Monday is Presidents Day — get ready for those door-buster shopping deals! — which got us wondering: Who were the best presidents from a Silver State or even Las Vegas point of view? After wheedling a couple of nice historians, we compiled this list.
Abraham Lincoln
The obvious choice to lead off this list — he juiced Nevada into statehood when we didn’t meet the population threshold (he wanted our electoral votes, not our mineral wealth). With this founding shenanigan, Lincoln made possible all the growth, boomtowns, federal investments, mob skims, and Usher residencies that define Nevada.
Herbert Hoover
Well, of course this guy’s on the list. Hoover’s role in creating the dam that bears his name resulted in one of the main pillars of the valley’s survival during the troubled years of the 1930s and after, as well as a crucial component of water and power systems in the West.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Historian Geoff Schumacher credits FDR’s administration for shaping this area with Depression-era public works projects and jobs, and also such World War II investments as the Army Air Base and the Basic Magnesium plant, which begat Henderson.
Lyndon B. Johnson
As historian Michael Green notes, by the early-1960s, Las Vegas had a water problem (it needed some, with its groundwater dwindling). LBJ addressed this in 1965 by signing legislation creating the Southern Nevada Water Project (urged on by Nevada Sens. Alan Bible and Howard Cannon), which resulted in the infrastructure the valley needed to get water from Lake Mead.
Barack Obama
Relying heavily on Sen. Harry Reid, the 44th president decisively drove Yucca Mountain into a near-death limbo, and established two national monuments relevant to Silver Staters — Basin and Range in Nevada and Bears Ears, nearby in Utah.
