Rogue Columnist

The new pintos

I operate the Arizona History Shop for journalists, amateur historians, and curious civilians — free and an email or phone call away. It's sometimes shocking how little Arizona's millions know about their (mostly adopted) state. The situation is even more startling with the East Coast media.

Today's exhibit is a story in the New Republic. Headline: "Arizona’s Democratic Senators Are Already Angering the Left." Subhed: "The activists who sent Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema to Washington aren’t happy with their early moves in office." Kelly and Sinema voted for an amendment that would prohibit undocumented immigrants from receiving pandemic stimulus checks. TNR reports:

Latino advocates aren’t happy about it. “We are extremely disappointed by the vote that they have taken to strip stimulus funds from immigrants in the Covid stimulus bill,” Hector Sanchez Barba, executive director of the Phoenix-based group Mi Familia Vota says. “So we are sending a clear message, early in the game with a new administration, that this is unacceptable. We immediately mobilized our people on the ground, we immediately reached out, but we’re going to use all the political capital that we have. We’re going to use everything that we’ve been building in terms of political power to keep all the politicians accountable.”

Mac

When today's Arizonans think about the state's most important U.S. Senators, they go to Barry Goldwater and John McCain. A few will remember Carl Hayden, one of the longest-serving members of the Senate and, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, third in the line of succession to the White House.

Yet Goldwater, although the father of the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party, had a thin layer of legislative accomplishments, and McCain did almost nothing for the state he made his home. Hayden was undeniably the most important figure in winning the Central Arizona Project in Congress.

The Arizona Senator who casts the longest shadow of accomplishments is nearly forgotten: Ernest McFarland. First elected in 1940 when he defeated incumbent Henry Fountain Ashurst, Mac was an important partner with Hayden in fighting for Arizona's share of Colorado River water. His most significant accomplishment was sponsoring the GI Bill, which provided benefits for returning benefits for returning World War II veterans, including educational benefits.

Mac was the father of the GI Bill. He also served as Senate Majority Leader from 1951 to 1953, followed by Lyndon Johnson.

Supersized

It's difficult to find another major metropolitan area where most of the suburbs are as populous as in Phoenix.

Consider: The "town" of Gilbert alone held more than 254,000 people as of 2019. It's only the fifth-largest municipality in metropolitan Phoenix, but larger than all but two cities in Los Angeles County: LA and Long Beach. Mesa is the 35th largest city in America, at more than 518,000 — larger than Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Minneapolis and a host of better-known cities.

This is very different from the pattern in most metros. Older eastern and Midwestern areas consist of large numbers of small suburbs and a large center city. That star may have dimmed, as in Detroit or St. Louis, but none of their planets are anywhere close on population. The same is true in Atlanta, with a relatively small city of 507,000 in a metro of 6 million, but no individual suburb comes close. Charlotte, the 15th most populous city in the country (886,000), essentially annexed its entire county.

Phoenix's populous suburbs weren't always this way. These were once individual towns in the Salt River Valley, separate from each other, with different histories, dependent on agriculture and railroads. Above is Main Street in Mesa 1940, when the population was 7,200. This separation was evident well into the 1960s.