Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix, 1860-2009

4 Creating a New Vision: The War and After

96 Part II level of military and defense-related spending in Pacific Coast states, as well as in Texas and Oklahoma, than in interior western states, a pattern also true for western cities (table 4.1). Thus, Phoenix felt the war’s impact directly, but its economic experience resembled (while slightly exceeding) that of other cities in the interior West. Military decisions about facilities reflected different factors. Situating military functions in Pacific Coast cities, most obviously naval facilities, made practical sense because of existing resources and proximity to the ocean. Placing facilities in the interior West to protect them from enemy attacks was also reasonable strategy, but nonmilitary considerations and prior policy also influenced these decisions. New Deal programs had promoted economic development in the West and South, partly by encouraging small businesses. Wartime planners, working through the Defense Plant Corporation (run by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation) and the National Resources Planning Board, embraced the same goals and encouraged the geographic dispersal of defense plants.2 And by early 1940 the military had decided that geography and climate made it wise to locate air training bases in the southern third of the nation. The decision to locate military and defense facilities away from the coast made the Valley a potential site, as did its proximity to the burgeoning manufacturing activity in southern California. The area’s geography, topography, and climate enhanced its value as a site, but it was still only one of numerous possible locations. The actual placement of facilities resulted from conscious efforts by city leaders. These efforts began in the late 1930s Table 4.1 Defense spending in western metropolitan areas, 1940–45: regional median averages (in $ millions). Region/city Contracts Facilities Total expenses Pacific Coast 1,737 97 1,834 Texas-Oklahoma 339 83 434 interior 68 44 150 Phoenix 90 73 163 Source: County Data Book: 1947, reported in Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), 10. Creating a New Vision 97 and reflected a web of personal connections, individual actions, and political influence. The war became a watershed in the history of Phoenix partly because it created specific facilities, but it achieved far greater importance because it led city leaders to rethink their understanding of the community’s prospects, to create and pursue a new vision for the city. While parts of this vision were apparent in the 1930s, it took the war crisis and the war-induced opportunities to make the new possibilities comprehensible. Building an Aviation Industry The impetus for the Valley’s wartime expansion of the 1940s had its origins in World War I. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company needed long-staple cotton, so it created a subsidiary, the Southwest Cotton Company, which bought land in the Valley and raised cotton. Goodyear Vice President Paul Lichtfield organized this effort, initiating a long-term connection with significantconsequencesfortheValley .3 Likemanyvisitors,Litchfieldwasfascinated with the desert. It confounded his expectations of Sahara-like dunes, for it was “blanketed everywhere with sagebrush and greasewood, the twisted rope that is mesquite, the glistening paloverde.” And the effect of adding water, he noted, was almost magical, as “the desert, in the Biblical phrase, blossomed like the rose.” Enamored by the area, he bought 160 acres in the west Valley on which he built a home in the 1920s. Although Litchfield assigned daily management of the Arizona enterprise to others, he supervised and maintained his company’s connection with the state. In 1918 he helped design the company town of Litchfield Park in the west Valley, which included a company hotel for visiting company executives. In 1929 that facility was converted into a fashionable public resort, the Wigwam, replete with a nine-hole golf course, and in 1931 the company expanded its operations in the area by establishing a tire testing ground.4 An early advocate of flying, in 1910 Litchfield started Goodyear’s aeronautics department, which produced a rubberized fabric useful for airplanes and for lighter-than-air craft—zeppelins, blimps, and observation balloons. Becoming president in 1926 allowed him to advance the company’s aircraft-related manufacturing and experimentation with blimps, and in the 1930s the company produced two aerial aircraft carriers for the military. By the late 1930s Goodyear was filling major government contracts for aircraft components and its K series blimps.5 As the demands of military production increased, Lichtfield’s familiarity...