Rogue Columnist

Grant Woods, an appreciation

The spontaneous outpouring of grief on news of Grant Woods' death at 67, too too young, is a measure of the man. We'll never see the same for Doug Ducey or Kyrsten Sinema or almost any Arizona pol you can name. Something similar might happen for Janet Napolitano or Terry Goddard, but this is an elite club.

Woods and I became friends when I returned to Phoenix in 2000 as a columnist for the Arizona Republic. A graduate of Mesa's Westwood High, we had long-running jokes because I had graduated from rival Coronado High in Scottsdale. He was a valuable off-the-record source and I knew the score. He'd already been ridden out of the Republican Party as a RINO. The state party had been radicalized since he was Attorney General from 1990 to 1999.

He was an outlier from the start, forcing the eccentric Bob Corbin from the primary and emphasizing civil rights, including a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Gov. Evan Mecham had repealed his predecessor, Bruce Babbitt's holiday proclamation in 1987. The holiday didn't become state law until 1992.

Lost opportunities

Carl Muecke illustration.

So this is where are: People are refusing to take vaccinations. Religious exemptions? Health worries? The vaccinations don't work? None of those hold water. The common denominator is these are Trump Republicans (and Trump controls the GOP). His administration's Operation Warp Speed is responsible for the tempo and effectiveness of the vaccinations. He could declare a genuine accomplishment. But the goal is destruction of the Biden presidency, retaking the White House in 2024 and Republicans retaking the Congress next year. All of these appear likely.

One reason is the vote suppression and state gerrymandering thanks to Republican-controlled statehouses. Another is Biden's agenda stuck in Congress, in no small measure because of Sens. Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin, only nominally Democratic. Finally is the far left of the Democratic Party with an agenda of defunding the police, allowing a rise in crime, encouraging "the homeless crisis," and pulling down statues. Wokeness might play in blue islands such as Seattle, but it's poison for winning national elections.

If the Republicans retake Congress, say goodbye to infrastructure, addressing climate change, and rebuilding the social safety net. The GOP operates in lockstep discipline. The Democrats are unable to slowly win legislative victories — something the New Deal accomplished even with commanding Democratic majorities in the Congress of the 1930s.

Neon Phoenix

Nothing said magic and excitement in an American city more than neon during the first half of the 20th century. The Great White Way in New York City. Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Ocean Drive in Miami Beach. Chicago's Magnificent Mile. In New Orleans, Bourbon Street.

Neon was found widely — from Route 66 to old Las Vegas. Today, with a few lucky exceptions, much of it has been replaced by bland, but easier to maintain signage or consigned to museums out of context. But it had particular beauty and sexiness in a city. This was true even of a small city such as Phoenix.

The challenge for the visual historian is finding color images, even though Kodak introduced Kodachrome film in 1935. Finding them, at least for Phoenix. Here's what I've got (click on the photo for a larger image):

Neon lights up Donofrio's Cactus Candy store on Central, 1915 (McCulloch Bros./ASU Archives).

A ribbon on neon on Central Avenue in the 1940s. Even the billboard above the coffee shop for Schlitz beer features neon.

The extremists

Gage Skidmore photo

Will Rogers quipped, "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." This was during the 1930s, when FDR's New Deal was made possible by an uneasy coalition of northern and midwestern big-city party bosses, unions, farmers, and Southern segregationists. Somehow it worked and the nation was saved.

Now, at another moment of national peril, the Democrats are not merely disorganized but deeply divided and nobody's laughing. Their time to make constructive moves on historic public investments in infrastructure, improve living standards, and return to progressive taxation is running down. If they fail and we get a Republican-controlled Congress next year and Donald Trump’s second term in 2024, we'll know who to blame.

In the past I've been willing to cut Sen. Kyrsten Sinema a break, tacking right sometimes to be viable in a red-purple state. It's in the "pinto" tradition of Arizona Democrats such as Carl Hayden. But in the Biden years, she's hardened into an extremist, deliberately blocking the president’s agenda when Democrats have momentary control of both houses of Congress. Like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, she's no "centrist." She's a destructive force who might as well be a Republican. And, like Manchin, she stands to profit from industries that oppose the Biden budget.

And they aren't the only ones.

The 2000s

I'll wrap up the series of decade history columns (twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and 'teens) with a look at Phoenix from 2000 to 2009.  This one is different because I was an active participant in many of the events, having returned home as a columnist for the Arizona Republic. Caveat lector.

Phoenix and Arizona roared into the new century on a historic wave of growth in the 1990s. The city's population topped a million for the first time, clocking in at more than 1.3 million in the 2000 Census and surpassing San Diego as the nation's sixth most-populous city.

All seemed to confirm the near constant, mysterious levitation of growth, despite the downturn in 1990 foreshadowed by the 1988 Barron's "Phoenix descending" report. The Greater Phoenix Economic Council (GPEC) had established high-end clusters to cultivate. But having worked in San Diego, Dayton, Denver, Cincinnati, and Charlotte, I was concerned and started asking questions.

For one thing, the big local election issue was Prop. 202, an initiative that would have required (very loose) growth boundaries. Early polling showed it leading among respondents. And the real-estate interests went crazy, labeling it "the Sierra Club initiative, ripping down supportive signs, and economist/developer Elliott Pollack darkly warning that if it passed a devastating recession would result.

The warpath ahead

Illustration by Carl Muecke.

One of the interesting parts of Michael Crow's empire is the Center on the Future of War, dedicated to exploring "the social, political, economic, and cultural implications of the changing character of war and conflict." With a faculty led by Peter Bergen, a CNN analyst and leading scholar on terrorism, and Daniel Rothenberg, former Managing Director of International Projects at the International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University, we're a long way from little Tempe Normal. The UA — or UArizona as they would have it — has nothing to compare.

Crow has a genius for going where the action is, particularly where money can be found in a state that shamefully underfunds higher education. And even with the end of the "Forever War" with President Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan (that and Iraq were not our longest conflict; that prize goes to the Indian wars of the 19th century), America's seeming hunger for war isn't going away.

The Pentagon, think tanks, and cottage industry of military journalism have us aiming at China, with runners up Russia and Iran. As for the first two, war with nuclear-armed adversaries: What could go wrong? Brown University’s Watson Institute estimates direct costs from the “war on terror” to be 929,000 deaths and a federal price tag of $8 trillion.

Downtown through the years

Follow this visual history of downtown Phoenix through the decades. I use the historic boundaries of downtown: Fillmore Street to the north; the railroad tracks to the south; Seventh Avenue and Seventh Street to west and east respectively. Click on a photo to see a larger image.

The early 1900s:

Looking east on Washington Street from the Ford Hotel. Redewill's music store was owned by the family that built the 1914 bungalow where we lived in Willo in the 2000s. We placed an Interior Department National Register of Historic Places plaque on it, the A.C. Redewill House.

The twenties:

Central Avenue heading south from Monroe Street, with the Hotel Adams the multi-story building on the left, and Central Methodist Church (ME, South), Heard Building, and Luhrs Building on the right.

Second Avenue and Washington in 1929. The awnings are on the red-brick Fleming Building. From left to right in the distance are the new Hotel Westward Ho, the Professional Building, and the Hotel Adams annex (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

Read more about this decade here.

How to read the news

Penelope Abernathy at the University of North Carolina has been tracking the expansion of "news deserts" in the United States — counties with no local newspapers at all, and those with only one. Even the survivors are hanging on.

U.S. newspapers lost 48 percent of their journalists between 2008 and 2018, and the losses are now accelerated by the pandemic. More than 1,800 newspapers have closed since 2004. Arizona newspaper circulation dropped by 37% between 2004 and 2019. The Arizona Republic's circulation fell from nearly half a million at the turn of the century — 10th largest daily in the country — to 82,861 at the start of 2021.

Much of this this is because of the collapse of the old business model because of Craig's List and self-inflicted wounds. The trends reach further back. Circulation of all dailies peaked at more than 63 million in 1989. It was down to 46 million by 2009, then 26 million by 2020.

Many newspapers are now being sucked dry by hedge-fund owners. As a result, the most experienced journalists are being pushed out. What's left are cub reporters while institutional knowledge is lost. The alternative is television news/entertainment, which is typically a shooting, an auto collision, and Heather-with-the-weather. (An honorable exception is Brahm Resnik at 12 News, a newspaper-trained newsman).

Meanwhile, a gray area of news also exists. In Phoenix, this includes Cronkite News out of ASU, KJZZ, and AZ Big Media. Flagstaff and Tucson are served by Arizona Public Media. Each of these have plusses and minuses.

This situation has profound implications for a self-governing society. Only real journalism exposes corruption, shines a light on self-serving politicians, explains complicated issues, and knits together civil society. Let's look at how to read the news — I've been a reporter, editor, and columnist for nearly four decades.