Rogue Columnist

Phoenix's historic streetcars

Moses Hazeltine Sherman was a teacher from Vermont who made his way to Arizona Territory in 1874. While teaching, he also made money in land and mining. Later, he would move to Los Angeles and become a millionaire. But before that, he and M.E. Collins founded the Phoenix Street Railway in 1887.

Originally the streetcars were pulled by mules. But electric cars took over in 1893. The new Territorial capital had a little more than 3,000 people. By 1925, the system boasted nearly 34 miles of track on six lines. It had two major spines. One ran west to the Capitol and on to 22nd Avenue, and east to the State Hospital along Washington Street. The other operated north and south from downtown to the Phoenix Indian School.

A long addition ran east from the Indian School to 12th Street, then cut north and west, eventually terminating in Glendale. Other routes went to the Fairgrounds; north through the new Kenilworth district to Encanto Boulevard, and over to the east side ending at 10th Street and Sheridan. Most of the streetcar lines ran down the middle of the streets.

Through the middle of the 20th century, most American cities and large towns had extensive streetcar networks. Numerous electrified interurban railways were also build, competing with the steam railroads of the time. They carried freight in addition to passengers on larger cars. The largest system was in Los Angeles, the Pacific Electric, known for its iconic red cars. Owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad, it operated more than a thousand miles of track in the LA basin.

 

Whither the Democrats?

The Wall Street Journal had a story today about Bernie Sanders supporters winning numerous state-level party positions as Democrats search for a way out of their deep wilderness. This might have major consequences as the party selects a national chairman on Saturday.

“It is absolutely imperative that we see a major transformation of the Democratic Party,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview with the newspaper last week. The party has “to do what has to be done in this country, to bring new energy, new blood.”

I find it interesting that Bernie Sanders, who carried so much damaging-and-false right-wing water against Hillary Clinton in the primary, is so interested in the Democratic Party. He didn't even become a Democrat until late 2015. At least Barry Goldwater, who took over the GOP in 1964 and began its long journey into today's hardcore extreme right organization, was a lifelong Republican.

The simplistic state of play has the Sanders-Elizabeth Warren "populist" wing of the party against the "old guard," denigrated as "corporate Dems" by the insurgents. In reality, the situation is far more complex and I don't see an easy way forward.

Despite President Obama winning two national elections, the Democrats lost hundreds of seats in state legislatures and ultimately both houses of Congress. As FiveThirtyEight reports, "At the beginning of Obama’s term, Democrats controlled 59 percent of state legislatures, while now they control only 31 percent, the lowest percentage for the party since the turn of the 20th century. They held 29 governor’s offices and now have only 16, the party’s lowest number since 1920."

White majoritarianism

Budweiser's "Born the Hard Way" advertisement during the Super Bowl won plaudits for putting today's anti-immigrant sentiment under a harsh light. But it was a stretch. In reality, the white Anglo-Saxon America of the 19th century was generally welcoming of Germans. They were Christian, often Protestant, hard working. Which is not to say the migration was without troubles.

For example, especially after the failed revolutions of 1848, German immigrants transformed Cincinnati. They congregated in the dense neighborhood north of the Miami-Erie Canal. The city's English and Scots-Irish majority sniffed, "There are a lot of Germans over the Rhine," meaning the canal. And the district, still one of America's architectural treasures, gained its name. The Germans brought great beer and helped make Cincinnati a magnificent music city. Before World War I, Cincinnati had many German-language newspapers — these, and much of the German culture, were victims of wartime xenophobia. Later, the German families moved to the west side. Even today, Interstate 75 is called the Sauerkraut Curtain, dividing old German from old English Cincinnati. The Germans assimilated and became some of the city's leading citizens. Samuel Adams beer is based on a recipe from co-founder Jim Koch's great-grandfather.

The Irish were reviled in many cities in the same century. They went on to become among the most American of Americans, producing two presidents. The largest mass lynching in American history was carried out in 1891 against 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans. Italians, too, assimilated, and became a distinguished (and sometimes, with the Mafia, notorious) part of America. In the early 21st century, the governor of Arizona, most prominent businessman in Phoenix and, ironically, anti-immigrant sheriff of Maricopa County were all Italian-Americans (many of Phoenix's most important earlier leaders were of Jewish extraction). So it went for scores of different ethnic and religious groups who came here. Native fear, discrimination and even atrocities, assimilation and acceptance. America is a credal nation, not an ethnic one. And we have been stronger for it.

Overshoot

Exurban sprawl in the Verde Valley, which competes for water resources with the Salt River Project.

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" — Edward Abbey
I was reading an Arizona Republic story about the state seeking ways to "prop up" Lake Mead to "forestall painful and chaotic shortages for at least a few years." The number that sat me back was that Arizona draws 40 percent of its water from the Colorado River.

For an old-timer like me this is an astounding statistic. In 1960, Arizona took very little water from the river. Greater Phoenix, which constituted 50 percent of the state's population, received all its water from the dams and reservoirs on the Salt and Verde rivers. The rest of the state was heavily dependent on ground water, the pumping of which was already a longstanding problem, with a few other renewable river sources. But the entire state held 1.3 million people — less than the population of today's city of Phoenix.

What nobody wants to discuss is when does Arizona hit population overshoot? With more than 6.8 million people, a population that places it in the ranks of such states as Massachusetts and Washington, one could argue it already has. This is particularly true considering the combination of an over-subscribed Colorado and the growing stress of climate change.

It's virtually a forbidden topic. Even after the housing collapse, Arizona's economy remains a one-trick pony dependent on adding more people, building more sprawl, creating a Sun Corridor from Benson to Flagstaff. The local-yokel boosters mounted up to attack Andrew Ross' superbly researched and well argued book, Bird on Fire: Lessons From the World's Least Sustainable City, precisely because he crossed the line. He asked the existential questions about the vast Ponzi scheme. I did the same as a Republic columnist, despite being warned from the most powerful levels: Don't write about water. I did and I was out.