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Through
most of the 20th century, divorce was rather difficult. Not only was
it socially unacceptable, but laws in most states made it an onerous
ordeal. But like anything else, someone, somewhere, will find a way to
make it profitable. For divorce (as well as gambling), that was Nevada.
Give people what they want, and they will come from all over to get it
-and spend their money along the way. Nevada's six-month residency
requirement was half that of other states in the 1920s, and several
high-profile divorces among the Hollywood elite drew attention to Reno
as a solution to an unhappy marriage.
Before long,
other jurisdictions decided they wanted a piece of the action Reno was
earning from its well-heeled short-timers, who lived, wined, and dined
as if, well, they were about to start a new life. In 1927, when Mexico
and France were reportedly considering lowering their
residency-for-divorce requirements (even though many states did not
recognize foreign divorce decrees), Nevada preemptively countered by
lowering its requirement to three months. This spurred Idaho and
Arkansas to do the same, to which Nevada responded again, in 1931, by
lowering its residency requirement to just six weeks.
By May of
1931, there were so many divorce seekers flooding into Reno, some were
forced to camp on the banks of the Truckee River for the lack of
accommodations in town. Gambling had been legalized that March, which
lured even more people, and in 1933 the state won the amoral trifecta,
as it were, when Prohibition was repealed. All told, during the 1930s,
more than 30,000 people came to Reno to get a divorce, pumping an
estimated $5 million per year at its height into an economy whose
population hovered around 20,000 full-time residents throughout the
decade.
Reno’s reputation for easy divorces became a
topic of pop culture, supplying plots for books and movies, which
further fed its reputation. Read about how the peculiar legal history of
Nevada
made Reno the Divorce Capital of the World at Collectors Weekly.
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