Isabella Greenway, an Enterprising Woman

Kristie Miller's interesting biography examines the life and legacies of Isabella Greenway, the "first of a number of remarkable women in Arizona politics" (p. xv) and the founder of the acclaimed Arizona Inn. The daughter of rancher Tilden Selmes and Martha (Patty) Flandrau, Isabella was born in the Dakota Badlands in March 1886. The Selmeses befriended a grieving Theodore Roosevelt, who had fled west following the deaths of his mother and wife in 1884. According to Miller, Isabella's beginnings in the Dakotas and her family's fortuitous relationship with Roosevelt "determined the course of her life" (p. 3).

The first half of the book traces Isabella Selmes's evolving association with the Roosevelt clan, her first marriage to Robert Ferguson (a former Rough Rider nineteen years her senior), Ferguson's long battle with tuberculosis, and Isabella's relationship with John Greenway (another Rough Rider and prominent mining engineer). Her first foray into politics occurred during the election of 1912, when she worked to turn out voters for Roosevelt's Bull Moose ticket. During the first world war, Isabella volunteered with the Red Cross, the Women's Land Army, and the Women's Auxiliary of the Council of Defense, where she gained important organizational skills that would prove significant later in life. A year following Robert Ferguson's death in 1922, she married John Greenway, perhaps the most important man in her adult life. Devastated after his death in 1926 due to complications following surgery, the forty-year-old widow resolved to see that Greenway's ambitions in life were fulfilled. She helped establish the Arizona Hut to help disabled veterans find work, she bought a ranch in northern Arizona, and lobbied for a dam on the Colorado River. Through a combination of hard work, political connections, and an effusive personality, Isabella Greenway quickly became a significant figure in the Arizona Democratic Party. During the early years of the Great Depression, she purchased an airplane company and founded the Arizona Inn in Tucson, a luxury resort still in operation today. In 1932, she attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and played an important role in securing FDR's nomination.

Due in part to her close connections to president-elect Roosevelt, Greenway ran for Arizona's lone congressional seat in 1933, winning a landslide victory. During her first term, Greenway lobbied for western irrigation projects, tariff protection for the copper mining industry, and for the restoration of veterans' benefits. Although her close relationship with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at times limited her independence, Greenway was not a "rubber stamp" for all New Deal legislation. She easily won re-election in 1934, and labored long hours in support of Social Security, rural electrification, and various public works projects. Exhausted after completing her first full term in office, Greenway opted not to seek re-election in 1936.

While Miller's laudatory treatment of Isabella Greenway is at times overdone, the book reveals a complex woman who, while pampered, self-absorbed, and a bit ditzy, was also altruistic, shrewd, and exceptionally hard working. Well written and researched (Miller uses a broad array of personal papers, letters, diaries, and photos), the book provides a cogent history of "an enterprising" but heretofore obscure woman at a critical juncture in American history. It should be well received by scholars and general readers interested in the dynamic role that women played in the development of the twentieth-century southwest.