussion, using three broad categories: small town Las Vegas; the significance of religion in Las Vegas; and, the significance of - ~.·------

72

gambling in Las Vegas. The pioneers's perceptions of small town Las Vegas are considered their basis of orientation for living in present-day Las Vegas. The other two categories of discussion are not situationally scaled. They are, rather, constructions of reality that reflect the values and attitudes of the pioneers. Within the boundaries of their world, these expressions of values and norms create the dissonance that the pioneers must minimize on a daily basis. The role of gambling in Las Vegas is undeniably important to the survival of the city, while the role of religion in Las Vegas is, at best, minimal, and unrelated to the financial well-being of the city. In the pioneers's world, however, the significance of religion takes on a very different role, becoming essential to the well-being of the community; the importance of gambling, on the other hand, is reduced to nonexistence because it does not coincide with the values of the pioneers, nor does it create an acceptable image of their environment. The significance of these two activities in Las Vegas can best be understood when they are put into the context of small town Las Vegas, the orientation point of the pioneers's world. The expressions of intimacy reflected in small town life also affect the roles of religion and gambling, as they see it, in their world. The context of small town Las Vegas is vital to understanding how the religious and gambling images have been altered to fit the needs of the pioneers's values and norms. ------~.·

73

Small Town Las Vegas

Focused encounters with each informant yielded a great deal of information about the pioneers's impressions of the development of Las Vegas and how they function today in their environment. These self-reports exemplify Lofland's (1976) situational encounter because they involve two or more people in a face-to-face verbal exchange for a relatively short period of·time; the average time of each interview was three hours. By defining the social situation in which the material was collected, possible limitations within the data can be inferred. Because the formal interviews were conducted one year after I had left Las Vegas, observational material that will be used to fill in possible gaps in the data comes from an earlier time period, and was collected while I was a reporter. When I returned in the summer of 1977, I had disassociated myself from the newspaper. There are inherent gaps in the data due to methodological problems that were impossible to correct. However, the material can be viewed largely as value statements that appear consistent among the pioneers. The patterns of consistency in the pioneers's inter- pretations of small town Las Vegas are especially important because they imply a certain body of shared values about life in Las Vegas. The extreme emphasis on the early lifestyle of these pioneers is also particularly important because it reveals their point of orientation for living in Las Vegas today. 74

Self-Reports

In 1933, there were about 5,000 people here, before the Boulder Dam construction began. Then about 5,000 workers came into the city, which boosted the income for the city.

By 1940, there were 8,430 people living her~: (Florence Cahill, 1977)

When discussing their experiences with the young town of Las Vegas, one important idea is repeatedly pointed out: population growth. The detail with which many of them recall the first years of Las Vegas is important, because it represents a vivid and lasting impression of life in Las Vegas at a specific time period. None of them would be able to give population figures for Las Vegas today, because, as Leva Bettinger put it, "I really don't care how many people live here now." This lack of concern about precise informa­ tion of Las Vegas's demography today reinforces the fact that the Las Vegas of 60 years ago is a much stronger image than the Las Vegas of today. Another pioneer, although her recollection is somewhat inaccurate, cites similar statistics:

When I came along, the whole town was over on the westside, and we settled in with the first families. I think there were about 2,500 people in town [in 1910 ], but there might have been more. I was too little to remember exactly. (Jules Nelson, 1977) 75

Depictions of life in the early town are also comparatively consistent and detailed among the pioneers. Consistencies in the ways in which they describe the physical and social setting of the early town are found in such accounts as the following, which emphasizes knowing the neighbors and accounting for the early social activities and business activities of various families.

We lived on Fremont Street just east of Fourth. There was the Chris Brown house and then our house and then a frame house that was built as a double house and W. J. McBirney, the deputy sheriff, lived there. The other neighbors lived in

three-room houses: ~rrs. Williams, John Park, Dan Nelson, Charles Bell, a superintendent for Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad, Walter S. Bracken, a cousin of Senator Clark. The Bettinger's clothing store was there in 1907, in the first Nevada Hotel building. Bettinger was using an electric iron to press clothes and a fire broke out and burned down the building. They moved to First and Fremont streets, now the Pioneer Club. (Florence Benning, 1977)

Leva Bettinger was also able to recall the names of her neighbors ln the early townsite:

The town then consisted of two blocks on Fremont Street, boarded sidewalks, a few small gambling houses. The whole town was over on the westside, and we settled in with the Ferrons, Brackens, Squires, Williams, Farnsworths. It was a very 76

friendly tmvn. Everybody knew everybody else. The town was really a railroad town, and it was a big event for us to go down and watch the trains roll in.

Florence Cahill, a key informant, is the only pioneer who had any justification for knowing these kinds of details. She came to Las Vegas as a reporter for the local newspaper, and for that reason, would know these facts:

It's always been the custom of the people here to look ahead and be prepared for what's coming along. When I arrived in the city, the city commission was setting up a police force in Las Vegas to take care of the influx of people that was expected. Prior to that, they had a constable who rode a horse around the streets of Las Vegas at night, and there wasn't any police protection during the day. Of course, they didn't need any because with a population of 5,000 people, and everybody knowing everybody else, and everybody knew where everybody else was at any given time during the day, it wasn't hard to figure out a crime. There just weren't any crime problems, even during the Boulder Dam days , because we were a tight-knit community working together to build a city.

Two important ideas are reflected in Florence's view of Las Vegas in the early 1930's. The first is a sense of intimacy, that everybody knew everybody else and that everybody could be accounted 77 for at any time during a typical day. Also, the idea that crime was practically nonexistent. These two pieces of information form a perception of Las Vegas that is applicable to Festinger's concept of dissonance. The pioneers'~ perceptions of Las Vegas stand in a I dissonant relation with perceptions of modern-day Las Vegas, in the sense that both conditions of early Las Vegas no longer apply to that environment. However, by maintaining an exclusive group of social friends who have similar historical roots in early Las Vegas, the dissonance produced by such a conflict is adequately minimized. The group serves as a support network whereby those sentiments of intimacy and trust are reinforced through mutual support. The social concerns of these individuals also consistently surface, both in recalling the functions of social groups in early Las Vegas, and in explanations of how those groups eventually separ- ated from the rest of the community. Florence Cahill refers specifically to a time period that represents the point when Las Vegas grew from "downtown" into "the Strip";* at this point in time, the core or the original population psychologically disassociated them- selves from any involvement in any activities on "the Strip." This distinction can be seen in Florence's use of the words "corporate Las Vegas," and "mainstream Las Vegas," both terms that separate her reference to "the community," or the "townspeople".

* I refer to this as a "psychological" split because, although the first casinos were beginning to go up on the Strip, the physical separation had not yet manifested itself, and the split was symbolic in nature. 78

In 1946, corporate ownership of the casinos took place, and the townspeople no longer knew personally the owners of these hotels. At this point, the community started feeling alienated from the night life scene, and moved out of mainstream Las Vegas. It's good, because that's where all the crime is. Also, during 1946 and 1956, two parallel social groups developed; there were the strip hotel personalities and TV personalities, and there were the basic community people. We, the community people, felt that because the social division was so apparent, we would have to be highly organized in our community activities in order to remain a vital part of the town.

Francis Fountainne, who received recognition from the community for giving birth to her first child in newly-founded Clark County, infers the importance of social groups in those days:

\Vhen we got here, we rented a small house on Second Street, but when the summer carne, we rented a small apartment adjoin­ ing the Stewart house at the old ranch. During that summer, legislation was passed for the partition of Lincoln County, so that Clark County became an entity on July 1, 1909. Just two days later I gave birth to my daughter on the old ranch. I became the mother of the first child born in newly-formed Clark County. Two years later, I became one of three founders of the Mesquite Club, the first women's club, which 79

was instrumental in having the first trees planted in the new town. Also, the Methodist Church had lots of hmcheons and weekend dinner parties, but I didn't participate too much because I was so busy taking care of my daughter.

Leva Bettinger also received recognition from the community when one of the first plane flights to pass over Las Vegas in 1925 involved her husband's brother, who dropped a gift from the plane into Leva's backyard, intended for her newborn daughter:

As the airplane flew over to\~, Jake dropped a velvet doll almost in the backyard as a gift for his niece, Frances Virginia Bettinger, and she still has that doll. Everybody

in town was watching and cheered when the doll came down. We were all laughing and carrying on.

This recollection brings a good deal of joy to Leva, as does Francis Fountainne's remembrance of giving birth to the first Clark County baby. But the broader social concerns of organizing events for the community comes through in Leva's next statement:

Sometimes it was hard to keep up the social gatherings because the roads weren't good and it was sometimes hard to get to some of these houses. But we always were planning activities. We called each other all the time, and it was such a joy every time one of the ladies was about to have a baby. We had baby showers, noon lunches, teas and we played 80

bridge a lot. Most of our husbands knew each other in business. It was sort of a large family made up of many smaller families.

Florence Cahill explained why she thought social groups were so important to the new community of Las Vegas:

I think there was a strong need for the townspeople to identify with something in order to find a basis for acquaintanceship, and the strength of these social groups I feel is attributed to this need to identify with something in town. TI1e popula­ tion increased so rapidly at this time that people felt they either needed strong ties to some groups or they would sink-­ sink or swim was the attitude, especially for the community women.

Although my other informants were not able to articulate possible reasons for the push in early Las Vegas to organize social groups, their perceptions of how these groups cropped up support Florence's explanation quite clearly. ~misie Roberts, who eventually replaced Florence Cahillas an editor for the local newspaper, described it this way:

All the men were pursuing their careers, you know, trying to

build up their businesses in town. Tile women took over other aspects of developing the town. Tiley were concerned with raising the children in an adequate town, so they were working 81

on community projects like the library, and the schools.

~fuude Frazier was a fine example of what women could do for the conummity that I think she really sparked the women's confidence that they could do useful things for the town.

This interpretation also serves as a good example of these women's expressions of the importance of their social identities within the larger community. Reports of self-attributes from them indicate that their underlying commitments to social groups that worked toward ''worthwhile goals," as Francis Fountainne described it, were important to defining their social identities, or roles, in the community as well. Self-descriptive material collected during these interviews stressed attributes such as honesty, friendliness, compassion for others, concern for education and community programs to enlighten community participants, achievements, respect, the value of religion in everyday life. Marabel Zackery repeats these themes in her recollections of life in early Las Vegas:

We were all friendly. We mainly concerned ourselves with work

in the community to help build the town. r4y father became the first treasurer for the Masonic Lodge, and I was involved in their social meetings most of the time. We also had bridge socials and other meetings like that, and showers for the ladies when one of them had a baby or birthday or anniversary. There were lots of reasons for getting together. We all knew the town would grow in size, but we never really thought it 82

would turn into this gambling mecca like it is, or the way people think of Las Vegas. It really hurt the town because, like I say, it use to be a safe little town.

Maisie Roberts continues these themes, emphasizing the strength of these social bonds and the sense of intimacy of living in early Las Vegas:

When I was growing up here, it was a beautiful place to be. You learn to appreciate the desert when you grow up in it. You learn to appreciate the beauty and the harshness of it.

We built this town out of she~r will, and God's blessings. But we were all in it together, we all knew each other, grand­ mothers and grandchildren alike. We were a community and we made decisions together. Fremont Street was Las Vegas, the heart of everything. Now, you can only see parts of that glorious past in the spirits of some of the grandchildren who still live here in town, and the sons and daughters of some of my friends. But you can only see it if you knew it. You just can't know otherwise.

Florence Benning expresses her strong identification to the social groups in early Las Vegas this way:

At the time [1912] there were no trees in Clark's Las Vegas townsite, just a few scattered cottonwoods. The Mesquite Club had a "tag day" where they sold tags on the street and 83

raised money to buy some 2,000 trees. These were planted along both sides of the street and in a comparatively few years, most of the residents took care of the trees in front of their houses, but there were a lot of vacant lots. So the club members carried pails of water and dragged horses to water the trees, so that they would live until they got a good rooting. After that they persuaded the city commission to take over the problem of watering the trees.

Many of the old trees have been cut down in the last few years, and I think the loss of every tree causes a twinge in the hearts of all the old-timers who remember the chore it was to get them and keep them alive until they matured. We also remember the blessing they brought us. I'll have to admit the "blessings" were not entirely without drawbacks though. No one knew at the time of planting that the females of the species produced an abundance of cotton in the spring, which played havoc with hay fever sufferers, like my mother.

This strong push for social groups and community activities lS understandably an important process to a group of people attempting to settle a town. Moreover, it resulted in a sharp social division between the sexes, leaving community efforts up to the women, and freeing men from any obligations outside of establishing their businesses in town. But this social division is also a result of the ethics of the time. In the early part of this century, American codes 84 of acceptable social behavior stressed this division between the sexes. The pioneers, then, were somewhat predisposed to dividing their activities up in this manner. However, the drive to encourage women to participate in community and religious activities is still operating strongly in the pioneers'' world today. It manifests itself in expressions of aliena­ tion within the community. As Florence Cahill explains:

Unfortunately, the separation between townspeople and resort people has extended further. The community itself has divided itself along lines of old, established families and young, incoming families. I think the young families moving here are the ones that bring in the problems. They couldn't care less whether their children are educated properly in the history of Las Vegas. All they care about is making lots of money, primarily through jobs in the gaming industry. The Monnons have funnelled a lot of their population into Las Vegas, but they always send their kids off to college in another state, and the kids just never come back to Las Vegas. They don't have roots in this town.

The themes of expressing concern over identifying the people who bring problems into the town, the tendency to link problems with "the gaming industry," and the expressed concern over educating the community about the history of Las Vegas, represent shared concerns of the pioneers and can be seen as sources of dissonance for all of them. 85

A psychological separation between "old, established families," and "young, incoming families,'' is evident. The division widens as the pioneers express their priorities for religion, history and the maintenance of a strong sense of community. The constant push to keep themselves active in various social groups indicates both a strong commitment to those shared values, and a method by which conflicting interests or motivations can be avoided. Most importantly, it reveals to the observer an identification, both individually and collectively, with the past. In summary, there are numerous themes that are embedded in these excerpts of the pioneers's constructions of early Las Vegas. They include a sense of intimacy; that everybody knew everybody else and that everyone could be accounted for at any given time. Second, a prevailing spirit of trustworthiness, and the assertion that crime was absent from the town, is a constant theme. When crime was expressed at all, it was attributed to outsiders. The strong social bonding that took place in the early years of the town is also influential to the understanding that certain cultural and social norms were being established in the town by way of these groups. The idea that pioneer men had their own interests and values, and perhaps their own conflicts, and women theirs, is an important theme. Finally, the concern over maintaining Las Vegas's history within the community is another constant theme. 86

Roles The other dimensions of social scaling that Lofland (1976) addresses are equally important to consider while presenting material that illustrates the pioneers's use of the small town image in their everyday lives. Roles, a somewhat broader concept for looking at a situation, are particularly applicable to the pioneers's activities because of the emphasis they place on their own social identities in

the community. The roles that make up those social identities are, in turn, significant to understanding the values and attitudes that motivate them to adhere to a specific construction of the world. Roles, according to Lofland, provide the individual with "an enduring sense of his or her 'place' and 'self,' a set of goals, and a set of relations with other 'socially shared and abstract categories' with whom it is defined as appropriate and necessary that the individ­ ual interact" (1976:135). These roles require a reasonable amount of time to develop and a reasonable amount of space within which to be displayed. In the case of the Las Vegas pioneers, social identities have been well established over many years of residence in Las Vegas. The 'space' in which the roles are displayed is reflective of the extent to which they affect the everyday lives of individuals. For the pioneers, roles are constantly being presented or reinforced in daily activities. They are important to the social functioning of these people. They also reflect a world that is restrictive, small in numbers of people, and exclusive to a segment of the permanent popula­ tion. Because of these limitations, the pioneers have defined a world that is unique. 87

The roles that the pioneers have adopted are less formal in the sense that they are not related to conventional occupations. They relate instead to the social positions that these pioneers see them­ selves filling in everyday activities in the community. They are constant, fluid social identities, and they reflect a deep commitment to certain values and norms. Self-descriptive attributes such as a concern for working on community cultural or historical projects, and religious programs or social events are seen as attitudes that represent values to which the pioneers are committed. The consistency between their public behaviors and these statements of attitudes are extremely important to consider because they provide the only observable link between internal and external actions. The majority of statements that contain self-descriptive role attributes emphasize an identification with social groups or a commitment to the specific goals of a social group. The following observations exemplify this idea.

Florence Cahill: There was a definite spirit to the people, and many of the social services such as the first juvenile home, were built through donated funds and the basic boot­ strap work of the people. This spirit is still alive in our community. When we were imbued with a sense of responsibility for making our community a decent place to live, we felt good about ourselves and all the goals we set for community and church programs. 88

Francis Fountainne: We concerned ourselves with encouraging people to achieve recognition in the community. But everyone was so hard-working that we couldn't possibly carry through

with each individual's efforts .... ~~ husband was proud of the things we did for this community.

Leva Bettinger: When we moved here, the church was really the only outlet for socializing. The Methodist Church was the first duly-organized church in Las Vegas, and I was very active as a Sunday school teacher. I later became a president and secretary of the Women's Society of Christian Services. It was a good feeling knowing that we were doing worthwhile things for our families and our community.

Marabel Zackery: I like to take care of my family, plan family outings, see a few friends, cook, things like that. I go to church on Sundays and it makes me feel good to see the faces of the children there. This town use to be very religious because we thought it was important to stress that in town. It isn't so much anymore, but that's because it's gotten so big now.

The attributes of self that emerge from these selected quotations can be reduced to the characteristics of hard-working, 'spirited' in­ dividuals; community-minded, socially aware individuals; religious and family oriented people. These generalized attributes fit well with 89 ' ' many aspects of Lofland's role situation because the roles affect the pioneers's everyday interactions with others, and because they are longer in duration, having developed over many years of connnunity participation. In addition, they illustrate strong gender and age bonds; they define social relationships, and in turn, the social construction, of the pioneers's world by limiting the types of people and social activities that they engage in. Roles are also important to focus on because they indicate strategies for self-management and management of others (Lofland 1976:143). "Strategic roles" refer to the roles themselves as they define certain strategies. "Role strategies" refer to the more personalized, internal strategic elements that constitute how the role is displayed. Hence, the strategizing of roles is clearly evident in the case of these pioneers; their strong identification with certain social roles and their expressed concern over certain community goals supports the first of these ideas, cuing the observer in to the strategy of such roles. By stressing particular social roles that involve a concern for selective goals, these pioneers are able to control their own public images (self-management of roles), and discourage opposing or conflicting individual roles from approaching them (management of others). In this fashion, they define their membership in an exclusive group of residents and their individual roles within that group. Conflicting cognitions are avoided by maintaining these roles, as well as by upholding the exclusiveness of the social group. Those individuals who do not have similar values 90 and goals in the community are easily ignored by not being included in the group, and not being recognized by the pioneers in their daily activities. By stressing religion in their lives, they automatically reduce the likelihood of interacting with individuals who do not agree that religion is important; by stressing social and community projects that upgrade the educational or historical quality of the town, they reduce the chances of being exposed to, or involved in, other activities of the town, such as the gaming industry. By aligning themselves publicly with certain social groups and roles, the pioneers are effectively managing others and their own identities in the social environment.

Groups and Organizational Scales Groups of people, whether they be formal or informal in nature, represent a shift in the scale of social organization from that of the individual as the perceiver of information to the collective whole's common perceptions of information in the environment (Lofland 1976: 182). Groups and forffial organizations share a great deal of common properties, the most distinctive difference between the two being the larger size and more formal nature of an organization. Lofland notes that it is important, though, to emphasize the idea that groups, even as small as three or four people, cannot be reduced to a human cluster that behaves in similar ways, as Sherif and Sherif (1967) point out. Lofland contends that the distinctive feature of both groups and organizations is "coordinated, differentiated, interdependent action that makes possible a level of activity that cannot be achieved as 91

individuals even if the individuals are acting identically" (1976: 183). Groups have a separate reality from individuals and it is from this perspective that group characteristics can be identified. No one member's personal participation is necessary for the group to function in the world. At this level, no formal divisions of labor or explicit rules of conduct exist, although at the organizational level these added features are more likely to occur (1976:183). The 'we" in many quotations illustrates this idea.

We concerned ourselves with developing projects that would help improve the quality of education and religious develop­ ment in Las Vegas. We wanted an environment that would be good for children to grow up in, and we wanted some outlets for social activities. (Florence Benning, 1977)

Lofland (1976:186) further distinguishes between the "friendship" situation and the "intimate relation" situation, the latter being more applicable to the pioneers precisely because they maintain such an intimate group network. In addition, Davis's (as cited by Lofland 1976:186) analysis of the "intimate relation" scale illustrates how this type of network is formed and how it operates in the world. Identification of a "focus" that the group will achieve together is a major feature of Lofland's definition, and applicable to the desires of the pioneers to carry out projects that would enhance the quality of living in their new community. Davis's characterization of "physical intersection" among group members at regular intervals 92

(1976:186) is also relevant to the pioneer groups. I was able to identify a minimum of four social groups that all seven of the pioneer informants were mutually active in: The Mesquite Club, U-Wan Study Club, Junior League, and the Pioneer Club. This does not include the great overlap of those seven women in the Protestant and Methodist church groups, or political clubs such as the Republican Women's Club, of which four of them belong. In addition, it was quite routine for the women to gather for luncheons and birthday/anniversary celebra­ tions. The added features of intimate communication among group members and the exchange of possibly detrimental information entail situations that I was not accessible to or able to evaluate. Although I attended several group gatherings in which my confidentiality was requested by participants, neither the size of the situations or the nature of the meetings was conducive to obtaining extremely intimate conversational material. However, it is worthy to note here that when the pioneers spoke of each other during interviews, they were able to convey fairly detailed accounts of various events in the lives of each other. Establishing a sense of "communion or self-merging" (as cited by Lofland 1976:186), is most indicative by the pioneers's use of such terms as "oldtimers," or "townspeople." Davis suggests that intimates seek out and exchange common experiences from the past, and opinions that are close to their own, and from these discoveries, a feeling of communion can be achieved. These labels suggest that those people who allow themselves to be identified as such are strongly committed to the past, and further, that there is a common, shared perspective of 93 that past. Florence Benning's characterization of "all the oldtimers" is reflective of this. In keeping with Lofland's distinction between "strategic roles" and "role strategies," there are two filllctions applicable to the "doing" of groups: one is viewing groups as strategies, and under this level of analysis, what Lofland terms "public place protection" is applicable to the pioneers; the second illustrates the strategies of groups, and under this concept, the conditions of "reintegrating intimates" is also applicable (Lofland 1976:189-197). "Public place protection" is an example of the most important function the pioneers, as a group, use in order to block out dissonant pieces of information in their lives. Their social groups are highly supportive of a particular depiction of Las Vegas, one that is rooted in the past. To avoid depictions that conflict with this image-­ depictions of present~day Las Vegas that emphasize the role of gambling in the lives of the community--the pioneers intentionally maintain a tight circle of long-time friends. They further involve themselves in historical development projects in particular, as well as other civic projects, in order to maintain this link with the past. Florence Cahill's accolnlt of these past groups reflects the high degree of support she holds for her fellow "townspeople":

Many of the cultural programs were purely funded by donations. The first library was built through donated funds, as were many other city buildings. When the townspeople were imbued with this reponsibility, they felt good about themselves and 94

their town. The wives of all these oldtimers took a very active part in developing the community with projects such as planting trees. But the social groups in the '30s were very much a closed corporation. They were highly selective groups, mainly centered around the churches. The Church Christ Episcopal, the Catholic, the Methodist church, were the main centers for the beginnings of social clubs for the women. The only two non-religious clubs then were the Mesquite Club and the U-Wan Club, which centered its activities around trying to develop cultural programs and educational programs for children; they founded the first library in town.

Similarly, the strategy of the pioneers's social groups can best be described with Lofland's "reintegrating intimates" (1976:196). Although he intended that these various strategies be applied mainly to the "two-person group," his final strategy, that of revitalization, fits well with the strategy of the pioneers's groups. Just as relationships need revitalizing from time to time, so do group situations. In order for the pioneers to maintain a degree of novelty in their long relationships, they devised occasions wherein they could enjoy each other's company. This comes in the form of both

11Commemorative ceremonies" and less formal "remember-when" ceremonies. Birthdays, anniversaries and historical celebrations are elevated almost to the supernatural by my informants. Never is a milestone missed or forgotten, a birthday passed by, or someone's wedding anniversary ignored. By organizing such revitalization events, the 95 support of these groups is enhanced by the enthusiasm and involvement of the participants. Florence Benning sums up the mood and feeling of small town Las Vegas:

In those days we had telephone numbers, but nobody ever used them. You just cranked the telephone and said to the central, 'I would like to speak to Mrs. Bracken, or Mrs. whoever,' and she was just as apt to say, 'Mrs. Bracken isn't horne. I just saw her go by the office a few minutes ago.' She kept us all informed on what was doing. She could tell you whether they were downtown or where they were. It was nice and homey.

By presenting this material within the social scales in which they were collected, a high degree of consistency between two-person and group encounters is detectable. The following two sections of material are arranged under two general headings, including the significance of religion in Las Vegas and the significance of gambling in Las Vegas. Because this type of material does not lend itself to the same type of situational break­ down, the viewpoints can be seen as building on one another, adding more facts to the total picture. It is important to view these opinions within the small town orientation just presented, for they represent the values and attitudes that define the pioneers's particular construction of the world. 96

The Significance of Gambling in Las Vegas

There was no red light district at the time when the Mcintoshes had the saloon, but when they sold it, the fellow who bought it, Al James, put on a second story and had ladies upstairs. We just spoke of the Block Sixteen in hushed whispers. When we would drive by either side of this block, we would look curiously but of course, never went down that street. I guess it was still there at the time that they were building the Dam. It was a good number of years afterward that it was finally abolished. (Florence Benning, 1977)

Although all of the pioneers can recall, with few discrepancies, the development of the gaming industry, it is important to note their emphasis on how community people used the hotel/casinos as opposed to the ways in which they describe outsiders's interests in these enter­ tainment businesses. They consistently characterize these hotels as being run by local people, and offering good meals for reasonable prices. They also insist that gambling houses were excellent places to hold organizational meetings. In the 1930's and early 1940's, the pioneers describe the hotels as being "harmless" in nature, run by "respectable'' local management who were actually making contributions to the financial well-being of the town. By 1946, when noncommunity personalities started construction on the Strip, they begin describing the building activities in terms of a separation between themselves, "the townspeople," and the "resort people." 97

Florence Cahill explains the separation of the community from the gaming industry this way:

When the small gambling houses on Fremont were big, we use to use them for places to meet. Some of the ladies didn't like going to these places because of their religious beliefs, but really, they were useful as meeting halls. We all knew the men who owned them, and it was just convenient to call them up and ask them to reserve a conference room for a certain day so our group could meet.

But Florence goes on to justify the harmless nature of the gambling houses back in the 1930's and '40's:

Yes, I mean, it was harmless in the '30's and '40's. We didn't drink at the hotels, just met there. I don't think its good for our children to grow up thinking that gambling is the way to make money. That's why we've tried to build up the cultural events in this town.

Although Florence is not aware that her terminology serves to separate her social identity from that of the outside entertainment world, she enforces that distinction by accounting for her own involvement in the social and civic projects in town:

We couldn't separate ourselves really from the gambling. I mean, it's part of the town. We built up the casinos because we needed to attract people into the town. After Boulder Dam 98

was finished, we felt like everybody was picking up and leaving and we were afraid that unless we could find some way to attract people into our town, we would have to find another town to live in. I guess we felt we needed to stick together. We put our energies into social activities, and the ladies really put their hearts into it. We oldtimers have the sort of strong will you don't find too often anymore.

Later, she confronted the issue more directly, making the social separation more evident:

You see, when the gambling houses, hotels were first estab­ lished, all the community people knew the owners of the places. They were regarded as personal friends, and so the gambling aspect of these hotels was not really a threatening reality to them. As I said, most of the social women's groups were meeting in these places for many years, and although some of the rigid Methodists refused to go into them, most of the ladies didn't feel the gambling houses were unhealthy. But there was a very distinct line drawn between who used the gambling hotels for gambling, and who used them for social activities. El Rancho Vegas was a large gambling hotel, but it was viewed as a community meeting place. It wasn't until 1946 when the large casinos emphasizing the night life enter­

tainment that social and community activities moved out of 99

these hotels/casinos and started using the churches or private homes more often for meetings.

Jules Nelson is, on the other hand, openly hostile to the gaming industry on the Strip:

I hate the Strip, I hate all the gambling. There's so many crooked people n.nming those casinos. Not like it used to be. But it supports the town now, and we never would have made it without them. I don't like this town anymore, but all my friends are here. It's my home. I'll stay here till I die.

So will my daughter.

Francis Fountainne recalls the gaming industry's growth as both a financial relief for the town's immediate well-being, and, in its infancy, an outlet for community activities:

The first resort hotel to be constructed was the El Rancho, of which the owner was Thomas Hull. Of course, everybody was elated. The Chamber of Commerce and the boosters for Las Vegas for a long time had insisted that this was an ideal spot for a resort hotel. Since gambling was legalized in 1931, they thought that would be a drawing card. Well, the El Rancho was really quite an affair. You could go there and get a

wonderful dinner for $1. SO. When the people began coming from outside town, they started having a little entertainment and it was a huge success. 100

... Of course, some of them [the casinos] haven't been successful. Milton Prell owned a small building out where the Sahara is. He had a bingo game and served very good food and it was very popular with the local people. Everybody used to go to the Club Bingo for dinner and then play bingo. So when he announced he was tearing it down and was going to build the Sahara Hotel, everybody thought it was a very foolish move. He had a good business going there. They like the Club Bingo.

I guess ~1ilton was right, because he did very well with the Hotel Sahara which he sold to Del Webb, and I imagine he'll do just as well with the others.

One important idea that Francis expresses is that she and the local residents thought the small hotel/clubs were highly successful while they lasted. They fulfilled several functions that comprised a major portion of the pioneers's lives in the 1930's and 1940's: they were used as meeting halls; they provided good meals for the community; and they did not encourage gambling. Despite the refusal of some women to attend such hotels, because, as Florence Cahill explains, "of their religious beliefs," most of the community used these features to rationalize their person­ al associations and participation in the hotels. These themes appear over and over again with all of the informants. The degree of emphasis placed on the "harmless nature" of the small hotel/clubs suggests that some degree of justification is going on, and that some degree of psychological tension is being experienced by this topic of 101 conversation. Florence Cahill's justification that "all the conumm.ity people knew the owners of these places .... and, although some of the rigid Hethodists refused to go into them, most of the ladies didn't feel the gambling houses were illlheal thy," is typical of the manner in which the significance of gambling has been cognitively resolved for my informants. The other line of rationalization for the significance of gambling in Las Vegas centers around the distinction between the "townspeople" and "outsiders." Again, all of the pioneers have psychologically made this separation. Jules Nelson, who openly admits her hostility toward Strip owners, describes how the first casino outside of downtown Las Vegas was planned:

It was about the time the Dam was started, that the Cornero brothers came into the city. And I must say that everyone thought at the time that if there were ever to be any night­ clubs or anything of that sort, they would be established on the Boulder Dam Highway, outside of the city of Las Vegas. And as a result, there were several pretty nice nightclubs for the time that were out in the area of where Fremont Street and Charleston Boulevard come together on the eastern edge of the community. And there was, well, the Green Shack, one of the best eating places in Las Vegas at the time, and

you could go out there and get a large T-bone steak and French fried potatoes and biscuit and honey and dessert and coffee for about a dollar and a half. And there was the Yucca -- ~.

102

Club, which was run by Paul Warner, who later became an assemblyman from Las Vegas. And there was the L. A. Beer Parlor, the Bull Pen, the Red Mill. After the Cameros were in here, they went up too fast.

Again, there are several distinguishing features in this infor­ mation that represent common themes among all of the pioneers. Jules Nelson points out the fact that, at first, the community residents wanted nightclubs to be built outside of Las Vegas. Even though her reasons for saying this consisted of the idea that outside nightclubs would attract more tourists to Las Vegas, nonetheless, the idea that there was a definite spatial separation between the community and entertainment sectors crops up in many other statements. The other idea is her definition of a "pretty nice nightclub," consisting of a place where one could get good food for good prices. She also identi­ fies one of the managers of a club, Paul Warner, which reinforces the idea that the locals knew who owned which club, and because of this kind of intimacy, attending the club was acceptable. Finally, her way of depicting the Camero brothers "coming into Las Vegas," also reinforces this "outsiders versus insiders" theme. Jules Nelson was the only informant who directly discussed the issue of prostitution in Las Vegas. Her insights into how it was rationalized by the community are revealing:

The story that went around the city of Las Vegas at the time they [the Camero brothers] came up here was that the then- 103 ' .

powers that be in the city of Las Vegas promised them that if they would come up and build the nightclub here in Las Vegas, that they could have exclusive rights to the prostitution. The city of Las Vegas would close down prostitution on Block

Sixteen, move it up to their hotel, and that they could set up gambling out there. At that time, gambling was not legal. But they could set up gambling out there and nm. gambling, liquor and prostitution exclusively in this area. So they got the hotel started out there, and started construction, and the city commissioners backed off from closing off Block Sixteen and closing all the bootlegging joints downtown. So, these powers that be, so-called, had to back off their promise, if any, to the Cameros.

This narrative of outside entrepeneurs filtering into Las Vegas to negotiate the construction of their casinos outside of downtown is another example of the cognitive separation between locals and outsiders. ~~isie Roberts recalls the building of the El Rancho as an endeavor undertaken by another visitor to Las Vegas, but she discusses how the locals influenced his construction:

Around 1938, a man by the name of Tom Hull, who was a hotel man from California, came to Las Vegas to visit, and when he was returning to Los Angeles, he got out where El Rancho now stands and had a flat tire. IVhile he was waiting for somebody to come out and fix the flat tire, he noticed how many 104

automobiles were passing the site and decided that he would build a motel in Las Vegas to take advantage of the tourist travel, which he was sure would become even greater than it was at that time. So he put together a plan to build this motel. Then some of the local people suggested to him that, to take advantage of legalized gambling, that he should build a gambling casino with motel rooms around it. And as a result, the Hotel El Rancho was constructed, where it stood so many years before being burned down, as the start of the Strip.

Florence Benning admits that the locals used one of the "Strip" casinos, but again, she clarifies what they used it for:

The only 'real' casino us locals used a lot was the Ramona Room of the Last Frontier. It was laid out by Bill Moore, the nephew of Griffith, and a graduate architect. He built this long, rambling building with a center lobby and rooms to the rear and through the--you left the lobby and rooms to the south into the main dining room--the Ramona Room. And this was the place to be for any event in the, oh, between 1941 and after the War. A lot of wedding receptions were held there, dinner parties for luminaries, the Kiwanis Club and the Rotary Club met at the Last Frontier Hotel.

She recounts how the community people stopped using the Last Frontier after Moore sold out to corporate businessmen: 105

Bill Moore built the hotel, and after it was finished, he remained here to manage the hotel. He made a real great success of the thing, and at the time, he was probably the number one citizen of Clark County. He was elected president of the Chamber of Commerce twice, and as I say, he was an out­ standing gentleman. And it only goes to show how fickle fame may be, because Bill got himself mixed up with some unfortun­ ate investments. After Mr. Griffith died, the other members of the Griffith family were opposed to operating the hotel and gambling. They were religious. They said that they were theater operators anyway, and didn't know anything about operating a hotel and all. So they sold it. But it just went down and down and changed hands four or five times. I don't know any more about it, except that we lost it to corporate people.

Leva Bettinger agrees with Florence Benning that the locals used the Last Frontier Hotel temporarily, until it was bought out by unknown businessmen and turned into a less than "respectable'' place:

When the Last Frontier went up by Moore, gambling wasn't legal, so the hotel offered real good food and drinks. They had gambling too, and went along without any trouble for two or three years. It was a popular place to have dinner parties and dances and nobody ever seemed to interfere with them. But then they sold out after Griffith died and by that 106

tL~e gambling was legal, so there wasn't much point to any locals keeping the place so they sold it. Ladies weren't allowed without an escort before the place was sold, and it was a respectable hotel. But after it changed hands, it really started to be a show place and it got wild and attracted men who·were drifting without any family and people the likes of them. We had no more interest in it.

None of the pioneers expressed their feelings of alienation over the split of "corporate Las Vegas" with the original "townspeople" in quite the way that ~nrabel Zackery did:

Until the big casinos started being built, this was a good little community, quite able to support itself, despite what everybody was saying and getting upset about after the Dam was built--that we didn't have any money coming in and we should let people build these big buildings and so on. But the people just came in and built the casinos and the gamblers came and spent all their money and it ended up in somebody's hands that could do no good with it. But I don't know--I don't interest myself in those things. Las Vegas isn't the place it used to be, and the people aren't like what they used to be. The real Las Vegas is gone to most everyone but a few families. It really is gone.

Separations between locals and outsiders, then, appear in three forms: a spatial separation, indicated by the pioneers'~ descriptions 107 of "the big casinos" going up outside of downtown Las Vegas; a psychological separation, indicated by the pioneers,,, use of tenns such as "the locals" and "the corporate" people; and, a social separa­ tion, suggested by the pioneers'~ emphasis on their activities in community projects rather than activities associated with the gaming industry.

The Significance of Religion in Las Vegas

Because the townspeople were all highly religious, and the women did not approve of gambling, we needed some other social outlet. This came in the form of social, cultural and educa­ tional clubs--things like, things we could really participate in and influence. Also, the women all felt a strong need to develop the town into something that would be conducive to raising children in, a good atmosphere for the well-being of their children. Junion League was one of the first cultural women's groups established, and women felt they could really make some sort of imprint on the town by developing education­ al and cultural programs their children would be able to

benefit from. (Florence Be1ming, 1977)

The significance of religion is an important part in the pioneers's assessments of their town's development. Initially, the churches had served a dual purpose. In addition to their religious outlets, churches provided the women with an outlet for social events. The first churches served the community by allowing and encouraging 108 people to participate in planning events that might also help raise Inoney for community development. Churches also became a way by which the pioneers could rationalize the growth of the gaming industry. In the following statements, it is important to notice the juxaposition of the images of casinos and gambling with those of religion.

My father was in real estate and wanted to come out here and buy land and settle. We had lived in the midwest. I remember this town was just bustling with excitement in the '20's and '30's. It was still very small, but all the people were so spirited, so willing to put all their energy into building up the town. The women in town were all very friendly and active, mostly in church affairs. They used to have lunches all the time and try to invite everyone in town that could come so they could tell everybody what projects they were working on. Some of the ladies didn't go because they used to have lunches in some of the hotels where unfamiliar men were there playing for money. But we knew the owners of the hotels, and we always had our meetings in these rooms that were shut off from the games. That stuff mostly went on around Block Sixteen, but I guess some ladies just couldn't come because of their (Leva Bettinger, 1977)

Francis Fountainne accounts for the importance of women's involvement in religious affairs as a method by which the community could get acquainted with itself: 109

When we first moved here, the church was really the only out­ let for social clubs for women. It was very important for us as young women in a new town to congregate and hold social outings. We knew we had to start working toward developing the town into a place that would be good for our children to grow up in, and the church served as a way to do this. The Methodist church was the first organized, and I was very active as a Sunday school teacher, and in the Ladies Aid at church. I was a president and secretary of the Women's Society of Christian Service when I returned to Las Vegas with my family in the '30's.

Florence Cahill depicted the influence of religion this way:

The city has always been a religious one because these folks all came here with strong religious backgrounds. They're basically God-fearing people. You have to have high standards of living and serving God and the community if you want to build a town. This emphasis on religion was absolutely vital to getting the community to stay. The resort industry and casino owners all came in after that core group of residents had established their businesses.

Another example of how the pioneers view the role of religion is the way in which they discredit the gambling interests in town with their own impressions of the religious activities going on at the same 110

time. Florence Cahill explains the discontentment experienced by many of the women as the ''big casinos" started cropping up:

vVhen the big casinos started being built, I guess after the war, it really bothered a lot of ladies. They didn't want to use those casinos for meeting places anymore. So we just started holding meetings at our homes, or at the church. We didn't want to be part of the gambling scene.

The idea that the hotels were "harmless" in the 1930's and early 1940's disappeared as the larger casinos started going up after the war. While the women could previously justify their participation in the hotels by claiming they knew the management, or observing that only "outsiders" would gamble, by the end of World War II, the tre­ mendous construction boom on the Strip discredited any last justifications of this nature. It became necessary at this point for the pioneers to separate themselves physically (or spatially) from the gambling aspects of Las Vegas. "Respectability," then, comes in the form of emphasizing religion in a town where gambling--an institution that also includes the businesses of alcohol sales and prostitution--is so influential. For a population of close to 400,000 residents today, Las Vegas has 128 Protestant churches (Las Vegas 1978:34), and an estimated one­ third of its residential community is active in these religious affairs. "Respectable" nightclubs, as previously illustrated, consisted of good food for good prices. When this actuality was no 111

longer valid, the pioneers separated themselves physically from the Strip. The following chapter illustrates the values and norms that underlie these two constructions of Las Vegas--that of the gambling image and the small town, religious image. By so doing, the elements which combine to form the world of these pioneers can be assessed. CHAPTER FIVE

WORLDS IN CONFLICT: THE EVIDB~CE FOR DISSONANCE

Introduction: Merging Data and Theory

This chapter addresses two issues: the selection of attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of the Las Vegas pioneers that constitute cognitive elements in a dissonant relation to each other; and, the identification of various mechanisms or strategies being used to control the dissonance and reinforce a particular social reality. In addition, research dealing with the question of degree of commitment to beliefs, and research that attempts to bridge the gap between commitments, attitudes and behavior, are discussed. Finally, the problem of determining psychological implications under uncontrolled, natural conditions, concludes the analysis.

Dissonant Images of Las Vegas The most striking discrepancy between the attitudes and beliefs of the pioneers of Las Vegas, and the more widespread attitudes and opinions of those members of the community not involved with the affairs of my informants, is the pioneers's almost total absence of recognition of the gaming industry. This discrepancy is primarily a result of a very fundamental conflict between the values, attitudes,

112 113

and norms of behavior they attribute to themselves, and the lack of those values and norms in the lifestyle of the larger community. Self-reports of the pioneers indicate that they think of them­ selves as religious people, interested in cultivating the cultural and historical aspects of the city, and concerned with maintaining a sense of community. They see themselves as playing a vital role in organ­ izing such events, to the extent that outside help in planning cultural events or religious outings is most often rebuffed. They say, further, that the "real" town of Las Vegas is made up of people like themselves, who have both religious roots and an understanding of the town that comes only from an extended period of residence in Las Vegas.

As one informant explained:

You don't know a town by plopping down in it for a while and taking what you can get from it. You know it by living in it and helping to build it, and praying to God that good people will stay there and contribute to the community.

Las Vegas is, however, a city supported by tourism, a fact that, at best, discourages any sense of permanence or community. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce notes that in 1977, over 10.1 million visitors traveled to Las Vegas, an average of 30,000 tourists a day (Las Vegas, 1978:6). Over 6,000 employees of Las Vegas were directly involved in the transportation industry that same year. Of the 79,100 people employed in service industries in Las Vegas in 1977, 52,800 of them were directly employed by the hotels, gaming and 114

recreation industries (Nevada Employment Security Department, 1978: 32). A more recent report of the State Gaming Control Board shows that 83,000 employees were working for the top 115 casinos in 1978, or one-quarter of all industrial employees in the state. In 1978, the Southern Nevada Activity Report reported that 321 conventions had been held in Las Vegas that year compared to 251 conventions staged in the city during 1977. The resort industry continued to grow to accommodate the growing needs of convention business and tourism. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce reported that two new hotel/casinos were built in 1977: the Nmxim Hotel and the Golden Nugget Rooming House. Expanded or remodel­ ed hotel/casinos in 1977 included the Riviera Hotel, the Stardust Hotel, the Fremont Hotel, the Mint Hotel, the El Cortez Hotel, the Flamingo Capri, the Convention Center's east hall and the Paradise Hotel, which was converted into the 20th Century. New hotels in 1978 included the Holiday Inn-Downtown, and hotels to be completed that year include the Flamingo Hotel, the Las Vegas Hilton, the Tropicana, the Desert Inn, the Silver Bird, Caesars Palace, the Las Vegas Club and the newly converted Imperial Palace, previously known as the Flamingo Capri (Las Vegas 1978:20). In addition, the State of Nevada Gaming Control Board reports that the Clark County taxable revenue for 1977 gambling earnings rose sharply to over $1 billion for the first time (Nevada Employment Security Department Economic Update, November 1978). 115

By contrast, no new growth has taken place recently in the cultural or religious activities of the town. According to the Clark County Ministerial Association, Las Vegas has 128 Protestant churches, 45 Mannon wards, 10 Catholic parishes, two Jewish synagogues and a few other assorted religious sects (Las Vegas 1978:34). According to current reports of construction activity in Clark County, no new religious-oriented structures have gone up in the last five years. A recent statement by clergy in Las Vegas suggests that, like most American communities, one third of Las Vegas's population is active in local congregations (Las Vegas 1978:34). No new construction has been planned for the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, the community college or the high schools and elementary schools either. In the countywide system, the State of Nevada Department of Education reports that there are 74 elementary schools, 16 junior high schools, and 10 high schools (Clark County School District Report, 1978). UNLV supports close to 9,000 college students and Clark County Community College draws in close to 8,000 students. Interestingly, the percentage of senior citizens in Las Vegas is on the rise, due to the allure of good weather conditions and the absence of state income taxes (Las Vegas 1978:25). But of approxi­ mately 55,000 Las Vegas residents over the age of 55, the pioneers who served as informants say that perhaps 250 to 300 of them are original homesteaders. As one informant added: 116

Old people who relocate here aren't coming here because they care about civic projects or cultural affairs. Or church affairs either. They come here to enjoy the clean air, the warm summers, the entertainment and recreation. They're as uninterested in the history and well-being of this community as the young people and families that come here are.

The livelihood of Las Vegas depends directly on the tourism and convention businesses, which, in turn, rely on the resort industry. This interplay of economic activities is responsible for shaping the mood and lifestyle of' Las Vegas's community, a lifestyle that rejects the important elements of the pioneers's lifestyles. Minimally, it encourages a large, transient population, most likely consisting primarily of young families or unattached young people who are inter- ested in obtaining employment with the gaming industry. An economy based on entertainment profits also encourages a great deal of crime in the city. Officially, prostitution is prohibited in Las Vegas, but unofficially, it turns over great profits. According to historian Guy Louis Rocha, there are about 40 brothels operating in Nevada today. "Prostitution has always been a part of Nevada's economic base," he contends. "When it comes to resources, there's never been any real base to develop industry, so Nevada has looked to legislated industry such as gaming, divorces and prostitution. This is how Nevada has brought in money" (Los Angeles Times, August, 1976:3, 16). The kinds of problems that a recreational city like Las Vegas experiences also reflects, at a deeper level, the values to which 117 the population is attuned. The degree of adherence to official and unofficial sanctions best indicates the underlying social and cultural mores of the community. In a town that must meet the demands of entertainment for a large proportion of tourists on a daily basis, there is little intere~t in religious proselytizing or historical enlightenment. These values, which are foremost in the minds of the pioneers, conflict with the values of those residents who support the tourism and resort industries in Las Vegas. The two sets of values, conceptually, create a dissonant relationship between the ideologies of the larger, more transient population and the ideologies of a small, permanent core of residents. It is crucial to the survival of the pioneers that the dissonance created by these conflicting cognitions of Las Vegas be reduced or minimized as much as possible. Their main strategies for accomplishing this goal involve some nonobvious attitudinal and behavioral manifesta­ tions. As a group of individuals deeply rooted in the historical aspects of the community, as well as its religious and cultural affairs, the past takes precedence over all things present or future.

Behavior, Commitment and the Conditions for Dissonance

Before we illustrate the various mechanisms by which the pioneers are able to effectively reduce the amount of dissonance they experience in their lives, the effects of behavior on attitudes and the degree of commitment to a belief should first be explored. Social psychologists are quick to point out, though, the lack of much 118 evidence to suggest any such attitudinal effects of behavior because attempts to study the effects of behavior by itself have been so infrequent (Kiesler 1971:15). The expectations by others for individuals to be consistent in behavior and attitude runs throughout the literature and research on cognitive processes. Some authorities, in fact, believe that Western culture emphasizes this idea more so than other cultures. Segalman (1968) suggests that stress on the individual's responsibility for his actions may be an integral part of the Protestant ethic. An important aspect of explicit behavior, though, is internal demands for consistency and the uncomfortable state an individual is left ln when he is behaving inconsistently with how he/she feels (Kiesler 1971:17). This uncomfortable condition discourages the individual from performing explicit and attitudinally consistent behavior because it leaves him/her open to possible conflicts with attitudes that are not salient at the moment. In short, explicit behavior commits the individual to whatever attitudes may go along with that behavior. As Kiesler (1971:15) points out, that commitment, like an irrevocable decision, can be seen in Lewin's (1947) terms as "freezing" one's cognitive world. All other cognitive functions must be shaped around the already expressed behavior. Lewin and Grabbe (1945) do not take the "freezing" property of explicit behavior too literally. Kiesler (1971) adds that even with the appropriate act of interpreting behavior from within the larger situational context, the effects of commitment do not simply depend on an individual's desire to appear consistent in front of others. 119

Kiesler says the individual's view of him/herself, his/her social identity, depends at least partly on the individual's interpretation of his/her own behavior (1971:43). Despite the controversy that arises over the relationship be­ tween behaviors and attitudes, behavior is considered proof of one's commitment to these actions, whether the underlying attitudes are consistent with the behavior or not. The most common usage of the notion of commitment, in turn, stems from dissonance theory. Festinger (1964:156) says that "a decision carries a commitment with it if the decision unequivocally affects subsequent behavior ... that the decision has clear implications for the subsequent unrolling of events as long as the person stays with that decision." Secord and Backman (1964:150) also equate commitment with an "irrevocable choice situation." Brehm and Cohen define commitment in the following way:

We assume that a person is committed when he has decided to do or not to do a certain thing, when he has chosen one (or more) alternatives, and thereby rejected one (or more) alternatives, when he actively engages in a given behavior or has engaged in a given behavior. Any one or combination of these behaviors can be considered a commitment (1962:7).

Festinger (1956) made an attempt to define commitment prior to his development of the theory of cognitive dissonance. In a contro­ versial study of a contemporary messianic-like social movement's failure to fulfill its predictions of salvation, Festinger mapped 120 out the conditions under which dissonance will occur in an uncontrol­ led, natural setting. A belief must be held with a "deep conviction" and have some relevance to the believer's behavior. The believer, Festinger states, must have taken some important action to support that belief, or behaviorally committed himself to some action that is difficult to undo. He reasons that the more difficult the behavior is to undo, the deeper the conviction of the believer will be. These two conditions indicate that the belief is likely to be resistant to change (Festinger 1956:4). The second set of conditions, because they exert pressure on the individual to change his/her belief, introduces the ,possibility of the existence of dissonance. The belief, Festinger explains, must be relevant to the real world and specific in nature, so that other events might unequivocally refute the belief. The pioneers's insistence on ignoring the importance of gambling in Las Vegas, and their methods for rationalizing their previous efforts to aid the development of gaming, exemplifies this condition. Finally, the believer must confront that disconfirmatory event and fully recognize its occurence. In the face of such disconfirmation, Festinger adds that the believer must have some degree of social support in order that the belief might be upheld, even in the eye of the confrontation (1956:4). Kiesler (1971) points out several implications embedded in the relationship between commitment and dissonance. One assumption is that the person must be committed to a belief or the unequivocal 121 disconfinnation of that belief cannot be ascertained from dissonance theory. Hence, if gambling was not so widespread in Las Vegas, the pioneers's attempts to devalue its importance would not be grounds for the existence of dissonance. As Brehm and Cohen point out, the degree of commitment to a belief will influence the way in which any resulting dissonance is dealt with (1962:8). A second implicit assumption in dissonance theory says that unless the subject is committed, there might not be any dissonance. Again, Festinger designates that alternative beliefs tend to be down­ graded while the commitment is enhanced or behaviorally reinforced. This implication is particularly applicable to the pioneers, who, in light of the fact that tourism and the resort industries play the most important economic and social roles in Las Vegas, tend to down­ play or ignore its very existence. Instead, the commitment is to deny that gaming plays any significant role in their lives and to uphold the image of Las Vegas as it was in its earlier development. Embedded in that construction are the values and norms of the pioneers. By denying the impression of Las Vegas as a focal point for the gaming and entertainment industries, the pioneers are able to reject any intrinsic values that they think might be associated with those particular activities. The final implication of the relationship between commitment and dissonance nears equating the two terms, contending that the greater the individual is committed to a given belief, the greater will be the dissonance. Kiesler flatly discards this view, calling it 122

"patently silly" (1971:62). Corrnnitment and dissonance are conceptually indendent of one another, corrnnitrnent being a factor in dissonance theory, not its equivalent. It is particularly important in applying the concept of dissonance to natural settings that the observer be aware of the commitments of the participants involved in the study. The commitments to improving the cultural programs and uplifting the historical consciousness of the community are foremost in the minds of the pioneers. This observation was confirmed by the impressions expressed by the pioneers during later interviews. It is also based on the amount of time the pioneers spent on various committees organized to plan and execute some type of cultural or religious event. Explicit behaviors that I observed seemed always to be consistent with attitudinal statements of corrnnitment to these goals. The values that motivate these commitments stem largely from self-descriptive state­ ments that consistently placed emphasis on religious values and a strong sense of responsibility to corrnnunity affairs. In addition, when asked if they thought this sense of duty to the community came from the experiences many of the informants had living in a newly established town, they all agreed. One other important aspect about these pioneers was their altruism toward social friends and their open resentment foward people outside that group, who, "unlike ourselves, couldn't care less about community responsibilities" (Florence Cahill).

The small, but exclusive social group that the pioneers have formed is an effective \vay of maintaining social support and keeping dissonant cognitions at a minimum. 123

Self-Attribution As Evidence of Commitment The collection of self-descriptive statements, attitudinal refer- ences and observable behaviors presented in the preceding chapter can be summarized in the following way.

Self-Descriptive Statements Explicit Behaviors (from interview material) (from observational material) Religious Conservative dress Responsible Very friendly with other members of social group Intelligent Active participation at social, Sincere business meetings Honest Attentive to family needs Law Abiding Active in church activities and fund-raising events Family Oriented Reserved around women outside Community Participant of social group but involved in same organizations Avoid using grocery, department stores, public services on Strip Stay close to home

The process of attributing values to others and that of attributing values to oneself are not identical processes. The list of self-descriptive statements above represents self-attributes, all of which were common to all of the pioneers. The list on the right of behavioral attributes were observed rather than elicited through descriptive statements from the informants. Although it is difficult to know if any psychological implications of these self-descriptive 124 f

statements exist and whether or not they are consistent with attitudinal statements, the consistency of these self-attributions and their behavioral manifestations are evident. These cognitive elements reflect underlying values, however, and can serve to more clearly define the commitments to which the pioneers have aligned themselves, and the possible ways in which dissonant cognitive elements are handled.

Mechanisms for Dissonance Reduction

Because dissonance theory allows for the prediction of non­ obvious behavior in a variety of situations, three patterns of behavioral "distancing" can be detected. These behaviors can be seen as mechanisms, or strategies, for reducing dissonance, assuming that Festinger's (1956) second condition for dissonance arousal--commit­ ment--is operating. Also, the idea that the pioneers play down factors in the environment that do not fit into their perceptions while enhancing the attractiveness of their own convictions, is evidence to support the notion of commitment. The primary strategies the pioneers use to reduce dissonance fall into three groups: psychological, spatial and social strategies. The predominate mechanism is distancing. Psychological, spatial and social distancing are intended to describe the methods of dissonance reduction and their effects on the pioneers's perceptions of their social world. PsjTchological Distancing The anthropological tradition of the ethnography of communica- tion stems from the understanding that sociocultural knowledge can be detected as coded in the form of speech events (Hymes 1964). Socia- cultural knowledge is viewed holistically within a culture, in terms of a bound set of categories, and our image of what these categories are derives from the way we visualize or talk about such culturally salient events or routines (Gumperz 1964).

,.) By analy4~ing the lexical choices of the pioneers as they characterize themselves and their environment, it is possible to detect some key words that suggest some shared cognitive strategies. Because these are words that are specific to the informant's sociocultural backgrounds, their usage is especially important in signalling con- textual strategies and communicative intent. Words that indicated a conscious attempt by my informants to separate themselves psychologically from the rest of the community

cropped up in references such as: 'We, the community people~ felt that because the social division was so apparent ... " (Florence Cahill), or,

" ... because the townspeople were all highly religious, and we didn't want a lot of people coming in to gamble ... " Florence Benning reinforces this mental distancing with such phrases as: " ... and I think the loss of every tree causes a twinge in the hearts of all of us old-timers ... " Francis Fotmtainne makes the distinction less

directly: "My husband was proud of the things we did for this town ... " Leva Bettinger, like .many of the other informants, separates herself on the basis of her participation in community affairs, using the 126

simple blanket tenn ''we": "We mainly concerned ourselves with encouraging people to achieve recognition in the community ... . We tried to get publicity for the groups .... We wanted to start cultural activities for the whole town ... " and so on. Or Jules Nelson's use of the "we": "There's so many crooked people rurming those casinos. Not like it used to be. But it supports the town I guess, and we never would have made it without them ... " The communicative intent in statements such as these is to identify or perhaps reinforce a particular reference group to which the pioneers belong, and by so doing, exclude all persons who do not belong to that social group. Following Sherif and Sherif's (1967) suggestion that the reference group serves as a reinforcement agent for the individual, these lexical items help to identify a particular construction of the social world by a particular set of people.

Spatial Distancing The physical boundaries of the pioneers's world is also a strategy for maintaining a spatial separation from the rest of the community. Whereas lexical items reflect a psychological/internal distancing between the informants and the outside community, the intentional avoidance of using any grocery stores, department stores, service stations or entertainment facilities located on "the Strip" is quickly admitted by all. Florence Cahill, the youngest informant, is also the most active. Unlike most of the other women, she drives and has a car at her dis­ posal all the time. In many instances, she provides rides to meeting 127

places for the other women in the group. Florence said that she seldom went to any casinos on the Strip, and avoided the whole Strip area whenever possible. This response was typical of the other informants as well. Although only t(o:W\ informants live in their original homesteads, \) ; Florence Cahill and Leva Bettinger, the remaining informants, chose to reside in duplexes or small apartments close to their old homes, all of which were located around the downtown area of Las Vegas. This general vicinity also represents the geographical division between pre-World War II Las Vegas, and the gaming industries' incipient development of the Strip in post-war Las Vegas. Other pioneers expressed their efforts to "tighten up" their social activities as the town expanded, in order that they could maintain their group goals without feeling threatened that other civic projects might take priority over their projects. They recall such intentions as meeting at members's homes, or using church facilities for their meetings. They all explicitly remember when they stopped using the local hotels for meetings. They say they stopped when local ownership of the hotels slipped into the hands of corporations, whose intentions, they add, were "to make money off of gambling from tour- ists, not to entertain the local people" (Leva Bettinger). For the most part, club meetings were always held in someone's home, in an empty church office, or sometimes in the upstairs, private offices of department stores in downtown Las Vegas, such as J. C. Penney. Luncheons were always restricted to private homes or community meeting halls. Only twice while I was in Las Vegas did the 128 women of one social club, the Mesquite Club, meet in a hotel/casino for lunch and a business meeting. One meeting took place at the Plaza Hotel, the site of the original railroad land auction, and the other meeting occurred at the Hotel Fremont, across the street from Leva Bettinger's family clothing store. In these two instances, the use of casinos was rationalized by feelings of familiarity with these establishments, even if the women no longer knew the managements. This type of justification for inconsistent behavior applies to what some social psychologists describe as a '~igh form of consistency," wherein the individual's high self-image tends to outweigh any negative consequences of his actions (Manis 1977). In short, the burden of dissonance reduction is in the hands of the individual, and his or her success at it depends on a positive self-image. The explicit behavior patterns support the hypothesis that commitment should be equated with self-responsibility and that choice is the main, or perhaps only, way to manipulate it (Kiesler 1971:166). The major advantage to this particular view of implied commitment to behaviors is that it posits a mediating variable for the effects of commitment. The committed individual feels responsible for past behavior and subject to scrutiny from other members of his/her social group if his/her behavior appears inconsistent with previous behavior. The individual is more resistant to change, because change would mean altering not only one's opinion but parts of one's self-perceptions. Change would involve explaining previous behaviors, or justifying them. Because these justifications are essentially demeaning to the individual, the change is resisted (Kiesler 1971:168). This tendency 129 to avoid inconsistencies because of its self-demeaning implications can be applied to the Las Vegas women, all of whom make a point of leaving their club rituals unchanged from meeting to meeting.

Social Distancing The pioneers effectively separate themselves from other community activities through their memberships with social organizations, all of which are either religious or culturally oriented. There is a notice­ able amount of overlap in memberships of various groups , further indicating that cohesiveness is an important element to the pioneers and supporting the idea that they share similar interests and values. Another indication of the pioneers's emphasis on cohesiveness is the fact that everyone, in the meetings that I attended, knew how to behave and what agendas were to be followed. No "norm-sending activities" that would serve to inform participants of what they were expected to contribute to the sessions was witnessed (Thibaut and Kelley 1959:134). vYhat had happened, primarily due to the length of time they have been members of these clubs, and the degree to which their personal commitments were reflected in the natures of these clubs, was an internalization of the group norms and expectations. Group conformity is so strong, in fact, that no leadership or individual roles were ever clearly observable. There were never any apparent leaders taking charge of business affairs at any meetings, or any seemingly apparent imbalance of responsibilities for any individual participant. At social events., they never singled any individuals out of the group to offer recognition for any personal efforts. The makeup 130

of these group interactions corresponds to what Thibaut and Kelley (1959:245) characterize as normative behavior with high intrinsic value. Because the norms of the group have been so thoroughly absorbed by members that no "surveillance" or sanctions from inside or outside the group are necessary for conformity, the rewards that in­ dividuals are obtaining through identification and internalization of group norms must be substantial. Individual members are highly motivated to perform the normative behaviors because of the high intrinsic values they attach to the attitudes and values of the group. Group affiliation, in turn, serves to separate the individual, socially, from other non-affiliates of the community.

Commitment and Psychological Implication

The importance of commitment is fundamental in determining the pyschological implications of any given cognition or cognitive item (Festinger 1957:12). The degree to which group activities occupy the pioneers's time and energies is indicative of their level of commit­ ment to those groups. Commitment, further, serves to aid in the specification of psychological prerequisites, and helps to identify what is consonant and dissonant in the minds of the pioneers. For example, we can safely assume that Florence Cahill, Leva Bettinger and Francis Fountainne will deny or challenge the ideas and goals of the Democratic Women's Club because they all actively participate in the affairs of the Republican Women's Club. The efforts of their opposing political group will be dissonant to their own goals. 131

Commitment will also aid in the specification of ways in which a person may try to reduce dissonance (Festinger 1957:13). Using this idea, the rigid adherence to normative group behaviors displayed by all of the pioneers illustrates their need to identify with the values of those groups, and points to the ways in which dissonance is reduced. Their insistence that religious, cultural and historical values be up­ held in the community, and their efforts to thwart the opposing priorities of an ever-expanding residential population whose interests lie largely, in some capacity, with the gaming industry, is evidence of a strong commitment. It also shows the manner in which dissonance is being minimized. Active and consistent participation in these

groups not only reduces the amount of conflicting information my informants might otherwise be exposed to, but it also specifies what cognitive dimensions stand in a dissonant relation to their own perceptions. Drawing on these various channels of behavioral and mental dis­ tancing brings us closer to identifying the sources of the dissonance that are theoretically present in this situation. The impressions, activities and observable support attributed to all aspects of the · entertainment, gaming industries by community people constitute the major sources of dissonance arousal. In turn, the most effective way of reducing dissonance that is caused by the confrontation of opposing commitments is to affiliate and actively participate in groups which work for community services and cultural projects. It is finally important to make one other distinction: the groups to which my informants identify themselves are both reference 132

groups and membership groups. Sherif and Sherif (1967) use reference groups to mean a group to which a person refers in order to gain evidence of correct values and opinions, whether or not the person is actually a participant of the group. Membership groups, on the other hand, refer to groups in which the individual is actually involved in some semi-formal way (Kiesler 1971:126). The two definitions coincide. The groups to which the pioneers belong are both reference and member­ ship groups. This is the case primarily because no mention of values, opinions or goals of other social community groups were ever mentioned, alluded to or implied by the pioneers. The groups to which they align themselves apparently symbolize the values and opinions that would constitute a reference group. The difference was that the groups they were actively committed to also embodied the values and opinions they attributed to themselves, thereby making them reference groups as well.

Linking Attitudes and Behavior

From the research that is available, it is apparent that social behavior is affected by a variety of factors, making it difficult to predict what people will do from an understanding of their attitudes. Any single act performed by an individual is most likely to be influenced or affected by several factors apart from his attitudes

~is 1977). Few investigations have used more extensive lists of behavioral criterion based on more than one observational variable. This study has attempted to rectify that situation. Based on group and individual interactions, formal interviews, observational ,,.

133 materials from business and social meetings, a broad range of factors that might influence and point to a link between attitudes and behavior has been documented. A study by Fisbeing and Ajzen (1979), in which religious attitudes were predicted, encouraged this strategy of including a wider range of variables in similar studies of attitude and behavioral comparisons. The researchers suggested that there may be substantial consistency between attitudes and religious behaviors if investigators would focus on the "volume" of religious behaviors being enacted by respondents rather than trying to predict respondents's actions in a particular setting (1974:73). A study conducted by Norman (1975), concerning the investigation of this ambiguous link between attitudes and behavior, suggests that the attitude-behavior problem may be dependent on whatever consistency might exist between expressed attitudes and beliefs of respondents. Using a sample of people whose beliefs were inconsistent with their expressed attitudes on a given topic, he found that there was no relationship between verbal attitudes toward serving in a psychologi­ cal experiment and the likelihood that these respondents would actually volunteer to serve in such an experiment (1975:83-91). He found, though, that attitudes and behavior were more closely related among respondents who showed "affective-cognitive consistency." He suggests that for those subjects whose beliefs and attitudes are inconsistent, the views expressed in an interview or questionnaire may not be held with any "firmness" because the issue may be unfamiliar or irrelevant to the respondents's daily activities. By contrast, respondents who are more consistent in their beliefs and 134 attitudes are more likely to have given some thought to various issues in question, and their personal reactions, being more stable, are more likely to influence explicit behavior (1975:90). The problems of arriving at firm evidence to show links between behavior and attitude plague most theories about attitudes and their change or resistance to change. Cognitive dissonance theory suffers from the same missing link. It assumes that at least under some cir­ cumstances, a certain behavior will imply a particular attitude. Aronson (1961) illustrated the problem when, in his experiment, the underlying assumption was that if an individual expressed his hard work to achieve some end (a behavior), it would imply the individual valued that end (an attitude). Heider (1958) expressed it as a behavior, such as buying a sports car, that implies an attitude, such as liking the sports car. Others express it differently. Central to dissonance theory is the focus on situations involv­ ing "internal satisfaction," or nonobvious consistency. The problem again rests in determining what cognitions create a condition of consistency, and how that consistency may or may not be manifested. Behavior is relevant to dissonance only in as much as it ''puts the organism in relation to contradictory information or as it fosters readjustment of 'out-of-tliDe' cognitions" (Tedeschi, Schlenker, Bonoma 1971:686). Further, Collins (1968) and Bem (1967) have been critical of dissonance theory because it only concerns itself with such cognitive relations. They would much rather see a more emcornpass­ ing set of behavioral criterion than isolated pairs of behavior that one might try to predict in certain settings. 135

This dilemma has sparked a recent resurgence of interest in what Festinger originally termed "logical inconsistency," and what Aronson (1968) relabeled "psychological inconsistency." Because the nature of inconsistency was not sufficiently defined by Festinger, inconsistency can be logical in some cases, but not necessarily always logical. Further, Festinger's listing of the instances in which dissonance might be aroused are not mutually exclusive categories. The categories include logical inconsistency; inconsistency with cultural mores; inconsistency between one cognition and a more general, all encompassing, cognition; and past experience (1957:14). The last two conditions for dissonance arousal are applicable to the pioneers. But an "all encompassing cognition" can easily mean a cultural more, as well as it could point to dissonance resulting from past experience. Aside from this technicality, Aronson and others interested in this theoretical work are trying to propose methods of specifying psychological implication in advance, predictions that are more than simple intuition. Theoretically, the notion of commitment makes distortions and reinterpretations of the action and its implications for attitude more difficult. But the empirical work so far cannot be faulted on the grounds that there is some ambiguity about psychological implication. The a priori implications of act for attitude in those studies is quite clear (Kiesler 1971:173). The amount of attention being focused on cqmmitment and dissonance reinforces the assumption that there is a direct link between behaviors and attitudes, even if the link cannot yet be identified. 136

In uncontrolled situations, though, the assumptions of commit­ ment and dissonance may or may not be valid, depending on what principles the respondents are committed to and what activities may be threatening those commitments. The predictive value of the notion of commitment loses some of its power. Again, the problem lies in being able to specify in advance, the specific connection between behavior and attitude. Kiesler cites the following example to illustrate this point:

When we focus upon people who happen to carry signs and those who happen not to, there are a number of intruding or con­ founding variables. The sign-carriers and the non-sign­ carriers could differ in a number of respects, many of them obvious ..... [such as] the extremeness of their attitudes on the issue .... farniliarity with the attitude issue ... social support for the attitude ..... In specific situations, such as willingness to volunteer for some act or reaction to counter­ communications, we can predict with some success how the subject's behavior and attitudes will be affected. If the overt difference between our two hypothetical groups-­ carrying a sign--merely reflects an underlying,difference on some well-known psychological dimension, then it is super­ fluous to speak of the difference as one of commitment (1971:27).

However, when the researcher can demonstrate that some qualita­ tive or typological distinctiveness defines the degree of commitment, 137 using several variables, the predictive value of the model might be retained (Kiesler 1971). vVhen the behavior is not manipulated, as in the case of natural conditions, commitment can only be defined if some number of variables can be identified as factors affecting the behavior of the respondents. Hence, the pioneers have expressed some powerful attitudes toward people who are not concerned with the historical and religious preservation of Las Vegas, and psychologically separated themselves from those people; they also have a great deal of insight into the historical foundations of Las Vegas because most of them settled in the newly founded town; and, finally, they have a social support system made up of members of their various social and civic groups, which serves to reinforce these values. It is reason­ able to predict that this typology will affect their behavior. The problem arises when we stop to consider that each one of these variables affects the behavior independently, and that degrees of affectation are not known, leaving us with no qualitative distinctive­ ness for any one variable (Kiesler 1971:28). Apart from the technicalities that are not clearly stated in Festinger's model for cognitive dissonance theory and the empirical problems of linking behavior to attitudes using internal implications such as the idea of commitment, the value of using a theory which attempts to account for certain kinds of psychosocial behavior is an important contribution to anthropology in particular, and all areas of social science in general. As with Festinger's preliminary study,

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