"Many of you are deeply impregnated with the gambling and venture habit. Octopus Colossus has invented many more avenues through which you can give vent to this habit, other tempting pastimes, sports, and devices to attract your earnings and bets, be they ever so small.
"Gambling is legally forbidden (except on your stock exchanges and boards of trades); in most of your national states; in spite of that, it is actively carried on in all its forms as you all know everywhere; powerful gangsters reach and ever entice from the poorest and their children. They also live in affluence and luxury and travel around in expensive bullet-proof automobiles, and live in electrically guarded and protected mansions.
"At your well known gambling dens of Monte Carlo, many spend the last moments of their lives sitting in despair on the suicide bench before jumping over the high cliff.
"Reno, Nevada, called "The Biggest Little City in the World," the divorce capital of your country, has legal gambling of all kinds and is wide open twenty-four hours a day. Gamblers two lines deep stand around dice tables and roulette wheels, play at twenty-one card tables, and bet on horse races. Many mechanical gambling devices and card games are constantly busy, mostly on the receiving end.
"Here you can discern your extreme human weakness; in spite of the many humorous warning posters in one of its most sumptuous gambling houses, your rich and even your poor take gambling chances.
"Rich society men and women, business and professional men, low and high paid workingmen and women, housewives, mechanics, laborers and lumber camp workers, cowboys, old miners, Indians, Chinese, and Africans—men and women of all ages, social security and state welfare recipients in all kinds of attire, elbow each other as they stand or sit alongside each other around these tables, gambling most of their pay, savings, and pensions away. There are no limits on the bets, from a nickel up to a thousand dollars. Gambling palaces, night clubs, and saloons, all with gambling paraphernalia, seem to occupy most of the largest and best stores and buildings in the business section as well as in other commercial zones all over the state.
"Most restaurants, retail food stores, and drug stores have gambling devices of some kind. Outside of mining, gambling may be the largest paying industry for the whole state and its population. The federal government, the state, county, and city governments of Nevada derive, directly and indirectly, large taxes and license revenues from these games of chance in every one of its cities and villages. If you Earth people must indulge in that pastime, we here feel that it's very commendable for these authorities to tax them.
"The gambling system in Nevada is praiseworthy, because it's in the open and legal, whereas in all your other states, gambling is operated clandestinely and on much larger scale, where they are thriving on their pay-offs. They either buy protection from, or are in cahoots with, politicians, officials, or police helping to greatly corrupt government. Large numbers of visitors pour into Reno from adjoining and distant states for divorces and gambling purposes."
Washington, April 22, (UP)—Sen. Estes Kefauver, D., Tenn., said today that the annual gambling "take" in the United States is reliably estimated at $20,000,000,000.
Kefauver, in his weekly radio address to Tennessee, did not give the source of his figure. But he said it amounts to nearly one-half this country's budget. Crime and gambling have grown to such proportions that a congressional investigation has become a "matter of urgent necessity," he said. Kefauver is the author of a resolution to hold such an inquiry—a resolution now pending before the Senate.