The Year Nevada Bet on Itself, Gambling and Divorce, Nineteen Thirty-One

In the winter of nineteen thirty-one, Nevada was broke. The Great Depression had flattened the mining economy. The cattle ranges were struggling.

The state treasury was thin enough to see through. The legislature, meeting in Carson City, had two options on the table: keep pretending or change the rules. In March of nineteen thirty-one, Governor Fred Balzar signed both bills.

One legalized all forms of casino gambling statewide, reversing the prohibition that had been in place since nineteen nine. The other cut the residency requirement for divorce to six weeks, among the shortest in the nation. Nevada did not discover vice that day.

It simply decided to be honest about what it had to offer. The gambling bill's author, Assemblyman Phil Tobin, was a rancher from Winnemucca. He is said to have argued that gambling was already going on all over the state and that the broke state needed the money.

That is not the language of a visionary. It is the language of a pragmatist. The divorce law was even more consequential in the short term.

Reno and its dude ranches became the destination for wealthy Americans who needed a discreet exit from failed marriages. New York newspapers stationed society columnists there to track the proceedings. Hollywood names came too.

The Riverside Hotel on the Truckee became the holding ground for the country's unhappiest marriages, ticking down six weeks in the Nevada desert while lawyers filed the paperwork. What the nineteen thirty-one laws created was not simply an industry. They created a brand: Nevada as the place where the rest of America's rules did not apply.

That brand has been the state's primary export ever since.