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book review
Suburban Xanadu:
The casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip
and beyond
By David G. Schwartz. (2003). New York: Routledge. ISBN
0-41593-557-1 (paperback).
Price: (approx.) CAD$ 45.00 or USD$ 35.95.
Reviewed by William
Thompson, University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A.
E-mail: wthompson@ccmail.nevada.edu
Suburban Xanadu offers the reader a
history-packed volume on casino gambling in Las Vegas and other American
venues. The book presents the material in an orderly, chronological
manner that covers many topics that have been likewise presented in
other volumes as well. Some very good material is new. Suburban
Xanadu seeks to establish that casino gambling is a normal (e.g.,
healthy) American pursuit, and that casino operators and regulators have
been able to keep the casino industry honest and above-board in almost
all cases. It is a "point of view" analysis; however, it is presented as
if it were a "factual" analysis. The book is generally well written, and
very well documented, but the overall tone is not always convincing.
The author, David G. Schwartz, has written a book that is essentially an
extension of his doctoral dissertation in history (2000). It is a great
achievement when a newly credentialed scholar is able to have his
dissertation accepted by a reputable publisher who then distributes it
for consideration by the general public. Editors of books drawn from
dissertations usually seek to extract and dispose of academic rigmarole
such as theoretical frameworks and hypotheses, and propositions subject
to formal testing. They also seek to minimize the use of academic
jargon.
Here the editors would have done a service to the reader if they had
insisted that the author actually give the reader such a "framework." He
should have at least provided some guiding themes and directions as a
road map through the detail and the unfortunately heavy dose of academic
jargon that remains. The book is crammed full of interesting information
that is well worth reading in and of itself, but lacks the coherent
sense of direction that is usually provided with academic methodology;
the reading becomes tedious at times.
The book is replete with trendy academic words such as "paradigm" and
"marginal" (whatever such words mean). This could be accepted as "part
of the territory" if the main concept were more completely developed.
That concept is, of course, "suburban." After completing the book, I am
still at a loss as to what the author means by the term and how it
relates to Las Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, Tunica, or any other casino
jurisdiction. There are references to the notion that the American
population became to a great extent "suburban" after World War II. Yet
precisely how this was tied to casino development is not adequately
explained.
This reviewer suggests that "suburban" is not a proper descriptive term
for Las Vegas at all. First, Las Vegas is a city, not a suburb. Second,
the Las Vegas Strip—which is technically under political control of the
Clark County government—is not now, nor ever was, a "suburb." The Strip
was developed on open land—the term "rural" might be appropriate, but it
was in fact "deserted" (more accurately, never previously occupied)
desert land. Before casinos, no one ever lived by the Strip, and even
afterwards no suburbanites lived by the Strip. There have never been
single family (stand-alone) houses near the Strip. Indeed, apartments
aplenty accompanied the development of Strip casinos, but they housed
card dealers, room attendants, and cocktail waitresses—not suburban
families. No Las Vegas school is located within walking distance of the
Strip.
The customers of the Strip were Americans and tourists from foreign
lands. They came from urban and rural areas, as well as from the suburbs
of Detroit, Houston, London, and Tokyo. Whatever their demographics, to
argue that qualities tied to "suburban" (as opposed to other) lifestyles
dictated their desire to come to Las Vegas is a bit of a stretch.
That the Strip developed outside of the city of Las Vegas (but not in
suburbs) is an historical accident. The city did not want to push its
services southward beyond Sahara Avenue, and the casinos existing out on
Highway 91 (now the Strip), forced to develop their own utilities,
turned to the Clark County government for support. This was not the
typical case of an American company leaving the central city and moving,
for instance, from Chicago, Detroit, or Atlantic City to the suburbs.
The Strip casino developers were never in the city.
The author seeks to explain why the Strip developed while the casinos of
downtown did not do so to the same degree. However, the idea of
suburbanization doesn't work as an explanation. The author does not cite
the analysis by Eugene Moehring (1989) in his Resort City in the
Sunbelt: Las Vegas, 1930-1970 that is directly on target. Moehring
explains that City interests (dominated by downtown casinos) did not
want the Strip to be within Las Vegas city limits, and how the Strip
casino interests afterwards won several major battles with the city,
notably to have the convention center located near the Strip, and to
have McCarran Airport built next to the Strip. Additionally, they
influenced the placement of the Interstate Highway so that it would
serve the Strip by funneling drive-in guests from California to the
casino doors. The author also neglects to point out two other major
factors in the growth of the Strip resorts: the advent of air
conditioning, which enabled horizontal as well as vertical growth, and
the coming of jet air travel, which allowed larger and faster aircraft
that could fly above storm clouds.
These factors certainly grew Las Vegas more than any suburban mind-set
that swept the nation in the latter decades of the 20th century.
The use of the word "suburb" also becomes a device for declaring that
"Atlantic City" has been a rousing success. The author concedes that the
city of Atlantic City has remained a dismal, decaying center of urban
blight, but he dismisses the fact that the main purpose of having
casinos was to bring urban development to Atlantic City, not to
its suburbs. The growth of suburban economies around Atlantic City
simply has not been the goal, and it has not done the trick. It is not a
good basis for declaring the "success" of Atlantic City, anymore than
one could say that the three casinos of Detroit have given the Motor
City economic development because life is good in Bloomfield Hills.
The other "title concept" of "Xanadu" comes from a poem by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. "Xanadu" was the pleasure-dome for royalty in the
mystery-shrouded city of Kubla (Coleridge's spelling) Kahn's 13th
Century China . I would agree that it makes sense to call the big resort
casinos of Las Vegas "Xanadus," but I am not sure why that is important
to the intended message of the book. The author points out that the
typical Las Vegas Strip resort is actually bigger than the fictional
Coleridge "Xanadu," but what does it mean to say Las Vegas is "big"? The
Luxor pyramid casino on the Strip is bigger that the Luxor pyramid in
Egypt, the Monte Carlo Casino on the Strip could house all the casinos
of Monaco under its roof, the entire village of Bellagio in the Italian
Alps could fit inside the casino of that name on the Strip. O.K., Las
Vegas is big.
The idea that the Mob involvement which did dominate early Strip
development was somehow internally honest and professional is advanced
with an unconvincing story about Charles J. Hirsch. This gentleman was
an accountant. He actually makes for a good side story—but it is a side
story. Hirsch developed essential control concepts for accounting within
casinos. In the latter Mob days of the late 1950s and 1960s, he
conceptualized the notions of "handle," "drop," and "hold." (The drop is
the amount of money the gambler brings to the casino and puts into play.
The handle offers a consideration of the amounts of money gambled—and
this includes money turnover, that is, money won by the player and then
gambled again. The hold is the percentage of money that the player
brought to the casino [drop], measured in chips sold to the player,
minus the money the player takes away from the casino when he leaves.)
The author contends that integrity was present in the Mob-controlled
casinos, because they were able to use the accounting methodologies
developed by Hirsch. The story about Hirsch is new to this reader, and
in and of itself it is an interesting story. However, I’d rate the
reasoning behind the story as less than compelling, as the accountant
developed his notions after the Mob secured its position in Las
Vegas. Hirsch occupied lower-level casino positions until he became the
controller at the Sands in 1970. What did the casinos do before Hirsch
came along? Secondly, Hirsch’s methods, while providing the casino with
a tracking mechanism to ensure that players were not cheating them, did
absolutely nothing to protect a player from a casino when the casino
wished to cheat the player. Overall, it can be suggested that the
casinos were happy to simply have the odds in their favor in honest
games (when the players were losing). However, there are ample stories
of casinos confronting high-roller players who were enjoying fabulous
runs of good luck. The stories find the casinos replacing honest dealers
with dishonest "mechanics," or changing decks of cards or dice, and then
deliberately cheating players. The stories are simply too much a part of
the fabric of the Las Vegas past to be brushed off with a story of good
internal accounting at one (or more?) of the casinos.
Another story of the triumph of "good" is provided by a profile of
William Harrah. It too lacks substance. Harrah was an innovator who
introduced bus junkets between San Francisco and his casinos in Reno and
near Lake Tahoe. I can see why an author from Atlantic City would choose
to overlook this innovation, and instead concentrate on the fact that
Harrah was a WASP, and therefore represented an exception to the
supposed rule that casinos were all controlled by Jewish and Italian
operators. But there were many other "non-Jewish non-Italians" involved
in early casinos: Benny Binion, Sam Boyd, John Ascauga, Baron
Hilton—amazingly, none of whom are mentioned in the book—as well as Kirk
Kerkorian and Howard Hughes. Back to Harrah. He was by most other
accounts a dismal failure toward the end of his life, as he refused to
modernize, or even keep his northern Nevada casinos in clean condition.
His car collection and his collection of spouses de-energized his
talents for casino management. Harrah's was saved by William Harrah's
demise in 1977 and by the efforts of Mead Dixon, Michael Rose, and Phil
Satre to take the company public and engineer an effective merger with
Holiday Inn. Today's Harrah's is nothing at all like William Harrah's
Harrah's.
As the title uses the word "suburban," it is somewhat disconcerting that
the author has given less than a single page to the phenomenal growth of
major casinos for locals (the Boyd, Coast, and Stations properties being
the best examples) that has occurred in the new Summerlin and Green
Valley neighborhoods that truly do epitomize the notion of "suburban."
The author seems to mix in the casino gambling of Las Vegas with casino
gaming elsewhere as he draws his picture of a "nice," "wholesome"
industry. He accepts the veracity of tribal studies that prove the
beneficial nature of Native American casinos. Some dissent can be
offered to these views.
The author also recognizes pathological gambling, but then dismisses it
from serious consideration by accepting industry dogma that problem
gambling cannot be accurately studied and described with numbers. Yet
the industry itself (the American Gaming Association) has done so,
concluding that 1.3% of adults are pathological gamblers, and a National
Commission has also used survey research to attach dollar values to the
costs imposed upon society by pathological gamblers. There is a growing
body of research on compulsive gambling.
The value of the book is not in the opinions of the author but in the
meticulous, well-documented scholarship used in drawing out a multitude
of stories about activities tied to the emergence of Las Vegas as the
leading resort city of the world. It is not a quick read, but it is a
good read.
The author is a scholar in one very good sense of the word. He has
labored hard and long to stuff his mind full of facts about his (and my)
chosen topic of interest—gambling. Good things must be said for scholars
who toil hard in the isolation of their own hand-to-eye-to-mind
laboratories. Studying hard worked when we were students; it also works
when we become professors. (It beats drinking coffee and discussing the
New York Times with colleagues.)
My critique need not be considered negative. I highly recommend this
book for its wonderful substantive content. Those interested in the
casino gambling industry would be wise to give attention to the work.
This reader is quite happy that the author, a fellow professor at his
university (the University of Nevada, Las Vegas), has now written a
second book on gambling, and a third book is in the works. David
Schwartz is becoming a leading scholar in the field of gambling studies.
References
- Moehring, E. (1989).
-
Resort city in the Sunbelt: Las
Vegas, 1930–1970. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press.
- Schwartz, D.G. (2000).
-
Suburban Xanadu: The casino resort on the Las
Vegas Strip, 1945–1978. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of
California, Los Angeles.
Submitted: May 25, 2005. This article was not peer-reviewed.
For correspondence: William N. Thompson, Department of Public
Administration, University of Nevada–Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV 89154-6026
U.S.A. Phone: (702)-895-3319, fax: (702)-895-1813, e-mail:
wthompson@ccmail.nevada.edu
Competing interests: None declared.
William N. Thompson (PhD, University of Missouri–Columbia) is professor of
public administration at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. He is an active
researcher on gambling topics. His books include: Gambling in America: An
Encyclopedia of History, Issues, and Society (2001); Native American
Issues: A Reference Handbook (1996); Casino Customer Service
(1992, 1996, with Michelle Comeau); International Casino Law (1991,
1999, with Anthony Cabot); The Last Resort: Success and Failure in
Campaigns for Casinos (1990, with John Dombrink). He has served as a
consultant to public and private organizations including The National
Gambling Impact Study Commission, The President's Commission on Organized
Crime, The Detroit Casino Study Commission, Lotto Quebec, The Manitoba
Lottery Commission, The Netherlands Board of Gambling, several Native
American tribes with gaming facilities, and commercial casinos.
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