How politics and religion handicapped Hot Springs in the race to become America's chief gambling

How politics and religion handicapped Hot Springs in the race to become America’s chief gambling resort


“On behalf of your children and yourselves, remove this cancer from your county!” Dr. William Brown was a 75-year-old retired preacher, but on that Sunday in 1964 he was very much in his element, preaching from the pulpit of the Grand Avenue Methodist Church in Hot Springs. As executive secretary of the Christian Civic Foundation, the successor to the Temperance League of Arkansas, Brown had shifted his focus from alcohol to what he saw as the new scourge among the weaker-willed of his humble state: gambling. “A wave of gambling is sweeping across America with all the fury of a prairie fire and in an infinite number of manifestations. God save us from a Las Vegas in the heart of Arkansas!”

Brown had good reason to be worried. At the time of his sermon, gambling was the main industry in Hot Springs, despite the fact that it was illegal in the state of Arkansas. So much so, in fact, that all around the Grand Avenue Methodist Church that day stood more than $18 million worth of towering hotel construction projects, hurriedly being erected to receive what by then numbered more than 5 million visitors to Hot Springs per year. Over the previous decade Hot Springs was locked in a de facto arms race with the city of Las Vegas over who would be the beneficiary of a flood of investment in the gambling industry. That money flowed from two main sources: the investments made by organized crime into the gambling industry of Cuba now orphaned by the revolution, and the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, which had invested more than $120 million in real estate projects, and was prepared to invest double that into casino projects alone. This, too, surely worried Brown because both of these sources were controlled by organized crime. My book “The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice,” tells the story of how Hot Springs nearly won that arms race and, if not for a couple of nefarious bombs and a couple of elections that went the wrong way, nearly became America’s undisputed gambling resort.

By 1964, however, much of that battle was already lost, and the gamblers of Hot Springs weren’t so much fighting to become Las Vegas as they were fighting to keep up. Internecine struggles between rival gambling factions in Hot Springs in the early 1960s allowed Las Vegas to get the upper hand. While Hot Springs locals battled each other, they also began to shun the involvement of outsiders who had once connected the town to the broader gambling infrastructure, and instead rejected their help. When mob boss Frank Costello flirted with moving to Hot Springs to quell the warring factions and take over as “Boss Gambler,” the governor of Arkansas, Hot Springs native Sid McMath, publicly warned him to stay out. Even Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, who invested Central States Pension loans into high-profile luxury hotel projects in Hot Springs like the Jack Tar Hotel and the Aristocrat Manor, was once closely connected to the leaders of Hot Springs. But Dane Harris, who as the owner of the city’s flagship gambling club, The Vapors, became the town’s Boss Gambler in the 1960s, had his differences with Hoffa. Contemporaries of Harris told me that until his dying day he blamed Hoffa for every bad thing that ever happened to Hot Springs. (The conspiratorial among you might find it interesting that after Hoffa vanished in 1975, the FBI spent two weeks searching for his remains near Hot Springs and questioning gambling leaders.)

But the likeliest obstacle to attracting the hundreds of millions of dollars that would rain down in the desert of Las Vegas in the coming decades was that, unlike in Arkansas, gambling in Nevada was legal. This was why William Brown was preaching in Hot Springs that morning. He had helped start an organization called Churches United Against Gambling to combat the gambling leaders of Hot Springs’ final effort at catching up with Las Vegas: a statewide ballot initiative to pass Constitutional Amendment 55, which would make casino gambling legal in Garland County.

Read more: https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/2021/04/01/how-politics-and-religion-handicapped-hot-springs-in-the-race-to-become-americas-chief-gambling-resort


LOOKING BACK: In the 1940s and 1950s, oddsmakers would have seen Hot Springs as more likely to emerge as the country’s top gambling destination than Las Vegas.