Pantechnicon; BBC's America: The Most Affluent Society

But evening and welcome to Pantachnikhan, the Nightingale magazine on entertainment, The Arts and Ideas. Tonight we present the BBC Radio Takes a Bicentennial Look at America. The series is compiled and presented by Michael Sumner tonight's programme The Most Affluent Society. A revolution they called it, those early Americans, but a revolution unlike any other before or since. For it was no revolution of a hungry mob as in Paris or Moscow. After all, the rebellious planters of Virginia owed two million pounds to London merchants. For the carriages, the fine wines, the silken Chinese wallpapers, the glass and silver and luxurious furnishings that graced their fine houses on the enormous tobacco plantations. It was a rebellion against taxation from London without representation in Parliament. A reaction against

an unsympathetic king, a reluctance to contribute to the cost of their own defence against the French, the Indians and the Spaniards. For many of the two and a half million people who lived in the 13 colonies of the New World in 1776, life was good, judged by 18th century standards. Only for the Negro slaves at a comparatively small number in the servant class was life hard and real. Thus it began and thus it has continued. In 200 short but dynamic years, there was two and a half million people scattered along the eastern seaboard of America have multiplied into a nation of 213 millions. They've come from the four corners of the earth, from the Orient, from Britain and Russia and Poland and Holland and Germany and Scandinavia, lured by the wealth and the promise of plenty and a better life. They mined its gold in California or in Colorado, its coal in Kentucky and West Virginia. They discovered oil in Pennsylvania. They farmed the great plains of Kansas and Nebraska, built railroads, ironworks, refineries

and invented the factory production line. The result was wealth, untold wealth and it still is. The American dream has become reality. Today America stands as the most powerful country in the world, with the greatest resources, the greatest industries and its people the most affluent. At the very top stand the rarely rich, beyond the dreams of Midas. As American journalist J. Miller puts it, I would say that they are the untitled, titled classes of America. They are perhaps the urls and the jokes of America. They are the French nobility without the titles. They have achieved this economic eminence without having the formality of blood or governmental recognition. These then are the new jet-set aristocrats, the people whose activities, polo and yachting, dancing and dining, whose affairs of the heart, marriages and frequent divorces, adorn the pages of the glossy magazines the world over. Their

lifestyle is the raw material of every gossip columnist. Where do you find them? It's rather ironic when you discuss where the affluent society lives in America because it's not only in places like Carmel or Hollywood or Miami, but it's more specifically in places like West Palm Beach and Beverly Hills and in Greenwich, Connecticut. It could be said for example that if you live in New York City, you're terribly rich, but that doesn't hold true because one out of seven citizens in New York not too long ago in the past were unwelter. So if you say that you live in Grammarcy Park or you live in Darian, Connecticut or you live in Greenwich and you're specific about the location, that helps establish you as an affluent person. But it is also true that not only are they these isolated watering holes, these spas of the very rich, that each American city of any size also has a suburb which probably has a very wealthy section of the suburb and that you will find wealth in America astonishingly well spread. You will find it in Omaha, you will find it

in Kansas City, you will find it in Dallas and Houston and you will find it around Philadelphia. For instance, no place that I know of in the world is considered a very very great elite thing to live along a railroad track yet the so-called main line that goes west to Philadelphia to Brynmore and Peioli probably has more $150,000 homes in it than any other railroad line in the whole United States. The homes that the very affluent living would be of all types, some of them would be obvious imitations of European style homes with tutor arches in them, some of them would be French chat toes, the very wealthy would have summer places in Florida or in Hawaii which would look like dressed up air conditioned native huts. It money comes in all sizes and forms in America and it's hard to pin it down. There is no universal rich man's house. When you know you're in the very wealthy you'll walk in and first of all if the door is

answered by somebody who's not in the family that can be a clue but that does not mean that every millionaire has a button or far from it. A lot of millionaires answer the door themselves but they'll certainly probably have somebody that does the gardening around the place. If you'll find a squash court or a swimming pool or a tennis court you can begin to get suspicious that probably this is money. If you find a play room that has got a television set and each child's room has got a color television set you can be even more sure that this has got money. But I think it's a mistake to emphasize solely that class if you're talking of the American affluent society. If you're talking about an American foreman who works in a unionized job in an industry he is very apt to have a couple of television sets that are color in his house. He's apt to be able to take his family for a two-week vacation to Europe too because the middle class American has a lot of the affluent trappings. He has the cameras also. I think the country would

not be known as an affluent nation were solely restricted say perhaps to the top 20% in income. I think you have to take a look at the solid 50% in the middle and say they do very well indeed. But for the top 20% Mexico, Europe, the Caribbean these are the places where the affluent American at play is to be found. But within America itself there are also the playgrounds of the wealthy, Florida and California and Colorado but above all that modern phenomenon Las Vegas in Nevada. It was in Las Vegas that I sought just for a couple of days the good life American style.

And it was Hank Greenspan, editor of the Las Vegas son who introduced me to his extraordinary city. The original Las Vegas that I remember was best characterized by Tom Mix who was a famous cowboy movie star in 1940. He was telling some people in New York he tried to interest him in building a racetrack here and the town at that time just had two glorified motels nothing else. And he said some day this area is going to be the finest resort area in the whole world. Now this is a prophecy looking around corners this man was able to do it.

Originally it was just a few of the old miners and saloon keepers who started the gambling back in 39. But then you get the more sophisticated people coming in when I refer to those who had illegal gaming backgrounds members of possibly the crime syndicate you know or people who had to indulge in it beyond the cloak of the law. So naturally they came here with criminal records of some kind and the other ones that really gave it its impetus at start. Already I sintered a lifestyle that makes Las Vegas unlike any other city in the world. Not only unbelievable wealth but echoes of old style tycoons racketeers some of them the mafia murder incorporated. Once they acquired money in their illegal activities they try to get out of the class that they came from the subculture so to speak and they try to

achieve a higher social status. So they built places like the Flamingo it was one of most elegant places in the nation when it was built and it was built by one of the toughest mobsters of all bugs. He was a member of murder incorporated but he built this you can't imagine the light of this place, the elegance of this place because he wanted to leave a monument. He wanted to better himself. He had an awful time luring people in there. They just wouldn't come to his place first. It was a mob place and many other limitations that it had. But the moment the man was killed right after he built it and all the malkish people that are attracted to gruesome scenes they all came to see the place of Bugsie Siegel built and that started an impetus of tourists. Others came along with Detroit also from a illegal background and they built other fine palaces of gaming and entertainment but always with some aesthetic eye they tried to build a place of beauty and this is how

the town got its beginnings. Las Vegas of course is a temple built for the worship in the ultimate analysis of one thing money and one aspect of money gambling. Even at the airport when I stepped into the arrivals hall I was confronted by the ubiquitous slot machine, the one armed bandit, whole

rows of them, hundreds of them and driving into the city I was dazzled by the array of gambling halls of luxurious hotels where I wondered should a wandering Englishman stay. That was the ultimate in my quest for affluent America. Where else said Hank Greenspan but Caesar's palace, the greatest of them all. The Caesar's to me represents the old Las Vegas which is the image of hospitality, of graciousness, of cordiality which was a hallmark of Las Vegas some years ago. Today Las Vegas had become so sophisticated all your big Wall Street corporations are moving in. They come from the higher cultures you know but they are self downgrading themselves to a lower culture because now they're ambitious just to make money for their corporate investors to show big bottom line profits. So the building functional money making machines, factories so to speak instead of these elegant places that the old time has built. Caesar's has the

very plush, very opulent but they still provide that hospitality that we talked about. They are still the finest entertainment now from all the other hotels they're all moving to Caesar's palace only because they receive treatment that is just a little beyond this normal commercial instincts of people you know. They're not treated as a product, they're treated as a talented you know temperamentally even performer which is what entertainment is all about and this is the graciousness the hospitality you find in Caesar's palace which unfortunately is now missing in too many places in Las Vegas. So Caesar's palace it was. After I checked in admired the beautiful facade with its enormous fountains and the entrance and corridors with their sculptures of Roman figures I was introduced to the hotel president Billy Weinberger. He gave me the bold facts about this remarkable

hotel. Caesar's palace at the present time has 1,250 rooms, five restaurants, 80,000 square feet of convention space, a swimming pool, a tennis facility with 12 courts and with the greatest staff in the world. We have employed in our hotel some of the great athletic figures in the world such as Joe Lewis of boxing fame, Pancho Gonzales who was Mr. tennis. We also employ a staff of 12 hosts to see that all of our guests needs and desires are taken care of. We house approximately 2500 people each day and approximately 20,000 people come through our front door in a 24 hour period. Billy Weinberger's bare statistics don't tell the half of it. You are affluent American staying at Caesar's palace will be given the room with a circular bed draped in fine fabrics

with a mirrored ceiling and a huge sunken bath. He'll drink reclining on silken cushions on Cleopatra's barge. He can eat Japanese style in a so steakhouse or the Piazza restaurant or most sumptuous of all in the bacchanal room. There in addition to course after course of gourmet food and fine wines he'll find himself resting his head upon the bosom of a toga clad young lady who will massage his head neck and shoulders between courses. The whole concept of the place is Roman and in modern terms echoes the lavishness of ancient Rome even the statuary and the stairs have been sculpted and built from imported Italian marble. The Romans of course were great gamblers and gambling lies at the heart of Las Vegas and Caesar's palace where you can bet on almost anything you can think of. We have 5021 tables, eight dice tables, five roulette games, two big six games, three backer at tables, a keynote department and a poker department and the 580 slot machines

of course. The gambling casino at Caesar's palace is vast, thronged 24 hours a day with people chasing lady luck. There are no clocks and you can't tell night from day. People fly into Las Vegas on Friday night and out on Sunday night and they rarely sleep. They come for 48 hours of non-stop gambling at the fruit machines and on the tables. You can bet anything from a few pence to five pounds on those slot machines and people do. Women especially will spend hours playing one machine hoping to hit the jackpot and will betide you if you

try to take over someone's favorite machine. The roulette wheels spin endlessly, the lights of the electronic bingo displays they call it cano flicker a dozen times an hour. Beautiful women spend hours in near silence at the backer at tables, staking 100, 200, a thousand dollars on the turn of a card. It's macabre and exciting, degrading and compulsive, repellent and hypnotic. Two bets I thought to myself could feed a starving family for a week or a month. Here I thought is the ugly side of human nature. Yet to Hank Greenspan it isn't as simple as that. As gambling became more lucrative and I'm talking about areas of prosperity, areas of depression which never seemed to harm gambling because there's always a desire even at the most recessive periods in the nation of people coming here to gamble. It never let up because in fact I think it did better during recessive periods than it did during

prosperous periods in around the country because well the very nature of gambling is people like to seek a more worthwhile future for their present security, whatever it may be, so they're willing to risk what they presently have in order to maybe hit the jackpot so to speak. That is only because of the human greed of the individual. The greed of the individual is the biggest odds that the gambler has going for him. If you and I, two human beings novices in the gaming industries and gambling say if we could go to that table, risk our money, take our winnings and leave, we could make money. You can double your money, you can travel, I've seen people come here with a couple of hundred dollars and they

wound up with ninety six thousand dollars and they lost it all back only because they wanted to hit the hundred thousand dollar mark and when they first started, if you said if you win a thousand dollars they would have been delighted. There's no banked page of that kind of interest. But they kept going and going and finally the greed within them. They thought it would never stop and they lost it all back plus stock cashing checks and they destroyed themselves in that regard. So this is the biggest odds that the house has. It cannot leave. The gambler can leave. He can walk away from it but the house has to stick. And that's why Las Vegas has grown to the proportion that you see here today and that it's really in its infancy because in addition to the lure of gambling which is the hope of every poor person to better their condition, you know, like if you're poor in New York City, you're hopelessly poor. There's no future, you have no hope. Here if you only have two dollars in your pocket, you always have hope that you can win a couple

of hundred dollars with it, you know, so at least it's not this for a law in this that you have elsewhere. But inevitably the gambling industry must attract the villains, cheats, card shoppers, thieves and the gambling crooks. But in the state of Nevada, gambling is legal, a big industry with rigid controls. There are enormous sums of money involved and security is strict. After watching the games in the casino, I went up to the quiet office of Caesar's Palace Vice President Jerry Walne, yet I could still see the casino on the television monitor screens beside his desk. Well, we endeavour to watch the games and all areas which are highly critical and so far as our monies are concerned, such as the counter room, the casino cage and of course all the games in the casino itself. We have a camera over each table which is operable with a pan and tilt mechanism and also zoom lens so we can zoom right onto the table

and even to the point where we can tell the denomination of the chips and the monies that are being gambled. It could be perhaps switched through some of those camera positions and would you tell me exactly what's going on as the camera changes. Fine, we are now at this point watching a 21 game. A dealer, as you will note, is dealing hands to everyone at the table. If you will note, we are not interested in the faces of the players nor are we interested in the face of the dealer. We are only interested in the hands that he is dealing and the payoffs that he is making. We make certain that the dealer follows all rules and regulations and makes no moves which are suspect and so far as the operation is concerned. They have a certain way of dealing and they must abide by those rules. If they vary from that, it is an indication that perhaps something might

be a mess. Has that ever happened? Have you ever discovered anybody cheating that way? Of course, in a business of our magnitude, there are times when you find people trying to cheat us. We have found several instances where dealers have endeavored to do this with accomplices switching perhaps decks and also perhaps trying to give signals to an accomplice at the table trying to indicate us to what his hand is. However, we have been fortunate in being able to catch these situations and every time you do catch someone at it and discharge and more prosecute them. Of course, everybody else at that point in time is on their best behavior again for a long time to come. Of course, Las Vegas, America's fun city is not all gambling. As Hank Greenspan told me, it has much more to offer. All on the lavish dazzling scale that makes it unlike any other place I know.

There are so many things about Las Vegas today that ensures it is not only its survival, but its progress. And that is entertainment as the number one force, I would say, because concentrated here, probably the top stars in the entire entertainment firmament, you know, they are all appearing at the same time. You see the Marquis. You see Sonatra, Dean Martin, Alan King, Sammy Davis, Jr., you name him and you can see him all in one place at one time when they congregated night. And this attracts people. It attracts people that came to California in 1850 when they heard there was a gold strike. They came with the excitement with the adventure, with the desire to get rich quick, which is the ambition of most of the human beings, let's say. Las Vegas provides this kind of excitement, this kind of hope, you know, to better yourself down the road. And it has all the glamour. It has all the

mystique of, well, the glamour of early Broadway when you had the finest shows match the London stage, you know. And the glitter of the lights, the Broadway lights were worldwide, known, I mean. Here in one small street, down on Fremont Street, you have four or five gambling goals, they have more candle power than they had on all of Broadway 20 years ago. It lights up the whole sky. Everything that people seek in life, all the adventure, all the ambition, all the hope, all the romance. I think you can find it here now. That then is Las Vegas, standing at the peak of affluent America, vulgar, you may call

it, a monument to the worst in man, perhaps. Yet all this is the product of American industry, American work, American ambition. And Americans are without doubt the most generous people on earth. The wealthiest, the most affluent, have an impressive record of service to the community, as Jay Miller explains. There are a lot of people who plow it back into philanthropy, who do underwrite the symphony orchestras and the regional theater groups. Andrew Carnegie was one. Scott Jimigrant came, didn't believe in leaving inherited wealth to his children. He had only a daughter, but he plowed it back into libraries, and to church organs, and did a lot for various universities and colleges. There have been the Vanderbilt's, founded

the college. There have been the Rockefellers. The Rockefellers have done perhaps more in this name of philanthropy than anybody. But of course the counter remark to that is they perhaps had more to give, because the old man was an extremely smart character who went back and reported to his employers, there was no future in oil, and then promptly bought all the oil he could get. We'll find today, for instance, the Guggenheims, who have done much for art museums, and who have done things for various philanthropic causes. The Ford Foundation is a notable thing. The Ford Foundation has not only worked domestically within America, but has made its impact felt around the world. The cynical will point out that a gift to charity provides the donor with tax relief, and that generous American tax laws are one of the greatest factors in the American's accumulation of wealth. Both charges are true, but let me end by quoting a recent set

of American government statistics. At the moment, foreign governments owe the United States a total of $55,000 million. If it was all repaid today, it would represent $750 per head of the population of America, and it would provide each American with a new suit, a pair of shoes, a weekend in Florida, a secondhand motorcycle, and a hundred loaves of bread. Like it or not, I suppose you could say, we all owe something to affluent America. We've been listening to the most affluent society part of the BBC Radio by Centennial Look at America. Thank you for being with us tonight. Join us every night at 630th of Antechnica. This is all understood, wishing you a very pleasant, good evening.