YEAH, THERE WASN’T A NEW PIECE YESTERDAY. Things are just that wacky here.
So wacky (between increasing freelance gigs and preparing for the big art show) that I’m not even halfway through Sally Denton and Roger Morris’s weighty new tome, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America.
But what I have read of it is dramatic, even scary.
It’s not that Denton and Morris have suddenly uncovered any particular pieces of shocking news, at least not in what I’ve read thus far.
It can be considered given knowledge, conventional wisdom, that Vegas (America’s newest and fastest-growing city) was started by mobsters and mob-connected financiers; that its resorts vaccumed and laundered cash from assorted places (Teamsters, Mormons, drug runners, and shady types with big political connections); that Vegas, and the inland west in general, has become a major power base for Republican politics, corporate finance, and the whole suburban-sprawl zeitgeist.
No, what makes The Money and the Power such a, well, powerful work is the way Denton and Morris tell how all these things interconnect. Theirs is a huge, sprawling desert highway metropolis of a narrative, with many off-ramps and intersections connecting seemingly disparate elements.
Among the elements of their tale:
- Vegas was, indeed, founded on mob money. (Denton and Morris prefer to use the old organized-crime tag “the Syndicate,” believing it better expresses a decentralized clique of local power-brokers.)
And it wasn’t just romantic “vice” mob money but pimping, extortion, and drugs–especially heroin, in cahoots with the CIA going back decades.
- The later arrival of conglomerates, now in charge of most of the big resorts, didn’t remove mob-style practices from Vegas. Instead, it taught corporations to act more like the Syndicate, spreading Vegas-style ruthlessness and arrogance to the rest of the world.
- Jack and Bobby Kennedy, sons of a Prohibition rum-runner, were well connected to the Syndicate. But so were many other politicians. The authors claim Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson all got into the Senate thanks to cozy relationships with their local home-state mobsters. The insider wheeling-dealing of Bill Clinton (from that former mob-gambling mecca of Hot Springs, Ark.) was merely better publicized than his predecessors’ similar, or worse, schemings.
- Only three women are mentioned by name in the first 100 pages, and two of those are a mobster’s wife and a senator’s mother. (The other is Lena Horne, one of the first black entertainers permitted to stay at the same hotel she performed in.)
This is deliberate. The authors have clearly intended to depict Vegas, and the new America they claim it represents, as a milieu of masculine aggression and greed without a needed balance of feminine morals or compassion.
The authors depict Vegas as the heart of a post-democratic American system, in which greed and manipulation are everything, and shady backroom deals have been replaced by open, publicized corruption. A world with nothing, real or potential, to alleviate or counteract brute power.
Such a depiction, even if only partly true, would mean bleak prospects for any progressive (let alone radical) change. I choose not to believe things are that hopeless. (Even in arch-conservative Vegas, the resorts were eventually integrated and many were successfully unionized.)
I also have a few reservations with the authors’ more overarching claims, such as the claim that Vegas has become the “shadow capital” of the brave new America. It’s an economic powerhouse, and a symbol of what Tom Frank has called “the global entertainment state.” But its affairs are increasingly controlled by such chain operators as Hilton and Starwood, who would abandon the town in an instant if better opportunities arose elsewhere (and, with the spread of legal gambling across the country, such opportunities increasingly are).
Indeed, implicit in the authors’ thesis (again, based on what I’ve read of the book thus far) is the idea that social progress can only come about when “vice” industries such as gambling and prostitution are diminished in influence–essentially, when the wilder aspects of human nature are suppressed. Millennia of social history have proven otherwise.
As I’ve written before about the limits of bohemian politics, hedonism isn’t a sufficient premise for true political change. But neither is moralistic prudery. Gambling, displays of feminine flesh, drinking and drugging have always been with us, and likely always will.
It’s just that in a global-corporate regime, such vices will be controlled according to global-corporate means, such as shown in today’s Vegas mega-resorts.
NEXT: Another plug for my art show, and an explanation about the print mag.
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