Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (review)

No other city seems to epitomize the Sunbelt more than Phoenix, Arizona. Its eight-lane freeways, palm trees, and ranch homes sprawl 700 square miles across the desert floor. Physical and economic growth are the political imperatives for most Sunbelt cities, but it always seems like Phoenix’s explosive march across the desert made it the epitome of the growth-at-any-and-all-cost mentality of postwar city boosters in both the US West and US South.

I often thought about sprawling and sunny Phoenix when I read the recent historiography on the Sunbelt. This literature on the region’s postwar economic and urban growth focuses heavily on the US South’s deep-seeded racial issues or on Southern California’s virulent anti-communism. It is difficult to identify how Phoenix fits into either of these interpretations. In other words, the current literature does not provide an adequate structure for explaining how Phoenix became such an exemplar of Sunbelt economic development and urban growth.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s Sunbelt Capitalism, however, provides a framework for understanding how 20th-century Phoenix boosters pursued and managed the explosive growth of their city and how their policies to recruit corporations to the city undermined the post-World War II economic and political order. She argues that Phoenix boosters and businessmen remade American politics to serve a pro-growth agenda that promoted corporate investment at the cost of social services. Phoenix boosters’ pro-growth philosophy and industrial recruitment practices amounted to a field-tested menu of policies that we would now call “neoliberalism.” The industrial recruitment tactics that boosters such as Barry Goldwater developed in Phoenix during the 1950s emphasized “the use of the state to facilitate commerce,” by “decreasing regulations, taxes, and union rights.” (3) The model of Sunbelt development pioneered by Phoenix boosters relied heavily upon the use of state power to facilitate public-private investment partnerships and allowed Phoenix to grow from a small town into a postindustrial metropolis.

Shermer’s framework places Phoenix businessmen and boosters at the centre of the story. Sunbelt Capitalism is not a social history of Sunbelt workers, nor does it focus on documenting a grassroots movement. Instead, Shermer develops her argument around the work of “grasstops” (2) – prominent businessmen and financiers, such as Walter Bimson and Barry Goldwater, attorneys such as Frank Snell, or civic and educational leaders, such as Grady Gammage. These business and civic leaders met and collaborated on political projects through the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce. During the Great Depression and the post-war era, these grasstops sought to weaken Phoenix’s economic dependence on the state’s “five Cs”: cattle, copper, citrus, cotton, and climate. Goldwater and his coterie of fellow grasstops sought to transform the US West from a colonial outpost into an economic powerhouse by recruiting high-tech manufacturing firms. Phoenix boosters’ single-minded focus on industrial investment allowed city boosters to use Phoenix to enact a set of economic policies that favoured “large, bureaucratic conglomerates” over small-scale, proprietary firms. (117)

Phoenix grasstops’ pursuit of a hightech manufacturing base led to the development of private-public partnerships in public finance corporations and universities. For example, Walter Bimson accepted Federal Housing Administration funds to advance his goal of distributing publicly backed, but privately issued, loans to correct the financial difficulties of the Great Depression. The Central Arizona Project and the expansion of Arizona State University from a normal school to a research university also demonstrated Phoenix boosters’ strategy of using the state to advance the goals of corporations.

Phoenix grasstops embarked upon these public-private partnerships in order to promote their city as the ideal “business climate” based, according to Shermer, on low corporate taxes and cheap labour rates. The Arizona legislature made the tax rate favorable to hightech, defense industries, but Shermer argues that Arizona’s 1946 right-to-work law was the true source of the grasstops’ political strength. The absence of strong...