Change and Continuity in the Time of the Blob: Growth Politics in Postwar Arizona History

At first glance, the image on page eighteen of the May 16, 1976, New York Times Magazine appeared to be some kind of abstract self-portrait. A symmetrical circle of a light but scarred face was ringed in black borders that extended down to form the shoulders upon which the head rested, with more of the body stretching below. A closer look told a different story. The pointillist dots that seemed to be a face and body were houses. The scars that lined the face were arterial roads. And the dark circle that ringed the face and formed the shoulders were golf courses. The caption, rendered in tiny letters below the photo, read, "Sun City, northeast of Phoenix." The headline opposite proclaimed, "The Blob Comes to Arizona." Edward Abbey's essay that accompanied the photos told of how the state had become "the home of the scorpion, the solpugid, and three species of poisonous lizard—namely the Gila monster, the land speculator, and the real-estate broker."¹

Stretching over eight pages of the magazine, Abbey's essay used The Blob, a 1958 horror film in which scientists set loose an alien life form that proceeds to expand and devour two entire towns (one of them ironically named "Phoenixville"), to explain Arizona's recent transformation. For Abbey, the blob was the perfect metaphor for explaining Arizona. Abbey's essay detailed, in characteristically acerbic terms, the dramatic increase of Phoenix's population. "Greater Metropolitan Phoenix," Abbey wrote, "had a human population of 65,000 in 1940; 106,000 in 1950; 439,000 in 1960; 970,000 in 1970; and in 1976, swollen worse than a poisoned pup, approximately 1,355,000." "Horrifying statistics," he concluded. Underlying the blob's horror, Abbey's essay warned of the environmental dangers that loomed. "Just about the time Tucson and Phoenix conglomerate, the two amoebas becoming one united and indivisible Blob, the Colorado River will be drained dry, the water table will fall to bedrock bottom, the sand dunes will block all traffic on Speedway Boulevard, and the fungoid dust storms will fill the air. Then, if not before, we Arizonans may finally begin to make some sort of accommodation with the nature of this splendid and beautiful and not very friendly desert we are living in."²

Historians grappling with the state's postwar history have, using less colorful prose than Abbey's, told a similar story. They have put growth—combinations of spatial, demographic, political, and environmental transformations—at the center of their narratives of the state's recent past. This focus is understandable given the state's history. Between the 1940 and 2010 censuses, Arizona rose from the forty-third most populous state to the sixteenth. In those years, the state's population rose from just over five hundred thousand to more than six million people. The focus on growth also reflects the new centrality of Arizona's story to the nation's. Indeed, a number of prize-winning books written in the past decade have suggested that understanding Arizona's growth is vital for understanding broader national patterns. These books have shown that examining Arizona's patterns of growth has tremendous potential to serve as synecdoche for an era that American historians have examined through actors and ideologies such as "growth machines," "growth liberalism," and "growth politics."³

Arizona histories have not just provided representative case studies, however. They have questioned key assumptions about the dynamics and periodization through which historians have narrated postwar American growth itself. Arizona histories written in the past decade have, at least indirectly, challenged three key elements of historical accounts of postwar American growth, writ large.

First, they have expanded the spatial boundaries within which growth is narrated by attending to the connections between economic growth and ecological transformation. While much historical work on postwar America has focused on suburban and metropolitan landscapes, Arizona histories have highlighted the broader networks of water and energy required to sustain these places. They have emphasized that the search for growth required the actions of political...