Journal of Arizona History

The Postwar Growth Consensus

While Arizona's boosters have long portrayed innovations in air conditioning technology, the proliferation of air travel, and their own entrepreneurial energies as the agents of the state's postwar transformation, two intertwined structural forces in the nation's political economy drove postwar growth.¹⁰ On the one hand, federal spending that scholars have termed "growth liberalism" brought vast new amounts of capital into local economies. In the years after World War II, policies that extended and expanded New Deal programs combined with the construction of a national security state to unleash vast amounts of, in essence, federal development funds. Efforts to subsidize white, middle-class consumption as a driver of the postwar economy led to the creation of extensive, federally underwritten suburban landscapes which surrounded almost every American city by the 1960s.

To meet the material needs of these areas, as well as to enable mobility, federal authorities made vast investments in infrastructure, not only the Interstate Highway System begun in 1954 but, particularly in the South and West, hydraulic and electrical infrastructure [End Page 540] to supply water and power. Agencies of the emergent national security state also spent an average of 8 percent of GDP on military expenditures, including the research and development of new military systems, between 1948 and 1962.¹¹ The result was new flows of federal development dollars into parts of the country that had previously been treated, in the words of Bernard DeVoto, as a "plundered province" of resource colonies.¹²

On the other hand, state and local governments pursued economic development by shaping policies friendly to private capital. Growth machines, coalitions of local politicians, businessmen, and property owners, competed with other cities by undermining the New Deal state's support for unionization and social subsidy. In states such as Arizona, without established regulatory and social welfare bureaucracies that characterized the industrial Northeast, "growth machines" presented tax abatements and other business incentives to industrial capital, while also instituting anti-labor "right-to-work" laws that kept labor costs low. At the same time, they promoted the quality-of-life amenities of newly built cities to an increasingly mobile populace.¹³ That policies friendly to private capital came to take such a prominent place in state and local politics even as federal spending became increasingly important to the national reflected the fiscal mechanisms of growth liberalism. Federal funds made their way into the local economy indirectly. Federal guarantees underwrote bank loans and real-estate development, cost-plus contracts paid for the work of investor-owned defense firms, and federal highway funds flowed to contractors through local agencies. This obscuring of federal action, at times intentional, generated a political paradox: "free enterprise" was most ardently celebrated in those locations most dependent on federal support.¹⁴ [End Page 541]

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Aerial photograph of Phoenix in 1928. E. D. Newcomer Photograph Collection, PP-PC 196, B8/F4, Arizona Historical Society, Tempe.

These forces triggered a massive postwar migration to the American South and West, an area sometimes referred to as the "Sunbelt."¹⁵ Metropolitan areas in the South and West grew at nearly twice the rate of their midwestern and northeastern counterparts. The effects of this growth were profoundly uneven throughout the state. The 1950 and 1960 censuses showed metropolitan portions of Arizona adding population at rates of 84 percent and 133 percent respectively. Rural parts of the state showed a population increase of only 8 percent in the 1950 census and actually lost 2.6 percent of their population in the 1960 census. Unlike the patterns of high double-digit migration from Mexico and Latin America that would characterize the state's demographics from the 1990s [End Page 542]

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Birdseye view of downtown Phoenix in 1958. Warren Krause Photograph Collection, FP-FPC 12 B10/F5, Arizona Historical Society, Tempe.

onward, the vast majority of population increase came from internal migration within the United States. The 1960 census showed 126,360 people had moved to northeastern Phoenix, the fastest growing area of the metropolis, from outside the area over the past five years. Of those, only 4,427 had moved from "abroad." The vast majority—108,441—had arrived from the Northeast and Midwest. "Is it possible," Abbey would wonder later in "The Blob Comes to Arizona," that "life is even more trying in Wisconsin than here?"¹⁶

At first glance, the dramatic migration of new residents to Arizona appeared to completely transform the state's politics. Prior to 1950, the Arizona Republican Party had been moribund. Between 1931 and 1950, a Republican occupied the governor's office for a total of five days, and no Republicans were elected to the State Senate between 1937 and 1952.¹⁷ The migration of Republican–leaning [End Page 543] voters from the Midwest, as well as the creation of a reliable Republican Party organ, after conservative, Indianapolis-based newspaper magnate Eugene Pulliam purchased the Arizona Republic, changed the party's prospects. Starting with the 1950 election of Howard Pyle as governor and the 1952 election of Barry Goldwater as the state's junior senator, the Republican Party became increasingly competitive in statewide elections. Indeed, the emergent power of the Arizona Republican Party has become a staple of accounts of the postwar nationwide rise of the right.¹⁸

Despite this political transformation, the postwar changes actually spurred political cooperation, at least for a time. The Democratic Party was riven by a divide between New Deal liberals and so-called Pinto Democrats, who deeply opposed the New Deal and particularly federal resource management; therefore, the emergence of a conservative Republican Party did not represent as much of a disruption as pure partisan tallying might suggest. More importantly, Arizona's politicians, Democratic and Republican, found accommodation in two main areas.

First, they generally supported the "business friendly" policies designed to draw capital to the state. In large part, this support involved Democrats acceding to policies advanced primarily by Republicans. Two examples highlighted by Elizabeth Shermer suggest these dynamics. First, Senator Carl Hayden, the Arizona Democratic stalwart who served from 1927 until 1969, had, in the immediate postwar years, opposed both the statewide anti-labor right-to-work referendum and the Taft-Hartley Act, which advanced a range of anti-union measures. From the early 1950s forward, however, Hayden refused to join Democratic efforts to repeal Taft-Hartley, as Arizonans, as he professed, had expressed their views and he would not go against them. Second, Ernest MacFarland, defeated by Barry Goldwater in 1952 but elected governor two years later, had long opposed tax cuts aimed at luring businesses to the state. In 1955, however, pressed by executives of Sperry Rand, an aerospace manufacturer considering the location of three plants in Phoenix, and by the leaders of the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, MacFarland called the legislature into special session to pass the repeal of a sales tax on products made in Arizona but sold to the federal government, a repeal demanded by Sperry executives as [End Page 544] the price of moving operations to Arizona. Both examples suggest the ways in which Democratic politicians, who retained majorities in the state legislature, came to accept, if not embrace, Arizona's institution of "business friendly" policies.¹⁹

Second, Arizona's political parties jointly sought federal infrastructure funds to allow the development of the state's resources. If Arizona's Republican Party became a redoubt of opposition to the New Deal state in the postwar years, that opposition stopped at the federally funded infrastructure—particularly the Bureau of Reclamation's dams on the Salt, Gila, and Colorado rivers—that had helped drive the state's growth since the completion of Roosevelt Dam in 1912. The Bureau of Reclamation was not without its critics. Goldwater, for one, argued that the agency had abandoned its early values, which involved "local interests solving their own problems in co-operation with the federal government," in favor of "projects which originate from the desire of technicians and engineers in the employ of government to keep busy."²⁰ More widespread, however, was the belief that federal reclamation proposals had failed to allow Arizonans to claim water that was, by the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, rightfully theirs. Indeed, efforts to push for a Central Arizona Project, which began in earnest in 1946, saw the state's representatives in Washington—liberal Democrats like Stewart and Morris Udall, conservative Republicans like Goldwater, and particularly Carl Hayden as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee—coordinating efforts to secure federal funding that would ensure sufficient water to support the state's growth. Claiming Arizona's share of the Colorado remained a, if not the, key legislative initiative for Arizona's elected officials during the 1940s and 1950s.²¹ [End Page 545]

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Panoramic photograph of Tucson from "A" Mountain in the early 1900s. Buehman Collection, BN 39,758, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.

This combination of support for both "business friendly" policies at the state and local levels and for new reclamation infrastructure funded by the federal government sat at the heart of the postwar growth consensus. These policies, in the eyes of most elected officials in Arizona, Democratic and Republican, would bring both corporate capital and natural resources to their state that would, in theory, have broad benefits. Of course, as was the case with "consensus" on the national level, Arizona's growth consensus disadvantaged many of the state's residents. Municipal elections in Phoenix and Tucson were designed to depress turn-out and benefit candidates endorsed by their respective growth machines. The state's "business friendly" policies made Arizona extremely [End Page 546]

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Aerial photograph of Tucson in 1974. PC 1000, Places-Tucson, AHS#106424, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.

unfriendly to unions in manufacturing industries (even as unions retained power in the service and building trades). Indeed, as one labor organizer stated, Arizona was "to labor-management relations what Mississippi was to the civil rights movement."²² They also provided extremely limited benefits to Arizonans without work or those injured on the job. And the state's government systematically sought to deny Indigenous populations federal benefits while attempting to claim tribal resources for the state's benefit. For the most part, however, the attraction of growth—particularly for a state whose elected officials came predominantly from local lawyers, businessmen, and landowners, who benefited disproportionately from post-war metropolitan development, and the new statewide electoral importance of metropolitan Phoenix and Tucson, where the benefits of growth were most directly experienced—forged political cooperation in the immediate postwar years. [End Page 547]

The Arizona Power Authority and the Battle over States' Rights

It was the challenge of bringing Colorado River water to central Arizona that led to the first significant fissure in this consensus. While efforts to build a Central Arizona Project initially united Arizona's elected officials, this cohesiveness fractured in the early 1960s as officials debated whether Arizona had the sovereign ability to build hydroelectric works and claim the Colorado's waters, or whether the federal government controlled the Colorado, a river which all seven states in the Colorado Basin saw as vital to their own growth. These debates show new division among the state's political elites. At the same time, they demonstrate their shared recognition that the state's future growth lay not only in economic and political strategies but in ongoing control and exploitation of natural resources.

Arizona's claims to the Colorado River had long been one of the most contentious issues in western politics. During the initial 1922 negotiations in Santa Fe, the state advanced a claim that it had a right to 44 percent of the river's flow, based on the idea that the state contained 44 percent of the territory that drained toward the river. Not only did the meeting reject the state's claim, it failed to adjudicate whether the water controlled by Boulder Dam belonged to the states, as Arizonans believed, or the federal government, as the commission's chairman, Herbert Hoover, insisted. Even worse from Arizona's perspective, the Colorado River Compact, the meeting's eventual agreement, located the state in the river's lower basin, forcing it to share the river's waters with California.²³

During his first Senate term, Carl Hayden filibustered the Boulder Canyon Act, which authorized the construction of Hoover Dam, in an attempt to prevent California from claiming the river's water. Likewise, the state legislature refused to ratify the compact [End Page 548] until 1944. That same year, Hayden, along with then-Senator Ernest MacFarland, introduced the first iteration of the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a series of aqueducts and dams that would bring water from the Colorado River to metropolitan Phoenix and Tucson. Passed by the Senate in 1947 and 1951, legislation authorizing CAP was blocked both times by the unified actions of the California delegation in the House. Following the 1951 defeat, Arizona officials filed suit against California. Accepted by the Supreme Court in 1953, Arizona v. California was adjudicated over the next decade.²⁴

Even as Hayden and other Arizona representatives worked, cooperatively, to pass federal CAP legislation, state officials attempted to secure dam sites that would power CAP on their own. In 1938, Arizona officials filed a request for a permit to investigate the hydroelectric potential at the Bridge Canyon site, eighty miles downriver from the border of Grand Canyon National Park. Hydropower from Bridge Canyon Dam, in this plan, would both provide the energy needed to pump water from the Colorado to central Arizona, and bring revenues that could fund construction of the project itself. California and Nevada, as well as the Bureau of Reclamation, objected, and Arizona let the request lie dormant, while reserving a claim to the site. In 1944, the Arizona Power Authority (APA), an agency created that year to claim the state's share of the electricity generated at Hoover Dam, took over the state's claim.²⁵ With the initial defeat of CAP legislation in Congress, the APA began to aggressively explore development of both the Bridge Canyon site and a second dam site at Marble Canyon, just upstream from the borders of Grand Canyon National Park. In 1949, the APA, attempting to forestall objections from California officials, offered to purchase all electricity generated at Bridge Canyon Dam (BCD), eliminating, as McFarland stated, "the necessity of California's paying anything" toward construction or operation of the project.²⁶ And in 1956, Arizona's legislature directed the APA to "take such steps as may be necessary, convenient or advisable to construct, operate, and maintain the BCD site or other sites, dams for the generation [End Page 549] of electrical energy and in connection therewith the facilities in or at the site of said dams for the storage and diversion of water."²⁷

Shared contempt for California's efforts at blocking the CAP's construction drew Arizona officials together. Hayden battled California's House delegation throughout the immediate post-war years, criticizing them for "blocking the Southwest's growth to their own benefit." In 1957, anger with California's actions reached a fever pitch. Fearing Arizona was planning to file an official claim on a dam site at Bridge Canyon, the Los Angeles Department of Power and Water filed its own application with the Federal Power Commission on the Bridge Canyon site. Arizona politicians reacted with fury. Ray Killian, the executive secretary of the Arizona Interstate Stream Commission, fumed that "the present attempt by Los Angeles to secure a permit to build a power dam wholly within the boundaries of Arizona, at a site already applied for by Arizona, is almost beyond our comprehension. … We shall resist such action with all possible means."²⁸ A Phoenix Gazette editorial denounced "Southern California water hogs," claiming the metropolis "never has hesitated to steal water from any source it could exploit at the expense of other Western states." And Barry Goldwater, speaking on the Senate floor, compared Californians to "buzzards waiting for death to finally come so that they might feast completely on what belongs to us."²⁹

As the 1950s ended, Arizona officials were thus pursuing two very different strategies for developing CAP. On the one hand, they advanced a strategy that saw federal agencies and infrastructure as key to securing the state's supply of the Colorado. While it might require the resolution of Arizona v. California to get moving, this strategy lay within the mainstream of postwar growth liberalism, with activist federal agencies serving as the primary venues through which development would be pursued. Federal agencies were vital because advocates for this approach acceded that the distribution of interstate waters remained a matter for federal authority to determine. On the other hand, the state simultaneously pursued a strategy that contended that the state of Arizona had an inherent right to fund the construction of dams that lay entirely within [End Page 550] state borders and to claim the Colorado's waters as an inherent state possession. While sharing an understanding that natural-resource development drove economic growth, this states' rights strategy suggested a very different understanding of the relationship between state and federal power, as well as with the nature of growth itself. It contended states should possess ultimate authority over resources within their borders, to be used as local officials saw fit. And it understood growth as a competitive enterprise, where the claims of one state to resources, and therefore greater potential for growth, came at the expense of another.

These two strategies co-existed until the early 1960s as neither could advance until Arizona v. California settled the water rights of the lower basin of the Colorado. The lawsuit remained before the Supreme Court for eleven years, the longest in the nation's history, with testimony from 340 witnesses and arguments by fifty separate lawyers. In 1963, the Court's special master, Simon Rifkind, finally ruled, upholding Arizona on almost every count. California, Rifkind found, had taken water in excess of its allocation. Arizona was entitled to 2.8 million acre-feet of Colorado River water.³⁰ While the ruling granted Arizona extensive rights to the river's water, it did not locate these rights in the state's sovereign authority over resources within its borders. Instead, it strengthened federal authority by empowering the secretary of the interior to determine water priorities by administrative action. Justice William O. Douglas's scathing dissent argued that the ruling "grants the federal bureaucracy a power and command over water rights in the 17 states that it has never had, that it always wanted, that it could never persuade Congress to grant."³¹

Douglas's dissent suggested the divisions that quickly emerged among Arizonans in the wake of the ruling, divisions that were complicated by national politics. With Stewart Udall appointed secretary of the interior in 1961 (his brother Mo immediately won the special election to succeed him in the House of Representatives), [End Page 551] advocates of the federal "growth liberal" approach to CAP had friends in high places. As secretary of the interior, however, Udall had new electoral considerations. In particular, he could ill afford to present a plan that potentially alienated Californians, with their thirty-two electoral votes, to benefit Arizonans, with only four. Even before the court ruling, Udall had already unveiled the basic outline of his solution, the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, which combined CAP and new dams on the Colorado at Marble Canyon and Bridge Canyon with a major water project in central California.³² In so doing, Udall asked the Federal Power Commission (FPC) to delay the approval of a license for Arizona to build a dam at Bridge Canyon, approval that the FPC seemed likely, at least in the eyes of Arizonans, to grant. Advocates for a state system feared that this regional solution would delay CAP when, as Governor Paul Fannin, told the Los Angeles Times, "We're ready to go." Udall likely fanned these flames by explaining to the Times that his plan would "erase the outmoded concept represented by state lines," a statement which Times reporter Gene Sherman called a "big bone in Arizona's sovereign throat." As Lynn Anderson, a former Arizona water commissioner stated, "He's playing for electoral votes for Kennedy. That's part of his business, I guess, and we can appreciate the position he's in. But we don't agree with him, not a bit."³³

At the same time, Barry Goldwater's presidential ambitions and emergence as an ideological standard bearer for the New Right led him to denounce the federal role in river-basin management in general and the Tennessee Valley Authority in particular. In so doing, he threatened to upset conservative southern Democrats whose votes were needed for any CAP legislation. While Goldwater remained a co-sponsor of the Hayden-led legislation that authorized Udall's Pacific Southwest Water Plan, a matter that Hayden pointed out "with great gentleness," as Max Freedman wrote in his syndicated column, doubts about Goldwater's willingness to support southern water projects "have arisen because of Sen. Goldwater's recent suggestion that Arizona could build the CAP by itself." Indeed, fearing that Goldwater's rhetoric might endanger CAP itself, the Arizona Daily Star called on him to stop his "unfortunate public chattering."³⁴ [End Page 552]

Goldwater's public criticism of federal infrastructure and Udall's efforts to block Arizona's plan to license a state-funded dam created new public fractures within the facade of Arizona's growth consensus. Harry Raymond, manager of the Maricopa County Municipal Water Conservation District, complained that "Secretary Udall's plan will take ten years just to think about. … Let's build our projects now and use the water we have." More ideological commenters attacked Udall for advocating "monopolistic federal activities" that would delay the ability of "the state to serve its rapidly growing population with water and electrical power."³⁵ Supporters of federal development described state development plans as fantasies. Noting that a state-built dam would cost $1.2 billion, far beyond the state's borrowing capacity, with "no evidence … that these funds would be provided by investment bankers or other private sources," advocates for a federally-funded CAP, likely Hayden's legislative aides speaking anonymously to reporters, warned that state plans would require incredible levels of public debt and would thus constrain the state's ability to attract new business. "These facts will not merely vanish," a reporter quoted one as saying, "merely because Sen. Goldwater dislikes TVA or wants to cut down Washington's role in public power projects."³⁶ Political commentators recognized the emergence of a new divide within the state's politics. As Raymond Moley, a former New Dealer turned conservative, wrote, "The issue has raised a great deal of controversy in Arizona, with Gov. Fannin, Sen. Goldwater and others favoring the state, and Udall, Hayden and others against."³⁷

In the long run, this dispute between federal and state advocates in the early 1960s might appear inconsequential. CAP would eventually be federally funded in 1968, with the majority of work completed by 1994 (the major exception being aqueducts intended to serve tribal populations). Its authorization continued to cause controversy, particularly related to environmentalists' attacks on the proposals for Marble and Bridge Canyon dams. That dispute would briefly reunite the growth consensus, as "The High Cost of Arizona" came under attack from the Sierra Club and other environmental [End Page 553] groups for proposing to inundate the Grand Canyon.³⁸ However, the fractures remained. Given Arizona's extensive public lands, and the continuing pressure for development, debates over federal jurisdiction and state sovereignty, and the development or protection of public lands would roil the state's politics again and again from the mid-1960s forward.

These tensions over where and with whom control of resources lay, and how and whether they should be developed, would only deepen as environmentalism became an increasing force in the state's politics. At the heart of these disputes lay a deep-seated belief among Arizona's officials that growth required more than the right fiscal policies and political incentives. It also depended on the development of natural resources. From the mid-1960s onward, imperatives for development would not only create new divisions among federal elected officials, it would also spark new conflicts between the state of Arizona and Native nations located in Arizona. As Indigenous people in Arizona saw, in their view, their homelands transformed and resources taken for the benefit of Anglo residents of Phoenix and Los Angeles, they launched new critiques of growth as a form of colonialism.³⁹

These conflicts deserve more extensive study than they have received. Future historians might also look to explore the dynamics of resource development and growth politics through greater examination of the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s; debates over subterranean water management, such as the controversy surrounding the Ground Water Maintenance Act of 1980; conflicts over recreational land use beginning in the 1980s; questions of development politics, including Smart Growth and the public land trust; and ongoing battles over energy resources on public lands, which began with the fracking boom of the early 2000s.⁴⁰ Additionally, they might investigate [End Page 554] the ways in which the promise of resource provision fell short of public expectations or caused unexpected problems. Indeed, when CAP water finally reached Tucson, the hard water transported by the project that would purportedly save central Arizona leached rust out of pipes, rendering public water at times undrinkable and forcing many residents to invest in costly water-softening systems.⁴¹

All these battles from the 1960s onward represented a significant difference from the consensus that characterized Arizona's resource politics in the twenty years after World War II. Indeed, while battles between state and federal ownership of resources have a long history in Arizona and the West, they were quelled during those twenty years as the imperatives of growth created new political consensus. In examining the construction of that consensus, and its fragility, future historians can come to new understandings about how cooperation over resources gave way to the conflicts of environmental politics of the late twentieth century.

Political Transformations

It was not only the attempt to claim resources that forged consensus in immediate postwar Arizona. The state's metropolitan areas also saw a remarkable degree of political dominance by local elites. In Phoenix, only a single city council member was elected between 1949 and 1975 without the endorsement of the Charter Government Committee, the political arm of the Chamber of Commerce. Politics in Tucson had similar intimate links between business and government. Real-estate developers routinely served on the city council, zoning commissions, planning boards, and in the city manager's office. Such intimate connections between local government and business and property owners, classic forms of what the sociologist Harvey Molotch termed "growth machines" in the mid-1970s, shaped the politics of growth in both cities from the end of World War II to the 1970s.⁴²

Growth-machine dominance arose from structural changes to politics in the late 1940s. In Phoenix, local elites labeled years of chronic instability in local government as the product of [End Page 555] "bossism." In 1947 and 1949, they organized politically as "the Charter Government Committee" (CGC) to push through a series of changes to the city charter.⁴³ The most important changed municipal elections from a ward-based system in which council members were elected to represent specific parts of the city to an at-large system in which the seven candidates receiving the most votes would serve on the city council. Each election, the CGC would put forward a slate of candidates, which reliably received the endorsement of the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette, both owned by Eugene Pulliam. The timing of local elections in non–congressional election years, a date mandated in the revised city charter, discouraged participation. Municipal officials made voting itself difficult through onerous registration procedures while conservative Republicans, including future Chief Justice William Rehnquist, aggressively enforced literacy tests.⁴⁴

In her study of reform governments in the Southwest, Amy Bridges found voter participation rates in poor, predominantly nonwhite Phoenix precincts falling below 10 percent in municipal elections, as opposed to 25 percent in more affluent areas to the north.⁴⁵ Charter Government, Bridges has written, created a voting public that resembled a wealthy suburb "in social settings that were considerably more diverse. This was accomplished by writing the rules to win, by organizing to mobilize prospective supporters and bring them to the polls, and by failing to annex communities less likely to support incumbent regimes."⁴⁶ While Charter Government candidates saw regular challenges during the 1950s and 1960s, both from homeowners aggrieved by unwanted annexation [End Page 556] to the city and conservatives for whom even "business friendly" government was too much, the group retained monopoly power over local government.⁴⁷

The CGC's use of that power has led both Shermer and me to argue that elite interests in political reform had more to do with attracting capital, consolidating control of local government, and making claims to resources than fighting political corruption.⁴⁸ With local politics securely in Charter Government's grasp, Phoenix lawyer Frank Snell and Walter Bimson, president of Valley National Bank, could pursue manufacturing executives with generous offers of tax breaks and land grants, details of the state's right-to-work law and other reasons to relocate businesses to Phoenix, secure in the knowledge that handshake promises would be honored by the City Council. A 1963 report prepared by the El Paso Chamber lamented that in Phoenix, "industrial scouts are met at the plane, entertained, offered free land, tax deals, and an electorate willing to approve millions in business-backed bond issues" while "El Paso does nothing." "Unless we start hustling after new industry," the report continued, "we're going to wind up in serious trouble."⁴⁹ Their efforts were broadly successful. Phoenix saw local manufacturing revenue increase from $5 million in 1940 to more than $600 million twenty years later, as the city became home to plants for Motorola, Honeywell, and other mainstays of the military-industrial complex.⁵⁰

Local politics in Tucson were much the same story. While little recent work has been done that charts the structural organization of local politics in Tucson, Michael Logan has demonstrated that a very similar growth machine dominated the city's politics. Tucson more aggressively sought to plan for growth by employing urban planners, but, as Logan has shown, the city's boosters forestalled plans developed in the 1950s and 1960s that threatened to serve as barriers to development. Tucson's leaders also proved more willing to use postwar federal redevelopment authority than did Phoenix's government. In one notable incident, Latinx homeowners who [End Page 557] successfully thwarted developers' efforts to buy up property south of Tucson's downtown to build a convention center saw their properties declared "blighted," therefore allowing the use of federal funds and local condemnation power.⁵¹ Tucson's local government also employed the competitive growth politics that lured business to Phoenix. In 1954, Tucson's Chamber of Commerce bragged that "Recently, a nationally-known scientific research company came to Tucson; found an ideal location with a building already up. Problem: one of rezoning to allow them to move in. Within weeks, residents of the area in cooperation with the city and county officials and the Chamber of Commerce had rezoned the area. … Result: Tucson is a city actually zoned for scientific research."⁵²

The broad assumption of the growth machines was that, despite the residents of Tucson who lost their homes to condemnation or the Phoenix homeowners who paid the highest property taxes in the state, their efforts would be universally beneficial. As Tucson mayor Fred Emery explained in 1955, "The City of Tucson itself has acquired new strength and stature. The Business of our community will gain by this, and as they gain, all of us will gain."⁵³

The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a sea change. Challenges to the growth machines had earlier been brushed aside with relative ease. That was no longer the case. The rapid expansion of both cities, demographically and spatially, brought new pressure to bear on growth machines that had thrived on the ability of a close-knit business class to organize city politics through central nodes of power—the Kiva Club and Hotel Westward Ho in Phoenix; the Flame Restaurant, 20-Grand Bar, and the Adams Hotel in Tucson. Particularly in Phoenix, the creation of new business districts—first in uptown, and then in different communities throughout the valley—made growth machines less cohesive. So too did the arrival of a new generation of business executives who worked not for locally owned businesses or law firms, but the national and multinational corporations that an earlier generation of boosters had drawn to the two communities. Such businessmen were, in Shermer's words, "based in but not bound to Phoenix."⁵⁴ [End Page 558]

More important still was the new ability of anti–growth machine politics to find new political success. In Tucson, city council elections in 1972 brought a controlled-growth majority to power. During the four years they held sway, this majority attempted to institute community planning by dividing the city into fourteen planning districts, advocating for in-fill development rather than construction on desert land, and promoting xeriscaping. These positions were by no means as unassailable politically as their predecessors had been. Indeed, the successful recall of three controlled-growth council members in 1977, after pushing a water-rate hike, suggested the provision of inexpensive water supplies remained a third rail in Arizona municipal politics. However, environmental politics, particularly those that can be tied to the preservation of property values, have, as Michael Logan argues, "possessed a voice in Tucson electoral politics consistently since the 1970s."⁵⁵

In Phoenix, growth-machine political power began to be destabilized in the 1960s as the CGC attempted to incorporate some voices critical of its focus on downtown businesses and to expand social services. In the early 1970s, city officials and businessmen proposed a new freeway interchange to mitigate the heavy traffic that developed as the Black Canyon Freeway fed traffic onto surface roads downtown. Surprising freeway advocates, Eugene Pulliam's two newspapers, long reliable public voices for Phoenix's growth machine, came out in strong opposition, arguing that the freeway's costs were excessive, that it would divide the city, and that it would replicate, in Pulliam's eyes, the disastrous Los Angeles freeway system. Voters rejected a bond measure to fund the freeway in 1973. While a freeway interchange was eventually built, one that destroyed more than six hundred historical residences and two archaeological sites, the freeway battle suggested the seamless connection between growth machine and local media, a connection that reliably argued that the plans of business elites were in the public good, no longer existed.⁵⁶ [End Page 559]

Second, the 1970s in Phoenix, as in Tucson, saw newly successful political challenges to growth-machine rule. The CGC had long organized behind the scenes—"a little group of people get in a closed room (smoke-filled usually)," CGC co-founder Margaret Kober explained—to designate a slate of candidates. "I don't know any better way," she argued. Such kingmaking had long rankled those kept outside, particularly nonwhite Phoenicians who bristled at CGC's tendency to "rent a minority," as one insurgent candidate described CGC's pattern of selecting one nonwhite candidate for its slate to provide the illusion of diversity. After showing cracks in the 1969 election, when a non-CGC endorsed candidate won a council seat for the first time since 1949, CGC rule essentially ended in 1975 in a hotly contested election in which some former CGC members who had not received the group's endorsement ran for office anyway. The election did not end growth-machine rule. The newly elected mayor, Margaret Hance, was a former CGC councilperson and would remain in office as a self-described "Reagan Republican" into the 1980s. However, the CGC slate won only two seats, and the election signaled the greater possibility for questioning the centrality of growth to local politics. "How many dollars are we going to save in services we won't have to provide to those who didn't move here," one Phoenician asked in the Arizona Republic. The 1975 election also opened the path to more substantial changes to the structure of local politics. The campaign ignited an effort for ward-based elections as a means to ensure representation of the various districts of the city whose incorporated area had grown from 9 to 435 square miles between 1940 and 1970. In 1982, voters passed revisions to the city charter that created eight wards, each represented by a councilperson, with a mayor elected at large. The changes aimed, in the words of one voter, to forestall the ability of "a small group of self-appointed manipulators" to control elections based on "the assumption that they … alone know what is best for the city."⁵⁷

The fracturing of growth politics in the 1970s and 1980s raises key questions for new historical research. The most recent generation of Arizona histories has located the unchallenged political [End Page 560] power of local growth machines as the central agent of the state's demographic and metropolitan growth. However, in the decades after growth-machine power came under new political challenge and scrutiny, the state's growth has continued apace. Even as the state's business elite came under new scrutiny due to their roles in the savings & loan (S&L) crisis of the 1980s and 1990s and the Great Recession of the 2000s, people, capital, and businesses have continued to move to Arizona in large numbers. If growth machines did drive the state's immediate postwar growth, what social, political, or cultural forces are responsible for growth over the past five decades? Did the unquestioned political authority of business elites become less important? If so, why?

These questions suggest a second line of inquiry about changes in the state's partisan politics. While Tucson remained a Democratic redoubt throughout the postwar years, Phoenix has been regarded by historians as one of the key birthplaces of modern conservatism. However, municipal government had a strong liberal minority on the city council by the mid-1960s, and congressional elections since the 1990s show Phoenix itself reliably voting Democratic. Indeed, political maps of Arizona replicate those of the nation at large, with central cities blue archipelagos in seas of red exurbs and rural areas. It is important for historians not to take these changes for granted, even if they do replicate national patterns. How did these political changes occur on the ground? What actors are responsible for the creation of "Blue Arizona" in a mostly conservative state?⁵⁸ To what extent do the imperatives of growth continue to shape local politics? If growth machine rule provided a means for the rise of Arizonans such as Barry Goldwater, Paul Fannin, and others to national prominence, how have the new structures of politics shaped the relationship between the local, the state, and the national? And to turn to this essay's final section, how have the changing demographics of Arizona reshaped the state's politics?

New Migrations

The increase in migration from Mexico in particular, and in Arizona's population of people of Latinx heritage more generally, [End Page 561] represents the most important change in Arizona's growth during the last decades of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first century. During those years, Arizona's politics were roiled with conflicts created as a predominantly Anglo power structure confronted a state where, between 1970 and 2010, the Latinx population increased from 14.5 percent to 30 percent of the population, an increase in real numbers of more than 1.15 million Latinx people. During those years, the state has seen conflicts, including the passage (and eventual invalidation) of SB 1070, which required police forces to arrest and detain undocumented people while allowing police to demand proof of citizenship during interactions with members of the public; the passage of HB 2281, which banned the teaching of ethnic studies in Arizona public schools; the policing practices of Maricopa County sherriff Joe Arpaio, which targeted Latinx people in particular; and the formation of vigilante border patrol groups such as the Minutemen. It has also seen the rise of a powerful immigration rights movement within Arizona as well as the formation of large new Latinx communities throughout the state. All of this suggests that Arizona history since the 1970s must incorporate Latinx history more centrally than have postwar histories. Indeed, recent Arizona history must be, to a large extent, narrated with Latinx people as central actors, not only in stories of migration but also in the other narratives of resource development and political restructuring that this article highlights.⁵⁹

Increases in Mexican immigration and the state's overall Latinx population represented a dramatic shift in Arizona's demographics. As mentioned earlier, the bulk of migrants to the state in the immediate postwar years came from the Northeast, Midwest, and California, with New York, Illinois, and Ohio serving as prominent embarkation points from the 1940s to 1960s. Combined with federal programs that gave white Americans systematic advantages in credit and mortgage markets, these migration patterns led to disproportionately Anglo populations in the rapidly growing portions of metropolitan Phoenix and Tucson. The territory north [End Page 562] of Phoenix's Van Buren Avenue saw over 67,000 new homes built in the 1950s. The 1960 census showed that of the 305,178 people living there, only 3 percent—9,252 people—had "Spanish surnames." The same census showed Maryvale, developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by John F. Long, with only 397 people with "Spanish surnames" out of a population of 16,421 total residents.⁶⁰ New districts of Tucson showed similar patterns.⁶¹ The vast majority of Latinx, as well as African American, residents of Phoenix lived south of downtown, in communities that a 1966 British magazine described as "square mile after square mile of some of the most rundown, dilapidated housing in urban America" and that a reporter for the New Republic called in 1964 "a cross between a Mississippi Black Belt Negro ghetto and a Mexican border town" with "streets unpaved, sewers unconnected, and public utilities inadequate."⁶²

Recent scholarship has argued that new federal restrictions on Mexican migration in the 1970s and 1980s inadvertently changed the dynamics of the nation's Latinx population. In 1973, Congress amended the 1965 Immigration Act to, for the first time, apply visa quotas to immigrants from the western hemisphere. With border crossing newly fraught, Mexican migrants, both documented and undocumented, began to abandon patterns of circular seasonal migration in favor of longer-term residence in the United States. Efforts to "harden" the border in the 1980s and 1990s, Ana Minian has argued, only heightened the tendency of migrants to relocate permanently to the United States.⁶³ At the same time, the collapse of the peso's value in the 1980s led increasing numbers of Mexican migrants to seek work in the United States. As both A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and Sarah Lopez have argued, these migrants created a new "remittance landscape," to use Lopez's term, in which dollars earned in American cities served as vital elements of familial and social support in Mexico.⁶⁴ [End Page 563]

Arizona's overall population figures show that while the state's Latinx population gradually increased from the 1970s onward, the 1990s saw dramatic increases in both the state's Latinx population and its population of Mexican migrants. Whereas decennial censuses for 1970, 1980, and 1990 saw a steady rise of the state's Latinx population of about 2 percent per decade, rising from 14 percent to 18 percent over two decades, the 2000 census showed a 6.5 percent jump to more than 25 percent, an increase of 607,279 people claiming "Hispanic or Latino heritage" in the terms of the 2000 census. The 2010 census showed an additional 4.3 percent gain, as the census recorded an additional 599,532 Latinx people, for a total percentage of 29.6 percent of Arizona's population. Substantial numbers of these Latinx Arizonans were born in Mexico. Indeed, the percentage of Latinx people in Arizona who were born in Mexico increased from 14 percent in 1970 to 38 percent by 2000.⁶⁵ The changes were even more dramatic in Arizona's metropolitan areas, as Maricopa County went from 13.1 percent "Spanish origin" in 1980 to 29 percent "Hispanic or Latino" in 2010, and Pima County went from 21 percent to 34 percent during those same years.

GIS mapping suggests the ways that these demographic changes manifested themselves on the ground. A 1980 map of Phoenix's census tracts shows almost the same pattern reflected in the 1960 census, with few people of Spanish origin living north of downtown. By 2010, however, a map of the same tracts shows large populations of "Hispanic or Latino" people living in northern Phoenix, as well as throughout the Valley.⁶⁶ Historians are only beginning to chart this history. Some of the most promising work, such as Anthony Pratcher II's dissertation, demonstrates the ways in which racial transitions in metropolitan areas sparked new patterns of conflict and social disinvestment. Pratcher's work examines the [End Page 564] history of Maryvale in the 1970s and 1980s, as African Americans and Latinx people moved into the formerly nearly all-white development. While Pratcher shows the creation of some new, integrated community organizations, the story he tells is mostly one of increased conflict. As early as the late 1970s, racial tension among young people in Maryvale boiled over into violence and the institutions that did exist failed to ameliorate the hostilities. Anglo residents of Maryvale, Pratcher explains, increasingly called for more law enforcement patrols, leading to patterns in which African American and Latinx young people found themselves subject to new policing.⁶⁷ Similarly, Geraldo Cadava's Standing on Common Ground characterizes the period from the 1970s forward as riven with new conflicts over immigration and even the very presence of Latinx people in public space. At the same time, he details how residents of Tucson sought to defend migrants and buttress transnational connections that had long linked southern Arizona with northern Mexico. "By the early twenty-first century," Cadava writes, "Arizona had become the front line of immigration and border conflicts," conflicts that have in many ways moved to the center of not only Arizonan, but national politics in the late 2010s.⁶⁸

Given the prominence of Arizona in these regional and national politics, it is incumbent on Arizona historians to explore the dramatic demographic transformation of the state in the years after 1970, especially its wide-reaching political effects and meaning for the recent social history of Arizona. Why did immigration increase so dramatically in the 1990s? How did new migrants interact with existing Latinx communities in Arizona? Did these migrants, as Sandoval-Strausz has argued about Mexican migrants in Chicago and Dallas, bring practices of urban space that have "saved" Arizona's cities?⁶⁹ How did Arizona politics reflect and drive the resurgence of anti-immigrant politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? If new work is to truly understand Arizona's recent past, it must put these questions, and Latinx peoples, at its center. [End Page 565]

Conclusion

It is easy today to see Edward Abbey's portrait of the Blob coming to Arizona as a harbinger of the history that has occurred since its publication. Indeed, Abbey wrote presciently about many of the challenges that confronted Arizona in the years since the mid-1970s. The sustainability of large-scale development in arid environments depended, he wrote, on "if the water holds out." One might extend that today to "and if the temperatures don't rise." He also puzzled over the deeply anti-immigrant sentiment of a state transformed by immigration. "Like the man and his wife who moved from Des Moines into Phoenix last night, each of us wants to be the last to arrive. Each wants to be the final immigrant." Abbey portrayed these dilemmas as continuations of patterns that had defined the state since 1947, when he "was among the first of the displaced refugees, after The War, to give up on the swarming East." The state's growth, he admitted, "was as much my fault as anyone."⁷⁰

In simultaneously examining the continuing transformations growth since World War II had wrought and portraying those transformations as approaching a breaking point, Abbey's 1976 essay also provides a tantalizing suggestion of the way Arizona's history offers clues about how to reconcile currently divergent explanations of the recent past. In their recent Fault Lines, Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer argue that the years since 1974 have been so marked with renewed partisan conflict that they should be considered a new partisan age characterized by the collapse of political norms, the increased salience of culture war politics, and the politicization of religion. At the same time, Lily Geismer, Brent Cebul, and Mason Williams, the editors of Shaped by the State, have argued that narratives such as Zelizer and Kruse's, which organize recent history into distinct paradigms, "obscure deeper forms of consensus around global capitalism, white privilege, patriarchy, and notions of American exceptionalism," a consensus driven above all by a shared political understanding that political institutions exist, first and foremost, to spur and protect economic growth.⁷¹ [End Page 566]

By demonstrating how the transformative effects of growth created the landscape for new conflicts, Arizona's recent history offers some routes out of this narrative impasse between emphasis on continuity or of change. Since World War II, the combined actions of federal, state, and local governments, and the decisions of millions of individuals who live within the conditions those institutions create, have transformed Arizona. Desert lands have become farmland, farmland has become subdivisions. Flowing rivers have become stilled reservoirs, and pastoral mesas have become strip coal mines. Since 1945, the flow of migrants to Arizona has been ongoing, interrupted only in blips by events such as the 2008 Great Recession. This ongoing in-migration has given forces profiting from development, in particular the real-estate industry, disproportionate levels of political authority. At the same time, the state's transformation from the nation's forty-third most populous in 1940 to the fourteenth most populous in 2020 has generated profound challenges to the state's politics and political economy.

This essay has highlighted the emergence of new conflicts related to resource development, political structures, and migration beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. In recent years, continuities of political economy have generated conflicts even more profound. The state's continuous and rapid development has produced a political landscape deeply riven between central cities; exurban communities near, but barely connected to, Phoenix and Tucson; and outlying developments, communities within a state in which the population is simultaneously very old and very young. Arizona has also seen perhaps the most violent and divisive practices of border policing in recent years as immigration rights activists have faced federal charges for providing humanitarian aid and federal agents have attempted to build border fencing on Tohono O'odham sovereign and sacred land. Finally, the continuing effects of climate change have become more manifest as the Southwest continues in a multi-decade drought and the state's burgeoning population stresses available supplies of water and energy. These ongoing conflicts, which are embedded in the state's and the nation's practices of development since World War II and the world that development has made, will be the story of Arizona for years to come. [End Page 567]