Los Angeles and Las Vegas : How the West Was Developed

It is a tale of two cities, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, inspired by the resignation of Robert C. Maxson as president of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. This July, Maxson will assume the presidency of Cal State Long Beach, after 10 years of extraordi nary achievement at UNLV.

That Maxson will be leading an academic institution in Los Angeles County brings the story full circle. For greater Las Vegas and Los Angeles County are more than mirror images of each other in their sprawl, their Sun Belt exuberance, their tendency to theatricalize everyday life. Los Angeles is, after all, the mother of Las Vegas. Between both cities there exist the deepest possible parallels.

Warren Beatty would have us believe that Bugsy Siegel founded Las Vegas. That is partly correct. The gambler first glimpsed the possibilities of large-scale resort casinos in a desert tank town. But Siegel was not the first to do so. A decade and more earlier, metropolitan Los Angeles--the prime mover behind the Boulder/Hoover Dam--energized Las Vegas as the first available playground for the construction site. Eastern journalists in the mid-1930s--including Theodore H. White, Edmund Wilson and Bruce Bliven Jr.--were mesmerized by the casinos and bordellos that sprang up in Las Vegas to serve the builders.

“It is a bit startling,” wrote Bliven in the New Republic, “to walk down the main street at 11 a.m. and see in almost every block one or more gambling houses, doors open to every passerby, crowded with men and women, old and young, playing Keno, roulette, poker, shooting craps or betting on horse races described by a raucous-voiced gentleman who gets his facts by di-rect wire from the track.”

On his visit to Las Ve-gas, White witnessed a scene worthy of Bret Harte. Entering the Nevada Bar, White heard above the raucous laughter the sound of classical music. “In the toughest place in town,” he noted, “a young girl was playing Beethoven. A couple of maudlin drunks hung on the piano, weeping. Gently removing them, I asked the only female ‘professor’ what she would drink. An orange blossom was made for her--without gin--and we talked. She had run away from home in Oklahoma, and had banged out her keep on a piano as far as Nevada. The ultimate goal was a conservatory in Los Angeles. The Beethoven was a lapse, she explained. ‘When they get drunk enough, I play it. They don’t know it, and I get my practicing done.’ ”

Siegel and Wilbur Clark (who brought Noel Coward to the desert and thereby established another tradition, big-name entertainment) seized upon this earlier, ruder identity, seeing in it the possibilities of an American Monte Carlo that would draw its clientele, initially and primarily, from greater Los Angeles. Without Los Angeles, Las Vegas made no sense.

In ancient Greece, when a city got too large, the citizens drew lots. Those drawing an “X” would be required to go out and found a new city. In a similar manner, Los Angeles served as the mother city of Las Vegas. Hollywood, including Ronald Reagan, who discovered the Strip before General Electric, found in Las Vegas not just a source of ready cash, but a way of playing before live audiences, of doing vaudeville with glitz, of making sure the public still loved them.

When historians search for points of transition in the developing identity of Los Angeles as a front-rank metropolitan culture, they invariably turn to the emergence of the University of Southern California, the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles. Few U.S. cities have used their two largest universities so consistently as icons of identity, as prisms through which to see the meaning of the present and the possibilities of the future.

New York, for example, has three large universities--Columbia, New York University and the City University of New York--and a number of distinguished smaller institutions--but none served as the primary mode of civic boosterism.

Los Angeles, by contrast, defined each of its epochs by and through a university. In its first American phase, the 1880s through the 1920s, USC served and epitomized the aspirations for professionalization and self-improvement of a region that needed thousands of doctors, lawyers, social workers, engineers, teachers. Then, in 1920, the Throop Polytechnic Institute changed its name to the California Institute of Technology. Behind that change was the transformation, spearheaded by astronomer George Ellery Hale, of a technical school into a leading scientific and engineering institute.

In the postwar era, the UCLA of Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy and university librarian Lawrence Clark Powell served, paced and expressed the unprecedented boom that was Westside Los Angeles--which, in turn, expressed the even more unprecedented boom of Southern California as a whole.

Ten years ago, Maxson arrived in Las Vegas, where the leadership and population desperately wanted something better; just as Los Angeles had when it founded USC, Cal Tech and UCLA. Maxson assumed the presidency of a small university--Tumbleweed Tech, it was called, known for basketball and little else--in an uncertain city where the primary industry had only recently been purged of the bad guys.

It was hard on the Los Vegas oligarchy to have Siegel and his pals among its founding fathers. By the 1980s, greater Las Vegas was pushing the 1 million mark--the point where, as urban historian Lewis Mumford explains, urban centers begin to become aware of themselves as cities and aspire to cultural upgrade. Already, Las Vegas had been recognized for pioneering post-modern architecture and was on the verge of creating a whole new generation of casinos--Caesar’s Palace, Mirage, Excaliber, Luxor, Circus Circus--that would shape a new form of interactive building (the building as entertainment and information system) for the 21st Century.

Maxson instantly understood his task: upgrade UNLV as a means of both reflecting and intensifying the upgrading of Las Vegas. He was perfect for the job: In his origins (Arkansas), his academic lineage (University of Arkansas, Florida Atlantic, Mississippi State), his career path (provost at University of Houston), Maxson epitomized the Sun Belt in all its populist vigor, its sudden rush to prominence, its deep longing for what the nation’s older regions seemed already to possess. Through UNLV, under Maxson, Las Vegas sought to put Siegel behind it the same way that Harvard and Boston had put behind themselves the slave-traders, the rum-runners, the Catholic-bashers and the religious hypocrites who had done so much to make Harvard and Boston esteemed and beyond reproach.

Maxson raised $100 million. He built 35 buildings, won accreditation for 14 new programs and 28 new degrees. He recruited top faculty and doubled enrollment to its current near-20,000.

Along the way, he took on a figure of near-mythic importance--basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian. The clash between the two epitomized two sides of the emergent Las Vegas: its aspirations for distinction, its love of sport; its thirst for respectability and proper procedure; its driving desire to win--no matter the cost.

Back in Los Angeles, USC maintained a similar relationship to its football program. Athletics boosted each institution into notoriety, but each sport stood in the way, at least as previously practiced, when respectability became the goal.

Maxson vs. Tarkanian, heroic wills and egos in two self-made Sun Belt giants--it nearly tore Las Vegas apart. But this is the stuff of which cities are made: the clash of will and ego, the drive toward excellence, the love of creative struggle and the challenge of the fray. The founders of Los Angeles had many a Maxson and many a Tarkanian among them. And now Maxson moves his flag to Cal State Long Beach, where Tarkanian began his coaching career. It isn’t over til it’s over, whether in Los Angeles, Las Vegas or Long Beach. There are still great cities to build.