Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics

433 Pages·2013·10.005 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

Sunbelt Capitalism
Politics and culture in Modern aMerica
series editors: M argot canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin,
and thomas J. sugrue
Volumes in the series narrate and analyze po liti cal and social change
in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas
about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public
sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels— local,
national, and transnational. the series is motivated by a desire to reverse
the fragmentation of modern u.s. history and to encourage synthetic
perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race,
and labor, and on intellectual history and pop u lar culture.
Sunbelt Capitalism
Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for
purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book
may be reproduced in any form by any means without
written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104- 4112
www .upenn .edu /pennpress
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Shermer, Elizabeth Tandy.
Sunbelt capitalism : Phoenix and the transformation of
American politics / Elizabeth Tandy Shermer. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Politics and culture in modern America)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 8122- 4470- 0 (alk. paper)
1. Cities and towns— Arizona—Phoenix—Growth.
2. Phoenix (Ariz.)— Commerce—History—20th century.
3. Phoenix (Ariz.)— Economic conditions— History—20th
century. 4. Phoenix (Ariz.)— Politics and government—
History—20th century. 5. Phoenix (Ariz.)— Social
conditions— History—20th century. 6. Conservatism—
Arizona—Phoenix—History—20th century. I. Title.
II. Series: Politics and culture in modern America.
HT384.U62A68 2013
307.7609791'73—dc23
2012023970
Dedicated to the families we choose

Contents
Introduction 1
Part I. Desert
1. Colonial Prologue 17
2. Contested Recovery 39
3. The Business of War 71
Part II. Reclamation
4. The Right to Rule 93
5. Grasstops Democracy 116
6. Forecasting the Business Climate 147
7. “Second War Between the States” 184
Part III. Sprawl
8. Industrial Phoenix 225
9. The Conspicuous Grasstops 270
10. “A Frankenstein’s Monster” 302
Epilogue. Whither Phoenix? 336
List of Abbreviations 341
viii Contents
Notes 347
Index 407
Ac know ledg ments 421
Introduction
Few Northeasterners realize the new prominence of the South and
West or appreciate that a new po liti cal era is in the making.
—Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority, 1969
In 1969, Kevin Phillips earned national recognition for Th e Emerging Re-
publican Majority, which reconsidered a per sis tent set of century- old re-
gional voting patterns. In this celebration of Richard Nixon’s 1968 electoral
triumph, Phillips concluded that the Republican’s victory symbolized the
overthrow of an “obsolescent ‘liberal’ ideology.” While public memory of
the book has largely faded, Phillips’s identifi cation of a “Sun Belt Phenome-
non” has had a lasting impact. In just fi ve pages, the author defi ned a region
that captured pop u lar and scholarly attention for thirty years. Phillips, an
amateur statistician turned White House aide, argued, “as of the present . . .
the huge postwar white middle- class push to the Florida- California Sun
country (as well as suburbia in general)— seems to be forging a new, conser-
vative po liti cal era in the South, Southwest and Heartland.” At the heart of
this phenomenon were booming metropolises, which he described as “cen-
ters of commerce, light industry, military preparedness, defense production
and space- age technology, vocational seedbeds of a huge middle class . . . a
century removed from the Allegheny- Monongahela Black Country and the
dun- colored mill canyons of the Merrimack.” 
Phoenix, Arizona, clearly exemplifi ed, as journalists Peter Wiley and
Robert Gottlieb noted, “the prototypical Sun Belt city.” Th e railroad hub
had once been smaller in population than rival Tucson and also a third of
the size of El Paso, the Southwest’s largest city at the turn of the twentieth
century. In these years, agriculture, mining, ranching, and tourism had
structured Phoenix’s economy. Aft er World War II, the Valley of the Sun