Men and women stand at a row of slot machines under a sign reading Get Change at Bar, with a long bar and more customers behind them — Open the full imageJPG, 640 × 493 px, 0.1 MB

Slot machine players, Las Vegas, Nevada (1940)

Farm Security Administration photograph by Arthur Rothstein of people at a bank of slot machines in a Las Vegas club, March 1940.

Date: 1940
Kind: photograph
Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Retrieved: 2026-10-12
Rights: The Library of Congress item record states: "No known restrictions." Collection: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, a federal collection. Call number LC-USF34-029864-D; digital ID LC-DIG-fsa-8b19717.

The Library of Congress title is “Slot machine players, Las Vegas, Nevada.” Arthur Rothstein made the photograph for the Farm Security Administration in March 1940. A sign above the machines reads “Get change at bar.” The caption names no one and does not name the club.

The photograph predates the race-book and wire-service disputes in Las Vegas that the Kefauver Committee heard about in 1950; it is filed as a view of legal machine gambling in Nevada, not as evidence about any of them. The copy stored here is the Library’s medium-size JPEG.

itemKefauver Part 10: testimony of William J. Moore, Nevada Tax Commission, on the race wire in Las Vegas (15 November 1950), pp. 2-12A member of the Nevada Tax Commission described the hearings behind Nevada's 1949 race-wire law, answered "I think so; yes" when asked whether the service came from Continental Press, and said Connie Hurley had been "the owner of the service" in Las Vegas.itemKefauver Part 5, Exhibit 49: memorandum on the wire service in Las Vegas (11 December 1950)A memorandum by the committee's chief investigator summarizing 1948 Nevada Tax Commission testimony about race-book wire service at the Golden Nugget and the Frontier Club, including a Chicago meeting at which a Continental contact named Connie Hurley as its Las Vegas representative.