Gambling is legalized in Nevada.

Nevada was broke. The state could barely pay its teachers, its mines were producing less silver every year, and the Great Depression had eliminated what remained of the tourist economy. Governor Fred Balzar signed Assembly Bill 98 on March 19, 1931, legalizing wide-open casino gambling, and Nevada embarked on an experiment in vice-as-economic-policy that would transform a desert backwater into one of the most visited destinations on earth. Gambling had actually been legal in Nevada before. The state permitted it from 1869 to 1910, when a progressive-era reform movement banned the practice. Illegal gambling continued openly throughout the prohibition period, with local law enforcement looking the other way. The 1931 legalization did not create gambling in Nevada; it simply acknowledged reality and imposed a licensing and tax structure. The timing proved extraordinary. The same year Nevada legalized gambling, the federal government began construction of Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas. The dam project brought thousands of construction workers to the area, creating a captive audience for the new legal casinos. Las Vegas, then a small railroad town, began its transformation. The first major casino resort, El Rancho Vegas, opened on the Los Angeles Highway (later the Strip) in 1941. The post-war boom brought larger operations. Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel's Flamingo Hotel, which opened in 1946, established the model of the lavish casino resort that would define Las Vegas for the next half century. Organized crime controlled much of the industry through the 1960s and 1970s until Howard Hughes and later corporate operators gradually displaced mob ownership. Nevada's gambling revenue reached $1 billion annually by the 1970s and exceeded $13 billion by 2023. The state has no income tax; gambling revenue and the tourism it generates fund public services. Las Vegas alone attracts over 40 million visitors per year. A desperate decision by a bankrupt state in 1931 created a $15 billion industry and an American cultural icon.