Question of the Day - 19 March 2025

Today, in fact, is the 94th anniversary; gambling was legalized in Nevada on March 19, 1931. And yes, in 2031, we'll be celebrating the 100th anniversary of wide-open casino gambling in the Battle Born state.

How did it come about? Actually, the gambling was almost an afterthought.

The issue that long preceded legalized wagering, established Nevada’s reputation as a renegade state, and first separated the Silver State from the prevailing national moral climate was, appropriately enough, divorce.

Nevada had hosted a handful of heavyweight championship boxing matches in the late 1890s and early 1900s, when prizefights were banned in most other states. They were brief national attractions, with datelines from exotic locales like Reno, Carson City, and Goldfield. But it was divorce that kept Reno, primarily, in the nationwide spotlight as a loose and libertine outpost on the western frontier -- and this was decades before the inception of legal wide-open gambling.

Ironically, Nevada’s "divorce law" had already been on the books for decades. Nevada had one of the shortest time requirements for state-residency status since its admission into the Union. The mere six months was aimed at attracting people to settle here when residents numbered in the mere thousands. Then, at the turn of the 20th century, a shrewd New York society lawyer with clients embroiled in public divorce spectacles -- in an age when divorce was barely legal -- put Nevada’s brief residency requirement and its location far away from the society-page spotlight together and came up with the perfect divorce colony.

Thus Reno went into the marriage-dissolution business. For nearly 40 years, the biggest little city did a brisk divorce trade; at the height of it, in 1927, the state legislature lowered the residency requirement to an unheard-of three months, cementing Nevada’s reputation as a sin state. Then, in 1931, lawmakers reduced it again, to an outrageous and scandalous six weeks.

By then, however, other states were passing six-week residencies and opening divorce colonies, following Nevada’s lead and cutting in on some of the Silver State’s unsavory profits. And why not? The Depression was in full swing. Prohibition had recently been lifted, signaling a burgeoning era of looser morals. Divorces, for those who could travel and had six weeks to spare, were easy.

Meanwhile, Nevada wasn’t idle. If boxing had been a blip and divorce a long but bygone windfall, the next step the state took to stay ahead of the national morals was a doozy: wide-open casino gambling.

"Hoping a few investors might open more gambling halls to bring in the tourists with the divorcees," wrote Gabriel Vogliotti, author of The Girls of Nevada and a keen observer of the period, "the men who made Nevada notorious with the divorce law then legalized gambling."

For three more decades, Nevada held a monopoly on legally satisfying the powerful urge to gamble. Las Vegas, in particular, provided a sieve in civilization, a safety valve for the American pressure cooker, to which solid citizens at home could escape in order to let loose a little steam. And naturally, as more and more gamblers arrived, gambling became less and less an outrage. True to form, other locales adopted it to get in on the legitimized action. Slowly at first, to be sure, but spread gambling did, out from Nevada. New Hampshire legalized the lottery in 1964. Atlantic City opened casinos in 1977. Iowa launched riverboats in 1990. Sports betting has been legal outside of Nevada since 2018.

Today, 48 states offer some sort of legalized gambling, 44 of which have some form of casino, whether commercial, tribal, or both. During a 2024 survey, it was found that 55 percent of adults in the United States had participated in gambling in the past year. That's nearly 185 million people and an increase of six percent over 2023.

It took half a century or so, but the country, once again, has followed Nevada’s lead.