Las Vegas Business Press : Goodbye to Old Nevada?

Goodbye to Old Nevada?

BY MICHAEL GREEN

This past Election Day, a couple of outcomes suggested how Nevada has changed -- and, in some strange ways, how it stayed the same.

Let's start with the change: a new law requiring you to douse those cigarettes. Question 5 means no more smoking in some public places.

This is another nail in the coffin of Nevada's overrated, misunderstood libertarian tradition. For many years here, a man could do what a man wanted to do -- gamble, both when it was illegal and after Nevada began a 45-year monopoly on legal gambling in the U.S.; drink during Prohibition, which wasn't unique; and find commercial affection in a rural brothel or the backrooms of Block 16 in downtown Las Vegas.

But recent growth has changed Nevada's population, and not just numerically. Many new arrivals come from areas that might vote conservative, but that conservatism has tended to be social rather than libertarian. Question 5's passage might not seem conservative but it certainly isn't libertarian. Indeed, it's far closer to the nanny-state status that many wrongly ascribe to California.

Other votes demonstrated this trend. In 2002 and 2004, Nevadans succumbed to anti-gay prejudice and passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between men and women. They have refused to make marijuana possession legal for anything except medicinal purposes.

Say what you will of the merits, neither measure reflects a libertarian ethos. If anything, they show Nevadans may have been libertarian when dealing with government interference with livestock grazing or gambling, but not on modern social issues.

But libertarianism long has been vastly overrated as a means of describing Nevada. Nevadans may dislike the federal government (may?), but where were the objections in rural towns to federal projects? Or in Fallon to the dam-building, irrigation canals and farming generated by the Newlands Reclamation Act -- which, not so coincidentally, later contributed to that hunk of concrete in the middle of the Colorado River.

Indeed, Hoover Dam later led to the Southern Nevada Water Project: The feds enabled Nevada to receive its full allotment of Colorado water, thus helping to create the Strip's volcano, fountains and canals.

Many Nevadans chafed under Sen. Pat McCarran's sometimes dictatorial tendencies. But they didn't object that he fought federal land management while obtaining military bases, airport funding and other federal money. His political protégé, Sen. Alan Bible, learned that lesson. His last campaign opponent, Republican Ed Fike, complained Bible had served too long in Washington, D.C.

Bible replied that being there so long enabled him to deliver that water project, among other measures. Nevadans concluded that government is best which governs least, all right -- as long as the money flows in Nevada's direction.

What stayed the same, though, was Northern Nevada's power. Thanks to strong support north of the Las Vegas range, Jim Gibbons became governor after losing only one county: the biggest one, Clark.

True, Gibbons comes in with baggage and without much of a relationship with the Legislature. But consider that state Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio has represented Reno and Washoe County in Carson City roughly since the dawn of time. The potential exists -- granted, it's unlikely -- for Clark County to receive a budgetary rogering.

Until federally mandated reapportionment and redistricting in the 1960s, each Nevada county had one state senator, regardless of population. If this system, the "little federal plan," survived today, Clark County's 1.8 million souls would have one state senator -- as would Esmeralda County's 1,200.

The numbers have changed, but rural Nevada's power to swing elections may have survived. And if you think that area is libertarian, Question 5 won approval in three rural counties and barely lost in four others. If you're liberal and a smoker, or you think it's easy to explain Nevada, don't say you weren't warned.

Michael Green is a history professor at the Community College of Southern Nevada and has written extensively about Southern Nevada. He is co-author of Las Vegas: A Centennial History.

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