Phoenix 101: Rugged individualism

Phoenix is built on many myths. Perhaps the greatest is that of the rugged individualist, standing in opposition to the statist and collectivist tendencies of "the East" and Europe. It's a familiar myth of the West, but it reaches levels of hilarious dissonance in my hometown.

In reality, Phoenix is the largest-scale example of government social engineering and public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy — i.e. socialism — in American history. Without massive government intervention, Phoenix would be a benighted little farm town of a few thousand, instead of a benighted migropolis of some 4 million, many raging along the public highways in their SUVs imagining themselves as 21st century range riders.

Modern Phoenix began with federal reclamation, the Newlands Act, which would begin the dam building that tamed the Salt River. It envisioned a Jeffersonian yeoman farmer democracy, with plots of 160 acres cultivated by citizens liberated from the dark satanic cities of the East. It didn't quite work out that way — rich farmers emerged and poor farmers (like my family) struggled. But all were being subsidized by federal tax dollars long before the New Deal. Their endeavors would not have been possible without the federal investment.

Reclamation allowed Phoenix to eclipse Tucson and Prescott to become the capital, first of the territory and then, in 1912, of the new state. Of course, the little city attracted its share of cowboys and prospectors — men we imagine to be indisputable independent mavericks — especially to its opium dens and houses of ill repute. Yet the prospectors benefited from the federal mining act of 1872, which gave them considerable latitude in staking a claim on public land and the potential to grow rich off property that actually belonged to the commons. Both cowboys and prospectors depended on the federal government to bring peace with the Apache and to subsidize in various ways the coming of the railroads to inhospitable desert. (Despite the Copper Square idiocy, Phoenix was never a mining town, but it's also important to recall that the big mining operators received heavy state and federal help, including in strike breaking).

Federally subsidized electricity brought air conditioning to Phoenix — a seminal allowing a large population to survive there. So, too, was federal action during World War II, which located numerous military bases and industries in and near the modest (pop. 65,000) city. With government-built streets and highways, along with the heavily subsidized water and power, Phoenix became the post-war suburban dream for hundreds of thousands of families — many of whose fathers had first experienced the magical place as GIs or airmen in training.

After the war, Arizona's congressional delegation stepped up its efforts to win the Central Arizona Project, a hugely expensive, bitterly fought effort to bring water from the Colorado River to Phoenix and Tucson. They succeeded and the $3.6 billion project was done. At the same time, federal and state money created a vast system of freeways, enriching farmers who sold off their land for subdivisions or real-estate sharpies who were in the right place at the right time, influencing the right people. Government-paid flood control made vast segments north of old Phoenix safe for tract houses. Sky Harbor and the aviation system are heavily supported in a host of ways by Washington.

And so you have today's metropolitan Phoenix.

It's not to say the West didn't have larger-than-life characters, or that history can't pivot on the will and character of an individual (think Washington, Napoleon, Lenin, FDR, etc.). Phoenix has had its share of characters. But its foundation was built on collective effort, public and private — and especially with huge federal subsidies and investments. Good things continue with collective effort, such as First Friday. And with money from Washington for light rail, representing one of Phoenix's few opportunities to save itself. Yet they are small in proportion to today's challenges.

One could argue that the urban enterprise started to spin out of control when the old stewards died out, leaving few heirs. Instead of a Frank Snell or Walter Bimson, we got Charlie Keating. Finally metro Phoenix declined into a vast Ponzi scheme, dependent on growing its population by 40 percent every decade, built on a subsistence workforce of illegal aliens, short-changing most people who actually live there for the benefit of the real estate elite. Public costs have usually been pushed forward, so infrastructure is inferior, envronmental damage left to fester and crises from rotten schools to climate change are left to future generations. It is hardly the mighty accomplishment envisioned by the Newlands Act and the generations that worked together to create a civilization in the wilderness.

Today's rugged individualist myth is acted out in various ways. Phoenix has, apparently, the highest number of gated properties ("communities") in the nation, especially out in the affluent white ("exclusive") suburbs. People don't want to know their neighbors. They did the "civic thing" "back home" in Minnesota or where ever. Now they want to be left alone. Many live "resort culture" — where people check in and check out, but they don't really see Phoenix as home. And one will do things at a resort that one would never do "back home" where neighbors know each other and have, say, front porches as opposed to huge garage doors and Arizona Rooms.

On the more sociopathic scale, we have the nuts with their guns, their anti-immigrant ravings, their marginal world built around talk radio and Fox "News." We have the cholo gangsta criminal element that roves a city built around an underground economy and being the smuggling center of the nation. It's the perfect city to draw a terrorist to pilot training — he can melt into a place (Snottsdale) where nobody wants to know you. It's a city that draws the land swindlers and the bottom-feeder businesses that fight to keep wages low, employee rights few and unemployment compensation a national embarrassment. All speed along in their air-conditioned vehicles, perhaps armed, likely speeding, disconnected.

Conservatives have stoked the myth for political advantage, especially on tax cuts, antagonism to public schools, gun rights and property rights. This is built on the startlingly ignorant self-image of "I don't need nothin' from the government!" The underlying message is one of no obligation to the common good. Or, despite the suburban mega-churches, any moral responsibility for each soul sacred to God.

It's difficult to gauge how much the demagogues have been persuasive, or how much Anglo metro Phoenix has become a self-selecting population that, outside of a few places such as central Phoenix and Tempe, already buys into this world view. Today's conservative members of Congress do nothing to help Phoenix get federal dollars that go to other metro areas and states (even in conservative states). So dependent is Arizona on federal money that it remains a net "taker" state — but it doesn't get federal money directed by leaders to a common good, as in the past.

And, of course, this has been a city with more land than brains — so the mentality was one of moving ever outward, leaving behind linear slums that were someone else's problem. The people with the greatest ability to build a great city are far removed from the actual city, its problems, its opportunities. And they like it that way. Most, even the civic minded, are heavily invested in the kind of sprawl that kills real community.

Individual rights and collective responsibility have always been held in tension in America. Often it has been a creative tension. In Phoenix, sadly, it has become a more and more nihilistic tilt to individual license. That's bad history and bad policy. It leaves the city particularly unprepared to deal with the complex problems it faces. But it seems unstoppable.

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My book, A Brief History of Phoenix, is available to buy or order at your local independent bookstore, or from Amazon.

Read more Phoenix history in Rogue's Phoenix 101 archive.