The comments section has been busy with musings about the Midwest migration to Arizona and the degree to which it is to blame for the disaster facing the state and Phoenix. I've offered my assessment in previous posts (it's a great deal to blame).
That doesn't mean every midwesterner is at fault, much less that I hate the Midwest. I spent nearly a decade there, in southwest Ohio, and hold it warmly in my heart. I saw it at its best and lately I've seen it at its worst. But no discussion of Phoenix is complete without assessing this huge tide of immigrants and the things they carried.
The first Anglo settlers of Phoenix were a ragtag group of tough adventurers, everybody from "Lord" Darrell Duppa, namer of Phoenix, who was born in England (maybe France), to the father of Tempe, Charles Trumbull Hayden, a Yankee who had worked the Santa Fe trail. The Mormons settled Mesa.
But Southerners and former Confederates were arguably in the early majority, personified by founder Jack Swilling, CSA. This gave the town a peculiar Southern-Western character that persisted into the early 1960s. My family came from Indian Territory and before that the pre-Civil War Texas frontier. Midwesterners arrived in more numbers with the completion of the Santa Fe Railway and its direct connection from Chicago. Among them was Dwight Bancroft Heard, who bought the Arizona Republican in 1912. He was a major landowner and farmer, and was the driving force behind the region's cotton industry. Along with his wife, Maie Bartlett Heard, he founded the Heard Museum.
Other midwesterners of note: Kansan Eugene C. Pulliam, who built a publishing empire including the renamed Arizona Republic. Lawyer Frank Snell was from Kansas City. (His partner Mark Wilmer, the star litigator who won Arizona v. California before the Supreme Court, came from Wisconsin by way of Texas.)
Another former Chicagoan was Walter Bimson who built Valley National Bank into a powerhouse. Heard, Pulliam, Snell and Bimson were city builders. The latter three, for example, in the late 1940s and 1950s, recruited the high tech industries whose fumes the metro area still runs on. All loved Phoenix. It was their home. In every way they connected the health of the city to that of their companies.
Other notable midwesterners liked Arizona, too. The Mafia became entrenched after World War II, and it's a myth that the gangsters chose only Tucson. That was the Bonanno family and Detroit's Purple Gang. Phoenix was the bigger mob town and enjoyed closer proximity to Las Vegas.
Later, after the stewards died off, Phoenix gained the company of Charles Keating, late of Cincinnati, who in the 1980s was the big man in Phoenix as he was plotting sprawl far from the city center and helping cook up the S&L scandal. Keating marked a symbolic and substantive shift in the city's leadership, an influx of sharpies and those, even well meaning, with neither interest in a coherent city nor interests beyond real estate. It could not be undone by the last city steward, Jerry Colangelo of Chicago (lately seen speculating in West Valley real estate).
After World War II, with federal housing assistance, a booming national economy, a thriving middle class thanks to the New Deal and air conditioning, hundreds of thousands of average midwesterners came to Phoenix. Eventually, millions to the metro area. Not a few were fleeing the turmoil of school desegregation and racial conflict.
Many were attracted to the conservative politics of the most prominent icon of Arizona, Barry Goldwater. As the tide grew and the city sprawled out, fewer were exposed to any local history. The stereotypical midwestern boob when I was growing up was someone who didn't know where our water came from. Their mispronunciation of menu items at Mexican restaurants and calling it "Spanish food" — we had a good laugh with that, not realizing the hate and fear that was to grow against brown people.
"There's no history here," I heard all my life from these folks. Yet many wanted to live a "rugged individualism" in the West that never existed, certainly not in Phoenix, a city that wouldn't exist without the federal government. The car-dependent post-war cityscape, especially the sprawl of the 1990s and after, along with many bumbles at city hall, acted as an accelerant to the rightward tilt of "our midwesterners."
Here we get into "Big Sort" territory, where people cluster with those of like minds and world views. So we didn't get many folks from the city of Chicago, or from Madison or Ann Arbor. They came from suburbs and had no idea of what to expect or demand in a livable city. A master planned community with championship golf? Life's good!
The former union members or liberals we attracted were largely Reagan Democrats who hated the institutions and ideas that had lifted them up. We attracted a huge cohort of retirees, rich and poor, that just want to be left alone. The sine qua non for most seems to be sunshine and heat. No wonder support for the arts is far below that of similar-sized cities or the education system is a trainwreck. They hold many loyalties to "back home," a sharp contrast with the old stewards.
And metro Phoenix continues to attract a reactionary majority among the Anglos. And they vote. The better-off among them, many part-time residents, have the money and power to make every challenge Phoenix faces better, fix many outright. They won't. At its best, Phoenix is a wide-open and welcoming place, unlike a Portland or Seattle. I told these newcomers: Welcome — now make this your home and make it better. They were deaf. These are "our midwesterners."
A broad brush, sure. But the paint sticks. In apt and cruel ironies, Mexican immigrants now help support the economies of the rural Midwest and the industrial Midwest has been devastated by bad trade deals started by Mr. Reagan and his conservative successors (including Bill Clinton). Some of the finest farm land in the world was paved over for subdivisions in the 1990s and 2000s.
With unions wrecked, reactionary politics is on the rise. But the great cities struggle on, their world-class cultural institutions and universities still proud, still a civil society and civilization there. That's because they retain enough of the best of the heartland. And maybe because they rid themselves of a huge rabble that only wanted sunshine and separation.
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My book, A Brief History of Phoenix, is available to buy or order at your local independent bookstore, or from Amazon.
Read more Phoenix history in Rogue's Phoenix 101 archive.
One little factoid from last week's midterms: Christine O'Donnell, the vacuous religious nut, lost her Delaware Senate race by 17 points but won the white vote by 6 points.
When we think about who migrated here and why, you start with race and conclude with sunshine. The appeal of an entirely new and mostly white "community", with championship golf, Applebees', and ample parking goes without saying. It's the American Dream, completely cleansed of historic stains and earlier migrations. Morning in America comes with a Great Room, La-Z-Boys, and neighbors you don't know but look just like you.
I don't know the relevant statistics but it does seem that Arizona got a huge influx of Californians over the past 20 years. I was hopeful that they might leaven our reactionary political culture and for a while that seemed to be happening. But the stresses of the past several years reveal something sadly familiar.
Arizona may be rootless and raw but we encapsulate in our DNA the tragedy of a much-longer history, some of it the fossil record of other continents. The nation as a whole seems determined to choose sides in a yet-to-be-announced civil war. Arizona went from a purple battleground state in 2000 to a fire-engine red state in 2010. History scratched our skin and we bled the fear.
Posted by: soleri | November 08, 2010 at 02:19 PM
My epiphany came 5 years ago at a McCain town hall @ Sun Lakes retirement community with a snarly, rude crowd of (largely) transplanted Midwesterners. Many wore their prejudice on their paunchy golf shirts. They wanted ALL the illegals rounded up and put on school buses and sent HOME. McCain tried to explain comprehensive immigration reform but all the crowd seemed to hear was a-m-n-e-s-t-y. The senator's security people were marching the worst of the hydrophobics out the door. I was taken aback. Never had witnessed anything like it.
While it is unfair to tag all the Heartlanders with this label, it IS a factor . . particularly with the so-called Golden Agers. Others live in their own comfy enclaves (like Fountain Hills) and manage to soft pedal their prejudices. But they're there, bigtime I think. And so is their fear of Mexico, fueled in part by the media's myopic "war next door" chant. Wish I saw a solution, other than waiting for this golden generation to pass away.
Posted by: Jim Hamblin | November 08, 2010 at 06:25 PM
Here are the four most republican leaning congressional districts in the midwest with the Cook PVI:
NE 3 R+24 congressman: Adrian Smith
KS 1 R+23 Congressman: Tim Huelskamp
MO 7 R+17 Congressman: Bill Long
IN 5 R+17 Congressman: Dan Burton
MO 8 R+15 Congresswoman: Jo Ann Emerson
OH 4 R+15 Congressman: Jim Jordan
KS 4 R+14 Congressman: Mike Pompeo
MO 4 R+14 Congresswoman: Vicky Hartzler (unseated 17 term rep Ike Skelton)
IN 3 R+14 Congressman: Marlin Stutzman
OH 8 R+14 Congressman: Tan Man Boehner
How much do you want to bet the newcomers to the Phoenix area are from these districts.
Posted by: Pete | November 08, 2010 at 10:39 PM
Forgot to 'fess up to being from Cedar Rapids, Iowa . . then Minn-e-apolis, Minn-e-sota. Was transferred to Phoenix in 1969, so maybe I had an opportunity to assimilate and appreciate. Our neighbors the Brophys explained about Mexico and how much their culture had permeated ours. Introduced us to Rocky Point and we've been forever enriched by that connection.
Posted by: Jim Hamblin | November 09, 2010 at 08:41 AM
You nailed it, Mr. Talton. I remember growing up in post-war southwest Phoenix, in the ethnically mixed blue collar area around the Alcoa, then Reynolds aluminum plant. On our block nearly every man was a war vet, and they seemed pleasantly surprised to be alive and beginning the American dream. New tract homes could be purchased for the equivalent of one year's income! I remember a specific incident when some Birchers (pasty,soft-handed,unhealthy looking guys in plaid shirts with pocket-protectors) piled out of their Rambler wagon and began ranting about how Eisenhower and Earl Warren were commies, all the men(this was back when people came outside in the evening) from Southern "rednecks" to Mexican Americans laughed at and derided them until they piled back into their car and left. I remember mid-westerners in our neighborhood being different than those I encountered later in the mostly white, middle and upper class areas of town. I think maybe because they understood from where their blessings derived.
Posted by: Some old guy | November 09, 2010 at 12:02 PM
I don't know where they're from, but theyyyy're heeeere:
* * *
A decision by the Fountain Hills Town Council to hire a single trash hauler and begin a curbside recycling program has been met with angry protests from residents who accuse town leaders of overstepping their bounds and taking a leap toward socialism.
Some even likened it to "Obamacare" for garbage, calling it "trashcare."
. . .
Councilwoman Ginny Dickey, who also supported the measure, said she felt that her motivations were especially questioned because she is the only Democratic council member and worked for seven years at the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.
"It seems counterintuitive, but in order for this proposal to pass, I believe I had to downplay the benefits of recycling," she said. "When ideology prevents rational discussion of a really pretty mundane topic, trash, there is no perspective. Everything is suspect, which paralyzes us."
http://www.azcentral.com/community/scottsdale/articles/2010/11/07/20101107tea-party-trash-fountain-hills.html
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | November 10, 2010 at 02:25 PM
Emil,
They came first for the plastic, but I didn't speak because I wasn't plastic.
Then they came for the paper and cardboard, but I didn't speak because I wasn't paper or cardboard.
Then they came for the glass, but I didn't speak because I wasn't glass.
Then they came for me, common garbage, but there was no one left to speak.
Fountain Hills Patriot - 2010
KEEP YER DAMN GOVERNMENT HANDS OFF MY CAN.
Posted by: AZREBEL | November 10, 2010 at 04:41 PM
I enjoyed Soleri's contrasting Churchill quotes on democracy in a recent thread, and thought the following carries the ball nicely into the current one:
"In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken in September, 71% of those surveyed said Bush deserved a great deal or moderate amount of the blame for the country's economic woes, and 48% said Obama should shoulder a similar amount of the blame."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-11-09-1Abush09_CV_N.htm
Mind you, that's "September" 2010 that the poll was taken.
Now, this is astounding, because Obama was sworn into office January 20th, 2009; whereas the Great Recession officially started in December, 2007; the financial crisis escalated and went global in 2008, which was also when the bank bailout (TARP) was passed and when most of the major government measures to control the financial crisis were initiated; and many of the factors (e.g., deregulation) leading up to the sub-prime crisis behind it all took place, not only before Obama was sworn in, but in some cases before his predecessor Bush came into office.
Obama's chief contribution was the stimulus bill, but most of that went to tax credits, aid to states (currently states' largest single revenue input and therefore the only thing keeping many of them, including places like Arizona, treading water), and such things as unemployment insurance extensions; most if not all of which would have been passed by a Republican Congress under a Republican president during a crisis of such proportions.
So, it's just astounding to me that 48 percent of the population could get the timeline of basic, even nation-shattering events, so fundamentally wrong. Then again, 46 percent of the population voted for McCain. I wonder if this 48 percent is nearly all Republican?
This brings us to the realm of quotes again. Paraphrasing Jefferson, a well-informed populace is vital to a well-functioning democracy. If half the population is continually confused, conditioned, and just plain "brainwashed" by the constant drumbeat of FOX News and (especially) right-wing talk radio, how can we have a well-functioning democracy?
Jefferson linked this ideal well-informed populace to a free press: but how free can the press be when its ownership is increasingly concentrated and homogenized by center-right and neo-conservative owners?
The range of news media in the United States, by contrast with, say, the variety that obtains in Germany and elsewhere in much of Europe, runs the gamut from A to D, and is distinctly weighted toward the side of fiscal neo-conservatism; and it seems to be getting worse with time.
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | November 10, 2010 at 05:58 PM
One thing about FOX news, when you lose the mind of a friend or family member to the "Fair and Balanced" network, it is gone forever. They block out all other sources of information and follow the mantra blindly forever more. It seems that people in AZ are susceptible to FOX's siren call. It would be interesting to find out why?
Posted by: AZREBEL | November 11, 2010 at 09:19 AM
I have been trying for years to figure out where these Chicagoans were coming from! Thanks for the education.
Posted by: CBEE | November 16, 2010 at 11:58 AM