Rogue Columnist

Phoenix in the thirties

Dorothea Lange photographed this homeless family nearly Brawley, Calif., in 1939. They had been picking cotton in Phoenix but moved on when the work ran out. They hope for relief in California.

The Great Depression did not bypass our little oasis city. Even if, as historian Bradford Luckingham writes, the city's newspapers paid little attention to the 1929 crash and most Phoenicians, like most Americans, didn't own stock, the hard times soon arrived.

The severe contraction from 1930 through 1933 claimed two of the city's six banks and two of its five building-and-loan associations. Another, Valley Bank, was on the edge of failure. Depositors were wiped out in these pre-FDIC days. Arizona's big Three Cs of copper, cattle and cotton were decimated as demand collapsed. Twelve theaters closed in Phoenix. The state actually lost population in the early 1930s. The average income of American households fell by 40 percent from 1929 and 1932.

In Phoenix, unemployment grew while businesses closed and relief organizations were overwhelmed. My grandmother told stories about Okies and Texans arriving in jalopies, sometimes on foot or as hobos on freight trains. Victims of the Dust Bowl came by the thousands to the Salt River Valley, not, as in Grapes of Wrath, going as far as California (something confirmed by Philip VanderMeer in his insightful Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix).

So don't believe it if you hear the shorthand that "Phoenix barely felt the Depression." Much less that its economic recovery came because of the "rugged individualism" of Phoenicians. For the second time in its young life, Phoenix was rescued by the federal government.

The Great Depression was the overarching story of Phoenix in the 1930s. And the New Deal not only saved the city and state much suffering, but arguably had greater effect because of their small populations and economic composition. Arizona voted overwhelmingly for FDR, who is shown campaigning in Phoenix in 1931. He is at the wheel of the car as always, with Sen. Carl Hayden and Gov. George W.P. Hunt beside him. It proved a good bet.

Missing plane and missing journalism

A helicopter crew aboard the destroyer USS Kidd in the Indian Ocean, involved in the search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

By Emil Pulsifer, Guest Rogue

There will be much Monday-morning quarterbacking on the Mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Not here. Over two days, beginning March 17, I predicted where the missing plane would be found and by whom, providing reasoning to back it up. Thereafter I gave frequent updates of analysis and criticism as new developments occurred.  Sift through the full record of date-stamped comments, here.

The errors of investigators and of the media reporting on them can be summed up as three logical fallacies: confirmation bias, argument from authority, and argument from ignorance.

Searchers began their efforts in a part of the ocean known to accumulate vast collections of garbage (it's even called a "garbage gyre"), yet the media treated every stray object floating in the water as if it had a good chance to be plane debris instead of almost certainly being garbage, despite repeated disappointments. 

Soon the satellite photographs showed many hundreds of objects, an embarrassment of riches. Suddenly, the search shifted hundreds of miles to the north, to an area which, coincidentally, offered searchers far more congenial weather. The mass of objects in the old search area was summarily dismissed, even though most of these remained unexamined. When new objects were spotted in the new search area, the media response remained the same. This time for sure!

The outage

Rogue has been down much of the time in recent days. The cause was a hacker attack on the hosting service, Typepad. I apologize to readers who were inconvenienced. This raises larger issues, such as whether a backup site is needed. I don't have the answers yet. But if the site should go down again, you will be more likely to reach the basic postings using www.roguecolumnist.typepad.com. Then, for specific pages, insert the "typepad" on url for that page. E.g. www.roguecolumnist.typepad.com/rogue_columnist/2014/04/ballingers-masterpiece.html

You can also check the status of Typepad here.

Ballinger's masterpiece

When the pink-and-white Civic Center opened at Central and McDowell in 1950, it included a "little theater" but the art museum didn't come along for another nine years. Both were considered small confections to the main course: the public library. Things were not much different in 1974, when a young University of Kansas graduate named Jim Ballinger joined the museum's staff as curator of collections.

That the Phoenix Art Museum today enjoys national stature and draws prestigious international exhibitions — and has grown to take up most of the former Civic Center block — is mostly because of Ballinger, who announced Thursday that he will retire after 40 years with PAM. He became director in 1982. No other single figure has done more for the city's cultural landscape — to create, grow and sustain one — than Ballinger.

The reader should know that Ballinger and I are friends. We also were neighbors on Holly Street in Willo. But he first sought me out when I started as a columnist at the Arizona Republic, writing on such issues as the city and state's economic narrowness, lack of civic engagement, poor educational outcomes and difficulty in retaining talent. In our first conversation, he showed his incisive grasp of how such challenges would affect the future viability of cultural institutions.

Cadillac cowboys

When Republicans were conservationists: Theodore Roosevelt with Sierra Club founder and activist John Muir.

Obamacare is doing better than expected. Benghazi lacks traction. The vast enterprise of "conservative" politics needs something, anything, to keep the red-state proles in the state of constant agitation that is so profitable for the oligarchs that bankroll it. Could Cliven Bundy be the ticket?

This is the man who has been flouting the law for years, grazing his cattle on public lands northeast of Las Vegas. When the feds finally moved in to seize the livestock, an armed protest caused them to withdraw.

To the right he is a hero standing up against federal "tyranny." A National Review writer likened his "little sedition" to the non-violent movement of Ghandi.

I broke away from a larger Rogue project to offer a few thoughts, given the interest by our readers here. You should especially read Soleri's excellent comments on l'affaire Bundy on the thread below the previous post.

Actually being someone from the West, among my first thoughts was how could Bundy be grazing 900 head in such desolate country? At least when I was growing up, a 640-acre "section" of Arizona rangeland could support only about 20 head — and that was barring drought.

Just shut up

Comes the New York Times with an op-ed headlined, "Global warming scare tactics." One point is indisputable: that journalists and those concerned about climate change shouldn't leap to blame the phenomenon for every major natural disaster.

But the deeper point embedded is that those of us in the reality-based community can't reach our fellow citizens on the right unless we tamp down our sense of "obligation to convey the alarming facts":

While the urgency that motivates exaggerated claims is understandable, turning down the rhetoric and embracing solutions like nuclear energy will better serve efforts to slow global warming.

A host of little nagging problems trails this article like feral dogs chasing an SUV through the remains of suburbia. The authors, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, are primus inter pares among the robooted "pragmatic" environmental movement. In almost every case, they argue environmentalism has lost, apparently because of its bellicosity, and must "move on." Alternatives must become cheaper than fossil fuels. How this can happen when policy prevents fossil fuels from being accurately priced, they never say. And new nukes aren't being built because of resistance from greens, but from Wall Street.

But this is the small stuff. The big one is how America has pretty much come to the end of dialogue. This has happened only one other time, during the 1850s, with the compromisers dead and the nation headed to the Civil War. Oh, my stars and garters! I am being alarmist! Uh...hmmm...can I not alienate conservative readers?

Strong mayor

Phoenix is the most populous city in America with the council-manager form of government. Council sets policy which is carried out by a professional city manager.

The only places that come close are San Antonio (where the city manager is the former deputy city manager in Phoenix, Sheryl Sculley) and Dallas. San Diego abandoned council-manager in 2006.

The alternative is the strong mayor form, where the mayor acts as a largely independent chief executive and the city council is a legislative body. Think: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Detroit and Seattle.

Twelve of the 20 most populous American cities have strong mayors. The remainder are council-manager. Now there is at least a boomlet to bring a strong mayor form to Phoenix.

Charlie Keating's Phoenix

Everybody who was anybody in Phoenix has a favorite story about Charles H Keating Jr., who died this week at 90. Here's mine. By the time I came back in 2000, Keating, the disgraced imprisoned former S&L kingpin, was once again a fixture around town. I would run into him at Durant's, where he was cordial but declined my invitation to sit down sometime and tell his story.

One day the restaurant was packed and Keating couldn't get seated. He confronted the day manager, the fabulous Mari Connor, and said, "Do you know who I am?" Without a second's hesitation at a restaurant that had hosted governors and mobsters, Connor said, "No, but I'm sure they can seat you up the street at Alexi's. Otherwise, the wait is thirty minutes."

Time wounds all heels.

I was gone from Phoenix during Keating's glory days of the 1980s. He developed Dobson Ranch in Mesa and Estrella Mountain Ranch in Goodyear among many other projects. The most impressive physical monument he left behind was the Phoenician resort. The name says much about the time: Phoenix was still the center of "the Valley's" economic universe. It would never happen today; the resort claims it is in Scottsdale, even though it in the city. And for all the criticism heaped upon it, the Phoenician to me remains a beautiful place — built within the existing urban footprint — with an apt, evocative, allusionary name.