Chapter 5
NEVADA, the sixth largest state in size and the smallest in number of people, covers 110,540 square miles, and is the only state whose population, 110,247 by the last census, is almost exactly equivalent to the area; there is one Nevadan for each square mile. It is thus the least densely populated state, and its capital, Carson City (population 2,478), is the smallest.1 Nevada is mostly desert, mountains, and fabulous natural resources. It is one of the friendliest states I know, and it lives on four things, mining, livestock, the divorce trade, and gambling.
First a word on why I include this particular chapter at this juncture, Mainly it is that though Nevada of course belongs to the West, it is in blunt fact a kind of hinterland to California. In Chapter 2, I mentioned—all too briefly—some characteristics of the states. Experts vary in how to classify them geographically. The Handbook of the United States published by the OWI during the war as a guide for American officials abroad includes Nevada in a special region “of rugged mountain ranges, enclosed basins of interior drainage, and wide desert plains,” that also comprises the California desert, western Utah, and parts of Idaho and Oregon. Professor Brogan in his U.S.A. separates Nevada from California and includes it in the “Mountain and Great Plains” states though he gives Idaho to the “Pacific Northwest.” The admirable U.S.A. number of Fortune (February, 1940) simply lumps California and Nevada together as a single block called “Far West.”2
Visitors from abroad who look closely at a map of the United States for the first time are often struck by the straight lines of most state frontiers, especially in the West. They are apt to deduce from this, erroneously, that such frontiers—since they do not follow mountain ranges or river lines—must of necessity be artificial. But this is not really the case. I mentioned above that states’ rights have been thinned down. But not state identities or lines! Indeed these are still astonishingly distinctive. Look at Utah and Nevada from an airplane. They are indistinguishable. You could not possibly tell where one stops and the other begins. Yet the two states differ so enormously that they might belong to different worlds. Utah is a creature of the Mormon church; it was settled mostly from the Middle West, by burghers with a remarkable religious fixation; Nevada was settled in reverse, so to speak, by miners and prospectors and gamblers who found California too tame. Utah is the most staid and respectable of states; Nevada is, by common convention at least, the naughtiest.
Nevada entered the union in 1864, only fourteen years after its first settlement; it was the first of the intermountain states to be admitted. This was largely because Abraham Lincoln needed votes with which to push through the 13th amendment, that which abolished slavery. The matter was of such urgency that Nevada’s brand new constitution was telegraphed in ioto to Washington—at a cost of $3,416.77—so that the Nevada representative might vote in time.3
It is of course quick and easy divorce that has made Nevada famous everywhere. As far back as 1861, when the state was still a territory, the Nevadans made six months the term of residence necessary for divorce. Partly this was the result of general western breeziness; the attitude was that if two people no longer wanted to live together, it was very well their own affair. Also there were no settled agricultural or industrial communities, and the miners wandered among California, Utah and Arizona camps, seldom living in Nevada longer than six months. Not until about 1906 did Easterners begin to take advantage of the Nevada divorce laws. Then the easy Reno system brought in a lot of business. Even so, the local reform element succeeded in passing a law requiring a one-year’s residential period beginning in 1914; but the business and professional men suffered so much that the legislature in 1916 restored the six months’ law. In the 1920’s and the early 1930’s, other states, like Florida, Arkansas and Idaho pulled down their own residential periods for divorce. Nevada, to keep ahead, then did likewise, first reducing the time to three months and finally to the present term of six weeks.
Nevadans themselves—despite their free-and-easiness and the instant availability of the courts—don’t exceed the national average in number of divorces; the overwhelming bulk of the trade comes from outside. A strange paradox that may account for Nevada’s own moderation is the strong local influence of the Roman Catholic church. Both senators, Pat McCarran and E. P. Carville (formerly the governor),4 are Catholic; so is the attorney general, and the archbishop of Reno—a well-known Catholic on the liberal side—has very considerable prestige and power.
Nevada’s two chief cities, Reno and Las Vegas, compete vigorously in divorce traffic; Reno is still far ahead (with 7,076 divorces last year as against 2,944 in Las Vegas), but Las Vegas, in the southern part of the state, is a lively and fast-growing rival. Reno accuses it of muscling in. These two cities, with their savory mixture of wild-West and urban sophistication, their florescent neon-lighted gambling dens and fashionable ranches on the outskirts, are among the most picturesque in the United States. Reno compares to Las Vegas as San Francisco, one might say, compares to Los Angeles. Las Vegas is in fact part of the Los Angeles orbit; it is very show-offish, loaded with California money, and possessed of one of the most attractive hotels on earth. One small item about Reno, possibly apocryphal: during the curfew in World War II, it was hard if not impossible to close up places that violated the law, for the simple reason that most doors in this easy-going city have no locks!
Nevada likes to call itself “the one sound state,” and postcards are available pointing out that it has no retail sales tax, no corporation tax, no state income tax, no inheritance tax—“and no thumb tax” on the roads. But the inadequacy of the schools and hospitals makes this boast a mockery. What, then, is the basis of public finance? First, the property tax, which is paid mostly by the railways, mines, and big stock-raising interests. Eighty-seven per cent of the land of Nevada is, however, still public land. Second, gambling.
This is by far the hottest issue in the state. Nevadans are not hypocrites and gambling was legalized from statehood on; in 1910, however, a reform group changed the law, and gambling was “prohibited.” Of course it flourished anyway; to clean up gambling in any mining area is like trying to mop up the Mississippi with a dishrag. Also, being “illegal,” it flourished to the accompaniment of vast corruption; the authorities had to be paid off. This state of affairs became a nuisance, and in 1931 gambling was legalized again; Nevada is today the only wide-open state—legally speaking—in the union. But the 1931 law did not tax gambling, except in the form of local license fees.
So far so good. Gambling proliferated, and so did Nevada—in a manner of speaking. Practically every delicatessen, railway waiting room, and drug store had its slot machines; and the big houses or clubs had faro, roulette, poker, craps, what you will. But the state continued to need money. It was “sound”—but very hard up. So a movement began to tax gambling. One of its leaders was State Senator Kenneth Johnson, himself the proprietor of a gambling house.5 His point of view was that if gambling was to last, the rank and file of the people must share in the proceeds somehow. The financial stringency became worse; Nevada could hardly pay its schoolteachers. The salary of the secretary of state was only $3,600 a year, which put a ceiling on salaries for all other public officials; some fifty thousand dollars was urgently needed to clean out the coyotes preying on the sheep herds, but the money wasn’t there. Yet, day by day, armored cars rolled and rollicked out of Las Vegas for Los Angeles, carrying cash away. One establishment in Las Vegas was estimated to gross $120,000 per month; one in Reno did even better. But there were two important sources of opposition to a gambling tax. One came naturally from most gamblers, who didn’t like to see their profits chewed into, the other from officials who feared that, if gambling were taxed, if it were allowed to contribute directly to the public welfare, the gambling interests would come to boss the state. The upshot was that a bill for a 10 per cent tax on gross gambling receipts was passed by the senate, but cut down to 1 per cent by the house. This 1 per cent tax is now in force. It only became operative in the summer of 1945, and no one knew then quite what revenue would accrue. Figures of gambling proceeds have always been a tightly guarded secret. One estimate is that the gross may reach forty million dollars per year, which would bring the state four hundred thousand dollars or almost half its budget.
Is gambling honest in Nevada? Yes—with your fingers crossed. The business is so lucrative anyway that, except in minor fly-by-night places, there is no real incentive to running a crooked game. An interesting point is that most of the big clubs have very little discernible police protection, though a hundred thousand dollars may be lying on the tables. But much of this is in silver cartwheels which, it is argued, are too bulky to make big-scale theft practicable; also, since all the roads lead into the desert, there is no place for a thief to go. Croupiers and dealers are, incidentally, paid very high wages—as much as twenty-five dollars a day. This is to discourage “leakage.”
Politics is, in Nevada, inveterately personal. I talked to one official who said that, to get elected, he had to “shake every hand” in the state; another, a publican by trade, explained that he had won an election because “Everybody knows I’m the only man in Nevada who serves a full ounce.” For a long time both the Republican and Democratic national committeemen had the same telephone number—Reno 3111—which was that of a famous old-timer in state politics, George Wingfield. And Nevada politics are full of tricks. In one recent election Kenneth Johnson found himself running against Kenneth Johnson. His opponents had found a man of the same name, and put him on the ballot in an attempt to split the vote.
Nevada was consistently Republican from 1916 to Roosevelt; during Roosevelt it was consistently Democratic, though the Republicans at present control the senate. It has, like most western states, the direct primary, initiative, referendum and recall; hence the democratic process is very “pure.” One point worth mention is the power of the newspapers, although most are absentee owned; they are very prosperous partly because of high rates for legal advertising, and several have what are jokingly called “permanently reserved seats” in the legislature. As to financial power, it devolves mostly on California; the chief banks are dependent on Giannini.
Another point is the Nevada tradition of always having a “strong” senator in Washington. This was William M. Stewart for many years, and then the veteran Key Pittman, who was Tom Connally’s predecessor as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The “strong” senator today is of course Pat McCarran, “easy-going, old-shoe Pat,” who has been God’s own gift not only to the people of Nevada but to various interests outside the state.
Why should Nevada, the least populous American state, always have a “strong” senator? First, because as everybody knows, Nevada, with 110,000 people,6 has precisely the same senatorial representation as, say, New York. Second, a strong man in Congress usually derives from a strong issue, and Nevada has had that from the beginning—silver.
Visit to a Ghost
Virginia City, the home of the Comstock Lode, is the first ghost town I ever saw. Bob Kenny of California took me there. We drove out one sunny summer morning from Reno, along twenty-three miles of glossy roads that led curvingly across the sagebrush to the violet and amber mountains.
Up to 1939, the Comstock Lode, probably the richest single mining property ever discovered, produced about six hundred million dollars in gold, about five hundred million dollars in silver. It has 750 miles of tunnels, shafts, drifts, inclines, and underground workings, and it helped finance the Civil War. It was the basis of such fortunes as that of the Mackays who created Postal Telegraph, and it was the undisputed dictator of Nevada politics for a generation. It was discovered in 1859, and for forty-odd years it made Virginia City one of the saltiest, most obstreperous towns on earth.
But not today. Virginia City looks like a lavender flower pressed in a book. Pick it up; it will crumble into dust. We passed the Bowers mansion, which once had solid silver doorknobs; we passed over the entrance to the Sutro tunnels, which with their laterals are nine miles long; we saw some “glory holing.” Nevada prospectors, with gold in their veins, still look for it in veins of earth. Anybody can get out and dig, and a glory hole is simply an attempt to find ore by digging from the surface. Most mining had, however, stopped when I was in Nevada, following Directive L 208 of the War Production Board, which shut down on gold and silver so that skilled miners could work on more strategic minerals, like copper.
We saw the Miners Union Hall, that resembles nothing so much as a man with a hangover; it is the oldest building of this type in the world. We saw the skeleton of the Hotel International, which burned down in 1914; it was once the biggest hotel in the West, and the first one with an elevator. We saw a deserted newspaper office, with its windows shored up by ironing boards. A plaque says:
MARK TWAIN
WHO GREATLY ENRICHED THE LITERATURE OF THE WEST
STARTED HIS CAREER AS A WRITER IN
THIS BUILDING IN 1862 ON THE EDITORIAL
STAFF OF THE TERRITORIAL ENTERPRISE
Further on is the rickety, worm-eaten shell of what was once a famous opera house. A sign on the wall says:
VINI VIDI VICI
THE OLD MEXICAN LINIMENT
GOOD FOR MAN OR BEAST
PENETRATES TO THE ROOT OF THE DIFFICULTY
Virginia City is, then, a fragrant tomb. The population was forty thousand in its heyday; today, two thousand. Never have I seen such deadness. Not a cat walks. The shops are mostly boarded up, the windows black and cracked; the frame buildings are scalloped, bulging, splintered; C Street droops like a cripple, and the sidewalks are still wooden planks; the telephone exchange, located in a stationery shop, is operated by a blind lady who had read my books in Braille.
But also in Virginia City is the Crystal Bar, its most palatable relic. Bill Marks, the barman who has been there for a generation, mixed us a bonanza fizz, and showed us his ancient treasures—a gas-lit chandelier quivering with colored lights; pictures of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight in 1897; crystal glasses that boom with sound; an old timetable of the Virginia & Truckee Railway, and a visitors’ register going back to 1875, with the signatures of General Grant, Jim Fair and the other bonanza kings, and of Thomas A. Edison, this latter like an etching on copper plate. We saw old metal-plate phonographs that still work, a clock painted on a glass mirror which, if you spin the hands, adjusts itself automatically to the correct time, and the 1880 predecessors of modern pinball games.
“Hi Ho Silver!”
Silver is not like wheat or even lumber. You can’t grow it back, and a silver mine is a strictly expendable proposition, as the Comstock Lode well proves. But the main reason why silver is such a permanent and lively issue in Nevada is that it doesn’t pay, according to the Nevadans. In the great days of Virginia City silver was worth $1.24 an ounce; at one time during the 30’s it dropped to 27¢; now it has been stepped up to about 70¢. To many folk in the East, this seems far too high—for instance to silversmiths in Connecticut; to the West it seems too low. The Nevadans could, they say, produce “marginal” silver in great quantities, if the price went up, and thus ameliorate the state’s great economic difficulties—though this would mean of course that the rest of the nation would be paying Nevada an even greater levy than at present for its silver crop.
Silver has dominated Nevada politics from the beginning; nobody not acceptable to the great mining interests could possibly have been elected to anything. Voters were simply lined up in any convenient bar and led to the polls by the nose; they would get as much as ten dollars each for their trouble. This was of course long ago. An actual “Silver party” existed for awhile, and the House of Representatives once had a “Silver member.” Then William Jennings Bryan came out for the free (and unlimited) coinage of silver in his celebrated Cross of Gold speech in 1896, and the silverites became Democratic. Nowadays practically all citizens of Nevada take the same prosilver line, but the Republicans are more outspoken, since they blame the New Deal for keeping silver down, though actually the price has risen. This in turn means that Nevada is one of the few states where the Republican party is inflationary, that is, it wants a higher price for silver.
Behind all this is, of course, a national situation which is hardly within the province of this chapter. Both gold and silver were legal tender in the United States, at a ratio whereby the value of gold was fixed at sixteen times that of silver, until 1873. The silver people have been fighting with unremitting pertinacity to restore silver to its former position ever since, or, at the very least, to increase its price. The issue was a hardy perennial for fifty years. Finally in 1934 a new Silver Purchase Act was passed by Congress, whereby the Treasury promised to support an artificial price of $1.29 an ounce, which to most people seemed an outrageously high figure. The Treasury accumulated a fantastic silver surplus, but it was only permitted to sell this for industrial use at a price around seventy cents, a price set by the silver bloc. This was not enough for the silver senators. They proposed new legislation in 1946 to lift the price still higher. Almost every reputable economist, commentator, and newspaperman in the East joined to call this one of the most blatant hold-up attempts in the whole history of the silver gouge. Consider for instance these excerpts from a letter to the New York Times (May 20, 1946), signed by fifty-odd members of the Economists National Committee on Monetary Policy:
There is no more validity in the argument of the silver bloc that silver should be bought and sold at its nominal monetary valuation of $1.29 per fine ounce, or at any price above the open-competitive market price, than there would be in an argument that the paper used to make paper currency should be bought and sold in the market at the nominal monetary value of the piece of currency manufactured from this paper.
Congress and the people of this country might do well to remind themselves that it was this same pro-silver bloc which revealed it was not only willing but determined, even in time of war, to protect its subsidy regardless of any adverse effects on the general welfare. It was this bloc that forced the Treasury to withhold much-needed silver from war industries for many months after we entered the war. [Author’s italics.]
The attitude of the silver bloc in respect to the public welfare, where silver is involved, appears to be no better today than it was during the late war, especially in 1942.
It is the duty of Congress and the President to see to it that the general welfare, rather than the desires of the silver bloc, is served when silver legislation is undertaken.
But the silver bloc is one of the most efficient, sophisticated, and ruthless in the nation—though hardly more to be singled out than the beet sugar bloc or cattle bloc. It comprises only fourteen senators, who represent seven states, with an aggregate population of about 3,600,000. These are exactly equal in power, however, to fourteen eastern senators who may represent 51,900,000 people. Such is the working out of one of the most conspicuous of all vagaries in the federal Constitution, and the silver bloc knows well—by trading votes and favors—how to take advantage of it for its own highly self-conscious aims.
What happened? After two months of debate—during which time eastern silversmiths had to melt silver dollars to keep in business, while at West Point, New York, the greatest silver hoard ever known to man lay inert and useless—Congress finally raised the price to 90.5¢ per ounce. The silver senators, to force the vote that brought this victory, even held up an appropriations bill that delayed payment of salaries to post office and treasury employees of the U.S. government. Another factor is that the new price will “complete the demoralization of currencies in many countries (Mexico, India, China) which the Silver Bloc’s grab started.”7 Now the silverites are hell-bent to lift the price again to $1.29. The taxpayers as a whole will of course foot the bill—to keep alive fewer than three thousand western mines. Final note: the entire mining industry in eleven western states supports only 3,700,000 people. Superfinal note: the total value of silver production in the United States is about one-half that of peanuts.
McCarran is a fascinating character. A man who served with him in the Senate for some years, and who has since been elevated to a very superior position, once told me that “the trouble with McCarran is that he can’t get along with himself.” This may account for his sudden changes of mind and cantankerousness. McCarran was swept into office on Roosevelt’s coattails in 1932, and then turned violently against him. FDR tried to get him “purged,” but failed. A dominant note in McCarran is his extreme Irishness. Oddly enough, though silver is of course his main pivot and preoccupation, he resembles more another Nevada metal—gold—in that he is soft, heavy, and not a good conductor.
1 Runners-up: Pierre (4,332), Dover (5,517), Montpelier (8,006), Frankfort (11,492).
2 On an over-all basis the confusions are just as great. Regionalism and sectionalism conflict. For instance the Federal Reserve System divides the country into twelve areas; the federal judicial system recognizes ten; the Statistical Abstract of the United States normally breaks down its figures into eight.
3 See Rocky Mountain Politics, edited by Thomas C. Donnelly, p. 89.
4 Carville was defeated in 1946. His successor is a Republican, George W. Malone.
5 His wife is a linotype operator, by the way; thus in America do the professions mix.
6 By the end of 1946, this figure had risen to 135,000, it is believed.
7 Time, July 29, 1946.