They couldn't pick a better time as that in life / It ain't too early and it ain't too late / Startin' as a farmer with a brand new wife / Soon be livin' in a brand-new state / Brand new state!
OK, I stole that from the musical Oklahoma!, about the 46th state, which entered the union in 1907. But the sentiments applied no less to the 48th, Arizona, the Baby State, the Frontier State, the Valentine State. At least for the Anglo settlers and not a few Mexican-Americans, especially in Tucson, statehood was a grand achievement, a validation of the efforts to build a new civilization in a wilderness. The government had declared the frontier closed in 1890, but it was very much alive in Arizona. The only photograph of my great-grandmother shows a grizzled, sun-baked woman standing outside an adobe hovel, my family's first home here. Air conditioning was decades away. She survived a Comanche attack as a baby — was scalped and wore a wig the rest of her life — when federal troops were withdrawn from the Texas frontier during the Civil War. In the 1890s, the family came to Arizona Territory. Plenty of heart and plenty of hope, indeed.
Many have been writing about the difficult path to statehood. I will only add that one big but largely forgotten impediment is that Arizona would come in as a Democratic state. Thus, it's no surprise that the Republicans who dominated Washington for decades after the Civil War would be loathe to give the opposition two new Senate seats and another in the House, along with Democratic electors in the Electoral College. Not only that, but allow statehood for a bunch of former Confederates and Southern sympathizers (Arizona Territory had a delegate to the Confederate Congress). And that's just what happened, with Henry Fountain Ashurst, Marcus Aurelius Smith and Carl Hayden beginning Democratic control of the state that would continue pretty much uncontested for 40 years. At his worst, Ashurst made Ben Quayle look like Pericles — he opposed a National Park for Grand Canyon, for example. Yet he also said, "When I come back to Arizona, you never ask me questions about such (international) policies; instead, you ask me, 'What about my pension?' or 'What about that job for my sons?' " Hayden, of course, went on to become one of the greats.
Statehood was more than symbolic. "Sovereign" states were self-governing and sent representatives to vote in Congress. With the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the United States established a great experiment in democracy. The original 13 states gave up their enormous claims to lands west of the Alleghenies, and the people living in these territories would be allowed to petition for admittance to the union as states in their own right. In the lower 48, this culminated with Arizona.
Yet the symbolism was heavy. When Arizona entered the union in 1912 as the 48th state, it marked the full realization of Manifest Destiny in all its grand aspirations and depredations. The continental empire imagined by Washington, Hamilton and even Jefferson was complete. Until 1959, the perfectly symmetrical 48-star Old Glory flew. Not only that, but an activist federal government using new technologies, embodied in the Newlands Act, would reclaim barren desert and make it productive. To subdue a hostile nature and the "savages" that dwelled in it was a driving force in the minds of these pioneers. That today's generations would view much of what they did as regrettable, even genocidal, doesn't change the reality of the world in which their minds operated.
Outside Arizona, modernity was remaking the nation and world. A year after statehood, the landmark Armory Show in New York would shake the art world. America had a new global empire, won in the Spanish-American War. Great Britain ruled a quarter of the globe. Pax Britannica had meant peace and progress in the minds of the imperialists, but this was nothing compared with the dreams of Americans. The American Century (later coined by Henry Luce) was only beginning. With great cities, railroads, industries, endless opportunities in the West and democracy, the great republic would fulfill its motto, novus ordo seclorum: A New Order of the Ages. A few months after statehood, Woodrow Wilson would be elected president, ushering in a host of Progressive reforms. Everywhere, progress seemed inevitable for the planet's 1.8 billion people.
Tragedy would come instead. A foreshadowing was RMS Titanic, technologically advanced and supposedly unsinkable, striking an iceberg on April 15th, 1912, and taking 1,500 souls to their deaths. Then, two years after Arizona entered the union, the Great War began, charting the course of the bloodiest century. We live with its consequences still.
So I wish the home of my heart a happy centennial, and I feel blessed to be here in Phoenix this week to mark it. The world hurtles ahead. We merely ride the leading edge of history.
Enjoyed your commentary. Would love to talk to you about using some of your family pictures in a forthcoming book on the families of pre-statehood.
History assumes a future where there will be someone educated enough read.
A tale of two photos.
At AZCentral.com you will find a photo of Wayne Newton and a photo of the new cover girl for Sports Illustrated.
I will keep my comments to myself.
Nice one Sublime Clerk!
Happy 100th Birthday Arizona! And a merry Valentine’s day to the Rogue Columnist commenters, lurkers, and Jon.
Good thing our current guv can’t serve seven terms like our first guv. That would be problematic.
AZ – 1912
Emil walks into a telegraph office.
4 hours later, telegraph operator marches Emil out of the telegraph office at the end of a shotgun.
Emil decides to wait until the internet is invented.
True story (sort of)
Wonder what the futurists say about our beloved state and its prospects for tuning into something that’s in tune with the resource-mandated constraints we’re likely to face? What little I’ve read isn’t encouraging.
“pre statehood”
I like that better than pioneer.
The only real Pioneer was Mitochondrial Eve from east Africa.
I was 14 when Ashurst died in 1962. There was a flood of recollection released in that event, which for a schoolkid was illuminating and confusing. Why didn’t he come home to Arizona after his defeat in 1940? Was he Arizona’s show horse senator? A grandiloquent windbag who role-modeled for Barry Goldwater and John McCain? If Carl Hayden was True Grit, who was Ashurst?
An answer can be found in the John Ford classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a compound of the James Stewart character Ransom Stoddard and the John Carradine character Major Cassius Starbuckle. Ashurst stylistically was the flowery orator Starbuckle. But he was also Stoddard, a man who evangelized for civilization in a raw and unforgiving land.
I recommend the movie not as a history lesson about Arizona but as a corrective to the myth that pioneers were one good thing but another. The harshness of early Arizona brought forward a motley-colored array of characters. Some were virtual sociopaths like Jack Swilling. Others were poetic dreamers like Darrell Duppa. They tamed this land with expropriation and death, Shakespeare and Longfellow.
We can put Walter Hall’s (Soleri) time capsule at the base of North Mountain.
It’s a shame Native Americans couldn’t self-deport.We wouldn’t have had to invent ethnic cleansing and reservations.”Good news,chief.We have your reservation”
No,I don’t advocate reparations or community guilt,but jeeeez,you think we would learn from it.
azrebel, missed the photos and don’t have the time to search for them, but I did see the SI cover model on one of the morning shows the other day and she is beautiful (with some surgical help), smart, greedy, and without a soul.
Here is too the next 100 years
Want to speculate on what the state legislature looks, then?
Nice history read:
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/a-mexican-immigrants-act-of-honor/
excellent post Electric (eclectic) Dog
More from Biggers:
George W. Hunt, warned his fellow Arizonans that a national showdown was taking place in their state. “The working class, plus the professional class, represent 99 percent,” Hunt said. “The remaining 1 percent is represented by those who make a business of employing capital.” Made from a copper mining camp in rural Arizona, Hunt’s admonition still resonates on Wall Street today. As Hunt put it, “It will be a happy day for the nation when the corporations shall be excluded from political activity…and vast accumulations of capital cannot be employed in an attempt to control government.”
https://jeffrbiggers.com/
Dog thats amazing
igot the rail to Portland
1st glass of Kung Fu Girl
Cal, et al:
True Believer
So another hypocrite in Arizona is exposed; and by Phoenix New Times:
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2012-02-16/news/paul-babeu-s-mexican-ex-lover-says-sheriff-s-attorney-threatened-him-with-deportation/
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu was outed by an ex-boyfriend. Babeu threatened his ex, Jose, with deportation if he exposed the relationship.
https://www.azcentral.com/news/politics/articles/2012/02/17/20120217pinal-county-babeu-threatened-ex-lover-article-claim.html
Arizona Republicans would be so much happier if they just accepted reality. If you are gay, deal with it especially if you claim moral high ground. If you represent Arizona get used to the fact that our state takes more from the Feds than most solidly blue states…deal with the fact that we like money from Washington, contrary to what is preached.
Had a great time with all at The Portland. Thanks!
Just finished watching the Babeu press conference. He was fairly adroit under difficult circumstances, artfully deflecting the issue from abuse of power to his right of privacy. But Babeu’s political career is likely over in a party that tribalizes around majoritarian cultural/racial identity. There’s no chance for a Democrat in CD 4, so it’s likely going to be a race between Ron Gould and Paul Gosar. I pick Gould to win.
Arizona political junkies have known about Babeu’s orientation for some time. His quasi-fascism is not for the faint of heart. He peddled red-meat xenophobia and national security state hysteria as his political bona fides. Like nearly every Republican gay, he was content to live inside a closet and silently consent to the demonization of other gays as the price of his conservative credentials. A party that obscenely runs against gays while prancing madly around its own skeletons is just one more reason why Republicans are so morally repugnant.
“prancing madly around its own skeletons”
That’s a keeper. 🙂
It was great to meet you Jon. Sorry I couldn’t stay longer.
And definitely a keeper Walt.