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recent work on the modern conservative movement has, for the most part, focused largely on the racial and cultural politics of the 1960s and 1970s to explain the dramatic transformation of American politics. Frustrated homeowners, militant housewives, dogmatic antiCommunists , racist blue-collar workers, evangelical Christians, abortion opponents, and other crusaders in the dramatic culture wars populate these narratives. The American South also casts a long shadow over the Weld. Scholars, for example, have delved into the apparent “southernization” of America, the infamous “Southern Strategy,” the inXammatory politics of school and neighborhood desegregation, the trajectory of state Democratic parties, and the apparent need for southern politicians on Democratic presidential tickets. There is (and has been) far less attention to the power and place of business-minded conservatives and western Republicans. Yet the scant work done has shown, decisively, that both warrant more inquiry. These politicians, policymakers, and voters were among the most powerful, militant members of the broad postwar conservative movement, the ones who embraced Arizona retailer Barry Goldwater and helped propel him into the upper echelons of American politics.1 2 Drafting a Movement Barry Goldwater and the Rebirth of the Arizona Republican Party elizabeth tandy shermer 43 Indeed, the business Right’s success is clear: deregulation, privatization , low taxation, and union insecurity have become the deWning characteristics of mainstream economic dogma. This philosophy represented an aVront to New Deal liberalism, which promoted a powerful , interventionist federal state that policed and regulated industry, redistributed wealth through an expansive social safety net, and empowered the citizenry, largely through the trade union movement, to help direct economic development. Some of the most famous critics of this midcentury liberalism were western Republicans, the famed “cowboy conservatives.” Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the constant presence of this strain of western Sunbelt conservatism on the GOP’s presidential slates. Two market-oriented mavericks , Barry Goldwater and John McCain, called Phoenix home, and scholars often invoke California transplant Ronald Reagan as a paragon of this antiliberal economic doctrine.2 These two western conservatives were not outliers but representatives of a broad, Sunbelt-wide movement that blended industrialization with political transformation. In the early postwar period, when southern and western states generally supplied the industrial core with foodstuVs and production materials, insurgents generally worked within chambers of commerce to launch electoral campaigns to win seats in city governments and state legislatures in the underdeveloped South and Southwest. True, as Andrew Needham points out in his chapter, many would make their peace with federal power in the name of rapid economic development. But even their complicated embrace of public infrastructure contained a fundamental distrust of, if not open hostility to, liberal economic orthodoxy. Goldwater, after all, had called the Central Arizona Project a loan. Hence, businessmen like the senator found common cause with CEOs eager to move out of the liberal-leaning Steelbelt and coastal California. Yet the diVerences in the South’s and Southwest’s postwar rejuvenation point to the importance of fully interrogating western booster Republicans’ role in the Sunbelt’s creation and the conservative movement ’s maturation. Fighting the liberal regulatory state and organized labor, as historian Tami Friedman has shown, very much shaped the politics of the South’s boosters. Still, the decidedly more urban West gave promoters far more political power than their southern counterparts, who found themselves Wghting the old agricultural elite 44 elizabeth tandy shermer for control of governing bodies and state Democratic parties. Thus, western Republicans, not investment-focused southern Democrats, Wrst enjoyed the fruits of the genuine boom economy, which unorganized labor, deregulation, low business taxes, and laissez-faire attitudes toward income inequality fueled. Moreover, the resultant population surges gave western Sunbelt states increasing inXuence over national aVairs in the House and Electoral College, even though they had far fewer representatives in the early cold war period and before. As such, the West’s conservatives had an earlier entrée into the business and political organizations behind the nascent conservative movement.3 The Phoenix Chamber of Commerce and the Arizona Republican Party exempliWed this transformation of the West’s political economy . In the early 1930s, both the state GOP and the Phoenix Chamber were small and ineVective. But a new generation of boosters, with Goldwater prominent among them, set out to refashion these institutions . From the start, their vision of a bright, industrial future and a decidedly antiliberal Republican Party were interconnected. These Chamber men then looked beyond their immediate surroundings and sought to fundamentally reconstruct...

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