Rogue Columnist

Writing Phoenix history

Apparently having read the Phoenix 101 posts, the History Press approached me to write a concise history of the city. In a hurry.

I thought this would be a compilation of Phoenix 101, but it turned out they wanted an entirely new book. Foolishly I signed up anyway. That's why I've been gone.

The final product may never see a bookshelf. It is certainly not an attempt to compete with the fine academic histories of Philip VanderMeer, William S. Collins or Bradford Luckingham. There are no doubt more qualified people who could have undertaken this project. Instead, at 32,000 words, it is an interpretive history of a fascinating city and one of great importance to America (whether America or even Phoenicians realize it). Think of it as the dissertation I never wrote.

Mindful of Harry Truman's admonishment that "the only thing new in the world is the history you don't know," I dug deep into primary and secondary sources. I'm glad I did it. Here is some of what I learned:

Book deadline open tread

The deadline for my concise, popular history of Phoenix is now approaching at crisis speed. So I must leave the blog to you, with my apologies.

I may be largely offline until late July. I will continue to update Arizona's Continuing Crisis and the Front Page as I can. And there's plenty to read in the special-report pages and the archived columns.

Meanwhile, feel free to comment on the news.

 

Progressive Arizona

President William Howard Taft signs the bill admitting Arizona as the 48th state in 1912.

If our advanced high-speed rail system backward dependence on overcrowded airliners works, I'll be on a panel next Friday at the national convention of Netroots Nation in Phoenix. The topic: How Progressive Arizona Became Tea Party Arizona.

Because panelists never get to say as much as they'd like, I'll set the table here.

Arizona indeed began as a capital-P Progressive state. This included a weak, almost figurehead of a governor and a strong Legislature, as well as the initiative and referendum where the people could essentially legislate on their own. Statewide officials were required to stand for re-election every two years. They could also be recalled.

Importantly for a state where mining interests and railroads exercised enormous power, the state constitution created a Corporation Commission with wide-ranging regulatory power over the capitalists.

All these were hallmarks of the Progressive Era, which developed as a response to the robber barons and inequality of the Gilded Age of the 1880s and 1890s.

Theodore Roosevelt busted the trusts and more vigorously applied tools that had been passed by Congress earlier, such as the Sherman Antitrust Act and Interstate Commerce Commission. He signed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which, like many Progressive measures, was a result of horrors exposed by muckraking journalists

Had TR won in 1912, he would have gone much further, enacting reforms that had to wait for his cousin, Franklin.