Harry Truman thought that Nevada should be deprived of its statehood, writing in 1955:
"Then we came to the great gambling and marriage destruction hell, known as Nevada. To look at it from the air it is just that--hell on earth. There are tiny green specks on the landscape where dice, roulette, light-o-loves, crooked poker and gambling thugs thrive. Such places should be abolished and so should Nevada. It should never have been made a State. A county in the great State of California would be too much of a civil existence for that dead and sinful territory. Think of that awful, sinful place having two Senators and a congressman in Washington, and Alaska and Hawaii not represented. It is a travesty on our system and a disgrace to free government.
"Well, we finally passed the hell hole of iniquity by flying over one of the most beautiful spots in the whole world--Lake Tahoe..."
http://books.google.com/books?id=DVVffTwVVy4C&pg=PA317
He wasn't the first person to think so. In the late nineteenth century, Nevada was in the "bust" phase of the boom-and-bust mining cycle. Its population in 1900 was 42,335--less than it had been in 1870. The state had one-fourth the population of an average US congressional district. In 1897 *The Forum* published an article "Shall Nevade Be Deprived of Statehood?" which noted that
"In the course of a spirited editorial article entitled, "How to Deal with Nevada," the Chicago "Tribune" remarked:—
"'Congress is perfectly able to deal with the unprecedented condition of affairs which exists in Nevada. The silver-mines which made her all she was have been exhausted. She has no other mineral wealth. She has no agricultural resources. She has nothing to attract people; and, as a consequence, she is flickering out'
"The "Tribune" urges that the thing to do is to deprive Nevada of her statehood, or at least to exclude her Senators from Congress, as was done with the seceding Southern States during the war and reconstruction periods. The same newspaper serves timely notice upon Wyoming that, failing to show a satisfactory growth in population when the census of 1900 shall be returned, that State also may be invited to march out of the Union with her unfortunate neighbor. These suggestions have been quoted with approval by many newspapers; and the feasibility of merging Nevada into the more populous State of Utah has also been widely discussed during the past few years.
"To degrade loyal States by depriving them of important attributes of their sovereignty would be radical, if not revolutionary. If it were suspected that the real motive for their unprecedented humiliation was the fact that they disagreed politically with a view strenuously held by about 52 per cent of the voters in the nation, and persistently acted with the minority of 48 per cent, it is possible that the proposed proceeding would be worse than radical,—perilous indeed, and fraught with new evils more dangerous than those which it is sought to remove. But happily the time has not come when it is necessary to appeal to the deeper and graver arguments which might be urged against the dissolution of the Union on the instalment plan..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=d0E9AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA228
Despite the *Tribune* (which was probably just angry at Nevada's support for Bryan) there was no consitutional way to *force* Nevada to abandon its statehood. But I am wondering if the federal government could give it economic *incentives* to revert to territorial status or join a neighboring state--and whether in the desperate economic conditions of the 1890's, Nevada might actually be tempted to do so...