University of Cambridge

Post-Doc, History

Other Affiliations: Loyola University Chicago, History

Mellon Fellow in American History

St. John's

About

Creating the Sunbelt Abstract:

Of the Sunbelt cities, none burned brighter or contributed more to the conservative revival than Phoenix, Arizona. In 1910, there were but 11,000 in this small town. Now, it is a part of a metropolitan region of over four million people. This dramatic growth tells us much about the character and history of mid-century capital mobility, the Sunbelt Right, and the political economy that sustained these conservatives. In the 1930s, government expansion, union power, and New Deal economic policy traumatized Barry Goldwater and other members of the Phoenix business elite. They rightly feared that Phoenix’s industrialization might well proceed along lines New Deal planners, locally-oriented small businesses, and Arizona trade unionists had etched.

Goldwater and his colleagues articulated an alternative vision for Phoenix’s future, one that entailed the development of a new kind of state. The ideas undergirding their growth philosophy can best be understood as a home-grown, developmental “neoliberalism.” Although much scholarship asserts that this ideology had its birth during the New York City fiscal crisis and the early years of free-market globalization, the business and political elite of mid-20th century Phoenix assembled many elements of this doctrine in their quest for hyper-growth and political hegemony. Phoenix’s economic elite opposed the New Deal state and its local iterations but they were not hostile to state action per se, especially if it sustained their vision of a growing, entrepreneurial city that competed on a national level for the most advanced and sophisticated business enterprises. Instead of championing a crude anti-statism in the immediate postwar years, Phoenix’s business community embraced government power and planning in order to reconstruct a developmental state that would privilege business by insulating the government from the electorate, weakening organized labor’s strength, curbing regulatory restrictions, and reversing the New Deal era tax shift from small property owners to businesses. Over 700 manufacturing firms began operations in or relocated key facilities to the Arizona metropolis. Based on extensive archival work in business archives, state records, and the Phoenix Chamber’s offices, case studies of the successful efforts to bring Motorola, General Electric, Sperry Rand, and Unidynamics to the Phoenix Valley demonstrate how this business climate was crucial for the city’s growth and development.

Phoenix’s metamorphosis is also placed in the context of Western and Southern growth as well as Northeastern deindustrialization. Many Southern and Western boosters had hoped to industrialize their communities but few articulated a modernization schema so violently hostile to modern liberalism or so intent on attracting industries not connected to agriculture or mining, long the pillars of the Southern and Western states’ economies. This comparison shows that Phoenix’s success, much praised by CEOs throughout the United States, helped increase competition between cities eager to replicate the desert miracle. As such, mid-century industrialism in Phoenix and the rest of the proto-Sunbelt did end the neo-colonial status of the region but it hardly perpetuated the liberalism, which New Dealers had expected to accompany urbanization and industrialization.